Dear Folks,
Having sailed through the Winter From Hell — 35 below and snowstorm after snowstorm — without the slightest sniffle, I woke up yesterday on one of the most brilliant days of the spring with a seized-up throat. Last night I tossed around and built up towers of pillows, trying to keep one nostril open — you know how much fun that is? Today my head feels as if it has swollen to triple size, and my muscles are as limp as popped balloons. And it’s still brilliant out; it’s High Planting Week, the week when everything has to go into the ground.
So I am in a terrible mood. I try not to write this newsletter when I’m in a terrible mood, in order to deceive you all into thinking that I am at every moment the upbeat dynamo I like to believe I am. But what the heck, we’re friends and you might as well know the truth. Like every other human being, I’m a bear when I’m in the first stages of a cold.
I may or may not find the enthusiasm just now to sing the praises of Foundation Farm in May, though the praises are fully deserved. The apple blossoms and lilacs are at their peak. I walked down to the pasture this morning to take grain to the sheep, and the brush along the brook was a-twitter with warblers. The leaves have just come out; they’re that special, dew-washed light green that lasts only a week or so. But you can put a grumpy stuffed-up person in perfect heaven, and she will only notice the black flies. The black flies are at their most ferocious now, and the first hungry mosquitoes have hatched, and I do not feel like an angel.
Until I got this cold, I would have told you that this has been the most beautiful spring I can remember. And I have a lot of springs here to remember — today is the 22nd anniversary of the day Dennis and I loaded our two cats and our beat-up graduate-student furniture into our failing Volvo station wagon down in Boston and drove north. Because of the Volvo we arrived more than an hour late for the closing at the bank in Hanover. I remember the banker saying, “Congratulations,” as we signed the papers. I wondered why anyone should be congratulated for taking on a $70,000 debt. Much less an uninsulated house, rotting foundations, and an annual horde of black flies, I would add, with hindsight and in my present black mood.
How did I get off on that historical tack? I was trying to summon up the beauty not of that spring, but of this one, right up until yesterday when it (or I) all went to rack and ruin. Unlike most springs around here, which seem to pass from snow to summer in about two weeks, this year the warm-up was gradual. The temperature has hung between 40 and 70 for weeks, without a freeze, and without a hot day. The rains have come right on schedule, gently, right after I put seeds in the ground. The coolness has not only been perfect for working, it has been perfect for the spring flowers, which can get blasted by early heat. So the daffodils — hundreds of them — have bloomed and bloomed and bloomed. The tulips lasted until the heat of yesterday, when everything fell apart, especially me. But the heat of yesterday also opened every apple blossom in the valley and made the place smell like lilacs — for those who can smell.
Our babies are growing fast. The sheep have been sheared and are down on the pasture. The lambs are so fat and strong it’s hard to believe what skinny things they were just six weeks ago when they were born. I have already sold three of them to a neighbor who buys some every year to graze her orchard and fill her freezer.
The ducklings and goslings, improbably, found their own way down to the pond. This involves a ramble longer than a city block, down a hill, along Daniels Road, over two bridges, along a hedge, and finally through the pasture gate — a tremendous journey for fuzzy-headed creatures with legs just an inch long. I couldn’t believe it the first day I found them all down there, dabbling delightedly in the water. Pretty soon they were taking themselves down each morning and bringing themselves back up every night, cackling and peeping and begging for grain. I guess small water birds have an innate drive downhill toward water. Anyway, now I have closed the gate so they’ll stay down there and not get hit by cars on the road. They are feathering out and beginning to look semi-grown-up. Cars stop all the time so children can go up to the fence and see the pretty little quackers on the pond and the black-and-white lambs playing on the green grass behind them.
That vision is refreshing, but I feel dizzy. I think I’ll go to bed.
May 24, 1994
I slept 11 hours, which was uncommonly sensible of me, and I’m feeling a slight return of humanhood. Now the trick will be not to panic, with everything that has to be done around here. So far John and I have held things together well. The farm has never looked so good, and we two workaholics have enjoyed the challenge. But all of a sudden it’s not only planting time, but also weeding time, lawn-mowing time, fence-fixing time, screen-changing time, and soon it will be haying time.
Well, I have no choice but to hang out in the wisdom of the 12-Step programs. One day at a time. First things first. Let go and let God — though God is the one who makes the lawn grow, not the one who mows it.
Because I have been traveling so much less and farming so much more, I’ve been able to appreciate more than ever the birds around here. Every year in March I start playing my bird song tapes when I drive to Dartmouth, thinking THIS year I will learn to identify every song I hear on the farm. (I have lots of tapes, and for those of you who are interested, the best one for beginners is Audubon’s “Birding by Ear.” It’s also a great cheer-up in moody muddy March to hear a bit of wood thrush.)
Anyway, in my determination to track down the sounds, I have been keeping binoculars at hand, and nearly every day I’ve taken a small bird excursion back into the woods, or down by the brook. I’ve discovered all sorts of birds I never knew lived here. Myrtle warbler, chestnut-sided warbler, brown creeper, olive-sided flycatcher. Redstarts all over — I hadn’t seen any for years, but apparently that was because I was looking in the wrong place, because now I see them every day. I’ve welcomed back my old friends the yellowthroat and yellow warbler and ovenbird and red-eyed vireo. A yellow-bellied sapsucker has discovered that if he pounds out his woodpecker-riff on our metal farm gates he can shake the whole neighborhood, so he does it daily. High up in the maple trees are the brilliant ones, the throat-catchers — scarlet tanager, oriole, indigo bunting.
I’m so grateful every year when these bright, flitting jewels come back from their long journey! I would much rather have them on my farm than minefulls of rubies and sapphires.
The first time I heard a wood thrush this year I was leaving the house at 5:30 AM to drive to Boston to give a talk. It was first light, and the thrush was right by the front door. Its warm, glorious melody just flooded through me. I don’t think there’s a more beautiful sound in the universe. (I saw two lovely deer on that morning drive, too.) My other favorite is the veery, another thrush, who plays mad, down-sliding panpipes in the evening and makes me laugh. He’s the last to start singing. I’ve been seeing him in my binoculars for two weeks, but I only started hearing the song three days ago.
So, let’s see, I do have a professional life fitted in between the farming. That talk in Boston was to a gathering of medical school deans who are organizing a campaign to make medical students and doctors more aware of the impact of environment on human health. It was hard for me to believe, but most of them said their schools spend no more than 4-6 hours altogether on the health effects of occupational exposure to human-generated pollutants — much less the more general effects of ozone depletion, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. Well, the good news is that there is now a determined effort to do something about that. The deans heard some strong statements from Tom Lovejoy on biodiversity, from Theo Colborn on organochlorines (which, as you are about to see, inspired me to write a column), and from me on population and economic growth and what it is likely to do to medical challenges and medical budgets in the future.
Last weekend I drove down to Westchester County to talk to the board of the Compton Foundation, and next weekend I go to Virginia to talk to the board of the Summit Foundation, in both cases, probably, to confuse them totally about the interrelatedness of all their funding efforts. In between I have put out a lot of proposals to keep the Balaton Group going, and written columns, of course, and a Balaton Bulletin, and I am back at the textbook, with determination, slashing everything else off my schedule until the damn thing gets done. I’m working on a chapter on energy economics, trying to explain why oil price goes up and down and up and down, while the supply of oil under the ground goes only down.
There is very good news about my financial future. The Jenifer Altman Foundation has given me a three-year grant, coming just at the end of my Pew Scholarship, to support part of my own salary and expenses in continuing the work of the Balaton Group. This was the idea of Michael Lerner, who was wise enough to realize that of all the Balaton funding my own support was what I would ask for last. So he arranged for me to get it first! That’s what friends are for, I guess — to know you better than you are willing to know yourself.
Well, you can tell from the renewed energy of the writing here that I am probably going to survive this flu. I think I’ll go out and plant some pole beans.
Love,
Dana
