Dear Folks, It’s Saturday night. I just officially collapsed after two days in the garden, came in and washed off the top several layers of dirt, looked for something I could do sitting down, and remembered it was time to write you.
We just had our week of spring; now it’s summer. A week of spring is a standard joke in New England, but this year it was literally true. The snowless winter, the deep-frozen ground, and a cold rainy April delayed everything by about three weeks — and a month of spring is what we normally get. So last weekend, when the weather finally warmed up, everything burst forth at once.
I don’t think I’ve ever before seen the shad trees and the daffodils and the bluebells and the pear trees and the tulips all in bloom at the same time. Followed in exactly five days by the dandelions, apple and cherry blossoms, and lilacs. It’s been spectacular! I wouldn’t want it to happen like this every year — I prefer my blessings parceled out so I can enjoy each one singly — but my goodness, what a show we’ve had. Right up against my bedroom windows are three big pear trees, covered in white blossoms. A song sparrow sings love ballads to his mate in one of them every morning at 5 AM, and I don’t even mind. I’ve been getting up then, to celebrate the dawn with him.
Two Sundays ago the sheep lost their wool in about one hour, when Jim Mason the shearer showed up. He makes the rounds every spring through New Hampshire, knows where every herd of sheep lives, and shaves off about a ton of wool a day. He’s the burliest guy you’ve ever seen — shearing takes incredibly strong back and shoulder muscles. He appeared, we rounded the sheep into the barn, he plugged in his clippers, I marked bags, Don helped me stuff the wool in them, I weighed them, and it was all we could do to keep up with Jim. He’d transform a sheep into what looked a goat in about 4 minutes.
The fleeces are big this year. I read that the average fleece in New England weighs 7.6 pounds. All of ours, even from the yearlings, are bigger than that, and Faith’s topped 13.5 pounds. Makes my spinning fingers itch, but at this time of year there’s no time for spinning.
The Monday after the shearing we had the biannual Sheep Parade, driving the whole flock, including skipping lambs, down Daniels Road to the pasture. It’s always a traffic-stopper, but the drivers all wave and smile — they are getting to see what I think is one of the most gorgeous sights in the world. The older ewes know exactly where they’re going, and once we get started, I don’t have to drive them at all; it’s all I can do to keep up with them.
The barnyard always seems empty after they go, but this year we still have Caesar, the huge white gander, stalking around, warning everyone away from the barn, where Cleopatra is squunched down on her nest. We can’t get near enough to see how many eggs there are. They are due to hatch in about a week.
In the basement 25 chicks are growing fast in a brooder box Don made for them. They almost have enough real feathers to move to their summer home in the orchard. In the barn a swallow has returned to her nest of last year — pretty soon we’ll see little hungry beaks pop up every time we go in there. Everything’s changing and growing so fast, it’s hard to keep up!
In fact I’m not keeping up, and I have been enduring occasional moments, and days, of panic. I’m weeks behind in garden work, and in writing, and in work for the Balaton group. For the first time in ages I’m lying awake nights with to-do lists whirling around in my brain.
Anxiety in May is normal for me. The farm work load balloons and timing is crucial — plant a week too late and you can lose the crop to September frost. But what I’ve been feeling lately is ridiculous. Whenever some hitch slows down my plans — the rototiller has to have new tines, or I can’t find the staple-puller, or the raspberry patch has to be cleared of witchgrass before new plants can go in — my reaction is not just irritation, not just anger, but roaring rage, way out of proportion. Rage is a new emotion to me, and I don’t enjoy it at all. I try to keep from spraying it all over my innocent housemates, but that results in a shut-down iciness that isn’t much fun either.
I have OA as a place to confess, and my friends there tell me that when you no longer use your drug of choice, sugar for me, to deaden your feelings, everything you’ve been suppressing for years is bound to surge up. Don’t deaden it again, they say. Let it come, and learn what’s it’s all about. So I’ve been pulling out witchgrass and studying my rage.
It’s Dennis I’m mad at, I first thought — for not being here, for letting down the partnership, the joint commitment, the beautiful enthusiasm with which we took on the responsibility of this farm. I’ve been mad at him off and on for years for not being here, even when he was here. As his interest drifted away from farming, I felt increasingly betrayed — and burdened. It’s not fair — that’s the emotion that came up next — I shouldn’t have to handle all this alone. Then came: I can’t handle it alone, this is too much for me. What if I fail? What if the gardens shrivel and the machines break down terminally and the fences fall down and the jungle takes over? What if I have to sell the farm? Rage transformed to self-pity, and then to fear, a deep fear of my own inadequacy. Behind all anger is fear, says OA.
In short, I’ve been having a bad case of the PLOMs, the Poor Little Old Me’s. It’s an emotion appropriate to four-year-olds, and for me it probably began at that age, for unfathomable reasons, long before Dennis came into my life. At the moment I find it funny that I could still be so childish and insecure. In fact I don’t have to do the farming alone. Today there were four hard-working housemates and a regular visitor, Richard Harris, scurrying around, clearing a new strawberry bed, mowing the orchard, fixing the garden carts, planting blueberries and potatoes, caring for the animals. In fact the farm is in better shape this spring than it has been in years, despite the difficult weather. Three bays in the woodshed are filled with next winter’s firewood. Fences and ceilings and machines have been fixed. The witchgrass is being knocked back into submission. The lawns are mowed and the place looks beautiful. It’s Not Perfect, but it’s Not Bad, either.
Progress, not perfection. When all else fails, lower your standards. Relax, Dana. One day at a time. Count what’s done, instead of what isn’t done. Trust the Higher Power. Notice that the world is working, and that its working does not depend in every minor detail upon you.
Well, sorry, I didn’t know that excursion was going to be in this letter, but it was on my mind and determined to come out.
The column keeps on getting written every week, somehow. The book is going slowly, but I like what it’s becoming. I have a new research assistant from India, a shy, intelligent, committed young man, who works at an institute for environmental education in Ahmedabad. It’s too soon to say whether he’ll help the book go faster, but he’ll certainly help it be less American-biased.
I spent a week at the end of April in Kassel, in West Germany, working with some members of the Balaton Group to plan a project on sustainable agriculture. We met at the house of Hartmut and Rika Bossel (Balaton Group members are wonderful about saving us money by making their homes available as hotels and meeting places).
The group was composed of three Americans, two Germans, two Hungarians, a Russian, and a Thai, an improbable combination, which, in the Balaton manner, worked perfectly together. One of the greatest pleasures of my life is the Balaton magic of like-minded, dedicated people, working together, bringing insights from many different cultures and experiences. We came up with a set of indices by which we might be able to measure the long-term sustainability of a farm, and a plan to monitor those indices on the very different kinds of farms in our very different countries — from Russian state farms to Thai rice paddies. And we agreed to a way of making consistent computer models of our agricultural economies, based on our farm data, to ask questions like: what would happen if every farmer in the U.S. went organic? What would happen if all farmers in Thailand adopted modern chemical-intensive measures? What would happen if West Germany went flat out for bioengineering? What would happen in both West Germany and Thailand, if West Germany stopped importing cassava from Thailand for cattle feed?
In typical Balaton manner, Hartmut insisted that we not work straight through every day but take long hikes through the blooming countryside. He lives in a little village outside Kassel, so the hikes took us, appropriately, through farms — spring-green fields of winter wheat, bright-yellow fields of rapeseed in bloom. We continued talking about our project as we went, and we talked about the farms we were walking through and learned about the German agricultural economy.
One morning we visited the experimental organic farm at the University of Kassel. Kassel is one of the few universities in the world that has a full department of organic farming. Hardy Vogtmann, a member of our group, is its head. He runs a research farm to demonstrate organic methods and to experiment with new ones on behalf of the growing number of organic farmers he advises. It’s a grain/fruit/beef/chicken farm — the lunch we ate that day came from it. Hardy will oversee the farm monitoring part of our sustainable agriculture project (he’s already monitoring organic farms in Germany; he will add conventional farms for comparison). Hartmut will oversee the computer modeling part (he’s already made a long-term national agriculture model for the German Parliament).
I returned home, as always from Balaton things, energized, grateful for these wonderful people in far-flung parts of the world, tired, and with still more work to do — in this case writing proposals to get our project funded.
Well, speaking of tired, I am. Time for sleep. Busy day tomorrow.
Love, Dana
