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.