Tag: chores

The Humblest of Things

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The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.
~Louisa May Alcott

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And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.
~Stephen Graham from The Gentle Art of Tramping

That great door opens on the present, illuminates it as with a multitude of flashing torches.
~Annie Dillard (in response to the above quote) from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

About living in the country?
…peace can deafen one, beauty surprise
No longer.  There is only the thud
Of the slow foot up the long lane
At morning and back at night.
~R.S. Thomas

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Ever since I started noticing
how beautiful are the most humble things
and the most humble people,
I realized a great door was opened to me:
the door to my own soul
and my own happiness.
I need go no further than my own back yard.

I must not forget my
astonishment
at the beauty around me
even on the grayest of days,
trudging the barnyard path
to exhausted chores.

If ever I fail to see
what is right in front of me,
this Lord’s grace-given gift
to my eyes and ears and arms,
I do not deserve to put on boots
or hold a pitchfork.

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Lyrics
Praise to the Lord of the small broken things
Who sees the poor sparrow that cannot take wing
Who loves the lame child and the wretch in the street
Who comforts their sorrows and washes their feet

Praise to the Lord of the faint and afraid
Who girds them with courage and lends them His aid
He pours out his spirit on vessels so weak
That the timid can serve and the silent can speak

Praise to the Lord of the frail and the ill
Who heals their afflictions or carries them till
They leave this tired frame and to paradise fly
To never be sick and never to die
Never die

Praise him, O praise Him all ye who live
Who’ve been given so much and can so little give
Our frail lisping praise God will never despise
He sees His dear children through mercy-filled eyes

Things to Be Done

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There are many things to be done today
and it’s a lovely day to do them in

Each thing a joy to do
and a joy to have done

I can tell because of the calm I feel
when I think about doing them

I can almost hear them say to me
Thank you for doing us

And when evening comes
I’ll remove my shoes and place them on the floor

And think how good they look
sitting?… standing?… there

Not doing anything
~ Ron Padgett “Inaction of Shoes” from Collected Poems.

Every day after work he’d sit in his armchair
with its antimacassar and its plush burgundy velour
and she’d kneel on the floor to unfasten the laces,
loosen the tongues, and lift out his feet.
When I was ten I stayed for a week
and did it for her. He thought I did it 
for him.
~Andrea Hollander Budy “My Grandmother Taking Off My Grandfather’s Shoes” from When She Named Fire

I did not grow up in a household that took time off.  Time was redeemed by work, and work was noble and honorable and proved we had a right to exist.

Vacation road trips were rare and almost always associated with my father’s work.  When he came home from his desk job in town, he would immediately change into his farm clothes and put in several hours of work outside, summer or winter, rain or shine, light or dark.

My mother did not work in town while we were children, but worked throughout her day inside and outside the house doing what farm wives and mothers need to do: growing, hoeing, harvesting, preserving, washing, cleaning, sewing, and most of all, being there for us.

As kids, we had our share of chores that were simply part of our day as our work was never done on a farm. When we turned ten, we began working for others: babysitting, weeding, barn and house cleaning, berry picking.  I figure I put in over 60 years of gainful employment – there were times I worked four part-time jobs at once because that was what I could put together to keep things together.

I know I’ve missed out on much of life being a “nose to the grindstone” person.

Now retired, I try a different way to redeem my time: to notice, to record, to observe, to appreciate beauty that still exists in the midst of chaos and cataclysm..

Life isn’t all about non-stop labor, yet we get on with our work because work is about showing up when and where we are needed.

And we are always needed, by someone, somewhere, somehow. That’s the reason why we’re here.

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Just a Couple of Aging Fools

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All day he’s shoveled green pine sawdust
out of the trailer truck into the chute.
From time to time he’s clambered down to even
the pile. Now his hair is frosted with sawdust.
Little rivers of sawdust pour out of his boots.

I hope in the afterlife there’s none of this stuff
he says, while I broom off his jeans, his sweater flocked
with granules, his immersed-in-sawdust socks.
I hope there’s no bedding, no stalls, no barn

no more repairs to the paddock gate the horses
burst through when snow avalanches off the roof.
Although the old broodmare, our first foal, is his,
horses, he’s fond of saying, make divorces.

…he says
let’s walk up to the field and catch the sunset
and off we go, a couple of aging fools.

I hope, he says, on the other side there’s a lot
less work, but just in case I’m bringing tools.
~Maxine Kumin from “Chores”

photo by Emily Vander Haak

They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows. They have
One mind between them, now, that finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.
~Wendell Berry “They Sit Together on the Porch”

If just for a moment,
when this world is tilting so far
we just might fall off,
we pause to look at where we’ve been
and get our feet back under us.

The porch is a good place to start:
a bridge to what is beyond
without leaving the familiar.

Outside, looking square at the unknown,
yet still hearing and smelling and tasting
the love that dwells just inside these walls.

What could we want more
than to be missed when we step away?

Our voice, our words, our heart, our touch
never to be replaced,
its absence a hole impossible to fill?

When we are called back inside
where Love made us who we are,
may the “in between” of
time spent on the porch,
be even more treasured,
because two aging fools sat together there a spell.

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Holding on for Dear Life

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Nothing much to look at
lying on the shelf, one on
top of the other, an old man
resting his hands on a cane.
Dried-out yellow cowhide,
lines cut deep into the palms
from stones, weeds pulled.
Fingers crumpled, swollen
like grub worms shoveled
up in planting. An extra pair
of hands helping with lawn
work, flower beds, shrubs,
whatever else comes along.
A grief pulled on to bury
the old cat some kid in a
speeding pickup knocked
out of the street like he’d
kick a can. Or kneeling last
fall to unearth the blooming
rose suddenly plucked by
an ice storm, then shaking
rich compost loose from its
twisted fingers still clenched,
holding on for dear life.
~Ron Stottlemyer “Work Gloves”

My farm work gloves tend to look ragged at the end of a year of service. I always depend on being gifted a new pair at Christmas to start afresh. It can take awhile to break them in to the point where they feel like a “second skin.”

These gloves keep me from blistering while forking innumerable loads of smelly manure into wheelbarrows, but also help me unkink frozen hoses, tear away blackberry vines from fencing, pull thistle from the field and heavy hay bales from the haymow. Over the years, I’ve gone through a few dozen work gloves which have protected my hands as I’ve cleaned and bandaged deep wounds on legs and hooves, pulled on foals during the hard contractions of difficult births, held the head of dying animals as they fall asleep one final time.

Without wearing my protective farm gloves over the years, my hands would be looking very much scarred up like my tired gloves do, full of rips and holes from the thorns and barbs of the world, sustaining scratches, callouses and blisters from the hard work of life.

But they don’t.

Thanks to these gloves, before I retired, I was presentable for my “day” work as a doctor where I would don a different set of gloves many times a day.

But my work gloves don’t tell my whole story of gratitude.

I’m thankful to a Creator God who doesn’t wear gloves when He goes to work in our world:
-He gathers us up even when we are dirty, smelly, and unworthy.
-He eases us into this life when we are vulnerable and weak,
and carries us gently home as we leave this world, weak and vulnerable.
-He holds us as we bleed from self and other-inflicted wounds.
-He won’t let us go, even when we fight back, or try not to pay attention, or care who He is.

He hangs on to us for dear life.

And this God came to live beside us
with hands just like ours~
tender, beautiful, easy-to-wound hands
that bled
because He didn’t need or want to wear gloves
for what He came to do~

His hands bear evidence of His love…

What Hard Work Yields

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I look for the spade
I used when I was young,
when my grandfather said dig
and I dug holes
the depth I’d been taught
so the posts would stand,
hold the miles of barbed and hog wire
dividing our ground… Dig, he would say,
and all morning, afternoon,
until it rained, until dark,
until I couldn’t lift the spade and grub
and he said enough,
I dug through dry brown
until it turned yellow clay
or black earth caked
to the tip of the steel. He taught me to measure
strength by depth,
narrow the hole around the oiled post,
and sturdy the line he’d laid
before I was old enough
to blister from work,
acquire the knowledge of straight,
of strength, cool soil,
rusted staples and splintered wood,
the knowledge of bending spikes
new, splicing wire,
swinging a hammer down hard,
the ache from hours of digging,
calloused hands and sunburn.
He trained me to rake,
tamp, stomp, pack dirt and clay,
the weight of the earth around the post,
its strength into the line.
Now the hammers, pliers and cutters are gone.
No rolls of wire hang from the beams.
No boxes of staples and spikes jam the shelves.
The tamping stick is broken.
Someone has wrapped duct tape around the spade handle;
the steel has rusted brown and rough;
a crack climbs from the tip to the mud-caked neck.
He would say it is useless,
that things are not like they were…
~Curtis Bauer from “A Fence Line Running Through It”

The old farmers in our county are dying off,
the ones who remember
when horse and human muscle provided the power
instead of diesel engines.
They have climbed down off their tractors
and into their beds
for a good night’s sleep.

Their machine sheds are cleared
in an auction,
their animals trucked away
for butcher,
their fence lines leaning
yet the corner posts,
set solid and sure in the hard ground,
keep standing
when the old farmer no longer does.

These old farmers knew hard work.
knew there were no days off,
no shirking duty,
knew if anyone was going to do
what needed doing
it was them,
no one else.
Things are not like they were
yet the strong posts remain,
ready to hold up another fence line,
showing us few remaining farmers
what hard work yields.

A Muck Shoveling Singalong

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He (the professor) asked what I made of the other students (at Oxford) so I told him.
They were okay, but they were all very similar…
they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies,
and they thought they would always win.
But this isn’t most people’s experience of life.

He asked me what could be done about it.
I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year
to do some dead-end job
like working in a chicken processing plant
or spreading muck with a tractor.
It would do more good than a gap year in Peru. 

He laughed and thought this was tremendously witty.
It wasn’t meant to be funny.
~James Rebanks from The Shepherd’s Life
(how a sheep farmer succeeds at Oxford and then goes back to the farm)

In our barn we have a very beat up old AM/FM radio that sits on a shelf next to the horse stalls and serves as company to the horses during the rainy stormy days they stay inside, and serves as distraction to me as I clean stalls of manure and wet spots morning and evening.  We live about 10 miles south of the Canadian border, so most stations that come in well on this radio’s broken antenna are from the lower mainland of British Columbia. This includes a panoply of stations spoken in every imaginable language– a Babel of sorts that I can tune into: Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, French and of course, proper British accent English.  But standard issue American melting pot genetic mix that I am, I prefer to tune into the “Oldies” Station and reminisce.

There is a strange comfort in listening to songs that I enjoyed 50+ years ago, and I’m somewhat miffed and perplexed that they should be called “oldies”.  Oldies used to refer to music from the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, not the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s and (heavens to Betsy) the 80’s and 90’s!   I listen and sing along with a mixture of feeling ancient and yet transported back to my teens.  I can remember faces and names I haven’t thought of in decades, recall special summer days picking berries and hear long lost voices from school days. I can smell and taste and feel things all because of the trigger of a familiar song.   There is something primordial –deep in my synapses– that is stirred by this music. In fact, I shoveled manure to these same songs 55 years ago, and somehow, it seems not much as changed. 

Or has it? One  (very quick) glance in the mirror tells me it has, and I have.

Yesterday – I Got You, Babe and you were a Bridge Over Troubled Waters for this Natural Woman who just wants to be Close to You so You’ve Got a Friend.  There’s Something in the way I Cherish The Way We Were and of course Love Will Keep Us Together. If You Leave Me Now,  You’re So Vain. I’ve always wanted it My Way but How Sweet It Is when I Want To Hold Your Hand.  Come Saturday Morning, Here Comes the Sun as we’re Born to Be Wild

Help! Do You Know Where You’re Going To?  Me and You and A Dog Named Boo will travel Country Roads and Rock Around the Clock even though God Didn’t Make the Little Green Apples to grow in a Moonshadow.  Fire and Rain will make things All Right Now once Morning is Broken, I’ll Say a Little Prayer For You so just Let It Be.

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction from the Sounds of Silence — If— Those Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.  Stand By Me as It’s Just My Imagination that I am a Rock, when really I only want Time in a Bottle and to just Sing, Sing a Song.

They just don’t write songs like they used to. I seem to remember my parents saying that about the songs I loved so well in the 60’s and 70’s. Somehow in the midst of decades of change, there are some constants.  Music still touches our souls, no matter how young or old we are.

And every day there will always be manure that needs shoveling.

Just Keep Going

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In winter the steep lane
is often icy
one in four, and today
it brings me
to my hands and
dodgy knees

absurd under trees
tall as the sky
a mile or two to go

I crawl for a while
then scrabble
to my feet but stay low,

young old man
I stop at a dry
stone wall then step

up
atop
a stile

owl call
far city
constellation

then down
to a field
that might be snow

nothing to do
but keep going
~Peter Sansom “In Winter the Steep Lane”

When faced with navigating an icy path ahead of me, I am rendered helpless. An icy path on a slope is even more intimidating.

Our farm is located on a hill, which is wonderful 50+ weeks out of the year, but in winter during arctic wind flow days, plus rain or sleet, it becomes a skating rink on an incline. Even the best traction devices won’t keep me on my feet.

I’m thankful my husband has much better balance than I do, but even the last ice storm was even too much for him. We don’t have much choice but to slide and crawl to our barnyard destination to complete our chores. It is exceedingly humbling to be brought to our knees, but that has always been the best position for sorely needed prayer and petition.

We pray to keep our aging bones intact.
We pray to keep our backs and noggins functional.
We pray for the thaw to come soon.

Despite an unsure landing for each footstep, there is nothing to do but keep going.
So we do.

To Recover the Lost

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The songs of small birds fade away
into the bushes after sundown,
the air dry, sweet with goldenrod.
Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters
flare in the dusk. The aged voices
of a few crickets thread the silence.
It is a quiet I love, though my life
too often drives me through it deaf.
Busy with costs and losses, I waste
the time I have to be here—a time
blessed beyond my deserts, as I know,
if only I would keep aware. The leaves
rest in the air, perfectly still.
I would like them to rest in my mind
as still, as simply spaced. As I approach,
the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing,
poised there, light on the slope
as a young apple tree. A week ago
I took her away to sell, and failed
to get my price, and brought her home
again. Now in the quiet I stand
and look at her a long time, glad
to have recovered what is lost
in the exchange of something for money.
~Wendell Berry “The Sorrel Filly”

I am reminded at the end of a week
of dark and wet and cold
with chores not done yet,
and horses waiting to be fed,
of the value of decades of moments spent
with long-lashed eyes, wind-swept manes, and velvet muzzles.

True, it appears to others to be time and money wasted.
But for a farmer like me, sometimes deaf and blind
to what is in front of me every day,
not all valuables are preserved in a lock box.

Golden treasure can have
four hooves, a tail, with a rumbling greeting
asking if I’d somehow gotten lost
since I’m a little later than usual
and they were a bit concerned I’d forgotten them.

Only then I remember where my home is
and how easy it is to wander from the path
that somehow always leads me back here.

Only Here and Now

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When I work outdoors all day, every day,
as I do now, in the fall, getting ready for winter,
tearing up the garden, digging potatoes,
gathering the squash, cutting firewood, making kindling, repairing
bridges over the brook, clearing trails in the woods,
doing the last of the fall mowing,
pruning apple trees, taking down the screens,
putting up the storm windows, banking the house—all these things,
as preparation for the coming cold…

when I am every day all day all body and no mind, when I am
physically, wholly and completely, in this world with the birds,
the deer, the sky, the wind, the trees…

when day after day I think of nothing but what the next chore is,
when I go from clearing woods roads, to sharpening a chain saw,
to changing the oil in a mower, to stacking wood, when I am
all body and no mind…

when I am only here and now and nowhere else—
then, and only then, do I see the crippling power of mind,
the curse of thought, and I pause and wonder why
I so seldom find this shining moment in the now.
~David Budbill “This Shining Moment in the Now” from While We’ve Still Got Feet.

I spend only a small part of my day doing physical work compared to my husband’s faithful daily labor in the garden and elsewhere on the farm. We both celebrate the good and wonderful gifts from the Lord, His sun, rain and soil. Although these weeks are a busy harvest time preserving as much as we can from the orchard and the garden, too much of my own waking time is spent almost entirely within the confines of my skull.

I know that isn’t healthy. My body needs to lift and push and pull and dig and toss, so I head outside to do farm and garden chores. This physical activity gives me the opportunity to be “in the moment” and not crushed under “what was, what is, what needs to be and what possibly could be” — all the processing that happens mostly in my head.

I’m grateful for this tenuous balance in my life, knowing as I do that I was never cut out to be a good full time farmer. I sometimes feel that shining glow in the moments of “living it now” rather than dwelling endlessly in my mind about the past or the future.

Thank the Lord, oh thank the Lord. I am learning to let those harvest moments shine.

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The Heart’s Need

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About living in the country?
…peace can deafen one, beauty surprise
No longer.  There is only the thud
Of the slow foot up the long lane
At morning and back at night.
~R.S. Thomas from “The Country”

…once when he was walking
Along a lane in spring he was deceived
By a shrill whistle coming through the leaves;
Wait a minute, wait a minute-four swift notes;
He turned, and it was nothing, only a Thrush
In the thorn bushes easing its throat.
He swore at himself for paying heed,
The poor hill farmer, so often again
Stopping, staring, listening, in vain,
His ear betrayed by the heart’s need.
~R.S.Thomas from “The Lonely Farmer”

I must not forget my heart’s need:
my utter astonishment
at the beauty around me
even on the hottest and sweatiest of days,
even on the grayest and wettest of days,
while trudging the darkened barnyard path
to attend, although weary, to chores.

If ever I fail to see
what is right in front of me,
this grace-given gift
to my eyes and ears and heart,
I do not deserve to put on boots
or hold a pitchfork.

Farmer with a pitchfork by Winslow Homer

He knows every stone that’s been struck by the plow
There’s a pile by the barn by the sweat of his brow
The land has his heart and he rarely complains
And it holds his knees when he prays for rain

He’s a dusty old carhartt and the light in the barn
He’ll work the late hours and he’s up before dawn
Every man has a story and the story goes on
From grandad’s eyes to a new born son

Why I farm is in my blood, like the sunlight is on my skin
Is who I meant to be, is who I’ve always been
Is more than just a living, it’s my way of life
And it grows like seed inside my heart
That’s why I farm

We always pull through when we thought we would break
In the flood ’93, in the draught ’88
The Lord has his timing ’cause only he knows
That when next year comes the crops will grow
Find more lyrics at 

Tough the world may shake around me, still I am stable
For as long as I am able, I’ll work this way
‘Cause when heaven comes this close to what you’re holding
This life is but a moment in a bigger plan
~The Henningsens