The Rural Life (6 page)

The nor’easter was a reminder of how disparate seasonal cues can be. The eye seems to read the year in one direction, while
the ear reads it in another. The tips of the downed limbs in the yard showed the swelling and blush that mark the onset of
spring. In the profound, wintry silence of Tuesday morning, the only sound was the distinctly vernal clamor of birds, a pugnacious,
whistling crowd of finches, the distant cry of a broad-winged hawk. Red-winged blackbirds crackled to themselves down along
the boggy edge of a snow-covered field, creating a strong, almost dizzying sense of temporal dislocation.

A day or two before the storm, the dogs wandered into a neglected garden bed. Its surface was matted with last autumn’s leaves,
a soggy palette of decomposing browns and near-blacks raised in curious mounds here and there. Beneath the mounds stood new
clumps of daffodils, righteously upsprung even under the darkness of six months’ mulch. Their spears had been blanched by
the lack of light to a pale yellow, nearly the color their blossoms will be when they finally appear. Tuesday morning the
daffodils were buried again. Once the snow had been dug away and the sun let in, the warmth of the earth beneath the stems
was almost palpable, the soil itself black. That’s half the pleasure of a spring nor’easter: knowing that all that snow has
fallen on an irresistible season.

L
et me summarize the situation. Daylight saving time has begun. Snow lies twenty inches deep in the upper vegetable garden,
twenty-two inches deep in the lower one. The southern slope of the pasture, bare for a few hours two weeks ago, is covered
in snow. Everything is covered in snow except the road, which on good days dries from mulligatawny to gravel chutney. Last
week three inches of slush fell—as slush—and it has managed to remain slush ever since. The sun has gone down the woodchuck
hole in the high bank by the side of the road and refuses to come out. There’s more light at the end of the day now, but that’s
not where we need it. We need it in the middle.

The signs of spring are thrown away, like unheeded hints. Robins mope in the lower branches of a thick-budded magnolia, waiting
for the worms of open turf. The red-winged blackbird I heard in a treetop the other day sounded, somehow, like an asterisk.
The chorus of birdsong is entirely different than it was a few weeks ago, but to me it lacks an objective correlative. The
tip of a single crocus would do. The house is full of seedlings, especially basil seedlings, all of them at the two-leaf stage,
but hooded and mum. The horses are shedding, and it looks like bad management on their part.

I spent a couple of hours moving mud around in the barnyard last weekend, digging shallow channels for the runoff, watching
the standing water siphon its way downhill. I pretended to be reclaiming land from the Zuider Zee, opening polder after polder
to damp cultivation. It reminded me of a wet spring when I was a boy in Iowa, a spring that filled the railroad ditches and
flooded all the low spots in our end of town. As fast as the soil thawed, the flood drained away, washing the ditch grasses
flat and releasing a raw scent from the earth, a lowland musk that must have pricked the noses of all the gardeners in town.

When I had drained the last of the barnyard puddles, I threw a hay bale in each of the feeders and went around with the grain
bucket. The sweetfeed shone like amber in the dark rubber grain pans. I stood and watched it glowing, suddenly aware of how
weary with whiteness my eyes have become, how hungry for color more striking than junco gray. Hunger is the byword for now.
On the bare upland stretches south of here, the twilight is crowded with deer. This has been a hard winter for them, and a
harder spring so far. They’ll be ruddy as the setting sun before long. We’ll all be ruddy one day, if that day ever comes.

S
pring plunges onward, and yet the season seems strangely more patient than it often does here in mid-April. Perhaps it’s the
long light at evening or the abundance of fair-weather days recently, but a time of year that is emblematic of swift change
has offered a consistency, a duration, no one really expects. The grass has risen through old thatch and blossoms have begun
to appear on old wood, which reminds you that spring is also a season for dividing the living from the dead—the plants that
can’t revive, the leaves blown into drifts below the hemlocks, the old stems that won’t bud again. Everyone in this neighborhood
builds a brush pile about now, and when the conditions look right, they set it afire, as though it were a pyre on which winter
burned, the last purification before looking ahead toward summer.

Before we bought it, our house sat empty for several years, so I’ve been building a Babel of a brush pile at the edge of the
woods. Instead of burning it, I’ll call it a thicket and turn it over to birds and animals that like heavy cover. What binds
the pile together are wild blackberry canes. What gives it body are the burdocks I’ve been collecting from the pastures. What
keeps it from blowing away are honey locust branches too small for firewood. The branches come from a massive bough that fell
from the parent tree some years ago, leaving a canoe-sized wound in the trunk. The bough came to rest on a grassy bank that
was planted years ago with snowdrops and Siberian squill. It offers a contrast that’s almost too easy to moralize—a bough
of prehistoric dimension felled by its own weight, while all around it bloom flowers that drove their way up through the snow
nearly a month ago.

The locust bough is about eighty years old. I’ve been disassembling it gradually with a chain saw and axe. One morning I sat
down and counted the rings. The wood itself is an umber red, and the rings radiate from the center like dark ripples on a
pond. The first time I tried to split a thick, freshly cut cross section of locust, the axe rebounded. When I came back a
couple of days later, the disk had developed radial checks—cracks running outward from the center to the bark, across the
rings. I tapped the sawn face of one chunk with the back of the axe, and it fell into quarters. Before long, there was a pile
of firewood—sharp locust wedges—where there had once been a serpentine log.

But I think I’ll leave one length of the downed bough intact, an impromptu garden seat of sorts. The bark is grown over in
places with moss and lichen, a patchwork of deep wet green and pale dry olive, grooved and notched and ravined. I’ve been
trying hard, like everyone near here, to bring out my dead during the last few weeks, to rake out the flower beds and borders,
to collect the litter of winter. But some days it’s been too nice to do anything but sit on an old locust log, still unshaded
by the tree above me, wondering about the season ahead, how it will flourish and what it will bear.

I
’ve been thinking about raising pigs. Ask anyone who knows me. Sooner or later the conversation turns to raising pigs. I have
a shelf full of books whose titles include the words “pigs” and “successful.” I’ve even sold, as futures, the four quarters
of a prospective pig to friends who have decided to humor me. At this moment in Montgomery County, New York, a sow is pregnant,
or “in pig,” as the pig farmers say, with a litter of piglets from which I hope to take two in May, when they should weigh
about forty pounds apiece. The sow and the boar who bred her are Tamworths, an uncommon, endangered breed, lean, gingery bacon
types, good foragers, good mothers.

What decided me on pigs was meeting a farmer who still raises pigs on pasture. “I have a pasture,” I remember thinking. What
all this means is that I’m giving in to the logic of where I live and the land I live on. A place like this is always asking
of me, “What can you do yourself?” I didn’t even hear the question at first. All I meant to harvest was lettuce and metaphors
and peaches in a good year and, of course, bushels of horse manure. But each added layer of complexity—reseeding a pasture
or keeping bees—points toward other layers of complexity, like pigs, that lie just a short logical leap away. I have no illusions
of attaining self-sufficiency. The only sufficiency I want is a sufficiency of connectedness, the feeling that horses, pigs,
bees, pasture, garden, and woods intertwine.

The nineteenth-century English ruralist Richard Jefferies once wrote that “every condition of modern life points in the direction
of minute cultivation. Look at all the people in great cities (and small cities, for the matter of that) who cannot grow a
single vegetable or a single apple for their own use.” I don’t know whether Jefferies would have argued that if you can grow
vegetables and apples (and pigs, for the matter of that), you should. But he did argue that instead of growing a single crop,
like wheat or corn, it might be better for many farmers to grow a wide variety of crops on their land, to cultivate minutely,
an idea that has proved true all over the world. The agriculture Jefferies had in mind was a deep biological complexity, not
quarter-sections of soybeans.

I’m no farmer, and the land I live on is naturally better suited to growing a little of many crops than to growing a lot of
one. The economic argument for raising vegetables and apples and a couple of pigs is small change anyway. But the garden waste
and the windfall apples will go to the pigs, as will pasture grasses and hickory nuts and beech mast and some commercial grain.
Meanwhile, the pigs will fertilize the pasture and grub out the underbrush at the edge of the woods. In late autumn I’ll haul
them up the road to a local independent slaughterhouse, which has a smokehouse of its own. I don’t know what I will think
when that happens, though nearly everyone tries to tell me how it will be.

I
t’s almost impossible to think about nature without thinking about time. In the country, time isn’t the fourth dimension,
it’s the only dimension, and it tugs in an ancestral way that has nothing to do with clocks or calendars. Time in nature is
both an axis and a cycle. But it’s also a jumble, a collision, especially in the way it works on human feelings. As Milton
says of geese, humans are “intelligent of season,” and that’s a perplexing condition to be in.