A Season of Normalcy

With the trees fully leafed out and the garden planted, with the dandelion days over and the solstice approaching, I like to think that we have arrived at the “normal” time of the year. In my mind, the way the world is during these long and light-filled days is the way the world should be. These are the normal times. The seasons that come before and after are just the prelude and postlude to these lovely green weeks of summer. But normal is a fragile state, easily disrupted. In this little world that I inhabit, a marauding deer, a hungry woodchuck, a microscopic fungus, a strong wind, a heavy rain, hail – any of these things can shatter my normal world. But until calamity hits, I revel in every normal hour and day granted to me.

The present wider world is not normal by any standard I hold to. It seems society is in constant turmoil as different factions strive for power. It seems that more and more people are “tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.” Old standards and norms have been cast aside. Many are without a moral anchor to hold them fast. As I sit in this quiet and isolated place I can see to some extent the way the world is going and it has its effects here to a degree, but I feel blessed, if not totally secure, to have some small measure of normalcy in my fragile world.

I have always loved the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. It is full of wisdom phrased in a way that especially appeals to me. As I look at the world and at the portion I inhabit, I say, as the Preacher said:

There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labor. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God. (2:24)

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. (12:13-14)

And so I report on what went on in my normal little world last week. It wasn’t as normal as I would like.

A sunrise last week.

In the wee hours of Monday morning we had our first Bat Encounter of the year. Stacey woke me up at 3:00 and said she heard a bat flying around. As usual, she hid under the covers and I got up to herd it outside. By the time I was out of bed, it had flown upstairs, so I had to go up and close all the doors to the bedrooms to get it to fly back downstairs. Once I’d accomplished that, I closed all the downstairs room’s doors and opened the front door. After swooping around the living room and dining room a few times, it flew right out the door and into the night. Then I had to go around the house and open all the doors I’d shut. The whole process took about fifteen minutes. In the morning I asked Hannah and Miriam if they’d heard me chasing a bat around the house in the middle of the night – neither one had. Tuesday morning, at 3:00 again, I was awakened by another (the same?) bat flying around downstairs. I got up and opened the front door and it flew right out. Maybe it’s the same bat and I’ve got it trained to use the front door now. I’m sure there will be more encounters as summer arrives. I like bats, but not in the house.

On Monday I began a batch of comfrey tea. It’s for my plants, not for me. I make it by cutting comfrey, which grows all over the yard and in the orchard, chopping it up, stuffing it in five-gallon buckets, adding some chopped nettles from my nettle patch and horsetails from across the road, filling the buckets with water, putting on lids, and then letting it sit for two or three weeks. The result is a foul smelling sludge that I strain and then use the liquid as a fertilizer. It smells really bad, but it’s a wonderful fertilizer and the plants love it.

Comfrey growing in the orchard.

Buckets of comfrey/nettle tea waiting to ferment.

Monday afternoon, seeing that rain was expected on Tuesday, I planted my pumpkins. I also planted the rest of the cabbages. The rain came as forecast and everything looked great. On Wednesday I planted my cucumbers, melons, and squash. That night it rained hard, which was perfect timing. Now all of the vegetables are planted and growing – onions, garlic, shallots, carrots, beets, spinach, peas, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, pumpkins, squash, melons, cucumbers, cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli. Now we wait and weed and water as needed and pray for a good harvest.

The cabbage patch.

Monday when I went down to do the chores, I found that the coop had been attacked. There were seven dead hens. Two of them were partially eaten, the rest were killed but not eaten at all. I thought from the way things looked that it was probably either a raccoon or a possum that did it. Monday night, after the chickens had gone to roost, Kurt and I went down and set a live trap inside the entrance hole to the coop and a motion detector. As we went down to the barn, I could see then that several hens had decided to sleep outside the coop, most likely because they were spooked from the previous night’s attack. Tuesday morning I went down to see how things were. There were black feathers all over the lawn, evidence that one of the outside sleepers had been killed. When I went inside the coop, there was a hen caught in the live trap that had tried to get back into the coop. She was pretty mad when I let her out. The motion detector never went off, probably because it was too far from the house.

Tragedy in the coop.

On Tuesday evening Kurt and I went down in the gloaming to set another trap. This time we used a larger trap that Kurt bought. It wouldn’t fit inside the doorway, so we set it outside, blocking the doorway and baited it with a sardine. We set the motion detector, this time within range of the house, and retired. At 5:00 on Wednesday morning, the motion detector went off. It woke Stacey, but I was sound asleep. She woke me and we dressed and went down in the predawn half-light to see what was going on. The trap was sprung and inside was an opossum (that’s the way I write it because it’s proper, but we actually say “a possum”). Later that morning, I took it way up into the woods, miles away, and let it go.

The culprit.

Not trusting that the opossum was the real or only culprit, we set the trap again on Wednesday and Thursday evening. We never caught anything else. We stopped setting the trap at that point, but I’m still closing the coop up at night, just in case.

We freeze-dried our first batch of eggs last week. It took about 24 hours to complete the whole process. They turned out great. Six dozen eggs became  two pounds of egg powder. The second batch we processed was watermelon and raspberries. The third was angel food cake chunks. It’s an interesting process and the resulting freeze-dried food is surprisingly delicious.

Trays of freeze-dried eggs.

Grinding them to powder.

Bagging the powdered eggs.

Freeze-dried watermelon and raspberries.

After a lot of rain midweek, I went out on Friday morning to walk the gardens and inspect the plants. The rain was a blessing. The plants looked good. However, I was dismayed to see that a deer had meandered through the orchard, my flowerbeds, and my vegetable garden. It ate all the leaves off my little Northern Spy apple tree. It walked right through the raised bed where my tiny carrots are growing. It stepped into the spinach bed and ate most it. Then it wandered through the long border, leaving footprints all along the way. I was glad it did not eat my lilies, one of the deer’s favorite foods. That day I sprayed deer repellent and it hasn’t been back since.

Deer tracks through my carrot bed.

I did a lot of work in the garden last week, some of it rather strenuous, all of it rewarding. I know of no other physical labor as satisfying as garden work. But my sixty-four year old body is not as capable as it once was. I’m usually pretty tired and sore at the end of a busy day. Back during orchard pruning time in early March, I messed up my shoulders sawing and clipping with my arms extended over my head. That never bothered me in years past, but this time it did. Now, weeks and weeks later, after seven or eight visits to my chiropractor, I’m almost back to normal. I guess I won’t be able to exert myself like that during pruning time anymore. I’ll have to find another way. Gardening is my main source of exercise – and it is pretty good exercise, too. I looked it up. Thirty to forty minutes of gardening can burn 300 calories. Raking, weeding, and trimming engage multiple muscle groups at once, which improves overall fitness. Gardening provides three types of exercise: endurance, flexibility, and strength. It’s also good mental therapy. I find weeding especially to be almost meditative. So, despite the aches and pains, I will keep on gardening as long as my aching aging body lets me. At the end of a hard day’s gardening I find myself saying half laughingly, but also seriously, that I can hardly wait for the Resurrection Day when my mortal and corruptible body will become immortal and incorruptible, no longer subject to pain, disease, or death. It’s a wonderful doctrine full of hope. What magnificent gardens I’ll be able to plant and tend then!

The long border.

Yesterday was about as perfect as a day in June can be. It was warm, but not hot, breezy but not windy, sunny but with big clouds to give some shade from time to time. I was out in the garden all day. The flowers were lovely. The birds were singing. I was happy to be part of it all. In the afternoon as I was walking back from the barn after doing the chores, I thought how, not so long ago, I was trudging through snow. Remembering that made me even happier that it is June and almost summer and snow is just a memory. It is true that tasting the bitter makes you appreciate the sweet. I wonder if I would love June less without February? Then, just as I’d reached the point in the day when I was too tired to do anything more, like a benediction, it rained. I went in and spent the rest of evening resting.

Irises at their peak.

Lovely little Siberian irises.

The first rose of the season.

I love the Sabbath. A day of rest is a gift and delight in so many ways. And early Sabbath mornings in June are especially delightful as the world around me is beautiful and peaceful and the earth seems at rest. This morning as I went down to let the chickens out and take my walk, everything was dripping with dew. The sun had just come up and was shining in the tops of the trees. As I came back to the house, I stopped to smell the night-blooming jasmine in its pot on the back porch stairs, still fragrant even though the night was gone. It was a good morning. I came in to get ready for church and listened to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, which made it even better. The final chorus, Dona Nobis Pacem, Give Us Peace, is glorious.

This morning.

My night-blooming jasmine.

We are back from church now. The bright morning has turned cloudy and it looks like rain is coming. That’s good. I’m resting from my labors in the garden and the rain can fall. The ride to church was more exciting than we wished as we almost hit a deer that jumped out right in front of us. Now we’re home. Lunch preparations are underway. The rest of the day is open to quiet resting, reading, napping, good things to relax the soul. Then a new week sits just ahead with all its latent promise and possibility and I’ll be refreshed and ready for it. Good Sabbath.