Another set of summer twin lambs was born in the field yesterday, one big, one tiny. It is possible that they started out as triplets and one didn’t take early on. Their mother gave me twins in January, little ewe lambs perfect for breeding next summer. I lost a ram lamb, a twin, to hypothermia on the big rain day last week. His momma led us to him huddled next to a stone wall, her lively little ewe hovering beside her. He was alive but just barely. He sounded a heart-wrenching cry that didn’t promise much but a frantic effort to save it on my part and usually a hole to be dug. We put him in front of the fire and tried to dry him. I tube-fed him with the most potent mix I could put together, and he died.
Noah Saltonstail’s horns are troubling him. I think he may have fly strike. Maxine Brown had success using Pine-Sol in a similar situation. I’ve seen him several mornings going to rub his head on the cool stones of the barn bridgeway. He must be caught today and treated each day for a while. I need him.
A customer is scheduled to come today to buy a ram lamb, and I shall thereby have money to extend the fence. More to do. I haven’t mowed part of the lawn in what seems like forever, and there are the expected loaves of bread to bake to greet my friends and family when they arrive at noon. The floors need mopping and the potatoes need hilling and the garlic is ready to replant and the new gate that was just cut for the new green fence asks to be painted and hung. I haven’t even begun to work on the summer’s project, promised to myself all winter, to convert the old laundry room, the most beautiful room in the house, into a dining room.
In other words, what shall be completed today, this wonderful one, with fourteen hours still left in it, and what shall spill over into an equally full tomorrow? And what hour, if any, shall be put aside to devote to heeding the message sent to me by that first red leaf on the maple tree one early morning only two weeks ago?
A STORY OF THREE BARNS
SOMETIMES THE most concrete of realities are built from the most ephemeral of dreams. The massive stone barn at the Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the sixty- by thirty-four-foot rectangular hundred-year-old barn on my farm, and my grandfather’s cow barn in Niantic, Connecticut, are three examples.
I was swept away by the Elk Creek Club this Monday to the Shaker Village in Massachusetts. Thinking that just outside of Albany meant a couple of miles on the outskirts of that city, my surprise was emphatic when Rosemary Sheehan, at the wheel, said, “Oh, Sylvia, that’s Albany,” as we swept on past.
My interest in the Shakers is practical. The bread I make in the summer and early fall is usually Shaker Daily Loaf. It keeps, it is delicious, and makes the kitchen a joy to enter while it is baking. I’ve been putting up all things delicious with tomatoes this weekend and am making crystallized plum tomatoes today from a Shaker recipe that has intrigued me for years. But the most important consideration was to learn what I could from their barns that could possibly help me in mine.
They have Merino sheep, a breed which I’ve only seen in pictures. I had read in Thomas Jefferson’s notebooks that he and George Washington imported several. Merinos remain the worldwide standard as the finest wool producers. The Shakers had been raising them since the early 1800s. It is a special treat for me to be able to see them. The Merinos were behind the great stone barn, near to shelter in case it rained. They have deep folds in their necks, which create more fleece and more problems for our contemporary shearer who uses electric clippers rather than traditional shears. The concern about rain stemmed from the sheep having a tendency to develop fly strike because the neck fleeces, once wet, never seem to dry out. The shepherds at the museum hired a man from New Zealand to shear the sheep this year. Since this is the predominant sheep there, he had no problem at all. The characteristic folds in the neck have become systematically eliminated by selective breeding; however, the museum is breeding them back in order to have a representative of the type of sheep the Shakers originally had.
The sheep were a dun color. The rams had fabulous curling horns. The pictures I’ve seen in advertisements made them seem to be huge animals, fierce and menacing, but those at the museum were Dorset sized. Their snorts and stamping front hooves, lowered heads, and piercing eyes made one certain they are not to be tangled with.
To my disappointment, the building that the Shakers used to house their sheep was no more, and the flock was confined in a conventional setup. But there had to be some solutions to some of my problems here in this barn. And there were, of course. The Shakers had made sturdy shutters to protect the lower two thirds of the windows so the cows wouldn’t accidentally kick them in. I’ve repeatedly put slats over the windows in my ram pen only to have them broken when I first separate him from the ewes. Heavy wooden shutters, high enough to be out of reach of his horns and low enough to allow light in, would do it. It was a good idea, but I continued to look. There had to be something else. Then I found it!
For four years now, I’ve been making wooden L-shaped brackets on which to hang partitions dividing my barn. The two joinings of the L would separate and come apart. The partitions are critical to the economical use of my barn. They must be high enough so the most energetic of yearlings can’t jump them. Sturdy enough so a hungry crew won’t gate-crash my heavier diners and I can save on feed, and easy to manipulate. Speed can often be crucial.
Well, there in one building spoking out from the round barn were doorways leading to a two-story drop, protected by a nonhinged sliding gate (hinges are the biggest single expense in my barn). The gates slid into and then dropped in an ingeniously fashioned system cut out of a single piece of wood. The notches held the gates firmly and securely. Beautiful! I saved the price of the ticket on one of those strong hinges alone!
I bought a picture of the inside of the roof of this amazing barn. The rafters are part of a huge wheel forming spokes to the center. In form, it is both elegant and complex. The roof itself is magnificent and modest. I’d love to have been present at the discussion and design meetings that resulted in this building. I wish I could understand the thought processes that originated it.
The first barn I ever went into was my grandfather’s. Grandpa used to take me and my brother Arnold and my cousin Henry to see the baby chicks he housed and raised on the upper level.
I remember the warm darkness of this barn, the stars sprinkled across the inside of the roof, round circles of light flashing in dances across the walls and floor, and yet on cloudless days, perfectly still. And then there was the still, thick air and the dust that sparkled in the light, but always the stars, the stars peeping through.
The very first time I walked into my barn, there they were, the familiar sight of stars sparkling in my roof, and sunlight dancing on the walls, and the glistening particles of dust gleaming in the air. How familiar and safe it felt. “Oh, stars,” I thought, “this barn has stars in the roof, too.”
And now when my boots slosh slosh in the wet after a rain seeping into the stanchion level of my barn floor, and I shoved and put down new hay and lime, I know I have to find the money to put on a new roof, and the stars will then be gone. My heart is heavy at the enormity of the project, and my face becomes grim as I slosh through the waste to get to the shovel. And yet never never has my heart failed to feel that same joy I felt as a little girl when I am in the haymow and see the stars in the roof, stars just like in Grandpa’s barn.
TWO STORIES IN ONE: MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN, CHRISTMAS 1993
I WALKED DOWNSTAIRS and into the kitchen this morning, the first day of Christmas. It registered a typical forty degrees on the indoor thermometer. Justina and my grandson’s mother, Naomi, had created order the evening before, when the intensity of Christmas cooking had reigned. The breakfast table was set perfectly. Blue-and-white dishes on the white linen cloth. Long-stemmed wineglasses were in place for orange juice. The big white enamel sink was gleaming and empty. The white stove was clean and shiny with blue-and-white dish towels hanging from its handles. My family’s boots were lined up near the fire, now do
wn to glowing coals. The white cotton curtains were gathered and pulled to the side to reveal an even whiter world. The sky was white with a faint blue cast, and the massive pines sheltering the house were thick with snow. As I write, the sun breaks through. The pale blue cast to the white sky intensifies, and gold is the snow where grey shadows do not lie.
I savor this moment alone in the kitchen where my family is still asleep upstairs. The ticking of the clock seems especially loud. The kitchen fire has begun to roar, small thunder. Steele has come down from my room to warm herself next to it. Sometimes I come in from the barn and stand on the step leading down into my kitchen, and this room, so central to all our lives, pleases me, its sense of order, its color, its aesthetics. One day last summer, when I had returned from shoveling the barn, I found the room especially comforting. Everything at that moment was in its appointed place. Blue-and-white Royal Copenhagen china lined up against the wall Justina had painted to replicate blue-and-white Portuguese tiles. Her set of blue-and-white ceramic canisters lined up perfectly, their painted windmills pointed all in the same direction on the long shelf close to the ceiling. A bouquet of white mallows was in an equally white pitcher. For a moment I had achieved a feeling in that room that so often eludes me, a feeling both familiar and distant. But what was it? And why was it so deeply satisfying, so urgently important, and so observably missed when absent?
My mother’s kitchen on Ocean Avenue in New London, Connecticut and, earlier, on Vauxhall Street in the same town, were very much the opposite of any I’ve ever created. My mother was not a cook or, at least, not the kind of cook who believes you begin to make a tuna sandwich by catching the fish, and she was certainly never covered with the flour badges I inevitably wear after baking our daily bread. My mother’s generation was the first to enjoy canned foods. Foods, that is, that someone else canned, someone else with a name like Del Monte or Ocean Spray. And she certainly enjoyed the advantage of it.
I remember most vividly the kitchen on Ocean Avenue. Gray marbleized Formica on the kitchen table. Black vinyl seats on the chairs. Cream gauze curtains on the windows that shut out neither the summer sunlight nor the dark of winter’s evenings. And the pantry where we both spent the evening doing the dishes. I talked and she listened. Everything was in order. There was a place for everything where the everything could always be found. I remember the silence in that room as I rushed into it as a teenager, a whirlwind of joy or despair and everything in between. The silence and security and order. The love in that room was absolute and impenetrable. It almost had to be pushed aside to walk through it. Nothing, nothing could ever cause even a ripple in that silent, thick air. The sense of security was expressed in that order. The knowledge of love was in my mother. And it filled the room in its entirety.
It was that summer morning, standing in the threshold to my kitchen, when I understood the why of it. Why is it so important to me to have that kitchen in order. Why is it so deeply satisfying when it is. My mother’s solution to the problem of keeping flower vases clean was not to put flowers in them so they never got dirty. But she always let me fill them, even as a two-year-old, without a hint of reproach. And now, in January, I start to think of forcing thorn apple branches to bloom. And if I don’t, a voice inside of me calls out that I am betraying my nature. And yet it’s not the flowers alone, nor the order alone, that is satisfying, but the deep, still, impenetrable love and security that they both together evoked that have meaning for me.
My children, grandson, and grandson’s mother arrived last week to celebrate Christmas. I have always delighted in the custom of celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas. It became even more enhanced when I married a man whose culture included a parade on Twelfth Night celebrating the arrival of the Three Kings in Bethlehem. We don’t always come together on Twelfth Night, and we don’t always finish making our unfinished gifts on Twelfth Night, either, but we believe we do, and we believe we will, and that is our gift to each other in this family, that Christmas isn’t one big explosion of giving and one burst of loving one day a year but that our thoughtfulness toward each other and lovingness have no end. There will be a tomorrow, another day to show our love.
Christmas, for us as in many families, is spent with our own particular customs and traditions. When my children were small I had very little money to spare on gifts. But I so wanted to have abundance under the tree that their thrift-shop finery, handmade sweaters, mittens, and long underwear became the gifts. Socks wrapped in individual pairs. Packages of bubble gum. A handmade doll and an apple green car. I remember spending my last dollar on a red Tonka truck that I couldn’t bring myself to leave behind for my then three-year-old son. One week we drank only powdered milk because I bought a strand of golden bells for the tree with the last money I had.
Those very bells are on this year’s tree, twenty-odd years after I bought them that Christmas Eve. And the socks reappear as well. This year they manifest as gifts from my daughter to my ex-daughter-in-law, peach colored, wrapped beautifully. And from me to my son, once more, black tube socks from Ames, all in a box that had once served quite a different purpose, and handmade ones as well from Micbet’s Shearlings. Mikhael was as thrilled with a bottle of pure vanilla extract to use baking chocolate chip cookies with his Daddy-O as he was with still another John Deere tractor added to his collection. Justina took the prize for starting to shop the earliest, last January. Naomi came in second, beginning in May. Jaochim did a most creative Christmas. I, who have been known to do it all in two days before Christmas, was pleased with myself for beginning last summer at the Walton Fair, and even found a forgotten gift of a wooden shoe form left in the back of the Christmas closet.
It took the family five hours to decorate the tree. The ornaments have been gathered since Justina’s first Christmas. Painted tin figures from Mexico, a tiny fuzzy brown bear, painted glass fruit, a miniature red sled. The tree was the last one to be found in the village the day before Christmas. And it fit absolutely perfectly in our Christmas tree corner.
I came home from work at nine A.M. on Christmas morning. Gifts were still being wrapped. Everyone helped me with mine. Once or twice they wrapped one for themselves thinking it was for someone else. It took us a day and a half to open them all again. Flashlights and emory boards, Chinese poetry and Emily Dickinson, Bartholemew’s atlas, bowl scrapers, and mittens, coffee from Hawaii via New York and coffee from Fortnum and Mason in London, white chocolate with pistachios and dried cranberries, music from the 1930s. Raggedy Ann books, corduroy shirts, beautiful soaps, a rhinestone pin, silk velvet ribbons. Each gift was thoughtfully chosen and given, each an expression of our interest in, knowledge of, and love for each other.
I try very hard to make the moment that my now-adult kids arrive home a step into a house redolent with security, order and, above all, love. I plan and make schedules in fifteen-minute units. What to dust and what to polish and what to bake and when. Sometimes I succeed more than other times. I am, no doubt, forever doomed, or shall I say privileged to have hay from the barn somewhere on the kitchen floor or a motherless lamb under the stove. But always, I try.
As I sit in the kitchen, early this morning, made peaceful and lovely and orderly by Justina and Naomi, a quiet time before everyone comes down, I understand the profound and deep sameness between this pretty, pretty room, smelling of baking and roasting and cooking, and that beige-walled room with black vinyl chairs, and gray Formica table, smelling of Campbell’s soup. The love is absolute. Its assumption impenetrable. This room is the same, this first day of Christmas, as my mother’s kitchen so long ago.
JANUARY 14, 1994
THE LIGHT in the sky is changing. The afternoons are brighter. Winter is emphatically here. Rarely complimented, much maligned, winter brings within it light and hope. It barely finishes when it hears us say, oh, the dark days of winter. It sends not one extra blast of cold down our chimneys for our misunderstanding. It simply continues, oblivious. It is autumn whose brilliance and fleshy
colors delude us into thinking winter’s days are dark. Autumn, with its gleaming blue and deep purple skies. Its evenings of opal or hyacinth clouds bordered by russet and gold hills; its mornings, with shining leaves, brilliant in the sunlight. And slowly, slowly, the night grows long and the days short. Darkness thick, sharp, intense, and deep. We watch the brilliant stars. The intensity of color and light has blinded us, enchanted us, and delighted us. And as each day progresses, each one shorter than the one before, we regret the falling of the leaves and the approach of winter’s darkness. But it is the day after the first day of winter that brings a half a minute of more light and that gradually leads us in slow increments toward summer.
This winter, each day seems as cold as or colder than the one before. My friend calls to ask, “Have you frozen to death yet?” The water in the house freezes from time to time. Human error (forgetting to leave the water running when it’s windy), false economy, my reluctance to run up the electric bill, and not quite being prepared all contribute. I’ve learned how many blankets and comforters it takes to sleep warmly if I’ve not the time to stoke the French ceramic stove in my room, and the little dogwood-painted thermometer reads twenty degrees on the cold wall.
I can’t remember the principles of heat and cold from high school physics. It would be helpful to understand how heat moves, aside from rising. And is it preferable to put the down comforter as the bottom layer or the top layer on a pile of blankets? Some people like warm climates, consistent, predictable, even temperatures. Others need the changes, the variables of nature. Some move south after living here most of their lives, and some of those return. But those of us who do live here are consistent in our argument that our lengthy mud season, that never-never land between winter and spring, is the most disheartening. That is the time to be prepared for, to arrange special moments of sociability or entertainments of the mind.
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