Dear Folks, It’s a bright, sunny day, thermometer all the way up to 22 though it’s not even noon yet. It’s been below zero the past two nights, so today seems balmy. The household is hopping. Anna’s daughter Andrea and son-in-law Kevin are here for the weekend; so is Sylvia’s mother Joyce. Andrea and Kevin have brought along their dog Tess, so Basil has company too. Don is down in the basement making a new support stand for our washing machine (the old one is crumbling after 17 years). Andrea and Kevin have gone out for a ski. I hear little Heather practicing her stair-climbing, with help from her grandmother and both dogs. Some delicious smells are coming from the kitchen. I have a cat on my lap and another curled up on the chair beside me. The woodstove is perking away. The sun is streaming in through the south window and warming the seedlings of onions, peppers, celery, petunias, and geraniums in my bedroom. This spring’s garden is already coming up!
Last night we had a birthday party for Don. He requested lemon meringue pie for his birthday “cake” and then managed to convince me that one cake must be equivalent to two pies, so I made him a pumpkin pie too. It was made from our eggs, of course, and Jersey cream that Binky brings us straight from the cow, and the last pumpkin in the root cellar. We roasted a leg of lamb from the freezer and potatoes from the cellar and cooked up some green beans from the freezer, all home-grown.
I love it when this old farmhouse fills with people, and they can engage themselves in three projects at a time, indoors and out, and there’s room for it all. I love it when we find out on Saturday morning that we’ll have extra people for dinner, and we can pull all we need out of the cellar and freezer. I know how the food was raised, that there are no chemicals in it, that it will nourish everyone well. Even at this time of year, in many ways the hardest time, the farm feels warm, abundant, and welcoming.
I just love it. Thank God, we’re holding everything together here, and little by little we’re moving forward, repairing things, working to give our care back to the house and the land that shelter and nurture us.
We still haven’t had enough snow to shovel. We barely have enough snow to ski on — there isn’t enough on the open fields, but the path back in the woods is ski-able and fun. Don, our Florida boy, who tried ice-skating for the first time last month, got into skiing for the first time last weekend, with Anna as coach. He did amazingly well, didn’t fall down any more often than I do. He’s enduring the winter well — but then it’s the easiest winter I can remember around here in years.
I was worried last month that we might have early lambs, but we’ve passed the target period and nothing happened — which is good. The ladies are just fat, I guess, and very woolly. They’re officially due on April 9 (150 days after we let Zesty George in with them last November) and could come any time in a 3-week period around then. I’ve been making an afghan this winter out of remnants of their wool left over from other projects. It’s almost done.
My life is continuing to unfold as an endless series of days before the work processor, punctuated by Glorious Saturdays when I do stuff on the farm and don’t write a word. The book is still progressing, with what seems excruciating slowness. I’m deep in the middle of Energy now, trying to explain why the price of oil is going down though there’s less oil in the ground, and how a nuclear power plant works, and how much more efficiently we could use energy if we put our minds to it.
These are all things I thought I understood well, but, as always, it’s one thing to “understand” and it’s another to write it down systematically and clearly so someone else can understand. I’m glad to be forced to do it, I’m really delighted that this book is getting written and that I’m the one who’s writing it, but there are plenty of days when I just don’t want to get up and face Energy. It is my Practice, my Discipline, my Cross, my Lesson to keep doing it anyway, no matter how I feel — that’s life; there’s always some such Practice. I’m working on being less grumpy about it, not always succeeding, as my housemates will attest.
It’s funny that with so little time to devote to the column and other writing, which used to occupy all my time, I’m managing to keep up my productivity anyway. I’m getting frustrated, though, by having more ideas than I can write and more requests from papers and magazines than I can take on. Two different publishers have asked me to do books for them, two magazines are waiting for manuscripts from me now, and the column is doing well. I think the message from the Universe is to relax and stop worrying, my decision to become a writer was a good one, and everything will work out fine.
The magazine In Context, which happens to be one of the good subscribers to this News Service, was so intrigued by Sylvia’s farm drawing in last month’s mailing that they commissioned her to illustrate one of my columns they were reprinting. They liked that drawing so well that they’re talking about regular Spain-Meadows illustrated columns. (I’ll enclose a copy here when one comes out). I’m excited about that — I think my columns have always needed some good illustrating, and I’m honored to have Sylvia be the one who does it! With Anna sending off short stories and articles hither and yon, in addition to working on her book, this farm is becoming a regular literary center — with its own illustrator, no less!
If you ever wonder how I think up ideas for columns, the answer is, I open myself to them and they come to me. Last week I was in Boston for a meeting on the telecourse and one of our advisers, Bill Moomaw from the World Resources Institute, mentioned that Landsat was about to be canceled (see the enclosed column). I was thunderstruck. Cancel Landsat? That’s heresy in the environmental world! So I pulled out my notebook and interviewed Bill on the spot, he gave me other people to contact, I went home and called them and they told me about other people, and hence the column wrote itself. It was a real easy one to write — there’s nothing easier than Righteous Indignation (which is why so many columns you read are written in that mode.)
The more I learned about Landsat, the more the column grew into a Crusade. I persuaded the LA Times to run the column and syndicate it — it will go out to about 600 papers tomorrow. I called up National Public Radio and talked them into doing a spot on the subject on All Things Considered. I called up Science magazine and got them all riled up to do an article. Barry Rock and I (he’s the UNH professor mentioned in the column) are bombarding every Congressman we can get to. He’s sending out “dear colleague” letters to 150 earth scientists he knows.
Want to help save Landsat? Copy the column enclosed here and send it to your Congresspeople with a short covering note. Do it right away; there’s only about a month left for action. Thanks!
Just went out to bring in firewood and replenish the sheep’s water. It’s a beautiful, still day, thawing a bit in the sun. The days are noticeably longer and the sun higher, and it’s the time to be thinking about maple syrup. Many people won’t dare tap this year because the pear thrip did such damage to the maples last summer. I’m never feeling rich enough in firewood at this time of year to take on all that boiling. But I’m just scheming a little; we have an enthusiastic wood crew here and plenty of maple trees; maybe next year….
Time to quit and write a column.
Love, Dana
