I’m filled, as always, with expectation. It’s a look I see in the horses’ eyes only at chore-time, when they know their grain is coming. But on a dark afternoon, rain falling, they stand in the middle of the pasture with no thought of the shelter they could take. Their posture is noncommittal. They’re November horses, just the way they were June horses not so long ago.
November 24
I pull into the farm from the city well after nightfall but early in the evening. I turn off the headlights as I come up the drive. The moon hangs over the eastern hills like a hypnotist’s watch. I drop a few things in the house, turn on the kitchen light, and wander out again to check on the animals.
I used to take a flashlight when I was new to this place. I no longer do, even on nights much darker than this one. My eyes adjust slowly, too slowly, but part of the pleasure of walking out in the night is feeling the adjustment, watching the flat opacity of my night blindness resolve into the three dimensions of the farm. All the nocturnal creatures are out and about and I’ll never be one of them. Even the horses are more nocturnal than I am. They live in natural light year-round, and by the time I get home from the city, they’re already a couple of hours into watching the night.
In summer, you can pretend the night is translucent and the Milky Way is emanating a warmth of some kind. But by late November, those illusions are past. The sun feels vigilant and benevolent, no matter how dim. And when it vanishes, just after four, it seems like the rising darkness is slowly becoming continuous with the deepest reaches of space. The feeling only intensifies as the weather gets colder and Orion rises in the sky.
The chickens are on their roost, pretending not to notice when I look in. The horses stand impassive in their pasture, though if I opened the gate and walked in, they would drift over to share their heat. Where the barn cat is, I have no idea, but he’s so black that he would stand out on a night like this. I complete my rounds, and still my eyes haven’t opened fully to the night.
I light a fire in the woodstove, put a few things away, remove a mouse from a trap in the pantry, and settle in to read in the kitchen. The night is too warm and still for the chimney to draw well. A rhomboid of light spills onto the deck, and at its edges I see a movement. It’s an opossum, come up to investigate the cat-food dish. It walks up to the foot of the sliding glass door and peers in, surely unseeing in so much brightness.
Perhaps this is the opossum I met on the ladder going up to the hayloft a couple of months ago. It was a surprise to both of us. Now it stands in the light for another moment looking hopelessly disorganized, as opossums do, and then it wanders off into the darkness, where the seeing is so much better.
December 10
Out in one of the pastures lies a pocket knife with a serrated blade. I lost it at least ten years ago, but I think about it every time I walk the fence line, even though I’ve long since replaced it. Somewhere, too, there’s a pair of lined work gloves, the ones I’ve used for the past six or seven winters. And where are my gaiters? Or, for that matter, the pair of flip-flops that vanished overnight?
This farm is a constellation of lost objects. They all know where they are, but they’re keeping mum, the better to surprise me when they finally turn up. Finding a long-lost object brings an idiotic satisfaction. “There you are!” I heard myself saying yesterday when I stumbled upon a waterproof timer for the horse-tank heater. I wasn’t looking for it, which is how I found it.
My dad had a basement woodshop with a pegboard wall for hanging hand tools—each in its special place. In practice, the wall was an index of what was missing. The problem isn’t a lack of organization. It’s the way one task turns into another. I go out to tighten a section of fence, set the hammer down in a conspicuous place, walk to the barn to get some wire, begin repairing something I notice while I’m there, and then it snows. Maybe I remember leaving the hammer by the fence. Maybe it turns up in April.
Living here is a constant exercise in problem solving. And that’s the trouble with something that’s gone missing. It’s a problem with no solution. I prefer the kinds that work out in the end, like discovering that the broken stepladder I’ve kept for years makes a perfect chicken roost.
When it gets as cold as it is—five degrees one recent morning with half a foot of snow on the ground—all the problems change. I decide to switch implements on the tractor. Off goes the spear for moving round bales and on goes the back blade. No matter how solid or impressive a tractor looks, it’s connected to its implements by several small pins which, when dropped in the snow, might never have existed in the first place.
But sometimes things work out just right. When the temperature plunged, the hydrant—a self-draining faucet—in the chicken yard froze up. I layered some insulation over a heat tape and plugged it in while the horses stood by, thumping their nearly empty tank. I thought it would be three days at least before the water was flowing. But when I went out to do chores that afternoon—wind chill at zero—the hydrant worked fine. It felt as good as it would to find that pocket knife.
December 30
I’m standing in the barnyard with the farrier. Remedy, the quarter horse, is getting his winter shoes. We’re surrounded by vast heaps of plowed snow, the kind my friends and I loved to tunnel through when we were kids. It’s a sparkling day, and for some reason I find myself thinking about a photograph we found after my father died. My grandfather is sitting on a high bank of snow, wearing work clothes, and he’s holding up a fox terrier, which looks like it’s ready to eat the camera. This is the home farm in northwest Iowa, probably 1936.
In the background is the barn where the draft horses lived. I don’t know whether my grandfather was his own horseshoer, but I doubt it. So there must have come many days like the one I’m having now, standing in the cold beside a sleepy horse while a man with a damaged thumb and a sore back goes about his work. In all these years, the technology has hardly changed. Fire, steel, nails, rasp, hammer, anvil, and a pair of heavy chaps with a hoof knife in a leather pocket. A patient horse and an extra human to hold the lead rope.
I knew that farm long after the horses had been replaced by tractors. When I was older, I tried to get my dad to tell stories about what it was like growing up there during the Depression. He would sometimes talk about the blizzard of 1936, and he always talked about the kindly cunning of the draft horses, who loved to lean into him. But those days were always cloaked in a vagueness I never understood, as if the farm were a country from which he’d emigrated and long since put out of mind. I wanted the details, what the work was like, which chores were his, how June differed from January, how much pain and how much pleasure. I never got them.
So I look back at the old photos and try to imagine the life there. I think of another photo of my grandfather—face sun-blackened—holding my dad on his knee and a pup in the other arm. My dad’s older brothers are there in ragged overalls, each one holding a well-chewed apple. In the background there’s an octagonal brooder house and a long house for laying hens. What I wouldn’t give to go back and see it all.
The closest I can come is to stand as quietly as Remedy does and wait for the farrier to finish. I close the gate behind him and send the horses thundering up the drive and into the breast-deep snow of the pasture. I hear the rooster crow as I carry an armload of firewood into the house.
Year
TEN
February 10
Most days I see a male cardinal sitting in the hickory tree behind the house, waiting to forage beneath the bird-feeders. You don’t really “see” a male cardinal. The world collapses to a carmine point that puts everything else out of focus, the hickory, the snow, the woodsmoke from the village down below. For its character—modest and more cautious than other birds—the cardinal is overdressed. But then what would living up to that plumage mean?
It would be nice if starlings came in ones and twos and were more like the cardinal in demean
or. We would suddenly see the ornateness, the exoticism of their feathering, which reminds me of darkly marbled endpapers in well-bound books. I’ve handled a starling skin—using its hackle feathers for tying trout flies—and each feather is a bit of the night sky with an iridescent galaxy shining near the tip.
But starlings don’t come in ones and twos. They come in gangs and mobs and hordes. They mug the suet. They bicker over the oil-seed feeders. They bother even the squirrels. Their behavior is strictly self-referential—they fight only with each other and they fight all the time. The other birds look on, appalled, like hosts watching their dinner guests brawling across the table. Starlings are capable of sleekness, but they often look bedraggled. Plus they have that child’s drawing of a beak stuck in the middle of their faces.
The starlings arrived at the feeders a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been mayhem since. I discovered that the Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services killed 1,259,714 starlings in 2009 and dispersed another 7 million of the 200 million starlings in this country. They’re all descended, as is well-known, from a few dozen birds released in 1890 by the American Acclimatization Society, which was devoted to introducing European species to America. Starlings are good intentions in the flesh, which says nearly everything about good intentions.
But they’re here and I look for a reason to admire them, apart from their feathers. I notice that they waddle, more ducklike in their gait than any other bird at the feeders. Somehow this makes them seem less leather-jacketed and hoodlike, if not endearing. I think of their habit of poking that bill into the ground and prying it open with colossal jaw muscles, searching for prey, aerating the world as they go. But it’s no use. They’ve de-nested billions of birds, and the porch where the feeders hang looks like a scene from Hitchcock.
Then one morning they’re gone. The cardinal sits in the hickory. The chickadees come and go, taking a seed then pivoting quickly for a glance around. The woodpeckers are on the suet, ladder-backed and probing quizzically. The house sparrows—nineteenth-century imports themselves—move civilly among the fallen seeds as if to show they belong.
March 12
Again and again, I’m struck by the persistence of objects. I go out to do the chores wearing a blue plaid wool coat. I have no idea how old it is, because it’s a hand-me-down, and yet every day there it is, waiting on its hook. I feed the horses and reflect, as I always do, that Remedy is thirty-three years old and still sultanic in his majesty. The sun comes up, and here we are everyday, all of us—animate and inanimate—persisting together.
There’s nothing very surprising about it, any more than there is in the persistence of memory, which assures me that this is the same world I went to sleep in. And yet, for brief seasons, I can’t help marveling at it. The farm and everything in it seems wonderfully solid, and it all reports for duty, unbidden, every day. Perhaps this is just a way of countering the other feeling I commonly have—that we’ve all been loaded aboard a planet streaking through time.
A rabbit has been eating the bark on the lower branches of the apple trees, which reminds me that now is pruning time—and that the trees are going on fourteen years old. The chickadees are suddenly singing their piping, two-note song. The snowpack is deflating. Nell is shedding great clumps of horse hair. Change is about to break out abruptly, persuasively. The woodshed, is almost down to nothing but chipmunk nests. Yet last week I burned a length of honey locust from a tree felled nearly a decade ago. It was still dense and orange. This week I burned a length from a sugar maple that was at least two hundred years old when it was felled, and the wood felt original, not a trace of decay. The house I live in was built mostly in the 1830s, and in the library there are a couple of quartos by John Dryden published in the late seventeenth century—the oldest objects on this farm that aren’t rocks, earth, or trees. So I wake up and pretend that I persist too, that I’m as perdurable as that ancient sugar maple or the words of Dryden. The sunlight coming over the eastern ridge feels new and ancient, both. I put on my chore coat, slip on my muck boots, which are cracking with age, and go out to open the door to the chicken house my dad built a decade ago. The birds flutter to their nests in a second chicken house not far away. And when I go out later in the day, there will be something new and fresh, nine or ten eggs still warm from the hens that laid them.
April 1
After a long scentless winter—apart from the tang of woodsmoke in the air—I could suddenly smell the earth again one morning last week. It seems odd to call the scent fresh—it was darker and mustier than that—but fresh is how it felt. It hovered like a ground fog above the last rotting banks of snow, so fertile that the spring scent rising from the damp earth might be a growing medium.
When the snow slid back at last, revealing pasture and garden, it was like the retreat of a glacier, leaving everything mashed flat in its wake. The grass looked like it was waking from a long, sodden nap, and all but the stoutest plants—the yuccas even—had been bulldozed. It seemed as though almost every non-woody plant had been drawing on a common reservoir of terrestrial sap that ran dry over the winter. That new scent in the air is the reservoir refilling, saturating the soil.
Vole trails are still visible on what looks like a lawn of crushed velvet, and the ground isn’t soft underfoot yet, except where the gophers have been digging, and there it’s spongy and accepting. The only ice left anywhere is under the scattered hay where the horses fed in the middle pasture. Every time I walk across it I think of nineteenth-century icehouses packed with the winter’s pond-ice and insulated with sawdust and straw—the inverse, somehow, of my hayloft still a third full of the hay of 2010.
This was a winter with casualties. The snow undid the bottom row of insulators on the electric fence one by one. I’ve lost track of the mice that wandered into my traps. Two losses leave me disheartened. One is the beehive. There was nothing stirring there on a sixty-degree day a couple of weeks ago, no bees on the aconites or snowdrops. There will be a mournful spring harvest as I clean out the hive and prepare it for a new colony next spring.
What worries me most is the barn cat, whom I haven’t seen since the harshest days of early February. He’d been coming up to the house to eat on the deck, but I usually saw him up in the hayloft, watching warily as I tossed down bales, or basking in a wedge of sunlight in the run-in shed. In the heaviest snow, he waited on a low dogwood branch until he saw me coming, and then hid until I set out his food. I believe he’s gone. He had a complicated route around the neighborhood, over the fields and across the road. So there’s just a chance that one warm day I’ll see him sitting on a fence rail.
April 21
Last weekend, I opened the hive of bees that died over the winter. For the past three years, I’ve left all the honey for the bees instead of taking some for myself, in hopes of making a hard season easier to bear. But in a winter as cold as this past one—and without a January thaw—it’s possible for bees to cluster so tightly, trying to keep warm, that they’re unable to move to their stores of honey only a few inches away.
I’d planned to take the hive apart in preparation for new bees. Instead, I found well over a hundred pounds of honey waiting to be harvested, honey in some sense bequeathed to me by the citizens of a vanished monarchy. Usually, beekeepers harvest honey in the fall. To be harvesting honey in the spring felt very odd, as if I’d started sugaring—a spring event—and somehow gone astray.
There’s something unspeakably beautiful, at once frugal and profligate, in the sight of a frame full of honey just as the bees have left it, each cell carefully capped. Beekeepers usually try to take off honey just after it’s been capped, but this was honey that had been capped last September, when the goldenrod was still in bloom. It had overwintered, aging and darkening as the days passed and the temperature dropped and its makers died. It’s unlike any other honey I’ve ever harvested, somewhere between grade B maple syrup and molasses in color. Its taste has bee
n affected only by the memory of losing the bees that made it.
The surprise was greater than simply finding unexpected honey. It was also the unexpected reawakening of the beekeeper in me, who has been dormant for several years. I’ve ordered three new packages of bees, and when they arrive at the end of May, they’ll go in new hives designed to let the bees produce their own comb instead of building on a foundation of wax or plastic already embossed in a hexagonal pattern. It’s a deliberate retreat from the familiar boxlike hives I’ve always used, which are really designed for large-scale honey production.
In fact, it’s been a week of surprises. Honey is slowly filtering through sieves and waiting to be bottled. More honey is waiting to be removed from the frames and begin its filtering. Beeswax is waiting to be melted in the sun. And one evening, an hour before dusk, I looked out the window and there was the barn cat—last seen in January—sitting on the deck waiting for his milk. He looked at me as though wondering where I’d been, a question for which I have no good answer.
May 20
For the past thirteen years, my horses have gazed across a gravel road at a neighbor’s pasture, where her horses stand, gazing back. Kinship, affinity, species recognition, herd instinct, longing—I don’t know what to call this habit. But my neighbor and I are planning to move my horses into her pasture. She has plenty of extra grass, and my land can use a rest.
There will be some sorting out. I wonder where my neighbor’s mule will come in the pecking order and whether her thoroughbred will defer to Remedy, who is the boss of my small herd. We’ll see. What I really wonder is what my horses will think and feel—that’s the only way I can put it—when they find themselves turned loose in a pasture they’ve spent such a long time contemplating. They’ve traveled widely over the years—to Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado—but to them, I suppose, that pasture across the road is thirteen horse-years away.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 24