Nat's Blog

The week of cool and even cold nights warming to hot days with bright sun ended Saturday. The sky foretold change with high wispy clouds dimming the afternoon. Sunday brought gray sky and by mid-morning, rain. Rain was tentative at first, stopping to allow the forest to exhale smoky mist. I took a second look to make sure it was not the smoke of fire. Then rain settled in and for the day and night, and this morning, as I begin to write (Monday), light rain continues to fall and the mountains are a smoky, dull green. The sky above is a hard, irregular ceiling of white and shades of gray. The feeling of season continues to shift as we approach September.

It seems that I have time on my mind if not on my hands, though I do see time on my hands: scars. Just on my left hand: the time I cut my thumb at Camp Pemigewasset when I was nine; the time I nicked the base of my index finger with a chain saw when I was in my late teens (a lucky escape); a ragged scar coming downtime center of my palm from the hand surgery I had four years ago; a blackened middle fingernail from a hammer blow two weeks ago; a scabby line on my palm from the slip of a hand saw one week ago. This kind of memory written into the cells of my hand. The permanent scars are the oddity, for skin cells are replaced (rebuilt) every 16 months or so, and with the scars recalled: memory. Of course, that is just my left hand, and I could recount many tales of other scars and aches of which the lingering pain in my ribs and shoulder is most recent. From a molecular standpoint, my entire body rebuilds itself every some number of years (seven seems to be the popular number). After my death and the shedding of flesh, DNA memory will linger in my bones as well as scattered in my descendants. Eventually my bones will disappear, or, perhaps, turn into stone and last a while longer. These carry a sort of memory too, a morphology, a shape and structure that tells of my place among the forking paths of evolution.

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Last night light it began to rain, lightly, steadily.  This morning the rain continues, diminishing to a light mist, increasing to steady rain, but never too heavy, not a thunderstorm nor tropical downpour.  Blue sky breaks through and the sky brightens, but to the north, to the mountains, all is cloud and mist.  Poplars sway broadly while their leaves tittle.  The new ducks enjoy the wet while the hens huddle inside on their roost.  Tomatoes in the greenhouse ripen and the maize maze is almost ready to deliver its load of corn.  Plants on the gourd house are now reaching towards birch-pole rafters, beckoning me to add more woven saplings for their tendrils to climb.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon looking for the spring and old reservoir up on the hill in back of Curious Gourds.  I found it, as well as the old iron pipe that once brought water to the farm.  Reviving this gravity-based water supply will help bring more water to the garden and to a small pond for the ducks — without using additional energy.  A small step towards a Hans Rey Energy Garden.  Our use of Our Town biodiesel in the tractor, and the solar powered electric fence, are two other examples of steps towards using local, sustainable energy.

Time is on my mind again as I see a red maple turning, a glimpse of vermilion in the otherwise deep green. I have been mostly residing in garden-time, which responds to the slow change of light and season.  With the forest all around my graceful clearing, and the Sandwich Range Wilderness just a mile through those woods, I have access to the even deeper mountain time.

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We’ve had good August days: days starting cool and warming up to hot with few clouds and little haze to block the sunshine during the day or radiational cooling after sundown, making for crisp nights full of stars. Last night in rained, not much, but it rained, and it is warmer. Morning haze blues the distant mountains,  not enough to change the gradient of greens, from sun-glittered almost white to shadowed forest almost black. Chickens are out and in: out of their strongbox pen and within the electrified fence. We are surrounded by the forest here in Sandwich Notch, and so many animals pass through our oasis farm, including predators. The cute baby raccoon I discovered in the plum tree has a family of chicken marauders, I am sure. They come in raising bands to wreak havoc and sometimes kill just to kill, leaving behind a grisly story of a nocturnal visit. The many bears that pass by are mainly practice fructarianism, especially enjoying apples from the many domestic and wild apples around. However, they are not unknown to exercise their omnivorous side and snatch a hen or two. Despite their ability to use their strength to tear apart what one might think is a secure pen, bears seem to be gentler and more focused than the masked bandits: one hen will do. Fischer Cats (not a cat at all), are the true terrors of the farm, snatching anything and everything including small dogs and cats. Lest this seem too violent a place, I am speaking of the occasional, and the good farmer takes precautions and even is sometimes willing to share.

Sandwich Mountain Farm and Curious Gourds Gardens are an oasis, an island in the forest: meadows, pasture, orchard and a few homes. I am reminded of a stanza from Wendell Berry’s, The Country of Marriage:

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

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I awake to sunshine,  heavy dew, crows calling.  I make myself a cup of coffee.

The last few weeks have seen the peak and passing of the hot spell, thunderstorms, hail and double rainbows. Two days ago I found a baby raccoon curled up around a branch on the plumb tree outside of the Curious Gourds Studio.

The thunderstorms also brought wind that knocked down a portion of Erin’s Amazing Maize Maze, which is coming into its own. At first I was dismayed, but then set forth to mending the corn, mounding or hilling each fallen stalk and packing it until it was again upright. My damaged ribs got sore after a few hours, but I rested and returned to the task, and eventually all was well with the maize — even a bit improved: I really should have hilled corn earlier, tended it better.

Drinking coffee and thinking of mending corn I recalled a recent email from one of our Whiteblack Correspondents, Eugenio, from San Luis, Costa Rica. I had recently restored his blog, Spider Web, and he was mentioning what next he might write about. He said:

Mi proximo articulo, pagina, o poema sera sobre ´remendando’….un zapato, una silla, una mano y una rodilla.  (he [my father] did get some wounds and bumps from hard work,  from playing soccer, etc)   Mi padre siempre estaba remendando-mending  cosas, herramientas, para dar mas utilidad y mas vida a cada cosa util. El nunca hablo de sostenibilidad, pero es lo que ha practicado toda la vida.

My next article, page, or poem will be about ‘mending’… a shoe, a chair, a hand and a knee. (he [my father] did get some wounds and bumps from hard work, playing soccer, etc) My father was always mending things, tools to add utility and life to each useful thing. He never spoke of sustainability, but that is what he practiced all his life.

Mending. I’ve always spoken of tending, tending trails, tending the garden, preferring this word to the more technical term “maintaining.” Maintenance is the engineer’s science, tending is an art each one of us practices day to day as we cook and clean, hoe the garden, or clean a waterbar on a trail.  It is the work of the New England Yankee, the French bricoler, building what is needed from what is at hand.

Tending and mending are so close, but there is a difference.   The origin of tending is from Middle English and means “to be inclined to move in a certain direction.” Mend also has its roots in Middle English, and is a shortening of “amend,” which includes as one of its meanings, to “put right” something gone wrong.

So, tending is the chosen path, the way we are inclined to move in life. But, as we know, the force of entropy seems to work on all levels to get us off track — physically, most obviously, but also in relationships, communities, our emotional selves: things fall apart.

Of course, we all know those neighbors with the perfect lawns and freshly painted houses and happy children off to graduate school. We look down at our shaggy lawns and weedy flower beds, the missing shingles and places where the paint peels. We recall the recent argument over mowing the lawn with a child or spouse. Why does entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, that gradual tendency to disorder and decay, that requires us to sweep the house everyday, pull new weeds, feed ourselves, and restate our loves and renew our friendships — why does it seem to hit us harder?

It doesn’t. Somewhere behind the shimmering lawn and painted house and pride of achievement is the same tending, and there too sometimes things come part and there is need of mending.

We are all tenders in our lives, moving in a certain direction, cleaning the waterbars and clearing the blowdowns on our trail. And sometimes we get diverted and things break. Perhaps a storm comes and knocks down the corn, a bicycle accident breaks a few ribs, harsh words hurt a friend or family member.   Then its time for mending, something extra that returns us to our path.

Morning.  Sweat drips down my face and soaks my teeshirt from the short walk to the Curious Gourds garden.  Again,  heat blankets New England.

Two nights ago I awoke while it was still dark, enjoying the relative cool of  early morning.  Through the window I saw an orange-tinged crescent moon surrounded by a handful of stars.  The sky was ever so slightly touched by color, faintly purple.  I dozed and woke again to see morning light seeping into the darkness and listened to a lone bird greeting the morning.  Stars still freckled the sky, but they were fainter, and the line of the Acteon Ridge glowed pink.

Dusk drains the landscape of light and color. Dawn reverses this emptying, refilling the sky, mountains, forest and meadows with blues, grays and greens that are chased by orange and pink: green seeps into the foreground; blue-gray soaks through the blue-black mountains in the background; and the meadows combine green with a sprinkle of reflected pink and orange.

I doze again this time when I wake my eyes smart from a burning circle of sun that is accompanied by a cacophony of birdsong.

Another crisp, blue day, warming up to a hot July afternoon.  From my home in Tamworth, New Hampsire I look across the fields and gardens of the Behr farm, an array of vegetables gardens, silver and swaying mature winter rye (now being mown for straw), and at the forest edge, chicken tractors. The forest at the end of the field shows the deepening green of summer. Beyond, the Ossipee Mountains are an even deeper blue-green, mottled with the dark speckles of faraway spruce and fir.  On the other side of my home is Main Street, and just across the bridge, over the Swift River, is Tamworth Village.  Towards the end of Main Street the pastures and outbuildings of the Remick Museum stretch up the Great Hill Road toward the Hemenway State Forest. Mountains, forest, farm, and community, one next to the other.

In my imagination I rise above the village, forest and farms. I see the Bearcamp Valley spread out below, stretching between the Sandwich Mountain Range and the Ossipees. The Community School is a few miles from the Village, and the Bearcamp River winds from South Tamworth into the Town of Sandwich and Sandwich Notch. One can walk the Bearcamp Valley Trail from South Tamworth to Beede Falls. Then it’s just seven miles through the mountains along Sandwich Notch Road to the Curious Gourds Studio and Garden at the Sandwich Mountain Farm. From “the farm,” as we call it, one looks to the northeast to the Acteon Ridge and Sandwich and Black Mountains. Welch and Dickey Mountains are to the North. Between the Ridge and Welch and Dickey, the Mad River flows from Waterville to the Pemigewassett River and the towns of Thornton, Campton and Plymouth.

For may years I have made my way through the geographic wall of mountains, driving (summer/fall) and skiing (winter)  on the rough but passable road in Sandwich Notch, or hiking the obscure wilderness trek of Lost Pass. This travel and desire to see a connection between communities is mirrored on a larger scale by my traveling and living in  Costa Rica and New Hampshire over the last twenty years.  My effort to explore the world through the Whiteblack the Penguin story expands this vision to the globe.

I am left with questions. How do the isolated (and sometimes insular) cultures, societies and economies of localities connect to others while maintaining a sense of place and commitment to nearby community? How do we think and act regionally and globally while also staying focused on the local? How do we make a nexus from loci?