Perhaps the dying elms, rotting from inside out, first brought them back. The woodpeckers made the holes; the bluebirds moved in. They increased, migrated and returned. So now they are here, right out my window, in a nesting box planted just for them in the middle of the small side field. I can look up from my desk, replace my reading glasses with binoculars and frame them through the layers of glass. Take comfort in their presence, perhaps because it is so tenuous.
The first year, they nested in an old bird box on the fence along the sheep track. I’ll never forget the afternoon I spotted the male swooping for an insect, the sun bouncing off feathers alive with colour. I remember, because my father-in-law was here lazing with us under the maple, grandfathering the kids. He did not share my excitement. Not everyone is willing to give up time to watch, discuss and worry about bluebirds.
That year was filled with bluebird elations and disappointments. The first nestlings were eaten by a barn cat. I was told (by a cat person) that the cat had mistaken the birdhouse for its lunch box. I mourned. Undeterred, the birds rebuilt in a rotting branch of the maple and I spent hours at the window watching food go in, fecal sacs come out. Finally the fledglings popped their heads up and down like Bert and Ernie, more like fuzzy puppets than potential flyers.
The first cerulean male appears in April, looking for a family home. He must arrive before the aggressive tree swallows, who will swoop and strike. He needs weather warm enough for bugs, yet free from marauding predators and noisy Rototillers. And then, when finally he’s hooked on the spot, he has to attract a female. If he does, my window frames all the metaphors of love. I watch, a voyeur of the most intimate relationship, and hope, against all my human convictions, for traditional family values in birdland.
My children, nestlings themselves, were jealous of my interest in these birds. There were days when they would block my view, uncertain of their prime place in my affections. They’d tire of my endless descriptions of daily bluebird events. They didn’t want the tally of pieces of grass delivered or the saga of the elusive female and her mood. Her coyness. Whether she seemed prepared to give the male the time of day, the treasure of her eggs. “Me, me,” my children would say.
New tenants set up housekeeping, enticed me each morning to check through the glass. I watched the flurry, gasped when sun hit azure feathers and wondered if Cézanne would have spent so much time with fruit if he’d known the bluebird’s complementary cobalt and rust.
One morning the female went missing. She did not return. The next day, straw protruded from the entrance, and I knew she was gone forever. The raccoon left clues of his crime: feathers scattered on the ground, claw marks gouged in the post, a solitary egg in the nest. I retrieved a feather for my desk and the egg. Just memento mori, paradoxical blues of living sky and sea to chill me.
If only I hadn’t been so smug on this side of the window. If only I’d put a collar around the post. My window framed a grave; I could have draped it in black. The male stayed for a while, looking confused and flustered and flummoxed. Where was his mate? What was he to do? How to raise a family without a mother? He left, and I saw a coffin, not a birdhouse, straw crepe around its door.
I bought a length of metal T-post, five feet of sewer pipe, stove bolts, lock washers and an angle bracket. My daughter helped me clean out the nest and my son beheaded the post it crowned with his ever-present stick. The birdhouse needed a new site, which would be framed by the mullions of my window and tilted slightly sideways to allow my binoculars to view within when the sun lined up. An old stump mound grew a new and incongruous tree of metal, plastic and finished wood. Where the cedar fence post had offered purchase to predators, the sewer pipe would repel. It was impossible to scale.
For weeks I stole surreptitious glances, moved my binoculars nonchalantly from the passing cardinals or goldfinches to the bluebird box. Finally, when I forgot to look, that lapis flash gleamed in my eye. He was back. The pall lifted and hope returned. My bluebird started to sing, to preen again. He was alone with his aria, broadcasting his availability. He was beautiful, and he had real estate.
Now even I wanted to curtain the window. After the devastation of the past it was painful to be tempted by the tenuous hope of a successful brood. I often glimpsed what I thought was a female through the glass only to discover that it was the bachelor fading steadily as the season progressed to more of an androgynous bluish-brown. The window encased a drama of soap opera proportions where nothing really happened and nothing ever changed. And my escape from the house and homework, the chatter of children and drudge of dailiness was just as compelling as daytime television is for other mothers.
When she did arrive I kept silent to avoid my family’s derision. And for luck. She might not stay. Other years I had watched courting gestures become more and more anthropomorphic. He’d bring bugs rather than flowers. She’d look away and then accept. They’d rub necks, necking, and flirt and bill. Not these two. He’d fly closer; she’d move away. He’d sing on the box; she’d rummage for bugs. This was new territory. The reluctant mother, the hard-to-get feminist bluebird.
The drama continued. Act three began when she laid her eggs, after she’d acquiesced and moved in. She emerged at intervals for short sprints through damp air, or poked her head out to look for danger. Or excitement. Act four was the hatch, spread over a few days, evident by egg casings flown out and dropped at a distance by parents keen on housekeeping. This was a five-act play with a frantic conclusion of constant feeding and cleaning until the babies took the plunge and their chances with cats and coons and crows.
The avian performance provides all the romance of Romeo and Juliet, the adventure of Antony and Cleopatra and the pathos of King Lear. My birds do summer stock in a recurring festival, and I hold a perpetual season’s ticket. Front row, centre balcony.
FEASTS
FEAST AND FAMINE. Livestock and deadstock. Drought and flood and everything between the two. It is all about growing: in the ground, in the barn, in the house. Venture and gain. Or loss. There are snow years and rain years and years so dry the grass scrapes the earth as it tries to grow. Blossom end rot, Colorado beetles, white muscle, pulpy kidney, cutworms, nose bots, corn borers, blue bag, thrips, scours, cockfights and orf. Pestilence, parasites and predators have all invaded the farm, but never has there been a year without feasts. Something always survives to be harvested at Lambsquarters.
The old farms weren’t money-makers, but a mixed farmer didn’t starve. A few cows for cream, milk to the sows, bull calves for beef, sheep to the rough pasture and chickens scratching the yard, hatching cockerels for the pot and pullets for eggs. When the price of one dropped, another sustained. And all the manure went back to the land, nourishing hay crops and grain crops and cornucopias of vegetables.
Farming goes in years. There are prosperous years and poor years. But there are also pumpkin years and aubergine years, basil years and potato years. Hot and dry makes the lettuce bolt early, but the Mediterranean foods prosper.
Long languid days, with alfresco lunches on the lawn, surrounded by delphiniums nodding in blue breezes, and hollyhocks watching with Argus eyes, half open, half nodding shut. On the pine table, covered with its Indian cotton cloth, pinks and greens meld into the garden itself: tomatoes and basil drenched in oil mixed with cheese melted by hot pasta. And the clipped grass, weeded gardens, bucolic sheep look natural and calm. As if they grew just so, with no heartache or pain. But the drudgery and downfalls of dark November days and March nights are worth every minute’s anguish in these moments of bounty, when the wool money buys Chianti for the table and I sink, with my family and friends, into soporific stillness, with only the honeybees and cicadas working away around us.
Those are my favourite times, on the lawn in the sun. From the first moment of spring, when the scilla bloom in a blue lake under the lilacs, to the ancient apples making cumulus clouds on the trees, to the late lilies and phloxes standing tall, demanding sun. Even in fall, with only hardy an
d serviceable mums still blooming in mounds, and asters and Michaelmas daisies angling from the borders, there will be tea on the lawn. Bundled in sweaters, we still sit at the table, bare wood now, for a last time, keeping the cozy on the pot, our hands wrapped around steaming mugs with a grip usually reserved for small children’s hands in crowds, drinking down the last suns of summer, before all feasts turn indoors, near fires and stewpots.
IN SUMMERS PAST we have partied up a fat lamb, sacrificed it to our friends on a spit over an open fire. It cooked all day, was brushed with a clump of thyme dipped in butter and spice, bronzed over the firepit, while the rest of the flock got sent off to the Pie-shaped Field, upwind and out of sight. It seems tactless now, with so many vegetarians about, but the taste, with cumin and coriander, lemons and nutmeg, is the essence of feasts from antiquity. The table as platter, the beast carved on oilcloth, delivered on high-piled plates with bread and wine and greens from the garden—arugula and beet leaves, mâche and romaine, buttercrunch and leafy lettuce.
But we are not the only ones to feast from our crops. One year, our best lamb was harvested from the remotest section of the farthest field by a hungry brush wolf. Coyotes are seldom seen, but often heard on August nights, howling and yelping, teaching their pups to bay at moons shared with domestic dogs who bay back, yearning for that wild time in their past.
Canis latrans is a medium-sized yellowish grey dogsbody with a white belly and black-tipped coat. Looking more like a wild dog than a wolf, it roams the semi-open country like a sleuth rarely seen. Even by sheep. When mice are scarce in the fall fields, having packed up and followed the grain to the granaries and the cluster flies to the farmhouses, the coyotes get hungry. And if the sheep are left to roam before dawn, a coyote might strike. Low to the ground, it edges up from the brush to steal a single lamb grazing on the periphery of the flock. The lamb, brought down by the neck in a swift kill, lies senseless while the flock grazes unaware.
On the morning of the wolf-kill, the sheep count wouldn’t balance. Sheep are not easy to tally. They mill and cluster and blend and rarely jump over fences in insomniac single file. I tried to sort them by threes as they milled around me, but the numbers wouldn’t figure. I set off with the dog and found the carcass over the hill, headless, disembowelled, de-livered, unrecognizable. No ears were left, so no tattoo could be read. I could identify her only by checking who remained.
The coyote’s feast is methodical. Acting more like a wolf than a dog, it butchers a carcass as if from a chart and eats the cuts in order. At second light the coyote is off, leaving the cache until twilight or dawn.
Marauding domestic dogs do more damage. They worry a flock, chase and torment it, bite a neck, a leg at random. They kill for blood sport, not from need. A pack of dogs will leave a pasture spread like a Trojan battlefield, littered with dead and wounded, blood and gore, and the fear in the eyes of survivors lasts forever.
The township sent the livestock evaluator to determine the nature of the kill, the source of compensation. The word got out. Coyote on the north line. Willis Harris’s son asked to hunt at dawn.
He arrived in darkness, positioned himself where the coyote neither sees nor smells, and waited. At first light the animal slunk back to the feast, continued his careful dissection until a shot rang out, missed, and he was gone, a blur, his prey abandoned. And while I hated losing that prize ewe lamb, the fattest and prettiest of the season, I was secretly glad the brush wolf got away. I can corral my animals, remove them from temptation. But days later another hunter drove in with his truck, the noble beast laid out in the back, his fur silver and gold and thick as winter honey, dead for his deeds. And I was meant to be pleased and to praise.
ONE YEAR, some cattle grazing the long acre (that stretch of roadside owned by the township) found their way up my lane to devour my corn crop. Beautiful heads of golden bantam, peaches and cream, sunny vee, just reaching maturity, silk forming but not bronzed, outer leaves stretching with the fecundity of their growth. Only days away from the table, from salt and butter and that melting burst of golden sugar in the mouth, sinful vegetable—an oxymoron, for how could a vegetable be evil?—and eaten in the hands, with blessings. Always I set the water to boil first, then harvest the husk straight into the ram’s mouth, skein the silk from the cob and steam it. Right from the garden to the plate.
But not that year. What the cattle didn’t eat before I tore out after them screaming and waving my hands like an ancient harridan, they trampled, mauled and manured. The whole crop was in ruin. Sixty days of growing for naught. Worse than naught, for my neighbour (whose fence had given, whose pasture had not) arrived with a lumpy bag of tough wooden cobs the colour of rancid butter, the taste of Jerusalem artichokes. Sinless vegetables, to be overcooked and eaten after a dour grace.
WINTER FEASTS begin at Thanksgiving when our board groans with the weight of the season’s growth. Roast lamb with mint sauce, garden potatoes, carrots, squash, beans. Pumpkin pies, and apple pies made with our Spies or York Imperials. Cream from the neighbour (his cows now under control), so thick it needs a spoon to coax it from the jar. Almost everything grown at home. Nothing from farther than down the line, where some years I buy a free-range hen.
As a child I cut turkeys out of brown construction paper, added feathers of purple and red and blue, drew orange crayon legs and smiles with lips. I’d never actually seen a live turkey. We made paper cornucopias with exotic fruit—bananas, lemons, pomegranates, things we could not possibly have grown, as far as we were from the earth in that city school. Thanksgiving was a time of harvest hymns and white damask, bitter turnips and giblet gravy swimming in silver boats, grandparents sitting under engravings of their ancestors hanging on dining-room walls papered in silver and gold medallions.
My corpulent grandfather, in a three-piece brown suit, sweated with angina after too many Crown Royals; my grandmother, thin and stooped in her green dress which zipped up the back, her jewellery glittering, would be a little tipsy from her old-fashioned (after slipping me the cherry) and would laugh just a little too late at jokes she never got. We would sit decorously around the table, which I still use, and give thanks for food someone else grew elsewhere. In the worst years the gravy was made not only with giblets but with the water from the bitter turnips, which ruined, for me, the taste of everything on the plate.
I’ve scraped off the table’s thick varnish and mahogany stain to reveal the oak—it’s a table gone back to its roots. What stories it could tell of my family’s feasts over the last century and a half. Now undamasked and laden with bounty grown within its view. No paper cornucopias but real vegetables nestled on real straw from the field, placed with care by my children, who share in the harvest. Potatoes: Yukon golds, Kennebecs and Red Chieftains. Gourds from the compost pile, sprigs of grain, baby corn cobs and small squash.
Each year a different harvest is celebrated. One season it was pumpkins. Seventy-two pumpkins filled the garden in a fertility blitz, and we made pies with their frozen flesh for years. One summer we had an abundance of potatoes, nine bushels. We stored mounds and mounds of the earth apples in the root cellar, with many left over for the next spring’s planting. This year we have plums as thick on the branches as pearls on a string. Damsons burnished purple, tightly formed, ovular, luscious, a meretricious display gathered for conserves and jams. Fortune-telling from stewed pits rimming winter plates: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor …
Lonely days of dark skies and damp air in November bring steaming pots of minestrone. Tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, zucchini, beans (green and dried), celery, parsley and my own pesto, made with summer basil, all simmer in the stock from a tough old hen. Our bones are made even warmer by our close connection with this food, food planted and weeded and tended. Food shaped by my own hands and the smaller hands of my daughter and the smaller ones still of my son. Soup sopped with fresh bread, which was punched and pulled as dough, flavoured with local honey or berries, and risen in the warmth of burning deadf
all in the stove. Then formed into loaves, braids or crowns, or even animal shapes like turtles with raisin eyes and salamanders, by the kids.
THERE ARE FEASTS of pleasure and of strife. One Easter there were fireworks between courses: one guest ran to the barn in tears, too much wine, too many harsh words, and when I returned from comforting her I saw the cloud of dust raised by another couple, departing in a hurry, in a flurry, in a flight that dissolved their marriage. At the table sat my beloved, calmly serving dessert to all the children; hers, theirs, ours. Lives inextricably changed from that moment. Cousins pulled apart, parents splitting, sisters separating. Families reconfiguring as quickly as table settings, with different placemats or sets of china, or silverware. Bits of cracked crockery replaced by patterns not quite the same. Tarnished platters, the silver worn off in places, the copper showing through. Chipped crystal and mismatched glasses.
The table, which had been pulled out to a great length, became small for a time. With the leaves parked in the closet, the table ends were tightly joined into a circle. We had tiny feasts with worried guests on divorce diets. Intimate darkened discussions over modest fare: eggs, scrambled and souffléd, shirred and poached, frittataed and baked. On the saddest days, soft-boiled, with toast fingers for comfort. Farm food laid in a warm barn to nourish unhappy souls attracted here by the land itself, drawn away from the city lights and cafés by some force.
SPRING BRINGS the beginnings of hope. The first sprinkle of chives on an omelette. Asparagus. Rhubarb. Food becomes more tantalizing as it grows up around us until the summer bursts with produce, and we move back outside for cookouts, and ice cream frozen with berries from the hedgerows, there for the picking. Fresh corn dripping butter, and dogs parked at a safe distance, dripping desire. Fireflies and stars appearing late in the evening are worth braving the feasting mosquitoes. The mosquitoes’ life cycle: from swamp to us to swamp. The farm’s life cycle: from spring through winter to spring. Our life cycle: from child-free to parents—of newborns through youth—from peace through trauma to planting to harvest. And all over again. And again.
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