Once in a Lifetime. So Far.
When you see a violet shivering at your feet in a low and sharp early spring wind, it’s all you can do not to kneel down and shelter it with your hands, gather it up into your warmth. But there are hundreds of them trembling in the cold, and how does one hug a meadow full of wildflowers?
There are patches of them everywhere, white and pale lavender to deep purple and the frost is so unforgiving, but these tiny harbingers of new life hang tough among the chilled blades of grass, trusting in the inevitable late morning sun’s thaw long after I’ve landed at work. I gingerly toe-step around them on the after-work walk and now they’re laughing in a kinder breeze.
As April wraps up and spring still figures out which side of the freezing mark she’s gonna land on, we’re already behind on our outdoor projects and that’s right on track for us. Someone (not to be named here, but you know her) signed us up for a second farmers’ market this summer and now begins the work of logistics duplication, from inventory to staffing to supplies. The good news is I get to buy another hand truck for the second market and it makes me happy. There are few tools on the “can’t imagine our lives without them” list, and a reliable working dolly is in a three-way tie for first place, alongside the two-wheeled garden cart and a freshly sharpened set of kitchen knives that allows us to close our own humble farm-to-table loop well beyond canning season.
When the office for your second (and bigger) job is framed by new grass and open skies, the mind tends to meander into areas encompassing the sublime and the ridiculous because there’s no one around to stop you. Raking through the compost in each of the raised garden beds, memories of singular events and experiences we’ve had on the land rose to the surface. I’ve only ever seen one single salamander in our twenty-three years as caretakers here, its sides painted with neon aqua stripes and matching dots down its back. And only once have I had the unique privilege to witness a pair of snapping turtles mating in the creek as a gentle flow of busy water washed over them (I don’t want to be indelicate here, but suffice to say, their hard shells and short legs didn’t impede them on the way to turtle bliss. Of course I gave them some privacy). On the day we visited the land as potential buyers all those years ago, we saw a pair of redtail hawks lock talons and spiral down in a vertical tunnel of love and species propagation the likes of which has not been repeated in our view. We’ve only ever lugged sleeping bags out to the sweat lodge one time to catch a glimpse of the Leonids in November (a spectacle that conveniently shows up around the time of our wedding anniversary and isn’t that romantic). I saw more meteors that night than Patrick did, no matter how many times he changed viewing position on the frozen ground at the base of a half-circle of young white pine saplings. I stopped saying “oooh—there’s another one” about six meteors in just because that was the kinder thing to do.
I finished the day’s garden prep work and mind-wandering with a “to be continued” ellipsis at the end of my thoughts and have since used my waiting time in line at the bank and the grocery store wisely, adding these to the list of one-hit land wonders I suspect will expand in perpetuity, long after I’ve made my Walk:
A spectacular post-storm vista over the eastern field that included a 3/4 rainbow with a rising full moon perfectly centered beneath its arc.
Watching a turkey vulture snatch up a young rabbit from this same field and soar upward with our first kitten, Scout, hanging onto the poor critter’s other end until it dawned on him that letting go was the better choice.
Walking through the flooded paths back to the woods, wearing my new Quality Farm & Fleet wellies right after a torrential downpour only to lose my right foot into the inky depths of a hidden gopher hole, filling my boot with rainwater right up to the rim (the schlooping sucking sound it made as I pulled my booted foot out was loud and juicy over my hysterical laughter).
The storm that layered four thick inches of ice on the barn roof, collapsing the trusses over six pregnant Boer goats who went into hard labor for the next 47 hours after Patrick and I frantically chipped away at the ice that froze our Guinea hens’ little feet to their outdoor roost (epilogue to that one: everyone survived their respective ordeals and the barn roof looked like a swayback mare until my talented brother, Mike, hitched up his toolbelt and set those trusses right again. We’ve long since given up the goat farming but that barn is ready for the next adventure as soon as we figure out what that is).
None of these events (see also: incidents, episodes, character-building growth experiences) has been matched or repeated, in part due to chaos theory and other right time/right place variables. The rest leaned heavily on honing our city kids-turned-country dwellers’ better judgment, where we learned to begin each trouble-shooting discussion with the phrase “remember the last time…?” and carefully considered our options from there. We’re neither thrill-seekers nor shrinking violets; we just receive what’s put down in front of us and give our creativity a thorough workout. Since it’s likely we’ll not raise goats again, I doubt we’ll see another collapsed barn roof kidding season in our future but who’s to say that Tink, our newest kitten in the clan, might not want to play tug-of-war with some bird of prey later this year over the furry field catch of the day? I’ll be torn between capturing it on the iPhone I didn’t have when Scout was dangling yards above the clover or reaching up to grab Tink’s back legs, adding my weight to the weirdest food chain in flight few have ever seen on a summer afternoon.
If you like variety, with no promise of reruns, this is the place.
