Rhythm of the season

Spring has finally (kind of) made an appearance in Upstate New York. The Winter was cold and bitter and even snowy…but it was also long. Why is it that we spend all year complaining about the season we’re in? Winter is too cold (or too warm); Spring is too short, too rainy, too cold or non-existent all together; Summer is too hot, too wet, too dry; Fall is too short, too warm, too stormy. I’m just as guilty as the rest, I complain right along with everyone else.

To me, Spring is always about transformation and transformation is never easy or smooth. Transformation, instead, is about stormy emotions, destruction of the old, birth of the new. Muddy paths and windy nights; turmoil and chaos – that is what Spring brings. It is an unsettling of routines, souls and perspectives. It is scary and beautiful all in the same breath. It is about surrender and acceptance.

Spring in Upstate is also the time when fields are plowed and planted. It is the time when farmers emerge from their workshops rested and repaired with a curse on their lips and a prayer in their hearts, prepared for the marathon that is about to begin.

Farmers are always in a tussle with Mother Nature. Last year it was a record warm Spring and a devastating Summer drought. This year, it is the continued cold snap and flooding. We need to get seed in the ground so that it can mature in time and be ready for harvest but we also need the ground warm and dry enough to get into the fields.

For many of us who have a supporting role on farms or in farmers’ lives, planting means saying “goodbye” for a solid six (or more) weeks. I had my goodbye chat last night, planting hasn’t started, but it will in the next few days. There may be a quick call from a tractor cab here and there, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope. After seven years in the country, I’ve gotten used to the rhythm and the calendar that farm men live by. I’m not saying that I like it, I’m just used to it now.

Sunday morning service

I went to a church wedding yesterday. Another one of my “little” cousins got married in a big Catholic church. I felt the way I always feel when I’m in a church – a bit confined. To me (and I’ll admit I’m not exactly religious) God isn’t found in a great big building with a priest telling you when to sit or when to stand or what to say after him – God is found in the small places and quiet moments. I would rather curl up in my wicker rocker on the front porch of the farmhouse with a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning and watch everything that is the farm on a summer day.

There are yellow finches lined up in various groups all along the telephone wires that dip low as they travel through the midsection of the front field. By nine these bright yellow dots will be replaced by sparrows or red-winged black birds. When it rains the sparrows like to sit along the wire and feel the drops of water roll down their backs.

Over the years a family of robins have pried away a piece of the siding along the porch’s roof-line. Every year they come back to make their next and raise their babies and head off to somewhere else when all their work is done. But their work isn’t complete yet. I just saw one fly back and squeeze through the hole with some breakfast.

I can hear my brother taking a break from morning chores. He’s sitting on the steps that lead up to the milk house and is playing with the puppy. In a few minutes his voice will carry through the sunshine and breeze as he herds the cows out of the barn and up the hill to an awaiting pasture for the day. Cows are by nature a curious sort with a keen instinct for the newest, tastiest weeds wherever they may roam. This trait runs counter to pretty much any task at hand. The other night I heard my brother yell “C’mon! Why is this so difficult? You come up and down the same path twice a day!” I went around the house and found half of the cows stopped along the back path munching on the hedgerows.

Life on the farm isn’t easy – my family fights battles throughout the day that I am lucky enough not to have to face like broken equipment, curious cows, looming grain bills and the marathon that is planting, haying and all that comes with summer. But, life on the farm is beautiful and wonderous. And when you stop at the top of the hill and the cows are secure in the pasture or you take a left out of the barn and stroll around the equipment shed or you sit on the steps of the milk house for a moment and look out to see and feel and experience the moment…well, that fills your soul with grace.

Blossoms

This afternoon I stood at the sink filling a kettle for tea and looked out  onto my apple tree. The wind and rain had suddenly picked up and lovely white blossoms were raining down as well. It made me think how apple blossoms are one of my favorite things about spring, perhaps because they are so lovely, so pure and so fleeting.

If we aren’t careful, if we don’t stop to enjoy the little things while they last, then what’s the point? To remind myself to take a moment to take in these short-lived favorites of the season, I’ve written a list…

1. Violets
2. Apple blossoms
3. Fiddle head picking
4. Lilacs
5. Freshly picked asparagus straight out of the garden
6. Ice cream cones on the first warm and sunny day
7. Sauteed peas with mint
8. Lilly of the Valley
9. The first time you smell cut grass
10. The pure joy of sunshine
11. The sounds of the cows as they are herded into pasture after a long winter inside
12. Red poppies across a green lawn

I’m sure there are many more things I love associated with this time of year; the problem is, I won’t realize what they are until the moment to enjoy has almost passed by – maybe that’s why I’ll enjoy them all the more.

Muddy paths

The past few weeks as I have made my way in and out of the house or the office, I don’t know, something just felt  missing. I could’t quite put my finger on it, but there was that nagging, back of the brain, “I think I’ve forgotten a really important thing” sort of feeling. All the rain we have had/are having/will have, finally put a name to the missing bit: Mud Season.

Growing up in Connecticut, we were used to the standard four seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. Silly, naive me, I thought that was all there were. It wasn’t until moving to upstate New York at the age of twenty-five did I learn there is a fifthy, murky, dirty season lurking somewhere in between as well.

Mud season is like the black sheep of Mother Nature’s brood – you know the type, always getting drunk at Christmas and making passes at the preacher’s wife, walking into a fancy restaraunt with grease-stained jeans and a Toby Keith t-shirt. Mud Season is the Pig Pen relative no one wants to ever talk about.

The truth is that we’ve had an odd spring thus far. It’s like everything has been pushed back four weeks or so. April showers are here in mid-May, will May flowers come in mid-June? And Mud Season has come as well but not at it’s usual point between the snow-melt and the greening of the grass,  instead it has come now. Mother Nature (someone who has been on my naughty list recently) has decided to throw us yet another loop.

What does this postponed Mus Season mean? Well, the fields have been too wet to get much of the field work done thus planting has been delayed and chopping haylage will be pushed back as well. It means dirty floors, messy walks and filthy dogs. And, my favorite, the kind of mud that grabs onto you and won’t let go, sucking your shoes right off your feet with a deep “thawp” noise.

It also means, hopefully, that once all this rain stops and the sun starts to shine that life will begin to show, wardrobes will shed and Summer will finally be here. In upstate New York we get such a short window of nice weather (the first snow will undoubtedly be here by late-October) that having a delayed Summer makes us antsy and fidgetty and ever so slightly cranky.

Come on, Summer! Come on, Sunshine! Come on, allergy attacks and sunburns and frizzy hair…I’m seriously ready for you all.

The call of the wild

I’ve got rabbit bits in my barn boots. Not exactly something I’m particularly excited about and maybe something you’d rather not read, but there you have it. Rabbit has become a favorite snack of Isabelle, our calico cat. This is at least the third she’s munched on in the last week. It’s sad and gross, but at least this one hasn’t been carried up into my bedroom – that was Friday’s wake-up call. Not how I personally like to greet the day, but clearly how Isabelle like’s to.

Zoe, the kitten, is currently sitting in the tree trying to “be bark” and blend in, hoping to catch a bird before finding a spot in some barn to take a nap. She’s not quite as ambitious as her older sister, but I suppose in time we’ll find remnants of her snacks here and there as well.

This is what spring and sunny days bring here on the farm – happy kitties and grossed out humans. What I find particularly funny is that instead of creeped out, the ladies in the house are curious and fascinated (how can she eat a bunny half her size?) while it’s the men who are squeamish and light headed – my father especially, who became all down hearted over the fate of Friday’s bunny and a bit peeved when he saw Zoe jump up and catch a bird mid-air.

Men can be such babies about things sometimes.

The sounds of summer

I have a hammock, or rather, my mother’s hammock. We bought it as a Mother’s Day gift about seven or eight years ago. It is something she has never used. Thus I sate again, I have a hammock on the farm in which I swing and ponder life, imagining taking various paths and the outcomes to which they may lead.

A friend and I put it up this Mother’s Day in a snow flurry. He hungover, me cheerful. He doing all the work and me doing all the pointing – it is a finely honed division of labor.

I love my hammock. I have perfected the positioning of my body in order to achieve near constant rocking. With my eyes closed I feel as if I am flying. If I open them though, and look straight up, I can see a canopy of maple leaves intertwined and layered so that they are not just green, but in fact thousands of shades of green.

My favorite thing to do is to rock with my eyes closed and listen to the activity of the farm all around me. There is a whine from the hay elevator as it transports bales from the wagon to the mount. A whine that winds down and is replaced by the rumble of my brother’s tractor as he heads back to the field for another load. The rumble fades away as he drives behind the barn and I can hear the rustle of leaves overhead brushing into one another in an audible caress.

A crow caws in the distance as if signaling the second coming of my brother, now driving along the rutted and dusty path up to the fields. The chain that hangs between the tractor and baler wagon jingles in a disjointed rhythm with every stone or divot it passes over.

My father, in another tractor, circles to the lower end of a hayfield down by my brother’s house. The baler that he pulls swallows a line of hay and discharges a cube in its wake. The arm of the baler makes a thunk-a, thunk-a, thunk-a noise that reminds me of a cartoon character.

I can hear my mother clanking around in the kitchen doing dishes in the sink. It is getting late in the afternoon and as she heads to the barn for milking, I head inside to start dinner, finish cleaning and say goodbye to a summer afternoon.