Winter is melting, and this makes me feel panicky. Because where did winter go? I was going to have all my shit together by the end of it. But here we are, and I've haven't. Any of it. At all.
But... I love this cusp - the one where there is all the exquisite expectation of spring, none of it spent yet, only anticipated - and it is stretching long this year. A morning of strong sun rays warming our forest, drawing sap up from under the frost, and then all of it crystallizing and dissolving into dense snow flurries that block out the mountains across the swamp. When this happens, I say thank you kind merciful earth, for I am not yet ready.
Our little sleeping loft is a quiet cocoon. My aunt sent us a quilt made of old sweaters for our bed. It is teal and purple and weighty with sleep and warmth and darkness. I am not prepared to crawl out from up there.
In the past year, we built a house. We sold a house (just two weeks ago, and with much relief). I have never stopped thinking about my illustration career, business, marketing. I have been solely focused on accomplishments of the roof-over-our-heads-and-food-on-our-table variety. Matt has shouldered more than his fair share of those burdensome thoughts as well. I am sick of them. Recently I have felt a shell of a person, and the only time I've been really me was the day I followed a filthy trail in the snow, littered with bits of lichen and studded with perfect little ochre-colored turds, to the den of a porcupine, tucked under a tumble of mossy boulders, deep inside an enchanted bower of red elder canes. I saw the porkie's muddy paw prints and I inquired at the mouth of his cave. I saw where he went up a sugar maple and stripped the fine branches and, presumably, swayed and pooped in the breeze. I tracked his route to a hemlock, neatly crowned, the ground beneath strewn with deep green trimmings. The snow slowly melting and revealing layers of porcupine travel patterns, established over a season.
With taps and buckets borrowed from friends, we've collected sap from seven of our sugar maples, and boiled it down into the first batch of Hungry Raven Hill syrup. The days are longer now, and it is nice to be drawn outside. Yesterday we watched a barred owl and a sharp-shinned hawk fighting over territory. They were like two fragments of the forest - big flakes of gray bark - broken free and bashing each other in the branches. This morning there were little duck-footed waddling paw prints in the fresh snow. Raccoon? He went hither and thither and not much of anywhere at all, then up over the bank and away.
That is the small news. The big news is that Matt, my very own Matt(!), performed a miracle on Easter Sunday, and brought forth clear clean water from deep under the ground. We have running water! You can turn a handle and water comes out of a pipe, into your drinking glass! It doesn't have algae in it, and you don't have to twist your ankle and slide down an icy precipice to get to it. Halle-fucking-lujah! And thank you, Matt. I am eternally grateful.
3 comments:
In 1954 I lived on a 100 acre farm in Pleasant Hill Missouri in a house with a cistern under the floor. We drilled 186 feet for water: a dry well for our money. My Father and I used a 770 gallon tank chained onto a 1 ton flatbed truck to haul water twice a week from town for the animals and for us. Every time we turned on the faucet in the house a pressure pump came on with a loud banging. We lived there 2 years before we went bankrupt, had a farm auction, and moved to California. I have never forgotten to be grateful for tap water. Ann
Good reminders, Ann, that clean water at the twist of a tap is a true privilege, and one that a lot of people do without. We all may be in that position in the future.
How do you manage to make porcupine poop interesting?
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