After a beautiful respite, enjoyed over seven sunlit days, the rains began to fall again in earnest this past week. Yesterday was truly a day for the record books. With 3.7 inches of rain by 10 p.m., the day brought the renewal of a pattern that wearies these damp bones. The mud, now fully rehydrated, is back to doing what it does best: providing an illusive perch for each footstep from livestock barn to hay barn to paddock. The hogs shift as well as they can out in the woods. New lambs are hitting the ground with a regularity that, however fleeting, lifts the gloom. The collards have turned aquatic, bouquets of green peeking out from an inch of water. Changes. Yet the cycles remain the same, repeating with no progression or regression.
This week I returned to my hometown for a quick visit. My stepmother is in the latter stages of dementia and now resides in a memory-care facility. We visited her, as my father, soon to be 92, does every afternoon. I sat close by, watching as he held her hand for at least two hours. Standing at his feet and then running around the room was 2-year-old Finn, his youngest grandson. The contrast was inescapable. As we headed out, my father commented on the many people he knew who call the facility home. It is a repository of memories, a curated museum of those he grew up and associated with over a long life, all save him now in a deeply sad twilight.
Earlier in the day, my father and I joined his oldest grandson for a bowl of chicken and sausage gumbo. My nephew is the son of my oldest sister, who passed away a few years ago. He has his own family and runs a flourishing landscape business.
The night before I had dinner with two other nephews. One has been married for a couple of years, and the other is to marry next month. More changes, and the hope of a younger generation, still insulated by decades from the diminishments of aging yet to come. Their talk over our meal and wine was, as it should be, of building and enjoying their lives.
Speaking at breakfast with two of my sisters brought me to a realization. Both of them have families of their own, yet now also care for our parents. With the responsibility they have taken on comes the daily accumulation of a debt for the rest of us siblings, who live far away, that we will ever be incapable of paying back. Charge it to the bill: one ongoing commitment of devotion and care from two loving daughters.
I stepped off the plane in Knoxville, only to be greeted by a crew of TSA agents who, though still unpaid, welcomed arriving passengers with a friendly hello. I walked outside to my truck, a light mist and wind blowing on my face. I drove the hour to the farm and entered the house to the smells of fried pork chops, mashed potatoes and gravy, sautéed carrots, and cherry-blueberry cobbler.
Just before we sat down to eat, Cindy hurried out to check on our very pregnant flock of sheep. She returned shortly to inform me that one ewe had just given birth to triplets. After supper, we trudged in the dark up to a remote pasture, the drizzle now abated. There, we gathered up the lambs, still damp in afterbirth, and carried them back to the barn. Their mother anxiously followed the tiny bleats and answered with her own throaty calls. More devotion, more care. The new, followed by the old, part of the ageless cycle of life and death and life again.
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Other news: Alas, the effort at the picture book of the 2019 garden and orchard is no more. Technical difficulties with WordPress were more than your Luddite scribe could manage using his mallet and gouge.
Reading this week: “A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment” (Henault and Mitchell, 2018)
