October light is my favorite light, photographer’s light. The glare of the sun softens, and in the morning and late afternoon, the light is especially subtle and beautiful. I see the light changing already as the end of summer approaches, this morning, Maria sat out in the pasture to look at the new flock, grazing together. It looked like a good flock to me.
Sarge, the World War II salvaged work truck of Pompanuck Farm, returned to our pasture today, he will be here for a week until Vince Vecchio, a reknowned big man in a truck comes to put gravel in the pole barn for the winter, and flatten out our bumpy driveway.
Then Scott Carrino will take Sarge and our very excellent donkey manure back for the Pompanuck gardens. Every year, Scott warns me that we should only use composted manure for the gardens, every year I tell him we know that, we have been up here for years.
When he comes next Wednesday, Vince will take our growing manure pile and put most of it in Sarge’s truck bed. He will add some gravel to the police barn, where the animals will huddle in the winter when it’s cold or icy. Otherwise, they don’t care much about the weather.
People forget that animals like sheep and donkeys are desert and mountain animals, they hate to be cooped in without ventilation. Our pony is hardy as a tank, no weather drives her into shelter if there is a drop of grass to look for. Ponies were bred as war horses, Genghis Khan rode them across Asia.
We’ll keep some of the composted manure for our gardens, which will undergo some major expansions and improvements next year.
Sarge is welcome here, I love photographing him (he will be a portrait in a show one day) and his arrival is a sign of the end of summer. Even though it is hot still, and sticky, and the flies are vicious and thick, everyone with a farm is thinking of winter. Ed Gulley is bringing me 90 bales, Sandy Adams is bring about 25 second cut bales here.
There is hay available here, just a couple of hours in any direction there has been severe drought this summer, compounded by the absence of any melting snow last winter. The ponds and wells are low, but in our county, we have been spared drought or extreme weather.
The first and second hay cuts have been strong, we can buy square bales for between $3 and $5 a bale (if it’s delivered). Just a couple of hours a way, hay bales cost twice that much.
We seem to be off the track of the most severe weather. (If my grandmother were alive, she would spit three times over her shoulder to drive evil spirits away if I said that, any time you said a good word about anything, spit flew all over the place.)
I get very restless when there is no hay in the barns in September, even though the animals graze well into October, even November. I don’t really relax until the woodshed is full (it is but we need one more cord if the winter is cold) and the barn is stuffed with hay
This winter, we will be feeding 10 sheep, two donkeys, and a pony, I think we’ll go through 125 bales of first cut. We give second cut as an energy boost in extremely cold weather.
We are also replacing the frost-free faucet on the side of the house, Jay Bridge is coming to do that before the first frost. Our oil burner has been checked, the wood stoves have been cleaned
My granddaughter seems to be stubborn, she is still hanging on inside of her mother, sticking her tongue out when photographed in there.
If she doesn’t come out by herself, birth will induced in a day or so. In New York City, life moves quickly, things are not often left to nature. There are perhaps too many lawyers. I have been thinking this week about what kind of world I hope my granddaughter grows up to live in, I will probably not be around to see too much of it.
I am learning what the script calls for, the script says my world will be turned upside down, I will be overwhelmed and blown away by a love I can hardly imagine. Oh, Jon, wrote one Facebook messenger, this will bring such incredible joy and magic for you.
My life has never really kept to the script, and I hope my granddaughter learns that life is never predictable, rarely follows our plans for it, and that the most precious thing about human beings is that each one is different, each one finds his or her own way and in their own time.
i understand that I can never say what someone else is going to do or feel, that is a path to disappointment and conflict.
I went to get some fresh sweet corn this morning, and turned on the radio, there was an NPR show with a New Yorker Magazine writer named David Denby. He has written a book about how kids don’t read any more, and he is worried that the distractions of the digital world are triggering a tragic decline in reading. The host seemed quite alarmed, there were tales of heroic teachers who tricked their students in reading real books.
You know the story, kids are too busy on the devices to love reading the way we think kids should. If every American had read Huckleberry FInn by Mark Twain, said Denby, no one would be voting for a con man like Donald Trump. There was a lot of Iphone and social media bashing, kids-are-going-to-hell-in-a-world-without- books.
It seems that the fate of the young is to never imagine being old, and the fate of the old have no sense of the pitfalls of growing older.
We often jump into the same trap. Because our children are different from us – they are always different from us – they must be inferior to us and our way of life. There is no medication for the most common disease afflicting the elderly: Old Fartism.
I used to be on these shows once in awhile, and I always tried to make the point that children who use their devices, who go on Facebook and Twitter, who play vivid and challenge video games, who use their smartphones and tablets, who go on Instagram and Snapchat are reading all of the time. They talk to people from all over the world, they soak up ideas from all over the world, their minds are stretched and stimulated beyond our imagination.
The real crisis is that our way of teaching them is not nearly as vivid, colorful, exciting or interesting as the things they are doing by themselves or with their friends, for all of the stresses and challenges of technology. We have never been dumber than they are or more out of touch.
They read much more than I ever did when I was young, and live in far more stimulating and challenging environments. Their neural systems are different from ours.
Is it better or worse? I can’t say, and nobody alive today can really say. We won’t know for a long time.
it is just very different. The younger people I know are pretty impressive, and the kids who grew up with access to the wider world also seem to be much more aware, tolerant, inclusive and eager to acknowledge that the world is in trouble and needs healing.
They seem less inclined to ram their own personal and religious beliefs down the throats of others or embrace conflict over solutions, they seem to accept the idea that is not our business who loves who and who marries who or how someone chooses to die. They do not seem traumatized at the idea that people should choose their own bathroom.
The minute I told people I was about to become a grandfather, people began telling me in no uncertain terms how I would feel about it; how it was like no other thing; how it could transform me in ways I could not imagine. They seemed to have the script for me, and it was, of course, their own script, not necessarily mine.
She will rock your world, change your life, teach you what love is, your world will never be the same.
Am I missing something if I hesitate to change the life I live, or don’t wish to have my world rocked as I set out to write my 30th book, enter my 70th year, love my wife, write on my blog, take my photos, help run this amazing farm? Am I selfish?
I am open to all of those things if they occur, but at this juncture – if it changes I will be honest about it – it doesn’t quite sound like me.That may be my own myopia or naivete. We will see soon enough.
How about I just love my granddaughter, and see her when I can and support my daughter in her parenting in any way she needs and wants?
I don’t want to sound like the Gringe, and I am very excited to be a grandfather, a sweet chapter in my life, and a real chapter in my next book. I just want to feel it for myself.
To be honest, I am not looking to be transformed – been there. I am just beginning to like who I am. I like my life and it is pretty full.
If I do spend a lot of time with her, I hope to encourage her to follow her interests and bliss, not mine. I hope to never assume she is inferior to me, or uncivilized, or damaged in some way because her culture is so much more different than mine. The odds are she will be doing things her mother and father have not yet heard of or foreseen. They will feel bewildered and uncertain. I will be watching from the sidelines in wonder.
I have a good friend who so upset with his grandchildren’s addiction to devices that he turns off the WI-FI in his house when they visit and pretends it is broken.
He says otherwise they would never talk to him and his wife or leave the house. He admits that when the WI-FI is off, they still don’t talk much to him.
To be honest, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I can’t order my granddaughter to love me or talk to me.
If push comes to shove, I’ll go on the IPad with her and explore the world and find some fun games to play with her. She has to want to come and be with me and Maria, it’s not something I would ever force.
It would be an unusual child who didn’t want to hang out with farm animals, especially if the animals love to hang out with people. But that has to happen naturally. My daughter was never much drawn to that, so why should her kid, who will own ever more amazing devices?
I’m not big on rules, and this is really the parent’s concern not mine. My idea would be for my granddaughter to spend some times with the donkeys, or cuddling Flo in the yard, or brushing the pony and collecting chicken eggs. She might like learning how to herd sheep with dogs. Maybe walk in the woods or make stuff with Maria in the studio, an enchanting place.
That is up to her.
This is complex stuff to navigate, and I want to be thoughtful about it. I will not, I think, be blown away by my granddaughter’s arrival, I expect to love her very much. I want to be as close to her as is practical given that we will be living very different lives a good distance away.
I’m not sure what being blown away even means.
I am a strong believer in boundaries, I do not wish invade my daughter’s life or push myself too far into it. She is living a good and loving and complex life and she will have a lot to manage. I hope I can help, but I don’t want to take any part of it over. I will not be going to Brooklyn ever week, or even every month.
When I think of life in six months, I hope it is much as my life is today – herding sheep and doing chores in the morning, Maria in her studio, happy and busy, the sheep and donkeys and pony in the pasture, me clacking away on my blog and my book and rushing out with my camera to try and capture my life.
And thinking often of my granddaughter, off in New York City, browsing the Web to send her stuff she doesn’t need that will drive her parents nuts, sending her text messages and e-mails as soon as she is able. I like the feeling of that.
Otherwise, I don’t need to have my life changed.
Mostly, I want to support my granddaughter in whatever way I can. To reinforce the idea of her as a strong and competent womn. To offer love that is largely unconditional without forcing too many rules or my values upon her. That is not my job.
I hope to tell her every chance I can how great she is, how gifted and remarkable, how she can do anything she wishes to do in this world. I think that’s my idea of grandfatherness.
On the forest floor, beams of sunlight peek through the canopy, touch a plan, a flower a weed. It is mystical down there, silent and rich. The wildflowers and weeds live for those beams of light which cut through the trees, caress them briefly and move on.
One of the many things I love about our small 200-year-old farmhouse is that the view from every window is amazing. Sheep out one side, a pony grazing on the other. Every morning, the chickens hold something of an organizing meeting on the back porch, they especially love sitting in Maria’s Rapunzel Chair, clucking and holding forth.
This was what I saw when I looked out the back door before I opened it. I think the white hen was in charge of the day’s agenda today.
