Life in the Kingdom | The Cusp of Summer

And so summer comes in full, or nearly so. In the orchard, the apple blossoms emerge in a burst of color, then begin releasing their delicate petals, one after another after another, and for the next two weeks, walking beneath the trees is like walking through the world’s most benevolent snowstorm. The air is full of flowers making their meandering drift to earth, and on gray days, it looks almost as if the trees are lit from within by some mysterious and irrepressible energy.

At night I lie with the bedroom window flung wide, alternately reading and pausing to listen to the undulating chorus of wood frogs. The sounds seem to come from everywhere at once, rising and falling and rising according to … what, exactly? I have no idea. Maybe whim. Maybe nothing. Winslow the cat perches on the wide sill of the open window, ears pitched forward, tail twitching, surely imagining the bounty of defenseless creatures just beyond that confounded screen.

In the morning, light comes early and I awake fully alert, with none of the slow-emergence-from-the-drowsy-depths sensation that plagues me in winter. Perhaps my alertness is derived from the same mysterious force that lights up those trees and compels the wood frogs to sing. Perhaps it’s not mysterious at all. After all, it happens like this every year. It doesn’t come from nowhere.

I dress quickly, in the same clothes I wore the day before and the day before that (and, if I’m to be entirely honest, the day before that): a sour-smelling T-shirt and a pair of Carhartts that are frayed at the cuffs and blown out on the right knee, revealing my penchant for favoring that leg whenever I kneel. How many times do I kneel in a day? It must number in the dozens, all those times I drop to my knee to sharpen the saw, drive a nail, or pet the cat. Maybe to plant a seed or dig with my hands around the edges of a rock so I can lift it free of the rich soil, toss it onto the pile at the eastern edge of the garden where it lands with the musical clink of stone on stone, just another in a long line of liberated rocks. Every year we think we’ve dug them all, and every year the frost lifts a few more toward the surface. Still, I think maybe it’s good that I have to kneel so often. It’s a little bit humbling, and it’s a little bit like bowing, and I like how it brings me closer to the ground. It’s the posture of a common man doing common work.

Maybe the energy I feel this time of year is really just relief—to have made it through another winter unscathed (and with a half row of firewood to spare!), to be reminded that for all the ways in which my life can feel too small and quiet, it also contains this overwhelming fullness, and that there is compensation for the sacrifices we’ve made over the years. The vacations forgone, the inflexiblity of the creatures that depend on us, or just the moments I find myself kneeling that don’t feel quite so much like bowing and more like a run-of-the-mill pain in the ass: flat tires, burned-out starters, leaking hydraulic hoses. Or trying to crack the huge nut that holds the brush mower blade in place, a consistently futile undertaking that always sends me scurrying to borrow Tom’s impact driver, but generally not before I’ve removed a considerable quantity of skin from the knuckles of my right hand. Yeah. That friggin’ mower blade. Gets me every time.

I used to think that these sacrifices were proof of something: that I was more committed, or harder-working, or maybe just a little bit tougher. I don’t think that way anymore; now, I see that we are all making sacrifices all the time, that there is no possibility of a life without concessions. But equally, that there is no possibility of a life that doesn’t offer compensations. The trick, if there is one, is determining which concessions you’re willing to make, and, by extension, which compensations are most important to you.

So here we are, on the cusp of summer. Winter has come and gone, and as always, Penny and I stayed put, breaking the ice on the cows’ water, feeding the insatiable maw of the woodstove even as we split cord after cord of firewood for next winter’s feedings. Over and over again, I knelt unceremoniously in the snow and on the ice, cold seeping through to the knob of my knee. There’s nothing noble about it, and it’s not proof of a damn thing. It’s just a middle-aged man shivering in the diminishing light, blowing on his numbing hands every 30 seconds, desperately trying to figure out why the tractor won’t start, hoping like hell he can get it going before dark. 

But now? Now in the mornings I take my second coffee in hand and walk outside in my sour-smelling tee and worn-out jeans. Now I stroll down the driveway, past the half-curious cows and the tractor that will soon start with a mere turn of its key. Now I enter the orchard, where the dropping blossoms flit through the air like moths and the grass is turning a deeper shade of green by the minute. I kneel and take a lush tuft in my hand. It’ll soon be ready to graze, and isn’t it a miracle that this happens every year?  

This column was originally published in the May/June 2023 issue of Yankee.

Ben Hewitt

Born and raised in Vermont, Ben Hewitt has played several roles throughout his life, including as a homesteader, carpenter, writer, and parent. He is very grateful to his readers for their ongoing support.

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