Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [138]
We move off the path and ease downhill into the waist-high grasses. A few weeks ago and I would be stirring up a steady click and whir of fleeing insects—now there is just the occasional grasshopper and a smattering of small ground moths. With each step I’m knocking loose seeds and husks—several of them find their way into my socks. This is an interesting corner of the farm—old overgrown grassland pasture rounding off and rolling steeply into patchwork groves. They shelter a valley where centuries of spring runoff have cut two sharp draws that converge to run in a single ravine westward. The bottomland trees are gnarled and fat, and twisted in mysterious ways, and they grow overlooking sharp banks and sinuous trenches. One is so unusually configured with fat low-hanging limbs and knotholes that Amy has dubbed it her Magic Tree.
Here in the old pasture, there are a few young pine trees—all under six feet and planted by my mother-in-law and the owners previous to her—but mostly the open space is being taken over by box elders. Right at the tree line I come to the old barbed-wire fence. Much of it is still in decent shape—the galvanized wire loose from the posts here and there, and crushed by fallen trees in a couple of spots, but it hasn’t gone rusty, and it wouldn’t take much fixing. Anneliese and I have talked of grazing sheep out here, or getting some beef cows. Fixing this old fence and putting up new is on our wish list for next year. I follow the fence line for a while and find a couple of spots where the wire has been swallowed by the trees, grown deep inside the wood, and it hits me how much easier it is to speak of fixing fence than it actually will be to accomplish the task. I wonder too about clearing all those box elders, and if we’ll have to fence the pine seedlings in if we hope for them to survive the cattle.
I cross the fence and go into the trees now, careful to hold the branches clear as I push through. Only ten feet into the canopy the feel of the place changes. Out in the field there was a sense of sweep and contour—in here with nothing but leaf scrap covering the ground between the big-trunked trees, I get that secret hideout feeling, the same little tingle low in the gut that I got when Ricky and I would hide out in the canary grass along Beaver Creek Road. Down here among the big trees with the sky closed mostly out, things are a gray shade of brown, so when I spot a cluster of brilliant red berries it is like a gift, and I stop to study them, kneeling down and tipping forward so that Jane might see. I talk to her quietly, reveling in the joy of being out on the skin of this rough earth, heads in the cool atmosphere of infinity, and yet able to speak so quietly and be heard. Jane wraps both little fists around the aluminum frame and amuses herself by chewing the nylon. I hike back out into the open and upward, and when I reach the ridge she is still champing happily away. I can see her chubby little arm hanging over the edge of the pack, bouncing in time to the pace we are keeping. I put my hand back over my shoulder, palm up. I see the little hand reaching now, slowly, until she lays her teensy paw in mine, then clasps her fingers around my thumb, and I look to the blue sky and think a silent Thank you.
Anneliese and Amy have gone to the neighbors to get a pickup load of straw for mulch, and I get a little zoom as I always do when I see my wife driving the pickup truck. She sets to digging potatoes in the garden, and I head for the office. Amy is unloading the straw, and Jane is happily struggling to all fours in the garden dirt as the chickens scratch and peck around her. Maple leaves are petaling down, and Jane smashes one in her fist, then shoves it in her mouth. Anneliese is beautiful with a touch of color in her cheekbones, but she also looks tired. I like to make jokes and goof on my own incompetence, but the truth is, this year has stretched