Nat's Blog

It’s been a number of weeks since my last message, and I have nearly leapt over autumn! The colors seemed to come early this year, burning fiercely and fading quickly. Rusty reds and earthy browns still linger, but many of the trees have dropped their leaves and ridge lines invisible since early spring again appear through tangled branches. There have been bright days followed by nights full of stars. And we’ve had our tropical downpours that brought a day or two of warm winds along with drenching rain. Yesterday it rained, but this was a cold rain and the day was raw. As I write this morning it is snowing!

A few days back I awoke early and took a walk through the pastures.  It was still dark and the stars were brilliant. The Big Dipper emptied between the orchard and the barn, or perhaps its was Ursa Major with a belly full of stolen apples somersaulting across the meadow. Light slowly seeped in, the stars disappeared, and then the tops of birch and poplar lighted on the north side of the pastures. The extent of the frost was now visible, pastures and gardens fringed white. The sun climbed into from the Notch, too bright to look at, refracting through thousands of tiny imperfect prisms before melting them away.

Two days of rain and gray.  This morning promised something more:  the sky was largely clear.  Clouds pinked the mountains early while mist hovered over the fields.  It wasn’t long before more mist rose from the fields and forest to blank the mountains.  Perhaps it would burn off?  The day proved undecided, mixing rain and sunshine throughout. The poplars have yellowed ever so slightly.  Here and there a red maple touts its name with a few ride tipped leaves, but the foliage is also undecided. It is an in-between time.

The goats and I are getting to know each other.  Pearl, the smaller of the two, is at once more timid and precocious as her companion, Alexandra.  She came with the name Sandy, which somehow didn’t fit this reddish-brown Oberhasli alpine goat (Pearl, oddly does fit though not because her color: it is her intensity around a center of energy, perhaps an irritation [a grain of sand], but also a like burning of a young star). Once I found the name Alexandra as the long form, Sandy could remain:  she is the protector. Larger than Pearl, Sandy is the leader of the two, always on watch, and the one Pearl will follow.

Pearl and Sandy are very different from the goats I had in Costa Rica, Bella and her daughter Lia.  They were mostly Toggenburg and very mischievous.  Both had their horns (as do Pearl and Sandy), and they often chased my daughter up the hill when she was on her way back from school.  Clara helped milk (my son Ben refused this chore), and both Ben and Clara drank goat milk for a few years.  All and all, the Costa Rican goats were not popular with my my family, including my wife Jenny.   There was one night, however, when for a short while we all loved the goats.

After some false starts with a rather obscene looking and acting buck, and some doubt about the efficacy of his visit — goats always look bloated — Bella became pregnant.  One morning we woke to find find two small, kids in the straw in the pen, one that had Bella’s Toggenburg coloring, the other black and white.  Both seemed weak and had trouble standing, but the little Toggenburg-like kid finally stood and began to nurse.  Her sister was not as robust, and we could not get coax her to nurse.  I went down to to the local market and bought a baby bottle and took some of Bella’s milk and tried to nurse the black and white kid.  She was not enthusiastic, and became weaker as the day went on.  That night I took her into our bed (Jenny did not object) and continued to try to nurse her.  Toward the morning she died.

I buried little Black and White next to Chorotega, the dog who came with our house and who had died our first year in Costa Rica.  Clara named the surviving kid Lia, and she became stronger as the days passed.  For a short time Ben and Clara seemed excited with the baby goat, but this also was beginning of milking and being chased by a horned goat became a common afternoon experience.  Love didn’t last long.  Except on my part.  And so I find myself with Pearl and Sandy.

The last two weeks have brought both sun and rain, hot days and cool evenings.  Rain and dull skies satisfied a thirsty garden, then a return to bright blue days and nipping nights.  Some mornings heavy dew and a translucent floor of mist covered the fields, and the mountains were smoky blue again.  After a sunny day, heavy rain drummed on the roof of the Studio, and in the morning the sky was dense with iron clouds that move slowly and relentlessly west to east.  For a while it seemed sun would return, clouds breaking open a moment of blue, but the cold iron quickly returned.  It is a day one wants a fire, and the emotion of autumn seeps into me even though the trees are not turning.

In my last post I mentioned that the date August 26 was both the anniversary of my parents wedding in 1941, and the passing H.A. Rey in 1977. Now, only a few weeks later, Hans’ birthday is coming up, September 16, 1898.

I have reflected a great deal on time these days.  Beneath the abstractions is a more personal question: what is it that remains the same in me over time. What does it mean to have ‘an identity,’ to be the same self when we know we are not, that we grow and change, and sometimes have trouble recognizing our past selves through murky memory.

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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, and crows calling.  I make myself a cup of coffee.

The last few weeks have seen the peak and passing of heat, 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 think of 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:  we use 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. As we all know, it’s easy to get off track. This can happen physically, as it did with me and my broken ribs, but also in relationships, communities, our emotional selves. Sometimes things fall apart.

Of course, we all know those neighbors with the perfect lawns,  freshly painted houses and happy children with perfect grades. We look down at our own shaggy lawns and weedy flower beds, the missing shingles and places where the paint peels. We recall the recent argument with a child or spouse.  Things fall apart.

One could look at this as a kind of entropy, a gradual movement towards disorder, what requires us to sweep the house everyday, pull new weeds, feed ourselves, and restate our loves and renew our friendships. Are those perfect others with greener grass and whiter teeth free from the work of tending? Somewhere behind the shimmering lawn, bright smile, painted house and pride of achievement, is the same tending.  And for everyone, sometimes things fall apart 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. Sometimes we get diverted and things fall apart. 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.