In the Dark of the Year

I just went down to get an early morning cup of coffee, and this was the view that greeted me from the kitchen window. No matter what kind of rotten, sad, grumpy or grinchy side of the bed I might wake up on, the God of wonder can yank me to the other side in a heartbeat.

A New Year to Celebrate

New Year's Eve. That traditional time to remember, to check out the highlights, laugh over the spilled-milk goofs, cherish the tender moments. And then we begin celebrating the coming new year. Frankly, I think we use it mostly as an excuse to have a good time. Other than the dangers inherent in drunk driving, I'm all for celebrating for celebrating's sake. We need it.

There's not a lot to cheer about. A doubtful, dangerous, destructive war waged under the most spurious of circumstances. 40,000 babies dying every day from hunger and its deadly companion ailments. A consumer-based "civilization" that threatens to plow through the last of the Earth's precious resources with hardly a nod to its own culpability. No wonder we tend to grab for the nearest alcoholic beverage before we can make merry. How else could we possibly face the truth of the mess we've managed to make in our own nest?

Given that gloomy reality, you might wonder why I think celebrating is a good idea. I rejoice that, as long as we're still hanging around as a species, there's hope. Hope that we might look backward some New Year's Eve with a sober, unflinching eye and decide to make some real changes in the months ahead. To live as if the Earth mattered, as if we aren't disconnected from those starving children, the poisoned water, the filthy air. What if we decided to figure out what we truly need, and buy only those items next year? What if we committed to producing half the trash we did last year, personally? What if we all gave Christmas gifts of a heifer, or a tree, or a year's worth of breakfast for an AIDS orphan? What if we awakened to the fact that food doesn't have to be locked up?

Sounds radical, I know. It will take radical to bail us out at this late date. But radical doesn't mean impossible, and it's in that wee little difference that my hope lies. So grab a noise-maker, strap on a silly hat and have some fun, knowing that next year could make all the difference in the world.

In the bleak mid-winter

For those of you who don't know the hymn "In the bleak mid-winter", it's worth researching. It's a haunting, lovely Christmas carol, vying for my favorate rating with "And every stone shall cry".

Ah, Christmastide.

I've morphed into something of a Scrooge over the past fifteen years or so when it comes to the celebration of Jesus' birth. Here in the convent our traditional practices ran along the lines of let's-see-how-much-we-can-possibly-cram-into-two-days. I think we're now easing up on that, but the hectic preparations, the long hours and scant rest of Christmas have taken their toll. I've developed a Grinchy heart.

It doesn't help much that the daylight hours have shrunk to about nine. Brewster is as close to the Arctic Circle as I can bear. Our lovely December snow has been rained down into a few dirty patches of ice. Everything is either gray or brown. There's mud everywhere. Waking the ducks up in the morning now takes nearly forty-five minutes. Drag the hoses from the pantry to the back porch. Fill the pools. Remove yesterday's duck leavings from the porch. Uncover the hay and schlepp it around to all three duck-house areas to provide a safer, cleaner roost for the coming night. Feed them. Crawl into the Triplets' house to reconnect the light they managed to pull down again. Empty the outside hose and drag the inside one back to the pantry. I usually love this work, but in these darkened days it is naked drudgery.

The only fun part is looking for an egg or two. Another duck is laying, probably Petra, and searching the tell-tale "nesting holes" in the hay brings back a touch of my childhood Christmas wonder. Will there be a surprise this morning?

I know this is the heart of the Christmas story — finding a gift in the hay of the animal house. And against all reason and hope, there it is. A tiny spark of life. A promise. A possibility.

I have to remind myself several times a day that winter is not only the season of my discontent, it is also the Earth's time for transformation, when everything appears to be hopeless but big changes are afoot. Those precious few reminders are all we get to keep us plodding along through the mud. That and a huge amount of trust in the wisdom of the Universe.

Here's to gifts and trust and surviving the bleak mid-winter.

EGGS!

FINALLY!! After weeks of checking the nesting boxes, we have our first eggs! We're lucky that either Macrina or Petra (they don't sign their work, so who knows) used the boxes so carefully made for this purpose. After all, every night it's a not-very-friendly race between Bernie and Basil to see who gets which nesting box to sleep in. The girls wait out the war; eventually one or the other takes the third box. I don't see this part, so I assume the odd duck out just snuggles down somewhere nearer the warm light bulb. Smart duck.

Sadly, Simon dispatched our smallest (and clearly female) duck from this life a few weeks ago. Slave to those old murderous genes, he caught her in the open field, and she was too small to fly away. She came down with a nasty cold early in her life, and spent several days in the cat carrier in my bathroom. I hoped that filling the room with warm steam would help her breath more easily. Miraculously she made it, though she was clearly way behind in her development. Nature — hard at work maintaining sturdy stock.

That left Teresa, whom we've been calling Terry, thinking s/he might be a drake. It's still up for grabs, but we got two more females, half-sisters to her/him, and they are the same size — a major gender-determining factor. All three of them are white, like Bernie. Maybe we're going to luck out after all and the Triplets of Belleville will join Macrina and Petra on the egg production line when they mature.

We're lucky to have found these eggs for another reason. Muscovy ducks are famous (or infamous) for depositing eggs anywhere but a nesting box: a pile of leaves, any grassy area, under the bushes ... so these may not actually be their first eggs. But we're going to hang on to that belief anyway.

It's so amazing. Years of buying eggs at the grocery store, and I never marveled at what I was doing or what I was getting. Now I pick up a "free" egg in the back yard, rather nasty-looking until cleaned up, and am just blown away by the miracle of it. How sad that with the onslaught (an apt choice of word) of factory farming, we consumers lost all sense of the mystery that drives energy exchange. Eggs are good, but when we eat what is produced by "our" ducks — after watching them grow up, traipsing (or flying) around the property, learning their routines and watching them establish relationship with each other — well, that makes a difference in my consciousness. I'm deeply aware that eggs, though plentiful, are still miraculous.

Only humans could (and did) dream up the idea to start charging money for the natural gifts of creation. Only humans could (and did) set up factories that had to squelch their workers' ability to see birth, life and death as miraculous in order to treat the animals and plants in ways that would enable huge profit-centered production. Oh, I know we can't all set up mini-farms in our back yards; we know how very, very fortunate we are to have access to the land that allows us to do that. But we consumers have lots of power; we could stop supporting factory farming, and start encouraging local farmers again.

We've been lulled into believing that factory farming provides cheap food. That couldn't be more wrong, especially when we consider the cost to the Earth and all her living systems. Big business marketing also purports to provide healthy food from its mega-system, but that is wrong, too. Mass production demands a whole array of drugs and chemicals to keep its "products" going, and our bodies don't need, nor can they handle, that kind of assault.

So, yes, when we pick up fresh, organic eggs just out back, it is a miracle — and a precious gift.

Nap time

The pressure's on: the first frost is looming, and the garden needs to be put to bed for its long winter's nap. Move the greens to the greenhouse or into the seed rooms on the second floor; mulch the strawberries, shore up the fences, harvest all the last-minute stragglers, transplant some herbs and harvest the rest, enlarge the kitchen garden, move the lilac and azalea, cut back the peony leaves and stems. No need to bother cutting back the hosta; the deer have kindly done that for us all summer long. Now no self-respecting slug would come near them for their long winter's nap.

We didn't get it all done. And by sundown yesterday three of us were walking like we'd celebrated our centenaries several years ago. Shoveling rocks and moving big pots full of wet dirt and cold-sensitive plants will do that to a spine.

But, oh, what satisfying work it was, painful backs notwithstanding. Things look almost too trim, now that most of the wild greenness is gone. The neat raised beds are obvious again, the mad profusion of sweet potato vines and marigolds gone to compost. Even underground must look different to the voles. I can hear them now, "Hey ... what happened to those yams??" Sorry guys, they're safely tucked into boxes in the basement for our winter consumption. You should have planted your own.

It seems only days ago that we were madly trying to get things planted, that there was no Duck Lane or Duckville Manor, that the trees were still bare and the days too cold to get the peas into the ground. And here we are again, winter lurking around the corner. Soon we'll be collecting maple sap and filling the house with the sweet smell of class A syrup.

Spring leaps into summer, which passes in an eye-blink, and there's never enough time to be bored by autumn colors before the first snow, which heralds the impending mapling season that hints of spring. I can still feel March's subtle disappointment that I hadn't tired of snow before it was gone.

I needn't have worried. It snowed today.