Who Can Say

Chokecherry harvest

Two of the past three mornings have delivered frost to the hollows and folds of our pastures. It’s so slight, you might not notice it if you didn’t feel it underfoot. It crunches and rustles a bit when you step on it, a million or more ice crystals shattering under your boots. Or maybe you catch it out of the corner of your eye, the way the early light glints off it, making it seem whiter than it really is. Or maybe it really is that white. Because who can say where perception and reality diverge? Not I. Certainly not I.

The weekend was good, full of honest labor and the small rewards of animals under our care. Two piglets were procured, replacements for the pair whose days are growing short in inverse proportion to the expansion of their haunches. The pigs eat voraciously of milk and wild apple drops, and I receive an inordinate, almost irrational amount of pleasure in watching them slurp and chew. Eat, my darlings, eat, I urge, pouring breakfast into their bowl as they dip their insatiable snouts. Every day, I walk past the bacon smoking pit at least a half dozen times, situated as it is along one of the primary chore corridors on our small holding, and damned if it seems like I can already smell the smoke rising off the wet apple wood. Or maybe I can smell it. Because who can say where perception and reality diverge? Not I. Certainly not I.

Last night for dinner, we ate a chokecherries and apple crisp, piled high with cream skimmed and whipped off that mornings milking, and sweetened by a slug of syrup distilled from the sap I pulled and grunted by sled and wagon across Melvin’s hayfield, one step lost for every two gained. For lunch, we’d eaten steak and tomatoes and potatoes and green beans, the latter two slathered with butter churned the day before. For breakfast, it had been eggs scrambled with beet greens and soft cheese and chanterelles and sausage, and it seemed to me as if I could taste something in these meals that was more than what I understood these foods to taste like. Not love, please, spare me, that’s too simple and trite. But perhaps effort. Perhaps purpose. Perhaps the moment I almost got trammeled by a runaway garden cart carrying 200-pounds of maple sap. Perhaps the three hours Penny spent with the boys, gathering chokecherries and apples. Perhaps the moment our steer Cinco crumpled to the ground and we’d swooped in with buckets to catch the arterial blood gushing from his neck. Or maybe I really could taste these things. Because who can say where perception and reality diverge? Not I. Certainly not I.

I lit a fire the other day, the first of the season and it felt good, like something turning over and expanding inside me. Settling into me. Not in an uncomfortable way, but in a way that’s like seeing an old friend you haven’t seen for years, or like hearing a song you used to listen to every day. And as I fed the fire with wood we’d split the winter before, I thought about the thousands of fires I’ve lit in a lifetime of heating with wood, and about the tens of thousands of swings with the splitting maul, that limber rhythm you get into when you’re warmed up and the wood is straight and true and it’s 12-degrees but you’re sweating, anyway, and damned if it didn’t feel like what I was actually burning was a little piece of myself.

Or maybe I actually was.