Lambsquarters (3 page)

We spent all our free fall weekends here, driving the hundred miles from Lake Simcoe where Thomas worked as a locum in a general practice until the move. We packed our car each weekend with some comfort to add to the house. A two-dollar chair, a three-dollar cupboard. Pieces picked up at wreckers or auctions. Salvage from garbage piles and dumps. We were scavengers and finders, and I spent my weekdays designing, scheming, dreaming and planning, stripping my finds, my treasures. Re-covering and painting, varnishing and polishing. Turning early straw into gold. Then finally the solstice arrived, the season shifted and winter fell. In sheets of ice and blankets of snow, we packed the last load in the car, filled the rented truck with our eclectic chattels and braved the storm.

Snow swirled through the fields as we arrived. It filled the lane and buried the doorways. Our Dutch-born neighbour tractored in, scraped a path for our truck with astounding speed. We dubbed him
de vliegende Hollander—the
flying Dutchman.

So little work had been done. The firms we hired
to heat and plumb, to wire and stabilize all blamed each other for their truancy: until the cement floor was poured there could be no furnace; without heat the cement wouldn’t cure. And it went on. So we found ourselves in January with little heat, no hot water, few lights. The tradesmen would drop in, leave their tools and not return for a week at a time. I wore more and more wool and scraped away alone at my endless walls, bravely trying to avoid despair during the long days as Thomas set up his practice in Murphy’s Mill. Many days I did not succeed.

WE AWOKE
to the cold each morning. Thomas would light the stove before leaving for town. His practice was instantly busy; the whole neighbourhood became patients. And I scraped and plastered, scrubbed and painted, demolished and rebuilt. I was contained in these walls I wanted to love. I had no transportation. I had no friends. And there was nowhere I could sit for a moment with my tea or my book and not be overwhelmed by the work to be done.

IT WAS DIFFICULT
to get clean. Thomas showered at the hospital, and sent out his shirts. There was no laundry in town, but the dry-cleaning woman did them herself. I was stuck. Like the pioneers before me, I had only the water I could heat and the vessels I could find to bathe in. The reservoir in the woodstove filled a plastic
baby bath to sit in, a bucket for my feet, and saucepans for my hands, one on each side. Too much of me was exposed to the wind from unstormed windows, leaky doors. And getting out was awkward. And as cold as church.

MONTHS PASSED BEFORE WATER RAN
hot in the taps, before the iron bath was heaved up the stairs, before the sinks went in and heat blew through virgin pipes. Workmen came and went, intruded on my space or left me waiting desperately for their help, neither state a comfort. They mocked my plastering, questioned my judgment, laughed at my mistakes. The work took its toll, though I was young and strong.

I learned to focus. To home in on detail. To complete one small task after another. To learn my farmhouse board by board, wall by wall, window by window until I could venture out beyond its doors and begin to work the land around it.

FARMYARD

THAT SPRING, BEFORE
the first snowdrop was planted, before the crocus spread and the scilla grew its six heads, I emerged from the house to mud, weeds and flaws throughout the demesne. In front of the house was a ploughed mess oozing earthworms and snails, sprouting dandelions and burdock, which for years I hopefully mistook for rhubarb.

Fences I’d stared through like windows in the fall suddenly caught my eye. They were rough and rusting, too frail to hold anything out, keep anything in. Raspberries in the back bred twitch grass with roots reaching the next township. Water from everywhere poured into the basement; its new concrete floor had been carelessly installed with the drain at the high point. We seemed to hold the headwaters of a whole river system in our dank cellar.

The neighbour advised permanent pasture for the
front, and though I was skeptical at first, I now perceive its merits. The mix of legume and grass, clover and fescue, timothy and rye thrive together when the weather is fair, but divide the responsibility to be green when it’s not. Some plants suffer in drought but relish the floods, while others wither with insects but fight off the weeds.

The area challenged my rake and hoe. Clods from the plough lay furrowed like forks in a drawer. Hillocks of hardpan were sprinkled with stone. I did get through it, arms aching and filthy. I hacked and I trampled, smoothed and spread, then set my pace, seed bag slung over my shoulder, walking that walk I’d seen only in a Millet painting of a peasant seeding the land. I found my rhythm.

Green grew, and grows, mixed with all the flowers that flew in at the time and have since.
Taraxacum officinale
, the lowly dandelion, competed with newly feathered goldfinches for brightness on the ground, and white clover globes shone through the green like miniature bulbs of light. Purple charlies crept.

Perennials dotted the edges. Plants I had no names for then, but slowly learned to read, to tend, to anticipate from year to year. When the grass grew I cut around them, leaving clumps on the lawn like relief on a painting, like lumps in gravy, sadly neglected flowers, left to live by their wits. I wonder how many I missed, clipped with the grass and lost forever in the
days before order was established and beauty could be cultivated.

I tackled the raspberries growing in a tangle behind the house. Just a couple of rows filled with leaves, trellised on grass, rusting away from neglect. It took gloves and boots, thick denim and canvas to enter their slum. Wool sweaters stuck to the canes like fleece to barbed wire, and thorns penetrated every soft surface. The canes thwacked my face when I got them loose, and scraped my wrists, the only flesh exposed. I looked like the loser in a cat fight when it was over and the patch was no winner. With great spaces of void, then massed clumps of cane, the patch was a wild mess that spring.

I learned about speed. About the slow pace of late spring, when work was delayed by rain and mud, when the ground could not be worked or even traversed. Then the sudden sun and the rush to plant, to dig out the clods and rake and scatter in a fury, the soil drying by the minute, threatening to harden to stone. Work unceasing, bones weary at the end of long light-filled days, muscles stiffening, skin browning, my face weathering and taking on the look of the land itself, early hints of furrows to come.

We planted little at first. A few potatoes, bought from a bin at the general store in Alderney, and peas, beans, carrots and lettuce. They paralleled the raspberries in sickly rows, shadowed by the giant maple to the west. I learned from books or neighbours’ nudges:
soak the beans overnight; cut the potatoes with three eyes in each piece for planting; use apple tree prunings to support the peas; sow lettuce every two weeks.

Though our crop grew slowly, our pasture jumped. Waves of orchard grass beyond the sagging fence headed up too soon. The timothy lagged behind, and the thistle and burdock awaited their chance, hovering at the fencerow, intent to invade. The pasture was out of control in a flash, beyond the level we could mow or maintain, and we were not ready for livestock of our own to chew it into submission.

The neighbour brought cattle, steers and heifers, I believe. Crossed Hereford on Holstein, black with white faces, roast beef on the hoof. They lapped sheaves of grass with raspy tongues, cut the field into tussock and turf. They ruminated at dusk, lowed at night, high-kicked at dawn, frisky for another day of grazing away from home. In moonlight their faces shone from the field like disembodied ghosts, their jaws circling, their eyes half-closed in bovine thought. They brought manure and flies, great plops of cow pies, and I found these cattlebeasts immense and frightening, their playful curiosity overshadowed by their drooling tongues, their manure-flicking tails, their great cleft hoofs.

They spurred us to clean out the barn and find flocks of our own. We filled truckloads with rubbish, fed bonfires with junk, forked barrows full of dung from decades of stock. Board by board we heaved and
sorted, cutting our bare arms on wire and mesh, bruising our bodies with trips over stanchions, with wrenching square nails from their homes in thick beams. I coated rusty steel with bright white and painted the barn doors red from my childhood dreams, where all barns glowed red and white. We discovered the windows, scraped off the grime, replaced the lights and illuminated even more debris. Rolling up our sleeves we kept digging and ripping, dragging and hauling until we had a space, some pens, some possibility of use.

In our early days we had travelled through Scotland, Ireland and Greece. We had swept spots of moor clean of droppings for our tent, heard the odd bleating of a sleeping lamb, the snore of its dam, the rustle of fleecy bodies shifting and succumbing to sleep. Sheep entered our dreams then and we had stored them away, fluffy gauze, in woolen moments of meditation. They were clouds, drifting between rational thoughts, but they surfaced now as solid matter, as the text to write a life on.

We put the word out. We wanted sheep.

BUS RECRUITS