Sylvia's Farm (28 page)

“No,” he replied.

“Well, my whole farm has headed your way. Could you please call me when they get there and I'll come and get them? Again.”

T
HE BIRD
, black, still, its red wings tucked neatly to its sides, rested on a branch of Michaelmas daisy. Ivory colored. Starlight in the afternoon. Its weight barely bending the tall stem. Silent. Motionless. I saw it. It heard me. It did not move. I waited. It stayed.

This morning, from the dining room windows, I saw another bird. Dark. Almost black. As large as the red-winged blackbird was small. It sat, quite comfortably, on the massive post supporting the fence around the marsh on the far side of the brook. I walked, with deliberate speed, toward it. Through the gate separating lawn from meadow. Across the pasture. Through still another gate. Across the little bridge. The vulture spread its wings and, slowly airborne, flew away. Soon others came. The air was laden with their massive wings. Beautiful, each one of them, separately and together, one by one finding, each a current on which to glide. Mysterious. Without apparent order. Even more of them covered the ground. Black shapes. Their majesty gone. They are the tidiers of the earth, the forest, the pasture. When they left, not even a drop of blood remained on the ribs of the sheep the coyotes had killed early this morning.

There is no reasonable balance to the life here. Sometimes there is harmony. And sometimes less than that. But rare is a balanced moment. Farming is the most intense thing I have ever done in a most intensely lived life. Sometimes I think I shall never stop crying. And sometimes the silence is so perfect it seems as if it shall last
forever. When the day goes well, it holds the most peaceful silence of all, a stillness so absolute it can be touched only by God. And when it does not go well, disquietude fills the corners of the heart and turns the mind to shades of gray.

This is not the simple life. It is even more complex than I who live it can grasp. It includes the tiny insects that run across this page as I write. Nearly invisible were it not for the lamp that shines down on them. Early evening. I kill some of them. I'm not certain what kind of insects they are but know I don't want them here. And yet I somehow cannot touch the one that most tempts my hand, following the ink as it crosses the page.

Wind carrying rain makes sails of the enormous pines around the house. I wait for the coyotes across the valley to begin their evening call. They are silent still. Perhaps nothing shall die tonight. Except the tiny insects that I shall feed to the fluffy yellow baby chick that lives in a coffee can under the lamp on the kitchen table. I am teaching it to hunt. It knows, however, that I am not its mother. It sits reluctantly between my hands, chirping frantically to be released, and yet it will perch with enthusiasm on my shoulder. I bend to encourage it to walk back onto the kitchen table, but it doesn't want to leave the soft flannel of my shirt. This is not the simple life.

I
T IS
A
raw, nasty, gray, snow-blackened meltdown kind of miserable day that I have chosen to be my day of renewed hope. It is only on this kind of day that hope can truly be renewed, for why should one need even to consider searching for hope on other kinds of days?

A lamb sits in my lap. The nipple from a bottle of milk is in his mouth. He is only beginning to learn to drink from it, having been fed through a stomach tube for the first two days of his life. Lambs are enchanting creatures when new. This little one is destined to become a very big sheep. He is as tall and long and has a far bigger head than a two-week-old twin ram that also is in the kitchen. He is the kind I like the best. Or so I think at the moment. The kind that gives me the most pleasure to look at, square and chunky and curly of fleece. A blocky little thing and looks like a living, breathing, moving, and occasionally bottle-drinking doll. Relaxed and peaceful on my lap, he takes a sip or two from the bottle. He knows I am the source to assuage the empty rattling in the last of his four stomachs and scrambled around my feet as I entered the kitchen this morning. But while he has put his nose into the milk in the cat's dish, he hasn't begun to associate sucking on the bottle with filling his belly. He is a big lamb for his two days on earth, and I don't want to risk tube feeding him again for fear of injuring him should he struggle. What to do?

Still another lamb dances around the kitchen. She is a refined and
lovely thing. Her fleece is already long and silky. Her face is finely drawn and beautifully formed. “Exquisite” is a word that could appropriately be applied to her. She, too, has claims on the word “favorite” in my eye. A violet ribbon on her neck designates her stakes in my newest flock. She is the exact opposite of the one now asleep in my lap. Oh, I have said of each, you are perfect.

I slept the entire night last night for the first time in recent memory. I got up very late and went downstairs to find the fire out. The kitchen felt dry, however. The day outside it is raw and gloomy. The melting snow betrays all of the winterlong efforts exerted to try to make the house warm. Black ash is everywhere on the snow, as are the remains of a frozen pumpkin that I had tossed to the geese and a bag of potatoes that had frozen when I mistakenly left them in the living room for a misguided day or two. I meant to toss them to the geese, but before I did they became buried, then embedded in the snow on the back porch. All things conspire to remind me how deficient I can be at managing winter.

But I came downstairs this morning quite without dread. Three of the four tiny kitchen lambs danced for me. A few embers left in the new wood stove caught at the paper and bark pyramid I built in it. The sight of a fire in the stove through the glass doors is an outstanding pleasure. A loaf of bread I was too tired to cut into last night is still in its pan in the oven. There was some coffee left in the pot to heat and have a cup in between feeding the older lambs. They are being weaned over the next two weeks, as they are beyond the age for needing milk replacer. They eat grain and now shall have the very best of my latest hay. Their brothers remain in the pen in the summer kitchen. The littlest are light enough to leap the walls of the beautiful new pen, to race up the stairs to stand by the door when they hear my voice from the kitchen answering the ring of the telephone. She's here. Hooray. Bottles.

The main focus on the farm is shifting to the carriage house. The shift has been gradual. I love it when that happens. The scale of that building is quite different from the others on this farm. And it pleases me so. I brought milk, early morning, to the slowly-being-weaned group of replacement ewe lambs who are now living in one of the horse stalls. The loveliest one, Cordelia, still gets a bottle three times a day. She isn't picking up the way she should and I don't want her to compete with the others for milk. They all get hay. The lambs get a sweet feed, a sort of molasses-laden granola that smells yummy enough for me to wish I could eat. The cow doesn't. And so she puts her enormous brown fuzzy head with the fluffy orange ears over the stall gate trying to reach the grain. The lambs are enchanted with her and run to her, stretching as tall as they can to try to touch Lady Agatha Van der Horn's face. Nothing can delight me more. The two white goats divide their time equally between the barn and the carriage house. I didn't know how to have them disbudded when they were babies, and now their horns make life a little less idyllic than it would be without them. But they are pretty, those two, Celeste Baldwin and her daughter Virginia. They are blocky little things, chunky and strong. They eat a lot and always look as if they are quite pregnant. Celeste is with certainty, but I suspect Virginia lost hers in January. They like to be in the carriage house when I am and come to the kitchen door for water when they grow tired of eating snow. They don't have access to the brook as do the sheep and are dependent on what they can get nearer the house.

There is still an egg eater in the chicken coop. I don't know if it is another chicken or a skunk. It can't be a rat, as the four wild barn cats now live there full-time. Oh, I do see them in the barn on occasion, but it is the carriage house where the main events in their lives take place. Pretty little Perkins still stares at me and purrs from a safe distance, asking for milk. I give her some of the lambs' milk replacer
in an old cow waterer. The carriage house cats all come out for milk. They catch their own dinners, thank you very much, and I no longer have holes in the feed bags that fill the center floor of the building. I've been offered help from two quarters with the building and have gratefully accepted it. One person has taken it upon himself to do the carpentry that is necessary there to restore one of the existing horse stalls and hay drops so the goats can winter there well and create some new features that will enable me to better use the space. Soon the goats shall freshen and live there with their kids. The milking stands are already installed. It is my farm in miniature in that building. I shall love it soon again. I think one of the nice things about today is that it stretches unadorned before me. I expect no one. No interruptions besides the normally reoccurring ones. No people to deter me from my attempts to perform my appointed tasks. A possibility that I might live the day correctly or, at least, as I see correctly. “To make something better and nothing worse.”

I keep notebooks. Those of this past year have now become too numerous. They are fine notebooks, five subject ones with brown paper dividers containing two pockets each in which to keep things. It became quickly apparent that they needed tables of contents so I'd know what was in them, and so I took to numbering their pages. “Personal: Page 2”; “Where is it?” consisting of a list of things I commonly put in a good safe place, a place that is logical, safe, and self-explanatory until the moment, three or four months later, when I can't remember where the safe place is. My mind is visual. Where I've put something on a day when the view from the window is green and light is hard if not impossible for me to envision in the dead of the winter.

It snows. The temperature has dropped. The kitchen is warm. With great comfort the lambs sleep, one like a rag doll in my lap. It is a Sunday. I am determined to change the tablecloth on Sundays. It
can be reversed during the week, but a newly ironed, starched tablecloth should appear at least once in a while. I am determined it shall be on Sunday. I've tube-fed the lamb in my arms once again. His head rests on the crook of my elbow. I long to get up and cut into the loaf of bread still sitting in the oven, but I am reluctant to move the lamb. The fire sings. I am grateful for the new stove. It is the sweetest time of day.

T
HERE IS
still another most beautiful of all lambs here on my lap. The lambs of the past few days have had the large-headed, blocky Dorset look that I need, or at the moment think I need, as does this fine little creature. And Fancy Bewling, which just became her name, has a thick curly fleece and great charm.

There is a long list of names in the section of my workbook entitled “farm.” I've chosen approximately twelve, to date, for the thirty lambs in the carriage house, summer kitchen, and house. Only one of the barn lambs is named of yet. They are tending to blend in with one another, at the moment, that is. However, they are beginning to be distinguished by braided yarn necklaces and shall all be named soon. Twenty-six of the last names on the list are from the phone book. All versions of Mc or Mac with a few Fitzes thrown in for good measure. They would seem to be a Scottish flock. I tried to name the new East Friesian Whilimena but it didn't take. Whilimena Fitzwilliam. She has become, and it does suit her far better, Phillida Greenleaf. The Greenleaf is after her father, William Greenleaf Sire, now dead. Still mourned. Mariposa Fitzgerald, twins Philipa and Phoebe Turnbottom, Victoria Gainsborough, Cordelia Fitzpatrick and her twin Carlotta (who lives in the barn), and Diedre McCormack are all named. Satisfactorily, I might add. But some of my better names, such as Marvey Chapman and Candida Lycett Green have not found the right lamb to bear their designation. They are too good not to use, however, and among the substantial number
to be retained and the eight dairy ewes I am buying in July there shall soon be enough sheep to wear them all.

With the exception of a well-waxed floor, which shall manifest by afternoon, my studio is at last ready for me to work more comfortably. It isn't possible to explain to workmen why an unfinished job can be so disastrous to my life. And so, when a lamp was left only partially rewired, its shade, its huge shade, I might add, placed on my recently acquired highboy, and the rest of its works all over my writing table, I was much hindered from using the room to its proper advantage. For three weeks. It is now repaired and the room is only an hour away from being perfect.

I have bought everything (from a rather modest wish list) in the past four or five months that I care to buy. Books. Books. Books. Garnet velvet for winter curtains in the dining room, a tomato red telephone on which to make calls about the book (which, incidentally, paid for the phone), a beautifully made copy of an old French clock to help keep me working a set number of hours. I've bought five or six more woolen blankets from the Salvation Army. I collect them with a passion. And hay. Hay. Hay. That is it. It is now of interest to me to begin to repair some things. The socket in the lamp in the studio, as an example. And some broken Royal Copenhagen dishes I bought when I first came here. They were too beautiful to throw away. If I am careful with the repair, the single crack in each will be barely noticeable when they are displayed on the long shelf in the kitchen. My copper teakettle requires resoldering, as does a silver plate hot-water bottle I received as a gift a long time ago. It received a dent on its seam when it fell through the then-open grate between the studio on the second floor and the kitchen. It is a good time now to lay out some of the winter blankets while there is still snow to clean them and a warm fire to dry them near. And my collection, again from the Salvation Army, of four-dollar Pendelton wool shirts
is due for a hand wash and dry on wooden hangers behind the wood stove.