Up!

2008-07-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

Not hell. Not fate.

Just fire. No brimstone here,
no retribution. Just fire.

Lightning-lit, cigarrette-embered,
or campfire poorly banked. Don't matter.
Don't you see? It's the way of things.
Tinder burns. Wood burns. Grass burns.
Houses burn. Rabbits in their burrows,
fledgelings in their nests, horses in their barns -
even people, given flame enough, and stubbornness.

There will be those who cite
the hand of god: punishment
dealt against the gays, against the heathens,
against the liberals and their fancy cars.
Just as a hurricane was sent to punish
poverty and good jazz music.
Just as floods were sent to punish corn.

Even the insurance calls them
Acts of God.

They are the acts of people
who built houses too close to the river,
who built houses too deep in the canyons,
who built houses on the faith that the levees
and the dykes would hold,
that forest fires could be prevented,
who moved into a house of sand,
straightened all the pictures,
dusted all the corners,
closed the door on the sea and said:
there. Doesn't that look better?

And when the tide came,
it was no punishment, not even for a hubris
such as ours. It was only the tide.

2008-07-15T17:51:00.000-07:00

Tomatoes!

2008-07-07T18:07:00.000-07:00

Smokey the Bear
is on the rack;
his tongue split
as a snake's.

Like any traitor,
he won't confess,
insists that he loves this country,
that he had no idea,

that he meant well.
He looks smaller without his hat,
fear in his eyes,
flames at his feet.

2008-06-30T09:19:00.001-07:00

Two days of sun, finally. The fields finally dried out enough that we could get in them without mucking things up, so we spent all day hoeing yesterday, and all day today. At lunch today I noticed little baby callus nubbins growing on the ridges of my hands.

There's no denying it: I've got middle-class hands. They're soft, and not very strong. I can stick them in some mighty hot water, after so many years of steaming milk and scalding myself with espresso, but aside from that they don't take much abuse. I've been fascinated with their slow transformation.

The first day of mucking I got blisters. The second day the blisters sloughed off and left a raw patch beneath each middle finger, right where my heart-line arcs to meet my life-line, unless I've got those backwards. There are little calluses there now; those were first calluses I've had since I my dedicated monkey-bar days in elementary school, aside from the tips of my left fingers from guitar. They've since been joined by a few more, under my first and ring fingers and on my palms. All tiny baby nubbins still.

I will confess to being inordinately pleased by those calluses.

The whole body is gradually changing. Darkening, hardening. The pattern of skin lines on my fingers is etched in dirt that can't be scrubbed off. I've got a wicked farmer's tan (which should look smashing with my wedding dress). I can carry the 50 pound bag of potting soil that in April I had to drag to the greenhouse. There are muscles emerging that haven't been seen since my days of competitive swimming in high school: triceps, abs, glutes. Hunger keeps pace with me all day in the field, and no matter how much I eat it will only abate for a little while. Beneath my baseball cap I am acquiring a sunburnt squint and a sense of satisfaction. I'm beginning to look like a farmer.

2008-06-28T12:17:00.001-07:00

My heart is burning.

2008-06-24T07:21:00.001-07:00

It woke us in the night. Far off at first, so far that only the flashing flashing flashing of the lightning came through, no thunder rumble to follow. But soon we could hear it, feel it in our chests and blood. Soon it came close.

Half awake, half blinded by the flashing flashing lightning, I half-dreamt that I saw him, tree-legged, splay-armed, stalking. I could see him in the woods above us, tangle-haired, grin-toothed, circling. Soon he came closer. The lightning herded him, goaded him, a beacon compelling him to follow, a siren light lashed tight to his heart and blood. It pulled me, too, pulled me upright in bed, naked body flashing flashing flashing when the lightning lit. I watched him in my mind, his tree-legs crashing, his endless yearning following every strike. Once he almost caught her, his footsteps so close so loud he must have been right on top of her, reaching his moss-hands, his barnacle-hands, his storm-hands out to touch her, finally, to hold that gleaming burning brightness, and I wondered why she chose just here to let him find her, just here above my half-wild head my half-wild heart where the darkness shook and shook with his running steps,

but she got away. She slipped away from him again, and then her brightness flash flash flashed far ahead of him, and he followed, he followed as he always must, she ran as she must, and soon his rumble passed out of hearing and my trembling self fell back into the pillows, fell back, finally, into the broad silence of sleep.

2008-06-22T06:20:00.002-07:00

if you stand here you will compact the soil.
you will crush the earthworms.
you will crush the roots.
if you eat only fruit fallen freely from the bough
you steal it from the deer who starve all winter.

you steal it from the earthworms.
there is no innocence.

still -

i am hungry. this body works
for its living. it demands payment.

there is fresh sourdough bread
and dried dead potato beetle
on my hands. the bitter taste lingers.

2008-06-06T19:39:00.003-07:00

I miss the barn. Our first farm experience was a modest disaster, but I did get to spend an hour or two a day in the barn. After dressing and brushing my teeth, I opened the coop door and let the chickens into their yard, then went back inside for breakfast. After that, time for bringing milk to the calf and hay to the yearlings, and later milk and grain to the piglets. I would turn on the radio as I came inside, and if I was on schedule, I'd be listening to the Writer's Almanac as I mucked the cow pen. After it warmed and dried some, I spent some time each morning picking the caked mud and shit off the flanks of the cows, a strangely enjoyable and relaxing activity. The rest of the place was an unceasing wave of stress - much of it having to do with the animals, in fact - but the barn itself always comforted.

I know I'm not the first to find solace in the steady work and steady bodies of animals and their care. I do not doubt for a minute that our decision to move was the right one, but I miss pressing my forehead against the calf's and breathing his warm smell. I do so miss the barn.

2008-05-31T16:01:00.000-07:00

Weeding all day: good work, but long. Strange muscles in my fingers are sore now, and I've gathered a new crop of sunburns and bugbites. Witchgrass had nearly overtaken the lettuces (the red one with the frilly edges is New Red Fire, the green one is Nevada, the red one with the midrib is Magenta, the oak-leaf is Brunia, the green butter-leaf is Silvesta and the last one is Red Tide). It took both of us together an hour and a half per row to clear the weeds out, then another half-hour to tame the re-may and get everything covered. Everything is dry; the rainstorms last weekend were the last we got, and one big storm they had predicted never materialized. We rushed out to put in a few more rows of transplants, believing in that rain that never came. They're near to dead now, and we don't have the time to water.

There is the theory that we got kicked out of Eden on account of the gardening. Farming can be a lot like playing God, and maybe he didn't like the competition. We're rainmakers, we're murderers, we're midwives, all. And we do rather more killing than life-giving, all told.

"This is a wire-worm. Kill it." And I do, slicing it in half with my fingernail, smudging myself with its pasty insides. We prune the tomatoes, hard, so many eager shoots sent to compost. In Arizona, twice I'd turned over with the flat blade of my shovel fat toads like clods of dirt, buried in the wet soil where the kale had been. Amazing that I didn’t chop them in half, lunging as I was blindly into the ground, where they hid blindly from the heat. I gathered them up in my hands, cold and still and strangely electric, and took them to the mint patch by the leaky hose, dropped each one into the puddle there and hoped the dog wouldn’t come by.

One time the dog killed a chicken when Kevin left the coop door open. We all stopped our planting to look over towards the sound of fear of death, outraged rooster, Kevin hollering at the dog to stop, stop, stop.

We took the chicken to the old classroom, three walls made of pallets and a trellis roof and a tarp. On the table, which was plywood on a stack of buckets, we plucked and cleaned and butchered the chicken which we thought was a rooster until we cut it open and found an egg inside.

One egg whole, in its shell: tomorrow’s egg. Beside it a yolk covered in a cobweb of bright veins, and beside that a smaller yolk, smaller and smaller down to the size of oats, or gravel; a constellation of potentiality.

The chicken was still warm when we cut it open; so different from a fish which is cold even before it dies. All day there were feathers and the smell of blood about me.

Once I almost chopped a baby rabbit in half, slicing at thistles with a scythe. We pulled gophers out of the traps by the dozens, tossed them on the compost heap with the weeds and the edges of bread from our lunch. Dead mice swarmed with ants in the outhouse; dead birds in the nesting boxes, live birds pulling young corn out by the root so that we must plant again, again, again. The bindweed choked the beans, the coyote gourd sank its deep root between my watermelons so that I pulled them up by mistake, and the blister beetles on the leaves of the eggplant were always stuck to each other in a miserable ecstasy of copulation and burnt my fingers when I smashed them.

Farming is systematic war as much as it is anything. Or: life is death as much as it is anything. The force of the cycle asserts itself bodily into the daily actions of living. We eat last summer's harvest, frozen and canned, last summer's chickens in neat plastic bags. We eat thinnings and sometimes weeds as they are pulled from the soil. We plan the death of the mean rooster. We crush wire-worms, cabbage loopers, grasshoppers if we can catch them. We muck the chicken coop. We live in a camper, and once a week our fresh water tank must be filled from the well and our blackwater tank dumped into the septic system. We are acutely, sometimes unpleasantly, aware of the inputs and outputs of most every aspect of our lives. We are wading through death and shit and so are you.

So are you.

2008-05-24T11:34:00.002-07:00

Been meaning to write more. Been needing to. Never seems to be time, never know what to say.

Storms today. Sudden flooding storms, rain so loud the radio goes mute in awe. Water down the inside of the walls in sheets, and I run to throw the tarp over our rundown camper home. The light in here now is soft blue, almost institutional feeling, but calming, too.

We've been fighting. Or not quite fighting, just edgy, just walking along each other's edges. Long days even if they're good ones and we come home hungry, tired, been together all day already and no time or space to take a full breath alone. Hard work that frankly neither of us is used to. Wind that comes up out of the north and blows the plastic off the greenhouse, snaps the lines, chills us down to bone. Or no wind and the bugs come up instead, biting hard at all our soft places.

But too we have our hands in the dirt, hard work that we love, bringing plants to life and sending them out into the world. At the end of the day we've done something. We can stand at the top of a field with our hands on our hips and look out over our work, the little sparks of green in a wide soft bed, in a wide cold world, and we put them there, grew them out from seeds, set them safe as we could make them into the soil. In a few weeks or months they'll feed us. The wind comes up and blows the hair out of my eyes, the first spray of rain on my face. I close my eyes.

2008-05-24T11:31:00.001-07:00

Spring stretches her languid limbs. She purrs out a great tumble of rain, then she turns and bites: an unbroken week of bright, beautiful days that wither the crops in the field. We fill a tank out of the pond, drive the busted truck up to the field, using physics, good timing, and luck in place of brakes. We plant a few hundred chard and lettuce starts, watering each one in by hand. Might be a thousand, all together; we planted some ten thousand onions on Friday, and then P. drove up to water them, too.

The sheer volume of plants stuns me. Every day we move a dozen or more flats from the greenhouse to the coldframe, move a few thousand plants into the fields, plant hundreds of seeds to fill the greenhouse anew. Every morning we walk down the aisles, little green seas on either side, and we can see how much growth came on overnight. One day the flat is bare soil, and the next morning two little leaves have popped out of every cell; in a week the plants are a few inches tall, and soon they'll be on their way to their own little patch dirt in someone's yard or on the farm. We thin the brassicas and have tasty mesclun salad for a week. The spinach bolts early and we eat it all, shockingly sweet, handfuls at a time.

On fresh pasture, the hens lay incredible eggs. The yolks nearly glow, deep orange and standing up so well as to be practically spherical even in the pan. Two hens went broody but got occasionally bored with the job, so for a while it was wise to crack each egg separately, carefully, and peer inside gingerly before dumping it into the mix. Our 50 meat bird chicks rapidly outgrow their enclosure, all gangly legs and long necks and dinosaur eyes. Soon they'll be out on grass, too, and the chick house will be full of tiny new layers, who stay cute much longer. Out in the chicken yard, the mean rooster keeps well clear of me, and I haven't even kicked him yet.

Finally the rain comes. We've planted all the cukes, zukes and squash and this time the sky waters them in. Big thunder that spooks the dog, good hard rain to swell the little creek and fill the soil. That something in my heart that always waits for rain loosens its grip; everyone jokes that now I've got my winter, and they're right. A few more thunderstorms and I'll be sated for the season.

[This was supposed to be posted last week. Sorry.]

2008-05-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

New farm. No internet. Busy.

Good.

2008-05-04T03:28:00.003-07:00

The river shoulders its banks apart. Rain comes. The air hangs swollen: opportunity, promises, humidity, warmth. The aspens go first, their catkins unfurling into long swaying tails, the tiny leaves that start as a vague haze of green and then grow. They glow, florescent yellow-lime-life-colored, paintstrokes from a sudden new palette on the hillsides. Beneath, bloodroot and dandelion lift their faces, shy trout lilies and crimson trillium. Slowly behind them come the more hesitant: maples, alders, larches, violets and columbine.

An orange hen went broody back in April, and last week her eggs began to hatch. Having raised chicks only from cardboard boxes, nobody knew quite what to do; except, of course, the hen. She herded the chicks over to the waterer and showed them how to drink, settled herself carefully on the rest of the as-yet unhatched clutch and let the chicks burrow down beneath her, fluffed up all her feathers, and screeched at anyone who came too near.

The piglets came last week, as well. Two of them, one brown and one pink with spots. Both outrageously cute and demonstrably smart: they needed to stay in their crate for a day or so to get used to the new location, and we decided the best way to feed them would be with those bottles used for hamsters and the like. At first, of course, they tried just sucking as they would on any other bottle, and as had worked for them on every other bottle they'd seen before. Biting and head-butting came next, but within about ten minutes, they'd figured out the little valve and were grunting happily away at their milk. By the next feeding, they hardly spilled a drop. Once we let them out, they also figured out the electric fence and found the one spot they could wiggle under - and proceeded to do so immediately. Luckily, they're friendly and curious, so rounding them up involved more coaxing and little chasing.

Last week, the week of insanely cute baby animals, was our last week on the first farm. We start Monday on our new farm, where we won't even have dial-up. J has a pretty good video of the pigs that he's planning to upload before we enter into the internet desert, so keep an eye out over on farmtime. And if you happen to be in Montpelier on Saturdays, stop by the farmer's market and say hi.

2008-05-02T17:42:00.000-07:00

Ramps! Oh hell yes. Spring for real.

2008-04-28T05:57:00.002-07:00

A good mouser,
and he gets fed in round with
the cows and chickens, but not too much:
a working cat, so keep him hungry. And the barn
is undeniably mouse-free.

But then what?
The small bodies pile up:
moles, chipmunks,
baby squirrels,
just-returned songbirds
caught in mid-song.

Twice a day I scruff him,
and the fear-frozen thing drops
paws up, shaking,
and I throw him in the house and hope.

Of course he doesn't know
the difference between pest
and wild. To him, they are the same:
a swift-beating heart with sweet-tasting blood,
a bright dark eye, a game to play out slowly
to its end.

2008-04-24T05:06:00.002-07:00

After the first thunderstorm of the season (of the year!) the frogs in the marshy field sang their cold little three-chambered hearts out. The weather report issued flood and fire warnings both yesterday, but that was before the storm, when a week of hot weather brought up the grass and dried all of last year's fallen leaves. Today the mud sucks softly at my boots - which J's mom bought me for my birthday last year, and which I've already nearly busted, as they are designed to be very cute and not necessarily to muck an entire barn - and when I let the chickens out they get busily to work finding the earthworms that came up for air.

Before the storm yesterday, we built an egg-mobile for them and set up a few hundred feet of fence. (Couldn't find a good link - the egg-mobile is a portable coop so we can move them about and let them graze.) Then we herded them all into the smallest part of the coop and set to chicken-catching. Chicken-catching involves being faster than the chickens, who are surprisingly fast, and/or sneaking up on the chickens, who are prey animals and therefore pretty sensitive to being snuck up on. Alternately, and especially when you've got the whole flock to choose from, it involves wading into the middle of them, and grabbing. Best is if you can get both legs at once, but one'll do if you can get the other real quick. Once they're upside-down, they mostly go quiet. I can catch and hold about three at once; N. the garden manager can get four or five. They're heavier than you think.

Catching the mean rooster comes about by accident when he flies at your face and you just grab him - feet in one hand and neck in the other. Catching the other rooster is much easier than you expect because it turns out he's a scaredy-rooster and he runs and hides in a corner and is very easy to grab. (I tried to think of another word so that I wouldn't use "grab" three times in a row, but really that's the only word for it. And scroll down a bit to the video on that link up there to see the second rooster do his thing.)

2008-04-20T15:56:00.002-07:00

For the past four days the farm has been ours. All of the six people who live here are currently away, and so is the garden manager who doesn't live here but ends up here pretty often anyway. He said, "take care of the greenhouse and the chores, I'll be back Monday." And then here we were, with a farm to take care of.

We mucked the barn, as has been previously mentioned. We had some help at the beginning, but the brunt of it was just the two of us and our pitchforks (we each broke one and then had to go down to the hardware store, covered in stinky muck, to get another). We watered the seedlings, opened and closed the sides of the greenhouse at appropriate times. We fed all the animals and made sure they had lots of clean water. We watched the calf -- there's no other word for it -- frolic. We came inside at the end of the day tired and hungry and happy, all our muscles whispering good work.

And nothing died, so I think it was a success.

2008-04-19T18:16:00.003-07:00

I come in from the barn, hungry for words. They sing themselves all day in my mind, while the pitchfork rhythm lugs my shoulders into strong knots and the sun burns me brown. We mucked almost all of the barn in the past few days, moving sheets and snarls of shit, piles and piles of wet-brown straw and the winter's worth of four cows' shit into the pickup and back out onto the compost heap. And all the while, the words spin up and around and out. I come in from the barn, wash my hands, change my clothes, feed my belly, sit in front of the screen, and then there is quiet. The words are gone. I want to tell you about the calf running mad circles when we let him outside for the first time. I want to tell you about the full orange moon above the twilight hills, the feel of good work in my muscles, the wondering about that question of husbandry, of herdsmanship.

Is it always wrong to kill? Always cruel? A good life and quick death may be all we can ask for in this world; done right, fear need never enter into it. Can you make a trade for death? I'll have spent twelve hours and more just shoveling shit for these cows; I spend an hour or two every day on their care. Today, calf-deep in it, blistered and burnt, I thought yes, I'm going to eat these cows, and that's fair.

But my parents spent a lot of time on the care of me, and mostly nobody thinks that entitles them to my death.

I want to tell you how I love that calf. I've been told that I'm supposed to keep him afraid of me, but I don't buy it. Anyhow, I can't. And so far, he'll follow me around the pen, let me pick up his feet and clean them, let me pull the baling twine out of his mouth, let me clean the shit off his tail. I don't know what happens when he gets big - the yearlings are half-nice and half-stupid, but they weren't really socialized when they were smaller and I don't know that much about cow behavior. Sometimes they all crowd me into a corner and then, yeah: I want them to be afraid of me.

But the little guy? My baby cow?

I want to tell you about the robins, and the flies, and the soft evening smell of dirt road. I want to tell you about how utterly I sleep these days, how easily I wake. I want to tell you about my hunger, how much I've been wanting poetry and green leaves. I want to tell you everything, but I can't find the words.

2008-04-18T04:51:00.002-07:00

First peepers and first sunburn of the season. Spring is officially and undeniably here.

2008-04-13T19:03:00.000-07:00

We're changing farms! Check out farmtime for the scoop.

2008-04-11T17:43:00.003-07:00

We chant a continuous stream of blessings for our future farm. On our farm, things will work. On our farm, things will be in order. On our farm, we will do it right the first time. On our farm...

On our farm also, he suggested today, we should label by scientific name. I tried to point out gently that, while I appreciate the sentiment, it wouldn't work out so well in practice. A little stick that says Solanum lycopersicum - for instance - wouldn't cut it for the several kinds of tomatoes a body is like to grow in one season; Brassica oleracea wouldn't help us distinguish between brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, and broccoli. But think of all the time we'd save on writing labels!

On our farm, we probably won't have cows. There is a sweet rhythm to the twice-daily chores, but also a slightly panic-inducing feeling of monomania. They are constantly getting into where they shouldn't be and out of where they should; eating or trying to eat objects as varied as plastic buckets full of manure, gloves, pants, elbows, and four-inch bolts; shitting in their (50-gallon, heavy, and difficult to move) water tank; eating their bedding hay instead the feed hay I just put out for them; deciding that the mucking fork is a terrifying enemy that must be vanquished; deciding that the water tank I just emptied by five-gallon bucket and hauled outside to hose out is a terrifying enemy that must be vanquished; deciding that if I'm wearing a hat they don't know me and I'm a terrifying enemy; and generally being a pain in the ass. Also, I'm pretty attached to them and I'm unsure about my ability to shoot them in the head when the time comes.

Though if they get out into the road again, I might reconsider that.

2008-04-07T17:09:00.002-07:00

We open the windows
let air in. The smells come in.
(There are smells
again now.) Robins are everywhere.
The compost stinks.
I sink into mud past my ankle
lose my boot pulling out,
lose traction, but
(but the ruts never throw you
off the road, only take you home
in a way different than you thought
you were going. It isn't like ice),
it isn't like winter.

The ground sighs beneath me,
opens beneath me. The cows are mudded
nose to tail, the calf kicking,
the chickens sunning themselves
on the final banks of snow.

The robin perched in the compost pile
singing.

2008-03-31T07:41:00.002-07:00

I'd like to take a moment to endorse my personal favorite treatment for menstrual cramps. You can see the Swiss-Bob in action over at farmtime. I don't know why it works, but it does. Really.

2008-03-30T09:21:00.002-07:00

We're supposed to get a major thaw on Tuesday - 58º and raining! - so we're going to spend today sledding. Horray!

2008-03-29T15:16:00.003-07:00

The door is frozen shut.
We pray for thaw. We pray
for sap, for anything green,
for the gauntbellied deer
who carefully, thoroughly,
remove each bud from each tree, we pray
for a wind that will warm us,
we pray for warmth.

The wind
turns my fingers useless. I fumble
tack after tack into the straw,
wield a hammer like the bludgeon
it is, strike my fingernails, the wood
everywhere but the target,
cursing the wind, the winter,
the chickens too stupid to stay in their pen,
the straw that spills out of my socks
every night, cursing the barn
and its thousand states of disrepair,
cursing the damn fool who thought
she wanted to be a farmer -
and the chicken still escapes
to lay eggs that freeze
in the hayloft.