Dear Folks, Well, the weather hasn’t changed a whole lot from what I was complaining about a month ago, except that things are easing slowly from ice to mud. The temperature is less often -15 and more often +35. Nothing seems to fall down from the sky except freezing rain. The ground is half bare, and frozen three feet down. It’s too icy to ski and too slushy to skate. Most of us, including me, are walking around nursing a persistent low-level flu and a month-long funk. YUCK!! Winter in greenhouse New Hampshire is DEPRESSING!! Let’s move a thousand miles north or south and have ourselves either a decent winter or an early spring. Let’s get OUT OF HERE!!
Well, it feels good to discharge the frustration by griping. The old-timers talk of cabin fever; the modern phrase for it is Seasonal Affective Disorder, abbreviated, accurately enough, SAD. Whatever you call it, I have it. My neighbor Ruth and I were talking yesterday of taking off for a weekend at least to a meditation retreat or a place up north where we can ski, or SOMETHING, ANYTHING to shake ourselves loose from the doldrums. I think we’ll do it as soon as my teaching term is finished, three weeks from now.
Even in crummy greenhouse winters, there are pleasures. Two weeks ago John organized a Saturday hike (it was going to be a ski, but, oh well) for our Land Trust. I’ve been on the board of the Trust since its founding six years ago, and John is one of its most energetic volunteers. We hold an outing every winter to let our members explore and enjoy a piece of newly protected land. The honored piece this year is right in Plainfield, on Morgan Hill at the north edge of town. John pulled off the protection deal almost single-handedly, talking the landowner into selling development rights, and applying on behalf of the town for state money to purchase them. Ruth and I went together for the hike and spent a lovely (though sleeting) afternoon clambering through the woods. It is a beautiful piece of land. It’s great to know it will never be developed.
Another winter pleasure: one night to celebrate the completion of Beyond the Limits, my friend Priscilla took me out to dinner and a movie. Snow was coming down that night, gently and beautifully, the kind of soft, magic snow we like to think of, when we think of winter around here. You’d think in a snowstorm people would stay home, but the restaurant and theater were jammed with festive crowds — everyone came out to celebrate the snow. The movie was good, too, “Fried Green Tomatoes.” I had such a great time that I didn’t even feel too bad when I looked out the next morning and saw that the snow had turned to freezing rain.
Some advance money is coming in for foreign editions of BTL, and, feeling rich, I splurged on some videotapes for the household, for days when it’s just too sleety to go out. The most recent acquisition is “Anne of Green Gables,” which happens to be Brenna’s and my personal favorite. (If you’re deducing from these movie reviews that my taste runs to the pretty and sentimental, you’re right!) I thought Anne of GG would be a bit beyond Heather, but she watches with fascination, as long as I explain the plot to her. She likes the part when Anne falls into the lake, and when she dyes her hair green. Dennis gave us a tape of “Fantasia” for Christmas; to my surprise Heather loves that too, especially the dinosaurs, and the fairies in the Nutcracker Suite, and the little Pegasus ponies that fly around to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. I hope I’m not ruining her ability to appreciate that music later without Disney images engraved on her mind. For myself I got tapes of “Aida” and “Cosi fan Tutte,” so I can spend winter evenings going to the Met and La Scala, respectively.
Really, it isn’t all THAT bad, this winter.
For weeks we had the primary to relieve our boredom — New Hampshire’s rare and precious moment in the sun (in the freezing rain, anyway). I live in a highly political household, so we have been having many hot discussions in the kitchen. Sylvia is a raving liberal, full of fury at the Republicans and their tricks. I’m off the left-right scale entirely and onto a Green one — no one is far out enough for me. John shares our basic analysis, but is more cautious; he mainly wants someone credible enough to beat Bush. So, like just about everyone else in New Hampshire, we went to see candidates, talked, read, and listened, wavered and changed our minds a hundred times. Folks here do take their primary vote very seriously.
Sylvia decided to write in Mario Cuomo, and John ended up voting for Clinton. I touted Brown to the very end, but when the moment of truth came in the voting booth, I wrote in Cuomo too. Hopeless, of course. But ever since my friend Nick called from Maine and said that the perfect ticket for him would be Cuomo-Jackson, I’ve been dreaming, unrealistically, about that possibility. Whatever else it would do, that combination would wake people up!
Well, we New Hampshirites have done our bit; now we hand over the choice to all of you in other states. We’re all glad that Paul Tsongas won; he’s a Dartmouth grad, well known to us, and a thoroughly decent man. It’s kind of hard to imagine a President who is a thoroughly decent man.
The farm has been experiencing the kind of murderous night-time excitement that usually comes only in summer — we’ve had raiders in the chicken yard again. As the nights warm slightly, some of the chickens have been refusing to roost in the coop, though a bird of any brain would know it’s dangerous to sleep in the trees around here. Chickens, of course, have no brain. One night Sylvia woke up to the sound of a massacre in process. (A chicken massacre is a very noisy affair.) She dashed out to see a rare sight — a fisher, which the folks around here call a fisher cat, a big, black, vicious cousin of the weasel. It weighs about 20 pounds and is notorious for carrying off not only chickens, but house cats. (Fortunately, in winter, our 5 cats spend their nights indoors.)
Raccoons pick off one chicken a night, as needed to feed their families. Fishers kill everything they can all at once. This one was just about to administer the coup de grace to a young rooster, having already killed a hen, when Sylvia burst out. Seeing her light, he grabbed the hen and bounded off — or FLOWED might be a better word for the sinuous moves of a fisher — but no, that word isn’t fast enough. Even with a fat hen in the mouth, fishers are incredibly fleet. DARTED? BOLTED? DISAPPEARED? ZOOMED OUT OF SIGHT? The English language fails me here. The one time I saw a fisher on this farm, what I saw was a black blur, which one morning at dawn, right under my bedroom window, slammed into a chicken in a burst of feathers and then streaked away, leaving only the feathers. STREAKED, that’s the word I wanted. Fishercats are black lightning.
The next day Sylvia followed the trail of fisher prints and little ruby dots of chicken blood way back in the woods, high up the rock ledge on the hill behind us. He could have come from anywhere; they have a range of 20 miles. Sylvia always has a secret sympathy for the beautiful predators of the farm, so she drew a picture of him, carrying off our poor gray-striped hen. Sylvia’s been carefully locking up the chickens ever since, but last night, when she went to shut the henhouse door, what did she find in the egg box but — a possum! Eating eggs and hissing at her. That is a first for the farm. I could have sworn that oppossums never come this far north. Maybe it’s another sign of the greenhouse warming.
We are beginning to notice more light in the morning and in the evening, and our blood is quickening just a bit with the thought of spring. The last two Saturdays I’ve started the glorious job of indoor planting. Only pansies, peppers, celery, celeriac, onions, marjoram, and petunias so far — the big indoor plantings come in March. Inspired by Eliot Coleman’s Organic Grower book (published by Chelsea Green), I’ve been mucking around with soil blocks. They’re fun. You mix your soil very wet and use a block-forming mold to lift out tight-packed cubes; then you line the cubes up in a flat and plant one seed in each. No fooling around with Jiffy Pots or any other kind of expensive divider-thing. For scientific purposes, I’m starting some seeds in soil blocks and some in other ways, to see what happens. But I’m leaning toward the blocks, just because they let you mess about with dirt so deliciously when all the dirt outside is frozen. Does me good, to get my hands into dirt.
Next week we’ll worm and crutch the sheep and get them ready for lambing, which will come at the end of March, if Wally the ram did his job promptly — which we have every reason to believe he did. Since there’s no snow, I’ll be able to start pruning apple trees as soon as there’s a day when it’s not sleeting. We still have to trap the beavers and tear down their dam — it’s too icy to do that now, but the time will come soon. Spring is becoming thinkable.
Well, I had intended to start another book this month, but teaching and trying to find money for the Balaton Group and getting out a Balaton Bulletin have taken my time, and there seems to be no end to the last minute work on Beyond the Limits.
The book is at the printer now, bound copies due March 13, should be in bookstores by the beginning of April, official pub date April 13. We are also distributing a 20-page summary to about 5000 important reporters and Congresspeople and others who we think won’t take the time to read a whole book. So tomorrow there’s another deadline, this time on the summary. It’s not easy, when you’ve just poured your heart into a 278-page book, to pare it down to 20 pages. But I guess we’ll have it done by tomorrow night, and then THAT will go to the printer.
The foofuraw is already starting and will just go on getting worse. I went for my first TV interview this month — essentially a practice one for the Family Channel. It is described in a column enclosed; it soured me greatly on TV (not for the first time). In mid-March I go back to New York for a speech to NGOs at the UNCED-prep conference and for an interview with the editors of Newsweek. By the end of March the speaking engagements come thick and fast all the way through to September — and then there’s Balaton, and I’m thinking of accepting an invitation to spend two months next fall in Germany, with my friend Hartmut Bossel at the University of Kassel.
Only thing I can’t figure out is when the farming’s going to get done, not to mention the book-writing and column-writing and newsletter-writing. I have managed to spend much of this month in a considerable panic about all that, but it was my hand that wrote each one of those speaking trips into my calendar, and my brain that not so long ago thought it would be a good idea to rewrite Limits. You don’t produce a book like that and then send it out orphaned into the world; you have to go stick up for it. So that’s what I’m going to do, with help from Dennis and J¿rgen. I’m trying very hard to worry about getting through it just one day at a time.
Love, Dana
