Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer
It snowed all day yesterday and when I woke up this morning there was still a steady, downward fall of flakes the size of moths. There was close to a foot or better rising straight up from the surface of whatever remained out when it began. The branches of the white pines down along the wetlands bowed so low under the weight of it it gives the impression that the trees are trying to lay themselves down at the end of a very long Winter. Around here the common lore tells you that it’s best to wait until the middle of May before you plant anything in the ground.
One of my neighbor’s delights in telling me the story of the Mother’s day blizzard of 1977 so I have tried very hard to mimic his activities and routines as he goes about the business of farming his place year after year. When he hangs his first sap buckets I go home and start putting mine out, and when I see him prune his apple trees in the neat little orchard that runs alongside of the Old Sutton Road I go back to the pole barn and get out the gray oak Stoke’s ladder and get to work on my own. Thus far I have been able to keep up with a great deal of the seasonal aspects of this calling absent a lifetime of experience.
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Imitation is indeed the truest form of flattery and whenever I see his wife out hanging clothes from the clothesline, or catch him riding his tractor down the half mile of road that divides his farmstead in two I always make a point to stop and roll down my window for a chat and tell them just how lovely the place looks and catch up on the health of his new calves or the quality of her homespun wool that they sell from the wooden stand in their driveway. If we have ever had a cross word I can’t recall it and they have always been helpful to us since the day we moved here, if somewhat puzzled by our decision to take on what we did with so little by way of experience.
In the Spring of my ninth year I was in the fourth grade, like our youngest son today. I have been thinking back on that a lot lately because he is having the same problems with the same math that I did those many years ago. It may have been the first time in my life that I experienced what adults think of as anxiety and I can still recall the dread I felt when Mrs. Beytas passed out the times table quizzes every Monday morning. She was one of the last of a dying breed of teacher that has long since passed on- she was just as comfortable spanking a student as she was giving out a little praise and because of that I always felt a certain level of righteous fear when I wasn’t up to her standards and expectations.
On the flip side of the coin was the way that we all felt when she took the time to do something special for us because we had been good students. I recall vividly the memory of her reading aloud to us in the Spring of that year one of my favorite books of all time, Charlotte’s Web. She’d let us out of our assigned desks and we’d sit on the floor by her feet while she settled herself in front of us with the book spread on her ample lap, her sturdy old ladies shoes rooted, soles down, on the floor in front of us like the roots of a tree. I will forever remember the opening scene of the novel, Fern sitting in the early morning kitchen with her mother asking the question, “Where’s Papa going with that ax?”
That simple inquiry set my mind off into a world that I had never inhabited before, but that farm and the subsequent unfolding of events chapter after chapter became very real to me for the two or three weeks that it took for her to complete the tale in a room that smelled like sour milk and sneakers. I could see in my mind’s eye her Father striding across the barnyard towards the hoghouse with a purpose, ax held firmly in hand and I understood long before her mother spelled it out for her what his object was and it both frightened and intrigued me at the same time.
I only dimly understood the world of adults at that age, their work and their conversations being something that didn’t involve me all that much, but it meant a great deal in the bigger picture of the world. They had responsibilities and they had duties and they seemed to go about them with a kind of grim determination that was somewhere off in the future for me and it was something that like Mrs. Beytas, I both feared and admired. I don’t think I caught the significance of Fern’s surname and the subtle genius it took for E.B.White to conjure it up until I was reading that book to my own children and flirting with the idea of becoming a farmer myself almost forty years later.
Arable. suitable for growing.
In the mornings during Spring, after I have finished up chores there is the task of collecting sap. There are six hundred and fifteen two gallon buckets and a dozen three hundred and twenty five gallon totes at the end of each mainline. Depending on how much runs on any given day it can take as long as four and half hours to gather it all up and get it back to the collection tanks on the hillside behind the sugarhouse. It is one of those jobs that takes time to do well, to transfer the clear sap from the bucket to the collection cube mounted on the forks of the tractor. It requires a preliminary filtering through a sieve into a second tub.
First you have to unhook the bucket and walk your way back from wherever the tree is rooted- some at the end of rocky defiles others just over the fence line from the lowest end of the property to the top. As you transfer the sap into the bucket it forms a clear sheet with a glass-like quality and every flaw on the edge of the bucket magnifies the imperceptible imperfections so that it appears to have a diamond patterned liquid silver finish to it as you pour. Each drop is precious so extra care is taken with every pour so that as much of the tree’s lifeblood is conserved from the spile to bottle.
As the empty buckets are rehung on their hooks and the drops commence to fall once more into the pails with a resonant tap, tap, tap like a drum the multitude of them as you retrace your way back from the end of the lane sounds like a recital echoing across the brook. Some days the temperatures drop enough overnight that a good potion of the water freezes in the pails and so the sugar concentrates and becomes thick. You reach in and discard the ice blocks and over time the Sun softens their edges rounding them off and they lay about the bottom of each tree, moonstone cabochons in the melting snow.
We have had quite a few guests in the past several weeks, families from as far away as North Carolina and Oregon. A few of them have been tagging along with family, others readers of the blog that simply wanted to see what we were up to at this time of the year and it has been a treat to host them and to have them pitch in with the multitude of tasks we’ve had to accomplish; stacking firewood for the arch, tapping the furthest runs, firing up the evaporator and making syrup for our customers. There have been the emails and the letters, many from the people we shipped to last year and even more who have stumbled across us since then eager to help us out by trying some of our harvest.
I have had more conversations with people in the past month than in the previous five combined and it has given us an opportunity to see this place through another’s eyes, the magic of the ice cold sap and the sweet flavor of a life that has been stripped of pretense. When we first arrived here ourselves I think we were trying to impose our old life on something new, to turn it into another business or to simply be the people we were in a new environment, but since then we have been the ones who have been changed by this place, its rhythms and cadences. We have put down our own roots, like the maples, into rocky soil and because of it our lives have produced something equally sweet.
Last week we had two litters of piglets and in six weeks all but a few will depart for other farms. There were of course a couple of runts, there always are, and like Mr. Arable I had the unenviable task of doing what was necessary so I found myself walking across the barnyard in the early morning hours as if I had been lifted from the pages of that book some fifty years ago and transported into that character. I can recall vividly what it meant to me back then and measure it against the man I am today. While I do not shrink from the task or the responsibility it weighs on me in a way that I could never have imagined when I was sitting on the floor in front of Mrs. Beytas, listening to her describe Fern’s indignation at the the thought of her Father “doing away with it” and I sometimes wish that I could go back to that time, if only for a moment.
In the hour it has taken me to write this the Sun has come up in a gray sky and the snow has continued to fall without missing a beat, a good three inches more. The bottom rails of the fence are buried and the cows are knotted up on their feet by the feeder waiting on me to shovel my way out to them for a visit. The robins that I watched a few days ago are nowhere to be seen and all the bright tendrils of green grass that were poking through the crusted snow from last week are buried again until this one melts off for good.
Then, of course, we’ll move on to the next thing and then the thing after that, the endless and cycling progression of the seasons and the changes that they bring with them. In a way, by going back in time, we have somehow guaranteed ourselves a place in the future. Maybe that was some of what I sensed in hearing Charlotte’s Web the first time and have pulled from it every time I have read it to our children as they listened as raptly as I had. Arable. Suitable for growing. We are small and then we are grown, we take our responsibilities as they come and we shoulder them, one bucketful at a time knowing that in the end there is a dulcet and mellifluous reward in having made the journey at all.
How sweet is that?
ORDER YOUR SYRUP NOW!!! OPERATORS ARE WAITING – HARDSCRABBLE
Please contact me either by phone or email @ (603) 938-2043 or [email protected] and we’ll box up your order as soon as the last pint is boiled.
HSF, Thank You!!!
They are all great, but this was a joy to read!!
Cool imagery Sir. In my youth I was taught by Mrs. Chaulk. I will never have same synchronicity with the land that you do but as I get older I find I am reverting to the lessons I learned when very young. I’d buy some Syrup but worry that it might be a hassle at border. Maybe some day I can.
Robo, I had the same reaction. HF mentioned school and it took me back to a time when I was a new student at Houston Elem. I can’t think of anything nice to say about the barrio school I’d left behind. This one was filled with white teachers and it made a big difference. Old spinster Trevino had taken my honor ribbon in second grade because I was so eager to do my work that I didn’t mind her when she asked the class to turn towards her. It went on like that til 5th grade. Old Madonado even took me back to 4th to punish me for not handing in my homework. Who gives kids, 5th graders homework over the weekend? Not Mrs. Stahl, my new 5th grade teacher at Houston. She has us grade our own papers, and the kid next to me always called out 100% whenever my name was called. Evidently, I had landed in the smart class. Other kids had the fearsome Mrs. Steele who taught catechism after school. Even that woman was not as scary as our art teacher, Mrs. Scotten or Cotton, I’m not sure. Her rejoinder, whenever a kid muttered under his breath, was I love you too! My project for the entire semester, since I’d missed half the year, was a paper mache’ Porky. she fashioned the head and nose out of a coat-hanger to catch me up with the rest. She made the snout too long and my Porky resembled a barkeep more than a pig. I forget the music teacher’s name but he would cue up the stereo and tune in to a station that played symphonies. He didn’t really have a class, he chatted with me as we listened to music. I talked about my old school, he offered, this used to be Austin High School. That explained the outsize playing field, the huge rooms and the wide staircases.
When it came time for high school, I tried to go back to the barrio schools. My mom petitioned the superintendent and I got permission to go to Jefferson High in the same neighborhood where Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, grew up. It was a ‘paso en falso’ – a bad move. There’s that saying, things happen for a reason. I think things happen because you made a bad choice and a correction comes by divine intervention. The teachers at La Jeff were as uninspiring as the ones I’d had in my earlier grade school. My dad had a setback, we moved to my granny’s in Juarez. I refused to quit school and when the border agent asked where I was going every day, Mr. Chisari kicked me out of Jefferson HS. No apology, just, you live in Juarez.
I wish I could remember the names of the teachers at Austin High. There was not one bad one in the bunch; even crazy-ass Mrs. Trambley who would ask for a scapegoat – anybody willing to go to the office when the class got too out of control – was better than the best teacher at La Jeff.
There was a dark cloud though, an old lady counselor who determined to deal with the invasion of cracker high by beaners with the idea of placing them in remedial classes. My counselor, Larry announced cheerfully a few years later, did you hear old lady Patterson kicked the bucket?
EC- Dr. Pangloss said you must have had a most excellent edumakashun in Texas to end up here as such a talented writer.
BL, the rotten apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The scumbags got caught trying to cover up their shitty schools. I can only imagine if I had stayed there, I would have ended up a retarded ignoramus. Bowie and Jefferson are the schools up against the border with the poorest of the poor kids and the additional kids from Juarez refugees.
(As bad as I painted the head counselor at Austin, our freshman counselor, Miss Dow was totally the opposite. While old lady Patterson was a snippy 60-ish former beauty, Miss Dow was a plain young gal who spent the time to go over college test scores and she took an interest in helping kids apply.)
Their scholastic program back then wasn’t much, you can only wonder when Mr. Chisari, the vice-principal gets his daughter elected homecoming queen. When the job becomes a family affair on the public dime, well, something is rotten in Durango.
I was telling my mom that I never realized until I wrote yesterday, that I had no recollection of anything outstanding in those schools. She said they were in big trouble, they learned, like former LA Sheriff Lee Baca, that lying to the feds has consequences.
https://www.texasobserver.org/blowing-the-whistle-on-el-pasos-crooked-schools/
Great piece. I think we were taught by the same woman. Her name was Mrs. Froc where I was, heavy with the rod when required but generous and loving as well. I remember a field trip to her farm where we spent the day playing games in the yard and being kids. She fed us and gave us tours of the animals and the land. She too read us Charlotte’s Web. Synchronicity is a funny thing, eh?
Loved the music choice. Female torch and jazz singers always seem to settle my soul. One of my favorites over the years is a Canadian singer named Holly Cole. I saw her live at the Orpheum in Vancouver years ago before my wife and I were going together. If I remember correctly, I was accompanied by another tall, curvy redhead. I guess you could call it foreshadowing.
I remember the audience dressed in suits and cocktail dresses and a pair of men’s underwear making its way onto the stage anyways during “Don’t Smoke in Bed” if my memory serves me.
I still love the sound of her sultry, silky voice. Edit: I once told Mrs. Marion there was only one or two women I would leave her for. Holly was one of them. She still hasn’t called….
I just ordered maple syrup by phone. had my credit card ready but was told that an invoice would accompany the order and just send a check–the honor system. There is still hope for our children’s future. Imagine amazon changing their business model if only for one day. Bezos–think about it.
Beautiful, brings back memories of the different jobs duties and scenery of life in the sticks on a farm, and mornings in the woods. Oh the nostalgia. It’s the beauty that hurts the most.
Thank You for writing.
HSF, very nicely done. Amazing you can take an hour or two from your obviously busy day and spit out something of this quality.
As an avid reader, I enjoy most stories that are well written, including those from Admin, Kunstler and others who clearly have a knack in “turning a phrase”. TBP is a trove of provocative ideas and writing, and I include Uncola, Francis Marion, Muck and many others.
Keep it up, my hat’s off!
Great article. HSF, you wrote me an Email suggesting that you didn’t get my address the first time, and I sent it again – did you get it the second time? Am I on the list for a gallon somewhere? Thanks! JtW
Got it.
Dude, I’m just saying;
“moonstone cabochons in the melting snow.”
That is like Henry David Thoreau in it’s simplicity and beauty. I am sure that your syrup is great cause I have some. I am willing to bet that your pigs are the best. But your writing man. You don’t find writing like that in many places.
Thankyou.
Read Charlotte’s Web as a class in fourth grade. A neighbor lady who was an artist asked my parents if she could do a portrait of me reading the book. So now I’m immortalized as a ten year old on a 3’x4′ oil on canvas hanging proudly on my parent’s living room wall. My wife is overjoyed (not) that it will go to us when they pass.
Of greater significance to me was Mrs. Fenaroli reading The Scarlet Ibis to us fifth graders. She cried and made most of the class, me included, cry too. It’s my earliest recollection of the emotion to be found in words. Powerful stuff.
My teacher in 3rd grade had a somewhat ashen countenance and always wore flowered dresses as if to compensate. She sported a short, circa 1950’s style hairdo, thick-rimmed glasses, and to this day, I believe the term “if looks could kill” was coined by someone who knew her.
Although I was read fairy tales, nursery rhymes and various picture books as a young child, it was in third grade when Mrs. Anklin read a book to the class over a period of weeks when I began to see word pictures form in my mind.
The first book she read was entitled (something similar to) “The Artist” or “The Clown”, and it was about a traveling circus. Once the word pictures began to take shape in my imagination, I was hooked. Charlotte’s Web was read to our class not long afterward and it, too, made a profound imprint on me.
As does happen in life, as Hardscrabble so eloquently illustrates above, the circle turns, eventually forming into the shape of things to come, in ways I could not have fully imagined.
Reading “Motorcycle Ralph” by Beverly Cleary, “Charlotte’s Web” and “Little House on the Prairie” by Laura Ingalls Wilder, to my own little cherubs, it was one night before tucking them in and turning off the lights, my oldest looked up to me and said: “Dad! When you read to us, I can see what happens in my thoughts”.
I smiled and knew, just like me so long ago, the “hook” had been set.
Quite a journey, indeed.
When you have a social structure of a society that produces a preponderance of single head of households, as we are experiencing today, Uncola, I believe those moments with the cherubs becoming as rare as hen’s teeth today. With all the accompanying social ills that that entails. I firmly believe that it is by design.
I’m an old guy. We didn’t have TV till I was 6. We had radio out here in these here rural parts.
Someone once said that radio stories had better pictures than TV. I agree.
It’s the same for books. When I read books, the pictures suit me better than the movin’ picutres. I get to choose the scencery.
Our disconnection from nature has wrought the sorry state of the world today. Keep on truckin.
Hardscrambled
All the syrup in the world won’t git yer ass raptured, and good gawd uh mighty I can’t git ther mental image uh you chopping one uh them poor little dudes straight in half like somethin off uh walking dead. What kind er psychopathic mongreloid are you? Also, right below that ad fer syrup Jimmy Q the oompa loompa uh doom has uh ad fer some loose cootered hussy which ain’t helpin yer ass at all. Yo, hardscrambled, send me some uh yer shit ASAP. The checks in the mail. Later.
I don’t recall my parents reading to me – must have been too young. But mine remember the two of us reading to them, during broad daylight – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (twice!), all the first set of Harry Potter books, the Terry Pratchett Discworld books – and even as teenagers, they kept listening!
The kids were in fifth and third grades, I think, the first time we read the Lord of the Rings, and in the Fellowship of the Ring we reached Durin’s Bridge in Moria – ” ‘Fly, you fools!’ he gasped, and was gone.” or something like that. Total silence, broken by a small voice: “He’s coming back, isn’t he?” “You’ll have to listen and find out” was my wife’s reply. It took days before their dread and curiosity was relieved.
The elder got a degree in English – some days, I wonder if our reading to her was the driving light that started her love affair with the language. If so, I did something right as a parent.
At times he sounds like Robert Pirsig alluding to the ghost of a former life. Other times, his vignettes recall the spirit of Henry David Thoreau describing the battle of the ants. Even though the author admits he is no great farmer, his writing says ‘Some Farmer’.
Where is the divine intervention saving him from slaughter but in the whole tale of renewal? Starting all over, he has been haunted, he has continued to strike at the old demons both ethereal and material. He has been spared from certain death and has seen the other side of the mountain.
I commented earlier on this post, but your near death or aha experience stuck with me. I have quite few of these divine experiences to look back on. To be thankful for. When it isn’t time it isn’t time. As I have gotten older I am forced to look back on these, and remember it could have always been worse. When it is over we just sit up, look around, take a deep breath, and say thank you, for another day, the air that smells sweeter, and that the body parts being functional, for the people that we love, and love us. Quick inventory so to speak. The work continues on schedule, and the sunshine seems brighter than before.