{in gus's room, with freshly painted floors, a mended sweater, and too big socks // put my desk HERE // ye olde drying rack}
Well here we are, in February, a month in which I am trying to do something that resembles Thoughtful Living. For the last few months I've been getting up, checking off the list, putting out the fires, and falling asleep on the couch before I even have the time for a sensible thought like, "I should go to bed." To drive home the state of things, this past weekend the act of setting out oats to soak on Sunday evening for Gus's Monday morning breakfast felt revolutionary; medal-deserving, even. I have felt a bit lost at sea as a mother, writer, and homesteader for the better part of a year- a year that has included more change than perhaps the last 6 or so combined. In a moment of recent passion spurned by efforts to track down a bee hive for spring I cornered Craig and said with a finger swinging in the air, "I don't want to forget the way we want to live because of all of this!" The moving, the ups and downs of foster care, the shift, shift, shifting.
Our beloved milk cow, Luella, got sick a year and a half ago and is no longer with us. We sold our flock of sheep last summer and gave our geese to a friend. And with the pigs and turkeys and meat birds processed in the fall, as they are every year, we are left with farm dogs, a stray barn cat, and what feels like the equivalent of backyard chickens. We have been tethered by large, lovely animals to our homestead for the better part of 6 years and I haven't quite known what or who or why in their absence. The reasons are both simple and layered, and while I sometimes feel inclined to explain myself to ensure people will like and understand my choices, and therefor like and understand me, I think what really matters is that taking a step back from animal husbandry was the right and good choice for us. It has come with its fair share of right choice heartaches and lost identity tailspins but I think a mistake we often make is conflating the right thing with the thing that feels best, particularly when the latter preserves our egos. It feels decidedly ungood to have taken a step back from milking cows and snuggling lambs, yet that step has afforded us the opportunity to shift into new spaces we couldn't have hoped for even a year ago. It hurts; it feels amazing. It feels like failure; it's the opposite of failure.
The week before Thanksgiving our family moved into the house that first brought us to Maine in 2012. It is old and beautiful and halfway renovated, bless its little heart. It sits on seven acres. The boys saw moose tracks in our woods last week and I can walk all the children under my wing to the local library whenever we feel like it. There's space for a studio in the barn and a cleared field in the back for our gardens. I hate to think about how much good soil we left behind, but surely if we turned garbage soil into something vibrant and healthy before- we can do it again. We got in too late to plant garlic this fall and of course there's the waiting on things we'll need to establish this year like rhubarb and asparagus, but this place is Home. I felt it in 2012, and I feel it today. It's where I'll feed my kids and write my stories and live that thoughtful life I'm zeroing in on.
I'm so grateful; so happy; so lucky.
Amen. (Amen, amen, amen.)
Late last summer on a warm and dusky evening we found ourselves paddling through lake water in the company of a hungry loon. We watched, frozen by thrill, as she circled, explored, fished; and when she dove deep, deep, deeper, we laughed and threw our bodies flat on the surface of the lake, terrified by the prospect of an underwater brush of the leg, a surprise nibble of the toe. When she resurfaced long after we had given up on her return, we cried out her new location in hushed joy. We stayed, watching, bobbing in the water, until we could barely make out the shape of our car at the lake's edge.
*
On Sunday, under a purpling sky, Craig and I slipped across the muddied path toward the chicken coop. Along the way- rhubarb, lemon balm, bleeding hearts, too much farm detritus to mention, poppies, thyme, no asparagus, deer and turkey in the far field, a single red winged blackbird clicking on a cattail. While Craig coaxed Louis the gander to bed, I scanned the sky. Within seconds something small and dark flew over my head. It's shape was confusing and though its dance was somewhat swallow-esque, it lacked the telltale grace. It's dives were more tumble-y and out of control, as if it couldn't keep its own body up, but still: the movement was joyous. And then it was known- a bat. In six springs I've never seen a single bat, though not for lack of bat house construction on the part of the littlest in our ranks. I had Craig track the thing while I ran in to pull Gus away from his tooth brushing. Outside, half dressed and mouth agape, Gus watched in silence, in joy, in reverence.
A few minutes later Gus was atop the compost pile, toeing up the top of the mound and releasing clouds of heat into the cool night air. When I turned back to the pond, the bat was gone. Two nights later I saw him again and let free a hope from the top of my head, like steam rising from hot, composting earth: may he find this place as comforting a home as we do.
I hope he comes back.
*
Yesterday, on three separate occasions, I found myself so overwhelmed with emotions related to the sight or behavior of birds that I barely kept my wits about me. They are as follows:
-Louis and Serena bravely paddled a foot or two out into the pond. Something absolutely ordinary for geese, but markedly extraordinary for my geese. They have, up until yesterday at approximately 10:23 a.m., preferred a child's electric blue paddling pool. Bearing witness to their first gentle dip into the pond was like watching a babe's first cautious steps, the world blooming right in front of them.
-For the third time in just as many weeks, we watched bald eagles (three yesterday) circle and soar over our homestead. We found ourselves simultaneously awed and alarmed by their presence. One does not easily keep chickens with crowds like these, but knock on wood, as they say.
-The swallows came home in earnest. Craig and I had been reporting possible sightings back and forth for a little over a week but what's a swallow sighting if you can't know it for sure? In the late afternoon the boys had gone in and I had stayed in the yard, arms akimbo, surveying the new fence layout that both allows the chickens and geese to free range but keeps them from the woods and shitting on my front porch. Just then three tree swallows dove out of the willow, falling gracefully towards the pond, pulling up only when it seemed too late. In that moment I was elated by the presence of modern convenience in my back pocket. I could stay with the swallows while texting Craig, "Swallows!!" And then a second later, "Come quickly but quietly."
*
This morning on the way to school Gus was broken out of the sort of gentle hypnosis that comes with staring at the side of the road while it whizzes by the car window. "Mama, I saw a loon!", he exclaimed from the back seat.
It occurs to me that above all my callings as a parent, to raise a child whose fabric of being is woven with the natural world- it is of the utmost.
While working at my desk just now (desk being a euphemism for the broken and lumpy thing we sometimes otherwise call a couch), I was jarred into my side profession of Goose Handmaid by a cacophony of honking. I know- cacophony. Feels aggressively pretentious when paired with a story from the frozen shitscape that is a barnyard come deep winter. I assure you though that in matters of goose utterances there is no better word than the one who chooses to define itself in terms like harsh and discordant. It was a cacophony of honking, without debate, and upon hearing it I jumped up aiming to define the peril in which my prize birds found themselves, only to realize they were simply announcing their continued survival on this sun-bright January day. In my haste and for the second time in as many hours, I had also kicked over a quart of water that had been sitting at my feet. I sopped it up with someone's towel (Craig's) and went back to the day's work only to find myself certain again that something was wrong, in the barnyard, with the geese. Or goose. A lone goose stood proselytizing the good word of the sun, or the imminent death of it's brethren, or the second coming of hellish degrees read in mercury- I couldn't really be sure. So I booted up and began calling out what?? with every few steps down the well-packed snowy path. And it was then that the goose went silent and still, watching this indelicate, snow-tromping homestead hag march toward it while making a cacophony in her right. After a moment the goose turned and casually walked into the coop, where at this point I could now see every hen, both roosters, and one, two, three geese bedded down in golden hay, taking shelter as sensible birds do on Tuesdays, in January, on the coast of Maine. All was well.
On my way back in I noticed the boards of our porch sunning themselves in widening ovals of melt. After weeks of relentlessly dependable snowfall and temperatures so low surviving felt heroic, today's double digit day might as well be the coming of spring. I'd like to think the geese knew how comforting the sight of those old worn boards would be to me, and that it was for that alone that they gave call.
