Island

This

I discovered a languishing draft post and read it through this morning.

March 2016
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Photo by my mother-in-law — thanks, Alice!

… is exactly what I’m after: for this pair to hang on a barn gate and watch the sheep, to sweep the hayloft, to kick manure piles*. They’re getting perfectly filthy, and we’ve still to learn how to skirt fleeces. Goodness, our city life is clean and pampered. In the words of Pongo (and how often I have listened to the words of Pongo in the past few months — Dodie Smith’s The 101 Dalmatians is Ada’s very favorite book, and if you’re someone who reads with kids you should definitely hunt up a copy), “Pampering does good dogs no harm, provided they don’t come to depend on it. If they do, they become old before their time. We should never lose our liking for adventure.”

The scale of the adventure in muckling onto a sheep who’d rather not have a haircut or in assaulting the encroaching blackberries and hawthorn with a brush mower is, perhaps, modest. We are only just starting to hone our country sense and strengthen our country muscles for the work this farm represents. This work will humble us. Fencing — and oh, there is a lot of it that needs to be rebuilt from scratch — is probably going to make me cry. Just putting one meal after another on the table without easy recourse to take-out when the tank of cooking mojo has run dry and everyone is exhausted and grumpy will require leaning in. (Luckily our house came with this amazing old edition of The French Chef Cookbook, so we can at least find plenty of humor in the black-and-white photographs of Julia cheerfully and athletically preparing to bludgeon an unsuspecting future dinner.) But really, these daily challenges shape our natures more than the grand adventures that make it into the family photo album, don’t you think? We’re choosing this farm because we want it to mold us.

* For you urbanites, this is not just because we lack superior entertainment options out here in the sticks. Heaps of horse puckey kill the grass and provide nurseries for undesirable larvae.

 April 2018

Skirting fleeces: check. We’ve done it for our own flock three times now and we’ve helped friends as well. I now feel competent to train others, so that I can be Chief Sheep Nabber on shearing day while deputizing my parents and other willing friends to shake out second cuts and pull off the daggy bits for composting. I have a seven-year-old who can write sheep’s names (if sometimes with inventive spelling: “Mod,” “Daphinae,” “Pershephune”) on the plastic bags receiving their fleeces and can run to fetch the bottle of CDT vaccine from the refrigerator or the sharper pair of seccateurs from the drawer in the tack room. This year we hosted new acquaintances who brought their four little Black Welsh Mountain ewe lambs in the back of their station wagon; we taught them how to skirt and how to trim hooves, too. We leveled up the adventure by tackling the llama’s first shearing in many years. He was really pretty decent about it all, but he does not enjoy oral dewormer and my poor dad, sitting on the fence ten feet away, was caught within the spray radius. Nor does he suffer injections lightly. I think I managed to deliver half his vaccine dose before just dodging a lightning hoof strike. Oh well, Chico, I tried. Here’s hoping we can break the natural parasite cycles by rotational grazing this season.

I talk and think about things like parasite cycles and rotational grazing quite a lot nowadays. I remember joking with my husband, soon after we’d had our first baby, that we couldn’t remember what we used to talk about before we were parents. Now I hardly know what we talked about before we were farmers. We’re terribly fortunate to have made friends with another farming family as nerdy as we’ve become about forage samples and manure; I’m not sure who’d be brave enough to come to dinner anymore otherwise. But it’s not isolating, this farm life. It’s connective. We’ve met so many helpful mentors and likeminded folks who care about growing things and solving rural problems and keeping these islands vital through agriculture and community building. It’s a new lens on a place I’ve known and loved my whole life, and it’s fresh soil for experimenting with different ideas about how to live and work and devote ourselves to a place and its inhabitants.

Farm life is never dull, either. The chore list never gets any shorter, but the jobs are varied and the work is real and there’s plenty to laugh about, too. You realize you’ve shifted into a different mode of living when you’re picking bits of baling twine out of your lacy undergarments, or when your husband accidentally slingshots you in the eye with a foam ear plug while shaking out the laundry. You have to appreciate the comedy in casually hanging about on the fenceline with binoculars trying to get a good look at a ewe’s lady tackle to see if she’s getting near lambing, or in racing to town for school pick-up with water still sloshing in one boot because you lost track of time trying to shampoo a sheep in a water trough before the breed association’s national show. There’s a stimulating power in building the creativity to lay track in front of the train when the breeding ewes you were leading to the ram’s pasture take fright and bolt back toward the barn with the eager baby-daddy out the gate after them in a flash and your enticing grain bucket now of interest to nobody.

Do we still miss Portland? We do. We have unbreakable ties to people and to ways of being that we developed during our years there. We did a lot of living in that little red house on 48th Avenue, and I’m still wistful about that home (particularly the kitchen). Did we do right to make this leap? Absolutely. And now I’m off to go move some electric fencing and then pick bits of nature out of another fleece while the sun is shining.

At the turning

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.

— Susan Cooper

On the shortest day I loaded a backpack with four tin cups, a thermos of hot cider, a parcel of cookies dusted in sugar, and a picnic blanket. It was a surprise outing for the children, an inkling of a new tradition I’d thought of. We drove a little way north along the rim of the valley, where there’s an open field I like. I used to ride an Arab mare around the perimeter, trotting her uphill for conditioning and resting at the top to puff and look out over the quilted landscape. Our family of four—and the dog—walked along the fence that surrounds the cemetery of the little church of St. Francis and picked a spot in the high corner to spread our blanket and watch the sun sink.

During our first full season at the farm I’ve watch the sun’s arc intersect the hills beyond our valley, working steadily south along the blue knuckles of Mt. Dallas to Little Mountain and then the low hills above Kanaka Bay. This deep in the year it doesn’t even reach the island, vanishing instead behind the Olympic mountains across the straits.

We called up the most luminous points of memory from the year that’s been: adventures in Paris, singing in St. Paul’s Cathedral, bringing home the kittens, making “fifty” friends at school, our first lambs. The great magic of life on this farm—a magic well grounded in work that isn’t always fun or instantly gratifying, mind you, but rewarding all the same.

Now we’re closing the year in a slog through boxing up all our remaining clutter in Portland. I am not quick to find cathartic joy in this chore; part of me would like to light a huge bonfire in the driveway and have done, but alas, city codes and sentiment over the possessions of my ancestors prevent me.

Wishing you a clean sheet, a new leaf, a freshening wind as we welcome 2018!

To the lighthouse

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As I’m writing today, we’re in Portland watching the clouds lower and waiting for the cold sizzle of freezing rain. My daughter has seen the inside of a school building exactly once this year and has logged a total of nine days of education since December 1. Our world has been snow and ice and sledding and baking and free play and Swallow and Amazons for so long I can hardly remember the shape of our standard routines. This wintry dreamtime has been such a complete holiday from real life that I dread the return of early rising, school lunches, and long commutes in dreary weather. If our thaw works quickly and we aren’t glazed in a fresh layer of ice, that day might be tomorrow, so I’m looking backward instead.

At the turn of the year, natured graced us with a golden day. I swept the children out of the farmhouse and into the car for a quick walk before the sun set. The wind had calmed; Mr. G stayed behind to enjoy the respite from its teeth as he set new fence in our most exposed corner, where the breeze comes in boorish from its romp across the Pacific. At the southeast tip of the island is the little Cattle Point lighthouse, built in 1935. The surrounding land is part of a conservation area crisscrossed with pleasant walking trails—as long as you’re not nervous about the rather abrupt plunge down to South Beach.

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A fellow walker watched my children and dog pelting ahead up the path and kindly asked if I was familiar with the lay of the land. Indeed, there’s been enough erosion here that the trails we walk today are not the trails of my childhood, and in some places they wind very near the edge of the cliff. As tempting as it might be to climb atop that stone the boy is passing above, the sandy soil is scooped out beneath it and I wouldn’t care to test whether an extra forty or fifty pounds might be enough to send it on its inevitable tumble to the sea. The kids stay clear. But I believe the only way to grow agile and surefooted and canny in risk assessment is to test yourself on trails such as this one from an early age, so I let them run.

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A gentler slope here

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Darn, I wish this hat were something I needed to photograph for a pattern release!

The lighthouse isn’t grand or terribly iconic, but its stout little octagonal tower and drum lens go on keeping the shipping off the rocks of Cattle Pass. The Coast Guard allegedly intends to do some restoration work here to shore up the building before it slithers seaward.

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Two bald eagles reign over this territory and we crept near their tree to watch them awhile, because that was the sort of magic on offer this day. The sea was full of splashy ducks and cormorants. The homeward trail got a wee bit tiring…

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…but the beauty and the docile weather made a rather dribbling pace no hardship. All the mountains were out—Mount Rainier, about 120 miles away, is just visible on the horizon at the right edge of the frame in the photo above—and the road home provided a close look at this handsome fellow in the twilight:

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My parents chose this home, crossing the continent years before I was born and setting down new roots. I had the freedom to leave; I’ve visited many beautiful places and I hope to see a great many more, and I could have stayed for good in a few of them, but this island has always called me back. On days like this, I think the greatest gift I can give my little ones is to infuse their growing and becoming with this same landscape. Who knows where they’ll fly? But if they carry this place in their hearts, they’ll know what they’re looking for when they find it.