january at fernwood

January 6, 2018

I believe I look forward to the New Year more than I do Christmas.  Christmas, no matter how simple you keep it, has a gaudy element, a bit of the overdone, while January is remarkably fresh and spare.  Even our property has a stripped down look, the unleafed views revealing a neighbor’s house, a new view of the creek across the road.  In the late fall this feels a bit distressing.  Curtains I ignore for half the year are pulled tight as soon as the dark rises, lest anyone catch a glimpse through freshly bare branches into the privacy of the house.  But by January I’ve nearly forgotten this seasonal modesty and I leave the curtains as they are until we’re headed to bed.  Anyone looking in from the outside on a January evening might catch a glimpse of lit candles, lamps on the mantle, the electric glow of our tiny fake fireplace (a placeholder until we order a real woodstove) and a smattering of people in couch corners, knees tented and noses in books.

“What do other people do at night?” I ask my family repeatedly in these months, for all I can ever think to do when the day is over is curl up with a good story, but other people seem to live such interesting lives. At least they do in my social media feeds.  All I ever receive back from such a question is a couple of absentminded shrugs.  Apparently no one else feels they’re left out of any big life secrets.

On Fridays we watch movies.  Lately, I’ve become serious about limiting the violence I watch, so the dreaded movie selection process has become even more fraught.  Now we not only have to find something everyone wants to watch but it also can’t have bloody murders, vigilante justice, beatings, rapes, predatory abuse, police brutality, war, or gun violence.  In short, there’s not much left to watch, and that in itself has been revealing for everyone.  How far, I wonder to myself, have I sunk along the fault line of desensitization?  I remember when one of our sons saw an old Western for the first time and became hysterical when a cowboy, one foot caught in a stirrup, was dragged along the desert by a runaway horse.  He couldn’t understand why a movie would show something like that, why it was entertaining to watch a man get hurt.  I wonder how many times I have begun a recommendation with, “There’s some violence, but the story is so good!”  and I wonder when the violence stopped mattering?

There’s too much to fear in the world as it is.  For example, I keep reading about the Big One, the expected Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake that could destroy everything west of Interstate 5.  It will happen soon, experts say, anytime between today and the next 1,000 years.  Seeing as we live in a 100-year old farmhouse perched on a tree-covered hillside somewhere between the coast and I-5, I worry about this a lot.  There are so many things you can control through discretion, hard work, and prudence.  And so many, many things you cannot.

But I can't do anything about the Big One and this is January, so Fernwood is in that stripped down, drizzly state she gets into every year, like an old woman just come from the shower, her hair pulled back, the bones of her face startling, her shoulders rounded to clutch the robe to her sagging chest.  Everywhere I look her age is showing.  This is the time of year we take note, jot down the spring and summer projects.  The duck house doors have to be rehung, there’s a leak in the roof where Ginger (the 10 year old chicken) likes to sleep, there are more branches down along the roadside and up in the woods.  This is in addition to the dilemma about the new geese.  Westley and Buttercup have turned into a gorgeous, funny pair who have done a splendid job of keeping the ducks safe from predators.  But they are huge birds and while I find it ever-so-charming that they are exclusively vegetarian, they have laid waste to my flower beds, decimating everything green that isn’t behind a deer-proof fence.  Not to mention, they love to hang out around the house and they poop.  A lot.   Add to the to-do list: solve goose problem.

Sometimes I look around at this place and think what it might be like in the hands of someone who loved to garden, someone who naturally gravitated outdoors to pull weeds and grow things, instead of me, whose natural habitat is the indoor landscape, book and tea in hand.  Fernwood, in her rambly, slightly neglected state, reveals that my daily priorities do not involve yard work and that makes me cringe a little. How I’d love to be Gladys Taber or Tasha Tudor or Virginia Woolf who managed both their art and glorious gardens.  But I can only be myself after all.   If nothing else, Fernwood’s appearance also reveals my feelings about Nature as a wise caretaker on her own and it gives me a lot of pleasure to see how Mama Earth nurtures herself, how she provides for the creatures that make their homes here with us.  When I do go outside (and I do, frequently), it is often not to subdue and tame, but to listen, watch, and learn.   In January, she seems to be asking us to strip down to the bone, see what’s been hidden, what needs to be realigned.  This is the time she invites us to breathe deep, see ourselves and our homes for what they are, no flinching.  I’m taking note.

tonia

talisman

 In the overgrown tangle that was the yard behind the house, he found a nest of new-born garter snakes.  That’s how he knew it was the right house.  He used both hands to pull apart the hedge of weed and bramble and peered in at the nest, the twist of infant snake bodies like a knot of bootstrings, each with a pale yellow stripe running along its sides.  He could see the hole in the earth that was their den, a small black circle deep in the hillside.  If they hadn’t come out looking for the sun just then, he’d never have found them.  He placed his hand carefully on the ground beside the nest and stood very still, waiting.  He could hear his parents and the realtor lady coming out onto the deck, the clomp of shoes on the wood, his father asking questions in the brisk voice he used for work.  He heard, “Do you have a copy of that inspection I could look at?” and he shifted his body into the shade, made himself smaller so they wouldn’t see him there.

He felt the cool ribbon of a snake pass across his waiting hand.  His grandfather said that stillness was the way to gain trust with an animal, and so he didn’t jerk or clench.  The snakes had to know he was safe, that he wasn’t the type of boy to swing them violently into the air or…other things.  The back of his throat rounded and he swallowed quickly, remembering Josiah and the way he’d twisted the snake they’d found, smashed its head.  He blinked his eyes, concentrated on being quiet, sending the message through his arm and down into his hand that he was safe, they could trust him.  He inched his hand closer to the mass of them, let his fingers lift up the thin bodies at the edges.  The snakes shrunk and expanded, weaving and testing, accepting, pouring themselves over him as if he were a natural part of their environment, a common stone, or stick.  He felt the shiver go up his arm all the way to the top of his skull and he smiled broadly.  This was the house.  He twisted himself gently to look at it, the straight lines, the pointed peak right at the center, the white walls and the empty windows that looked like they were just waiting to hold faces, the reflection of lamps, inside them.

His mother had seen him and was coming down the steps; he watched her picking her way through the tall grass, her soft pant legs catching and releasing, gathering a confetti of seed heads.  Be quiet, please be quiet, he pleaded with his mind but he could see on her face that she already understood this.   She knelt down beside him, bringing with her the scent of vanilla, warm grass, the coffee they’d bought from a drive-through on the way here. 

“What did you find?” she whispered, pulling branches back, leaning in to see around his arm.  He tented his hand, a tectonic shift that lifted the snakes and revealed his knuckles, the arch of his fingers.  She grinned, leaning back. 

“A whole nest,” she said.  “That’s lucky.” 

He turned his palm upright and closed the fingers before all the snakes could slip away.  When he lifted out his arm, two black ropes were twisting around his hand.  He held them out so they could watch them, the flattened triangular heads, the eyes like tiny marbles, the upcurved line of their mouths like a knowing smile.  One of the snakes explored the road of his arm, moving past his wrist and then twisting back down towards his hand, but the other stepped out into thin air, leaning itself down, reaching for the earth.  His mother extended her own hand, let it slip across. 

“The people who lived here were old,” she said.  “They got too old to take care of the yard anymore.”  She had seen the poisons in the garage, the fertilizers and traps.  The man had apologized, the realtor said, he’d broken his hip, couldn’t keep it green and tidy as he used to.  She knew this shamed him, because he’d insisted that the realtor explain to them, wanted them to know the house was cared for, but she was glad of it.  The snake she held reached out into the air again, searching for the ground, and she let it go, slanting it back toward its nest. 

“Snakes are a good sign,” she said, standing up and brushing at the grass seeds that clung to her.  “That means there are frogs and insects, birds.”  She breathed in.  “It’s not much to look at, but it feels right, doesn’t it?” 

She put her hands on her hips and smiled down at him. He was silent, watching the snake.  He brought it towards his face, tilted so he could look into the inky eye.  Animals speak with their bodies, his Grampa had told him, and he knew the snake was speaking now, its thread of a tongue tasting the smell of him, its eye taking in his strangeness, its gaze steady and unafraid, its lithe black body calmly coiling itself into a bunched ribbon in the palm of his hand.