The Rural Life (5 page)

T
o northern gardeners, this time of year is full of anxious pleasure. Even as they daydream about the botanical pleasures of June and July, ordinary mortals find themselves nearly defeated by the gardening deadlines that pass so swiftly in March. Extraordinary mortals—whose seeds arrived two months ago, whose windows are now full of seedlings, and who are ready to sow peas and carrots the instant the soil thaws—will suffer torments of their own when the perfections they’re planning somehow fail to germinate or blossom. A garden is just a way of mapping the strengths and limitations of your personality onto the soil. It would be too much to bear if nature didn’t temper a gardener’s ambition or laziness with her own unsolicited abundance.

March has been oscillating wildly. One day the horses were lying on bare earth in the warm afternoon sun. The next day they stood with their rumps into a wind that was blotting the tree line with horizontal snow. Five inches fell, and again it was possible to follow coyote tracks across a field to a spot where the coyote had dug out a vole. At the edge of a small stream, a weasel had left muddy footprints where it climbed the snowy bank.

This is the season when people with livestock begin counting the bales in the barn, wondering if they can hold out till the pastures green up or the first cutting of hay has been made. Farmers aren’t plowing yet, but at six-fifteen on a recent morning, I saw a farmer spreading manure on his cornfields, throwing clods and exhalations of steam into the air behind the tractor. The light had come up early—it’s the season for that too—and the very sight of that farmer at work seemed full of hope, a reminder that the soil will thaw, peas and carrots will get sown, and one way or another the garden will grow.

P
rovident rural residents are already at work preparing next winter’s woodpile. Perhaps it’s an unwritten rule of the season: stack next winter’s wood before you dig this summer’s garden. Or perhaps the splitting and stacking of wood is tied to the rising of sap in the sugar maples and the sudden appearance of sap buckets hanging in the woods. There’s a keen moral pleasure in knowing that firewood split and stacked and sheltered from the weather in March will burn with abandon in November. Less provident rural residents will buy so-called seasoned wood in September. They’ll be plagued all winter long with damp logs and dull fires. When the weather turns sharply colder, their woodpiles will freeze into a single lump.

The lump of firewood beside our house has finally thawed, and an ant—the true harbinger of warm weather—made its way across the bedroom wall and down the page of a book a few days ago. If this time of year is rich in anything, it’s rich in expectancy. Everything in nature seems ready to stir, and yet the only thing visibly stirring so far is daylight itself, which is steadily undoing winter. Cold weather has kept the lid on the garden, and the few ambitious shoots that have shown to date seem to be thinking better of it. Ice returns now and then to the small pond in a nearby field. The air looks warm, but it isn’t—yet.

What remains most wintry still is the sound of the world at dusk. The chain saws and axes and hydraulic wood splitters stop their work, the traffic dies away, and everything falls silent. A dog barks in the distance, and a white pine creaks. A train rumbles by just beyond the hill to the north, and eventually the last freight car clatters out of earshot. Then, nothing. The nothingness is audible only because it’s just about time to listen for the peepers. They’ll begin some night before long with a few reedy notes, which will turn, all too swiftly, into uproariousness. Then it won’t be possible to remember the quiet of these nights just before the peepers begin. The night sky will suddenly look warmer, more intimate. Orion and Taurus—the winter constellations—will skid into early morning. Humans like to read their own reluctance into the seasons around them. But it’s a headlong world in the country, and though most rural residents are provident, not everyone is provident in quite the same way. Some people plan for the winter, and some people plan for the spring.

T
here are 290 bales of hay in the barn loft, enough to last four horses well into the warmth and the tall grass that’s coming. Every couple of weeks since late October, I’ve gone to visit two brothers who raise hay and milk-cows on a Massachusetts hillside. While the brothers stack bales in the pickup, they grouse about the weather and the calamitously low price of hogs and the six-dollar drop in the price per hundredweight of milk. I write a check for the hay—a commodity whose price never seems to fall—and, as part of the deal, I bring news of the weather in other parts of the country—the snow that fell in south Texas in early December, the high winds last month in Lander, Wyoming, the knee-high oats and the peach orchards now blooming in central California.

There’s a refrain to these visits. The older brother, who’s in his early seventies, compares the actual weather with the predictions published in the
Farmer’s Almanac.
The younger brother complains in turn about the inaccuracy of computerized weather reports. I always listen to this singsong with a sense of irony, yet the weather report I want to hear is exactly the kind these old farmers deliver, based as it is on their keen sense of the difference between conditions on their hillside and conditions on ours, seven miles away.

They told me last weekend that the frost is finally out of the earth, all but a crust, that is. They learned this while driving fence posts in a nearby pasture. The woods, they said, are nearly dry enough for the loggers. The brothers recalled that last year they had turned the heifers out onto grass by now and that when the two of them were young boys the oats had to be in the ground by April 15, though they haven’t planted that early in a long, long time. This is not the atmospheric science of air masses and isobars and
NEXRAD
Doppler radar. This is the weather in a world of outdoor labor, weather with a long human memory, where April’s drought or flood is still felt in August’s hay field, and for many Augusts and Aprils in the mind thereafter. By the time I feed out the hay I stacked last weekend, a year will have passed since it was baled, and my two farmer friends will be baling again.

After I finished stacking hay, I took the chain saw down to a pile of logs that had been drying in the lower pasture for a full year, logs that, split and stacked, will dry another summer and burn next winter. The top logs were warm in the sun, but ice still clung to the lengths of ash and birch that lay on the bottom. Snowdrops and aconites had pushed through the brown thatch near a hickory tree and across the slope to where I sat on a stone outcrop, resting. It was spring, and it wasn’t. The bees droned in the sunshine, hovering near the lengths of wood I had just finished cutting. In this still early season, the sap that oozed from the heartwood was the sweetest thing to be found.

I
f you let a leek winter over in the ground—winter over all the way till spring—it grows into a monster, a pale, thick-necked, grasping Medusa. The leaves will have dwindled to a few dry rasps. They may even have rotted away. But that white-haired leek head, thrust so obdurately crown downward into the loam, will not come up without the soil it has entangled over the winter. Shake it like a chunk of sod to dislodge the dirt, and the garden fills with white rootlets and the powerful, lingering odor of the leek that would not let go. To eat leeks young is a kindness to them.

A few leeks remained in the ground from last fall, along with a clump of unbulbed Florence fennel and a broken row of carrots, one or two of them firm, the rest top-rotted. I had forgotten them, and the January frost had heaved them. I dug them all up. I also dug up hickory nuts and old plant labels. The garden fork drove tine-deep, and the soft ground was a surprise. I had planned to do a little probing in the warm spring sunshine, but I ended up turning over the whole of the upper vegetable garden, laying a clod on its side and breaking it up with the edge of the fork. Soon I was in shirtsleeves, reaching down to uproot deadnettles, which were already crimson with new growth. It was an old relationship being worked out all over again, the perennial weed and the perennial weeder.

Just before the hard freeze in mid-January, we replaced a 200-foot section of post-and-rail fence. The posts had rotted, but the cedar rails were in good condition. They had turned gray over the years, and a lichen like the discolorations on a whale’s back had taken root on some of them. This is the sort of gift that an old farmhouse will sometimes give you—57 nine-foot cedar rails that look like something out of a poem by Robert Frost or James Whitcomb Riley. I laid out raised beds 4½ by 9 feet in the vegetable garden using some of them. At the moment, the ground is still bare and mounded. It looks as though I had slain and interred five giants all in a row and not yet erected the markers. So fearsome is the early gardener.

On Sunday evening the sun seemed to have come to rest among the birches beyond the pasture. I stood in its prolonged light and considered the beds. I was impressed by their symmetry, their intent. Their geometry exposed the rise in that stretch of the garden, making the land look as if it were bowing to the southeast. The illusion of mastery was nearly perfect, except that instead of controlling a deep vertical column of earth, all I had done was to box in the top few inches of the earth’s surface. A spade blade’s depth beneath the corner of one bed, I knew, there was a rock as big as a subway grate. I could only dream that I’d eradicated the deadnettles.

The earthworms and microbial life-forms commingled as always in the soil beneath the pathways I’d made, making pathways of
their own under the rails, dutiful to their own purposes, inattentive to any of my superficial doings except when the garden
fork appeared among them. Those creatures are not about to be herded into my corrals.

“N
or’easter” is a word that people who live in the Nor’east get to use from time to time, as they did on Monday night. Even
some of the hill dwellers of western Massachusetts and eastern New York find it hard to say the word without feeling nautical,
without imagining that when the wind dies down and the storm settles at last, the yard will be filled with sea wrack and some
surprising pelagic debris. But on Tuesday morning the yard was only full of snow and fallen branches—tree wrack. The plows
worked the roads all night long, their blades throwing waves of slush into the ditches and striking sparks from the asphalt.
Behind them came the tree crews and the power trucks.