Tag: Farm Life

This Failing Light

September 10, 2026 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Day after day, day after still day,
The summer has begun to pass away.
Starlings at twilight fly clustered and call,
And branches bend, and leaves begin to fall.
The meadow and the orchard grass are mown,
And the meadowlark’s house is cut down.

The little lantern bugs have doused their fires,
The swallows sit in rows along the wires.
Berry and grape appear among the flowers
Tangled against the wall in secret bowers,
And cricket now begins to hum the hours
Remaining to the passion’s slow procession
Down from the high place and the golden session
Wherein the sun was sacrificed for us.

A failing light, no longer numinous,
Now frames the long and solemn afternoons
Where butterflies regret their closed cocoons.
We reach the place unripe, and made to know
As with a sudden knowledge that we go
Away forever, all hope of return
Cut off, hearing the crackle of the burn-
ing blade behind us, and the terminal sound
Of apples dropping on the dry ground.
~Howard Nemerov “Summer’s Elegy” from Collected Poems

As far as I can see this autumn haze
That spreading in the evening air both ways,
Makes the new moon look anything but new,
And pours the elm-tree meadow full of blue,
Is all the smoke from one poor house alone
With but one chimney it can call its own;
So close it will not light an early light,
Keeping its life so close and out of sight
No one for hours has set a foot outdoors
So much as to take care of evening chores.
The inmates may be lonely women-folk.
I want to tell them that with all this smoke
They prudently are spinning their cocoon
And anchoring it to an earth and moon
From which no winter gale can hope to blow it,—
Spinning their own cocoon did they but know it.
~Robert Frost “The Cocoon”

The summer ends, and it is time
To face another way. Our theme
Reversed, we harvest the last row
To store against the cold, undo
The garden that will be undone.
We grieve under the weakened sun
To see all earth’s green fountains dried,
And fallen all the works of light.
You do not speak, and I regret
This downfall of the good we sought
As though the fault were mine. I bring
The plow to turn the shattering
Leaves and bent stems into the dark,
From which they may return. At work,
I see you leaving our bright land,
The last cut flowers in your hand.
~Wendell Berry “The Summer Ends” from A Timbered Choir.

I too regret the closed cocoon,
so seemingly safe at the time —
once launched before being ready,
there is no returning.

In this fading, failing light, I feel undone,
weepy at harvest, gathering urgently,
not wanting anything to go to waste,
trying to memorialize it all as it changes.

I part again from you, Summer –
your gifts seemed endless
until you yourself ended –
a reminder that someday,
so must I.

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Watching the Rain Happen

September 8, 2026 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Immense, entirely itself,
it wore that yard like a dress,

with limbs low enough for me to enter it
and climb the crooked ladder to where

I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.

One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell
darkening the sidewalk.

Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,
I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,

watching it happen without it happening to me.
~Marie Howe “The Copper Beech” from What the Living Do

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
then with the gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.
~Wendell Berry “Stay Home” from Collected Poems

A steady silver rain pours out
over the gray world on an ordinary
morning. Drenching for hours
the field, wild flowers, soil
and all the birds off somewhere dry
in hidden nests, keeping quiet.

And you, too: keep quiet for a few hours,
let your thoughts fizz like that silver sheen,
shushshushshushshush, ceaseless sheet
of velvet, of plenty. Enough to hear, to drink,
to soak in, though you hadn’t known
how dry you were.
~Joanne Esser “What You Need: (It Doesn’t Have to Be Lightning)” from Nothing is Stationary

Yesterday morning, our county was awakened shortly after 6AM with several thunder crashes after lightning bolts flashed and illuminated our dark bedroom.

Thunder storms are unusual in the Pacific Northwest; even more unusual is an early morning storm with so much drama and subsequent dumping rain.

I was fortunate to be sheltering inside a comfortable home with a good roof — not sitting in a tree.

I was happy, watching it happen without it happening to me.

Then I looked out my kitchen window, where a drenched pine siskin sat trembling on our bird feeder, her breakfast interrupted by the downpour. No doubt she would much rather have been at home quietly sitting in her favorite tree, but as she was unable to fly so soaked by the heavy torrent, she huddled under the little cover of the feeder, trying to ride it out.

Watching her cope with her wet plumage from an unplanned bird bath, I realized I hadn’t known how dry I was.

After twenty minutes, the storm was all over as the sun began peeking out from behind roiling clouds. She shook off the excess drops from her feathers, picked out a few more seeds before launching on her way to parts unknown.

I sat and finished my toast, musing at our brief breakfast alongside one another, each safe under temporary shelter.
In her own way, she let me know:
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

And so I shall…

Lyrics:
We all need love and shelter
A place where we let go and rest
To live secure with one another
To be ourselves, not somebody else

Everybody needs respect and dignity
Everybody needs love, real love

We all need to know we’re worthy
That we are treasure to our core
We can tell the truth about our trauma
To be believed so we can be restored

Everybody needs love; everybody knows love
Is what it takes to make a life
So everybody breathe love; everyone receive love
It’s how we heal and make things right

We all need confirmation
To know that we are seen and heard
To live our lives out in freedom
Then all our flags of hope can be unfurled

We all need a place to shelter

Lyrics:
Whisper truth over me
I’m loved eternally
Never am I alone, you’re here with me
I don’t have to be afraid
Faithfulness doesn’t change
Unshakable terra firm underneath my need

I wanna know this love
A love that never dies
For when I trust I find
Your love sustains my life

Whisper grace over me
I don’t need to earn your peace
Help me surrender now as you carry me
When shadows are lengthening
I’m sheltered beneath your wings
Compassionate arms of love are still underneath

I wanna know this love
A love that never dies
For when I trust I find
Your love sustains my life

I wanna know this love
A love that never dies
For when I trust I’ll find
Your love sustains my life

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Hard at Work on Labor Day

September 7, 2026 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Silk-thin silver strings woven cleverly into a lair,
An intricate entwining of divinest thread…
Like strands of magic worked upon the air,
The spider spins his enchanted web –
His home so eerily, spiraling spreads.

His gossamer so rigid, yet lighter than mist,
And like an eight-legged sorcerer – a wizard blest,
His lace, like a spell, he conjures and knits;
I witnessed such wild ingenuity wrought and finessed,
Watching the spider weave a dream from his web.
~Jonathan Platt “A Spider’s Web”

I believed only air
stretched between the dogwood

and the barberry: another
thoughtless human assumption

sidetracking the best story
this furrow spider knew to spin.

And, trying to get the sticky
filament off my face, I must look,

to the neighbors, like someone
being attacked by his own nervous

system, a man conducting an orchestra
of bees. Or maybe it’s only the dance

of human history I’m reenacting:
caught in his own careless wreckage,

a man trying to extricate himself,
afraid to open his eyes.
~Jeff Worley “Walking Through a Spider Web” from Lucky Talk

Not everyone is taking a holiday today on Labor Day.
Some are busier than ever, creating a masterpiece nightly,
then waiting in hope for that labor to be rewarded.

I too spin elaborate dreams at night:
some remembered,
some bare fragments,
some shattered,
some potentially yield a meal.

We work because we are hungry.
We work because someone we love is hungry and needs feeding.

Yet the best work is the work of weaving dreams
~out of thin air and gossamer strands~
where nothing existed before,
not as a trap or lure or lair
but as a work of beauty-
a gift as welcome as a breath of fresh air.

Lyrics from E.B.White poem “Natural History”
The spider, dropping down from twig
Unfolds a plan of her devising
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising

And all that journey down through space
In cool descent and loyal hearted
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started

Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning

Lyrics

Take the silver thread of a spider’s web
And spin, spin, spin
Silver wings to fly and sing
Upon the wind
High above the trees, across the seas
And through the sky
To the rainbow’s bend, where stories never end
And dreams never die

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Just What I’ve Gone and Done

September 5, 2026 barnstormingblog2 Comments

Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.

When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.
~Wendell Berry “Sabbath Poem X, 1979″

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,
then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?

This is the best—
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso—
and, if necessary, the windows—
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.
~Billy Collins from “Morning”

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
—The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds—
“I’m sixty-eight” he said,
“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that’s just what
I’ve gone and done.”
~Gary Snyder – “Hay for the Horses” from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems

Sure enough, I’ve gone and done it — spent over 50 years of my life taking care of horses. I hope for at least a few more years of horsekeeping as long as I am able while our three retired, aging Haflingers stick around.

No one said I had to do this and plenty of people saw it as expensive folly, including a few cherished folks who continue to aid and abet my horse ownership.

When I was young and agile and full of energy, I didn’t really project ahead fifty years to see that picking up hay bales, moving manure piles and being bumped or stepped on by a 1000 pound animal is a bigger deal now than it once was.

Fourteen years ago, I wrote the following on this website:

From September through April, I scramble to the top of the hay pile in the barn to push down two bales to feed to our horses, now that the pastures are resting and “left to grace” for the winter. My husband has been busy spreading our composted manure out on the fields to give them an extra fertilizer boost for next spring’s growth.

As farmers, we have to always be thinking one or two seasons ahead: the hay brought into the barn in June or July does not leave the barn until late-autumn. The manure piled up in winter gets spread on pastures the following fall. The tilled cornfields surrounding us are seeded in May and not harvested until October after several months of rain and sun and rain again.

More than practicing forethought, as farmers we know our meager efforts, as tangible as they are, are dependent solely on grace: that there will be enough rain, that there will not be too much rain, that there will be enough days of sunlight, that the seed will sprout, that the machinery will work when needed, that there will be no blight or pests, and that the hay crew will materialize when needed for harvest. So much of this is not due to the labor of our hands, no matter how much we sweat and ache, but due to the great work of the Creator in His Creation.

Every hay bale I open spills forth His mercy, a reminder of how grateful I am for seed and sun and rain and a barn full of promises.

Despite the hard physical work, fifty years hasn’t changed how I love the smell of a soft muzzle, or seeing my reflection in their eyes.

When I lived in a city apartment so many years ago, I knew I would love to wake up every morning to take care of horses the rest of my life.

And you know what?

That’s just what I’ve gone and done.

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Going First Through the Dark Doorway

September 1, 2026 barnstormingblog3 Comments

In gratitude to the writing and wisdom of farmer Wendell Berry who, at age 92, passed through his porch’s dark doorway yesterday 8/31/26

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”

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 affection 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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The Mundane Becomes Miraculous

August 31, 2026 barnstormingblog1 Comment

Last night
we were laying in bed
when my husband
rolled over and said,
“Do you hear birds?”
I said I heard
the laundry
dragging itself along
the inside of the dryer
as it turned.

My grandparents’ neighbor,
Doris, once said she heard
birds in the chimney.
Her in-home helper confessed
they weren’t birds—
she’d had a baby in the night
without knowing
she was pregnant.

Poems are like that,
insisting on being born,
heard, making themselves
known
as soon as we’re quiet
and still. We hear
birdsong in the ordinary,
and it sings us awake
in the dark
until the mundane becomes
miraculous.
~Elizabeth Wickland “Do You Hear Birds?”

Like people or dogs, each day is unique
and has its own personality quirks
which can easily be seen if you look closely.
But there are so few days as compared to people,
not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising
if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people.

But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed,
unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle.

For some reason we like to see days pass,
even though most of us claim
we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time.

We examine each day before us with barely a glance
and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for,
and wait in a bored sort of way for the next,
when we are convinced,
our lives will start for real.

Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted,
as some days are,
with the right amounts of sunlight and shade,
and a light breeze scented with a perfume made
from the mixture of fallen apples,
corn stubble, dry oak leaves,
and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.
~Tom Hennen “The Life of a Day”

Age concentrates the mind.
The moment you realize you will no longer do something
you’ve done all your life.
The moment you realize that you will now need to do something you’ve never had to do before.
The moment you realize that what used to be will never be the same.

Some of this could lend itself to melancholy.
But there is also a bigness to such moments that allows for wonder.
A sense that you can’t quite comprehend it all.

Like any life, mine has had its pain,
yet from the outset it seems to have been graced
by unbelievable people and events.

An anthology of miracles.
~Roger Rosenblatt from “The World is a Room with a Piano Waiting to be Played”

I am ashamed to admit I squander time shamelessly,
blind and deaf to what is happening around me,
waiting for that particularly special day
I always dreamed of,
tossing off mundane yet irreplaceable moments
as somehow not measuring up nor exciting enough.

The shock is:
there have been nearly 40 years
of such ordinary days on this farm,
one passing by after another,
emerging fresh each morning
from the mundane duff and stuff of life,
and wouldn’t you know…
every single one has ended up being exactly what I’m looking for.

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A Cloud of Stink

August 25, 2026 barnstormingblog1 Comment

Like a piece of rotten meat
which not only stinks
right on its own surface
but also surrounds itself
with a stinking molecular cloud of stink,
so, too, each island of the archipelago
created and supported a zone of stink around itself.
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

If you’re looking for sympathy
you’ll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

As I’ve written elsewhere, I spend over an hour a day dealing with the excrement of my farm critters.

This is therapeutic time for me as I have deep respect for the necessity to clean up and compost what is smelly/stinky/yucky and biblically objectionable. (Deuteronomy 23:12-14)

None of us, including God, want to take a walk having to pick our way around poop.

As I’m busy picking up manure, I watch our dogs seek out the smelliest, most vile things they can find in the barn or field (preferably dead) and roll themselves around in it one after another until they are just as stinky as the stuff they found. They are clearly joyous about it, especially when they do it together. It is curious throw-back behavior that I’ve assumed, wearing my animal behaviorist hat, was about a wild predator covering up their scent in order to stalk and capture prey more effectively without being detected – except they are really truly so smelly that any prey could sense them coming from a mile away and would learn quickly that a moving creature that smells like poop or a dead carcass is bad news and to be avoided.

This is the main reason our farm dogs live full time outdoors. We prefer to avoid stinky dirty creatures too. So I’ve tried to understand this behavior for what adaptive purpose it may have.

What makes the most sense to me is the “pack mentality” that suggests that once one dog/wolf rolls in something objectionable, that the rest of the pack does too. This is a unifying theme for anxious individuals – they aren’t really on their own if they smell and blend in with the rest of the pack. So they spread the “wealth,” so to speak.

Stink up one, stink up all. Like team spirit, it seems to improve morale – until it doesn’t anymore.

I’ve been feeling covered with stink myself lately as I’ve searched for those sympathetic around me and found myself stuck between shit and syphilis. There are so many divisive opinions right now about a variety of current issues; vile nonsense has been flying right and left on social media as well as face to face. The theory is if all stink the same from rolling in piles of misinformation, we are then no longer alone.

Yet our destiny does not have to include believing, sharing and “flinging” the stuff that stinks to see who it will stick to. I no longer want to be a target.

Time for a bath.
Time for soap and cleansing and some serious self-examination.
Time to stop joyously rolling around in it.
Time to bury the excrement so we’re not staring at the ground, picking our way around the piles and can actually hold our heads up to see where we’re heading.

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And Light Splashed…

August 6, 2026 barnstormingblog1 Comment

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.
So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
and still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
“Light splashed…”

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.
~Stanley Kunitz “The Round” from Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected

It is too easy to be ground to a pulp by the various irritations of the day – aggravations are too easily expressed, worries never seem to wane – all of it sucks gladness out of me.

When my feelings become four-dimensional and surround and drown me, I lose all perspective on what got me out of bed to begin the day.

God is in these intricate details, whether the splash of light on a petal or the smell of rotting compost; it is my job to notice this. It is tempting to look past His ubiquitous presence in all things, to seek out only the elegant grandeur of creation and bypass the plain and smelly and homely.

Yet even what lacks beauty from my limited perspective is worthy of His divine attention. He knows the value and purpose of each thing He created, including me and the things that aggravate me no end – like mosquitos.

The time has come to be refreshed and renewed
even when surrounded by decay.
His care is revealed in the tiniest way.
He is worthy of my attention because I am constantly worthy of His.

If I rise early enough, I can see each new day’s light splash everything awake. By the time I come in to sit down to record my words and photos, I’m thoroughly washed by a fresh dawn. I can scarcely wait to take on what this day will bring.

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.

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Waking with the Light

August 4, 2026 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Light wakes us – there’s the sun
climbing the mountains’ rim, spilling across the valley,
finding our faces.
It is July,
between the hay and harvest,
a time at arm’s length from all other time,
the roads ragged with meadowsweet and mallow,
with splays of seedheads, slubbed and coarse, rough linen.
The fields above the house, clotted with sheep all spring,
are empty now and froth with flowering grasses,
still in the morning light. Birds move around
the leafy fields, the leafy garden.

It is the time
to set aside all vigil, good or ill,
to loosen the fixed gaze of our attention
as dandelions let seedlings to the wind.
Wake with the light.
Get up and go about the day and watch
its surfaces that brighten with the sun.

And later, when the light is drowsed and heavy
go find the burdened fruit trees where the shade
lies splashed and opened-out across the ground.
Spread over it a quilt worn soft by other bodies,
then curl and fall down into sleep at light.

Awaken to a world of long, loose grass-stems,
and leaves above,
and birds, breaking out of the leaves.
~Kerry Hardie from “Sleep in Summer”

Saying good-bye to July last week
meant admitting summer is already half-baked
and so are we–

we who are still doughy,
not nearly done enough.

The rush to autumn is breathless.
We want to hold on tight
to our longish days,
fall asleep in the grasses,
endure sweaty nights
for just a little while longer…

Please, oh please
grant us unending light
and steady us for the task
of getting ready for letting go.

A new series of summer photo notecards from our farm is now available as a thank you gift to you for your financial support of Barnstorming — details here

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Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.