Winter landscape passes quickly on skis. The mushrooms of snow on stumps; the cattails of snow on bulrushes already bursting with their own internal cotton wool. The black eye of a snowshoe hare perfectly camouflaged against his white world. In winter the views are quick and crisp. Sleeping nature.
Spring awakens with the thaw. Before bugs or leaves, the forest yawns awake. Sap runs. Small shoots of horsetail—prehistoric plant, brown, speckled black, alien—push ancient genes through spaces in the road. Bullfrogs croak, peepers peep. Warblers in bare trees sing, flash yellows and blues, reds and blacks on the starkscape. Ruffed grouse drum. Water burbles the edges, mud oozes, but the road holds, carries us into this heart of marshness.
Slowly, green arrives. And the road leads to details. The minutiae of life on the edge. Iris poke through the marsh with the promise of blue and yellow flags. Rigid horsetails morph to fine feathers, yellow-green and soft. Trilliums, red and white, and bloodroot grow on higher ground. The showy but shy flower of the ground ginger hides under leaf mould. The canopy begins overhead, budding, then unfurling into dappled skies, filtering sun and rain both. This stage is quick in Grey County, where spring can last just days before a heat wave arouses everything through to an orgasm of greens and abundance. There’s so much to see, but blackflies and mosquitoes, fighting for territory and ownership, rush the body through the bush. Orchids, tiny pink salacious snake-mouths. And mushrooms. And morels.
Then full summer days begin with marsh marigolds massing, drifting into iris and angelica, soaring their arrowhead buds into the ether and opening as cumulus clouds of bloom. Lobelias begin—first the red cardinalis, then later the blue siphilitica—and spotted jewelweed spreads tender stems under the cedars. Nettles encroach a spot: if you have bare legs stay to the middle. Time passes. Fireflies strobe. Cicadas hum like errant wires.
August is a time of thick dews. Spiderwebs of gold and silver cross the road and are rebuilt each night by Penelope and Arachne working their own secret fates. Goldenrod, Joe-pye weed and fleabane, fall aster and touch-me-not. Things are going to seed. Iris pod like little peppers. Ragweed at large in the air.
Then a sudden frost. The first red leaf. A next and a next. Gold and brown and orange. The forest begins to die. It does not go gentle.
As the road circles through the bush, so the season follows—or leads. The man I live with has opened up the way, has revealed the secrets of the swamp. But only to those who will look, who will slow to the speed of the snail to see, who will suffer the slings of blackflies and the arrows of nettles to experience outrageous fortune. He lets me walk on water.
TROWEL
THE FOREST TOOLS ARE LARGE, sharp, wicked: bucksaws and swede saws, axes and hatchets, and chainsaws, which pollute with noise, the odour of fuel, and require the armour of Kevlar and steel. The tools travel in the wheelbarrow or trailer, which is hitched to the Ford or the baby John Deere. Or they dangle from Thomas’s long arm in an old white pail, quixotically labelled “leaks fluids” as if dreams could be held there intact, or solid plans or ideas. He can swing the saw over one shoulder and hold the axe by its neck, but usually he has more to carry than that. So he dons his overalls or his chaps or both and is panoplied for his fray with woods that are ever encroaching on the waterward road, ever falling and felling, responding to the vagaries of the elements.
He heads down the thinning fall meadow, through the late grazing flock, around the centre stone-pile and shade cedars and disappears through the gate, over the swamp edge and into the forest, past the stumped area we call Knock-down Corner and beyond into the Bush and away. And while he trudges and trims, piles and stacks, orders the deadfall into posts and lumber, kindling and road fill, I garden unarmed near home. I harvest or deadhead, divide or weed. My tools are manageable in my hands, tiny, efficient and light. I almost always use a trowel.
A trowel is a double-edged sword. A hand tool with a thin, flat double blade for mortaring rock or plastering walls, or a small, scooped shovel for opening the earth to receive or relinquish young plants. The word derives from the Latin trua, meaning “ladle,” or trulla, meaning “spoon.” In its way the trowel does provide nourishment to those who pick it up. It feeds an aesthetic need and reinforces the power of production. It feeds the simple pleasure inherent in the skill to build or grow.
Trowels are strong symbols for Lambsquarters. With them we throw mortar, plant seedlings, smooth plaster, weed and thin. Trowels were among the first tools here, and they remain crucial to the farm.
The house saw few changes in its first hundred years. Rudimentary electricity at mid-century led to pumped water and primitive indoor plumbing. A telephone. A Romanesque archway that must have grown from a simple doorway between the front and back parlours, small rooms both, joined now by a vaulted entrance, the only curve in a structure of strict straight lines. Paired sconces graced this graceless passage, a token of frivolity surrounded by austerity. This aberrant arc, which neither separated nor joined the cramped little rooms, had to go. We attacked the plaster with the wrecking bar, pried out the lath, dismantled the studs and found ourselves (when the dust settled) with a large bright room, punctuated with a branch line of void in the wall. I bought a trowel.
I’d never plastered before, but Lionel, the buildingstore man, who had taken on the cause of the renovation, assured me it was simple. He sold me a huge bag of plaster and the trowel and gave mixing instructions. So there I was, hod in hand, my first batch of mud ready to throw, my shiny pointed trowel securely nestled in my fist, its wooden handle warm in a room still awaiting central heat. It was January.
Before buying the plaster trowel, I had invested in the cheapest of garden trowels the previous fall. We bought the farm in October, and having no way of knowing what might appear in the derelict gardens the following spring, I planted as many daffodils as I could around the apple trees in the front orchard. The trowel was an inferior one. It immediately became acquainted with the rock population just under the surface of the ground and succumbed. It was the first of many.
By the time I got to plastering, I’d already mastered the arts of demolition, wood splitting and stove starting, fuse replacing, wallpaper stripping, lino lifting and dump going. I thought I could do anything. I liked the feel of the trowel. I loved the feel of the throw. Plaster mixed perfectly careens off the blade and sticks exactly where it’s sent. Catch for one player, and never a miss. The throw comes off the topside, after scooping with one blade, but the bottom is the spreader, its pointed end directing morsels of muck into corners, angling one side to eke out the fill to the other edge, smoothing along the original wall to make a perfect join. Artistry and play and serious work in one action, like Ceramus’s pottery.
It took a day to fill both walls, to mix and pitch and level, and to stand back and admire this pristine stripe, white against the grungy grey of the old plaster that had been papered so many times without ever seeing the light. Papered and papered and painted over to obscure any whisper from the ghosts of the original plasterers.
My trowel got little rest after its initiation. Jack posts in the basement raised the centre of the house about the height of a hand, cracking the walls above the doors, leaving huge gaping holes and piles of plaster on the floor. Mouse holes (arches I thought existed only in cartoons) appeared under the layers of pasted wallpaper, and more than once my trowel’s work was defeated next day by squatter’s rights.
By spring I was trowelling outside, pointing stone foundations and bricks, and digging in earth rich in nutrients, ready for flowers and fruits. The stonework was haphazard, required a different kind of muck, and the bricks have a trowel of their own, a narrow pen-sized instrument, curved to snug the space between the rows, ooze out the excess and cut it off with an edge. Small beer.
I have had countless garden trowels, cheap metal objects, painted white or green or yellow, with plastic or wooden handles, wide blades or narrow. For years I replaced them as I ruined them. Some succumbed at first thrust,
first tilt. Trowels are not levers. I tried plastic blades (they don’t penetrate), soft handles (they bend), narrow shafts (they collapse). Then I bought the perfect trowel. It was forged steel, expensive, strong, trusty. Its blade was slim but not anorexic; its handle solid but not rough. It was my twin all spring: where I went in the garden, it came too.
During the long days of spring, starting right after morning chores when the sun rises early and the dew sinks into thirsty ground, I follow the dandelion roots down to their underworld, passing the three-headed Cerberus of dog bur, dogbane and dog grass. The dog bur is the best. It’s sticky and prickly but has an easy root to lift. Dog bane is woody and puts up a tough resistance. Dog grass is the worst. Its roots weave an impenetrable and unending subterranean labyrinth. A Heraclean task.
Morning weeding and afternoon planting. When the sun is soft and the earth warm, my trowel makes the hole, mounding earth aside. I water, place and plant, tamp with the back of the blade, scoop the fresh soil in place, move to the next. Pungent basil, reeking tomatoes, and hot peppers, which dare me to touch my face, the trowel settles them all in their rows. Distant neighbours who will grow into intimate friends.
By evening, when the blackflies swarm and the light wanes, I take my pail, my pots, my trowel to the tap and rinse and park them for another day.
One morning, my perfect trowel was gone. Vanished. Thomas had been mortaring by the tap. He’d put in a new window well, moved rocks back, dug a trench, poured cement, smoothed, flattened with his mason’s tool, mortared new rock sides into place with skill. The job had taken weeks and had somehow swallowed my trowel. Trowelled it in. Like a time capsule, or an interment, or a pomegranate mistakenly eaten. It was gone, never to surface again with no one to bargain for its release. I’ve never found another like it.
THE STONE TROWELS are never idle in season. Their work began with Grant Mather, a stonemason with long hair and a penchant for Earl Grey tea. He laboured one summer on the barn courtyard, rebuilding a wall that something didn’t love. Rubble and promise, remnants of its former life as foundation, the stones and mortar lay in ruin, cannoned, crumbled, humbled and low. And Grant, who but for an i and an e would be the rock itself, spread his tools amongst the wildflowers (Mather meaning “camomile”) and slowly brought the wall back from death. He split, he placed, he eyed and he smoked. He butted his joints in the mortar and carefully sealed their tombs. He taught me to mix, to point and to place. He taught Thomas to split, to lift, to design. He taught us the physics and the aesthetics. And, oh, the trowels! Tiny mortaring trowel babies, spoon-sized, butter-knifed. Large capacious trowels, hungry for the hod. Grant spread his perfect mix and the stones grew from rubble into a mural of pinks and greys, purples and greens.
I followed his teaching, learned my lessons, took my wheelbarrow to the sand pile, shovelled in the mix, added water in small amounts. Too little water makes the mortar grainy, dry and unmanageable; too much and you have a slurry. Mortar should feel like snow on the shovel. The trowel cuts down and lifts, forms a liquid edge around a tight pack of muck. It comes off the forehand like a shuttlecock, sails through the air with a flick of the wrist and lands in the crevice, a perfect score.
The following summer was mine. I had my own sand pile, my own trowel, a whole barn foundation to point, inside and out. The bank side is underground, but inside is a solid rock face, stones outlined with the empty holes and spaces of mortar past. On the hottest days, the stones were cool. Sheltered from the sun, wedged against the dark earth to the north, they waited calmly with a cold dignity to be redefined, reglued, renewed with fresh mortar, with the gentle stroke of the trowel. I hosed them down, flushed out the crumbling bits of cement and straw, the grains of sand and dirt, and began my pitch and throw. I got in a few backhands and side-swipes, and mastered the art of the tool. The west wall with outside exposure I saved for early fall, when the sun was low and less intense and warmed my back in the afternoons. I worked in patches, mortaring deep, returning to point, then back once again to finish the smooth edge, determined that no crevice would be left to hold water, allow frost to enter, or crack and attack the wall, sending it tumbling to Frost’s condition.
The west wall extends into the barnyard, evidence of the original bigger barn. It sloped with decay, its outer edge eroded to one big situpon rock. I repaired the wall gently, leaving the slope, filling the holes, capping the top. But one summer the mature John Deere tractor, steered by the youngest Harris son, connected the manure spreader with the wall and the spreader won. It cracked the mortar and loosened the rock. The situpon, also used as a mountain path by agile lambs, became treacherous.
Grant was gone by now—moved to a rockier riding—and I called another mason to help. He never came. So one day Thomas eyed the rubble, decried the danger, took up the trowel and began the repair. He revelled in the combination of brute strength, physics, geometry and artistry required to build with stone. He gathered special specimens, chose them for their colour, texture and tone, and brought them from distant parts of the farm. He hauled rocks high into the air with hands he hadn’t known he had. And too soon the wall was finished.
By fall he’d found a new venue: the bottom of the Sidefield, more than two rods long. He commenced to dig and gather material for a roadside stone fence. Rock piles everywhere were in danger of depletion; favourite stones, jumping and stepping stones disappeared and were replaced with fresh earth and small seedlings of trefoil. Magic stones, monster stones, round rocks and mound rocks seemingly grew legs and took themselves to the site, nestled in to wait for placement, hoped for an outside spot, gave up their moss.
The foundation hole was so big it took a ready-mix truck to fill it. This was to be a serious wall. Levels and plumb lines, stone splitters and hammers, steel-toed boots and crowbars appeared at the scene, and after the first course was placed, out came the mortar and trowel.
The wall grew on two sides and two ends. The middle was a dump for rubble rocks, rejects in size, those bits that broke off in the glacier, got rounded in the crush. They were gathered by the barrowful, tipped into the goo and trowelled in, globful after globful, sounding thunk as they went. Not beautiful, these rocks, settled in between the glorious carapace of granite and limestone, conglomerate and quartz, but they formed a solid skeleton nevertheless, the backbone of the wall, hidden, veiled, but vertebral in strength and substance.
The wall rose in courses, rows of rocks that were chosen to harmonize with their neighbours, not just to east and west, but also above and below. And it was slow, cerebral work. Much of the planning weighed as Thomas leaned on the end of the crowbar. He took careful measure of mass and force, surface and density, shade and hue. The gargantuan rocks were moved with magic, with faith, with smoke and mirrors, with the help of our son, now solid himself and tall and strong and capable of shifting great weights. With the crowbar, some boards, the wheelbarrow, and the brilliant use of an old wooden ladder, propped on the morphing structure to convey massive boulders up, against gravity, a rung at a time. Higher and higher the wall grew. Mortar disappeared as fast as snow in May, was swallowed by the wall like rain by parched earth slaking its thirst. And always the trowel flicked, filled, flattened, tamped and trimmed until the summit was attained and the mortar cap went on. From mounded top to flat bottom, the trowel stamped the wall as done, curbed its growth and sealed its fate.
Thomas had another mentor mason, a neighbour up the road. He was a philosopher by profession, a painter by talent and a stone builder by inclination. He created the most whimsical of structures. He made a garden wall that is full of holes, and a pentagonal secular abbey with local rock, broken tombstones and antique carved lintels. He niched the two-storey abbey with treasures and filled it with art. His pigeonnier, constructed on stone stilts, supports a sculptured blend of a bird in flight and a fish. Beaked in front and fan-tailed behind, it swims in a cerulean wooden frame painted to blend with the sky. He taught Thomas how to scavenge for stone. He taught patience and co
lour and form. His counsel was firm, his praise was scant and his opinion is now just a memory, for he died too soon. The medieval alchemists would be astonished to see what he created. The fabled philosopher’s stone, which turns all base metals into gold, was his secret. But he was not a secretive man, and he shared his skills. Stone creations sprouted all over the township under his tutelage. One of them is Thomas’s wall at the bottom of our lane.
ONE LATE FALL DAY I went to the wall, which was not yet finished, but put away for the season, and saw rust on the rock. It had been bloodied when a boulder had dropped on Thomas’s hand, splitting his finger like a sausage. Blood had filled my own fair mason’s glove and had spilled onto his boots and his art, his creation of unyielding stone. He stormed into the house unable to speak, unable to look at the damage he had done, unable to feel the pain of the crush or to reconcile the danger. Our daughter, grown and calm and competent, had taken over the kitchen to cook the meal, a celebratory dinner turned meaningless as I drove Thomas at speed to town where the young medic soothed his pain as she stitched him together, saved his face and his hand.
Now, seeing the remnant of his life’s blood still on the rock, I decided to pay homage to this wall, this shell of a wall-to-be. I secretly fetched my garden trowel and a basket full of bulbs. Spreading the leaves, I dug on both sides of the wall and dropped scilla, grape hyacinth and crocus roadward, and daffodils, which the sheep won’t eat, on the field side. Carefully replacing the leaves with my trowel, I mused on the mixture of mortar and earth, blood and sweat, the meeting of trowels at this structure. It rises now as a measure of the solidity of this place. I planted my bulbs as a sacrifice to its stature and as an offering to its builder.
This is the sublime: the simplicity of the tools and the intensity of their creations.
Lambsquarters Page 17