Tag Archives: Deirdre Heekin

Soon It Will All Be Over

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Deep in the winter mud season it is hard to see through to the other side, where spring rules. Could we but string two intimate days with the sun, no rain, and a warming wind, then I’m sure my mood would lift. But each day, this day, I slog. I slog out to the barn to feed the sheep. I slog to the chicken coop. I slosh and slog to feed the pigs, raising with each step a black-brown slurry that splatters my newly laundered Carhartts. Looking down with disgust, I turn to find something convenient to kick, and sink ankle deep into the mire.

I stomp back to the farmhouse to change my clothes. Once inside, I do a compulsive check of the weather website. I shout upstairs to Cindy, “It’s going to be cloudy and rainy today.” “Yeah, I’m looking out the window,” she replies to the idiot who seeks written confirmation of the obvious.

Having failed to receive appropriate commiseration, I review my impressively detailed to-do list. It doesn’t take much searching to find an excuse to do nothing. Listed on the page are a multitude of tasks related to mud season … none of which can be completed because it is mud season. We need to have a dump truck of fill dirt delivered to redirect rain runoff from pooling in the inner corral, but the owner of the truck wants a guarantee he won’t get stuck in the mud. Which means that maybe in July, when the sludge of winter is a dim memory, as I trudge through my rounds cursing the heat and drought of summer, he will show up.

Then, there is the large pile of gravel to be distributed where the sheep traverse gates and buildings, areas where the mud is deepest. Yet the tractor in this season slips and slides with alarming imprecision as I navigate the entryways. The front tires sink deep into the mud when I attempt to pick up the heavy load of gravel. Another task that must wait for summer (when I’m sure I will have all the time in the world).

Which reminds me of an essay I wrote in third grade:

“I just finished my last math test and now am taking my last writing test. Things don’t look very good right now. But soon it will all be over, and I can run and jump and fish and play.”

I like that kid, I think. He certainly had his priorities straight.

I head back outside to work in the hoop house. At the back of the barnyard, through various muck-laden gateways, the hoop house in winter is a delight, both warmish and dry. What water there is comes from a drip tape that irrigates the rows in a controlled fashion. Unless, that is, one of the tapes breaks. That’s when you open the door to find that your well-organized watering overnight, for the past eight hours, has created a muddy, mucky mess that mirrors the world outside. Sadly and not surprisingly, on this day, this is what the open door reveals.

Soon it will all be over, then I can run and jump….

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Reading this weekend: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (D. Sayers). And rereading, The Unlikely Vineyard: the education of a farmer and her quest for terroir (D. Heekin).

A Drive on New Year’s Day

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A few raised beds

Raised beds in winter

Whitehorse is singing about “busting unions in Wisconsin, drinking mojitos by the pool” out of my truck speaker as I pass the second ugliest house south of the river in Roane County, Tennessee (random brick color and nary a scrap of landscaping). I’m driving over to some good friends’ house to pick up two more large wooden boxes to use as raised beds for our gardens.

Beyond their small farm is a pseudo-Blackberry Farm resort for the religiously devout. To get there, count either four Rebel flags down on the right or five farms with fighting cocks, depending upon how you measure distance. One of those houses belongs to our former farrier. On the 10-acre plot sit a hundred or more huts, roosters staked to each one. Staked to keep them from killing each other before their designated time.

In Harriman, on the far end of Roane, is a store where you can buy the razors to attach to the cocks’ spurs. They’re either a quaint rural item or something to horrify your inner Peter Singer, all depending on what century your sensibilities respond to. The store is also the best source for anything needed in a homestead household, so we tend to overlook any failure to adapt to the kinder, gentler modern mores — a moral failing on our part, no doubt.

After picking up the boxes and a short visit, I take a long looping pass back through our end of the county and the cost of the recent rains adds up. The toll is modest damage compared to other parts of the country, but no less dear to the person whose home access across a creek has been washed away in the floods. Get used to it, I think, because climate change is gonna bite you where it hurts, and often.

Turning down Salem Valley I smile as I pass the remains of an old satellite dish. One fine Sunday I watched as a grown man blasted it beyond repair with buckshot. Shell after shell pumped into the dish as I drove cautiously past, making me wonder what the TV had done to piss him off so royally.

That same Sunday, ‘round the bend, I spied a woman in leather miniskirt and pink fluffy sweater outside her church. She had a bible bigger than her head in one hand and a phone planted against her ear in the other. She stood out for many reasons on that cold morning.  But the Whitehorse in me wanted to imagine the man shot his satellite dish over her lost love: “Annie Lu, Annie Lu, won’t you save me from you.”

A couple of ridge loops later and the ugliest house south of the river, Roane County, Tennessee, comes into view (black and white brick, no landscaping and a blue mansard roof, which sounds way better in print than in reality). I get a giddy pleasure out of contemplating the sheer awfulness of that structure each time I pass it. I would go out of my way, and do often, just to gaze upon it. Who built it and who lives there? And if architecture shapes the soul, then what Dorian Gray-esque artwork lurks in the attic?

I pull back onto our gravel drive and arrive home to discover a friend has gifted me four pounds of elderberries, enough to make six bottles of wine. A good start to 2016.

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Reading this weekend: An Unlikely Vineyard: the education of a farmer and her quest for terroir by Deirdre Heekin