Survival

It’s an oatmeal-for-breakfast kind of morning.

You know what I’m talking about—a cold sun rising over week-old snow still five inches deep, single-digit temperatures with no relief in sight for the next nine days, and morning chores that won’t take care of themselves. I layer up, boot up and carry two gallon jugs of water (one hot, one room temp) to the “downstairs” chickens in the new coop. Of course their waterer is frozen solid almost right to the top, leaving less than an inch of headspace for fresh water. It’s an old metal restaurant buffet steam pan, so I’m thinking if I flip it over and pour the hot water on the outside, it will release the chunk of ice. It works (I’m a genius!), I refill the pan halfway from the gallon of room temp water and prop their coop door open enough for the sun to give them some cheering light. Onto the “upstairs” chicken, who lives in one of the old but still-sturdy rabbit hutches and then a quick stop at the bird feeders where the bluejays are bullies and the mourning doves look so motherly among the towhees and black caps.

Back inside, unlayered to just enough to clothes that will keep me warm without having to turn up the heat much past 65 degrees, I haul out the navy blue Tupperware canister of rolled oats (most likely an auction find, and probably from the 80’s. The canister, not the oats) and start building a meal that will stick to my ribs if I do it right. Not quick-cooking oats or those flimsy namby-pamby single-serving packets, no ma’am. Today’s weather calls for the heavy duty variety, and I load them up with small wedges of Gala apples, two thick clots of almond butter, coconut sugar, cinnamon and real butter. Haven’t even stirred it yet and I have to chase a stray dog away from the ridge where I tossed a couple of slider buns from the package my sister Peggy gave me yesterday (Bumper, the youngest kitten, has already scrambled his way to the top of a maple in the sitting area out back). In one bite, the stray mouthed them down like marshmallows and snuffled around in the snow for more. For that quick dash outside, my sweatshirt and rain boots that I keep on the front porch are enough. I holler, the dog runs down the driveway, and now it’s time to eat. Some days ‘round here, you really earn your breakfast.

When we first saw and fell in love with this place and never ever wanted to leave it, not even for groceries, Patrick and I tried on a few plans for what do when we became feeble and in need of care. Ideally, hiring in help would top the list of options, but that’s money right there, so best to have a few back-up ideas in case that Mega Millions doesn’t come our way. Nursing home? Geez, I hope not (and this was waaaay pre-pandemic, mind you). Neither of us can bear the thought of being apart. Niece or nephew in the guestroom? Perhaps (we’ve already started grooming and sweet-talking a couple of them). But the simplest option is this: when my decline is clear, imminent and irreversible, wrap me up in a blanket, put me out in the field and the Creator and I will take care of it from there. We laughed nervously at the prospect, and the logistics are still a bit blurry around the edges (not to mention the legal ramifications for whichever one of us is doing the wrapping and dragging into the field). But if you’ve ever fallen asleep outside on the grass in early summer, or on top of a soft bed of fragrant fallen pine needles in mid-October with the mid-autumn sun filtering through the branches, you know no skilled facility with all of its highly-trained medical staff and daily activities could even come close.

Still, as we grow farther away from our thirties (and forties, and…ok, fifties), we test our physical limits and reimagine our plans to stay here until we die. A few weeks ago, in one of those first magical and deep heavy snowfalls that covered everything, I headed out for my morning walk around the seventeen acre section of field, all romantic and starry-eyed. The scene around me was a full distraction of gorgeousness, and I fell for it, not even registering the effort it would take to get me around the paths and eventually back inside for oatmeal and hot tea. I had to lift my boot-clad feet for every step, marching and pushing through the drifts, my heart rate thumping from the exertion and I wasn’t even to the Hill yet. By the time I got to the middle of the cut path in the field by the woods, I was tired and unsure I’d be able to finish. My starry eyes widened with the realization that respect rather than romance was the better inner posture to take; there were still acres to go. For the first time in my life, walking this land stirred up fear instead of peace. I am still unsettled by it. I dug deep and kept marching, more attentive to my heartbeat than I can ever recall being.

With the week unfolding into a long deep freeze across our place and much of the nation, I’ve kept that respect-over-romance approach right in front of my red-cheeked face where I can see it and feel it. I’m not ready to be wrapped up and set to Rest on the frozen ground. Not just because I feel that I’m still far too young to make my exit—that’s part of it, certainly. And my heart health is fine, truly. But I learned something profound and indelible in that morning snow-walk moment that needs a bit more application to the evolving relationship we have with the land. She’s not a playground or petting zoo. She’s a true force of nature that beckons us beyond our comfortable couch to show us who’s still in charge. If we want to be here well into our winter years, it’s a necessary truth to accept and assimilate at a cellular level. For one day, our cells and hers will become indistinguishable from one another, and I want to go out feeling as if I understood that, even for a moment.

No Degrees of Separation

It’s Tuesday around 12:30pm. I’m eating lunch at our kitchen table, taking a break from the upstairs home office, when Copper, the feline matriarch of our clowder, settles herself beneath my chair, farts, and growls disdainfully at Bumper, who’s at the water dish rehydrating. He ignores her and she walks away, the kitchen now sufficiently cat crop-dusted.

Not twenty minutes later, a red tailed hawk slams into the living room window and drops into the mulch, talons pointed skyward. Patrick was on the phone trying to sort out some banking business and let fly a string of expletives in the ear of some poor but patient associate. I threw on my flannel jacket and grabbed one of our walking sticks on my way outside, thinking I could gently flip the bird right side up, but from a safe and respectful distance. It worked and, back on its feet, the hawk—a young’un—stumbled drunkenly through the cold flowerbeds in front of the kitchen windows to the back door and stood trying to collect his dignity. I sang to it, a sweet Lakota lullaby I know, until it flew shakily into the meadow for a restorative perch on the branch of a shagbark hickory. Meanwhile, back inside the house, all four cats were on full alert, watching the drama unfold through the window like a row of ducks at a shooting gallery line-up.

My life sure has changed since I started working from home.

For nineteen of our twenty years here, pre-pandemic, we’d leave the house in the morning to work elsewhere and not return for hours, the cats and chickens in charge of our belongings. I shudder to think of the elaborate capers that escaped our scrutiny as we labored miles away, unawares. I remember one day being sick at home on our old couch; I looked up at the ceiling fan to see a small squirrel sprawled across one of the paddles. Our cat at the time, Scout, was sleeping on my stomach and when I woke him up and pointed upward, he looked at me, shrugged and fell back asleep (I suspect there was some sort of Arrangement going on here, and I just happened to be home to witness it). Suddenly, the squirrel leapt from the fan blade, skittered down the wall and across the kitchen floor, sprinting to the mudroom. I had to pick Scout up and carry him there so he could at least pretend to give chase (sigh…some cats are born to their purpose, others have to be held by the paw the whole way).

We’d come home on occasion to find a few upended plants sitting askew on the carpet in a scattering of their once-tidy potting soil, but the rest of the kittens’ unsupervised deeds remained dark and unpunished. They still hide the evidence well, putting on an irresistible mantle of innocence and purrs that not even Patrick can ignore. We feed them little salmon treat nuggets, stroke their scheming heads and let them sprawl on the couch until we’re displaced to the deck chairs on the porch. I try to recall the constellation of circumstances that brought our cat total up to four. In a small bungalow-style home, with winter’s breath on the windows, that’s about three cats too many.

Until last spring, the wall between my work and home life was tall and thick, and not as transparent. The twenty-two minute commute from the office door to our screen door allowed for a slow and final evaporation of any unfinished business that followed me from my desk to the car. By the time I parked and walked across the front porch, it was all about gardening and field walks and winsome kittens and, for a time, forty Boer goats spread out across seven acres wrapped in electric fence. Copier breakdowns, policy revisions and new hire orientations blurred into the background, waiting restlessly but contained until the next business day. Exhales were the rhythm of my breath until dinnertime, and isn’t that why we moved out here? I know my computer will outlive me, but the current bend in the creek near the Old Man sycamore and the pairs of bright red cardinals dancing in his branches may not, so I’d best get out there and be with it all, unfettered and free in mind and body.

It’s different now. Lines have been crossed, blurred and shattered out of safe necessity. On Mondays, I touch the corporate workspace for ease of making copies, a faster WiFi connection that works well for some of my more graphic-rich projects, and virtual meetings with colleagues on the other side of my office walls. When I leave at the end of the day, I put my wastebasket outside the door and step into the remainder of a workweek spent in the guestroom-turned-home office on the second floor of our 100-year-old farmhouse. Kittens become coworkers (though they’re productivity is hard to measure by usual business standards) and my commute is now a steep set of stairs with two landings and a window with a view to the south. This is wonderful, because I don’t have a window back at headquarters. But it still feels strange having emails come into the house that have nothing to do with chickens or our recent seed order. And there was that twinge of guilt at first when I’d skip the day’s shower because who’s going to know, right? I look in my closet, where a professional wardrobe hangs unemployed, on hold until it matters again how I look between 8am and 5pm. (out of courtesy for my coworkers, I leave the camera off for our virtual meetings. They know enough about me already).

Straddling two worlds that were once separated by the chasm of my work-life balance construct, I’m getting better at keeping a daily schedule framed by healthy starting and stopping points. The gentle click of the home office door closing behind me is the new exhale moment at day’s end. Whatever was left undone or in process will be there when I’ve finished breakfast the next morning, brushed and flossed my teeth and at least run a quick brush though my hair. I’ll take the current convenience of fixing lunch one floor below as a temporary luxury and the absence of a morning commute as retirement practice. We’ll be back in the office soon enough, bumping into each other at the copier and exchanging pleasantries as we pass in the hallways, reheating our lunches in the microwave and receiving visitors in the lobby whose smiling faces we will happily get to see in full.

Until then, it’s occasional cat farts and a comfy clothes dress code and red tailed hawk rescues. I’ll make it work.

A Body of Work

Yesterday I backed into the long handle of a golf club that we use to prop open the door to the chicken coop and fell backwards, landing on arthritic left thumb. I watched it all in slow motion on the way down to the cold ground, and don’t remember if I did the classic arm wind-milling in an attempt to right myself. Flat on my back and looking up at the blue above me, I smiled and chuckled to myself, rolled onto my knees and stood up.

I used to be so graceful and surefooted.

I also had fewer lines on my face, more energy and could even sprint when I wanted to. Whatever happened to that ageless thirty-two year old who could work sun up to past sundown and not reach for the Advil on her way to bed? She was the one who chuckled while considering the chicken run from a different vantage point yesterday. I expect I’ll be giving her a few more laughs before I pack up and head to the Other Side.

Before we took up the mantle of caretaker here among the trees and the furrowed fields, our bodies lent themselves to less rigorous activities of the outdoor sort. Cutting the grass, maybe trimming a hedge or two, but that was about it. Oh, and dragging a couple of trash cans to the curb once a week. Hoo-boy, talk about mopping one’s brow, eh? At our last official suburban home, we got ambitious one summer and put in a concrete path off the back steps using one of those molded heavy plastic forms that Quikcrete called a Walkmaker. You’d fill the randomly-spaced sections with a stiff crack-resistant concrete blend, lift off the form carefully and set it down again to refill until the stepping stone path of your dreams reached the garden. We were so young and in love, we drew a heart in the wet cement and put our initials inside it, using a stick to make the point and the fletching ends of an arrow on either side of the heart’s edges. It was easier back then to go through the stooping, shoveling, smoothing and tugging motions necessary for such a project; we could carry on that way for hours without a break and still have energy to safely make dinner while the cement dried. We didn’t quite get that path to its intended destination, and became distracted by some other outdoor event until we sold the house and left the molded concrete stones behind to tell an unfinished story for the new owners. If nothing else, they knew we were smitten.

There’s no marker on the timeline of my accumulated years where I can pinpoint that moment when I could no longer lift eighty pounds of Quikcrete like I used to. Or the exact day when my left thumb grew more stiff and in need of coddling at the end of a long stretch of handwriting my memoirs. It’s never that precise, the aging process. It’s far more subtle and gradual when one’s muscles don’t quite lengthen the way they did during the Big Barn Cleaning of 2002 or the trimming of goat hooves when we kept a herd of forty-two (do the math on that one: four hooves per goat x forty-two and that’s a mighty lot of chasing after four-leggeds to wrassle them into the pedicure position). It’s easier to run through a list of the surgeries I’ve had and remember to send a Christmas card to each of my anesthesiologists. Let’s see…I’ve come through a tonsillectomy, wisdom teeth extraction, two stapedectomies to replace the stapes bones in both ears (with a platinum filament, no less. Ain’t I all fancy now?), brain surgery to remove a benign tumor on my skull, a total hysterectomy and treatment for Graves disease (not surgery, but I did get to drink radioactive iodine from a tiny brown bottle while sitting upright in a chair with a heavy lead apron that covered my torso. The nurses who administered the medicine made sure they were safely on the other side of the glass door to the treatment room before I raised the bottle to my lips and said a silent “bottoms up!”). Thyroid now shrunk into oblivion some twenty years later, I dutifully take my levothyroxine every morning as the sun rises through the bathroom window.

Living where we do is a daily physical commitment that needs our regular attention, and our bodies must show up in working condition. The projects themselves are enough to get our blood moving and our lungs expanding. Who needs a gym membership when you’ve got 41 acres of squats, overhead presses and ab crunches during the planting and harvesting ends of the season? Our mortgage payments ensure that we’re motivated to get the most of what this natural weight training program has to offer, and I stop just shy of saying we’re now sculpted in our 50’s. We’re not couch potatoes, but neither are we ripped. I’m grateful to make it around the paths by the woods and in the fields every morning no matter what precipitation falls on me and around me during those seventeen acre treks. I feel sturdy and alive. And that’s worth a tick mark in the achievements column of my life’s ledger.

We know that at some point, it’ll be the day’s big event to walk down to the barn to fire up the riding mower and cut the meadow’s two and a half acres of grass down to size. There will still be another eight acres to go but we’ll save that for the next day and hope it doesn’t rain before we get to it. We’ll be less fussy about keeping the weeds down around the house; as long as they don’t climb up the siding and obscure our view from the second floor window to the west, that’ll be fine. Of course, by then we may have moved the master bedroom to the first floor and will only venture upstairs to see what that snuffling sound is in the attic that’s almost empty now.

In some sort of cosmic paradox, this rural tenure of ours has both invigorated and aged us in equal measure. We’ve more lines and spots on our skin, that’s true. But we also take in every molecule of oxygen the trees put forth; it hits our bloodstreams like the tonic it’s meant to be. I feel more renewed than fatigued more days than not, and I relish those evenings when I’m exhausted from the days’ physical work rather than the “wired-tired” of too much mental stress. The difference as I drift off to sleep is decidedly distinct and I don’t even remember my dreams. Delicious.

Today began like most other days, with a walk around the land and a good bit of taking stock of the projects that await us when the winter melts into spring. This morning, though, I was determined to get a head start. When the trees are bare and the fields’ contents a transparent brown, it’s clear which thickets need cutting, which trees need to be freed of the grapevines that cling to their nubby bark and weigh down their upper canopies. I set my sights on a small group of black walnut saplings just on the other side of the meadow, draped in straps of grapevines swaying in the cold winter winds. My technique is fairly simple: cut the thicker section of vines that lie closer to the ground, then pull on the thinner dangling end of the vine above until it comes loose and cascades down past my ear-muffed head to the ground. All was going according to plan until I grabbed hold of a rather stubborn vine and gave it a mighty tug. I toppled backwards as the vine slipped out of my grasp and held fast to the sapling’s uppermost main branch, laughing my way to the ground in a soft tuck-and-roll maneuver. I could almost hear the nearby thorny blackberry stalks snickering as I lay there for a long minute, wondering if two falls in as many days was cause for concern. I sat up, fixed my gaze at the end of the grapevine still swaying above me and pushed myself off the ground to full standing position.

One of us was coming down, and it wasn’t going to be me.

In Our Dreams

In the luscious quiet of a new morning, I tiptoe past the garden on my way through the field to the woods. She’s asleep beneath her blankets of compost, mulch, and flattened cardboard boxes I repurposed from the recycle bin at work. The 6 x 6 planks that frame the raised beds are stoic and patient as the space above them flutters with the ghosts of last year’s harvest. We’ve already mapped out the area where we’ll plant potatoes and onions this spring, garlic is in and out of sight, doing whatever garlic does in mid-January, and a pile of woodchips from the grandmotherly silver maple we trimmed last November is looking forward to covering the paths between the rows of future strawberry spinach and amaranth. In the middle of it all, a young volunteer mulberry sapling pauses its stretch toward the sky, saving its strength for a spring growth spurt. Tucked into the morning’s latest winter scene—bare trees dusted with a confectioner’s sprinkling of snow—the garden looks peaceful and trusting, willing to hold on carefully to the tender roots of whatever starts we truck out on planting day in the two-wheeled garden cart that still holds the top spot on our “Best Purchases for Outdoor Projects” list. She’s counting on our careful planning and discretion and we’re determined not to let her down.

And…the seed catalogues have started to arrive, in nonstop glorious full-color succession.

Some of them are just too indulgent to be allowed, with their vibrant and precisely staged layouts of rich purple cabbage and pole beans, twelve varieties of basil (I want them all), melons with neon orange or red insides wrapped in dark green striped or speckled outsides, and those Atomic Grape tomatoes that almost change colors as you watch them ripen (we have a couple of strategically-placed lawn chairs in the garden’s paths so we can do just that). As much as I love winter’s muted palette of greys and whites interrupted by tawny browns and deep evergreen, I freely admit to leafing through the pages of the catalogue du jour on the top of the stack to soak in the electric colors of this year’s zinnias and cosmos. My eyes drenched in such ocular delights, even for a few moments, helps me push on through some of the rougher days. I encourage you to try it.

Today, under a moth-eaten blanket of clouds and slow-motion snowfall, the warm breath and cheerful technicolor displays of spring aren’t even visible on the mind’s horizon. I’m fine with that—you know, live in the present—but at night I can set my dreams to a different station, and so I do. In the dark behind my eyelids after midnight, I imagine those raised beds bursting with kale and corn mache, tender French Breakfast radishes and Bull’s Blood beets (the dark blackish-purple leaves an excellent shot of color for any mixed salad). Butterflies and bees flit about pollinating anything they can get their little feet on, and the row of cattle panels bent into curved trellises anchored with t-posts are dripping with Lemon cucumbers and three different kinds of plum tomatoes. I walk through this tunnel of lush green in a flowing cotton sundress and eat the warm fruit right from the vines (this girl knows how to dream).

I can hear Patrick’s garden dreams as he slumbers by my side, though his imaginings lean heavily toward soldier-straight rows of everything we’ve planted, each seedling in its place and perfectly spaced per seed packet directions. He built all those raised beds so he’s entitled to a vision of precision and orderliness (I’m quite fine with a more higgledy-piggledy layout, letting our green children run wild and barefoot in their formative days until my inner adult tries to tame them after its far too late. One of the many reasons I don’t have human offspring). When we both wake up after a long and delicious night of such meanderings, it’s a harder task to transfer these images to paper, drafting a Garden Plan that each year, we swear we’ll abide by no matter what. We write down what goes where and in which raised bed, who’s in charge of what garden sections, and a daily maintenance schedule that resembles arriving and departing flights at O’Hare. Being mere mortals, however, our ambitions can easily dissolve in the weariness at the end of our day jobs (which help fund this whole botanical enterprise) and we make a less-impassioned promise to get out there tomorrow and dig the rows for those Ruby Crescent fingerlings we’ve been eager to grow. Thinking of those potatoes on our plates, roasted and drizzled in just the right amount of olive oil and pink Himalayan salt, is enough motivation to follow through.

Given the current state of affairs, these garden dreams have sometimes been hijacked by others, manifesting our worst fears (more violence and riots, a virus that has no “off” switch) and creating nightmares that don’t end when we open our eyes. We keep falling asleep anyway, night after winter night, tucked trustingly in the arms of hope, holding fistfuls of seed packets and tiptoeing past the promise of spring asleep in the humble field behind the house.