Lambsquarters (31 page)

Elsewhere on the farm the boundary fences contain. There are no gates for egress, for escape. The fences form solid penning, connecting and dividing neighbours. They haven’t always held. The pig who arrived at the back door on Easter Sunday, snuffling and snorting and frightening me before I figured out who it could be, had rooted her way round the rails
edging the swamp, crashed one down, lifted another and followed the path to the house. The Easter pig.

Cattle broke through the wire into the Hayfield, ate some of the crop and trampled more. A Jersey bull set up camp on the front lawn for a whole spring day before I could discover who owned it. Goats sail over the top of any kind of fence, are not containable and are not missed. And occasionally a few of my sheep have gone astray through a weak fence and grazed their way to the neighbour’s grass.

In winter every fence has its up point, its area prone to snow, which fills in until the posts are gone, the rails buried and the fence a mere memory of pales past. Skis fly over top with nothing to stop them; the property goes on forever. But by spring, when the ground is firming up, the rails lean forward through tangle and brush, angling awkwardly over and down, and the climb becomes difficult. The kids never complained. My daughter was always an expert scrambler; my son grew so tall he could almost step over. But I begged for a stile, cajoled for a stile, and finally, when the woodsman felled the dead elm on the fencerow, I took short lengths of log, arranged them on both sides of the rail, slipped a board through and I had a way across. It was wobbly and primitive, but it was a step. This motivated Thomas and he arrived with his saw, his sense of order and form and improvement. He tinkered with my mess and turned it into something beautiful and steady and
safe. A mirror of himself: a solid stile to help me over any barrier, face any obstruction and get to the land beyond it.

Once he understood about stiles, he took them on. Particularly when he realized he could make them with rock.

All along the inside of the meadow fence is garden. It has grown, over the years, spread from the few perennials that survived the plough, the bachelors and the neglect, into a border that runs from barnyard to road. The garden weaves in and out of the lawn, through the groves of lilacs and cedars, the shade of maples and the worrying noses of browsing sheep on the other side. There is one gate into the field by the house, but it serves neither back nor front gardens well. Though it is rail, the fence is not good for climbing as I’ve discreetly lined it with wire netting that I renew and repair each spring to deter ovine marauders. The rails refuse a foothold.

Rocks have been my rescue. A huge boulder, moved by magic or memory, stands on end in the field, high enough for one big step over the top. On the garden side, amidst short spreading lamium, there are flat flags leading to the stepping stone that boosts me over. Nothing tall grows here but the rock—just short plants the sheep can’t reach through the open space I’ve left beside the stile so Sydney the dog has her own path. She runs at speed, turning sideways at the last moment, and
just like Zoë before her, flies through the fence to land with a twist. We can be in the field in a second if we spot a problem or take a whim.

To the south, amidst the blue garden, there is another path of rocks, flat to begin with, then mounding to the lift over the fence, letting me through to another trail to the field. It leads me to harvest the pears, and to prune them against their constant determination to grow up rather than out. It leads me to the locust trees and sumac at the roadside, the escapes of
Tulipa tarda
and scilla, grape hyacinth and narcissus, which I dig out with my trowel and transplant on the tame side of the fence. Harnessed back into my garden, they only seem to grow to escape once more.

Stiles take me out and bring me back. They are two-way streets that open up my land and return me to its heart. They provide the possibility of a walk most days until the snow whitewashes them away.

STORM-STAYED

SOMETIMES THERE IS WARNING
for our legendary snowstorms, which fill all hollows, mound all hills. We’ve learned over the years to read skyscapes: the mare’s tails and mackerel scales in the clouds, the black northern horizons, the grey streamers fronting in from the west, which herald the steady march of the lake-effect troops. Sometimes the news alerts us to the upcoming squalls. The radio interruptions and General Store gossip in Alderney, the flurry of activity as everyone rushes to the village for supplies while the getting’s good. Canned foods, milk, animal feed. Fresh vegetables and fruit and extra treats for kids who might be stranded at home ravenous from snow play or shovelling. We get a full tank of fuel in the car, bring firewood in from the fencerow and, if the power’s threatened, store water in the tub, for electricity runs the pump from the well.

It’s a Grey County expression, to be storm-stayed. It differs from being snowed in or snowbound, which suggest hot drinks and warm fires within safe walls. Being storm-stayed is serious business in the snowbelt. It can happen in your car, in town if the roads are closed by the police, at home, or anywhere else you might be when the storm hits.

The news is full of ominous reports of an approaching storm: squalls, streamers, blizzards and hazards. But it’s already midday; Thomas left for work long ago without a change of clothes, without a thought that he might be stuck in town for days.

By the time the school bus returns, the first flakes are falling. My grown children walk up the lane, stepping over the drifting dunes of snow while gusts gather in the east. The beast. Aeolus, warden of the winds, raises his gale slowly at first till it swirls and tangles, chills and bites. The snow fingers become full-bodied drifts, hills and valleys rising from the flat desert on the once sandy lane.

My son shovels out the garage then closes it, lowers doors, checks latches, battens down hatches while my daughter and I take the dog to herd the flock into the barn. Their winter fleece is iced pure white; the black sheep is in disguise, in white-face for the day. We shut them in first with a panel then dig the frozen fodder, bedding, manure and snow that fills the threshold, obscures the channel for the massive door, its track
high up, valanced, protected. We dig with fork, spade and crowbar, slide the door to, stay the wind from.

After dark the winds explode, volleying white snow off black skies. Eddies and currents pattern the air, dervishing snow into drifts to the tops of fences, to the bottoms of windows set well above ground. Stiles lie buried until spring.

Thomas is stuck in Murphy’s Mill, tense in the knowledge that he is alone on call. The roads are closed to evacuation. I wake often in the night, alone in my bed, cold and agitated with the howling of the blizzard, the weight of the snow, fret for all the creatures I care for here. Responsible.

Dark morning is marbled with the smoke of squalling snow. The Jubilee radio station announces local bus cancellations to the ironic ostinato of “Get up in the morning get on the bus,” but there’s a phone chain too. Buses are cancelled. No school. Pass it on.

Heading out, bundled in my barncoat over a down vest, earflaps snug under my hood, sheepskin mitts and high boots on, I can see that the east garage doors will never open and that I must go out the north way where the path is blown free of snow. The dog doors are clear: two raised panels carved out of the larger door and loose but for top hinges. One door swings in, one door swings out. Sydney paws at her out door gingerly, giving me a woeful look after her night inside. I follow, snowshoes in hand, and find a patch of windswept
ground where I can strap them on. I’m equipped now, as I hadn’t been that first year when the snow came up over my hips and each step was a heroic measure of my dedication to this life.

I settle into the giant teardrops of wood and gut and leather and let them carry me across the top of all the mountains and valleys that miraculously exalt my once gentle barnyard. Even if the gates were not down, removed for winter access, they would no longer impede my way—the drifts are that high. Only the tops of the fence posts remain as wedged markers in this new terrain, this sea of white that waves and breaks and continually reconfigures around me.

The lower half of the stable door to the feed room is buried in snow. It opens out, so I cannot budge it. I consider returning to the house for a shovel, or using one of my snowshoes to rabbit my way through to the feed room. I’m flummoxed by the tenacity and intensity and sheer volume of this falling manna. Then the brilliance of the Dutch door illuminates my mind. The door is not just for admitting summer breezes into the stable, for leaning on when gazing out between hay-loads, for hose or cord conduit, for conversation with my Dutch-born neighbour. No, the door, evident in sixteenth-century oils where it spills light into interior spaces like liquid gold, is suddenly my ingress, my access. The bottom section latches with a hook and eye on the stable side, but the top—wide tongue-and-groove
boards hewn in another century—has a toggle latch, a curved metal handle on the outside, a bar and catch within. I lift; it rises and the top of the door pulls out and around, rests against the barn wall, held fast in the wind god’s open palm. I take off the snowshoes, hoist up, over, drop down and I’m in!

Frontenac and Lanark, my fall kittens, now half-grown cats, mew and burr with excited trills as the snow and I spill into their demesne. The sheep salivate for their breakfast, the chickens cluck and the rooster struts. He’s far past his morning crow and ruffled at my delay. I feed out, check resources and observe that waterlines flow, doors enclose, roofs imbricate. I hope the thick layer of snow that has blown through the barn cracks onto the hay and straw in the mows will insulate rather than melt and ferment my forage and sour my fodder. I mentally check through the beasts and tasks and shut the lights. But the door is much higher from the inside, and is hard to mount. There are shovels in here: my crusty square blade with the bentwood handle, a spade, the long flat scoop I use to gather sheep pellets from the cemented barnyard in summer. But I need to get
out
to dig, and the wind is wild and the snow continues to fall in pages, in books.

Back in the stable I find an apple box. A square wooden structure with a flat top, it’s the perfect height for picking low branches in fall or climbing through the top of a standard Dutch door in the depths of
winter. It boosts my trip over and out and onto the snowshoes again. I dig in my toes, navigate an about-face, latch the top half of the door and head house-ward, secure in the knowledge that the flock is fed and cosy and the storm is outside their day.

All week I snowshoe to the barn every morning and every night—even after the roads are open and the lane is clear and the kids are back at school. It takes that long to blow out the barnyard to the point where I can take my shovel and carve a path to the Dutch door. The flying Dutchman brings the tractor, the snowblower, and carves tunnels through the drifts after the wind abates. He once told me that they don’t have Dutch doors in his part of Holland. And I’m sure they don’t need them for weather. But they weren’t wrong, the old masters. And nothing reflects light like snow.