September Sketches
A joyful life
A Cloudless Sulphur floats near my rocking chair, seeking last-of-the-season nectar in the blossoms of the weigela at the side of the front porch. For a few seconds the butterfly stays busy among the flowers, without apparent movement or effort. It then rises and drifts out of sight, again with no visible effort, and is gone. Life for the butterfly seems in this moment to be a perfect marriage of gaiety and purpose.
The tree and the highway
The sound is unmistakable: a large tree falling. It falls slowly enough to give me time to leave off weeding in the hoop-house, rush outside, and watch it drop and settle, the upper limbs waving a long, quivering final goodbye. From a quarter-mile away, across the outer corral and two pastures, I can see its bulk blocking the highway that winds through our valley. It has fallen from the other side, across the two lanes and onto our lower fence.
The tree blocks the road for a couple of hours, giving all the neighbors a chance to gather, shake our heads, and wonder at the immensity of a two-centuries-old white oak. The upper branches have taken out thirty feet of fenceline, promising me several days of chainsaw work and fence repair in the future.
Dangers of a repaved road
In those days after the tree fell, our road, all ten miles of it from the interstate to Paint Rock, got dressed up in a new coat of asphalt. The road crew filled in the significant potholes that had served to alert, day and night, all who live along the road to oncoming traffic. That smooth black surface was flawless, which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse: it invited drivers to accelerate their speed. Sure enough, three weeks ago, as we sat enjoying our evening coffee, we heard the screech of sudden braking, followed a few minutes later by the sirens of every emergency vehicle within a twenty-mile radius—the sounds of which in our quiet valley can be heard long minutes before they arrive at their destination.
Another backup of traffic on our little road, this time for an hour or more; another chance for locals to gather, this time somberly, as they waited for one of our nearest neighbors to be extracted from her car. Like many of us, she lives on a curve. She was broadsided as she pulled out of her gravel driveway at the north end of our hayfield. Eventually the emergency personnel drove her by ambulance the mile and a half to the parking lot of Cedar Fork Baptist Church, where she was then airlifted to the university hospital an hour away. She is still in the hospital, anticipating a long period of recovery.
Fall arrives
The last hog from the summer crop loaded easily into the trailer on a warm September evening. The next morning I opened the gate from the working chute and slid open the back door to the trailer, and two hundred-plus-pound lambs walked in of their own volition, joining the hog for the short drive to the processor. We called for the weights the following day. The hog dressed out at 275 pounds, and the hanging weights of the lambs were 55 and 66 pounds, all within our target ranges.
Loading livestock for the slaughter always elicits in me a moment of introspection. We spend a lot of time with these animals, building trust as we care for them until the inevitable harvest. That I am introspective is not meant to be maudlin, nor is it an invitation to that all-too-common public hand-wringing of the virtuous. The process is what it is, and I’m comfortable with it. I am glad that our animals trust me enough to walk quietly and unstressed into the trailer. As Wendell Berry writes in one of his poems, “… life renews itself in this world, continuing through death after death.” Here, on this farm, the meat is returned from the processor, customers arrive, return home, feed their families and friends, and then we start again.
A couple of days later a trailer pulls up the drive. Our old “hire the Farm Kid” kid arrives with his father and unloads another batch of feeder pigs. The four healthy weanlings immediately begun snuffling through the mound of fresh hay in the hog paddock. Later, after my coffee time spent watching the Cloudless Sulphur among the weigela blossoms, I go out to do my evening chores and find that the piglets have already escaped. This time, unlike the three little pigs in Kayaking with Lambs, they are easily enticed back home and more firmly secured.
………………………………………………………..
Reading currently: Dominion (T. Holland), Sabbath 2016 (W. Berry), The Life of Andrew Jackson (M. James).
………………………………………………………..
Note: That Bezos fellow must really want to get to Mars. He is now selling my FPR book, Kayaking with Lambs, for $13.60 (normally $22). I’d suggest, without being biased, that this continues to be a good time to buy a copy or three.