Hiatus

The view from the rickety back porch in April is dire. I can see the snow-capped slide of Whiteface through the budding trees, the pasture looks barren and brown and pock-marked with last fall’s chicken dust baths. Piles of wood chips – hawthorn and poplar and blackberry – from November. Pleasant, crisp Autumn afternoons. Weedwackers and chainsaws and singing aloud to no one but the stone walls being released from the scrappy hemlocks and pisspoor tensile fencing jobs of the previous homeowners. The stone walls sang in the sun before being buried by the snow. Oh, the last five years of un-doing their curious doings have been a wild ride. I sang Neil Young’s "Country Home" over and over. It’s only someone else’s potatoes if you’re picking someone else’s patch….

I see an escaped Australorp living her freest life in the farm puddle, pecking at proverbial peepers. I haven’t put the chickens in the garden as I normally would have; they are restless and escape their fenced-in paddock with ease. Half a dozen scraggly two-year-old egg layers jump that useless electric netting and spend the day exploring the wastelands. I chase them down every afternoon when I get home from work and toss them back in.

I love listening to the peepers every night. My friend told me that in Martha’s Vineyard they are called pinkletinks. But they are called peepers here. They peep. Peep peep peep! They are a cacophany of peeping chaos and if I don’t get to close my eyes for a few weeks every April and listen to some frogs in a puddle scream I AM HERE, then April would indeed be the cruellest month. But we have our peeping peepers, so I must disagree with Mr. Eliot for now. My crooked old camp chair sits on the back porch at dusk and the gold of the sunset ignites the snow-white of the poplar branches, the screaming green of the pasture, the young pines in the scruff, the shadows. Close my eyes. Peep, peep, peep. Wilder at my feet, filled with doggy joy and loyalty and fluffy love. Pip somewhere nearby, morose. I should have named him Eeyore. Or Hop-Frog. The dogs are my peace, and my chaos. I doze off and feel the peace of spring, the chaos of spring. That sun feels nice. This rickety old back porch can be nice, too.

So much work left to do.

But will I do it?

I sold the farm stand last week. I posted it on Facebook Marketplace for $500 and referee’d a war between ruthless homestead moms. In less than 24 hours I sold it to a farmer in Lebanon who was excited to add a purple farm stand to an enterprise with a purple chicken coop and a purple pop-up tent. We loaded it into her pickup and strapped it down, said a prayer it would stay put while she drove some wild roads, and I saluted a year of honor-system sales with my lovely neighbors. I also wondered if I have a side hustle in building farm stands.

If you haven’t heard through small town whispers, Something Wild Farm is on hiatus. Romantic relationships end sometimes, and ours is one. The farm business was a facet of our relationship. The rest is private, and we thank you for not asking. I spent the winter dreaming by the wood stove with pesky orange cat Hamilton on my lap sponging the heat of the flame, his chosen color. I sat in the barn with the woolly sheep drinking tea from my Yellowstone mug. We breathed frosty breaths and cuddled cozily in the hay. The smell of lanolin on my hands from all those sheep pets helped me sleep. I snowshoed around the pasture with the dogs for 30 days in a row and waited around for them to bite snowballs out of their paws while the Cold Moon rose over the brittle pines. I went over a month without shopping in a grocery store, eating frozen peas and Remick Farm beef and homemade bread and Cheese Louise sandwiches. I wrote a dozen blog posts that will never be posted. I let the March winds prune the trees and call forth the maple sap. I boiled that sap into maple syrup. But I sold the farm stand. You can find my syrup for sale at the Your Neighbor's Flowers Farm Stand this spring and summer until it's gone.

If you ever feel distraught, give things away. Sell some stuff, but give most of it away. Give away vegetables and eggs and maple syrup. I’m giving the sheep to someone on the Seacoast who wants to restore her family’s land, the same mission I’ve had. The younger sheep will be bred someday and that makes me happy. Emelda will be their matriarch and live out her days. The chickens will be split among a few local farmers and homesteaders. Sandwich’s nooks and crannies are filled with young people who know what they’re doing. The future here is bright. I’m keeping a few of the birds for myself, including old fat Brownie; I think grocery store eggs are...un-interesting. The old ladies will ride out the summer and then be delicious broth in the previously mentioned Yellowstone mug. Chick brooder supplies and trash bags of wool find themselves in various living rooms around the county. The Chick Shaw is moving down to the Seacoast to service a newly founded egg layer cooperative, feeding multiple families and creating food resilience. Good. Little parts of me and my passion are being spread all over.

Something Wild Farm no longer sells eggs; I’m keeping them for myself. It hurt to tell our regulars I wasn’t selling anymore. My fridge is full of eggs. It feels lavish. Do you know how good this feels? I don’t go to the grocery store much these days. Coffee and shredded cheese and dark chocolate, swipe that debit card. The occasional protein bar when I’m too lazy to cook the damned eggs. The Heath’s cashier may or may not wonder how I’m alive when all I buy is steak and butter and BBQ sauce. I buy Real Salt by the ten-pound bucket online. The omelettes here are unforgettable. I buy fresh greens from local farms at the Taproot store in Lancaster while I await the dandelion greens and chives in my own garden. Tulips and daffodils set the table every week. I peel the spider-legs off last year's potatoes and fry them in pork lard. I'm thankful for my country home, it gives me peace of mind....

I’m gutting the house. My neighbor commented at the pile of junk in the front yard, “Looks like you got some solid spring cleaning going on.” Actually, we just don’t need to own 7/8 of what we own. I think a lot about this, lately. I want to own books and kitchen tools and a few nice shirts. Tools and pens and colored pencils. Notebooks and some stationary supplies. Someone told me there are six generations of clothes on Earth. Can you imagine how many generations of kitchen appliances there are? The dogs and I went through the dog toys closet and filled a trash bag with a few years of half-chewed memories. I swear Wilder shed a single doggy tear. His pea-brain forgot the minute I tossed a keeper across the living room floor, however. I read a statistic that there are 300,000 items in the average house. I’d like my house to have around 100,000 items. And 90,000 of them should be books. The rest can be potatoes, for all I care.

So what’s the future to bring?

A dear, dear friend who knows my soul sent me a text recently: “Wendell says – to heal the land you first have to care about it. To care you first have to love it. And to love it you first have to know it. Resonant for you?” I care about the land; I love the land; and I know it. I know it better than any human. It resonates every day.

April turns into May, and the pasture gets greener. The green is intense; I almost can’t handle it. I’m stomping around the glory-of-the-snows, daffodils, and the forsythias, filling animal waters, daydreaming about the day I don’t have to do this anymore. Missing the day I used to do this, already. The fresh sedums blast through last year’s spent stems. The tiniest lilacs say, "Hello! We are on our way!" Little purple gems. I gotta think about the garden. The garden consumes me. There’s no choice. It’s either lettuce and arugula or burdock and bindweed. Peas and kale and carrots or burn it all down. I long to plant corn and sunflowers, but we must wait a bit to sing songs of praise to the stalks of summer. The honeyberries flower and the rhubarbs bush out. We got this, Rich. You focus on the greens.

I see the garlic coming up, a couple hundred of 'em, and nothing else matters. Protect them at all costs. The sheep were just sheared. A bittersweet farewell to my shearer of three years, two anti-social farmers waving goodbye to each other.

Let them eat grass.