Day: January 24, 2018

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”  – Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution.

A cold front swept away the rain and clouds Wednesday afternoon, we had three dogs out in the pasture for the first time in weeks, Gus had his muzzle on, no eating out there for him. I loved this sky and took a deep breath when I saw it. Red kept order as usual.

I love living on my farm, I love the soil and the sky and the smells and the animals, I d feel it has cultivated me as a human being..

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all,” wrote the author and environmentalist Wendell Berry. “It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”

Living on a farm is not like living anywhere else, and I have lived in a lot of places. A farm connects me to life, to Mother Earth, to the inner world of animals.

I did not live on a farm until I was in my late 50’s, yet I feel every day that I have never lived anywhere else.

The farm is all about life and death and reality and acceptance. It is my great wish to live on this farm and die on this farm. I hope Maria will scatter my ashes here if I do die first, and I can rejoin the soil, and become a connector of lives, the source and destination of us all.

I loved the Mansion Tea Party Wednesday evening. I don’t often have a chance to sit and talk with four or five people together at the Mansion and it is always rewarding. I am addicted to their stories of life.

On the left, Winnie talked about her life on a dairy farm,she and her husband getting up at 4:20 a.m. every day of the year, for many years.She talked about the life of farming and of her four sons. Only one worked on the farm when he grew up, and only for 11 years. Now, he runs a local diner.

Alice is struggling with her hearing, she laughed during our word game and whispered in my ear, “I can’t hear a thing, I’ll just laugh every now and then.” Jean had trouble following the game – at one point we were supposed to think of three different words and write them down on a piece of paper. She couldn’t quite grasp the instructions. She smiled at me and leaned over and whispered “help me!” and I filled out her cards and put them in the bowl.

I brought Sylvie tea and a scone, but she said since she invited me to the party, she should get Maria and I tea and scones. Next time, I said. We talked for a half hour or so, sipped our tea. Everyone joined in, everyone had something to say.

Sylvie was the daughter of American diplomats, she spent most of her childhood in post war Austria and Germany. I have a special connection with Sylvie, she invited me to a game night and tea party at the Mansion this evening, Maria and I ended up being team leaders in a kind of pantomime word game.

Maria’s team won, but just barely.

Sylvie told me the story of her lost dog Hank, who vanished in the mountain caves of Austria. Her memory of Hank is fresh. Sylvie is a stoic, she does not ever complain or show much emotion, but she has wonderful stories to tell. Of her two loves, lost to breakdowns and suicide.Of her moves and strokes. Of her deep religious faith.

She also told me that she loves receiving letters from the Army of Good. She said some of the letters are returned because she gets the addresses and zip codes wrong, and then she can’t find the original addresses, so she reads the lettlers as prayers.

I volunteered to help her address her letters so she can get the mailing addresses right, she values these friendships very much and worries that people will think she doesn’t care about the letters. “These are my friends,” she said.

We had the nicest time at the tea party, and Sylvie was pleased that we had come. So were we. We had fun playing the word games – Maria and I are both insanely competitive, we made a lot of noise.

Then we all had tea, scones and hot chocolate. I had Jessica, a Mansion staffer on my team, and she was exceptional at the pantomime.

Sylvie thanked us for coming, and we thanked her for inviting us. Red had his had in her lap, and I asked her if she ever had a dog and she told me about Hank. She misses him still.

Sylvie cherishes your letters and carries them around the Mansion in a special briefcase. She says it takes her a day-and-a-half to write a letter in response, and many of them come back due to the wrong addresses.

You can write Sylvie c/o The Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y. 12816.

Back In the saddle. Thanks to our new soft muzzle, Gus is back in the saddle again, today he took a ride with Fanny. We missed having him out in the pasture, and he loves coming. He was startled by the muzzle, but also adapting quickly to it.

He’s very good that way and he has a lot to adapt to. We’ve slipped into one of those good troughs, no incidents for two, going on three days. He looks good, is hungry, active and adjusting to his new life.

The muzzle will enable him to get outside more, run around with Fate, visit his animal friends the sheep and donkeys. For a few weeks, Gus has been mostly a house dog, which doesn’t really suit him or us.

He’s coming in the car on outings again, and staying out in the dog fence. We only muzzle him in the pasture. i always marvel at the adaptability of dogs.

Fanny seemed quite happy to see  him, but the donkeys are mysterious and deep, you never really know what they are thinking.

We know better than to think this is all over, but it is pretty good and we hope to keep our streak going. The trick is not to relax too much and think it’s over. We have learned a lot and changed a lot. We’re in a good place today. It was fun to see Gus sitting up there with his muzzle. He looks even stranger than he usually does, and he is learning that he can just walk around the pasture and have some fun and not eat sheep poop.

The deep cold is coming again tonight, just for a couple of ways. It will warm up when Maria and I go to Salem, Mass., this weekend for her birthday. There is a Georgia O’Keefe exhibit at the museum there, a good present for her.

There is a bleak beauty of cold, the winters here can chill the soul and the heart. We are entering the hard month, when the beauty of the winter pasture begins to fade, and the hard work of navigating the ice and cold and snow begin to wear. Older people with money like to go to Florida, but I would not like to do that, I love the aestheticism of winter, the sharp contrast of the seasons.

What  would Spring mean to me without winter, what would the beauty of the deep forest be with the nakedness of the cold time. Here, we all share community, we all share the cold, there is no left and right arguing about what cold is. At the pharmacy we all commiserate, tomorrow it will be very cold again, and Friday as well, then Saturday it will warm.

We all have the sense her of Spring coming, the sun is stronger, the days longer, the sky more beautiful. February is always our time of storms, but they lack the bite of January storms. Spring is just too close.

I loved the bleak sky tonight as the sun sank over the hills, and the mud turned to ice. I would miss the winter if it went away, or if I went away. It feels as if I have accomplished something to get through it.