The Rhythm of Seasons

Spring has settled across the north, blurring the hills and fields with shades of green, muted and brilliant, each glance fitting of Monet.  Along the roadways, yard sales and fiddlehead stands have sprung up, bidding passersby to linger and buy, and on the shoulders near the .  The popples have fully bloomed and the caterpillar catkins litter the road like down; while daffodils dance in the constant breeze; trilliums bow shyly beneath the old apple tree; and dandelions bloom against the southern foundation. 

"Peeper"  Male tree frog

In the softness of dusk, peepers chirp and chorus around the vernal pools, and in the distance of the hemlock bog, a northern hawk owl woos a mate, his tremolo call echoing eerily in in the growing dark.

Northern Hawk Owl

Most evenings, there are deer browsing the greening grass, wandering to within less than sixty feet of the house. Some nights they bed down just beyond the large round bales of hay at the edge of the raspberry bed.  When they first appeared, the dogs would find them first by scent. Noses up in the wind, trails aquiver with anticipation they would swing their heads until they focused in on the deer. 

Hannah

Hannah would hold the point, freezing in mid stride, but impetuous Monty, still barely a teen, would shout at them, startling the deer whose white flagged tails flashed and bounced as they took a leap or two toward the woods.  Then, they would stop, turn slender muzzles toward the dogs, large ears twitching in the twilight. Eventually, with a solid fence containing the dogs, deer and canines reached a peace.  Now when we let Hannah and Monty out, they scent the air, locate the deer and watch with wide eyes for a few minutes before beginning their business, cavorting around the pen with a toy, or settling onto a soft patch of greening grass to enjoy the warmer air.   The deer go back to grazing.

Deer watching dogs

The swallows are frenzied with courting and collecting bits of mulch hay from the garden to build nests in the four boxes we have put up for them.  They call and chirrup to each other as the swoop and dive across the sky, and a pair of flickers have taken up residence in a hollow in a dead popple at the north boundary of our land.  The harrier hawk, silent death on wings, has returned and swoops across the field in early morning and late afternoon searching for mice and voles.  Wild turkeys have spread north and a lone hen has taken over our south field.  Every day, she marches methodically back and forth across the field eating small bugs, grasses and seeds.  That she is alone puzzles us as all winter, the single tom we have seen has been surrounded by a harem of hens.  Occasionally we hear his gobble in the distance at the edge of the woods, and earlier this week, we got a brief glimpse of him as he ranged along the tree line.  We expect that eventually there will be poults following their mama up and down the field.

Hen turkey in the front yard

We have taken stock of this winter’s damage, adding dozens of repairs to the growing list of chores that will fill the long days of summer.  The blueberries and raspberries fared well, and with a little pruning should have big yields.  Lilacs and roses planted last fall in the developing memorial garden weathered the winter and are showing new green, and rhubarb and horseradish, garlic and chives are up and growing.  Our asparagus has been slow to poke up through the thick mulch, but this winter was colder and longer than most, so we are waiting patiently.  Bruce has been busy thinning the iris beds, replanting the gleanings along the cedar post fence. 

The leaves of the maples are as big as squirrels’ ears and so he has moved along to set onion seedlings and sow the first planting of peas.   Inside, zinnia, rosemary, squash, pumpkin, and cucumber seedlings stretch and turn their first leaves to follow the march of the sun across the sky.  Tomatoes are set outside during the day to harden off and brought in at night when temperatures still dip into the mid-thirties.  Soon, we will put in the beets and kale, Swiss chard and lettuce, and the second planting of peas.

Monty is quasi point at a sparrow

When we moved here, we resolved to live as independently and purposefully as we could, and so our relationship with the weather and the land is important.  To do that, we grow or make as much of what we need as we can: vegetables, quilts for the beds, presents and gifts, even furniture and toys as the occasion necessitates.  We work together and separately, moving with the seasons, choosing the chores as the day dictates.
With the coming of spring, we begin emptying the freezers, eating up the corn and green beans, Swiss chard, carrots, parsnips, and kale we still have from last year’s harvest, but our appetites have turned to lighter fare.  The grill is pulled from the shed, cleaned, and oiled and we begin with meals that are mostly cooked outdoors: grilled chicken, tiny lamb chops, boneless pork ribs.  Salads become part of our daily routine, and the first potato salad last week marked the official beginning of warmer weather. 

Onion seedlings

One of our earliest treats, along with fiddleheads of course, is dandelion greens. Unlike an increasing number of people, we don’t try to kill off our dandelions.  To do so is both impractical – eleven acres of fields – and unsustainable.  Dandelions feed bees, on which we must rely for pollinating the foods we eat.  Without bees, no tomatoes or squash or peas.  No apples from the trees, or roses blooming along the fence line. And so, our fields gleam golden with dandelions, in spite of Bruce harvesting several bushels of the young greens every year for us to eat.  We boil the greens twice, throwing in a wedge of salt pork or a few splashes of olive oil, and eat the greens hot with a splash of cider vinegar. One year, we even gathered a bushel of blossoms and made wine, which had a brassy sweetness to it, not quite worth the effort, and still the fields were gold.

Windows are flung open during the day, curtains flap in the breeze, and the stale smells of winter are banished. We bathe the dogs, rubbing them dry with thick towels while the wiggle with delight, then race around the house before we let them outside to roll in the greening grass, bask in the warming sun. The solar drier is back in use now, and decked with quilts and spreads, human and dog blankets and daily laundry that come in from the line bleached by the sun, wrinkles erased by the wind.  At night we lie down in a bed that smells sweetly of wind and sun and greening earth, and we sleep soundly, wrapped in the fragrance of the woods. 

Throughout the summer, we eat fresh from the garden, throwing together meals with what we have from the land and what we have bought from or traded for with friends and neighboring farmers, supplemented from the from-scratch essentials of local honey and maple syrup, organic flours and beans, pastas and rice. By late summer, we are harvesting and putting away quarts and quarts of vegetables, pickles, relishes, jams, jellies, applesauce, blueberries and raspberries, even a vegetable and oat frozen dog food, all grown and harvested by us.  We have placed orders for local poultry and meats from our neighbors and friends who raise livestock, and we have ordered, split and stacked the year’s wood – four cords.  Quilts and blankets are pulled from storage and hung in the sun to air.

Frying partridge nuggets

After the harvest in fall, we add ground lime, compost from one of three bins we rotate by filling them with garden trimmings, vegetable scraps, coffee grounds and comfrey leaves to the garden.  We cover it all up with hay and wait for winter to come and freeze all solid, the bulbs and seed sleeping safely through the cold dark days. Because we rotate our crops for best yields, we keep detailed charts of each year’s gardens, and plan the next from these.  With the first frost, we finish stripping the garden, dumping the dead plants into the compost, and tucking the garden in for the winter under an eight to twelve inch layer of hay.  Bruce cleans the furnaces and chimneys, tunes up the snowblower, puts away the grill and summer furniture. He cleans equipment and prepares for hunting season which yields partridge and rabbit reliably.  In fact, today, he made partridge nuggets to freeze for the grandboys who ask for them just as other children ask for chicken nuggets.  Two pounds went into the freezer today to be offered what for lunch when Kasey brings the boys over to visit.

Fried partridge nuggets

This winter was difficult, frozen in time, filled with loss and sorrow, a reliving of memories of those we have known and loved and lost.  Some days, we were so haunted by those memories, it was hard to put one foot before the other, but the reawakening of the world from cold slumber brings us renewed hope.  We gather our strength from simple pleasures, small delights and the peace of this northern land, following the rhythms of the seasons as Thoreau advised, by breathing the air, drinking the drinks, tasting the fruits of each season, sustained by the life we have chosen.

Planting onion seedlings

And then ...

First rainbow over the fields that a week before were buried under a foot of snow. (May 2, 2014)

The world has gone from frozen white to liquid silver, overnight, or so it seemed.  The dun of the winter battered fields is tinted faint green, especially on the southern slopes where the still infrequent sun has warmed the soil, heated the grasses into growth.  Along the tree line that separates our yard from overgrown field, the popples are fuzzed with new catkins, and the pussy willow buds, once plump and pearled gray, are swollen and shaggy, dusted with faint gold pollen, the earliest of the spring.  Eventually each bud produces a myriad of tiny seeds that carry on the wind and settle to sprout into new bushes.  Thickets of red stick, hidden since December, glow like garnets against the drear of this cold spring. 

Along the roadsides, the ditches run fast and burbling filled with the melt from snow that is sometimes a foot or more deep beneath the thick furs and spruces of the woods. The rush of moving water creates a melody with the wind, tumbles down to the streams and rivers still swollen beyond their banks, flecked now and again with thin floes of ice that bob and swirl their way downstream. Where the water has slowed and pooled in the ditches, caught by a rise of land or a tangle of brush and dead leaves, it mirrors back the thin cerulean blue sky, the cotton candy clouds of this freshening season. 

The field a week earlier

A week ago, with cold rain and intermittent snow still falling, our world still slumbered, but in the last few days, the promise of summer’s golden hours have been borne in on the wings of the tree sparrows who have returned to the summer cottages we provide them.  Their arrival always coincides with the reawakening of the cluster flies, also known as attic flies, from their winter hibernation.  The flies follow the sun, gathering in small swarms and clutches along the warmest sides of the house, and the swallows swoop and soar around and around, now low then high, gobbling up the still sleepy flies from midair.  The bigger creatures have awoken too, or moved from cozy dens where they have wintered. 

Tree swallow outside the living room window

All last week when we walked the dogs up our muddy road, the cloven prints of moose pocked the dirt, zig-zagging from one side to the other, disappearing at last into the woods or field.  There were rumors that the deer had been especially hard pressed by the nearly fifteen feet of snow and the bitter cold of this winter, and although we had kept a careful eye along the verges of the fields plowed last fall, we had not seen a one.  We were worried.  And then, there they were.

A doe, still dark with her winter coat and a yearling ambled up from the wetlands along Salmon Lake Brook and through the thickets of red stick across from the house.  Monty saw them first and sounded the alarm.  They stopped, hesitating for a moment, big ears twitching, noses lifted and scenting the air.  Then they skirted the apple trees and tiptoed onto the rutted road, stopping again, looking about before ambling into our southern field.  They dropped black muzzles and browsed, inching slowly up the field, eating their way the whole six hundred feet to the edge of the woods, where they melted like ghosts into the trees.  They were the scouting party. 

Strolling down the road beside the redstick

A day later, a single hen turkey moved into the south field, feeding on spilled weed seeds and tiny new grass. There has been a fairly substantial flock of the wild birds roaming our two-square-mile neighborhood for most of the winter, but none had ventured here.  That the single hen seemed to be staking territory to raise a brood was a good omen.  At dusk, three more deer appeared from across the road and suddenly the world was full of life. Deer leaped across the road in arcing bounds, raised their heads in the fields to watch as we passed by.  Yesterday as we drove up the hill from town, we counted nearly two dozen, some noticeably pregnant, all grazing intently, unconcerned about our presence.  It’s been a long time since we’ve seen so many and we are overjoyed.

We have posted our land for the last seven years, after a hunter with more bravado than brains sighted in his scope by aiming at our houses.  Adjacent landowners who use the fields for growing hay had not, and since this area has long been known for good hunting, there was always a rush of traffic, especially on opening day. We often joked that we could make money if we set up a coffee-and-doughnuts stand that one day.  But there are a lot of what we call heater hunters in this neck of the woods.  Those ”sportsmen” see hunting as simply driving around in a warm truck rather than actually walking the land, and after several years of badly rutted fields left behind by such hunters, our neighbors posted their land  to hunting on foot only. 

The traffic during hunted season has thinned considerably, and deer find the open fields behind our house a good sanctuary.  This morning, three grazed the field across the road while a

Deer in the back yard

moose nibbled on young shrubs near the woods line.  This afternoon, four deer made their way down from the back woods  to the septic field, which as Erma Bombeck once said, is always greener, and browsed hungrily for almost two hours about a hundred feet from the bedroom windows. 

We are moving into spring, and beyond it, summer stretches like a promise.  Flats of onions and leeks, large and tall zinnias, and a couple rosemary plants are up and promising good meals and beautiful blooms to come.  At noon I swung by Kristine Bondeson’s Down to Earth Garden Center (http://www.maineswedishcolony.info/midsom/partnerpp/downtoearth.html) to pick up the San Marzano and Moskevich tomatoes we paid her to grow for us and several flats of pansies.  The flowering baskets from the annual plant sale sponsored by Phi Theta Kappa, Northern Maine Community College’s honor society, are filled with tiger-striped petunias and hung by the garage doors, and I’ve finalized the plans for this year’s herb garden.  Next week we will lay black plastic to warm the soil, and soon after, begin planting.

Hannah

While the day has been cold and gray, more April than May, we have made good use of it – playing fetch with Monty in the snow-free yard, watching our dear girl Hannah, happy the cold has begun to ebb, stretch out in delight on a patch of grass.  A turkey curry soup, thick with leeks and carrots and parsnips all grown here, and turkey from a neighbor-friend, simmers on the stove. Only the celery is not locally grown.  A leg of lamb, also raised on the same farm a few miles away, is marinating in balsamic vinegar, rosemary and garlic for dinner tomorrow with Kasey, Andrew and the boys.  They spent the day planting a hundred Christmas trees at the new "old” house which will soon become their home, the trees a fledgling business. .

Monty

It has been a long and difficult winter. Snow, extended bitter cold, dark days, and more sorrow than we thought we could bear, but we have made it through, sustained by good friends near and far who we hold always in our hearts.  The freezers have enough food left to carry us through to the next harvest; the woodpile, for once more than adequate, only needs topping off – a cord or two; and we can plan some days of leisure amongst those filled with the work of mowing and gardening and preparing for next winter.  We move with the rhythm of the land and it carries us with it.  By doing so, we can believe that things will be right with our world.  

A Season of Sorrow

April 5 snow

We are weary of winter, burdened with more than fourteen feet of snowfall, weeks of bitter cold, gray days, early darkness, and persistent heartbreak.  Each day we rise, hoping for blue skies, the glint of sun on pristine snow, warmer temperatures, greening grass, and some relief from the onslaught of sorrow that has marked the beginning of this year, reminding us of our own fragility. 

Almost forty years ago when Bruce and I got married, friends made bets on the union not lasting.  We were too different and we both brought baggage – dysfunctional families, our own wild pasts. We were affronted, but I suspect we both paused for a moment then jumped right in.  We were young, invincible, life stretched ahead of us, eternal and full of possibilities.  Together, we racketed through a few years filled with sports cars and dogs, wild adventurous road trips, daring deeds and horrible missteps.  And then, we had a child.

Four miscarriages, each more heart-wrenching than the last, had left us wondering if we would be childless, but then after a long, torturous pregnancy, fraught with round-the-clock vomiting, preeclampsia, and premature labor, Kasey was a miracle.  It was short-lived.  A series of surgeries two years later erased any hope that we would bear a second child. I grieved and Bruce consoled me, and   we squared our sagging shoulders and pushed on. We were still young with years ahead.  They were not easy years, plagued with illnesses and job loss, misplaced trust and sometimes poor decisions, unexpected deaths and frequent disappointments, but somehow, that invincibility of youth – and perhaps sheer stubbornness - carried us forward, building a family on love, changing the pasts we had known as best we could.

We stumbled often, sometimes falling flat on our faces, but always picked ourselves up and soldiered on.  We learned to garden; raised chickens, turkeys and pigs; took in strays – both dogs and children; and cried, fought and laughed a lot.  Years passed and somehow, when we were not looking, while we were busy moving through life unaware, the accumulation of days and years piled on us. Children left home, married, began their own lives.  The house became quiet, and after thirty years of struggling and working toward our dream of a small farm in the country, we moved to northern Maine, bringing my aging mother with us. 

For a few years, we pursued the dream, planting huge gardens, raspberries and blueberries, herbs and rhubarb, asparagus and horseradish.  We filled more than two freezers with the provender from our labors, and Kasey and I, often accompanied by a very young Silas, trucked produce to the farmers’ markets and sold our excess wares.  We did well.  Then one May day while Sara and I were planting corn, I stumbled, lost my balance and could not regain it.  The world tilted.  Although I had been feeling a bit off for a week or so, the vertigo was alarming. 

Sara misses little.  She has the eye and instincts of a diagnostician and she was on me immediately, insisting we take a break, cajoling me into admitting that perhaps things were not right.  She insisted I see the doctor, and a week later I did.

A CT scan followed that visit, and for 10 days I waited for the result, telling myself it was nothing, probably simply allergies.  And then the phone rang, and on the end of the line, my doctor asked, “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?” and my stomach knotted. 

“You don’t have a brain tumor,” she told me calmly.  An odd rush of relief and panic washed over me.

“You have a Chiari malformation.”

“A what?” I asked.

“A Chiari malformation. You can look it up on the internet,” she answered.  “I’m sending you to a neurologist.”

The world tilted.

A week later I met with the neurologist who confirmed the diagnosis, ordered an MRI, prescribed medication for the vertigo, the persistent headache, the sleeplessness, the pain.  There are four types of this malformation, and I was Type II, just serious enough to compromise the quality of my life.  I struggled through each day and my world narrowed.  The gardening fell to Bruce and Kasey, when time allowed.  It was the beginning of the slowing of our lives, and I grieved.

Chiari malformations are structural defects in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls balance. For a variety of reasons, part of the cerebellum pushes down to the spinal column affecting the nerves, and the symptoms vary from one type to another. Some people never know they have it; for others, the symptoms, and hence diagnosis, develop in adolescence or adulthood, and can include abnormal sensations in the arms and legs, dizziness, vision problems, difficulty swallowing, ringing or buzzing in the ears, hearing loss, vomiting, insomnia, depression, or headache. I had all but two. We exhausted every option for treatment available in our far northern part of the world, and a year and a half later, Bruce and I began a series of trips to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, a nine-hour drive away. 

In Boston, surgery was offered repeatedly as the only option to correct the problem and prevent future damage.  I was not keen about someone cutting into my brain, and fortunately neither was my doctor or neurologist.  They referred me to a chiropractor, and miraculously, it has worked, keeping my vertebrae where they belong and not pressing on the wayward cerebellum. I began to heal, and we regrouped, cut back on the gardening, stopped doing farmers’ markets, focused on more leisure time, and planted flowers where once vegetables had grown.  The world narrowed a bit more, marked by regular trips to the chiropractor, and we began to joke that we were getting old, something that had never occurred to us before.

“My 60-year-old body isn’t listening to my 20-year-old brain,” Bruce joked often as he rubbed aching muscles at the end of a day of gardening.  It was a different reality, awkward and unsettling, but life resumed some normalcy.

My mother’s declining health and the care she needed prompted Bruce to retire to help support her.  That he was old enough to retire surprised us both, further slowed our hurried pace through life.  We were more measured, reflecting on friends we had lost: Annie, to breast cancer; Karen to a liver infection; Bobby, to AIDS, but hardest was the death of my dear friend, Michael two years ago, followed within weeks by the loss of Bailey, the GSP who was my boon companion for almost thirteen years.  This passing of so many dear ones was new to us, and the world slowed and narrowed a bit more.  We cut back on the gardens, bought wood instead of cutting it, and began going to bed earlier.

This winter has been brutal and we are tired of cold and snow and sorrow.  By Bruce’s measuring, we are only three inches shy of fifteen feet of snowfall for the year, and although cold is the norm this far north, it has been more persistent.  Usually, we can expect a week or perhaps two of temperatures that dip to -40, sometimes -50 degrees, and the balance of the season, they remain in the -20s or teens. This year, there have been weeks where the thermometer never climbed above -25, falling at night to the -30s.  It has left us all weary, feeling shut in and cut off.

In early February during a spell of nights that plummeted to the low -30s, my mother was ambulanced to the hospital with chest pain and shortness of breath.  After four days there, she was transferred to rehab then assisted living, and she has not been home since.  Each day she failed a bit more, in spite of support, and the reality of her eventual passing weighed heavy on us.  

It also marked the beginning of a month in which nearly every day brought a new sorrow. Becka’s three-year-old had his tonsils removed and had trouble with the anesthesia.  He is well now, but there were several days of gripping fear. Then the heaviest blow of all came when Amy’s Anthony, impelled by the same 19-year-old fearlessness and invincibility that we all have, left this world in a car crash. The quick smile, the daunting independence, the joy of his mother’s heart, the tiny boy his “Miss Kasey” adored was gone. The world unwound and my heart broke for Anthony and Amy. I found myself struggling with the weight of grief and worry, Bruce hovering to support me, but equally rattled and stricken at such a loss. I was consumed with memories of things that Amy and Anthony and I had done: Pickity Place and Parker’s Maple Barn, a hundred walks, playing on the beach.  Gone.

As I was trying to make plans to fly down for Anthony’s funeral, my mother fell and was again ambulanced to hospital, this time with a broken pelvis. When she returned to assisted living, it was with extensive medical and personal care support.  Just as we caught our breath, a dear friend was hospitalized in the ICU with severe pneumonia, and this week, a beloved, gentle friend of more than 30 years passed away.  We will hold Doug in our hearts forever.

Gone are the days of parties and music, the laughter of children filling the house, the determination to push ahead no matter what. At night now, Bruce and I sit beside the fire, wishing and waiting for spring to finally find its way this far north. Sometimes we are quiet, each lost in our own thoughts or a show on the television.  Sometimes we talk of what the years will bring. Sometimes we simply shake our heads and grieve, overcome by sorrow and fear.  We have come to accept that we are not invincible. We find ourselves older and wiser, more fragile than when we started out and yet more certain than ever that whatever seasons of sorrow we must endure, we will do it together as we have always done. That is enough to carry on.