To Your Heart’s Content

Four straight days of accumulating snow. It is dense with moisture, the poverty snow I wrote of Wednesday, and moving through it calls to mind the heavy-limbed feeling of running in water I remember from childhood. So much effort expended for so little progress. Our yard is a spiderweb of beaten tracks – to the barn, to the hydrant, to Rye’s goats, and finally, deep into the woods where the pigs reside. I’d intended to bring them closer to home for the snowy months, but things intervened, and I am now shackled to my own stupidity as I ferry the sloshing five-gallon buckets of milk-water-grain slurry to the hogs and their insatiable hunger, each lurching step a down payment on the debt created by my procrastination.

Yesterday the power flickered on and off and on again intermittently, and the boys were perplexed. It was our first significant outage since we grid-connected way back in September 2013; prior to that, we were immune to the vagaries of utility power, and they’d never experienced such a thing. Truth is, we own a generator, and thus could have brought ourselves back online with only a modicum of effort, but could not determine a reason good enough to do so. The animals’ water troughs were full, and both wood stoves were radiating waves of delicious heat. Our refrigerator is powered by cold winter air, and the chest freezers’ frigid cargo would hold for days. So we stuck a pot of leftover squash soup on the cook stove, lit a few candles, and went about our business in the soft light of those small flames.

Then the candles burned down and we went to bed.

•     •     •

Inspired by Penny’s rousing success with intricately folded strips of birch bark, and seduced by the sweet corruption of material wealth, the boys have been in a frenzy of making. As such, I humbly offer this link, where they have posted a few of their wares, each and every one crafted with exactly zero assistance from Penny or myself.

Go ahead. Corrupt to your heart’s content.