Ticket to Ride

 Bordering the Western edge of our farm there’s a line of track that cuts through the ghost town ruins of old Copas. The snow melts quickest along the rails, and sticks down the sides of the hilled spine that snakes its way with crowds of thicket and ephemeral water bogs cheering it along. In April, a walk along that line rewards the wanderer with view of marsh marigolds by the plenty. One year there were so many they seemed to give off a glow like a pot of gold hidden in a tuck and roll of the earth. This is the railway which, 130 years ago, used to send spuds off to the city by the car-load. Now it’s largely used for hauling rock quarried up in Dresser, WI, and the weekend tourists riding the historic train from Osceola into the state park.  Last year the faster (and louder) rock train didn’t come by at all, prompting us to wonder if trains were yet another random pandemic casualty.

photo by Ben de la Cruz, NPR

In Kroscienko, Poland there’s a similar all-but abandoned rusty line of rail skimming through a thickety countryside near the Southeastern border with Ukraine. The pictures of this particular set of parallel lines, grimacing with its rotting planks and patches of stubborn snow, like shaving cream on the face of the hill, are remarkable because they look exactly like the ones in our backyard-which is to say, they are not remarkable at all. There the trees are also bare, the recently sawed-off ends of the encroaching junk saplings by the work crews, marking the abrupt imaginary line where the wild tangle of overgrown weeds and grass and shrubs were deemed suddenly unwelcome, after nearly 100 years of having it their own way. Poland is sending several crews along the line to rebuild it, and bring it back into use to help with the refugee crisis. I wonder how many old things, old ways our tech-savvy world has abandoned, only to frantically return to them when faced with something like war. Why not live with it in place, in use, always?

Fran in Winter

Over the years we’ve met people randomly who recognize our farm slowly by remembering their first view of it from the back, waving at us from the train as we planted out the pumpkin crop or harvested cabbages. To them, it seemed like the train was a magicked thing, which took them back 100 years as soon as they stepped upon it, and it chugged its way across the St. Croix, through the woods, and suddenly happened upon a clearing where Buttercup and Fran were grazing and gazing at them placidly with their big Jersey Cow eyes, and little girls in calico dresses were running barefoot to catch a glimpse of the engine.

When the train starts running again, and the picnickers wave from the historic cars and stand at the back for a better view of things, it will be hard not to think of that sister train in Kroscienko, hauling women and children away from the shelling and gunfire. I hope it too will be a magicked train, breaking the evil spell that made them into hunted creatures, giving them a chance to enjoy a better view of things again.

Impromptu Arias

 In late February the sunlight grows stronger and the seed of the new growing season seems to soften a crack and germinate in the hibernating heart of the farmer. Like a small animal that rolls over in a deep burrow lined with musty leaves and twigs, stretching itself and blinking with a yawn and a sigh before it remembers what it is in this old world, and what it is like to be up and doing, I find myself lining up the seed packets and marking up calendars with dates to start to Celosia and the Sage…

I can always tell that spring is on its way when the children get restless and wild to be outside… the increasing daylight is coaxing them out like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, and we greet peeks of real (squishy) dirt revealed in the medians of the gravel driveways around these parts with almost savage enthusiasm. Bits of green moss and watercress bravely waving in the streams that vein their way through the watershed district that surrounds our farm receive rhapsodies of admiration. It’s almost incredible to us now, to think these little growing things will go un-noticed when their cousins begin their vigorous vying for our attention and exclamation! They are yet another beauty that only the magic wand of privation grants us the privilege of enjoying.

In the midst of one of those teasing thaws that tickle us into daydreaming about barefoot afternoons on the beach, plucking cherry tomatoes, and gathering big bouquets of Queen Lime zinnias, we are suddenly singing our hearts out: it’s an impromptu aria, conjuring the earth, calling her up off her winter couch, even as the sun rolls back the heavy white down comforter from off her shapely shoulders…

It’s practically pagan, and silly, with no one but the trees to hear us, and yet it feels as if we were created for no other purpose than this , to wander a tree-lined path, treading smiling mosses in the median of a graveled drive, participating with all our anticipating hearts in the thaw, as if we were given a voice only for this audience-less concert, as if the desire of the heart to rejoice in the birth of a new year of growth must have some means of accompanying the finches and chickadees in the canopy above, throbbing with new sap running, humming with new buds forming, and hence: the stream-of-conscious opera in the all but forgotten out of the way places that surround our sleeping fields. I sing like a wild creature, but I find my mind straying to those cultivated patches of garden that wait for their manuring and their tilling, and the love of farmer’s hand, clutching dirt covered crumpled-up plans for the rows and widths of vegetables and flowers and herbs, like a man who remembers how he loves his homely wife in her kitchen after catching sight of a siren selling figs in some foreign bazaar ripe with spices and the scent of hookahs, because of some motion of her arm, reaching up to her basket, very like his rounded love, reaching for a tea cup swinging on its hook.

One particular day the wind had the whole woods stirring, and our tame little walk transformed into an adventure as whole limbs crashed down in our path before us, and twigs were tossed to the forest floor with a brazen impatience for anything dry and old. My 2-year-old gripped my hand and said: “Mama! The trees are saying “Wake up! Wake up!” That was the first day we felt that winter was being blown away, and the spring was being ushered in like Mary Poppins, all spit and polish, ready to play “tidy up the nursery”.

On the 25^th we will celebrate the feast of The Annunciation. “The Holy Spirit will overshadow you.” In the Song of Songs, the love poetry refers to a “wind upon the mountains” and a “wind that will blow upon my garden”. It is hard not to imagine the Blessed Virgin as that garden, and the wind as the Holy Spirit. The seed that flowers into the new tree of life is the Christ Child…every spring, the earth seems itself like another song of songs in honor of the Queen of Heaven. These are the thoughts that cloy as clods of earth clunk up the muck boots and get tracked through the kitchen and utility room…