A mow in early June is an airy place. If the timing and season have been right, the mow will be all but empty, with a few bales of hay left perhaps, some old straw on top of the granary. All the beams are exposed, as well as the mortises and tenons, the hand-drilled holes holding hand-hewn rungs in the ladders to nowhere. Straight ladders go up either side from the middle. Suicide ladders that go almost to the roof and abruptly stop.
Light seeps in through the barnboards and throws diagonal rays across floors golden with strawdust or green with hayseed. Like Zeus morphing through the planks in a shower of gold to seduce Danae in her tower, the sun slides through the cracks to conceive a Perseus of its own in the promise of fodder to come. And rain on the metal roof first pings then escalates to a thunderous roar during a spring storm. There is little to absorb sound: Echo cries her lonely plea.
The barn was empty when we first came, of course. No animals; no feed. That first winter it stood forlorn and unvisited. The rusty siding and tin roof were its outward signs of grieving and loss. And during our first summer it lay lonely too. I learned about baling and stooking and mowing that summer, but not in my own barn. I helped fill the neighbours’ mow with my hay in return for their knowledge. Books can’t convey the heat in the hay mow when the crop reaches the top, or the height of the wagon and thrill of riding on a well packed load from the field. Sweating from working the land, bitten by cut stalks and thistles, I flexed my aching back and extended my weary arms.
The second year, I turned my barn loft into mows, one for hay and one for straw. I had my first sheep now, just a few, but they were resident. They would winter here, would need feed. The crop came in, abundant, dry, a little later than I would learn to like, but wholesome and good. We got the elevator set up: a long conveyor belt (just a little wider than a bale of hay) tilting from the barn bank through the door and across the barn floor to reach the highest mow. Until the haystack began to grow, the elevator just picked up the bales to drop them on the floor, a senseless operation. I knew now how to pack my mow with tight bales on the outside row, to build a wall of hay that would withstand the winter climbing. A reticulated wall, like the second stomach of a sheep (called the reticulum or honeycomb bag) where it was headed. We set up each row in the opposite direction—now lengthwise, now widthwise—for strength and safety. When a boot hit a crease between the bales mid-winter, the foot would just sink down to the knee, not forever.
The ladder came to life as the day progressed. Climbing was easy as the bales came in, just a row at a time. But getting down to the barn floor for lemonade between loads could only be done on those ancient rungs, set on the outer edge of the haystack, like a rock face, a perpendicular decline. As the wall grew, the trip got more treacherous, extending beyond the ladder’s top, over the high beam, where there were no guardrails or ropes or carabiners. No crampons on my boots. My cottage loft had not prepared me for this. It had been small and safe, but I had been taught to fear it. Perhaps that fear festered and was now resurfacing.
I still resist the high hay mow on the first cold days of winter feeding, when I’m alone all day, where no one would find me if I lost my footing and fell. The sheep would bleat to be fed, but help wouldn’t hear.
The straw mow is smaller, beside and over the granary, which has pronunciation problems of its own. Grain fills it, but it loses the hard a-sound in the process and ignores the single n. Granary rhymes with tannery. Archaic words for archaic practices that go on all around us still if we will see. The straw mow fills itself. The golden bales are so light and dry they can be tossed gently into place. The straw gilds the mow and closes in both sides with living walls of bedding and feed. Gold and green. Echo, shamed and rejected as in the myth, disappears across the fields to the edge of the wood as long as the barn is full.
THE HOUSE LOFT is still a loft, but changed too in its way. We first discovered it behind a derelict door, which revealed a forgotten staircase, unlighted, leading narrowly through unfinished walls. Dried plaster oozed from slatted lath on one side; you could see the blackish insides of outdoor boards on the other. On a spacer between the two-by-fours was a mummified mouse. A bit big for a mouse. A mere case of a rodent, tanned from inside out, leathern and brown, the grey fur lost in its dry preservation. The stairs were decidedly steep, though not perpendicular like the barn ladders, and led directly to a dark sleeping loft, fallen into disrepair from neglect, over the back kitchen.
Mysteriously, nothing about the loft was quite finished. There were no walls or floor or ceiling, but loose boards left lying over the joists made hunched walking possible around the open stairwell. One small window graced—no it did not grace, it punctured the dormer end. The glass was cracked, fly-specked, cobwebbed, opaqued with years of disinterest.
I don’t know if we were told it was a sleeping loft or if I invented that use for generations of grandchildren, farmhands, and summer visitors who were brave or disrespected enough to sleep there. It was a summer heat trap, with no ventilation except from the crack in the nailed-shut window, yet the first frosts in fall would seep through the siding like short-tailed shrews.
During our first two years the loft stayed closed, dark, scary. But when the water ran hot, the light shone, the heat radiated and the brick tent encased a hearth again, it was time to designate the loft as a space for creation.
As long as I can remember, I have played at art, dabbled at craft. My grandmother taught me to knit when I was small, and I sewed most of my clothes at school. I learned sculpture and tried to paint. For a while I did pots, but something wasn’t right: the mess, the wet, the dependence on kiln and glaze. Only the mesmerizing circles of the wheel entranced me. And so here I turned to wool, to turning fleece into wool, to twisting and plying my need for craft with my love of animals and from them spinning a life.
I had a neighbour who spun. I followed her home from Alderney one day and boldly turned in her lane. She got out of her car, gave me a quizzical look, and I told her my business, asked her to help me, begged for the knowledge to spin. Malka gave me my start right then and there, invited me into her home, her studio, and slowly showed me the wool, the wheel, the magic of thread. She is a meticulous person, and her skeins are perfect. She is an artist, and her concepts are clear. Together we learned the secrets of my sheep (for she has none), the qualities of those first Hamp crosses with their bulky dense wool, and I made my first continuous thread, my first skein, my first pair of socks for my beloved.
The socks didn’t happen quickly. I needed equipment and patience and time. I suffered discouragement, despair and rage. At first I tried a drop spindle, an aptly named tool. A simple shaft attached to a whorl, it can be made from a stone and a stick, or a potato pierced with a pencil, or it can be lathed from fine wood. Flicking the whorl sets the shaft spinning and sends the twist up into the fleece, which grows on itself as the spindle gently falls lower and lower. But as the yarn breaks in inexperienced hands, the spindle drops all at once, and the more it dropped the more discouraged I got, and the more it broke. If I could manage to spin a full length of yarn from hands to floor, I would stop and wind the results on the shaft and begin again. But beginning was perilous, so I stood on a chair to increase the length before I was forced to stop and wrap up the strand. It took forever to fill the shaft and the result was grim. It looked nothing like wool in a thread; it was lumpy and uneven, a thin spiderweb filament culminating in a blob of fleece, now thick, now thin, connected by the sheer force of the wool itself, an imbricated fibre, elastic and gregarious, sticking together with microscopic barbs that extended like paper dolls holding endless hands in a row.
I bought a spinning wheel. No more chair standing, or winding, or stopping. The bobbin fills by itself through a mechanical combination of cords or brakes, and the wheel is powered by foot. Both hands are free to feed the fleece, to control the twist, to guide the yarn onto the spool. It looked so easy when Malka spun. Her foot a soft rhythm, her hands relaxed, the fleece feathers in her lap,
waiting their turn to fly.
But the wheel lost its pace at my touch; it balked and bumped and turned in reverse. It travelled the floor, trying to flee my heavy foot until I wedged it in place. I abandoned the fleece and retired my hands for the moment to focus just on my foot, gently down and up, down and up, loosening the tension, working with the wheel and establishing a rhythm. So deceptively simple to turn the wheel at a steady pace, so discouragingly difficult.
I would just find my speed, make peace with the wheel, feel ready to add the wool and begin to spin, when suddenly it would stop revolving or reverse. I felt all the frustration of Jason’s quest, wondering how I could accomplish the labours necessary for attaining my golden fleece. The wheel was my wild bull, the raw fibres my dragon’s teeth, but my desire to succeed finally got me past the dragon (perhaps Malka spelled it to sleep) and the circle whirled, finally; it drew in my fleece and wound my thread on the bobbin.
Miles and miles of locks lay waiting to be formed into yarn, as they grew on the backs of my flock.
BEFORE WE TACKLED the loft, we filled wool sacks in the barn at shearing and brought baskets of luminous fleece with its rich raw smell, thick with lanolin, into the house. There was too much to knit, too little time. I bought a loom and learned to weave. It was an instrument I could play like a keyboard to create full concertos of twills and tweeds, solos of diamond and cross. I used my full reach to throw the shuttle, to catch through the web, a cloth growing under my eyes as I worked. Such comfort in climbing onto the bench, settling up to the beam, positioning my feet on the treadles, working the spaces with my toes, arching my arms for the throw. A settled position, not easily vacated in those days before mobile phones. There were times it was difficult to climb out, entranced as I was by the rhythm, the click of the lams, the scrutch of the reed, the ratchet clicking cloth onto the roller.
At first I had my loom in the kitchen, my wheel by the fire. But the fruit of that loom too often worked its way into the pots on the stove; wool turned up in the stew. And one day, in a fit of frustration with pastry that refused to roll, I went to throw a fistful on the floor and missed. Heddles and reeds, treadles and pawls covered in lard and flour. It was time the loom had a room of its own: the loft.
We shifted the stairs from west to east, filled the north wall with glass, set two dormers on each side and gave them gothic windows crafted by a near-gothic glazier. We argued with our carpenter, coddled him and cajoled him into preserving rather than levelling. From our own bush we harvested fat cedars, and by way of an ancient man with a shingle mill, we roofed our loft with our own wood. Our mason matched the brick with pilfer from a local ruin and built a nineteenth-century chimney pot around the centre flue for the wood stove below.
The low walls were plastered, as were the wide sloping ceilings and angular dormers. And though he cursed the angles, the pargeter found time to help me dress the loom, to grip bundles of taut woolen threads in his dusty hands as I wound them evenly round the beam for a warp. I worked my wool all over the farm while the loft progressed that summer. I harvested dye-plants in the meadow, spun under the trees, wove sawdust into my kitchen fabric. Endless days of creativity followed by painting and varnishing. Smells of boiling greens for dyeing mixed with the scent of freshly cut pine, of plaster, latex, lanolin and turps.
YEARS LATER the smells have changed. There’s the wool still, and recently the pungency of a new coat of paint. Fresh pine in the new railing, and the musts and moulds from aging books gathered second-hand for shelves that grow like spiderwebs along the walls. The sounds of shuttles and spindles, clacking of treadles and whirring of wheels have submitted to clatter of keyboard and ruffling of paper. The loom has crept to a corner, and the wheels surround a guest bed. But I do use them still between chapters, and I write my life in spinning, plying, webbing. I write sweaters and shawls from my sheep and scarves from my dogs with the same hands that weave words in the bookish end of the loft.
I climb stairs covered in catalogne, rag carpet created from old curtains and sheets from my youth. And as I rise up above the house, away from the chores and the others, I look out to the trees, the sky, the endless fields and fencerows. The sun on my right in the morning, on my left late in the day, clouds to the north, the grey of November, the snows of winter and the trapped heat in July. It’s often too hot or too cold, too bright or too dark, but this loft of my design, roofed from my bush and floored from my loom is my upper region, my air, my sky. It is as close as I get to the heavens.
FIRST BORN
BABIES HAD NEVER BEEN PART of the plan—at least not our babies. Fur and feathers, and tightly curled wool intrigued me. Animals who grew to maturity in short months, who went on their way, who walked at birth.
I became accomplished as a midwife to my flock. I learned to disentangle twins locked in a fatal embrace, turn breeches, retract tails and find hind hocks. I put back prolapses and treated mastitis; I urged weak lambs to suck.
A young chick, curious about the water pail, tipped over the edge and lay floating one day, eyes open and staring, body slack. I scooped him out, felt no pulse, but breathed into his body, pumped his wings in some slapstick Holger Nielsen, dried him with the hair dryer, and he came alive. Lazarus. I seemed to have a knack.
BEFORE WE CAME here, back in our nomadic days of youth hostels and backpacks, when so many of us seemed to be on the road, we met an American who’d fled his homeland and its military draft. I don’t know if we ever really knew who he was or where he was going, but one night in a faraway place, we shared his wisdom, perhaps gave ours. He believed that the only things that couldn’t be taken away from us were what we had in our heads and our hands. Knowledge and skill. And that advice shaped us and helped to bring us here, where we learned the minute changes of weather that govern our crops, the moment before the timothy heads up, the imminence of labour for a ewe. I learned to spin and weave, to dye with wild plants, to sow and harvest. And Thomas learned to build, with wood and stone, with logs and fence wire. Each project brought new skills and packed new knowledge into our heads.
We took courses at the agricultural and community colleges down the highway. Carpentry and plumbing, apiculture and sheep, meat production and wool, restoration architecture and woodlot management. We took things apart and learned how they worked. We attempted to put them back together. We watched our neighbours, rode their seed drills, drove their tractors, packed their hay, killed their chickens (well, only once did I do that, but I know I can). We watched calves being born, wrenched out of their mothers with block and tackle. We fed them milk from galvanized calf pails furnished with wide rubber nipples. We helped castrate piglets. Thomas witnessed the butchering of a pig and turned the neighbour’s stomach when he rummaged in the hot entrails, searching for an appendix, ever eager over anatomy. Our hands grew calloused and our minds overflowed with information. We trialed and erred and eventually came to understand many different things crucial to life in the country, to life itself, to recognition of our place here.
After five years on the farm, I was just beginning to feel I understood, had mastered some basics, could survive. There was no place for children in my plan. No courses to take, no degrees to be done in parenting.
Then on a night in February, during one of those wintery winters when the snow circles the county like Orion’s belt, Thomas got a call. A patient at a farm nearby was in labour. Her husband was blowing the snow from the lane, getting ready to head to the hospital. As Thomas dressed to go, another call came. There wouldn’t be time, could he go to the farm? It was two in the morning, pitch dark but for the blizzard, and I nuzzled the pillow while he moved about. “Come with me,” he said. “I might need help.”
We got in the truck, busted through the snow in our lane and headed east, then north. The drifts made dunes on the road, hillocks from one side, fingering deeper and deeper over the iced gravel, but we bounded through at speed. Thomas is a madman in a storm, can drive through anything. The laneway was clear whe
n we arrived, and we made our way into the house, the only one lit on the line.
I remember daffodils, armfuls of them, brought from Holland by a relative who came to help the family. How could that be? But I remember them, smell them still. The scent hit me at the door, that pungent yellow elixir of spring cutting through the harsh crisp night. And then somehow we were up the stairs, in the bedroom, at the most beautiful scene in the world. Mother and newborn, already come, beaming and perfect and calm. Propped on pillows, the babe wrapped in a blanket on her chest, the mother and her child were still attached by the cord neatly tied twice with clean string. The father, a dairy farmer, was acquainted with birth, knowledgable and strong, delighted with himself and his loved ones.
Thomas cut the cord, separated the two and put the baby in my arms while he checked her mother. The baby in my arms. I was not a holder of babies. This tiny life, only minutes old, in my arms. Her calm warmth, her beautiful skin, her searching eyes. Born at home in her parents’ bed. In my arms until her mother was ready to take her, to put her to the breast, to dissolve into the love affair of the nursing couple.
NOT LONG AFTER, I was pregnant. Awaiting my own February birthing, my own beautiful scene. My fear of this change in my life was stiff and persistent, and I laboured throughout the pregnancy to ward it off. I planted daffodils by the dozens, hoping they would cheer me in my postpartum depression in the spring. I put my ram in early, to give me lambs before my baby. I swam through the summer and ran through the fall, and as soon as the snow came, I skied, staying fit, training for the marathon to come, trying to preserve some part of the body I knew so well.
I grew awkward in my chores, lumbered over gates with pails of water. My balance askew, I got knocked down by the ram. I wore coveralls with the buttons undone through the middle; I bent with care. I picked out the stitches in my barncoat zipper, added a triangle of fabric so the coat would fit over my belly, sewed the zipper in place. When lambing began, I felt each of the ewes’ contractions, breathed with each push, wondered how on earth my baby would come without small hoofs to pull on, small legs to grasp. And when the time came for docking the lambs’ tails and tagging their ears, I stood holding each animal while Thomas performed the surgery, tears pouring down my face with the pain of it all, and determined never to circumcise a son.
Lambsquarters Page 4