The Power of Logs and Their Splitting

 We split logs. 

It was among the coldest days of winter thus far – bitter, but at least sunny and still; unlike the previous day of breeze and freezing rain.  Multiple mounds of oversized logs had languished for months, long after the more readily useable ones had been claimed following the tree trimming and removal in the fall.  This was to be the day for dispatching the formidable remains.

 

It was new territory for me, and I’ll admit to some trepidation. For a city kid more accustomed to books and guitar strings, power equipment intimidates me.  My dreams toss with anticipatory calamities involving broken bones and crushed extremities from hydraulic force gone awry.  But John had booked the rental of the splitter, and we were anxious for the wooden rubble to be gone.  He eyed the wood as fuel for the wood stove heating part of his house.  Our socially centering fire pit could use the rest.  All that, plus the prospect of physical activity was compelling.  Holidays aren’t known for their exercise, and these days had been illustrations of the point.  Too much kitchen time, followed by too much table time had led to too much sofa time.  My body ached for a change.

 

Never mind, then, the cold; I picked up John in the pickup, headed over to the hardware store, and hitched up the splitter which looked like it had seen better days.  That, of course, only added to my apprehension.  Back home, we abandoned caution, pulled the engine rope, and set ourselves to the task at hand.

 

I will say that, despite the age and state of this particular piece of equipment – hardly a model of maintenance - the splitter is a marvel of basic ingenuity – marrying power and physics in a productive partnership.  Position the log on the platform, pull the handle, and the modest lawn-mower-sized engine animates the hydraulics to slowly propel the iron wedge up against and then through the wood, grain divorcing grain, cleaving the whole into dismembered sections.  Fellowship and warmth, the benefactors.

 

The work went quickly, methodically.  By the time Larry joined us late morning to contribute an extra set of hands, the project for which we had set aside the day, was largely accomplished.  Oak and walnut and Osage orange; log by half, by quarter, by stack.    And it felt good, this active exertion on a holiday morning, gloved and frosty breath, recycling the farm’s woody harvest with friends, in embodied anticipation of life in the new year.  

 

Towing the splitter back into parking lot, unhitching and paying for the abbreviated day, we drove away, smiling; as warm inside from a day well spent as the fires and the friendships our labors would fuel.

Even Here. Even Now

 In years past, the barn has been given over to Advent.  The equipment has been pushed aside to make room for a lighted tree, wreaths and a piano, holiday treats and carols, and the eventually hushed recollection that we are someplace reminiscent.   Even in this barn – even in this metal building with a cement floor whose only livestock has been an occasional brooder with baby chicks – holiness could be born.  

 

Remembering that it happened once

Writes Wendell Berry,

We cannot turn away the thought,

As we go out, cold, to our barns

Toward the long night’s end, that we

Ourselves are living in the world 

It happened in when it first happened.

That we ourselves, opening a stall

(A latch thrown open countless times

Before), might find them breathing there…

 

Somehow, even in this enclosure smelling more of diesel and grease and soup and cinnamon than hay and manure and animal sweat; even in this collection of red sweaters singing of snowmen and bells, silent nights and a prayerful Dona Nobis Pacem, the hopes and fears of all the years are met in our very midst.  And into the night and the encircling days and the poignancy of it all reawakens a dormant reverence.  Eventually the room is left dark and the door is locked and the last of the taillights disappears down the drive, but the songs somehow reverberate in and beyond this silent night made audible.

 

In years past.

 

This year, like the one it follows, the barn remains dark and crowded with tools instead of friends.  The tractor dominates the corner instead of the lighted tree.  Empty buckets an apparent metaphor for yet another COVID Christmas.

 

But “apparent” is the revelatory word, for we have long-since known that appearances can deceive.  Holiness, we have long-since heard it preached, has this quixotic habit of appearing where we least expect it – in barns, yes, and babies; but even in less likely vessels…

 

…like me and you, like living rooms and Zoom, like memories and hopes and songs sung on mute, like the space cleared by the clear-eyed conviction that no place is infertile; that no place is beyond the germinating potential of redeeming grace, and reconstituting peace.

 

Even amidst a pandemic.

 

Even here, and now, on this less-than-silent, socially distanced night…

 

…we can sing.

The Rests Between the Notes

quo·tid·i·an

/kwōˈtidēən/

adjective

1. of or occurring every day; daily.

o ordinary or everyday, especially when mundane.

 

These are those days. Ordinary.  Mundane.  

Outside the chores are reduced to chicken feed and water.  It is simple work – almost rhythmic – with, as the word suggests, a common dailyness that lends the morning hours the faintest hint of structure.  There is an occasional egg to collect, or two.  Otherwise, ordinariness is the norm.

Inside, yes, there is decorating to do for the holidays – among my favorite days of the year.  Carols in the background, tree lights and treasured ornaments in the foreground.  Christmas cookies iced with memories along with the sprinkles.  But the festivization of the living spaces will be accomplished soon enough, and the oven will return to commoner baking.   

Which is not to bemoan these quotidian days – inside or out. To call them “ordinary” or “mundane” is not to mock or malign them.  There is something replenishing about the plod of the days; centering.   I think back to the wise insight a mentor once offered a youthful me:  “If every moment were a mountaintop experience your body couldn’t handle the electricity.” 

I’m grateful for those mountaintop exhilarations, whenever they occasionally occur, but I’m equally grateful for these slower, ordinary, pedestrian ones.   

Music needs rests to elevate the notes.

Gardens need fallow seasons else fertility declines.

As we need the mundanity of days.  

Feeding and watering outside.  Washing and laundering, sorting and discarding inside.  And reading – replenishing the soil of mind and soul.  Patient chronos, preparing space for kairos.  Snow is finally in the extended forecast – three consecutive days next week.  If it falls and if it blankets the ground the pace will dial down even more.  Meanwhile, the clock ticks, the heart beats, the sun rises and, soon enough, sets.    Sleep, and then rising yet again.    

Metronoming the simpler rhythms of these quotidian days.

Practice Drill

Perhaps it was Black Friday weariness.

We have three coops for good reasons.  One - the Freshman Coop - is the "pre-school" shelter that serves as the transitional home for juvenile hens who have graduated from the brooder.  It is fenced off and over-netted.  In the main chicken yard are the Varsity and Junior Varsity Coops (the names an homage to my wife's career in public education), and they house the adults - the 30 or so hens and, at present, one rooster who make up our flock.  There are two here because neither is big enough to accommodate them all.  

Except on occasion.  Like Friday night.

Though I hadn't been aware of any unusually frenetic activity - shopping or otherwise - that Black Friday evening the entire flock bedded down in a single coop.  As I noted, it has happened before on rare occasions, coaxed by the onset of frigid temperatures with the prospect of keeping warm, or as aversion to some opossum exploring the other in search of eggs or a comfortable place of his own.  Friday the temperature was quite mild for this time of year - warmer even than the night before - so winter chill was not the incentive.  As best I could with my cell phone flashlight I explored the nooks and crannies of the empty lodging - beneath; within - but found nothing hiding or threatening.  It was simply and silently vacant.  A puzzlement.

As a child at school we routinely drilled in preparation for one calamity or another.  The bell would ring in a certain pattern for "fire" and we would line up, centipede-like, and head down the hall in one direction.  A ring in a different pattern signaled "tornado" and we would line up and head off in a different direction.  In my earliest memories, from a time clouded by the Cuban Missile Crisis, frosted by the Cold War and electrified by the "communist threat in Vietnam", we would periodically and on command retreat beneath our desks for a bomb drill.  I don't recall if the bell would ring for that, or if the teacher simply shouted, "Go!" and there we would crouch until receiving the "all clear." With countless others I have wondered in subsequent years, skeptically, exactly what protection our desks would have afforded against overflying, bomb-dropping communists, but we were prepared for them - or so we thought.  Who knows?  Maybe we should be huddling beneath our desks to protect us from COVID-19?

Regularly, then, we would practice making our way to the safety of the playground, or the cafeteria, or the shelter beneath our desks, hoping we would never need the skills we were rehearsing.

Maybe that's what was going on with the chickens.  Maybe nothing at all was amiss, and they were simply running practice drills in preparation.  Winter, after all, will surely arrive one of these days with a vengeance, and I have no reason to think we have seen the last of the opossums.  and who knows what other calamities might threaten.  A lingering communist, perchance.  

Perhaps, then, it wasn't fearfulness after all, but merely prudence.  Preparation.  Practice for what is coming.

Saturday morning at sunrise I made one final inspection of the empty coop and confirmed that I hadn't missed any intruder.  Lowering the ramp of its occupied neighbor and opening the hatches, I watched as everyone spilled outside and commenced the new day.  No one seemed worse for the night's cramped conditions.  Smiling at the resilience of the birds and what I presumed to be their prescient preparation, I walked back toward the house suddenly aware of their instructive nudge.  Advent would begin the following day - Advent, the season of watching and waiting, yes, but more importantly the season of preparing.  Getting ready.  Running "practice drills" for the greener life within as without.  And I wondered how I might prepare.  

I don't know that the rooster and hens are the religious types, but their example has been an inspiration.  I don't imagine that I'll be huddling under any desks, or bedding down in a crowded coop, but I do intend to make myself more ready...

...for renewing life. 

In whatever way it might drop down, blow through, flame up, or simply blossom
out.

Between Now and Then

 With muted gold and rose striating the indigo, the night sky moves toward dawn.  Predictions anticipate a warmer day ahead – 60’s instead of 40’s.  It is a pendulum I’ve come to expect in these swing days of nature’s indecision between autumn and winter.  Simultaneously reticent to let go and eager to move on, we hover along with the transitional ambivalence; dancing between “there” and “then”.  
 
We are no stranger to the tension.  As one, myself, who abhors goodbyes while simultaneously delighting in hellos, I am easily sympathetic.  How many treasured visits come to an end by moving out from the living room, only to stall in the driveway with one more story, and then another, and only finally one last hug?  How many warm and convivial Thanksgiving gatherings are truncated by Black Friday strategizings.  Staying or going?  Holding or reaching?  Tomorrow tints today which, of course, bears the lingering scent of yesterday.
 
High winds have been foreshadowing blusters on the way, but today the last remaining hose outside will still flow freely, and there is wrap-up work to accomplish with the hives.  We will take, perhaps, a final walk around to see about final winterizing details and then, with little choice, settle into the limbo of this betweenness; alternately freezing and thawing and pondering what other comings we need to prepare for with welcome, and what grips our fingers need to loosen around those of which we need to let go.  If that sounds ominous, it isn’t really. It is simply the nature of things.  We take up; we drop.  We receive; we release.  “When I was a child…,” the apostle Paul contrasted, “…but when I became a man…”. 
 
Yes, as the song observes, “We live our lives between then until now,” but it seems true to me that we likewise live our lives between now and then.  I know the Buddhists will counter that we only have the “now,” and while I agree that the present is the only real place to live, it exists among the broken pieces of the shell of the past from which it broke out, and for all its immanence, is always moving on without staying put. Life, then, as constant motion; undulation.  Going and coming.  Goodbye and hello.  Releasing and embracing.  Sunset, sunrise.
 There are gratitudes to speak aloud, coupled with farewells.  Greetings, as well, though we know not yet to whom to speak them.  Eventually, as is the way with things, it will become clear.
 
In the meantime, we wade into the tidal currents of this day and it’s incumbent ebbs and flows, its grippings and releases – its darkness and, just now, its dawns. There are seed potatoes to order for spring and coop bedding to refresh for winter, along with deck planters to store away.  And time to protect for each other.  Being alongside the doing.  
It will rise to 62-degrees in the hours at hand if the forecast is to be believed.  I’ll just note that the forecast for 7 days hence is for 11-degrees. Goodbye, and then of course, hello.
 
Now, with the fluttering of autumn’s few and last remaining leaves, and, inevitably, then.

 

 

The Handing Over Time

Overnight the temperature toyed with freezing, but never quite crossed the threshold.  If the forecast is to be believed, subsequent nights this week will laugh at that dividing line.  The chicken yard is carpeted with feathers from the molting as the girls prepare for winter.  And so must we.  Yesterday we stored the rain barrels and reconfigured the gutter downspouts.  We replaced the chicken waterers with their heated versions and stretched the extension cords to serve them.  Straw bales are on the way to insulate the coops, and before long I’ll twist the arms of my friends to help trade out the tractor’s mowing deck for the snowblower.  There are hoses to coil and collect.  Of course there is still work to be done in the garden, dismantling the tomato supports and extricating spent plants.  There are plenty of peppers yet to harvest along with greens and leeks and a cabbage and carrot or two.  Days grow shorter while the nights stretch deeper into morning.  It’s time to clean out, clean up and batten down.

 

Winter always catches me by surprise, though its coming can hardly be a mystery.  One minute I’m marveling at the colors and the falling of the leaves and the next I’m organizing snow shovels and ice melt in the garage and flannel shirts in the closet.  There is a wistfulness to the change – to what singer/songwriter Carrie Newcomer calls “the handing over time.”  I’m among the few who love winter, snow and all; but I dearly love autumn.  Fall is the only time I make room for the color orange, but on the pumpkins and trees I note its remarkable beauty.  There is a crispness to the season; a clarifying freshness that belies the seasonal decay.  I almost don’t mind the nudging reminder of the passage of time that is, undeniably and inexorably, passing.  My wallet bulging with newly minted Medicare cards, I hardly need additional reminders.  

 

But I love these days, shorter and chillier though they may be, and drawn from a bag that is only getting lighter.  I love the interiority of the hours, the glow of the hearth, the lethargy of the dogs and the softnness of the sweaters.  I love tromping through the thinner woods and scuffing my feet through the leaves.  I love exhaling and seeing my breath, picking up a pinecone, and admiring the blue/gray berries on the cedar; the anticipation of snuggling in while, outside, the elements flex their muscles.  I love the game of gathering an egg before it freezes, and finding tracks in new-fallen snow while doing my aesthetic best not to sully the scene with any of my own.  I love listening deeply into the silence – the hush that increasingly settles on the land.  I love these yet-colorful days with their morning bite and their evening silhouette and their daylight invitation to hurriedly get the last remaining chores completed.

 

And in the briskness, shivering with the joy of being alive.

Because We Need the Supervision

We’ve been adopted by a cat.  I’m sure she has an actual home somewhere in the vicinity where attentive residents actually feed her and provide water and toys and more proximate affection, but for whatever reason she has decided that we need watching over.  Almost constantly.  Day and night.  We are just as likely to find her nestled into the bare dirt in the chicken yard, as camouflaged in the tall grasses at the edge of the prairie, or curled around the flowerpot on the old oak stump beside the barn.  Early on in her supervisions I worried over the chickens, thinking that the cat had nutritional designs on the birds, and I would shoo her away.  But over the months of her visitations I’ve relaxed my concerns.  She may have her eyes open for the mice that routinely pirate the chicken feed - and I welcome that - but she has made no move on the hens.

 

I refer to her using the feminine gender not because I’m privy to any special discernment regarding her nature, but because I can’t bring myself to refer to the creature as “it” – a pronoun too static and inanimate to apply to a being so lithe and vibrant, so attentively aware and so clearly animated; and for some ineffable reason she simply strikes me as a “she.”  Incongruently, I’ve fallen into calling her “Casper,” even though I know that the “friendly ghost” of my childhood cartoons was a boy.  It doesn’t seem all that incongruous, however, given the androgenous nature of the ghost, and the white, almost apparitional nature of the cat.  

 

The dogs will see her through the window, in daylight or darkness, luminously traversing the driveway, from hither to non, presumably altering her angle of vision.  They will bark as she passes, but she seems untroubled by their perturbations as if knowing that they represent no threat behind the glass.  Usually, however, she simply appears – silently, elegantly, watchfully.  At various times throughout the day or evening I’ll go out to fill the feeders or gather the eggs or close the coop doors and there she will be.  Verbally and physically laconic, if such a thing is possible.  She watches me, keeping her distance.  If I violate it in the course of my ministrations she will saunter off to a more comfortable remove, recommencing her observations once I’ve absented myself. I’ve noticed, however, that she is gradually becoming more forgiving of my intrusions, less troubled it seems by my passages and more prone to hold her position.  

 

We aren’t cat persons, so I won’t speculate on her intentions.  As I hinted, she receives from us no food or affection, nor does she solicit such benefactions.  In fact, as the weeks have passed and I have grown more accustomed to her manifestations, I have come to see her presence more as an offering than a seeking.  She asks for nothing, so far as I can tell; she simply offers the gift – the soulful wisdom - of her supervision.  

 

And given the thinness of our comprehension of all that surrounds us here, never mind our age or tenure on this small piece of land, she seems to recognize that we need it.

Toward a More Delicious End

An Open Letter to the Garden’s Rotted Tomatoes

 

I apologize.  

 

Whatever else I might say, that acknowledgement of guilt must come first.  

 

I’m sorry.

 

You did your job.  You fulfilled the vocation assigned to you by the One who ordained that seeds and plants and their successive fruits would perpetuate each other in cyclical reciprocity – a dynamic trinity of essence, expression, and expectation.  You sprouted, first in the warmed greenhouse soil and air amidst the waning bitterness of winter, then rooting deeply into garden soil while reaching tall up trellising frames, finally to blossom and bulge into the red or purple or golden sunlighted acidic orbs that are your delight.  

 

And you accomplished it against all odds – high winds, pummeling hail, withering heat, drowning rain.  Despite injury and stress, you recovered and persisted and choked forth fruit.  Beautiful, taste-bursting fruit…

 

…while I got busy with other things.  They weren’t irrelevant distractions, I can assert in my own defense.  There were weeds to pull in other parts of the garden; there were obligations that took us temporarily away or absorbed our available time or otherwise claimed our attentions. There were travels, as well - too-long delayed - that took us even further away, which gave opportunity to still more weeds.  And then the harvest was upon us with its perpetual gathering and slicing and combining and cooking and canning; and the days simply did not offer ample enough hours.  Over the course of recent weeks we gathered as many as we could, but did not get so far as you, which I grieve.

 

I offer such an accounting not as an aggregate of so many excuses – nothing can finally “excuse” the resulting tomatocide – but more to rebut the understandable but mistaken impression that we simply didn’t care, or couldn’t be bothered.  We cared.  We bothered.  We just couldn’t get it all done.  And you were left to rot on the vine.

 

There is a sense, of course, in which you couldn’t care less.  As noted, you did your job:  you made fruit which contained new seeds which, even now, are falling to the ground where at least some number of them will nestle into the cracks of the soil, over-winter and, come spring, sprout and produce the next generation of vines.  Earlier in my farming I would not have predicted this, but the proliferation of volunteer plants over the years – including this one – attest to the contrary.  Seeds want to grow, and yours quite likely will even without my well-intentioned ministrations.  

 

But I suspect you harbored more esoteric ambitions – to occasion the burst of a bite, the ecstasy of flavor, the groans of satisfaction and the dribbles of delight.  You, too, must ache to lie together with crisped bacon and fresh lettuce; to melt into marinara, be spiced and surprised into salsa, or simply to drip your way off the edges of a burger.  

 

And I let you down.  I left you hanging.  And there you languished, softened, drooped and finally dripped into a rotting puddle at the base of the wire support.

 

I’m sorry.  You sprouted and matured for more than this, for better than I’ve given you.  You offered yourself in generously delicious glory, but my attentions were elsewhere.  I neglect and miss so many gifts this way.  And I am the poorer.  I give honor to the work you have done – the striving, the ripening, the offering.  You are an exemplar for these days.  

 

Chastened and inspired, I move toward autumn and the stillness of winter, before the stirrings of spring gives us fresh opportunity to honor and please one another.

One Big Happy -Larger - Family

 

We have become foster parents.  To a rooster. 

 

It was a charity case.  A mercy.  That much is clear.

 

Exactly on whom this merciful charity is being showered is less clear.  It’s certainly not the rooster, who had been raised since a chick by a loving – indeed adoring – family.  He enjoyed a good and pampered life right up to and well beyond the moment when he was revealed to be a “he.”  Purchased as a “she,” Dwayne (for that has always been his-née-her name) embodies the truism not uncommon with such well-intentioned sales, “accidents happen.”  Eventually the “cockadoodledoo” revealed the truth, punctuated by jaunty tail feathers and cocky strut.  The young flock had one fewer hen.

 

Dwayne’s curious nom de plum stems from the playful intersection of his breed – Barred Rock – and the favorite actor of the young boy who had selected him – Dwayne, “the Rock”, Johnson.  Hence, “Dwayne the Barred Rock Johnson”.  What had seemed odd for a hen now proves prescient.  “Dwayne” it is.

 

But therein began the problematic considerations.  Not everyone is infatuated with roosters.  Neighbor relations can fray.  Restrictive city ordinances can prohibit. That, and for those who get into chicken keeping for the eggs, roosters add little return on investment.  They consume but don’t produce – unless, of course, you hope to hatch your own, which intrudes its own level of complexity.  None of these were concerns for the family or their sole neighbor – they loved Dwayne.  He was a treasured member of the flock.  There was, however, that pesky ordinance.  Keeping Dwayne would be a rather voluble violation of the law.  

 

Enter Taproot Garden. 

 

We have chickens, the family well knew, and remotely situated as we are – well beyond the reach of the restrictive anti-rooster law – they knew as well that we had once included two such stately and similarly accidental residents among our flock before meeting an untimely and tragic end in last summer’s raccoon wars.  They had even heard us lament their absence.

 

“Would you possibly be interested in having Dwayne come to live with you?” they wondered.

 

I have to admit that we smiled at the offer.  It hadn’t been long before that we had cursed the gender reveal within our own flock.  We didn’t want roosters – one, let alone two.  We were not interested in enduring the crowing, refereeing the aggression, dealing with the fertilization, or disturbing the neighbors. Roosters would have no place in our flock…until they did.  We came to listen for their calls.  We chuckled at their demonstrated pride.  We almost saluted their soldierly protective vigilance.  Our hearts melted at the eventual chick that hatched from a craftily hidden egg.  And when the chicken yard fell silent with their absence, we…well…missed them.

 

And so what might charitably be called the “reciprocal mercy.”  A twin generosity:  our friends needed to give, and as it turns out, we needed to receive.  And at the center of it all, Dwayne moved from happy home to happy home; loving hands to welcoming ones.  All with visiting privileges anytime.  

 

A happy resolution.  Once or twice I have seen our older hens rolling their eyes as they hop up on the parallel bars, out of reach.  As if to say, “Here we go again.”  

 

But they don’t really seem to mind his spreading around the largesse of his love.  

 

His reliable crowing – morning, noon, afternoon and evening - like Benedictine prayer, remind us that life is larger than we settle into presuming, and is animated by a community of affection, receptivity, and mutuality.  

 

We genuinely are better together.  

 

Cockadoodledo.

 

More Than Meets the Eye

Hidden gems.

 

Ever since the hailstorm rained destruction on our garden in late June, we have repaired what we could, pulled up what we couldn’t, and valiantly hoped for the best.  For the most part, our hopes have fared better than our expectations.  Squash plants and chard – the broadleafed bullseyes of the storm – resiliently revived, as numerous recent mealtimes can attest.  Our coolers are jammed with beets and turnips unfazed by the battering, and early evidence portends a bumper potato crop in the making.  We’ve harvested enough garlic to keep all of Transylvania “vampire free”, and the broccoli, kohlrabi and peppers are well on their way with downpayments on future harvests already in hand.  

 

Tomatoes, however, incurred a more enduring setback.  Though most of the plants survived in various states of woundedness, the fruit that was already maturing on the vines was knocked to the ground or pocked into disfigurement.  Gratefully, more have come along to whet our anticipation, but the few we have brought in, reddened and ripened, wear their scars.  “The spirit is willing,” the old saying tells the truth of it, “but the flesh is weak.”  We have passed the subsequent weeks trimming off broken branches, clipping to trellises drooping ones, scavenging for beans and zucchinis and the occasional pepper, and weeding.  

 

Weeding, indeed.  The hail occasioned scant interruption for the purslane, miscellaneous grasses and intrusively choking “this and thats” which, if evidence is to be counted, found the onslaught stimulating, even vivifying.  Row by row we have worked our way from one end, across the center aisle into the next section, and then the next before arriving this morning at the final row, bordering the easterly fenceline.  It was, after all, the least urgent – occupied by the newer asparagus plants that have long since completed their springtime flourish.  It turns out, however, that the asparagus was not alone.

 

Lost amidst the overgrowth was a volunteer tomato plant, an echo of last year’s crop.  Deprived of a cage or a trellis, its vines were left to meander among the grasses…

hidden; 

held; 

sheltered; 

protected.  

And there, revealed by Lori’s yanking and clearing, were two perfect and perfectly ripened tomatoes.  

 

Gifts.  

Delivered lovingly into our disbelieving hands by these grassy Good Samaritans who had taken the errant vines as their own and kept them, protectively safe, until they could hand them, trustingly, into our care.  

 

As if to say, “we’ve done what we could.  The rest is up to you.  Enjoy.”

 

Of course, we will.                   

With amazement, delight, and slightly chastened gratitude.  

For the “good” that has been accomplished by that which we were convinced was “evil” - 

alien, 

invading, 

choking,

pernicious, and...

...rescuing.

As with so many things, it turns out that there is more to be seen than what is readily seen.

Crowing, Exploding, and Concern for Each Other

I’ve been thinking a lot, this week, of Sam and Gallo – our two unintentional roosters who both perished last summer during the “Great Raccoon Invasion;” the rooster, and the notion of community. As indicated, we hadn’t planned on having the cockerals.  They were, so to speak, an accidental acquisition.  By the time we recognized their true identity, however, they had wheedled their way into our hearts – the crowing, notwithstanding.  In truth, we adjusted to their daily vocalizations, and once the chicken yard suddenly fell tragically silent, we missed them.  There was something grounding about their antiphonal song.  

 

We don’t, however, live in a vacuum, and we had talked with our neighbors.  We place a high value on neighborliness, and the last thing we wanted to do was alienate those who share our adjacent space.  It is a fiction, after all, that roosters only crow at dawn.  They do that, indeed, but they don’t stop there.  They crow when they are feisty, they crow when they are bored, and if there happen to be two of them they crow when they are feeling especially competitive, mounting a “call-and-response” chorus to rival any gospel choir.  Our neighbors scoffed at any perturbation, and even lamented with us when the crowing ceased.  They said they missed the sound. But still, one never knows.  The birds can be precociously loud.  In truth, we couldn’t help but guess that the roosters made significant withdrawals from our relational bank account, with few enough compensatory deposits.  

 

The roosters have been on my mind this 4^th of July holiday weekend.  It is fireworks season – fireworks having become synonymous with independence for some unknown reason.  Nothing apparently says “freedom” like artificially colored gun powder.  Once upon a time, fireworks were prohibited in Iowa, what with the obvious nuisance of them, the fire hazard and susceptibility to personal injury and property damage.  All that changed a couple of years ago, ostensibly for “libertarian” and recreational reasons, though I wouldn’t be surprised if potential tax revenue had something to do with the loosening of restrictions.  And so we have it now that fireworks are sold by licensed merchants within some calendar parameters that are presumably honored, and exploded by citizens according to other parameters that are largely ignored. 

 

I’ve got no vendetta against fireworks, by the way.  I have a sentimental spot in my heart for fireworks for unrelated reasons having to do with the opposite of independence.  But it is an interesting phenomenon in the context of what it means to be “in community”.  Like our roosters crowing, they don’t explode in a vacuum.  They have a social impact – on pets, on combat veterans, on those who simply prefer quietude.  A community fireworks display, at a designated time and place, is one thing.  Random neighborhood explosions are another.  Exclamation points on the notion of personal freedom, they are, with their percussive disruptions – like the willful truck pulling a long flatbed trailer hauling some piece of heavy machinery that pulled into our driveway recently in order to turn around by backing out and into our mailbox with both destructive consequences and apparent impunity – an exercise in not giving a damn whether anybody else gives a damn.  

 

We are in a public time in which it is hard to be bothered by anyone else’s bother.  We are, after all, “free” – from what is pretty clear; for what is harder to discern.  But we are pretty sure our patriotic forebears died so that we could be free to annoy each other.  Perhaps when the fireworks sales tents have closed and the darkened skies have cleared and the night has finally fallen silent, we can concentrate enough to think about it, and come to some clearer understanding about the tension between freedom and responsibility; between the relative significance of me and you and us together.

 

In the meantime, “Bang!”  And “cock-a-doodle-do.”  Sleep well. 

The Humble Acceptance of How Little We Can Do

And then the hail fell.

 

Since early March we have been diligently sowing seeds in the greenhouse, watering and watching, coaxing and smiling as the stems curled up through the potting soil and stretched their way into true plants.  With spring came clearing and reviving beds in the garden, loosening the soil, spreading compost; readying.  Since mid-May we have been transplanting seedlings from the protection of the greenhouse to the expansive vulnerabilities of the garden – row upon row like a marching band in careful formation.  

 

Gradually the spaces were fully populated, the irrigation tapes positioned, and the weeding undertaken in earnest.  Thick squash stems supported wide leaves; green and yellow bean bushes rose and stretched; small purple kale stems peaked through the veiling grass; and tomatoes wondrously began to swell on the vines.  Never mind the cacophony of weeds and intruding grasses, it was beautiful – perhaps the handsomest garden expanse since we moved to Taproot Garden 10 years ago.  Guests nodded in vegetable envy.  Family marveled at the investment of energy and time and wondered aloud what we would possibly do with all the harvest. 

 

And after years of waiting and watching, the fruit trees were promising reward.  Apples and pears, apricots and plums were growing heavy on the branches.  And cherries.  It’s hard to say how the cherries had become the Holy Grail of our orcharding, but somehow they had risen to that nobility.  Perhaps it is my affection for a good cherry pie, and Lori’s constant indulgence.  We had planted and waited, and this year the bushes and trees were covered – announced in the spring by profligate blossoms, and answered by plumping berries.  We had tasted them the day before and they were ripe and ready.  We would pick them the following evening – the cherries, and the remaining honeyberries nearby.

 

And then Tuesday afternoon the sky darkened, the wind whipped, the lightening ripped open the thundering sky, and the hail assaulted the landscape.  Pea-sized, then marble-sized; on and on in a deluge of destruction.  It pounded the deck; covered the lawn; buried the flower bed and ravaged the potted plants.  We stood at the window, silently and helplessly watching the destruction.  To step outside would surely be injurious.  And to what end?  Covering would be futile; there was no way to drag it all inside.  And then, as suddenly as it had begun – what had it been?  Fifteen minutes?  Thirty? – the conflagration of ice was over.  An ominously silent stillness replaced the deafening percussion.  And all around us spread a carpet of leaves and limbs, exploded blossoms and ice. Fearfully approaching the garden, we opened the gate and stepped into a dystopian wasteland.  Stems stripped of their leaves.  Stalks broken into pieces or pulverized out of existence.  And the cherry trees robbed of their sweet promise.  Not a berry remained.  London after the German bombings couldn’t have looked more ruined, nor the scene of a biblical plague.  It was an open-air morgue of the shredded and maimed victims of a meteorological assault.  

 

In the hours and days since the hailstorm all we have been able to say is, “we’ll see.”  Life, we know, seeks life.  Bodies lean toward healing.  We’ll see what resurrects after this Good Friday affront.  Maybe much; maybe nothing. We’ll see.  The fruit is certainly gone, but perhaps the vegetables will renew.

 

Regardless, we do not need to wait to see afresh how limited is our control of those things that matter.  We can do what we can do for our bodies, our kids, our careers, our gardens, but neither good intention nor vigilant attention insures a fruitful outcome.  Viruses come out of nowhere.  Choices in which we are not involved change our course.  Hail falls here but not 4 miles away.  If, as Tennyson observed, nature is “red in tooth and claw,” it is also flayed in gale and icy stone.  Standing amidst the vegetative rubble, we comprehend again the essential impetus of our efforts, and the necessary ministrations beyond those beginnings, but above all the puniness of our powers to bring it all to fruition.  Life is infinitely larger than we are; far beyond us, the movements and machinations of the universe – until they reach in or down or whatever their directional approach, and caress or coax into ripeness or twist and crush into oblivion.  

 

We will do what we can. 

 

And then we’ll see.

Weeding and Reaping

The summer solstice has passed, and summer officially welcomes us.  The new season arrived with thunder, lightning, rain and…cold.  It’s an ironic beginning – the accouterments of summer having baked us dry for weeks – but the unseasonable break was a welcomed exhalation.  We could relax the seemingly continuous irrigation of the garden and the hand watering of the potted flowers that had depleted the rain barrels, at least for a time.

 

We are now well into the first harvest of the season:  weeds.  Having been preoccupied with filling the next row – sowing seeds, transplanting seedlings from the greenhouse, caging and trellising tomatoes – the first rows were left vulnerable.  Reaching the end of the planting and looking back to where we began, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the profligate precociousness of the more native species resident in the soil.  That, coupled with a period of other-focused neglect, the garden is a riot of this and that threatening the viability of all our good intentions.  Grass is choking the chard.  Dandelions hide the okra.  Ragweed towers over the potatoes, giving them full view of the Colorado Potato Beetles that have chosen this moment to nibble at the latter’s leaves.  There is reclamation work to be done.  I know that scripture says, “what you sow is what you reap,” but that is only superficially accurate.  With all due respect to the Apostle Paul, I might amend his truism to say, “what you weed is what you reap.”  

 

Newly refocused, then, we lean in.  Pulling.  Hoeing.  Piling extracted encroachments.  I rediscovered beets yesterday, and curly kale I had forgotten I had planted.  And turnips actually ready to pull.  The initial sowing of carrots is likely lost, choked out by the competition, but there are additional seeds in reserve to which we can now pay more attention.  We often read how “nature abhors bare soil”, but it is always a marvel to witness afresh how many weapons nature keeps in its arsenal.  It’s impressive, even if its effectiveness means constant vigilance and labor.

 

In the end it is a valuable discipline – a reminder that starting is no predictor of finishing; that the giddiness of sowing and harvesting must be matched by the tenacity of tending throughout the season between. 

 

Paying attention.

Observing.

Intervening.

Protecting.

Providing.

Breaking a sweat.

 

Because the gardener who can’t be bothered with the hassle of the hoe won’t be bothered by any happiness of the harvest.

Blind, But Beginning to See

 We are drawn to the prairie.  Intellectually, we know it to be habitat for any number of species, and forage for a range of pollinators.  But there is more to our affection.  There is the graceful ballet of the tall grasses in the breeze; the complex diversity of its plant population.  There is the echo of Iowa’s past when most of this state was covered in this way.  There is the allure of its opaque mystique, veiling any real certainty of what might be hiding, sheltering within its reaches.  

 

And so it is that we found ourselves wanting more.  We feel no devotion toward conventional lawns, and our property supports more than it needs.  That, and there is a hillside we thought could use some “dressing up” with native flowers and bluestems.  The prairie contractor whose skills and knowledge we routinely leverage stopped by to review what we had in mind.  “This area gets too little sun,” he observed about one targeted area; “this section will take multiple rounds of attention,” he qualified about another.  “And this one…” he paused to wade into the foliage for a closer look, “…this one is filled with wild bergamot.  Your bees will love them.  And these wild legumes are good for the soil.  This is Illinois Tick Trefoil, and that's Canada black snakeroot, and there is goldenrod.  Even this variety of thistle is important, though the farmers don't like them in their fields."

Time and again he pointed out, and gave a name to, value.  "They are the same species you would be planting with the prairie mix.  You want them.  It doesn’t make much sense to clear them out only to reseed them.”  About still another he matter-of-factly asked, “haven’t you noticed it blossom?” – as if to wonder why we would destroy what so generously offers up its natural gifts.  For me, still lamentably stuck in the banal binary of “good” plants and “bad” plants, it was helpful to have these native stems reframed.

 

Blindness is the result of any number of conditions, I know, but ignorance is likely chief among them.  It isn’t, of course, blindness of the literal, physical kind - my corrective lenses compensate for any of those current deficiencies; simply the inability to actually see what you see.  Jesus, as I recall, warned against such a condition.

 

Ignorant, then, and thusly blind, I sheepishly thanked the contractor for his knowledge, his patient instruction, and his integrity.  He could have simply taken our money, after all, and done what we were asking him to do, never mind the idiocy of it. Instead, he invited us to actually inhabit the world that presently surrounds us; to see with more appreciative eyes; to eschew the fiction of what we wanted, in favor of wanting the beauty we already have.  That serving as such an environmental, horticultural “Sherpa” for us wouldn’t put money in his pocket didn’t seem to bother him.  The land, itself, is apparently more his employer than two aspirational farmsteaders. 

 

We smile now, passing along these trails; more appreciatively curious than aesthetically judgmental.  Even when we can’t identify what we are seeing – which is, yet, most of the time – we start with the assumption that this or that stem or petal is, for its own expression of life and beauty, worth noticing.

 

Even the thistle.  

 

And I wonder to what other and broader beauties my ignorance blinds.  Hues and shades.  Shapes and stories.  Wonders that my pre-conceived delusions about loveliness prevent me from seeing.  

With Potatoes in the Tomb

 Yes, it’s Holy Week. Whatever theological significance that might hold, from the time we first moved to the farmstead and began to plan a garden we were routinely told - even by those with less experience than we (if such a thing was possible) that it had great horticultural significance. “Are you going to plant your potatoes on Good Friday? You are supposed plant potatoes on Good Friday.”

Never mind that central Iowa - solidly situated in the heart of agricultural growing zone 5 - is as likely as not to have soil still frozen below planting depth this time of year, very possibly with a fresh blanket of snow covering the surface. In fact, just yesterday the sun awoke to 21-degrees; thankfully the snow was conspicuous by its absence.  There is a month swing between the earliest possible Good Friday and the latest - March 20-April 23 - and so it seems like an odd cultivational benchmark to adopt.  Even that latter box on the calendar barely falls outside the last average freeze date for this area. Hardly a climatological sweet spot. 

So how did Good Friday and potatoes come to be such storied bedfellows - at least in the mythology of gardening wisdom?

According to the Farmers Almanac, the tuber traces its religious roots to fear, superstition, and theological role modeling. 

Amber Kanuckel writes: “In the 1600s, potatoes were just arriving in Europe and Europeans were suspicious of the tuber, believing that it might be evil. The French, believing that potatoes caused leprosy, officially outlawed them in 1748. 

“To try and safeguard themselves against potential misfortune, daring farmers started planting potatoes on Good Friday, but only after sprinkling their gardens with Holy Water.” (Amber Kanuckel, "Good Friday and Potatoes,” Farmers Almanac)

Good Friday, Kanuckel goes on to suggest, because of its connection to Easter. Death and burial, followed by resurrection. Burying sin so that new life can emerge. Potatoes, presumably, are suppose to “get” the hint and follow suit.  “What you sow,” the Apostle Paul noted, “does not come to life unless it dies.” (1 Corinthians 15:36)

Ok, then.

The transformation of death, I understand.  That other part?  Hmm.  However specious it all sounds to my rational sensibilities, and nonsensically incompatible to my religious ones, it is a fancifully appealing thought to my more poetic leanings. I’m increasingly drawn to the notion that there is more to this sowing and reaping, living and dying, heaven and earth business than meets our analytical, scientific, either/or eye. We can scoff at any notion of a garden’s spirituality, reducing it all to growing days, moisture maintenance and adequate levels of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in the soil.  But Jesus, himself, while teaching about the Kingdom of God, observed that a farmer “scatters seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how” (Mark 4:26). 

"He knows not how."  That's the part that pulls at me.  Whatever we may think we know about the horticultural intricacies - whatever science we may honor, whatever superstitions we may apply, whatever past learnings we may employ - there is yet mystery at work in it all. If seed potatoes choose, then, to join my Good Friday prayers and share my Easter morning celebrations, I am happy to have their company in the choir. A little garden-rooted spirituality couldn’t hurt.

And so it was, on this 64-degree, snow-free Good Friday, that we opened a few furrows in garden beds, nestled in an assortment of cut potatoes, and buried the lot of them. 

And, yes, prayed. 

As the old refrain once promised, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!” Good Friday, and then Easter.

Potatoes, I trust you are paying attention?