Archive for the 'joy' Category

In High Summer

admin July 19th, 2011

We shared two cherry tomatoes this morning, the first ripe of the year, and that, to us, is the proof we’re fully into high summer.  If I don’t pick the zucchini every day, I’m sorry.  The weather is hot and sultry, the apricots are close to ripe and the peaches are following.  The boys drown in fruit every day – it is the one thing I can’t say no to.   The fireflies sparkle like fireworks.  The kids live in the creek and under the sprinkler, and seem to stretch out daily, getting taller, stronger, learning new things.   Tonight we’re headed to a baseball game (local minor league) – what more perfect summer evening activity is there?  Without precisely planning to, we are replicating the idyllic American farm summer of nearly everyone’s childhood dreams.  Even if you didn’t live it in your youth, you know this somehow.

The calves have moved from being wobbly babies to young cattle, busy at the important work of grazing.  Most of the summer crop of babies are born – seven so far, Midori, Amaretto, Margarita, Tequila, Kahlua, Grog and Stout.  Only Selene and Calendula are left to kid in the next week or two.  The pregnant goats waddle crankily in the summer heat, ready to be over with this nonsense, while the new moms call anxiously back and forth to their little ones.

The first crop of pickling cukes has turned to jars of pickles, the second is fermenting in buckets.  The blueberry jamming will start this weekend.  The raspberries have been coming in for weeks, but I never get any – the boys regard our plentiful canes as their own private snack bar.  Raspberries, what raspberries?

The boys grow lean and strong on summer the way goats fatten on browse.  Their knees are always scabbed, they are nearly always dirty, but it is rich, healthy dirt, like the best soil.  They grow like zucchini in wild excess.  The younger boys earned their pocketknives at the end of June, and I watch 7 year old Isaiah cut the twine on a bale of hay or carve a stick to a point.  Asher lifts a full water bucket and staggers to the goats with it.  Simon tells me airly that this year he can help me load hay, and is strong enough to lift a bale.  ”Feel my muscles!” they beg, and I do!  Eli cracks 5’5.  Simon masters lighting a fire with a flint and steel “I can show you how, Mom.”  He’ll have to – I never could do it without the magnesium.

Dinner makes itself.  Take some sweet corn and tomatoes (the farm stand in the valley has plenty already – they are always 10 days ahead of us or more), a sprinkle of basil, the last of the snap peas, some sliced zucchini… there’s so little that is needed after that.  Don’t know what to make?  A vast salad of mixed greens and herbs, into which go what you have – some new goat cheese, crumbled, a couple of handfuls of blueberries, a hardboiled egg,  tiny new carrots, cukes,  a fresh pulled beet…  Sprinkle with flower petals – sweet daylilies, cucumber flavorted borage, licoricey anise hyssop, bergamot flavored bee balm – and devour.

Ravenous boys and adults will eat anything fresh and delicious, particularly if they pick it themselves.  Asher gnaws on a raw zucchini – I wonder who taught him that, and taste it.  The Costata Romanesco zucchini are delicious raw!  The livin’ really is easy.

And not.  There’s so much work to do on the farm in summer.  Move fence and animals.  Barn the hay.  Pull the weeds, scythe the grass, put up the blueberries, ferment the cucumbers, fix the gate, make cheese, feed the calves, move the chicks, pull the bolting bok choy, dry the herbs, make the tinctures, cut back the tansy, move the rabbit tractor, side dress the kale, transplant the last broccoli crop, and always, always look ahead.  Because even though it seems on these long, hot days that it will always be summer, winter is coming – darkness and cold are on their way and the more summer we can contain in jars, the more growth we put on the animals with fresh grass, the better we prepare, the better the living will be when it isn’t quite as easy.

Everyone knows this, not just us.  There is a purposefulness in all this biology – or so it seems.  ”Eat, darling, winter is coming” say the mother goats.  ”Outside and scratch – the grasshoppers won’t always be here” calls Mama hen to her babies.  It is fanciful, of course, but true as well – they know, we know that these days can’t last.

The kids know it too – they revel in summer, and are mostly old enough to know that it won’t always be like this.  Brown like nuts, they hurry to make the lists of the things we want to do yet.  Can we build a tree house?  Can they climb to the top of the hill in the woods all by themselves to pick blackcaps?  Can they follow the creek back a whole mile?  When is the fair?  When is camp?  When are swimming lessons?  When does Daddy go back to work?  When does the pool close for summer?  Will there be time for everything?

We’re not there yet, of course and we mostly live in the present, but they know that August is close, and then as August winds down, so will the summer idyll.  Not into winter yet – fall is our favorite season with cooler weather and the delights of harvesting.  We’ll be ready for pumpkins and apples by then, for new backpacks (ok, well, new-to-them, anyway) and crayons, for days at the creek when you don’t want to be in the water, just nearby, for colored leaves and busier schedules.  There won’t be quite so much time to just pick berries or climb trees.  We’ll be ready for butchering and getting wood in and the rest.  But it is impossible to live on a farm without seeing the cycles of the year and nature come ’round and ’round and always be thinking about what’s next.

You have to.  The beets that will nourish us in the fall have been seeded.  I’m thinking about when the spinach and arugula crops for overwintering will go in, now that the turnips and kale are set.  When best to plant the broccoli for late fall – it doesn’t love the heat, but it has to go in at the end of July.  A fall pea crop is always a challenge – but hey, worth a shot!   The meat birds for fall arrive any day now, and we count weeks for butchering dates.  We must build more rabbit housing for growing out the young ones – they’ll be ready soon and will be butchered in September.  Time to think about breeding dates for next year and where the garlic will go.  Right now all is lush and abandoned with endless hours of light and infinite heat, but the hours and the heat will gradually decline – the thing about being at something’s peak is that the slide is downwards.

I don’t mind, though.  Autumn has never looked depressing to me, as it did to Keats.  The Jewish year begins in autumn, and that always seemed right to me – everything starts anew, refreshed by the cool breeze.  And in truth, who could keep up this pace all year ’round?  Almost all places have a quiet season, whether it is the heat of summer when little grows, too hot, too dry, or the cold of winter when the ground is frozen.  By the time the jars have been filled and the treehouse built, the salamanders caught and released a thousand times, by the time corn is no longer new and you long for pumpkin and hearty things, well, it is time.

We live looking forward.  We move on to the next season as the work we do now itself lays the groundwork for the fall, winter and spring crops that we will subsist upon.  We are watching the boys grow big and strong in summer, envisioning the next year and the they next as they mature.  We live looking back, remembering as I pull this crop of bolted lettuce the cold, wet spring day I transplanted it.   As each goat delivers, we recall the February day that I released does and bucks to their mutual delight, and always remember the summer farm childhood we all lived or dreamed of.  We live in the moment, delighting in the full milk pail, the first harvest, the sweetness of berries, the warmth of the sun, the cold beer in the shade, the first time the boys use their pocketknives or climb to new heights.  At high summer, more than at any other moment, past, present, future come together and simply are.   The days are so long, they seem to be infinite.  We know it is merely an illusion, but we revel in summer, stripped of limits, timeless and beautiful.

Sharon

Celebrations!

Sharon June 27th, 2011

Friday was a fabulous day, after a very, very long week.  For a week, we frantically prepared for our final home visit.  Some of it was pretty normal stuff – minor repairs, etc… Some of it, I think was pretty weird – who knew that freshly washed window screens were a requirement to be a good foster parent (yes, they did explicitly require that). They gave us hoops, and we jumped through like trained tigers ;-) .

We passed – in what is still the first biggest news here in our particular tiny household in New York, Eric and I will be (as soon as the paperwork is processed) New York State foster parents and eligible to accept placements.  After this, we wait for an appropriate placement, and go from there.

Outside our little household, obviously the biggest news in New York was that we finally caught up with cultural leader Iowa and got gay marriage!!!!! YESSSSSSSSS!!!  No longer do I have to explain to my sons why New York’s marriage laws are so much stupider than other states.  Plus, we’ve got some parties to go to!
All in all, Friday was a terrific day – gay marriage, certification, heck, even gelato with friends.  What’s not to love about that!  Plus, now the blog’s back and I can give you all my full attention.

Eric and I have never had a Jewish wedding – we had a civil wedding in MA many moons ago, before my conversion was completed, but for various reasons we have long put off a religious wedding, in part because I was unwilling to have one in a state or a movement that didn’t affirm gay marriage (and yes, I know that technically the state marriage didn’t matter anyway).  My religious movement got its act together some years ago.  On Sunday, at our Rabbi’s house, celebrating his daughter’s 8th birthday, our Rabbi asked “So, NOW can I marry you two?”  I guess I have to say yes ;-) – so parties all ’round!

(I should note that while many of my atheist colleagues at science blogs are rightly deploring the role of religious leaders in undermining gay marriage, my Rabbi is by no means atypical – my Conservative synagogue, my mother’s Episcopal church and the churches, temples, covens and synagogues of millions led the way on this issue – they offered gay marriage long before states began to do so, and they have been speaking from the pulpit in favor of gay marriage and trying to bring the law and their communities into sync for many years.  My parents stood up and married in their church some years before they could do it in their state – and that’s true for thousands and thousands of gay people whose religious communities have taken the lead in social justice!)

I missed the first round of gay marriages in Massachusetts – my best friend was out cheering at Cambridge City Hall at midnight when the doors opened and the first celebrations began.  We weren’t at my mother and step-mother’s legal wedding (although we were certainly at their church wedding some years before that!).  Jesse, my friend called me so I coud hear the cheering and weeping for joy, and I wanted to be there as he was.  Every friend and acquaintance I had called that day to ask if my mother and step-mom were really going to do it, to congratulate us and them.  I couldn’t be there – we were caring for Eric’s grandparents and couldn’t leave them.  I told my boys, most of whom were too small to really understand that they were around for something important that day.  It felt like a large segment of the nation was partying – and that can only be a good thing.

You can be sure my family will be out there celebrating the first marriages in New York, that my sons, now old enough to care about justice and to understand what’s at stake will be out there celebrating. And again, I guess there’s no reason not to stand up under a chuppah ourselves.  As it should be – parties all ’round!!!

Sharon

And Not a Single Regret: On Doing the Crazy Thing

admin March 15th, 2011

The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands
For beeves hereafter ready for market;
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”
How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill—only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle—
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret. – Edgar Lee Masters “Fiddler Jones”

A lot of people have warned me that our decision to adopt through foster care is completely insane.  This I knew.   Some people we love are worried about it, and they are probably right to be worried – they certainly aren’t making up the risks.

When I was thinking about how to answer someone who asked me “aren’t you worried that this could be terrible?”  I found myself infected with her worries – after all, her questions are perfectly reasonable – and I don’t deny it could be terrible.  I can think of a long list of ways it might be – the kids might be so damaged that the placement doesn’t work and we’ll have done more damage to them. Our own kids might hate us for needing to shift attention to other children.   Someone might get hurt or damaged.  Our lives might become chaos that prevent us from doing everything else we want.  I’m actually good at imagining negative scenarios ;-) , as you can probably imagine.

I don’t have an answer to those risks.  I don’t deny their possibility.  At the same time, my entire adult life can pretty much be described as a history of doing the crazy thing, the risky thing, the thing that made no sense to other people.  Our history is one of taking the crazy leap without enough preparation or knowledge – and somehow having it turn out all right.  Or better than that.

It was perfectly reasonable for loving people to doubt whether two grad students living in an apartment in one of the most densely populated cities in the US could make a go of a farm.  They were right – it was a crazy thing to do.  What the hell did we know about farming?

It was reasonable for people to ask whether we were too young and financially insecure to have children.  Was it crazy for us to get pregnant?  Probably – we were financially insecure, newly married, uncertain.

It was reasonable for people to ask whether we were insane, married only a year with a colicky baby, to take on the care of my husband’s aging and fragile grandparents and buy a place with them.  It might have been the unmaking of our marriage, too much stress and strain.

It was reasonable to ask, upon the diagnosis of my oldest child, whether we were nuts to have risked having more children, given that autism runs in families.  They were right – another severely autistic child might have been more than we could bear.

It was reasonable for everyone to wonder whether it was crazy for us to start a CSA – after all we’d only had one full gardening year in our new place, had never run a farm business, and we now had a disabled toddler and a baby, as well as building on for Eric’s grandparents.  It was hard and it might have been too much.

It was perfectly reasonable to wonder whether I was crazy take on not one, but two book contracts when I’d never written a book – and had four kids under 6, one still a baby.  What the heck did I know about writing books?

It was perfectly reasonable to ask whether I had lost my mind when I took on a third book contract before the second one was finished and before any of them had been published (and it would have been even more reasonable to ask that of my publisher ;-) ).

What did we know about dairy goats?  About slaughtering our own chickens?  What did we know about silvopasturing or cisterns?  What do we know now about parenting traumatized children?

Most of our friends and family didn’t ask these questions.   The miracle is that they were supportive, enthusiastic and generously kept their doubts to themselves, or offered us good critical thought and advice.   Still,  I don’t doubt they were secretly looking up the requirements for commitment hearings.

Inexplicably, however, miraculously, however,  what happened was that all of these things were more successful, led to greater happiness and to better outcomes than we would have expected.  The CSA was a howling success.  Eric’s grandparents were the joy of our lives and we wouldn’t have traded that time with them for anything.  The farm has been the basis of everything we’ve done since.  The books weren’t a howling success, but a moderate flow of goodness that still serve us.  The children were gifts and delights – autism turned out have more pleasures and gifts than anyone would have expected.   Every time something seemed too hard (and on some days it certainly did) the hard was achievable, or manageable.  We struggled.  We made mistakes.  We risked a lot – and in the end, like Edgar Lee Master, had not a single regret.

At the same time, the few occasions when I curtailed my natural insanity and listened to either my doubts or someone else’s didn’t work out that well – I finally left the grad school I’d seen as the “safe” choice for me, the logical outcome, the low-risk career choice.  It was safe – but it wasn’t right.  The one time someone told my husband and I we couldn’t do something, that it would ruin our lives, and we didn’t is one of my greatest personal regrets.

Does all that history mean that I might not end up regretting all this?  Not at all – I make no mystical claims about the influence of the past on the present.  This could be the thing that puts us over the edge – and I do have fears and anxieties about adding more kids to my family.  But I found it helpful to put together my own history and look at my past and realize that when I’ve taken wild leaps of faith, I’ve never regretted them.  I’ve only regretted *not* doing the crazy thing I really wanted to do, not taking the big risk.  It is not all the truth that ever was, but it is comforting to know that insanity has its virtues.

Perhaps there are other people out there who would like to do the crazy thing.  I cannot promise you it will work. I can promise you that sometimes you will wonder what the heck you were thinking.  I do say that if fortune smiles on you, if hard work and good luck can make it happen, the crazy thing has much to be said for it.   I’m shooting for what Fiddler Jones had – he was a bad farmer that one, because farming wasn’t his crazy dream like it is mine.  But the outcomes, oh, that’s worth having.  A broken laugh.  A thousand memories.  A body and a fiddle or a scythe and shovel worn to broken.  And, by and large,  not a single regret – at least for the things you took heart and plunged into because they felt right.  But you only get to that by risking failure, by risking regret, loss, disaster.  Its an irony, but a price well worth playing for.

Sharon

Doing Has No Need of Wishing

Sharon April 29th, 2010

This weekend we attended an event at the library designed to get kids excited about poetry – each age level had a different writing and art project to do.  The project for first graders involved making  a list of wishes, and Isaiah set laboriously to writing down his most secret desire.  At six, he does not write easily or fluently, although his spelling is quite good.  And there, scrawled across a whole page, meant the long list of wishes that one assumes fill the dreams of small children, was this “I wish I had a farm.”

This occasioned some comment among the event’s organizers – a number of the adults mentioned that they too had the same wish, and expressed surprise that a child should wish for this.  There was amusement when I said that we did, in fact,  live on a farm.  But I also knew what Isaiah meant.

You see, Isaiah from as early as I can remember, took to this life in ways my other children did not.  They all love the animals and the open spaces, the creek and the gardens, the climbing trees and the woods to play in, but of all my children, Isaiah is organically, naturally, innately a farm child.  Of my sons, he is the most fascinated by plants and animals, most anxious to participate in anything domestic.  When he was younger, he hated to leave the farm, although he’s grown more adventurous with time.

Isaiah loves to cook and can bake a mean pan of cornbread almost by himself or a sheet full of chocolate chip cookies.  He can name more plants than Eric can, and when Asher scraped a finger recently, Isaiah was the one who ran to the lamb’s ears to make a bandage for him.  Every animal on the farm likes and trusts him, and he alone can pick up every bird on the whole farm.  He loves to build and mend things.  When he was two, as we left for a visit to his Grandmother in New York City, each child was allowed to pick something to bring with them for the trip.  My other children brought favorite books and toys.  Isaiah brought a salad he’d picked himself – sorrel, mint, lettuce, mizuna, arugula – as a gift for his grandmother.  I think that salad still says something deep about my child.

He’s not a perfect child by any means – he can be just as cranky and mean to his brothers as anyone else –  but he has an astounding generosity for a child his age, something that seems innate in him, since he has had it since birth.  When there isn’t enough candy to go around, Isaiah is the first to offer his up to a friend or a brother.  He likes giving things away so much that he saves up his money to make more donations of trees and animals to the Heifer Fund than the ones we subsidize.  If he does spend his money on himself, it is often for plants – while his brothers want candy or toys, Isaiah just bought himself a bamboo plant which he carefully carries out to the porch each morning and in every cold night.  I take no credit for any of this – it all comes from deep inside of him, and we are fortunate that he is so well suited to his place.

And I know, because he tells us, what Isaiah’s farm dream is – he wants more animals, more kinds of creatures.  He wants a tall, two story barn with a hayloft, and ideally, barn cats to chase and bales of hay to climb in.  He wants more of the animals to be his own special ones, his to care for and choose.  He wants to sell more things, be a true working farm with people coming down the drive to buy eggs and plants – and sometimes from him.  He wants it to be beautiful to others, beautiful to us, integral to the landscape and to the community – the place our neighbors come to buy what they need that we can provide.  He wants to be part of the diversified small farm of every child’s dream.

I admit, I dream of a hayloft myself, but I can’t give him that…as yet.  Our hay barn remains a small, low building.  But what we can perhaps give him is precisely the rest of it – slowly, slowly we are returning from days Isaiah can barely remember, to being a true working farm.  Over the years of my intensive writing projects, we’ve let many of things we did in our first CSA years fall apart – the gardens were enough to feed us but have gotten smaller, many maintenence projects were deferred for lack of time and energy as the computer took up more and more of my days.

I still have to finish one more book (by spring of next year), but the pace has slowed and I am able to focus on our next steps.   Like Isaiah, I have a “real farm dream” – but it is slightly different.  It has more perennials in it, and different animals, a hoophouse for winter greens, summer heat lovers and rapid solar drying of my herbs.  It has a small building for displaying our wares – the eggs, the bedding plants and herbs, the tinctures, salves and creams, salad greens and flower,  a list of other products for sale - rabbits, dairy goats, baby chicks. 

Eventually it has a two story barn with a hayloft and room enough for all the creatures that eat our good grass and grow fat and rich with milk.  Eventually, I dream there will be hayloft.

Someday I dream of  barter with the neighbors for pasturage, perhaps, for a pair of working horses to haul logs out of the woods for firewood and cut hay.  Or maybe we’ll finally break down and get a tractor, who knows.  I understand the horses better, though.

Eventually the young perennials I am planting right now will grow large and begin to produce, and I will have nuts and new fruits to sell, and elderberry syrup and currant and aronia juice to sell.  I’m waiting until the children have the fun of climbing up the trees to help the harvest – it is hard to believe that someday they will need to climb.

Eventually, we will begin seeing the fruit of our breeding and selecting of small backyard dairy goats for thrift and hardiness – and I hope we will begin to see them popping up in yards.  I find that the best advertisement for the goats is the goats themselves – it is not possible to meet them without beginning to consider ways you could bring these small creatures home to your own yard.

I’m still mulling over sheep in the long term, and a host of other projects.  My goal is a year round income – products that come and go with each season, workloads that move around the year, if not evenly, gracefully. 

I dream of a place to teach classes, to invite people in.  I dream of neighbors all sitting down to a homegrown thanksgiving turkey.  I dream of open-farm days and tomato tastings. 

I have no idea how many of these dreams will come true, or whether Isaiah will ever get the farm he dreams of.  I hope he does – at least some of it – with us. I hope as he grows bigger, we are wise enough to let him make as much as he can of our place in his image, so that he doesn’t feel he has to go off, seeking a farm that he could never find at home.  I tell him that we can try and make our farm into what he wants – that it will take time and determination and work, and if he’s not afraid of those things, it may well happen.

The old saying “Doing has no need of wishing” is only partly true, you know.  It is true that you need not stand about in hopeless desire for something that seems so far away an unattainable if you set to making it happen.  But there is a time and a place for wishing, for the innocent dreaming of what could be.  I’m glad my son wishes a farm, and I’m looking forward to a long future of doing the work of making both our wishes come true.

Sharon

Bow Low to Your Earthworm Overlords!

Sharon September 10th, 2009

I don’t really have a “winding up the AIP class” post this time, so I thought I’d just repost something I came up with during the class.

That is, there will be times when we each of us have to make decisions that commit us one way or another to a particular vision of the future – it isn’t possible to both put your 401K towards insulation on your home and keep the investment; it isn’t possible to both take the high paying, earth-destroying job and also not take it.  Life sucks that way ;-) .

But a lot of the time, I think it is useful to ask yourself this – what if a miracle happened, and all the limits were taken away?  How would I look at the choices I’ve made in my life.  Would I be happy?  Would they be to my benefit or detriment?  Do they serve me when times are good, as well as when times are hard?  How do I choose to see things.

My feeling is that you can look at your work in the garden as endless enslavement to cruel earthworm overlords who demand turnips as tribute, or as a chance to live a life of basic and true and valuable things, eating well and earning your literal bread.  You can see putting down the car keys and getting on a bike or your feet as a loss of time, privacy and convenience, or the gift of the wind in your hair, time to notice things, better health and greater strength.  You can see your composting toilet as a big bucket of, well…you know…or as the gift of clean uncontaminated water and fertile soil. 

Me, I’m having a grand old time, and if you took all the limits away, I’d still be here, digging.  Of course, it could be the worms are just making me say that, ’cause I drunk the turnip juice. 

 Sharon

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