Sylvia's Farm (18 page)

Yesterday I made such soup. Neither yellow nor orange, but brown, green, and red. An American soup. Soldier beans. Slab bacon. Bay leaves. Tomatoes. Garlic. Kale. It takes well to a slow simmer on a hot plate. This morning it seemed suitable and fitting, on this nasty day, to have it for breakfast. Wonder of wonders! It fueled me for an entire day. Maigret's farmer knew something. And someday I shall try to recreate that soup, soup that was described as a feeling with no mention of a single ingredient. I just know of what it had to be made.

One of the most satisfying things about farming is achieving a
sense of order. When everything is in its place, and everyone has been fed, and all is as well as can be expected, there is a feeling like no other. Secure for the moment. But I rarely achieve that feeling for myself. Coming inside the house often means confronting tasks undone, preparations not made, a life unsecured. I farm alone, in a manner of speaking. Although it doesn't exactly seem that way when, on occasion, there are people here to put up a fence, or put the barn back on the sill, or bring me my supplies. And it's equally hard to view myself as alone with Steele, Samantha, and a substantial number of animals around me all of the time. Nonetheless, there is no one but me to make the house comfortable to come into after or in between chores. I'm beginning to miss having a stove in which to bake apple tarts or Shaker Daily Loaves, or Prune and Walnut Rye bread for that matter. It is now dark. I've drawn what curtains are hanging and wonder when I'll get to sew, iron, or hang the rest. I brought in some sticks of pine for the fire, old and dry. The living room smells of them burning. My leather work gloves are a still life on the coffee table, next to a plate of apples I fished out of the brook the other day when I went to check the new line fence. My coffee is nearly hot. The American soup bubbles on the burner. For the moment, at least, all is well.

T
HIS HAS
been a curious day, to say the least. A friend gave me a very antique cast-iron wood-burning stove for which he had no use. It arrived last evening. Don Roberts, contractor and gentleman, brought it with his men and proceeded not only to take apart and move my original one but also to set up the “new” one and wait until it began to throw off enough heat to ensure that it was working properly. I was initially reluctant to burn very much in it, until I saw what it could and couldn't do, and so I spent the evening in front of the living room fire. Freezing.

For some reason I don't exactly understand, my trusted fireplace has not been doing its proper job this year. The temperature of the house was perhaps forty degrees. And I, tucked in a chair lined in both a deerskin and a lambskin, wearing three sweaters, found myself attacked by waves of chills. I know I'm in big trouble when, in such predicaments, my mind steps in and begins to analyze the situation. I begin to try to remember my nursing school physiology. What causes chills, exactly, I ask myself. How many minutes or seconds elapse between each wave? Why do they start in my back when that is against the deerskin? Et cetera. Et cetera. Big trouble. I then begin to think about people in Bosnia in the winter. Very big trouble. I then feel guilty about complaining.

This morning I lit the new stove, and to my amazement the room became twenty degrees warmer in less than half an hour. I can live with this, I thought, while running around the house synchronizing
the two thermometers and trying experiments to see if heat really does rise, or does it expand, or does it push aside the colder air in the rooms above the now overheated kitchen. Exactly what does it do? And how long does it take to do it? And how, ultimately, does it work?

What I think now is that my beautiful, expensive, Danish enamel stove did not ever do its proper job. This antique black cast-iron stove has thrown out more heat in less time with less wood than the stove I have depended on to care for me for the past twenty years ever even insinuated it could.

By the second hour of being warm, my mind began to become less obsessed with being cold and, while somewhat obsessed with being warm, could also think of other things. Wonderful what a little heat in the house can do to one's creativity.

It became unbelievably simple finally to finish turning my yellow studio into a well-functioning room. The beautiful desk that Ernest Westcott built and Don Roberts managed up the stairs (it was, of course, a mere one inch too big all around to get through any of the doorways) and into the former servant's bedroom is now gleaming with old maple finish and well balanced on its extra-long lilac tree legs. It has been positioned and repositioned precisely until it now affords me a view of my sheep and cows from the windows overlooking the barn and barnyard. There is a very nice wooden box with fax paper and foolscap on which to write underneath it, and my little antique French inkwell is filled. The desk is five and a half feet long and almost three feet wide. I shall learn to sort and file and keep track of my life on it.

Even more amazing is what a little heat in the house can inspire. The room is closer to what it needs to be than it has been in a long time. I lack only a lady's slipper chair in which to sit and look out onto the flock. My own little chair had been sacrificed to serve in the
little third-floor library. But another shall surely fall in place from an auction or sale. The servant's bed, narrow and neat, has been a daybed and is now my winter bed. The indoor one. I intend to have another one built for the loft level of the barn this winter. My closet is now perfectly arranged with sewing and knitting things. It is amazing to me the freedom that comes with so small a degree of what we take for granted in our lives. To be warm enough. Not to get a shock of cold when going from one room to another.

What that shock does to one's mind is amazing. I found myself, the other day, wondering how many other people have felt this same incredible narrowing of the perimeters of their lives. How many are there in the world even now, as I sit here, unable to concentrate because they are cold? There are countries at war and others at peace whose people face the autumn and the winter knowing that their very minds will soon not belong to them but become the possession of the cold. I console myself with knowing that most people have lived this way since time began and human beings moved farther and farther north. But they learned over generations how to survive in it, I think. It is left to me, however, once more to reinvent the wheel. It becomes an interesting obsession, being cold, viewed with some detachment and some fear. And now, in a room that has on occasion today, verged on more than warm enough, it becomes a revelation to realize what the mind is capable of, unfettered.

The sheep have begun to draw me to the barn more and more often these past few days. They offer me so much peace and comfort at the onset of winter. They replace my thoughts with a silence that is almost impenetrable. One moment at a time an accord is reestablished. And a sense of rightness pervades my time there. With the grace of God it will be nearly as well within this house. It can never be the same. It will always be different. The house houses my mind. The barn, my heart.

T
HE CALF
that has been named but is not yet called by his name has been finding a way out every day this week. He is a red Jersey. It is hunting season. Aside from the fact that I don't want him out, I have been afraid for him. So it is with a sigh of relief and a measure of satisfaction that this morning I found him in the carriage house exploring the place where the cow grain is stored. He isn't yet sure what grain is all about, but it seemed to interest him. It was a simple thing to get him into a cow stall. One semiskilled maneuver and he was in. The problem of how to confine him, particularly alone, had been on my mind for a while.

My cows, Lady Francesca Cavendish and Dame Millicent Follansbee, have learned their place and haven't tried to move beyond the pasture and onto the lawn to graze for quite some time. And I have, as a direct result of their disinterest in the lawn, become lax when drawing the gate shut. So it was with a modicum of surprise that I greeted both of them not simply outside of the pasture but on the back lawn trying to push open the door to the carriage house. This was too good to be true. I've wanted them in as well. It is time to begin a winter feeding schedule, and the mornings have been twenty degrees by seven o'clock, a bit cold for them to be lying on the damp ground, especially as Francesca is springing and Millicent is still nursing. I swung open the stanchion gate and in they came.

I've been working on making sense out of the carriage house for the past few weeks. The top of the two stories is nearly neat. Spare
chairs are hanging from pegs, as are spare cages. Some of the hay is stacked and in order. The floor is swept. The sweepings of hay have been transformed into fresh, sweet-smelling nests for the chickens. The sweepings from the area surrounding the chicken coop have now been put in a flowerbed. The phlox top-dressed with last year's leavings were glorious this year.

Cat food is in a very nice metal can from last year's popcorn with a picture of an idealized farmstead on it. In blue, no less. The kittens have an acceptable feed dish and a fine water dish. The moment one of them notices I have arrived, they rush out of a tent they seem to have made for themselves from a crevice between three hay bales. I hope I don't move those bales in a moment of forgetfulness.

Five new Barred Plymouth Rock chickens arrived this morning and are now ensconced in the carriage house. They are fine hens and I am delighted to have them. My little Barred Rock pullets haven't even thought about laying yet, but I love them. I do still expect great things from them. These new hens are, however, a handsome addition to the flock. The rooster that accompanied them has been joined by other roosters. A fine fellow he is! He got attacked by one of my Banty cross roosters while still in his cage and had to be set free, the better to defend himself, before I was quite ready to put him out. He shall live with the others for a while until I am ready to put him with this flock. With any luck I might get some Barred Rock chicks.

The pigs have a run in the barn aisle now, which I have hopes shall become well rooted up. I suspect, however, they won't find it interesting enough to help me dig. I fed out some hominy to them because cornmeal wasn't available the last time I went to the village. They don't seem to like it. Too much was left in their feeders today, so I strew whole corn in the aisle, but that generated more interest from the sheep, well walled away from the aisle, than the pigs.

I've lists of things to do hanging in every conceivable place that
needs me to have a reminder. And I did not do a single thing on them today. Or rather, not in the way any of it was entered on the lists. When I wrote “clean the carriage house for one hour” I didn't mean the loft and I didn't mean sweep every stem of hay into the hay drop for the cows. I meant the downstairs that constantly rearranges itself without any direction from me.

Instead of obeying lists I went where the call was the most compelling. And that took me to the unbalanced hayloft, which is beginning to sag. It is in trouble and has already kicked the barn out in a corner off its sill on the good side, the newly roofed, newly floored side. I do best walking on hay, particularly on hay bales turned every which way, in my stocking feet, so off went my boots, and to my surprise they landed next to the shoes I wear to town. When did I take them off in the barn and why? Up the hay bales I climbed. I wasn't stacking, just throwing them over onto the center aisle floor. And suddenly, more than enough was moved.

The midlevel of the barn has been on the chaotic side of order or, rather, disorder since all of the fleeces were piled on a table in there last May and since hay arrived and spilled through the doorway in July. It symbolized being out of control to me. Fleeces dripping off a table, hay spilled everywhere, obscuring whatever is underneath it, chaos personified. And so I took a broom and rake to it. Per usual, it was far less involving than one would expect.

With a small amount of effort, and a little bit of time, the floor became swept clean, and the geese penned immediately outside of its great door became bedded once again in dry hay. Amazing how wet geese manage to make their home. Ernest Westcott put a new handle on the door to the loft, as well as a spring on the door to the goose pen. I can now walk in and out of the pen rather than climb over it. This all makes me feel like quite a civilized farmer. I fed the geese some bread to go with their cracked corn, as they too rejected the
hominy, and gave them clean water for the fifth time today, they seem to dirty it so often, all the while feeling as if some order was finally being attained on this farm. There is something about a barn floor being clean and dry that is very satisfying.

Determined to address directly
something
on the list, I began to unplug the hay chute that had become overloaded this summer when I tried to stop my hay man from throwing any more in my mow. I went to the house and got my favorite and second-best pair of scissors, the ones with shiny brass handles, and went back down to the barn. It was nearly dark. Twilight, in fact, but in the barn it was closer to pitch black. I climbed onto one of the broken beams and peered up the hay chute. The flock surrounded me knowing I was about to put down some hay that they might snack on. I reached above my head, cut the string, and began to pull, all the while hoping I wouldn't drop my scissors into obscurity. It never even occurred to me it could all come down on my head.

The rest of the sheep decided it was time to come in and eat. They have grown quite fat this year, eating hay as well as grass since summer. The corner became crowded. Night fell. And looking up at the loose hay in the chute became a dusty procedure, made especially interesting as I no longer could see a thing. I felt around for the scissors, found where I had dropped them and proceeded up to the house taking an armload of burnable scrap wood with me. The house was fifty-six degrees in both rooms. I made a fire that would improve quickly. I threw some wood in both the stove and fireplace. If only every day were as nice as this one.