Well, perhaps click HERE, and let it be your soundtrack as you read this post.
-Tennyson
In farming you collect, in your
mind’s eye, hidden things. You learn to look for them and treasure them or
anticipate them. You are, after all, constantly burying hope, and watching it
(usually, often, mostly) grow. There are also the invisible threats you keep a
weather eye on. You set out the tender young Skyphos Butterhead lettuces despite
the potential for frost, drought, slugs, and pocket gophers. You are constantly
coming across invisible memories. “Oh yes! This is where we planted the
snapdragons that first year, and they grew nearly three feet tall!” or “this is
where the peppers went in 2021, when that mole tunneled right under the roots
and they died of starvation! “ Or: “This is where that bee stung Jack and he
swelled up like a sausage, and he found out he was allergic to them as we sped
to the hospital!”
Small things move you. The morning light casting shadows on the pasture, the bent resolve in your daughter’s back as she grabs the manure fork and mucks out the barn, the sound of the goats at their hay feeder. There are times when you wonder if you will survive the May time. Everything is so beautiful with promise, you are falling love with the things you can see beginning to grow, and also with the hidden possibilities you sketch for the farm in your mind. The roller-coaster ride of vagaries that are attached to this life keep you in a heightened state of anticipation- like a runner on the blocks ready to push off for the sprint, or the bronc rider in the shoot who has just strapped his gloved hand in tight and waits, in that strange calm, for the chaos the begin. You honestly have no way of knowing whether the season will be a success or not.
My husband calls May the “Time of Fear of Commitment”. If you
spend 6 hours in the garden will you have anything to show for it later? While
the laundry goes undone and the dishes in the kitchen sink sit stacked unwashed?
There the farm stands before you. Never lovelier than in the May. Yet if you
respond to her, it is possible you will pour yourself out for rabbits and
racoons to come and make a dog’s dinner of it all! Like most of life, the only
thing certain is that nothing is for certain- except a wild ride, and that there
will most certainly be pain.
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| sketch of Schubert by Friederick Lieder |
Schubert was a hidden soul. He began life as the 12th child of a school teacher. Soon it was revealed that he was gifted with incredible musicality and a soprano voice that pulled his listeners into the clouds, and himself into the Vienna Boy’s Choir. He began composing then, but when his voice cracked, he was out on his ear, sponging off friends. He was miserable at self-promotion, and most of his success was posthumous. He was so shy and retiring that he could not bear to give public performances. He preferred to debut new works among friends. Perhaps this was because of his utter and abject poverty. The longer I live, the more I realize that any kind of poverty can make you that way. His life was like farming in May.
The will she-
won’t she /up and down /hot and cold nature of farming in spring; that was
Schubert’s life. That’s farming too. In spring, you play the lover, trying to
sing the farm into life.
My songs call out gently
Through the night as they
beseech you;
Come down here into the quiet grove of trees,
Beloved, come to me!
Agatha, though named after an early roman martyr who died in horrific tortures, was the only hen that survived our late winter fox raids, before we found out our solar powered chargers were no longer working. When the time came for us to release our new batch of chicks into the outdoor coop, we were uncertain how she would take it. Usually older hens are merciless to newcomers. “Establishing the pecking order” is very real, and very vicious at times. Most chicks are relieved of a few back feathers by the time it is all over with. Yet she chirruped warmly to them, taught them where to drink and how to scratch, and, paused a moment in time to look deeply, beak to beak, into the beady eyes of a small Buff Orpington. What began as cloudy in her life, has blossomed roundly into mothering the next gen.
But it can go the other way too. You can waltz out to
the barn, smiling to yourself as you share the morning’s secret with the birds. 
Can you hear the nightingales singing?
Oh, they are beseeching you
With the
sweet notes of their laments,
They are interceding with you on my behalf.
It feels as though no one else but you and the swallow know of the new sun rising over the river, and threading its light on the loom of pines across the way. Then you open the door to the barn and find a giant hulking horse’s rump staring you in the face. Your eyes bulge from your horrified head and you find that both delinquents have slipped their halters in the night, and one of them has managed to squeeze himself down a narrow shoot, turn a 90 degree corner, and wedge himself into a tiny closet of a milking parlor to chow down on the bale of alfalfa left there. You breath. You breath more. Not the peaceful, slender spandex coated breaths of women in high pony tails doing hot/goat/puppy yoga down- town, but the snorting breath of rage that odd 1930s comic cartoons of bulls do, nostrils flaring, eyes glaring, face rippling with various tremors of red, pink, fuschia. “BACK UP! BACK UP! BACK UP! BACK UP! You are barking the order till the ions of the universe rearrange themselves and are recreated according to your will.
The horse miraculously obeys despite being boxed in like
last year’s Holiday Barbie. “I find it’s easier with horses to avoid eye
contact” Lynn Miller, editor of the Small Farmer’s Journal and experienced
teamster tells you later on the phone. “Eye contact is intense for horses.” You
are not making eye contact with the horses. You barely disdain to acknowledge
their existence. You are snapping the lead ropes on to their halters and
marching them out to the round pen and MAKING THEM WAIT, CONSARN IT! For their
breakfast of NON ALFALFA and TIME OUT MISTER! JUST WHAT DID YOU THINK YOU WERE
DOING-BIG MAMA AINT HAPPY NOW, BOY- OH NO YOU DI-INT.
Just the other day you
were snapping pictures of the little darlings as your daughter filled the water
tank. Today, those same loveable shaggy haired horses wait till you go back to
the barn to clean up the havoc they left behind….wait till you are sighing over
a cup of coffee in the kitchen….wait till you are talking about improper
fractions with your 9 year old.
And then.
Then one of them stomps a hole in the
150- dollar stock tank that you took that picture of yesterday.
That you just
filled to the sweet brim yesterday.
That never did Nobody-nowhere no-wrong not
never not yesterday or the day before that- not ever.
Even polymers can die
miserably.
And that, to bring y’all back to Schubert, is Standchen. That’s
Standchen in the spring. He wrote a honey of a song- a lied (“LEED” German for
SONG), if you will, meant to be a “Serenade”. But it is not the kind of song the
lover sings to the already secured beloved. It is the kind of song that starts
like a sunny day, and quickly steps behind the clouds, only to emerge again into
daffodils and bunnies, and then dip into depressing doubt and melancholy. It is
the kind of song the lover sings because he cannot help it. Because he must.
Even though he is not assured of success. Maybe because he knows success is an
open question but he cannot help pouring his heart out as if from a pitcher into
effort after effort to make it a fraction perhaps maybe a tad more….likely.
That’s farming. That’s farming in the spring.
You bring the seedlings out because it’s time for them to harden off before planting. But perhaps there will be a frost. You may find yourself in a 1020 tray/50 cell flat relay, bringing them to and fro from the greenhouse depending on the weather…just days ago everyone was barefoot, T-shirted, dreaming of shish-ka-bobs…then Canada (it’s always Canada’s fault!) sent a “cold air mass” down and now with it has come the fretting. Perhaps the peas will sprout, or perhaps not. Perhaps they began to, and then dried out…or perhaps there was so much rain they rotted where they lay, buried in the earth with a trellis spreading it’s waiting arms above them, fruitlessly.
The apple trees are budding. Will they survive the cold snaps? Will
they bloom to bees busy with pouches of pollen packed about their thighs,
brushing their soft little bodies about, playing bumbling matchmaker amongst the
pistils and the stamens? Did last year’s pruning do the trick, or cause coming
catastrophe? After all, I am still learning the pruner’s art. David Schlabach
says “ A vigorously growing tree can easily be shaped with a few major cuts. But
you cannot prune vigor into a weak tree.” A young tree pruned too heavily can
suffer major setback. In spring some of the apples are taking their sweet time
to “flag out” with leaves. You come into the kitchen for some zip ties and to
ask if anyone has checked on the hive lately, and re-filled the sugar feeder.
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| Apple Tree in May on Little Flower Farm |
That’s when you stand there, with the radio playing Schubert’s Standchen and it
hits you in the chest like a swift kick, and you blink back the tears wondering
why the song can’t make up its mind. Is is to be a comedy or tragedy? Does it
end in a major key or minor? Does it end happily? Why must it struggle so? AW
COME ON NOW! Why do folks got to be playing Standchen in the spring? You are
standing there with your sore farmer-heart, trying to coax young and delicate
things to grow- things prone to disease, disaster, and death, and there’s
Schubert breaking your heart while you stand on aching legs by the toaster and
fumble in the drawers and shelves.
They can understand the longing of the
breast,
They are familiar with the pain of love,
With their silver notes they
stir
Every sensitive heart.
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| Hiving the new package of bees |
I remember listening to a man who was outraged that a European Weeping Beech he was acquainted with had been brutally and mistakenly pruned by innocent and unknowing grounds crew. “They are wonderful trees when left unshorn” he told us passionately, “They create a whole hidden world within their branches, you can sit in them, undetected, read a good book all afternoon.” Being a hunter, he would also know that the deer and rodents and bear could feed upon their nuts. His usually gentle eyes darkened and hardened remembering afresh the ignorance of the crew that hacked away at the tree, mistaking it for another species, leaving it set back for many seasons without it’s leafy tresses, without its ability to provide a “hidden world”. Many of his listeners listened with mute disinterest. They did not know that he had suffered the loss of loved ones at a young age, and felt keenly the pain of all stunted growth.
Sibley’s guide says that such a tree “grows slowly, so the wood is not
important commercially.” Yet such a tree could hide a lover’s kiss, and bear the
backside of a boy swinging his legs, eating a sandwich, and reading the Hobbit.
Such a tree could create a canopy for a girl to lay beneath and find that her
favorite color is the green that happens when light shines through those
toothless leaves in summer.
So perhaps even (shorn) beeches sing Standchen
songs.
Let your own breast be moved too,
Beloved, listen to me!
I am trembling
as I await your response;
Come, make me happy!
But too, there are other things
that flourish with a sudden and strong pruning. I remember well when a 400 foot
row of zinnias that we had planted the day before, were topped, unceremoniously,
but frustratingly thoroughly by grazing deer, bringing them down to miserable
nubs barely two inches above the ground. Too busy with everything else to pull
them out and begin again, we left them, only to watch them bush out in several
growth points and become something of a hedge of flowers, bearing so many blooms
we were able to supply our CSA members with bouquets well into September. The
lesson: one may easily suffer seeming disaster only to be saved for something
better.
Schubert’s great idol, Beethoven was once critiqued for his string quartets. He responded: “Oh, they are not for you. They are for another age.” When Schubert himself eventually worked up the courage for his first public concert, he could finally afford a piano of his own. But then, he died just a few months later.
Most of what we achieve in this life is not for now, but for
after our life is over. While we give our tender hearts to so much that is
beautiful in this world, we do so while collecting the invisible things too.
Putting them in our pockets, filled with other hidden lovelinesses, small enough
for no one to notice, yet weighty enough to sometimes cause us to stumble. All
this: the dirt under the finger nails, the anxiety over frost, the broken water
trough, the shmuck who pruned the tree, the blind mole, the bee’s sting, the way
the light fingers the new leaves, the sound of birds and greed of squirrels; the
seedlings that will live, and the ones that the cutworm gets; all these are not
for now. They are for another age. They are the building of invisible castles of
living stone.
They are a kind of “Standchen”, themselves. A song we hum to ourselves, while singing to God.
Or perhaps they are His own serenade as He
awaits our uncertain response, singing to us from the garden and the grove.
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