Spring: When Everything Seems New Again | Life in the Kingdom

The reluctant departure of winter means that the pasture remains brown and sere at the outset of May. Heavy frost still comes most nights, riming the ground, and we begin each day with a small fire in the cookstove, just enough to make coffee and chase away the morning chill. If we had more wood, we might stoke the fire once again midmorning, but the woodshed is down to a handful of oddball sticks, the runts and funny-shaped rejects we could afford to discard when the shed was better stocked. On a couple of occasions I consider going into the woods in search of a deadfall, but scrounging for firewood in May whispers of a desperation I can’t quite admit to, so instead we let the fires go out and don woolen hats until the sunshine filtering through the windows warms the house enough to take them off.

Despite the lingering cold, the excitement of the season has us firmly it its thrall. In May, anything and everything seem possible. This is good, because there’s much to be done. The gardens must be prepped, winter mulch pulled off the beds to let the soil warm. As always, there are fences to repair. We’d moved the chickens into one of the greenhouses for the winter so that we could demolish their old, dilapidated coop; this was a wise and necessary task, but now we need the greenhouse for tomato starts and have no place to move the chickens. I begin constructing a new coop but soon run out of lumber, so I spend a precious half-day tinkering with the sawmill and the other equally precious half pulling balsam-fir logs from the woods with the tractor. The animals seem to feel the excitement, too. They pace their respective paddocks, sensing that soon they’ll be turned out to the first tender shoots of grass. We’ll have to turn them out earlier than is ideal; in the extreme cold of this unrelenting winter, they ate more than usual, and our hay has held up no better than our firewood. Sure, we could buy more, but hay is expensive, and such purchases can’t be made lightly.

The days pass so quickly that they feel liquid. One minute we’re waking up, the next we’re tucking in, and whatever happened in between already feels as though it happened in another life, maybe even to someone else. We rise early, aided and abetted by Fin and Rye’s fervent desire to get a wild turkey into the freezer. Vermont’s turkey season begins on May 1, and every morning the boys are up before 5:00, dressing in camo and rubbing one another’s cheeks with cork they’ve charred in the fire. “Papa, do you see any bright spots?” they ask me, tilting their expectant faces into the light for inspection. I rub the cork over the places they missed, and they head out the door to the blind they built out of leaves and branches at the fringe of our neighbor Melvin’s back pasture. They know there’s a flock roosting nearby. They’ve seen where the birds have scratched the forest floor in search of grubs and insects. They’ve heard the males gobbling. Penny and I stand at the kitchen sink and watch them disappear down the pasture, their footprints just visible in the frost-white grass. Three hours later they return home, and I don’t have to ask whether they’ve had any luck, because we’d have heard the shot. This happens morning after morning, and to my great surprise, the boys don’t seem discouraged. I’m not a hunter; I can’t fathom their patience, but I’m glad for it. One morning after they return from the turkey blind, Fin takes the season’s first swim. It’s not an auspicious day for a first swim—raw and blustery, no more than 50 degrees—but Fin has never experienced cold the way most people do. He strips naked and throws himself into the frigid water, whooping, while Rye watches from the shore, cloaked in wool. “Come on, Papa, come on!” Fin calls from the pond, and for a second I actually consider joining him, if only for bragging rights. But common sense prevails. Finally, the weather breaks for real, and the slow march of spring’s arrival becomes a sprint. The transformation is almost breathtaking in both speed and force. Suddenly everything is green—and not the pale green of April’s tentative foliage, but a shade so deep and verdant I think I might be able to taste it. Then it rains; the pasture grows by inches each day, and I no longer think I can taste the green—I know I can. I exhale a heavy breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. On May 15, with three bales of hay remaining in the barn, the sheep go onto grass. The new lambs have never set foot on pasture, but they know just what to do. On May 16, we release the cows from their winter paddock. They run and cavort with lumbering bovine glee, tails streaming in the air behind them.

—

Sometimes I think about how our lives have come to be defined by the seasons, and how each season provides in its own particular way. In winter, we rest until we become restless, at which point we cut firewood and plan for spring, making extensive lists of ambitious projects that in our fevered imaginations we truly believe we’ll accomplish: Build chicken coop. Start new barn. Roof over sawmill. Plant orchard. In spring, we sugar and seed, our energy building like the sap rising in the trees. Heady in our optimism, we add to the list: Fix front stoop. New plastic on small greenhouse. Clear lower side of farm road. “I know,” Penny says, “let’s build a sauna, right by the pond.” “Why not?” I say. “Everyone needs a sauna by a pond.” She adds Build sauna to the list. Our enthusiasm knows no bounds. And now, finally, comes the release, the days we’ve anticipated for months, although suddenly, in the midst of planting and fencing and sawing and building, we realize how foolish we’ve been. A sauna?! Ha! So silly. We cross Build sauna off the list. Maybe next year. Start the new barn?! Who are we kidding? We cross off Start new barn. We plant a few apple trees, but an orchard?! Not even if we squint. Not even close. So we cross that off, too. We finish the chicken coop and get the plastic on the greenhouse and decide that the front stoop and the sawmill roof can wait until fall. Surely we’ll have time then. Surely.

—

May comes and goes. The boys don’t get a turkey. But that’s okay, and besides, the brookies are biting in their favorite fishing hole. They carry them home two and three and sometimes even four at a time, and we fry them in butter. The boys eat everything, even the heads.

I go looking for morel mushrooms to add to the pan, but my usual hotspot is cold. Four days later I return there, expecting nothing, but there are mushrooms everywhere, a carpet of them. I’ve brought no bag or basket; instead, I fill my ball cap to overflowing and then make a pouch of my shirt. We eat morels for three meals straight and then they’re gone. It’ll be nearly a year before we eat them again, and even then, who knows? Morels are tricky; they offer no guarantees.

The gardens are more reliable, and now they’re planted in full, row after row of fledging starts, enough to grow a year’s worth of vegetables and some surplus to barter with friends. The blueberries flower and set fruit. A good crop. The chickens seem pleased with their new coop, and the small greenhouse is given over to tomatoes. From the big greenhouse, we harvest early salads of lettuce, sorrel, and spinach. We haven’t had fresh greens for months, and we eat them ravenously, absence having made our tastebuds fonder. Up the road, Jimmy takes his first cutting of hay, and I know it won’t be long before we’re stacking bales on the wagon behind our friend Martha’s old John Deere. We’ll fill our barn with 1,000 or more bales of hay, and then we’ll run to the pond and leap in, gratefully exhausted. Another winter’s worth of feed for our animals. The season will provide. It always does.

—

On a cool Saturday morning in early June, I walk down the field to find a new calf wobbling at its mother’s side. It’s hours old and still unsure of itself, tottering as it nuzzles for a teat. I pull up short and stand for a minute to watch. I want to see the calf nurse, partly because seeing it nurse is the best antidote to my lingering concern that it might not nurse, but also because watching a newborn calf nurse is one of the small pleasures of rural life. At 42, I still need to remind myself not to let these pleasures pass me by. The air is thick with mist, and moisture collects on my skin. It’s cool enough that I shiver a bit in my T-shirt, and I will the calf to find its mark so that I can begin to move again, to warm myself with my own pumping blood. The calf wobbles some more, its pursed mouth finding everything but its target. It suckles at its mother’s leg. It suckles at her flank. It suckles at the air. Finally, just as I’m about to press forward to offer assistance, it finds a teat and begins to drink. I can hear the slurping from 20 yards away, and I pause for just a moment longer, standing at the far end of our pasture as the day lightens around me, my skin goosebumped, my boots soaked through from the dew-wet grass, watching the newborn calf nurse.

I’ve seen it a hundred or more times before. I’ve crossed our pasture tenfold times more than that. No, twentyfold. More. But I’ve never seen this calf nurse on this morning. I’ve never crossed our pasture on this day, the mist lifting in precisely the way it’s lifting now, like a slow curtain, revealing the sun. Everything feels new again. Yankee’s editors and author Ben Hewitt understand that the term “Northeast Kingdom” popularly refers to Orleans, Essex, and Caledonia counties in northern Vermont. We’ve taken a bit of artistic license in asking Ben Hewitt to write about his family and fellow Vermonters who may live outside those boundaries, because the term “the Kingdom” captures perfectly the mindset and singular way of life that Yankee has always respected.