Yup

Trapline, day before the storm

This is a dangerous time of year ’round these parts, what with Penny hunched over a stack of tree and shrub-crop catalogs like an earthbound vulture at a meat lover’s buffet. This morning I made the mistake of perusing her “wish list” and I could feel the cold beads of sweat gathering on my forehead just thinking ’bout all the holes to be dug, compost to be carried, and amendments to be spread. Ho boy. It’s coming. It’s coming in a big way.

Actually, it’s already begun. Earlier this winter, I cleared the small copse of spruce that stood between house and barn to make room for all those holes we’ll be digging soon as the ground thaws, which means we’ll probably be able to take up our shovels somewhere ’round the second week of July. I dropped maybe a dozen mature trees, and another dozen or so youngsters. The better specimens await the mill; those too crooked or lacking in sawable girth went over the bank at the back side of the farm road. I might’ve saved them toward a load of pulpwood, but we do not send clean biomass off this farm. Those trees are my son’s soil. And not just my sons, but my sons’ sons. And daughters, if such is to be their fate, because of course daughters need soil, too.

Just below where I’m dumping the soil-to-be, there’s stand of mostly balsam fir, and they’re next to go. I don’t feel too bad about it, since the majority of them suffer from advanced heart rot. Indeed, many have already succumbed to the condition, having long ago tipped to lean heavily on their neighbors. Can’t blame ‘em, really; heck, if I suffered from advanced heart rot, I’d probably do the same darn thing. Still and all, I have no qualms about expediting their return to the soil.

All this clearing is part of a long-term plan to transition the land nearest the house toward perennial food production, which is itself part of a long-term plan to ensure our future on this smallholding. Penny and I are 45 and 42, respectively, which means that half of you are getting all misty-eyed trying to remember what it was like to be that young and thinking “whippersnappers!” while the other half of you are thinking, “crikey, why bother? It’s almost over, anyway.”

It’s not almost over, of course, despite that clichéd way the days and seasons have of passing ever faster as if, having arrived at the presumed midpoint of our lives, we’re now barreling down the backstretch, picking up steam on our way toward the finish line. Still, just recently I read about an old fella who stuck it out on his family’s homestead until the age of 98, and right then and there, I decided it’s 98 for me. Not a year less or more. 98.

I’m joking, of course. Who knows? Who would want to know? Talk about hubris. Still, I can’t help this image I have of Penny and I shuffling out our door 40 years from now and down to the trees we planted back when we were just whippersnappers. There’ll be fruit on those trees by then, and maybe even some nuts, the roots fed by all the decomposing pulpwood we didn’t sell back when we had the chance, and we’ll reach our old, gnarled hands up into the branches and pick us a couple of real sweet apples.

We won’t be able to eat those apples, of course: You need teeth for that. But while I take my morning nap (splayed on the couch, snoring in time with the dog), Penny’ll make ‘em into a dandy sauce. And come lunch we’ll gum that sauce down like the happy old fools we are, and Penny’ll say something like “now aren’t you glad we dug all them holes and planted all them trees when we was whippersnappers?” And I’ll just smile (dribble of sauce running down my chin) and say “Yup.”