Christmas is always a time for reflection and a chance to indulge in a bit of melancholy.

But on a farm, chores still get done. So a couple of hours ago I got started while it was still dark.

This morning’s chores began with a cup of coffee, a list, a Christmas plate of blueberry pancakes with Steen’s syrup, and then I was out the door. Some goodies from the kitchen slop pail for the pigs in one hand and five gallons of old walnuts in the other. I headed first to the paddock in the woods to feed the new pigs.

Nineteen degrees this morning and they are burrowed deep in an old round bale of hay. A call or two and they stick their heads out. I bang the pail and they scurry to the trough, only about forty pounds each, yet they still put away an impressive amount of food. Emptying the food and walnuts into the trough, I break the water on their water tank, head out of the paddock and over to the barn.

All creatures are up this morning. The chickens thud off of their roost and into the run. The ducks are quacking incessantly and the garden hog is barking and running up and down his fence line. Above it all is the bleating of a barn load of sheep desperate to remind me they are hungry. Gradually, as I feed, the cacophony fades to just the sheep. And they grow quiet as I give them some grain and fresh hay.

At the front of the barn, I pause to look out at the scene. Smoke drifts up in the early dawn from a half dozen homes in the valley. The lights come on in the kitchen of Adrienne’s home down the hill. Where I shared a mug of gluhwein and dinner with her and her family on last night’s Christmas Eve.

The cistern is frozen over to a depth of a few inches. Using a hand sledge I bust up the ice and fill the various watering pails, sloshing the icy water on my pants. As I distribute where needed around the barnyard, I’m in a contemplative mood. Aware that my family is gathered together in my hometown and my partner is with her family in Florida.

Choices we make define our lives and often take years to become evident. This fact and this day remind me of bits of a favorite Christmas poem by Robert Louis Stevenson.

His Christmas at Sea, a poem of a man seeing but unable to reach the parents he left behind.

…. Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea; And O the wicked fool I seemed in every kind of way, to be here hauling frozen ropes on blessed Christmas Day.

…. And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me, as they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea; but all I could think of, in the darkness and the cold, was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

Haul your ropes and have a merry Christmas,

Brian