Wind blew out the power early Monday morning and save for a day and a half of unexplained good fortune midweek, we found ourselves candlelit into Saturday evening. It wasn't too bad. This old farmhouse stood crookedly upright as ever. Our family was fed. And despite poor choices made on the part of two wayward hens, all the animals survived to berate us humans another day. We could have used a shower, and we surely looked forward to a time when our toilets weren't flushed with leech harboring buckets of pond water, but don't we all know it gets worse than those minor inconveniences. It was clarifying even for our rhythms to go through such upheaval in the days after the storm. I imagine some could recognize a life too tangled in the grid without the tumult of extreme weather, but unfortunately it seems I am the sort to need a good shaking, a good week of uncomfortable living, to wake to the notion.
Last weekend we picked all that was in reach on the apple tree but when the storm hit I lost my saucing nerve under threat of canning on our old cookstove for the first time. Yesterday, with power restored and a kitchen smelling of apple juice on account of all the softening apples in the corner, I finally got around to coaxing the fruit into winter sauce. Though the gnarled tree off the barn aggressively prunes her pickers in a quiet but on-the-nose protest of having been pruned too minimally herself over the decades, she earns her keep with a tangy and vivd pink sauce. I love her for it only slightly less than I love the sweet child who helped me pick her clean, than I love the good man who dug the potatoes made into latkes and topped with that just made, mouth puckering sauce last night. What a prayer of thanks that meal was. The longer we carve out a life on this little hill, the more I feel the injustice done by words like slow and simple when extracting the ethos of this existence. This life is focused, intentioned, purposed. Let us call it that.
I sometimes get the feeling if I'm not abundantly careful the current of the outside world will sweep me away from here, this place, and all the hope and intention we've poured into it. I'll find myself wondering if our son shouldn't be signed up for a thing or two or three throughout the week. I'll begin to worry about certain benchmarks I'm not measuring up to as a thirty-something. Next thing I know, I'll be downstream living someone else's life. In my most overwrought moments I think of moving farther north yet for a life of forced, all-encompassing slow living; or of tethering myself further to this place in the day in and day out with something like another couple of pigs or a small fiber operation. I cannot leave my house today on account of the 75-100 sheep milling about. Or, No, he isn't on a competitive swimming team on account of living 327 miles from the nearest indoor pool.
You know, there are a million different ways to distract and detach from a life well-lived and I have found myself crawling out from under at least a handful of them lately. You can up and leave your old life - make jam, tan hides, wear your handmade dresses - but the world that birthed you stays the same. It even has the nerve to come knocking on your weathered front door and call you by name. It'll put a sharp finger into your bruised insecurities - the ones you got clearing this path of your own - and tell you your child can't be the only child at school with hand-mended pants. That or something like it. Little by little, in comes the current. The way I see it, you have got to get up every morning and choose the life you want over and over again, even when it isn't easy. (And pretty though she is, this life isn't always easy.)
***
I forgot to lock the chickens up until well after dark last night. I ran out with shoes so hastily slipped on it would have been more apt to call them toe covers. Knowing the path around to the coop well enough to plod along safely even on an ink pot of a night, I saved the beam of my flashlight for illuminating the woods that wrap around three sides of our homestead. Quiet, dark, still. I thought about the big rock that juts up out of the earth right inside the tree line and what it might be like to sit there on this moonless night. Swooping great horned owls; prowling coyotes deep in the woods, fleeing from my scent on the wind. How much more is there than all of this, I wondered. Communion with towering pines, unrelenting faith in a moon shrouded, the thrill of something other than myself- bigger, meaner even -living it's life just outside the slow scan of my handheld beam. A night black as pitch, unrelenting in all directions, I suppose makes a current in its own right. Just have to let it take you home.
Tonight after dinner I slogged through chores in the kind of storm late October makes her reputation on. Whorling leaves and rain that seems to come from below as much as it does above. And while I might have found myself thinking of all the ways Weather will get the better of us this week, I couldn't help but feel a little thrill in my chest as I slid on rain-softened acorns underfoot. It's a short and easy path to feeling alive- getting out in it like that, and don't we need this rain. We, generally, as in the people tending earth around here; but also We, more specifically, as in the people tending geese on this little hill from which I transmit. Our front porch is a shit-Pollock of their making and for a clean canvas, a good rain is second only to a good fence- a thing which we have not got. And so she said: blessed be the rain.
