Chapter Five

The Garden

“LANDSCAPE PROVIDES OUR first geography,” writes Maxine Kumin, “the turn of the seasons our archetypes for our own mortality.” The land bears witness to the history of a place. Human beings change it, but the earth changes them more profoundly by forcing them to adapt to weather, climate, soil, and rainfall. There is nothing subtle about the seasons in Ohio, not only the temperature but the humidity, wind, slant of light, feeling in the air. I am not like a migrating bird; I like to live the entire year in one place, to watch and feel the seasons passing and one year becoming another.

Seasons are much subtler in places like California. A native of upstate New York who spent years in southern California told me he believed that pitting oneself against the weather is necessary in order to stay sane, that in climates where people are not challenged by weather, they turn their struggles inward. While northerners complain of long cold winters and deep snow, dealing with the elements forces them to engage with the world, even though the Industrial Revolution compelled most of the population to leave the farm to find work. It was the first time I ever considered that shoveling snow might be salubrious. It seems to me, however, that every climate engages inhabitants in some way with weather.

Spring in northeast Ohio has at least three subseasons, the first beginning around the third week of March, when daytime temperatures rise but nights can still be cold, sometimes well below freezing. My first task of the year is to prune the old wood from the blueberry bushes and spread mulch at the base. I clear the garden of winter debris, dig out corn stubble grown soft in winter mud, and cut back last year’s asparagus stems.

The second phase of spring begins in early or mid-April when temperatures can still fall below freezing, especially at night, but a wet, earthy smell and a feeling in the air alert residents that life is ready to break out of the soil. Then the grass begins to grow, about the third week of April, when there may still be snow on the ground. Early grass is a beautiful lime green, which it will never be again during the year. Crocuses bloom, usually only for a week. As crocus petals turn brown and fall off, the bright red tulips open, followed by sun-yellow daffodils, then deep purple hyacinths, and finally royal purple irises in my rock garden on the south side of the house, which receives the most sunlight.

As soon as the soil is dry enough in April, I plow and cultivate the vegetable garden with a rototiller and transfer the horse manure from a mound I nicknamed the Cascade Range. Having had all winter to decompose, the compost is rich and black. Organic matter is fully composted when its original components are unrecognizable. Using a wide-tined steel fork, I shape and sculpt the mound that is about thirty feet long, four feet wide, and three feet high. Attacking the manure pile always appears to be a bigger job than it finally is; I enjoy turning it several times a year, rotating it so that all parts are oxygenated. I spread the manure with my wheelbarrow along and between the planting rows and immediately begin building a second mound I call the Coast Range which will become next year’s compost. We throw food scraps onto the manure, as well as shredded leaves in the fall. The agent at the Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster where I had my soil tested reported to me that it was very rich. After twenty years of fertilizing the soil, I can cultivate the humus to nearly a foot of depth. Many organic gardeners will not use rototillers, as turning the soil so deeply brings weed seeds to the surface, yet the tiller also aerates soil and aids in decomposition of compost. I find that raking by hand and rototilling take about the same time and result in similar growth of weeds.

At the north end of the garden, walnut, maple, and spruce seedlings my father gave me years ago grew too big to be transplanted and now form a small copse. Once I had planned an orchard there, but the spring frost killed my cherry trees. I replanted, only to find deer browsing them in the spring. Tree bonnets protected the leaves, but in the fall, young male deer killed them by rubbing their antlers against the branches until the tree seedlings were reduced to sticks. I gave up on fruit trees and planted blueberry and raspberry bushes. Successful local orchardists construct cages around their seedlings, but mice often find them cozy places to build nests and in the process chew the roots and sometimes kill the tree.

The final part of spring lasts from early to late May when all snow is melted, but frost may still endanger young plants even as late as the first week of June. Dogwood and forsythia bloom, and apple blossoms open. Cottonwood, oaks, and maples come into full leaf. Violets create an impressionistic carpet of purple among the green grass in the field and lawn. Dandelions add the color of the sun to the lawn—indicators of healthy turf and one of the favorite foods of honeybees and bumblebees. Bluebells and trillium bloom in shadier places. Mulberry and locust leaves open toward the end of the month, and purple and white wild phlox grow luxuriously over banks and fence lines. May-apples appear on the forest floor and bluets form a pale carpet that looks like snow.

Planting continues from mid- or late May until the end of June. The first vegetables to furnish our table are the tender asparagus tips that begin ripening in April and last until late July. A perennial, asparagus grows as high as six feet and matures over several years, each succeeding season producing more than the last. Besides the quality of soil, it is water that most determines success: abundant rainfall makes irrigation unnecessary, and if only three days pass without rain, people begin to talk about dry spells. Clarke, who comes from California, finds the most eccentric trait of Ohioans to be their definition of drought: two weeks without rain.

Last year’s spinach wakes up from dormancy about the third week of April and grows until the earliest of the new spinach arrives in late June when I plow last year’s under. I plant spinach three times during the summer, so we enjoy it from April until November. Rhubarb ripens the first week of May and must be used immediately as it does not freeze well, so I make stewed rhubarb and cobbler. Peas planted in early May can be harvested by late June. I plant beans and corn three times as well, two weeks apart, and harvest from July through October. Rhubarb and spinach are the easiest plants to grow, weed, and harvest. Asparagus is easy to grow and harvest but difficult to weed because I cannot cultivate around the roots; blueberries and raspberries are easy to weed and harvest but difficult to grow; strawberries are easy to grow but difficult to harvest and weed. Some rows I devote to flowers, usually marigolds and zinnias, in order to reward bees and attract butterflies but also to lure away insects that would otherwise attack the vegetables. The technique works. Ideally, every other row would be planted with flowers.

The best defense against insect damage, I have found, is not chemicals but crop rotation. Strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant are “deep feeders” that should be rotated with nitrogen-fixing plants like peas and beans. After a strawberry crop is exhausted, in about four years, the same ground can be planted in “shallow feeders” for three to four years. Potatoes leave pathogens in the soil that attack these same varieties and must also be rotated. Legumes planted in different rows from the previous year produce more abundantly because the insects that feed on them do not seem to find the new rows. My yield more than doubled when I began rotating scientifically. A garden diary reminds me what I have planted in each row and which varieties produced the best. Still, what works one year may not work the next.

Pulling weeds can be a chore or an exercise in natural history. The term “weed” is a cultural construction referring to any plant that someone does not want. Common plantain, called Englishman’s foot by Native Americans, was one of nine sacred herbs of the Anglo-Saxons; Chaucer and Shakespeare cite its medicinal properties. From this auspicious beginning, the immigrant has become a weed. As well as plantain I pull curly dock, sow thistle, knotweed, white campion, creeping buttercup, common mallow, horse nettle, mullein, and sow thistle from the vegetable rows. Instead of using herbicides I control weeds in my riding arena and gravel driveway with a mixture of cider vinegar and yucca. Corn gluten can also be used to control weeds, but it has to be spread repeatedly and loses its effectiveness if applied too soon before rain. Some combinations of fatty acids can be effective, but they have to be reapplied frequently.

Summer officially begins with the solstice, but summer in northern Ohio really begins around the first or second week of June. Strawberries ripen throughout the month, although in productive years I have had strawberries from late May until mid-July. My father taught me how to grow them, planting as early as possible in April and plucking the first flowers in order to ensure a larger harvest in later years. Weeding any perennial is challenging as the root systems create channels that undesirable plants follow, primarily dandelion, thistle, and common mallow. Usually the third year yields the largest crop. Sweet or tangy depending on the variety, and picked and eaten fresh, they taste as if the sun shines from inside them.

The best time of day is just before and during sunrise. I agree with Thoreau that “morning brings back the heroic ages.” Just before dawn the birds break the night silence. The eastern sky above the hills brightens before it becomes rosy and golden. Finally the sun reveals itself in the upper branches of the trees. It is over in moments, but the promise of the day is not.

Spring and early summer provide some of the most spectacular weather, sixty to seventy degrees (F). Changing light throughout the day transforms the eastern and southern hills, which are more blue or green depending on the season and cloud cover. I feel as if I live in several landscapes at once: summer light dazzles; storm clouds cast smoky gray shadows. In mornings the eastern hills are outlined in coral. Gray-green pines step from mist in a bas relief of trees and bushes. Silvery cold dew on fields shimmers in the muted half-light more lustrous than the fire of noontime. Dew hangs jewel-like on the orb weavers’ polygonal threads strung between fence rails and stems of Queen Anne’s lace. Contoured fields across the creek are all different greens—soybeans darkest, then corn, then hay and grass. Wooded hills rise above them. This luminous moment is what the inspired life is all about: filling in groundhog holes or cutting weeds can be beautiful because of the colors and the wind. Soul is that which rejoices in the life of the body.

Fog as well as light transforms landscape: on fair spring days the veil drops away to reveal the familiar trees and hills like a promise of continuance. Lifting from a stream, from the pond, or between hillside trees, fog has its own life, especially in autumn, like sea smoke rising from shoreline crags. Clouds also change the landscape. Coral light from a few strata in the east make deep green grass even greener. I love the enormous sun-filled canyons of cumulus that deepen the sky, usually in spring and summer, the curled wisps of cirrus called mare’s tails, the stratocumulus that look like rolling surf, and smaller rounded clouds moving quickly like fleets of ships eastward. Seldom in Ohio is there a clear sky. I enjoy cloud-contours and regret not having become a meteorologist. Storms build up like dramatic performances. One afternoon the clouds turned a dark steel blue until the hills to the northeast took on an aspect I’d never seen before: they no longer seemed to form on the horizon but to be islands in a great body of water. The grass turned darker green. All day big cumulus built up, gold-lined. Then around 7:30 P.M. the thunderstorm began.

In late June of the year Grayfell was born, a storm blew in with gale-force winds until the smaller cedar trees bent nearly double. Several limbs came down from the Norway spruces and the elms. Rain pelted windows. We lost electricity as usual during violent weather, and the house was so quiet that I realized how much noise the water pump and refrigerator make, and I wished for a hand pump and fireplace. Even the lights give off a constant although nearly inaudible hum that I never noticed before. It was over in a half hour and clouds became mysterious convolutions like rounded hills and valleys, white and beautiful against a cobalt sky. A partial rainbow appeared. Perhaps two to three times a year I see rainbows, often full bows that reach all the way to the ground east of our house, most accompanied by shadow bows. In order to create a bow, the droplets must be round rather than oval and the sun near the opposite horizon. Bows in the eastern sky appear in the evening, while those rarer ones in the western sky appear in the morning.

Several times each summer I embark on a mission to root out wild cherry seedlings as their leaves represent an omnipresent threat to horses. Before I knew this I never noticed these trees with their beautiful, tapered green leaves and rich, coffee-colored bark. Now I have learned to spot them even among lush vegetation. Eating just one dried wild cherry leaf can poison a horse, so the owner has to clear all these trees from pasture and farm. The resilient roots, however, can travel underground. It’s common to find this Hydra growing many meters from the place where I first pulled it out. It sequesters itself among thorny, invasive multiflora rose. Wild cherry has moved up and down both banks of the creek that crosses my pasture, established itself on a steep hillside, and even popped up around the house.

Clearing the fence line is one of the most difficult jobs on the place. Using a scythe, I cut away grass, thorns, and seedling trees that grow up along the wire where the mower does not reach. Tearing out wild clematis and woodbine is not difficult, but I regret having to cut down apple and honey locust seedlings, and once a well-established young white oak. If I did not clear the fence line, however, the vines would pull it down. Many trees that now act as windbreaks grew up along neglected fence lines, and for that reason in Ohio one often finds strands of old rusted wire tangled among leaves.

Like Wendell Berry in “A Good Scythe,” I agree that using a scythe is easier than using a power tool for the reason that the scythe cuts a much wider swath and can be used on tall weeds with tough stems. It takes a good deal of strength and energy to use one; even with proper technique, swinging that blade requires as much exertion as climbing a long, steep incline. While I work, however, I can listen to the song of birds and hear the grasses being cut like the sound of tearing silk. Cutting with a scythe uses my own energy, and I go home tired in a good way. The power weed-eater not only destroys the peace and drowns out birdsong with its piercing noise; it also uses fossil fuel, not my own energy. While it is heavy and difficult to control, it requires the use of only a few muscles so that at the end of the day, although I am tired, I have expended no energy and am not strengthened by the work. Finally, the power tool cannot cut the heavy weeds that grow along the fence, such as wild carrot and multiflora rose, and the area it does cut is very small. When we work with our hands and arms we learn the limits of our own strength, appreciate the work done by others, and understand what is involved in taking care of the land. The work is hard, sweaty, and often frustrating, but fulfilling when I survey the cleared fence line.

Even around the flower garden I prefer to use clippers rather than a power weed eater. I find I am no more tired using the hand tool, and it takes no more time. The same is true of leaf blowers and snow blowers: the work is not easier, and noise renders it less satisfying. Power tools are complicated and costly to maintain, while the scythe has only a nut and bolt which I remove when I want to have the blade sharpened. I do not have to change oil or air and fuel filters. The only advantage of the power tool is that it gives a more finished look.

When I cut weeds along the fence line I learn to know Queen Anne’s Lace, wild carrot, bull thistle, ragweed, nut sedge, phlox, blackberry, bluestem, wild oats, and brome. I identify oak, locust, cottonwood, and wild apple seedlings and hear the distinctive notes of meadow lark, chipping sparrow, wood warbler, chickadee, and bobolink. When Canada geese fly over I can stop my work and listen to the dramatic sound of their honking or their wings like cloth being shaken out. At intervals I rest and look up to survey the green hills and changing clouds.

Taking my scythe to be sharpened, however, used to involve the inevitable lecture about how much more “efficient” the power tool was. I listened because the handyman was old (I might have assumed that someone in his eighties would value tradition more, but he made his living selling these things) and then explained that gas-driven weed-eaters were too heavy for me. That was the one argument he appreciated until he ordered a line of lighter weed-eaters built to be used by women. After he died, his son, who took over the shop, dispensed with the lectures.

I kept my first scythe about fifteen years before it broke on unusually thick wild carrot, and when I looked for a new one I found I could not get one manufactured in the United States. The Chinese-made tool I bought has bolts that cannot be replaced here. The global economy found a way to punish me at last.

Summer solstice marks the shortening of days, yet the bulk of the season is still before us. Goldenrod, purple ironweed, Shasta daisy, and ox-eye daisy bloom. Hillsides where I planted crown vetch are covered in a lavender blanket. Robert Frost writes pessimistically in “The Oven Bird” that summer is a “diminished thing” because the spring flowers are so much more beautiful than those that bloom later. Certainly it is a changed thing, the dogwood, forsythia, bluebells, and violets having faded and the lime green of the grass become darker green under summer’s universal fire. I don’t think, however, we could endure year-round the frenzied growing and blooming of the spring any more than we could endure eternal youth. The summer has its own, subtler beauty with its longer days and early dawns. In mid-July the cicadas begin to sing, telling me the autumn will come and days are precious.

Henry David Thoreau regarded owning a farm as slavery, and some environmentalists believe that agriculture destroyed nature by harnessing it and allowing the human population to swell beyond the number the biosphere could support. On the other hand, the greatest environmentalist in American history, Aldo Leopold, writes that the danger in not owning a farm lies in thinking that food comes from the grocery store and heat from the furnace. I agree with Leopold: too many people have no idea what is involved in their survival. They take food for granted and discount the importance as well as the intelligence of farmers. At the Ohio Food and Farm Association Conference one year I learned of experts who estimate that fully half the food grown in the United States is wasted, and I wonder how sane a society can be if that is the case. The same conclusion applies to energy: we could cut nearly half our consumption with simple conservation methods such as recycling, powering down computers and turning off lights when not in use, and setting thermostats only a few degrees higher on air conditioners and lower on furnaces. Carrying our own containers, buying in bulk, and returning to the old system of requiring deposits for glass and plastic receptacles would reduce prices and cut down on litter and trash.

Thoreau lamented that he was not as wise as the day he was born, and since he was a wise man I read this passage as a wistful lament that human beings tend to lose their instinctive natures as they become part of society. Aldo Leopold asserted that education is the process of learning to see only one thing while going blind to another, and since he was an educator, I suspect that what he means is that with specialization we tend to lose the sense of the wholeness of things. Each new observation or discovery does not crowd out something else but instead widens and deepens appreciation. When I first began hiking, I saw forests as mazes of upright trunks and tangled undergrowth. Now I notice the sinewy bark of muscle wood, ridged bark of the white oak, speckled bark of the wild cherry; I may spot a trillium beside a rock in spring; I can distinguish between the calls of ovenbird and pine warbler; I know that, when I climb a steep trail through woods, the farther the light extends toward the base of the tree trunks, the closer I am to the summit. Education reveals intellectual, aesthetic, and moral choices, but learning widens and deepens perception.

Shopping for groceries is an unpleasant chore that reminds me of how much knowledge we have lost about sustainability. Even buying seeds and plants can be discouraging. When I first moved here I bought starts at a small place where the knowledgeable owner answered questions and made suggestions about different varieties of tomatoes, peppers, and corn; nevertheless, her shop went out of business, while the one next door, where the owner did not know anything about crops or seeds and specialized in lawn ornaments more than plants, stayed in business. I then located a store in Ashland where the matter-of-fact owner knew about his products and provided different varieties of broccoli, strawberries, and corn but shared what he knew only in a very gruff, unfriendly manner. That person sold out to someone who may as well have been selling plumbing supplies. Another grower outside Ashland, with over thirty acres of bedding plants, provides almost no choice among varieties and has so few staff that no one has time to answer a question. Finally I located a family-run garden store south of Loudonville surrounded by fields, woods, and farms and containing two duck ponds and a garden where the bottomland was so rich the soil glistens black like coal. The building is attractive with extensive greenhouses, indoor and outdoor displays, and fruit and vegetables. Even here the people cannot tell me very much about the different plants, which varieties of tomatoes are best for canning, or anything about turf. Every year there are fewer choices of tomatoes, and usually only one variety of broccoli, peppers, melons, or squash. They do offer choices of beans and corn, but the owners cannot tell me the differences, so I have to look up the information online. Even on a farm and in a multigenerational family business, knowledge is not passed down. So I shop from catalogues and buy strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and asparagus from growers out of state. Even so, from the hundreds of varieties of strawberries in the world, I may choose from about ten. Neither the global economy nor capitalism has given us greater choice.

Similarly, shopping for fruit in grocery stores is an exercise in unimaginative consumerism. Of the hundreds or so varieties of apples in the world, I never find more than eight or ten in even the largest grocery stores. There is usually little choice of any other fruit or vegetables. All the offerings are geared toward sameness except cereal where the manufacturers seem to vie to create the unhealthiest combination of sugar and salt. In markets in France, on the other hand, people can choose from a hundred kinds of cheese, while here we are lucky to find six.

In 1998 I attended a conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in Missoula. Before the conference I camped and hiked in Glacier National Park near the Canadian border. It is the most beautiful of the national parks that I’ve seen—Acadia, Great Smokey Mountains, Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Olympic, Rocky Mountain, Yosemite, Giant Redwood, Mount Rainier, Glacier Bay. The Rockies in Montana are not as high as those in Colorado, but they are bigger. I climbed Mount Brown and Grinnell Peak and hiked a trail to a pass called The Saddle where I looked over a vista that rivals anything I saw in Alaska or the Himalaya—blue-gray mountains and white glaciers that stretched to the horizon. After sitting for hours on a rock looking out over those still peaks, I hiked back and saw, far down the mountainside, a brown bear fishing in a stream that meandered through a grove of locust saplings, my first sighting of the great beings who should own this land. Years later I was able to glimpse grizzly cubs in the Grand Tetons and a pair of mating grizzlies on an island in Glacier Bay National Park.

Must we be assured of survival before we love wilderness? People did not begin to admire landscape until most could be confident of escaping starvation and until the middle class had leisure and relatively safe conveyance over distances, nor did we venerate wilderness until it had been relegated to reserves. Yet there have always been explorers, and some people have always loved to leave civilization and go to the wild places, and the desire to simplify is as old as civilization itself. Irish monks in the sixth century who desired seclusion went to the Skellig Islands in the far west and built stone huts high on the sheer cliffs. When their community grew larger in spite of the hardship of living on a nearly inaccessible rocky island, a few members moved to an even more remote part of the island to escape their like-minded brothers. Something inherent in the human psyche yearns for simplicity and for a natural environment unchanged by human habitation.

I know autumn is here when there is no manure in the barn because the horses stay out all day and all night. Some evenings the golden sunset walks across the eastern hills. Then in the west the cloud blanket turns rose and gray, like the glow of a volcano, before the dusk descends. Autumn as well as spring has three phases defined by the changing colors of leaves. For about one month, from late August until late September, the sugar maples begin to turn yellow and red while most trees are still green. Days are warm. Clarke says the pleasantest day of the year is usually September 18. The frenzy of growth is over and crops come to fruition—tomatoes, peppers, cantaloupe, beans, corn. Broccoli matures in late July, while peppers and tomatoes ripen in August and last until the first frost of October. We have tacos and salads made almost entirely of garden produce. Broccoli can be harvested until September, but we find the late broccoli to be rather bitter, so instead of eating them we allow the later heads to blossom into a mass of yellow flowerets that hum with bees, who also love the asparagus flowers. Beans grown overly ripe can be harvested for seed.

The second phase of autumn, from late September to late October, is most spectacular with red and mountain maples, flowering dogwood, black tupelo, scarlet oak, northern red oak, and pin oak turning crimson and burning bushes blazing fuchsia. Black maple, striped maple, and yellow buckeye turn golden. Sugar maple and sassafras leaves become both red and yellow. The most magnificent is the sweet gum that bears both colors at the same time. White oak attains a bronze color while Shumard oak leaves turn auburn. The peak of the colors happens usually around the third week of October. Typically the first frost occurs on October 17 with really hard frosts around the morning of the change to standard time. Green alfalfa fields alternate in contours with brown bands of harvested soybeans and swaths of yellow corn stalks still standing like stalwarts unwilling to give up. Fields are yellow with goldenrod and purple with ironweed.

The third phase lasts from late October until Thanksgiving and is characterized by different shades of bronze, auburn, and muted gold. Oak and birch hold their leaves longest while cottonwood and dogwood drop theirs earliest. We do not rake leaves but mow them with the tractor so that the blades chop the leaves into fine, shredded compost. The holiday break allows an opportunity to trim the bushes back and burn the sticks. I rototill the garden one last time, lay straw on the strawberry plants to protect them from severe winter temperatures, and cut down the cornstalks.

The process of growing with all its wayward meanderings is also the process of fruition. We reach ripeness not by making every correct choice but by error as well, because our mistakes teach us more than happening on the lucky “right” choices. The wanderings and wrong turns make people interesting. What we are left with in the end—careers that take us in unexpected directions, success or disappointment in love, places we have lived in and become part of, opportunities we passed up that haunt our memories—is what brings us to self-understanding.

Cold weather invigorates and inspires the feeling that something is about to happen. The earth is not dead: it sleeps, waiting for spring. Trees sparkle with delicate buds of frost that have grown along the branches and twigs. Winter solstice, the darkest of the year markers, also foretells the time of greatest hope. December 22 should be New Year’s Day since it marks the beginning of the return of the sun.

Weather in northeastern Ohio is strongly affected by the lake, and although we do not experience the blizzards known to East Cleveland and Ashtabula, during several years when snow fell five and six feet we had to hire a farmer to plow our driveway with a backhoe. I can gauge the cold from the horses’ water buckets. If they have a thin layer of ice, it is comfortable to work outside. If I have to break the ice with an ax, it is well below freezing. (I derive a peculiar pleasure from taking an ax to an iced-over water bucket.) If the buckets contain several inches of ice, it is near or below zero, and I have to bring them into the house to thaw. When the ice no longer sticks to the side of the bucket, I pitch it onto the lawn and by spring have an ice sculpture.

In January and February, snow blows and drifts, accentuating the blue of spruce branches. Snowflakes shine in wind that sculpts wells around the conifers. The wooded hills to the east are veiled gray and white. When temperatures drop into single digits and below zero, air turns blue, like crystal ice, and tree branches are encased in shimmering glass. The hills look like a Japanese ink or charcoal drawing. You can see into the very heart of the land—the snowy floor of the woods. Trees are smoky gray, black, or slate-blue in the distance with some green of hemlock.

Winter colors can dazzle as spectacularly as those of other seasons because of the stark contrast. The stems of dead Queen Anne’s lace and other plants turn auburn red against the snow. Cardinals blaze russet. Corn stalks and leaves not cut down look golden brown against the white. When snow falls or is blown on wind, all is lace. Dawn casts diamond pinpoints of blue, green, yellow, orange, red, purple, and silver on the undulating white blanket.

One January Colleen and I found a dead mole lying on bloody snow, a series of straight lines fanned out around it. This rune, probably impressed into the snow by the beating wings of a hawk or owl scared away before finishing his meal, conveys the message of the wild, that all creatures must live their own natures, that some must die in order to ensure survival for others.

Winter provides the best time for writing and reflection, for testing oneself against the weather, for learning to live within the limits the earth imposes. Snow makes me appreciate the coziness of the house, but it also makes me feel as if every time I leave the house I embark on an adventure. I like walking in falling snow and seeing the pure-white folds and cornices sculpted by wind. Winter brings us to our senses, the thrill of the cold wind teaching us that we live at the mercy of the earth that forms us. Storms also remind us that we do not own the earth; it owns us, and we mistreat it to our peril. The winter of 2014 brought record-breaking cold temperatures, sometimes as low as minus twenty degrees. The water pipe that ran from the house to the barn was frozen for six weeks, and I transported the horses’ water in milk jugs on a sled. That season provided my first experience of snow rollers, hollow tubes of snow created by wind. This rare and wonderful phenomenon occurs when sunlight causes the surface layer to begin thawing over a substrate of ice or powder to which the upper layer will not adhere; wind blows the exposed snow, but its weight prevents it from traveling far. Instead, the snow layer curls into cylinders that look as if they are created by people or animals, but there are no footprints or hoof marks around them. Absent the scientific explanation, people might have speculated that snow rollers are the work of fairies or other winged creatures.

At last, March brings the equinox and snow squalls turn the air to lace followed by bright spells and snow melting on green swaths of grass. Of all months, March is the least predictable with the largest variation among temperatures. Ice is a greater problem then than in January; the most hazardous kind, called “black ice,” forms on pavement. Always, there is at least one large snowstorm in late March that blows in suddenly and, usually, just as suddenly melts. Rivers and creeks rise, sometimes dramatically. One year the little stream in our pasture flooded so extensively that it carved out new banks even though the thick vegetation should have held the soil. I had to reset the fence post on the north side, since the ground around it had been washed away to bedrock, and the post itself hung in midair, held up only by wire.

As I change the oil in the tractor to get it ready for spring I think about necessary work versus drudgery. Drudgery means labor for unfairly low wages that enriches the employer while impoverishing the worker. Good labor not only benefits the worker but allows her to realize some accomplishment. We should enjoy putting in the effort to live on the earth, as Wendell Berry argues in “Home of the Free.” Especially in this age of specialization we should know what goes into the other tasks that support ours. Because one job requires less training or skill than another does not diminish its value. No work should be deprecated except shoddy work. The bank janitor and clerk are as important as the president, venture capitalist, or investor, and their actions not likely to create massive recession.

Clarke asked me what famous person I would choose to be if I could. Certainly not my hero, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, whose personal sacrifice transformed the lives of women after her but whose own life was difficult and short. I admire fearlessness (as distinguished from heroism, bravery, or courage) and even a certain amount of recklessness if it is inspired by curiosity or love of the natural world. If I could choose another life it would be that of Friederike Victoria “Joy” Adamson, an Austrian woman who immigrated to Kenya in the 1940s to escape Hitler’s Anschluss and worked there with lions and cheetahs. She lived several lives at once: as a biologist, she helped to restore animal habitat and returned orphaned lions and cheetahs to the wild; as an artist, she painted wildflowers that had never before been recorded; as a writer, she preserved the story of her work, most famously in Born Free; as a conservationist, she traveled the world educating people about the importance of preserving the megafauna found nowhere else. Two marriages ended in divorce, but her third husband, British zoologist George Adamson, possessed the same lust for life that Joy had and, like her, stayed active into late age. They died for higher causes: both were murdered, Joy by one of her own employees and George by poachers who were trying to kill a tourist.

Ever since I read Our Town in high school, I knew I wanted to live an active life. In act 3, Emily Webb asks whether anyone ever really understands the importance of being alive. The stage manager–chorus answers, “The poets and saints do, maybe, some.” I used to wonder whether it was possible to live the active life in the modern world with its automation and information economy. Work should be done purposefully and carefully, but the worker should also know why it must be done, how tasks were accomplished by those who came before, and how one’s own work contributes to that of others. I am speaking of art and labor both, of painting pictures or writing poems, but also of plowing, harvesting, clearing fence lines, or mowing grass.

The active life involves more than physical work and is not merely “busy.” Activity must be done well but also mindfully, with the inspiration of a quest. Wendell Berry writes that plowing with horses is a “song.” A verse from the Upanishads states that “Prayer is perfect when he who prays, remembers not that he is praying.” The Maitri Upanishad further advises the reader to “keep the mind pure, for what a man thinks, that he becomes.” Walter Pater wrote that all life must become ritual. W. B. Yeats finishes “Among School Children” with the question “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” When I work, I am both what I do and what I think about while I work. Human bodies were built to walk, not to sit. In order to live a full life we must use arms, legs, and hands as much as we can, yet the mind must also be engaged. When I move a pile of composted manure from the paddock to the garden, I think not of drudgery but usefulness. When I am tired, I remind myself that doing hard, dirty work is better than not being able to do it. Negative thoughts defile the purity of action.

A person can live the active life in the city as well as in the country, but she cannot live actively if she ignores the earth.

In February every year at the annual convention of the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA), keynote speakers talk about such subjects as conservation, encroachment by the oil and gas industry, saving family farms, ways of financing small farms, and combating the influence of agribusiness and chemical companies like Monsanto, which has created seeds genetically modified to withstand spraying by the herbicide glyphosate, also developed by Monsanto and detected in the food chain and even in mothers’ milk. Seminar leaders advise attendees in the best ways to grow blueberries and brambles, raise apple trees, rotate crops, install solar panels, control weeds naturally, prevent soil erosion, and defend communities against horizontal hydraulic fracturing. Spending two days among more than a thousand people interested in organic farming and gardening inspires me for a new year of planting and harvesting and makes me wish I had majored in agronomy.

Farm tours sponsored by OEFFA demonstrate the success of organic farming: a farmer in northern Ashland County uses partial tillage—leaving large clods of earth in rows between crops—to control weeds; crushed walnut shells also inhibit weeds along fence lines; a young husband and wife in Knox County run an egg, turkey, pork, and dairy operation in which the animals (including the hens) graze in a succession of “cells,” areas of a larger pasture cordoned off by movable electric wire. Cattle are rotated several times a day in order to keep them from overgrazing any one area; as they eat the tops of the grass, their hooves press the lower stalk into the earth where it decomposes into more fertile soil. This method of rotation, the farmer claims, fixes one hundred pounds of nitrogen per acre per year. Hens in movable wire pens follow, and their instinctive scratching through cattle dung separates and aerates it for further decomposition of organic matter. Turkeys also graze freely in rotated pastures, protected from nocturnal predators by a pair of vigilant geese who will take on foxes, dogs, and even coyotes. Pigs forage beneath a tree line that separates the organic farm from a neighbor whose farm is not certified organic (the “buffer zone” must be twenty-five feet), feeding on their favorite food—acorns—and other plants as they trample weeds. Because of continuous rotation of different animals, the pastures never need mowing, reseeding, or fertilizing. Swarms of flies, which create problems for neighbors of feed-lot farms, are unknown since the manure is composted into soil; the flies that land on the cattle are eaten by cowbirds that live in the woods surrounding the fields. Our neighbors across Honey Creek (husband, wife, and three daughters) rotate organic beef cattle and chickens on this principle of cell grazing. They keep a goat for milk and butter and grow all their own vegetables and fruit.

I walked the township road that crosses Honey Creek and ascends the hill to the east and noted the brambles and seedling trees rising from last year’s fallen leaves and competing with each other for the available water and space. Human beings have been created no more purposefully than a tree that manages to take root in the woods, started from a seed dropped by a bird or squirrel. Perhaps we should see ourselves, no less than any tree, as part of a thriving ecosystem, offspring of the land. How can this whole intricate ecosystem and the spirit that animates it care only about human beings? The divine is not the individual bee but the instinct of the bee covering its legs with pollen; not the horse but the speed of the horse pounding thunder out of the ground; not the flower but what propels it open in the spring.

For millennia the earth has been displaying its intelligence in old-growth forests. We need to recover that intelligence lost with the invention of plow, sword, and wheel. Our fall was not in rebellion but in learning to fear the world and not feel at home in it. Daily, we should practice the art of belonging and living—not as if each day were the last, as the saying has it, but as if it were the first, a door opening, not a door closing. Health is the health of all ecosystems; a farm should resemble as much as possible a natural ecosystem, and we should be directly related to the sources of life. Even the history of our language tells us this, as tree names are some of the oldest Anglo-Saxon words. The earth is more than four billion years old. Upright-walking australopithecine creatures appeared only about three million years ago, Homo sapiens has been around for only about 315,000 years, and agriculture that enabled civilization to evolve is only 10,000 years old. We are newcomers who need to respect the inhabitants who have been here so long before us; we are caretakers, not owners, of this garden, and we need only look around to see that nature is trying to show us the gate that will lead us back inside.