February is when the big storms hit and the farm takes the worst beating of the year. Ice clings to power lines and usually tears them down. Blackouts are common enough, and every time my world goes dark I am grateful for my lanterns, candles, and those amazing woodstoves that keep the dogs and me warm and cozy as housecats.
But storms do not allow much in ways to comfort, not for long anyway. The wind on this mountain can literally howl. Snowpiles can collapse trees and ruin pole barns and wire fences. This is when the shrinking wood pile starts to worry you, and the electric bills skyrocket with the use of space heaters and water tank defrosters. Hay is at a premium, and always in demand.
It is a harsh month, but a necessary one. It’s these weeks that make winter real and make it stick.
If I have any leftovers from last night’s dinner, I don’t fuss with the stove in the kitchen. I just slide the crock of mac-n-cheese or leftover soup into the Bun Baker’s lower oven. Soon it’ll be warming up with the same energy source I knew so intimately back in June, when I was out there splitting that seasoned locust, sweat running out of my pores like out of a tap.
There’s an old saying: “Wood warms you twice.” Few things are truer. You burn up an inferno of calories doing the lumberjack work of felling, sawing, and carrying the logs home with a harnessed horse, then you heat up again while you sit comfortably by the stove. While I do prefer that second warming, I can’t help but admit it’s because of how much damn work went into earning it the first time.
Eventually I plan to move off the utility grid entirely and use solar panels to heat my water, with wood only for household heat. But these goals will happen in smaller financial steps. When it comes to home improvements, I do what I can, when I can — and farm improvements always come first.
Cold Antler Farm is a scrappy place. The fences sag, everything needs improvements, and the layout is suspect at best. But I love it. You can see the front of the house in its moldy winter glory. The plastic siding needs to be scrubbed and my little stepladder/mop idea doesn’t hold up to proper homeownership standards.
So I call the boys at Common Sense Farm to come up in the next few weeks with their ladders and fancy truck, and in two hours this house will look a lot smarter. There are about ten odd jobs that involve heights I cannot reach (without crying), so as a woman firmly grounded, I welcome their help. Since we have a barter system between our two farms, there’s a good chance it will cost me some livestock, such as spring meat birds, but that’s fine by me. Cold Antler will always be a scrappy place, but I will do my best to make it less so.
Hmm. Can you embrace scrappy while trying to fight it?
A thaw came today. The real deal. Fifty degrees of slush and sunshine. You can actually see parts of my driveway.
I am outside tonight with Jazz and Annie. The stream that runs through my property is roaring and the sound is spring. I stand there and close my eyes. Poetry, that rambling. Mixed in with that gurgling percussion are the soft hoots of a Great Horned Owl in the high trees.
I turn around to look at the house. It looks tired: stains from the old furnace pipe on the front, leaves and ice stuck to the sides. It looks like a panting version of the proud white house that shone like a lighthouse on the green mountain all summer. Yet she is still there, and I realize that we have almost made it through our first winter here, this pack of four.
Gibson is on the steamer chest in the window, sitting on his sheepskin and watching us. A light is on upstairs in my office. It is on because I forgot to shut it off after I watered the snap peas; but it is also on because somehow through all the snow plows, heating bills, and mortgage payments, I have managed to keep paying the electric bill. Same goes for the Internet, groceries, and gas for the truck.
Such modest accomplishments, but I feel like a domestic superhero. This place is making it. We’re not eating lobster dinners or keeping the heat above 64 degrees — but we are making it. And who needs 64 degrees of luxury when it’s a comfortable 34 degrees outside after dark!? Hell, I don’t even have a jacket on.
But time to slow down, breathe deep, and come home to a banjo and three smiling dogs is all I need. Throw a thaw on top of that sundae and you’ve got yourself a farmer crouching to pounce on any defrosted soil. Soon it will hold potatoes, peas, lettuce, and more. Soon lambs will be running across the fence lines in little gangs of lost boys. And soon I’ll be running again across the back roads of Washington County under a blazing summer sun. It just takes me a little time to recharge to see all that.
Tonight I see it. I might even get six hours of sleep tonight.
Take that, winter.
The thaw is over, and it ends with a snowstorm! It has been such a mild winter, snow-wise, that the blizzard comes as a shock. Patty invites me for a bona-fide sleigh ride with Steele. Within twenty minutes of receiving that phone call I am bundled up and outside her barn ready to jump into the Victorian cutter she bought at an auction. It is a thing of beauty, black with plush red velvet seats.
Today as Patty and I harness Steele to his 1880s sleigh, I feel for the first time that everything makes sense. I know where to clip the breaking pull-backs attached to the shafts. I remember to unhook the girth before running my lines through the loops. And the whole time I feel like a friend, not just a student. Makes you feel lucky.
I am living in a Grandma Moses painting.
Cold Antler is both a modern farm and an old-fashioned one. What pays the bills are books and workshops and ad sales, but what fills my stomach and my soul is the land. I am always cash tight and never really know where the next month’s mortgage payment will come from. But I feel rich for this piece of land that feeds me and the gifts, lessons, and life it offers me. Even on a frigid winter morning there is hay to haul and eggs to collect, chicken in the freezer to defrost, and a bin of homegrown taters in the pantry for a side.
The geese cackle and Gibson races around me as I carry buckets of fresh water to fill the heated, ice-free tanks for the livestock. I pull a small carrot from my back pocket and offer Jasper a snack. His brown eyes light up at the flash of orange. Cars on their way to work and school drive down the mountain road, and I wave to people I know. My own office is upstairs in the computer/tack room, where saddles and harnesses line the wall around my desk. I will go there after everyone’s had breakfast, myself last of all.
I come inside with chattering hands to the warm stove-lit room melting with eastern daybreak and can nearly fall to the ground in tears. Eggs and carrots in my pocket — this is work and salary in one beautiful unit of understanding. I am home and my home feeds me. My life can be stressful and scary, but it makes sense.
I wish everyone could feel this and know.
Patty and I have become fast friends. As the weeks of harness and driving lessons have continued, I now associate winter Sunday afternoons with backcountry roads, heavy horse collars, and Steele’s jingling bell. Patty has promised that come summer we can take him all the way to Battenkill Creamery, a local dairy and ice cream haven.
We’ve had a lot of conversations about horses and my dream of owning one. And the more I talk about horses and drive hers, the more I realize that I can do this. Find a calm draft horse and hitch him up for rides into town. And not just any draft horse. I want my dream horse: a Fell pony, that horse from the picture books I thumbed through at bookstores.
All I have to do is come up with the money, barn, training, and time to own one. Yes, it’s far from realistic and even further from reasonable, but my eye is now on the prize, my dreams foaming at the mouth. You never know. Magic happens.
There are a lot of sighs on pig harvest day. It’s intense and not at all enjoyable, but you accept those sighs. They are decisions exhaled. You own them, and you move on. Better sighs are just around the corner. Tomorrow will be a dark day in the life of my pig, but a bright one for this farmer.
I’m proud of this Pig. She grew fast, fat, and true. A trio of experienced traveling butchers will be arriving and taking care of everything from killing to skinning and halving.
I feel blessed to have these folks just a phone call away. For animals, most of the stress of slaughter isn’t the agony of death but the transfer to the abattoir. Animals get confused and scared from such change, and may spend a day or two waiting in concrete stalls, cramped or fearful, while they wait for their ending. My pig will die in the same place where she has spent the last three months sleeping and eating. It will surprise the hell out of her.
There are worse ways to go. I won’t pretend slaughter-day death isn’t horrific; it is. But when done right it is as quick and humane as possible, and from the moment the gun is fired to when the animal is gone from this life is literally two minutes. It will be just a sliver of her time here at Cold Antler. I don’t like watching it, but I always do. I feel it is my responsibility to be a part of the whole process, from holding a piglet in a dog crate, squealing in my arms, to the day its head lies on a snowbank.
Even with all this, it’s still a day I look forward to, and I mean that without any harshness or disrespect. Today is the day the work of raising this animal is done and she will serve her purpose. I started the day singing, and I will end it a bit more somberly — but not without joy. The death of a pig is a cause for celebration, feasts, and the promise of more piglets soon. Pork helps keep this farm going strong.
This morning I wake up to thick snowflakes coming down, snow-globe style. It is beautiful. I stoke the woodstove, put on a pot of coffee, pull a wool sweater over my braids, and head out to see to morning chores. I think about the Tschorn family hosting dogsled rides this morning in Bennington, and a coworker‘s photography show I still have not seen. But today I won’t be riding in a dogsled or looking at pictures on a café wall. I go into the barn to have some words with Pig. Yes, I named my first pig Pig. Not very original but true all the same.
The day is warmer than I am used to — already in the high 20s, and the comfortable atmosphere paired with the gentle snow seems to soften the work ahead. Pig, not yet six months old, is just inside the old red barn door. She is standing up, looking at me curiously. She lets out a few gentle snorts, and I realize how quiet she has been all along. She never really makes any noise unless something in her evening meal makes her snort with glee.
Despite once eating a hen alive when it flew into her pen, she was never vulgar. She didn’t smell bad. She wasn’t violent or jumpy, and never complained — though her world isn’t one to cause much complaint. She lived a peaceful and comfortable life in this barn. Her nests of hay, pan of grain, and red water bucket served her well. Compared to most of the pork in this world, she has lived the life of royalty. Her little curled tail wags as I scratch her ears.
I look down at her eyes and say, “Thank you.” I have never meant those words more than at this very moment. I walk out of the barn. The next time I go in will be with the butcher.
Harvest Day was an event. Eleven people and six dogs made up the work crew that descended on Cold Antler. The mission: turn a living Yorkshire Pig into food resting in the chest freezer. The pork patrol was mostly limited to me, my good friend Steve, and Vicki, the traveling butcher, and her husband. But other friends of the farm stopped by to help with various aspects of a winter animal harvest, and their effort was greatly appreciated. Two families arrived with their young children and did everything from help pick out a butchering location to climb on the roof to push off snow (necessary to keep the pork-cooking kitchen roof from leaking). It takes a village, darling. Welcome to the table.
This morning after my first hog harvest, I have to check the freezer to make sure the meat is still there. I’m not entirely sure it wasn’t a dream. I want proof positive that yesterday’s work party actually happened. But when I crack open the chest it is all there and accounted for: more than 120 pounds of roasts, ribs, hams, pork belly, sausage fixings, loins, and chops. I have never been in possession of this much meat before in my entire life. I am lousy with pork. I get a little dizzy and shut the lid.
Later this morning, fetching water from the well for the sheep, I walk past the giant maple tree. New snow has all but covered the blood. A farm exhales.
