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. 

Slow thaw

Rosed sunrise

March came in without ceremony.  No lion or lamb marked the passage of days, rather the simple flipping of a calendar page.  Sunrises to sunset remain the same.  At dawn, a glow of apricot or berried red edges the eastern sky, and then in evening, the day brisk and cold with the persistent wind, and then a red fireball smearing to orange and ruby as the sun slips beyond the horizon and night creeps in.  The back fields is mantled in white, here scoured smooth and glossy, there scalloped in waves by the wind from the north.  The roads are narrow and bounded by bankings taller than a car, the leeward sides blurred with snow that settles in thick drifts across the dark pavement.   The rivers and streams are sheened solid or rubbled with ice that hides the fast black water below.  We are beyond cabin fever, impatient for the change in the air, the subtle softening that singles the approach of warmth and light, new growth, new beginnings.  It is slow to come.

Back of the garage

And so we busy ourselves still with indoor tasks: emptying and organizing closets, bagging clothes for the thrift store, sorting and filing papers in my office, rearranging the baking pantry.  It is busy work with a double purpose: to keep us from an early burst of spring fever and to establish a new routine, a new moving forward since my mother moved to assisted living.  Her absence is palpable, marked with both relief and regret.

For the past seven years, our life has been marked by my mother’s aging as she fell victim to all the slings and arrows that inevitability brings.  She has been through cancer, two surgeries, increased immobility in large measure the result of a work injury a quarter century ago, and the nasty creep of losing her memory.  As her abilities diminished and her life narrowed, ours did too, but so imperceptibility, in such small increments that we missed it happening, caught up in simply trying to support her as best we could.  The past week, as she has settled into her small apartment, made new friends, our lives have expanded too. I still visit her each day, call her every evening – a practice begun long before we all moved here – and we take her for appointments to the doctor, the hairdresser, but we have begun to reclaim the things that are important to us, reveling in the time we now have. I could feel guilty if I allowed myself, and there are those moments when I do, but we now are able to plan for and do those things that make our lives happy and full.

Each month, a flurry of catalogs arrive in the mail, and most are consigned to recycling, but others, especially as we wait for spring to arrive, provide a good diversion.  A new catalog came from King Arthur flour in yesterday’s mail, and I set it aside carefully for future viewing.  Kasey and the boys were coming for a winter supper of our homemade split pea soup, complete with simmered ham bones, and Kasey’s honey wheat bread, and macaroni and cheese and hot dogs for the boys who turn up their noses at the thought of pea soup, much as their mother did years ago.  That Kasey now likes this simple and satisfying dish is a joy to me.  So the catalog was tucked into a safe place for later.

It was a terrific evening.  A warm fire was burning, the smell of pea soup and cheese filling the house, the two boys delighted in separate turns in the bath tub, the original Cinderella on the TV, time together around the spool-legged table, laughing and talking, and surprise root beer floats as dessert for two delighted boys.  Of course, one ended up spilled under the table with the bigger boy down on hands and knees with a roll of paper towels, but it all ended well.  And then the house was quiet, dogs snoring in their chairs, maple and beech snapping on the hearth, and I turned to King Arthur.

I have long been a baker and I have long loved King Arthur flour.  I have multiple connections to the company, so every catalog is a delight.  I use nothing but KAF in my baking because it is consistent and reliable.  Rarely do I have baking surprises. It’s also in Norwich, Vermont, right near Dan & Whit’s General Store, a short drive from Wilder where we lived for much of my childhood, right next door to the Norwich Inn, and just up the road from the combination town green and school yard where the annual fair was held and I rode horses in the parade, and a host of other happy memories.  Dan & Whit’s was and appears to remain a classic general store that sold everything from penny candy to sturdy school shoes to home baked beans and terrific minute steaks from the butcher counter.  We went there for everything and I loved roaming the narrow aisles perusing the merchandise.

At that time, Norwich was a sleepy, little Vermont town just across the Connecticut River from Hanover, New Hampshire, home to Dartmouth College. Although doctors at the then Mary Hitchcock Hospital and professors from Dartmouth all made Norwich home, it was at heart rural and unpretentious, the perfect place for a company with the integrity and commitment to quality that it takes to win my loyalty.  Every time I open the catalog from King Arthur, I am transported back to that time and place, and thumbing through it last night was no different.  After two times through, I came up with a list of “wants” that a month ago I would have ignored.  They include both recipes and products, and I see some busy baking days ahead.  

With spring coming, the pages are filled with items and recipes built around both St. Pat’s Day and Easter, along with the usual terrific breads and rolls.  High on the list of must-makes is Chocolate Stout Cake: King Arthur Flour that calls to my Irish and my chocolate-loving sides.  What could be better than combining a dark beer and chocolate!

Scouting the voles

Then there are the Easter Cookie Wreaths: King Arthur Flour , nearly a copy of my Aunt Iva’s recipe.  Aunt Iva, my dad’s sister and gone now for more than a decade, used to amass huge platters of Italian cookies of every variety at Easter and Christmas. Aunt Iva married a first generation Italian American and embraced the culture, especially the food.  From her came many of the recipes I use now, but this one, although very similar to several I have, includes one new ingredient: King Arthur’s Fiori di Sicilia, a flavoring described as a “special blend of citrus and vanilla” which, along with the glazed icing characterizes this type of cookie.  The elusive balance of citrus and vanilla that I managed has never quite satisfied me, so I’m planning on ordering a small bottle to try it.  And while I am ordering that, I’ll likely get more glazing sugar, and mini cinnamon chips to make Snickerdoodle whoppie pies (also a KAF recipe), and perhaps some almond flour, and so it goes.   There will likely be a whole lot of baking going on here.

The gardening catalogs are also coming in now. Not the ones that offer seeds; those were ordered and received back in January and are waiting now to be popped into flats or sown directly in the garden come true spring.  These are the kind of catalogs that offer cold frames and irrigation systems, greenhouse coverings, pruning shears and boots, pots and plant markers.  They too absorb my full attention and make me peevish about the two-foot deep layer of snow still hiding the outline of the garden.  If the melt doesn’t start soon, I could break the family budget getting “ready” for the planting. 

But there are some subtle signs that winter is loosening its grasp, especially if one is watching carefully.  On the distant hills, the stands of beeches and birches, popples and maples are tinged with the faintish blush of pink, brought on by the increased hours of sun, the swell of sap through the once-frozen limbs.  The roadways into the sugar bushes that I pass daily are plowed where snow once lay deep, opened in preparation for tapping and gathering the sap that will become golden and amber maple syrup.  The voles in have begun to move beneath the snow, sending Monty into frenzied tunneling to search them out.  And, around the base of the trees, the snow slumps and settles in ever widening circles, a sure sign that warmth, although still fleeting, is not far away. When my mother calls, there is a new lilt in her voice as she tells me with delight that today they had a full turkey dinner at noon and she met two more people. I throw another log on the fire, pick up another catalog, and settle onto the couch.