The Healing Land

The Slack-End of the Year

Words by Shawn and Beth Dougherty

The Slack-End of the Year

Mid-March. The view from our kitchen window is black-and-white, like a snapshot from the 1940s. There is the barnyard, where the most recent snowfall has been trailed by someone delivering a bucket of skim milk and squash peelings to three young pigs. Beyond that, bare pasture is punctuated by a line of fence posts and barbed wire; still further are steep woods mounting to the high ridge of Rex Hill. Mid-day dinner is over, but the comforting smell of fried potatoes and onions, ham, and buttered toast lingers after the last dishes have been washed and put away.The family is settled by the wood stove to work quietly for a few hours before the evening chores draw us outside again. There is coffee in the pot on the stove.

Winter waiting

Our farm is settled into the lull of waiting. Winter still has us in its grip. At noon the thawing patches on the south side of the house and barn speak of warm relief to come, but the ground is still cold, even frozen, and the only green things to be seen are the somber dark greens of hemlock, pine, and spruce.

January may start the year on the calendar, but on the farm, where winter is an annual death laying to rest the efforts of the previous year, January is a dark month, tucked under a blanket of snow or encased in an iron frost. February coaxes sugar out of the seemingly lifeless trees as an amusement to lighten the days of waiting. March, encased in cold mud, is a month of stolid endurance. When the life of the soil is inaccessible, then animal life – human, livestock, and wild– continues on the principle of hope.

So this is the real slack-end of the year, the quiet time before strengthening daylight restarts all the business of Nature. Right now everything is hidden under a thin layer of snow, marked out in trails of muddy footprints.

Written in Mud

Mud is our primary crop in March, coming up in patches wherever work is being done. By the woodshed, a layer of chips has been churned into a relief map by the feet of boys splitting firewood, a modest mountain range traced over with the rut of the wheelbarrow that carries split wood up to the house. Outside the barn door, the cows coming in to be milked take their last few steps through knee-deep mud. In the kitchen garden, bedraggled hens step fussily over the decay of last summer’s mulch, beady eyes cocked for the smallest sprouting chickweed, the least last seed of nasturtium, winter squash, or corn. And from where the cows drink at the spring, trails reach out like the arms of a muddy octopus headed to late-winter pastures.

Ten years ago, mud covered a lot more of this farm. Under previous owners, field-kept hogs stripped it bare, leaving the unprotected soil to run away in rivulets of rainwater. Traffic of humans, animals, and tractors churned the naked ground into mud. The sun baked the ruts of tires and prints of boots and hooves to concrete; then with the next rain, everything turned back to mud. When we came, the land was struggling to protect itself under an armor of blackberry, greenbriar, and wild rose. On this March day we can still see remains of that armor: here and there clumps of cane, like twists of barbed wire, trace black scribbles on the snow.

The Animals Came in Two by Two

As it was animals who stripped the grass from these hills, it is animals who have reclothed them. Goats pushed back the briars so grass could move in again. Now cows and sheep graze here, and the briars are mostly gone. Dozens of species of grass and broadleaf flourish, carpeting the ground with wildflowers from April to October. Early on a June morning you can catch orchard grass in bloom, clouding the hillside with yellow pollen sifted from tiny purple flowers. Midsummer, hidden in the tall grass, Deptford pinks – small five-pointed magenta stars on hair-slender stalks – and mists of tiny bedstraw flowers delight whoever goes out to tend the cows.

This is the difference twenty-odd years of careful management can make to a farm. A lot of folks made it possible: the Franciscan Sisters, welcoming us to their land and giving us permission to put it in service; local farmers helping us with their experience; all of our children, in the work of building fence, clearing pasture, milking cows and goats. Just as this farm is connected on all sides to other farms and woods and fields, and crossed by streams spanning townships and counties, so is the work of keeping a neighborhood productive and healthy, a community labor.

To Tend the Earth

By mid-April we will be deep in outside work, moving the grazing herds fast over greening pastures, keeping an eye on calving heifers, putting in the first potatoes, milking five or six cows instead of the winter’s three. May will find the farm in full swing, with cows and sheep belly-deep in grass and all the gardens to be put in at once. Once the work of the farm really gets going, life won’t slow down again until November.

Maybe big farms, the tractor-and-row-crop kind, look more impressive, but the complex work of a farm like this one, where a family manages grass, cattle, a few hogs, poultry, and garden crops just to feed themselves with maybe a little to sell, is enough for us. Each part of the farm is like a piece in a complex puzzle, everything touching, everything giving and receiving back. Grass feeds cows and sheep, and they feed everything else: garden, pigs, poultry, and, of course, humans. Nothing is wasted; very little needs to be bought from off the farm. Sunlight and rainfall are our principal resources. Our job is to tend the earth.

In the Beginning . . .

We’ve been here over 25 years now, years during which the tide of mud has receded. What mud is left has other meanings now, like that mud in the hands of our Creator when He made the first gardeners. There are trails of mud that thread from maple tree to maple tree in February, all the trails ending at the sugar shack, where steam rises from the shallow sap pans. Out back there is mud where the boys, in anticipation of warm weather, are laying stones for a new fire pit, ringed with benches made of stumps and split logs. Mud in the lane speaks of bare feet in summer.

Even under the cold damp hand of March, we sense that the end of winter is near – and with that end, a new beginning. Neighbors stopping on the church steps on Sunday morning compare reports on sprouting tomato seeds. Calves are being born, and even under a winter storm they tell us that green grass cannot be too far away. The hens tracing paths over the snow-covered garden are in lay again, so there will be plenty of eggs for coloring and baking for our Resurrection celebrations.

Mud will give way to growing things; spring will follow winter.