The Rural Life (2 page)

S
omehow it seems appropriate that the year should have ended with a winter storm worth remembering, a walloping northeaster
drawing snow down in heaps from a solid ceiling of clouds. This was the kind of storm preceded most richly by anticipation,
by the heraldry of radar and rumor, bringing in advance a seasonal glibness to almost everyone in its probable path—everyone,
that is, who doesn’t have to travel. On Saturday morning the weather drew people to their windows again and again to see how
fast the snow was falling, then to see if the fire hydrant had disappeared, then to worry whether the plows were coming. And
as always when a storm of this dimension crosses the Northeast, what it brings in greatest abundance is a muffled hush, the
sound of nothing doing.

A winter storm is episodic by nature, whether it marches on an arctic track out of the west or rides upward along the coast
from the south, as this one did, congealing as it comes. It’s been a long time since the last episode of this magnitude, and
it was strangely reassuring, if only as a reminder of what true winter really means, since winter is now a pale, warm shadow
of its ancestral self. Many seeds require a period of cold, called stratification, before they’ll germinate. Thanks to this
storm, residents of the Northeast can consider themselves properly stratified.

In the country the storm meant a chance, when the gusts were strongest, to pretend that we’d been shifted northward in latitude
to the shores of Baffin Bay, or backward in time to the middle of the last glaciation, when ice sheets rumbled southward across
Canada. The snow skidded around the compass with the wind, and though the storm never reached the blizzard conditions forecasters
predicted, it was strong enough at times to blot out the dark edge of the forest, to erase stone walls, to weigh down the
hemlocks, giving them a more pendulous motion than they usually have. The falling and blowing snow stole color right out of
the air, turning a cardinal in a mock-orange bush into an indistinct rose-gray blob. By nightfall the snow in the fields was
fox-deep.

E
very evening just at dusk I carry two hay bales into the middle pasture. One goes into the high feed bunk, the other into
the feeder just below it. Each bale is bound by two strings of sisal baling twine. I cut the strings near their knots, which
were tied by a mechanical baler sometime late last summer in a Massachusetts hay field. The bale springs apart, and the hay
falls into flakes. I coil the strings into a neat loop and put them in my pocket. There’s at least one coil of twine in every
jacket I own and another in the hip pocket of every pair of jeans. On this place, baling twine is the thread of life.

Not that it gets used for much. It ties down tarps and ties up tomato vines and rose canes. It piles up day by day in an empty
grain sack or a cardboard box in the barn. The horses are easier to catch with a double length of twine-string, as my farming
cousins called it, than with a proper halter, and the horses are also gentle enough to be led that way. I know ranch hands
in Wyoming who never ride out without a loop of the stuff—usually the orange plastic kind—knotted to a saddle-string or a
D-ring. It’s hard to describe the emergency that a length of baling twine would fix, but you’d know it if you ever rode into
one.

And yet this is the common stuff that gives rural life its substance, a token of what divides this way of living from any
other, a reminder of what comes next, what comes every day. Coiling those sisal strands is one of the rewards of doing chores,
as is standing among the horses while they crowd together and begin pulling hay from the feeders. The brown horses are mole-dark
in their winter coats now, and the dapple-gray mare called Adeline looks ghostly white. Their long hair makes their ears seem
especially small, and that makes them all look attentive, though they spend most of the day dozing broadside to the sun’s
low rays.

If you live with horses, you soon get used to the feel of a line lying across your palm and fingers—a rein, a lead rope, a
lariat. It becomes second nature, what hands are for. You begin to feel for the life, the responsiveness in any piece of rope
you handle, even a coil of baling twine, because when you work with horses, that line, no matter how stout or supple, is what
connects you to them. It transmits the dexterity of your fingers, the guilelessness of your intentions. It becomes a subtle
tool. It allows horse and human to moor each other.

Recently the neighbors’ horses got out through a broken gate in the middle of the night. They trotted up the yellow line on
the highway for a couple of miles, backtracked down a gravel road, and disappeared into the woods. We searched until three
A.M.
, driving the back roads, walking the dirt margins, looking for hoofprints or fresh manure. The night was foggy and there
had been no snow. In the end, the horses found us. They walked out of the trees and onto the road we had traced them to. They
were wraiths until we haltered them. Then they turned into their old solid selves, a pony, a small mule, and three aging,
swaybacked horses, all footsore. And who’s to say what we turned into, standing there in the mist, clinging with relief to
the lead ropes in our hands? The moon barely glimmered upon us, a knot of creatures on the edge of the winter woods, exhaling
together, happy to be connected again.

S
now has been falling all day long. The skylights are drifted over, and by noon dusk seems to be in the offing, the day so gray, so white, that the winter color of the goldfinches—pale as olive oil—feels like an overdraft on the eyes. Some days chores are barely that, just a visit to the barn and then back for coffee. But this morning the gates were deep in snow and the Dutch doors on the barn needed shoveling out, as did the deck and the path to the woodpile. The horses dropped sweetfeed from their mouths, staining the snow molasses. Three crows in the barnyard stood watch over their shadows, except that there are no shadows on a day like this. One horse had rolled in a drift, leaving what looked like the wingprint of a giant owl descending on its prey.

On the way back to the house, I stopped to clean out the winter entrance to the beehive with my pocketknife. The beehive stands beside a white steppe that will be a vegetable garden one of these days, when April comes and the soil is black and fragrant once more. Yet there’s no better day to plan a garden than this one. The landscape has a purity it will lose when the snow melts. The geometry of each bed is perfect at this moment, if hidden.

One mail-order plant catalog is folded open to its pulmonarias. I’ve dog-eared another where the hostas begin, and in another, from North Carolina, I’ve marked every plant that could grow in this zone, while lamenting the crinums and kniphofias that won’t.
Dirr’s Hardy Trees and Shrubs
lies open on the desk beside
The National Arboretum Book of Outstanding Garden Plants,
sources of inspiration and depression. Latin names skim across my thoughts like water boatmen on a summer pond—
Tradescantia, Helleborus, Cryptomeria, Epimedium.
But by afternoon, designs have begun to tangle, and the list of plants is far too long. The only sensible plan I can think of is this one: I’ll walk outside with a stick and draw my gardens in the whiteness, echinops here, ligularia over there, a Japanese pieris by this corner. Then I’ll sit by the fire while the snow falls, watch them all disappear, and start over again in the morning.

L
ast year it rained all summer. Most of the garden languished, but not the potatoes, which love water. I hilled them twice with compost, and by late August each of the potato beds was a tangle of vegetative sprawl, a mass of deeply dissected leaves and contorted stems. No harvest is quite as satisfying as a good potato harvest. The tubers always come as a surprise, patroonlike and globular in their tight jackets. The vines make a substantial heap, and when harvest is over the ground is suddenly bare and freshly dug, open to almost anything next spring except tomatoes or more potatoes, which might pick up diseases from last year’s crop. When I carried the baskets to the house I tried to guess their weight, but the only measure that came to mind was a ton.

I took a potato out of the storage closet this past week and noticed that many of the spuds on the rack had begun to sprout in the cool darkness. On the purple fingerlings there were only small buds, barely noticeable, but on some of the russets and plain white boiling potatoes whose exact variety I can no longer recall, the sprouts had truly begun to rise—about an inch long, pale as potato flesh, already weakly chitted, to use that strange old word.

If the ground had been soft, I could have cut them into sections, an eye apiece, and planted them. And if I had been counting on those potatoes to see me through the winter, the sprouts would have been a dismal sight, a sign that the potatoes would wilt before long and that hunger wasn’t far away.

It seems like such an insistent gesture, to throw up sprouts in the darkness of a ventilated closet that once held a small oil furnace, with thawed ground so far off in the calendar. Most gardeners are trying to temper just that insistence in themselves right about now, to honor the heart of winter for not being the shank of spring. I know I’m ready to sprout in the cool midwinter darkness. Snow is still falling on the garden, blanching the uppermost leaves of the leeks still in the ground. I look at the cherry tree I planted last spring in a corner of the garden and the memory seems very distant.

The ruins of the garden are still just visible above the snow—the tomato cages I forgot to pick up, a single stake from the pea trellis, the bare rose spines, the denuded Japanese maple, and, under the hemlocks, a surprisingly stout spire of
Cimicifuga.
I wake up in the middle of the night and begin to take inventory of the things I plan to do once the snow melts away and the ground begins to soften. Then I remember it’s January, a month when only the potatoes are optimistic about warmer weather.