Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s May! It’s May!! I am writing to you from the faerie tea table in the garden. It’s a gloriously sunny day that almost (key word almost) makes me think I won’t have to use a snow shovel again for a minute. Thus begins the Great Vermont Planting Gamble—the rhubarb is up, the peach trees have already begun to blossom, would it hurt to sneak a tomato or two into the soil? Yes. The answer is yes. Putting tomatoes in now is like letting the chickens run loose while the coyote family in the hollow behind the barn is nursing a litter of pups. Who wants to live dangerously? I want to… but I plant lettuce and spinach instead.

I am sitting here in one layer—just a shirt and jeans—and the only wool in sight is on the back of a ewe scheduled to be shorn on Tuesday. The chickens are pecking through last year’s rotting leaves and feasting on worms. I have been enjoying their eggs (the chicken’s that is, not the worms’). They make a lovely breakfast mixed with wild ramps foraged in the woods and fresh dandelion greens that are as close as the front doorstep. The roosters are crowing, birds twittering (the barn swallows arrived on Wednesday!) and everywhere there are glad tidings of bug lust and amphibian honeymoons. Between all the fresh food and flirting, you’d think I was at a tequila bar in Boston’s back bay instead of here at the Land of Lost Plots.

I need to keep myself very quiet though. I’m hiding. I don’t want Gus and Otie to know I’m out here. Once they see me, they moo and complain in obnoxious tones of increasing frustration. They see no reason for me to be doing anything other than visiting them and scritching and scratching at all of their itchy places. They are big boys, now five years of age, and their itchy places are the size of chalkboards. I have taken a small garden rake and used it gently to scratch a wider area than my hands can manage. This makes their eyes roll back in their heads and their lips twitch as they extend their necks in funny spasms of bliss. Why should moments like this end without consternatious mooing? Their fur is shedding in big clumps that little birds take away as nesting material. Sometimes the boys will “scratch me back” with their 80-grit tongues and we will stand in a grooming pod—two of them getting less hairy, one of us getting so coated in dander, dust and hair that I cannot enter the house without stripping off in the mudroom first and shaking my clothes outside.

They make an embarrassing amount of noise when they know I am around but busy with other things that are not them. They are as imperious as nineteenth-century aristocrats ringing the parlour bell and bellowing for service. One of my neighbors has actually enquired what the noise is all about. “Are they dying? Starving? Have a broken leg?” she wants to know. “At what point should I come down and help or call the vet? I never do because I can hear you talking to them, so I know you are there. But it sounds like they are being murdered. I had no idea cows could be so loud!”

The truth is, they are just REALLY spoiled. They have an entire round bale of hay to themselves to eat, not to mention fresh green grass. Their trough of water is filled three times a day and never empties. They have mineral blocks and salt blocks, and they are in pristine health. They are just bored. They want to be brushed and petted and fed long bits of grass they cannot reach. They want to have their halters on and go for walks—dare I say “work”? They are smart creatures who are extremely social. They like to have a sense of purpose. And they have learned they can summon me whenever they want because I don’t want the neighbors disturbed. I know we live in Vermont and it’s unlikely that anyone is going to call the cops because “the cows are too loud,” like they do about barking dogs, but I am trying to be a good neighbor.

“No good can come of this,” says Prudence. “You are going to have to Ferberize these cows or we aren’t going to have a moment’s peace all summer.” She is referring to Dr. Ferber’s method of letting infants cry for longer and longer periods of time before being scraped lightly with a rake.

“This makes no sense to me. These Jerseys are stubborn creatures. The Ferber method is just going to make them persist longer and longer,” I say, “It’s best to just keep hiding from them as best I can.”

They have learned that I am home when my truck is in the driveway. They see me drive in and they bounce and gallop along the fenceline as ungainly as middle-aged men trying to contra dance with each other for the first time. Their bellies swing out to each side as they bump and stumble and grin, screeching to an ungainly halt and sticking their tongues up their noses in joyous anticipation of a cuddle. They are the most relentless of suitors whose dance moves are genuinely dangerous.

Amidst all the jolly noise is a palpable silence too—a silence I cannot stop hearing—that fills me with a sense of sorrow and the humble echoes of the Passage of Time. It is the sound of my neighbor’s dog NOT barking. She “crossed over the rainbow bridge” last week and it hurts my heart every time I realize I will never hear her bark again.

Iris loved to bark. She barked as if it was her job (It was!) and she put in a lot of overtime. She was the great Pyrenees I have mentioned in previous blogs. She was like having a pet polar bear roaming the neighborhood. She kept the coyotes at bay, literally, by baying at them night and day. Remember the time she got loose and came to find me hiding naked in the outdoor tub after I accidentally dumped an entire cart of cow manure on myself and decided to rinse off outside? (This was a blog a few years back.) I heard the teenagers in her house coming over to catch her and I lay flat on my back in the tub, trying to be invisible, but Iris would not leave the tub and a teenager came over to grab her and then he and I were both suddenly screaming face to face in horror. The poor guy is probably still having nightmares! He was just valiantly dragging her home when two of my own damn Jack Russells came tottering out of the house and decided, despite their age, hearing loss, heart conditions and the fact that one of them was missing a leg, they could take on a hundred-pound mountain dog in her prime. So instead of slinking into the house to get dressed, I found myself sprinting naked towards the nearest dog fight. Good times. Good times.

All those dogs are gone now. Probably in a heavenly pub somewhere, having pints of rainbow stew and laughing about all the mischief they caused.

I miss them.

I kind of miss Winter too.

Spring is great, don’t get me wrong, but Winter feels like a grief I am not quite ready to shed. I like the cold, the isolation, the sense of “going inward” to contemplate, to mourn, release, and rest. Spring is so “outward, onward, upward,” that it feels a little exhausting too.

There is an ache that comes with every Transition. We pause, hung in an awkward balance, unable to plant anything but the smallest and hardiest of seeds right now. Old leaves need to be raked, the soil prepared. There is a pain that comes with leaving old Loves that must remain Unfinished, even as new loves keep arriving daily. Our emotions, like our days, begin with sunshine at breakfast, sleet at noon, barefoot optimism by 4:pm and end by a woodstove by nightfall. Winter needs its closing ceremonies. But, as Frost says “Ah, when to the heart of man/was it ever less than a treason/To go with the drift of things,/And bow and accept the end/Of a love or a season?”

There are barks we shall hear no more, especially over All THAT MOOING!!!

Keep Mending my Dear Ones!

I love you Sew Much!

Yours aye,

Nancy