The smell of that buttered toast simply spoke to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cozy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.
~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
photo by Lea Gibson
“Outside, the north wind,
coming and passing,
swelling and dying,
lifts the frozen sand drives it
a-rattle against the lidless windows
and we may
dear
sit stroking the cat stroking the cat
and smiling sleepily, prrrr.”
~William Carlos Williams
(This is for our daughter who is off to college, whose cat Jose continues to look for her around the house as we are completely inadequate substitutes when it comes to kitty cuddling.)
photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson
There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
photo by Nate Gibson
“O cruel cloudless space,
And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies!
Why do we feel restored
As in a sacramental place?
Here Mystery is artifice
And here a vision of such peace is stored,
Healing flows from it through our eyes.”
~May Sarton from Nativity
photo by Nate Gibson
“I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember.
‘We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,’
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.”
- Oliver Herford, I Heard a Bird Sing
photo by Nate Gibson
“Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a Love-thought, thro’me, Death
And take a Life that wearies me.”
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834, Fragment 3
“That’s no December sky!
Surely ’tis June
Holds now her state on high
Queen of the noon.
Only the tree-tops bare
Crowning the hill,
Clear-cut in perfect air,
Warn us that still
Winter, the aged chief,
Mighty in power,
Exiles the tender leaf,
Exiles the flower.”
- Robert Fuller Murray (1863-1894), A December Day
photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson
“This is what I have heard
at last the wind in December
lashing the old trees with rain
unseen rain racing along the tiles
under the moon
wind rising and falling
wind with many clouds
trees in the night wind.”
- W. S. Merwin
photo by Nate Gibson
“The grim frost is at hand, when apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth.”
- D. H. Lawrence
photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson
“Give me the end of the year an’ its fun
When most of the plannin’ an’ toilin’ is done;
Bring all the wanderers home to the nest,
Let me sit down with the ones I love best,
Hear the old voices still ringin’ with song,
See the old faces unblemished by wrong,
See the old table with all of its chairs
An’ I’ll put soul in my thanksgivin’ prayers.”
- Edgar A. Guest
“Through bare trees
I can see all the rickety lean-tos
and sheds, and the outhouse
with the half-moon on the door,
once modestly covered in
summer’s greenery.
Through bare trees
I can watch the hawk
perched on a distant branch,
black silhouetted wings
shaking feathers and snow,
and so can its prey.
Through bare trees
I can be winter’s innocence,
unashamed needfulness,
the thin and reaching limbs
of a beggar, longing to touch
but the hem of the sun.”
- Lisa Lindsey, Bare Trees
“There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you ….. In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.”
- Ruth Stout
photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Josh Scholten
Here is a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world…: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling — not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land.
Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The weather is getting brisker so the outdoor critters, some invited, some not, are starting to move inside. The cats scoot between our legs as we open the front door, heading straight for the fireplace to bask in the warmth rather than a cold wind. The puppy comes in from the yard for his nightly snack and chew bone, and stretches out on the rug, acting every bit like a piece of furry furniture. And today there was another mouse in the trap under the sink. I almost thought we were mouse-free with three weeks of none sighted and none trapped, but there he was waiting for me when I got home from work, well fed and quite dead. He became an opportune meal for a cat too lazy to go get himself a living breathing mouse. From nibbling to nibbled. It is a tough world, inside and out.
Our most numerous and ambitious visitors from outside are the spiders, appearing miraculously crawling futilely up the sides in the bathtub, or scurrying across the kitchen floor, or webbing themselves into a corner of the ceiling with little hope of catching anything but a stray house moth or two this time of year. Arachnids are certainly determined yet stationary predators, rebuilding their sticky traps as needed to ensure their victims won’t rip away, thereby destroying the web.
I don’t really mind sharing living quarters with another of God’s creatures, but I do prefer the ones that are officially invited into our space and not surprise guests. The rest are interlopers that I tolerate with grudging admiration for their instinctive ingenuity. I admit I’m much too inept and bumbling to find my way into someone else’s house through a barely perceptible crack, and I’m certainly incapable of weaving the intricate beauty of a symmetrical web placed just so in a high corner.
After all, I am just another creature in the same boat. There is something quite humbling about being actually invited into this complex and broken world, “pitted and scarred” as I am. I’m grateful I’ve so far escaped capture in the various insidious traps of life, not just the spring-loaded kind and the sticky filament kind.
So it is okay that I’m settled in, cozy in front of the fireplace, just a piece of the furniture. Just so long as I don’t startle anyone or nibble too much of what I shouldn’t, I just might be invited to stay awhile.
photo by Josh Scholten
Great Harvest Bread Company Chocolate Babka
“The smell of that buttered toast simply spoke to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cozy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.”
~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
I’m not a practitioner of the ancient art of aromatherapy for medicinal purposes but I do know certain smells can transport me more effectively than any other mode of travel. One whiff of a familiar scent can take me back years to another decade and place, almost in time traveling mode. I am so in the moment, both present and past, my brain sees, hears, feels everything as it was before.
The most vivid are kitchen smells, to be sure. Cinnamon becomes my Grandma’s farm kitchen, roasting turkey is my mother’s kitchen on Thanksgiving Day, fresh baked bread is my own kitchen during the years I needed to knead as therapy during medical training. Today it is the warmth of a slice of chocolate babka bread for breakfast.
Occasionally I have the privilege of babysitting infants whose skin smells of baby shampoo and powder, so like the soft velvet of my own childrens’. The newly born wet fur of my foals carries the sweet and sour amnion that was part of every birth I’ve been part of: delivering others and delivering my own. My heart races at the memory of the drama of those first breaths.
The garden yields its own treasure: tea roses, sweet peas, heliotrope, lemon blossom take me back to lazy breezes past blossoms planted along the house, wafting through open bedroom windows. The fragrance of the earth after a long awaited rain will remind me of how things smell outside this morning.
I doubt any aromatherapy kit would include my most favorite–the farm smells: newly mown hay, fresh fir shavings for stall bedding, the mustiness of the manure pile, the green sweetness of a horses’ breath.
Someday I’ll figure out how to bottle all these up to keep forever. Years from now my rambles will be over, when I’m too feeble to walk to the barn or be part of the hay harvest crew any longer, I can sit by my fireplace, close my eyes, open it up and take a whiff now and then. It’ll take me back to a day like today with the best smells on earth in my own backyard.
They will simply speak to me with no uncertain voice.
Jose, lord of the manor and farm
Tony running in the lower field
“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
― Henry James
Front yard light and shadow under the walnut tree
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
~John Lubbock
haybarn
2012 Hay Storage
It will not always be summer; build barns.
~Hesiod
tree house in the walnut tree
front porch
Jose, who owns the front porch
Old buddies Dylan Thomas and Bobbie
Samwise Gamgee at 18 weeks
Thistle making more thistle
Gravenstein windfalls
a few of a million blackberries on the farm
silver plum tree
Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.
~ Harper Lee in Too Kill a Mockingbird
‘Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
Thomas More
poplar row
in the filbert grove
heavy cone crop
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby
milking barn window
from the field
old milk barn
barn lane
Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
~William Shakespeare
hydrangea
BriarCroft’s new Cardigan Welsh Corgi puppy Samwise Gamgee or “Sam”
Naming a new puppy is almost as important as naming a child. The difference is that a puppy needs a “call” name that will be an invisible leash for the rest of their lives, bringing them running whenever they hear it. Ideally, children will outgrow their invisible leash, but never dogs.
A new puppy at the farm means finding that right name that will be the connection between dog and family. For our 9 week old Cardigan Welsh Corgi, it is “Sam” –named for Frodo’s steadfast and loyal companion Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings. A Corgi is definitely hobbit-like, from their short legs to their hairy toes to their pointy ears. We lost our older dog Frodo to cancer a few months ago, so this new Sam, as in the classic tale, will carry on where Frodo could not. We feel it fits this little fellow quite well and look forward to our journey together. Thank you to Dune Cardigans for Sam.
Sam saves Frodo numerous times in the Trilogy, staying with him even though he believes Frodo dead: “Don’t leave me here alone. Don’t go where I can’t follow.”
In other memorable exchanges:
Sam: Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?
Frodo: No, Sam. I can’t recall the taste of food… nor the sound of water… nor the touch of grass. I’m… naked in the dark, with nothing, no veil… between me… and the wheel of fire! I can see him… with my waking eyes!
Sam: Then let us be rid of it (the ring)… once and for all! Come on, Mr. Frodo. I can’t carry it for you… but I can carry you!
“There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.”
quotes from from The Lord of the Rings (movie)
Speaking of the “wheel of fire”, not everyone on the farm is happy about the new puppy:
Jose is definitely annoyed.
Really really annoyed!
photo of barn swallow from Powdermill Avian Research Center
“Somehow the question of identity is always emerging on this farm. I found the body of a barn swallow lying just inside the barn the other day. There was no telling how it died. I noticed the intense particularity of its body, its sharply cut wings, the way its plumage seemed to glow with some residual celestial heat. But it was the particularity of death, not the identity of life, a body in stillness while all around me its kin were twittering and swooping in and out of the hayloft.”
Verlyn Klinkenborg
Stumbling across death on the farm is always startling. The farm teems with life 24 hours a day: frogs croaking, dawn bird chorus, insects buzzing and crawling, cats stalking, raccoons stealing, dogs wagging, horses galloping, owls and bats swooping. Amid so much activity, it doesn’t seem possible that some simply cease to be. An ancient apple tree mysteriously topples over one morning, a beloved riding horse dies of colic, an old cat finds her final resting place in the hay loft, another old cat naps forever under a tree, a newborn foal fails to break free of its amniotic sac, another foal delivered unexpectedly and prematurely lies still and lifeless in the shavings of the stall, a vibrantly alive dog is put to sleep due to a growing tumor, a predator raids the dove cage and leaves behind carnage, our woods bears its own tragic history.
Yet, as often as it happens, there is a unique particularity about death. The stillness of death permits a full appreciation of who this individual is, the remarkable care that went into creating every molecule of his being. The presence of absence is a stark and necessary reminder of our mortality.
In truth, we will glow with residual celestial heat, still warm even after our hearts cease to beat. We are distinct individuals in our own particularity–living and dying at a particular time and place as a unique creature, given a chance in the cosmos of infinite possibilities. The Creator knit us together specially, every feather, hair, bone and sinew a work of His Hands, and what we do with what we are given is all the stuff between our first breath and our last. Particularity is a good reminder not to squander our brief time as part of the history of the world.
A guarantee of particularity is the presence of His Holy breath, though momentarily stilled, yet still filling us forever.
 photo from St. Lucie Audobon Society |
The first time I saw him last year was just a flash of gray ringed tail
Disappearing into the autumn night mist as I opened the back door
To pour kibble into the empty cat dish on the porch: another
Stray cat among many who visit the farm. A few stay.
So he did, keeping a distance in the shadows under the trees.
A gray tabby with white nose and bib, serious yet skittish,
Watching me as I moved about feeding dogs, cats, birds, horses,
Creeping to the cat dish only when the others drifted away.
There was something in the way he held his head,
A floppy forward ear betrayed hidden wounds I could not approach to see.
I startled him one day as he ate his fill at the dish. He ran away
His head flashing red, his back scalp missing from forehead to neck.
Not oozing or bleeding, nor something new. A nearly mortal scar
From an encounter with coyote, or eagle or bobcat.
This cat was thriving despite his trauma and pain,
His tissue raw, trying to heal. He had chosen to live.
My first inclination was to trap him, to put him humanely to sleep
To end his suffering, in truth to end my distress at seeing him every day,
Envisioning the florid flesh even as he hunkered invisible in the shadowlands.
Yet disfigurement did not keep him from eating well or licking clean his pristine fur.
As much as I wanted to look away, to avoid confronting his mutilation,
I greeted him from a distance, acknowledging his maimed courage,
Through wintry icy blasts, and four foot snow, through spring rains and summer heat with flies,
His scar never quite healed, a sanguine reminder of approaching mortality.
I never will stroke that silky fur, or feel his burly purr, assuming he still knows how,
But still I feed him his daily fill, as he feeds my need to recall:
Each breath he takes is sacred air, no matter how deep his wounds,
Nor how much, because he lives, he continues to bleed red.
Our “tuxedo” kitty arrived on the farm in 1993 with all the accoutrements of an especially loved cat: a soft bed, scratching post, litter box, collar with bell, self dispensing food and water dishes, expensive diet. Her owner was moving and could not keep her after two years of luxurious indoor living. So black and white Bobbie Sox would become a barn cat. No collar, special diet, entertainment center or scratching post were necessary. All her stuff was put up in the hay loft to make her feel “at home” where she initially walked out of her cat carrier, and I don’t think she ever looked at it or touched it again. She gazed about her new surroundings, flexed her muscles and disappeared into the hay. Freedom was at hand (or four white paws).
She chose not to be particularly social; she kept away from the other farm cats, and kept her loft kingdom to herself. Even when called, she would not come quickly like the other cats. She stayed aloof and formal in her interactions. I would climb into the loft to fetch hay bales, and give her a daily ration of cat kibble, and I’d glance into the hay stack to find her. She would be generally on her throne on top of the stack, looking down at me with curiosity, her yellow eyes a reflective flash from her black face, her stark white bib bright in the semi-darkness of the loft. She would wait until I was gone to come down to eat her fill. I don’t recall ever touching her soft black fur coat that first year—she always stayed at arm’s length, regal in her demeanor and her dress.
Over the ensuing years, as other cats came and went, Bobbie Sox was a constant. She ventured more often from her hay loft perch, helping to keep the rodent population under control. Occasionally, I’d see her sharing her food dish with her peasant feline companions in the barn. She would talk more often to me when I came to the barn, and every once in awhile, she would come up and rub on my legs as I did chores. Her formality started to soften and her personality blossomed.
Sixteen years have passed since Bobbie’s arrival. This past year she showed her age for the first time, becoming a bit thinner, and showing signs that she wasn’t able to keep up her self-grooming. Her tuxedo coat started to mat in places, and her clean white bib began to show stains she could no longer reach to lick clean. Her bright yellow eyes began to cloud with cataracts. She didn’t respond as quickly to sounds. She seemed to forget her reticence to be touched. Bobbie began to accept and give love.
Yesterday, as I climbed into the loft, I did not see her peeking at me from her usual perch. Instead, she lay on the floor, a little black shadow tucked up against a hay bale. Her body lay still and flat, deflated, eyes partially closed, white bib blemished and yellowed. She had gone for good during the night, leaving her little tuxedo suit behind.
We will bury her today on a little hill overlooking the barn loft throne she occupied for so many years. We have wrapped her little body carefully in a soft blanket and will lay her gently in earth still warm from the autumn sunshine.
And now, truly, freedom is at hand and at the feet of her four little white socked paws.
