 |
| The woodland and the 'Happy Crapper' |
On the train again.
Riding by green pasture, dark woodlands as yet bare of leaves. Snow
on the black lobes of the mountains. Low gray clouds sweeping brooms
of rain. Spring heralded by the eruption of yellow: daffodils, cover
crop over a flat field, thick flowers of gorse in the hedgerows.
Sheep and their lambs stumble slide and run from the carriages
clattering passage. A hundred geese take flight from a bare field,
white-banded tails.
We have spent the
week at a small croft, working in the rain and cold, sunshine, mixed
thick clouds. The small humid poly-tunnel full of plant starts, and
salad greens, beets, cilantro. Outside, the cool spring,
wintered-over kale, garden beds prepared and waiting in the ground. I
built a gate for a net-covered berry patch, and a raised bed out of
junk lumber which we filled with manure.
A lot of our time we
spent shoveling shit in the rain. A large pile of manure (well
composted) was delivered by a farmer neighbor. We loaded it into
wheelbarrows and dispensed it to various vegetable beds and compost
piles around the woodland plot. Mostly light spring rain, sometimes a
little heavier; we wore our raincoats, and worked up a heat in our
muscles.
We shoveled shit in
the rain and ate wild plants off the woodland floor. Ground elder and
wild garlic leaves, miner’s lettuce. These things in the urban mind
are the height of poverty. From that perspective, they sound awful on
their face. But in our days there was only contentment –
gratification of accomplishing work, that goes to food from this
place; contact with the place, the mind of the weather, the sight of
the far water, the lambs asleep in pasture, the bursting yellow
flowers, the smells of the fecund ground and the woodland under rain,
feel of the soil in the hand. Our hobbit-like breaks for tea and
snacks beside the wood stove, in a kitchen redolent with baking
bread, getting warm. Time for good conversation with our hosts who
make their life here, inside an old stone house, that has held how
many years of words. In this kind of life, for us, there are hardly
any costs, almost pure benefit. Living this way, even for a week,
provides the evidence, our feeling of being at home, and the
excitement we feel contemplating a similar relationship to our own
place, wherever we may find it.
No comments:
Post a Comment