Not Much of a Difference After All

First swim of 2014. Fin’s the first one in the pond every year

The weather was cool and damp and tired-feeling all weekend long and by the time I came indoors both Saturday and Sunday evenings, on the tail end of a solid 10 or more hours of mucking about, much the same could have been said about me. The diversity of the the weekend’s undertakings – build chicken coop, move chicken coop, set up piggy paddock, haul firewood, split firewood, stack firewood, plant trees, sink cedar posts for grape arbor, organize the mess of things we can’t quite bring ourselves to let go of (including but not limited to: five partial rolls of chicken wire in varying states of disrepair, a leaky tea kettle, six cloudy lengths of well-used polycarbonate roofing, a batch of weathered fiberglass fence posts that cannot be handled without gloves, a non-functioning tractor starter, and so on) – was typical of a spring weekend on this holding, and it left me sweetly fatigued in a way that’s too long been missing. Muscles not so much sore, but used. Fingernails packed with grease and sawdust and who knows what all. Hands dirtied more thoroughly than soap can remedy. I know not everyone appreciates these things, and I know that if I were compelled to labor toward someone else’s profits rather than those of my family, I might not appreciate them so much, myself. But damn. The way it sits, it feels just right.

By Sunday night, I was bleary enough that when my eyelids began drooping at 7:30, I did not fight their descent and allowed myself the luxury of slipping into a slumber that lasted until Blood’s crowing returned me to consciousness nearly 10 hours later. Blood’s the only alarm clock we have in this house. He does a fair job of it, too, though I wouldn’t mind a bit if the ole bird had a snooze button.

Last week, I turned in the book to my editor, and that was some relieving, let me tell you. Not because it wasn’t a whole mess of fun to work on – it sure enough was – but because there is just so much good stuff to be done out-of-doors. We are excited about this summer, in part because we can feel our place coming together in a way that is hard to adequately express in words, but is nonetheless perfectly clear to us. Maybe it wouldn’t be clear to anyone else; it might only be obvious through the lens of context and our relationship to it. Whatever the case, something has shifted over the past few years, and it feels to us as if we are coming nearer to our ideal of this small farm as being not merely a collection of plants, animals, infrastructure, and humans, but an actual living, breathing entity with its own personality and intent.

Yes, we are still shaping it, and hopefully will be until the day we die. But both Penny and I increasingly feel as if this place is guiding us, rather than the other way ’round. I’m not sure precisely how or why or when this happened. Probably it was always true, and we were just too dim to recognize it. Sometimes, I’m not even sure if it’s a real phenomenon, or just imagined.

Of course, sometimes the difference between what is real and what is imagined isn’t so much of a difference after all.