the perfecta

New Year's Day.

2012-01-01T16:12:00.000-08:00

What farmers do come fall.

2011-12-08T09:59:00.000-08:00

The paring down of things to less.

2011-12-08T09:51:00.000-08:00

It's a sign.

2011-12-08T09:36:00.000-08:00

Bride+Groom+River=Gray Catskill Love

2011-11-04T18:36:00.000-07:00

How a rainy day makes colors brighter.

2011-10-03T18:06:00.000-07:00

What I mean when I say empty and full.

2011-09-22T21:10:00.000-07:00

What a river looks like when it's full.

2011-09-11T14:16:00.000-07:00

Paddling out on the flood waters of Hurricane Irene I saw: half-submerged barns, flowers blooming out of the murky surface, bloated summer squash floating , dirt roads that were now waterways, a v-shaped tree turn into an x-shaped tree, gates that led to somewhere instead leading to nowhere. Water! It knows no bounds. The hurricane, which from the looks of the town seemed to have blown by without a hitch, had actually, behind our backs and upturned faces, funneled down to us through the wide and receptive Connecticut River that had taken in the waters of Vermont and the Berkshires, flooding the river over it's banks all the way to now, to our rubber-booted feet and a neighbor's canoe, as we set out to see how what we thought was one thing could so quickly become another.

This is where the water began.

Floating over our submerged field.

Hey! It's our weeds and our winter squash!

The tips of a row of Brussels sprouts.

The local tractor fixer-upper shop, on the road out to our field.

It felt a little mystical.

Ben, the farm manager, taking it in.

Early morning quiet.

2011-09-08T03:56:00.000-07:00

You have so many options.

2011-08-18T20:49:00.001-07:00

Things that come from the ground, continued.

2011-08-14T19:08:00.000-07:00

Little red fruits.

2011-08-10T20:10:00.000-07:00

Things that come from the ground.

2011-08-07T19:44:00.000-07:00

The remnants, or what is left behind looks nice to me.

2011-08-07T18:40:00.000-07:00

The harvest is ready for you.

2011-06-26T11:01:00.000-07:00

Lettuce every week makes quick work.

2011-06-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

The storm came through and we watched.

2011-06-12T18:36:00.000-07:00

At the Bulb Show

2011-06-12T18:07:00.000-07:00

At the Bulb Show

The dying flowers smell like pickles,

a boy, awkward in his body, observes.

His mother leaning over him in the humid glass greenhouse.

Yes, she confirms, with a lilt of surprise in her voice, they do.

Reds and purples and yellows pop,

like a carnival ride on Coney Island.

Here among the blooms,

even the white on white feels colored.

The dripping glass vessel where winter and spring meet,

brackish water carrying us out to sea.

We are turning our backs on the cold,

floating in a tide of blossoms burst open by forced hot air.

We are reveling, giddy with it.

A woman, gray hair pulled loosely back in a barrette,

helping her stooped and frail parents down the steps

towards the tulips and the freesia.

Her mother lifts her face up to the color, inhales.

Come on, spring, she shouts, we’re ready!

Onions are just the beginning.

2011-05-26T19:19:00.000-07:00

Old Poem.

2011-05-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

Here it is now

Here it is now, the stardust that is us, cellular division occurring minutely

imperceptibly until the teaspoon of ourselves that is 13 billion years old that is the supernova is shed, littered, scattered over surfaces,

becoming the bird, the mockingbird flashing it’s bright white stripes,

for what reason who can tell, white stripes that say

don’t stop your looking that say

something is urgent, pay attention to the commonplace

Consider the earth that continues to become you the grain is

threshed the sea glass is

worn and will one day line your heart is

ancient, I didn’t touch you in order to feel you,

I touched you in order to see through you -- you who knows,

who knows, nobody, all of us, I saw every color and then nothing,

no more sight only arriving, landing, nesting my load unburdened

onto this our only ground, my mouth yearning

for the dirt the grit

on my tongue for the bite for the yielding of something soft under my teeth

for the flight that will yield no words only silence and breath,

a new language that contains millennia, minutiae -- eyelashes, fingerbones, arterioles -- and my blood rushes then ebbs, I hear it pumping when I lay my ear on your abdomen listening to the oceanic conch shell whirring

of your internal structures, low walls of fieldstone, of glacial refuse,

encompass fields that were once useful and are now fallow, unmolested, wild

pieces of space, entirety broken down into squares along it’s waving slopes,

there is an opening from one to the next where the stones are no more

& it is here I slip through.

Poem.

2011-04-06T21:09:00.000-07:00

Yes

Yes, the milkweed has gone to seed,
it’s white silky threads bursting out in tiny gentle waves with something
that could be called the opposite of force and yes
I touched those threads once. I tore open the pod
because I was impatient to feel, only to find a softness
beyond the word soft, which at this point holds no meaning whatsoever.
Here we are then bare.
With trees bare and sun low and skin cracking, yet not naked at all.
The rye grass grows imperceptibly out in the field. The field
I worked every day for months for weeks for seconds for something
I couldn’t touch for a deep resonance in the heart
that only the swallows and perhaps the Great Blue Heron can feel
in their great and ancient flight. They are so self-possessed it’s almost offensive.
There they go I hear them.
Swishing around me and then.
Out past all people,
past you and me past past loves and wrenching breaks past our tiny futile attempts
at largeness and import, the seeds lay dormant and perfect.
The soil freezes and thaws, over and over again,
pushing new stones to the surface with a force that the Puritans called God and
I in my callousness don’t call anything.
The crepuscular evening called me instead
to join it in it’s cold air and dim light.
People I love dug roots out of the ground as I spoke to them pulling
on a skinny evergreen branch and balancing on a barkless log.
They will make medicine of it and I will have numb lips.
It is here I feel warm.
Don’t give up on the rural. And the evening grew darker, still.

Our bodies get lost in the salty sea.

2011-02-18T12:39:00.000-08:00

the dead sea
israel
fall 2010

Done for the season.

2011-02-18T12:27:00.000-08:00

adamah
falls village, ct
fall 2010

The abundance was full of color.

2011-02-18T12:01:00.000-08:00

adamah
falls village, ct
summer 2010

The greenhouse floor is fertile ground.

2011-02-18T11:00:00.000-08:00

adamah greenhouse
falls village, ct
summer 2010

First fruits and thensome.

2011-02-18T10:40:00.001-08:00

adamah
falls village, ct
summer 2010

Tell me the story of the seed and I will cry every time.

2011-02-18T10:21:00.000-08:00

adamah
falls village, ct
spring 2010

people and the wide gray ocean

2009-12-21T13:41:00.000-08:00

photo essay of nantasket beach

hull, ma

august, 2009

looking back there was lots of sun

2009-12-16T20:25:00.000-08:00

now that it's very cold and the days are very short, the summer seems like a distant planet that i once inhabited. everything is different now and the insides of my soft mittens feel like home.

oh, there it is

2009-08-31T17:29:00.000-07:00

in the field today, weeding the strawberries, i was having a long dialogue with myself, which i tend to do when i am quiet and alone for a long period of time. and i started thinking about what i am most drawn to in life. i started imagining a clothesline with wooden clothespins, like the one i just hung up in my house. it makes a jagged line from one wall to another, zigzagging across the room at sharp angles at about the height of my head. i started imagining that if my life was traveling that clothesline, going from place to place, angling off from here to there, what would make up the rope? what would be the fiber that connects all of the different pieces? immediately, without any thought (a rare moment for me), one word came to mind. beauty. on all sorts of levels, both physical and spiritual, tangible and intangible, but definitely, at the core of it, beauty.

in a way, it felt somewhat abstract. but then i remembered a moment when i was sitting in my room last week and it was right in front of me. flowers and glass jars, one jar holding found marbles.

it was so simple and so, well, beautiful. and that was it.

my farm at sunset

2009-08-29T14:59:00.001-07:00

what i can find when i walk out to the fields at sunset:

wildflowers: goldenrod, wild carrot, amaranth and purple loostrife

prepared beds waiting to be planted

purple cabbages

the opening out to the main fields (otherwise known as the most magical place ever)

a frog living in a big puddle in our muddy road (otherwise known as a vernal pool)

a bag of our rubber bands mysteriously exploded in the roadway

a shy pumpkin blossom

two types of celosia flowers

wild edibles walk, partially

2009-08-20T12:43:00.001-07:00

So. I went on my second wild edibles walk at Blue Heron Organic Farm, an extremely cute farm down the street from mine. Last year we learned about mushrooms, pokeberry, sumac, wild ground cherries, wintergreen, and all sorts of easy-to-identify and easy-to-eat plants that grow basically all around us (especially around the edges of farm fields, abandoned urban lots, and highway medians). It was really mind-opening to suddenly become aware of these living organisms that were growing around me and be able to drive down the street, go for a hike or a farm walk and know what I was actually looking at. This year I was excited for that same experience. I rushed home (translation: I left the farm at 5:30 as opposed to sticking around late as I usually do, ran sweaty across the street from the farm to my house, and took a 2-minute shower) and sped down the road to Blue Heron. I got there and when I actually slowed down to listen to Russ Cohen, an expert in wild edibles of New England, talk about mushrooms, I realized that, wait a second, I actually just want to walk around on my own and I have no room in my head for external information. And also, it was very hot, very sunny, and I was sweating all over again after sweating for 10 hours straight. So. I veered off away from the group and meandered around, taking pictures and worrying that I was getting poison ivy or lyme disease by walking in all that tall grass. But somehow it was great: to realize that sometimes even the stuff I'm excited for in advance is not actually right for me in the moment, and then to follow that impulse and change direction, from group educational experience to alone-walking-time. I have a complicated relationship with alone time, but right now it's the perfect remedy.

Some pictures:

when something is lost

2009-08-08T16:53:00.000-07:00

Our tomatoes have late blight, the same fungus that was responsible for the Irish potato famine in the 1840’s. That means what used to be gorgeous, lush, five-foot plants are now shriveling and brown. Green, almost-ripe fruits hang all over the plants, ready to ripen, but instead are scabbing and rotting. The very sad fact of this blight is that almost all of the organic farms in New England have it and most are losing their entire tomato crop. The even sadder fact is that this blight is a product of our mass-produced, conventional, chemical-fueled agricultural system. Infected tomato seedlings that were grown in a massive plant nursery in Alabama were sold to big box stores (Wal-Mart, Loews, etc.) all over the east coast. Home gardeners unwittingly bought these little seedlings and the blight, which is wind-borne, spread to nearby farms. And there you have it. The saddest fact is that conventional farms can spray toxic fungicides that kill the fungus, however, organic farms have nothing at their disposal that can kill the spores. And even what we can technically spray contains heavy metals, which have been shown to pollute ground water sources and vernal pools. Which brings me to this. How this system of producing thousands (millions?) of a growing organism as if it was just an inorganic inert factory product, using gross chemicals and then selling them dirt cheap to box stores that sell them like they’re t-shirts from China, leads to the destruction of beautiful, cared-for plants that small farms and individuals have grown locally to produce local food. How much more proof do we need that this system is pretty disgusting?

It feels private in a way. The slow demise of something I’ve grown from seed. All that work, beginning in March in the greenhouse- seeding, heating, watering, then transplanting hundreds of plants. Then planting out in May- post-hole digging, adding a scoop of sea kelp or bone meal into each hole, keeping the two dozen varieties in order, drawing the field map. Then in June and July- mulching with straw, banging the trellis poles into the ground, trellising, watering when it got too hot and dry. The whole farm team has gone through worry and then denial and then action and then acceptance after we finally brought a sample of our scabby tomatoes to a scientist who studies this stuff. We needed official confirmation from someone more objective than ourselves. It’s actually making me laugh out loud right now imagining Hannah and Emily and myself at the local famer meeting holding our tomatoes in a Ziploc bag that was fogged up by the moisture inside, waiting expectantly with some last thread of hope for a diagnosis. And all of the other farmers were sitting next to us with their own plastic bags of yellow leaves, lesioned stems, and scabby fruit.

Although at this point it’s not as bad as we thought it would be. Our plants are still dying, but we have been able to harvest a bunch of cherry tomatoes, green (unripe) tomatoes, and a few ripened large fruit. I don’t think they taste quite right, but that’s to be expected. I made my first Sungold tomato sauce of the season, which I thought would never happen. And it tasted better than anything. Literally. I know I just said that they don’t taste that great, but when cooked they taste sweeter and my excitement over actually being able to eat some definitely added to the flavor. They feel oddly symbolic of something. Of something of value of summer of sweetness of long-awaited emotion.

garlic harvest

2009-07-20T17:35:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from the CSA newsletter I write for my farm's blog:

This week on the farm has brought our first small (but exciting) harvests of eggplant, cherry tomatoes, green tomatoes, and peppers. I am continuously amazed by the first fruits of each plant we grow- The first dark green jalapenos! The first bright orange tomatoes hanging low on the vines!- and I am immediately brought back to the moment when those same plants, those same fruit, were all contained in tiny, dry seeds in the palm of a hand. When I am hot, dirty, tired from hoeing, and the air feels like a wet sheet around me, the amazement is, let’s just say, a little harder to come by, but still, it comes.

words are harder to come by

2009-07-20T17:21:00.000-07:00

when words are harder to come by

annie doesn't seem right anymore

nothing is on fire

and seeing is not a blessing

but still there is darkness and shape

still there is current and flight

and the birds are roosting anyway

in that tree full of light

preserving the spring in jars

2009-06-29T17:11:00.000-07:00

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it.

-Li Young-Lee

poppies and early morning on the farm

2009-06-06T18:15:00.000-07:00

also the end of may

our seedling sale! and the blue hat

2009-06-06T18:09:00.000-07:00

end of may

tomato planting

2009-06-06T18:04:00.001-07:00

lilac sunday in the arboretum

2009-05-30T08:15:00.000-07:00

may 10, arnold arboretum, boston

photos, from top to bottom: 1. the family mural 2. and 3. isadora duncan spring dances

a trend setting in?

2009-05-25T08:08:00.001-07:00

check out this nytimes article about today's young folk getting their hands dirty.
i'm not so into casting farming as a trend, as if it's the new hot fashion, but at least it's giving value to this awareness that's building around the earth and farming. i definitely fit into the category of urbanite/student turned farmer and i relate with one of the students who is quoted as saying that he finally doesn't regret not being born in the 60's. right on.

this past week has been planting central! after our last frost passed, we planted all of our tomatoes, eggplants, sweet peppers, and melons in one week. they are all heat-loving crops so you always need to wait until the danger of frost is gone. of course, nature went from one extreme to the next. after the last frost we had two days of over 90 degree weather! insanity. and all of our baby eggplants were sadly drooping. we ended up watering them in by hand and sending out lots of love to them.

this weekend we had our annual seedling sale and we sold more than ever before. both days of the sale were busy, with so many people telling us that this was going to be their first year gardening. i love selling our plants and sending them out into the world. my top favorite customer was a boy of about 8 named eli, who was starting his own garden. he came with his mother and a handwritten list of the veggies and fruit he wants to grow and was very cautious in choosing each plant he bought. he asked me if we sold marigolds (which we don't) so that he could plant them next to his tomatoes to keep away the aphids! definitely impressive. he was such an obviously special person, a child with an old soft soul.

a new phase

2009-05-10T15:13:00.000-07:00

Photos, from top to bottom: 1. The day's bounty 2. Anne and Pay watering in the scallions after a dry spell (we don't use any irrigation at Drumlin) 3. Watering in the lettuce 4. Transplanting basil seedling for our seedling sale at the end of May

This week was the first week with all of the new farm apprentices. There are four new folks, plus Pay, who worked last season, and myself. It feels great to have a whole team of us working together and lots of new energy is being shared. Some of us have had previous farming experience, while for others this is their first time farming full on. There is something great about being both a teacher and a student. This season, I can share the knowledge I have accumulated over the past year and a bit with the apprentices who are seeing and doing everything for the first time. I am almost surprised at how much I have learned in a such a short period of time, from identifying bird calls out in the field to how to transplant basil. It's always a good test of knowledge when you are in a position to pass things on and suddenly all of these stored up facts and ideas and techniques come spilling out. And of course, there are many times when I don't know the answer or I forget and then I can rely on Pay, who grew up on a farm in Mexico, or Matt, who has been farming for 10 years, or Anne, a devoted volunteer who has been gardening all of her life.

While farming, I have come to realize that I like being a hands-on learner. I have always known this, deeply. But it is very apparent and on the surface now. I have always yearned for a balance between mind and body, and most of the time have veered way too far to the mind part of it all. This idea of using the body, particularly the hands, came clear in a conversation with a good friend who is training to become a nurse. She is in the midst of her rotation through Labor & Delivery and has now observed and participated in eight births. She was describing her duties as a nurse-in-training: taking vitals, monitoring the fetal heart rate, etc. and quite unexpectedly ended her description with, "It's like farming." "What do you mean?," I asked. "You know," she said, "hands-on. It's just like farming, with farming you're using your hands to help something grow, to be born, working with the soil, with nursing it's helping someone give birth, using your hand to help natural processes occur."

I loved this thought. No wonder I love both farming and childbirth.

singing frogs

2009-05-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

Harvesting Japanese mustard greens

April 23

We planted 3,200 strawberry plants over the past three days. The small plants come in the mail, their roots wrapped in wet newspaper, and we have to keep them moist and plant them over the following few days or they will dry out and die. We won’t harvest the fruit of these new plants until next year. This year, when they put out new white flowers, we will pinch them off so that the plants put energy into their roots and new growth instead of into their fruit. When they are ready to fruit next year, we will plow in a section of old strawberries and the cycle continues.

It was windy this afternoon. But I could still hear the spring frogs singing at the pond in the middle of our fields. It sounds like they are harmonizing with each other. And as I write this in my bedroom I can hear cars going by, but between them lies the high-pitched song of spring peepers.

in the morning i saw this

2009-05-02T18:21:00.000-07:00

April 15

An hour-old baby lamb.

kids are born

2009-05-02T17:43:00.000-07:00

march 28

Today, for the first time, I watched a goat give birth. It was fast and quiet. The two babies were standing and walking only a few minutes after they were born. It made me think about how different human beings are from other creatures when we are born, how our bodies seem startled by the absence of the womb. And yet how oddly similar- the connection between the mother and her babies, the placenta, the contractions, and the surprising moment when the baby slips out into the airy world.

Photos: 1. Children watching as the goat gives birth 2. The older kid rests on the ground while the second one emerges 3. The two kids meet (check out the boy with his finger on his nose)

wool

2009-04-30T16:54:00.000-07:00

March 28

Every year at Drumlin we have a sheep shearing festival called Woolapalooza (yes, that is really what it's called). A sheep-shearer from Vermont cuts the wool of dozens of sheep with huge hand-held shears. When he is finished the wool comes off all in one piece. He is the only person east of the Mississippi who still shears sheep by hand without an electric razor. It is truly an art that is slowly being lost. Man, sheep, scissors, very simple. I feel like a mesmerized kid no matter how many times I see it. Each sheep comes out looking like a whole other creature, smaller and thinner and more vulnerable without their thick wooly dreadlocked coat.

laughing birds

2009-04-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

March

The migrating birds are returning. Red-breast robins, bluebirds, swallows. I hear them singing everywhere and I wonder if the birds and other animals that stick around and burrow down and live through the snowy winter here feel a little upset, like hey, this is our land. Like people who live in a beach town and feel a slight resentment towards the summer tourists because they know that they are the true residents, because they love the place year-round.

Matt called me outside today to quietly point out a pileated woodpecker that was pecking a large maple tree above the maple sap evaporator. It was a huge bird (over a foot long, I later found out) and so utterly different than any bird I have ever seen. The pileated also has a call that sounds like loud harsh laughter, a strangely human sound.

That same week I heard an NPR show about an assisted living community in California that was authorized to shoot and kill dozens of woodpeckers that were causing damage to their homes. This, after the community had cleared out the dead wood that the birds normally nest in and then built new houses in the birds' habitat.

i was very nervous when i read this

2009-04-30T15:46:00.000-07:00

February

I was asked to speak at a "Local Food" Tu b'Svhat seder, the Jewish celebration of trees and the spring (in February, since that is when spring begins in Israel). Here is what I shared as a closing to the seder:

My first days as a farmer were spent visiting trees. Every day that the temperature went above freezing, we visited the trees. These trees were (and are) old and wise and shaggy. Their shaggy bark, like thick pieces of gray, peeling paint. It was February, a year ago, and it was the beginning of the sugaring season.

Before this, I would not have been able to tell the difference between a sugar maple and any other New England tree in the middle of the winter, they were just part of the natural landscape that I drove or walked by, blending into the background of my human drama.

Suddenly I was having a personal relationship with 60 trees, checking on them, peaking into the tin buckets that hung on them to see how much sap they had wept. Some days I stood leaning against the biggest trees listening to the sap drip into the buckets, making music as it hit the metal below. It made me think about weeping and singing.

Tu B'Shvat is the new year of trees. It arrives just as the sap begins to flow within the trees. The trees are waking up to the spring, and I am waking up to the trees.

Thinking about what I was going to share tonight, about why I started farming, I came upon this line from the Torah that the Kabbalists pondered when creating the Tu B'Shvat seder:

"For man is like the tree of the field".

One could read this line and think "this is reminding me to pay attention to the connection between people and the natural world", but that thought already assumes a dichotomy, people on one side, nature on the other.

One of my motivations to farm was to reject that dichotomy and live in a direct way as a "tree of the field".

Recently I taught a lesson to a class of urban 3rd graders. We were talking about how different plants grow and I mentioned in passing that trees grow from seeds. They couldn't believe it. Trees growing from seeds! This was a whole new idea for them. In a way, I could relate to their amazement, finding out new really basic stuff about the natural world is how I've spent most of my first year as a farmer. But their reaction also reminded me of how disconnected most of us are from nature.

I started farming partially for selfish reasons- it was therapeutic and beautiful and I love being outside. But I also started farming because I wanted to be connected with the earth. To dedicate part of my life to growing things. To live more of a hand-made life.

This idea I think is summed up and elaborated by this quote from Noel Perrin:

"The point is to simplify as much as possible, and so test the standard claims of one's time about the cost of things- an education, a house, a life."

I think farming, supporting a farm, being a member of a CSA, all of these things help us challenge the status quo and remain grounded in simplicity, which, I think, we all strive for.

When I plant seedlings out in the field, I am literally putting down roots, just like I put down metaphorical roots in my own community and within myself. When I pull away weeds I am clearing the way for healthy growth, just like I try and make space for my own inner growth. And collecting sap, I see how the trees bring sweetness and energy into their almost-budding branches. It is sad in a way, tapping the trees and taking some of their well-earned sugars away. But there is a lesson in that too, a lesson about giving and taking, about weeping and singing.

winter on the farm

2009-04-30T15:27:00.000-07:00

From top to bottom: 1. Filtering the boiling maple syrup 2. Wooly sheep taking cover from the snow 3. An example of my winter breadmaking craze 4. A winter breakfast (eggs, potatoes, and carrots from the farm)

growing things

2008-05-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

some photos:

spring

2008-05-08T19:20:00.000-07:00

april 28

here is what we have sown: basil, parsley, eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, leeks, onions, scallions, cabbage, lettuce, chard, flowers, strawberries, spinach. since mid-february we have been working in the greenhouse seeding many, many seeds into many, many trees. each onion tray has 660 seeds that will grow into 660 onions. i’m not sure if that sentence makes any sense. what i’m trying to say is that it’s amazing to imagine each little seed becoming something large and layered and stunning.

hot paper lantern is my favorite pepper variety name. and lobelia for flowers. the seeds are so small that you just dust them over the soil and lightly mist them until they turn into small green clumps like moss on a rock.

celosia flowers look like velvet brains when they bloom. running my hands over the trays of baby leeks feels like hundreds of soft feathers on my skin. bright lights chard has rainbow stems- red, yellow, orange. and the ruby red chard literally has hot pink roots. literally, fluorescent pink. i know because we spent hours in the cold rain this morning transplanting them from their little cells to the wet field.

my body is tired.

this month has brought lots of spring. daffodils, tulips, crocuses are blooming everywhere. and my favorites, magnolias and forsythias. maya and i discovered flat plants popping up everywhere (they look 2-dimensional) and i learned that they are day lilies. they may be a new favorite. i’ve learned to drive a tractor (yes, a tractor!) and learned to prune apple trees standing in their branches. matt has been a good, patient teacher. i’ve only hurt myself once, slicing my thumb with a little saw.

on the farm, suddenly things are moving quickly. april is the beginning of the busy farming season. as an apprentice, i am trying to learn as much as possible and not get frustrated when i don’t know. but i am easily frustrated because it’s hard for me to be a beginner. i just want to know all of it right now.

yesterday i walked outside and a hawk was sitting on a tall post. it was very still. i gasped at the sight.

god

2008-05-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

and a favorite child’s-mind-on-display moment:
a group of first-graders came by the evaporator to learn about maple syrup. they stood all crowded together in the “maple cloud” as the teacher naturalists like to call it and watched me stoke the fire. I told them they had to stay away from the fire because it could hurt them. A little boy said, “Yeah, fires can burn children and hurt us.” And I said, “yeah, fires can really hurt anyone, including me if I’m not careful.” “Except for God,” he said. “God could stick his hand in there and it wouldn’t hurt him at all.”

sugaring season

2008-05-08T17:54:00.000-07:00

april 1

today was the last day of sugaring. from february 18 to april 1, the trees ran and wept their sap into our galvanized tin buckets. as a true child grown up by the suburbs, i always imagined sap to be brown, showing its sugars right away. but when i opened my first bucket i looked into clear cool liquid. it was just like water. in fact, it is mostly water and only through boiling does it turn brown and thick. in the beginning we had to stomp through snow and ice to get to the maples, and the sap was frozen in the buckets. there was no hint of green in sight. it was that in between time, when you can feel the end of winter, but spring hasn't come yet. the slow drip of the sap into the bucket after it's emptied- it's a beautiful rhythm like rain like music. standing up against the tree, listening to it. my friend maya and i laughed as we collected sap in the rain and spilled some of the it by accident. it's like you're simultaneously spilling the blood of the tree and the best maple syrup ever, she said. but there was some seriousness to that feeling. i thought a lot about the ways people have exploited natural resources to get what we want. although tapping trees isn't shown to damage them at all, there is something strange about tapping the stuff that feeds the tree. and yet it's a beautiful ritualistic process that provides us with connection to nature and food.

and then the evaporator. two large metal pans sitting over a wood stove, filled with gallons of sap, looking out onto a small ice pond. it was freezing- sitting outside stoking the fire, gloves, and steamy breath, and many layers of overalls and sweaters, but the sweet steam was very sweet. it rippled up into the wooden beams above, streams and patterns of soft white water.

every morning, either matt or i came down to build a fire below the large pans. the first day it took me six tries to get it started. throwing huge smoothly chopped logs into a burning orange fire, listening to mourning doves cooing, and trying not to freeze.

i started reading about sugaring as i sugared (oh, the meta-ness of that). and i came upon a book by noel perrin, an academic who moved to vermont to live the rural life (and who grew up in the suburbs, like me). it's called "amateur sugar maker" (like me) and it's about living as simply as possible (ode-like to thoreau, who happened to live down the street from drumlin farm).

here is one of my favorite passages:

"the point is to simplify as much as possible, and so test the standard claims of one's timea bout the cost of things- an education, a house, a life."

and one more, about his trip to a local lumberyard on his search for timber to build a sugarhouse:

"ken bragg, who does his own logging, was sawing... more accurately, he was propelling hemlock butt logs down toward the saw carriage with a peavey while lewis p. farwell, his white- bearded, ninety-one year old sawmaster, did the actual sawing."

how can you not love this passage? what is a peavey? or a saw carriage? and who knew that there was such a thing as a sawmaster? i have no idea what is going on, but i get the feeling of what it is and i love that feeling. it is of something old and physical and useful and strong.

a month of collecting and transferring from tin buckets to plastic buckets to large barrels to the evaporator. then from the evaporator to the kitchen where i boiled it more and filtered it and put it into bottles. of watching fires and syrup boiling with foam like the murky bubbly waves of an urban ocean tide.

working with maple trees, like any plant, is not like most work, you can't just put it on hold. it's alive and you have to pay attention every day. it had tedium to it, for sure. but it also allowed me time to watch the snow melt, to listen to ice cracking on the pond as the days got ever so slightly warmer, to appreciated the day when i could take off my gloves and not have my fingers go numb. basically, to feel spring come and no miss it, like i might have in class or in a building or just being in. and now there is a lot of syrup to be eaten with multigrain pancakes and chocolate chips. thank you mother maples.

the beginning of the season

2008-05-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

the land in march: old cherry tomato plants (top), cracked earth and kale (bottom)

february

my fingers are cracked and the dirt won't wash out, no matter how much i scrub. looking at these hands makes me happy. my hands were feeling useless for a while, too soft and too fragile. they feel hardy now after a month and half of farm work at drumlin. my arms are stronger and i can lift things i couldn't lift before. there is a simple pleasure in that. a simple pleasure! i think the intellect fights simple pleasures, because they are just that, simple. give me something complex, my mind says. but underneath simplicity is something very deep. that is what i'm on the farm to do, seeding and planting and transplanting and cultivating and sugaring, they all contain depth. i'm trying to touch it.