The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage you stand in the centre of your room, house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there, and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose their soft arms from around you, the birds take back their language, the cliffs fissure and collapse, the air moves back from you like a wave and you can’t breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing. You were a visitor, time after time climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming. We never belonged to you. You never found us. It was always the other way round. ~Margaret Atwood “The Moment”from Eating Fire
The farm where we live has fields on a hill with woods. Evening walks are listening walks, with birdsong now identifiable thanks to our Merlin app on our phones.
There is always plenty to hear.
It is an immense relief to listen to something other than talking heads on TV or podcasts. The voices we hear in the woods remain unconcerned about politics, hantavirus outbreaks or the state of the economy.
I also listen to the sound of breezes rustling the tree branches, the crunch of sticks and dry leaves under my boots, and more often than not, woodpeckers tapping away at tree trunks, eagles chittering from the treetops, and unseen owls visiting back and forth from their hidey-holes.
So, like the outside world, our farm does have its own talking heads and drama, but I know who I will listen to and where I prefer to hang out if given a choice.
I know I’m only a visitor to their world – there is no owning this land, only temporary stewardship. We will be invited back as long as we tread softly.
Until next time then, until next time.
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There is weather on the day you are born and weather on the day you die. There is the year of drought, and the year of floods, when everything rises and swells, the year when winter will not stop falling, and the year when summer lightning burns the prairie, makes it disappear. There are the weathervanes, dizzy on top of farmhouses, hurricanes curled like cats on a map of sky: there are cows under the trees outlined in flies. There is the weather that blows a stranger into town and the weather that changes suddenly: an argument, a sickness, a baby born too soon. Crops fail and a field becomes a study in hunger; storm clouds billow over the sea; tornadoes appear like the drunk trunks of elephants. People talking about weather are people who don’t know what to say and yet the weather is what happens to all of us: the blizzard that makes our neighborhoods strange, the flood that carries away our plans. We are getting ready for the weather, or cleaning up after the weather, or enduring the weather. We are drenched in rain or sweat: we are looking for an umbrella, a second mitten; we are gathering wood to build a fire. ~Faith Shearin “Weather” from Orpheus, Turning.
On the planet the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades… Lick a finger, feel the now. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I’m still discovering, right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God. ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from The Cost of Discipleship
Never before in the history of humanity have we had the ability to pull the weather forecast out of our pocket and know not only what to anticipate in the next 24 hours or 10 days, but even what is happening right now.
Prior to phone apps, we scanned the skies, checked the barometer, looked at where the weather vane points, monitored the thermometer, and put a licked finger up to test the wind direction.
As obsolete as those measures seem now, I confess they still make sense to me.
It’s a little silly if my phone says it is raining at “my location” and I can’t find a single cloud.
I want to know what is happening around me from my own observation, trust my own eyes, feel my own sweat in the heat, my chilly goose bumps in the cold, my wet head in the rain, my hair messy in the wind.
I want to know we’re all in this together, right now.
I want to live completely in this world, living now, finger held to the wind.
Then, having the information I need, I throw myself completely into the arms of God.
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In the morning, when I slide open the heavy old barn door on its track and step inside, pull the cord to let the chickens out, then turn again toward that open door, tall rectangle of light and ragged grass, trees and sky, the face of the other old barn at the right, its hand-hewn rafters where barn swallows nest, fly in and out through gaps made by neglect and the passage of time, the way the body falls into disrepair, I wonder if stepping from this life into the next will be like stepping through an aperture like this and I hope it’s true, ordinary morning like this. ~Daye Phillippo “Aperture” from Blue Between Owls: Blue Chore Coat and Other Collected Poems
Each ordinary morning, I’m aware how much our barn buildings have aged as I slide open sticky doors, walk past peeling paint, mossy roofs, and gaps in the siding.
Deterioration of the body is inevitable over the decades.
I know this about my own state of disrepair as I move about more carefully during my chores, staying aware of uneven footing, struggling to lift what used to seem lighter, finding the work, as gratifying as it has always been, more challenging.
Our over 100 year old red hay barn underwent a major renovation 5 years ago because it was threatening to fall down in one of our winter windstorms. Thanks to that investment, it is strong and hearty again with new foundation posts, siding, and roof.
Still, it won’t last forever.
I had a pretty major repair myself last year allowing me to continue to do this physical work that is so important to me. Yet, I won’t last forever.
I like to think when those heavy rolling doors open to heaven someday, it will feel just like this: leaving behind what is temporary and always needing repairs, to enter into the redeeming glory of the eternal and everlasting.
And there is absolutely nothing ordinary about that.
photo by Harry Rodenberger
video by Harry Rodenberger
sample of lyrics: Can’t touch my heart it’s not my time. Bust my bones and throw my body on the line Cause I’ve got love to fill me in I’ve family to help me re-begin
Old barns don’t tear down let ’em stand proud until they fall to the ground.
A strange feeling waking up to meet my Savior this whole bizarre ballet that I lived through but I’m not living all alone these wounds of mine will set me free
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More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all. ~Ada Limón“Instructions on Not Giving Up”
I thought I was emptied out – hollow and irretrievable – after a long drawn out winter of difficult news, and now these cold rainy spring days forecast even more bad news happening in the world.
Yet here I am ~ here we are ~ still among the living and breathing. I am swept away by what I see greening all around me.
The landscape begins to explode with layers of color and shadow. Standing close, I too am ignited. It is impossible to witness so much unfolding life and light and not be engulfed and heartened and singed around my edges.
It lures me outside where flames of green lap about my ankles as I stroll the fields and each fresh breeze fans the fires until I’ve nothing left of myself but ash and shadow.
Consumed and subsumed.
Combusted and busted.
What a way to go.
I’ll take it. I’ll take it all.
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In a daring and beautiful creative reversal, God takes the worse we can do to Him and turns it into the very best He can do for us. ~Malcolm Guite from The Word in the Wilderness
Samwise, one of our two Cardigan Corgis who recently passed away in his sleep at a ripe old corgi age, always did twice daily barn chores with me.
He would run up and down the aisles as I fill buckets, throw hay, and he’d explore the manure pile out back and the compost pile and check out the dove house and have stand offs with the barn cats (which he always lost).
We had our routine. When I got done with chores, I whistled for him and we headed to the house.
We always returned home together.
Except this particular morning. I whistled when I was done and his furry little fox face didn’t appear as usual. I walked back through both barns calling his name, whistling, no signs of Sam. I walked to the fields, I walked back to the dog yard, I walked the road (where he never ever goes), I scanned the pond where he once fell in as a pup (yikes), I went back to the barn and glanced inside every stall, I went in the hay barn where he likes to jump up and down on stacked bales, looking for a bale avalanche he might be trapped under, or a hole he couldn’t climb out of. Nothing.
I’m really anxious about him at this point, fearing the worst. He was nowhere to be found, utterly lost.
Passing through the barn again, I heard a little faint scratching inside one Haflinger’s stall, which I had just glanced in 10 minutes before. The mare was peacefully eating hay. Sure enough, there was Sam standing with his feet up against the door as if asking what took me so long. He must have scooted in when I filled up her water bucket, and I closed the door not knowing he was inside, and it was dark enough that I didn’t see him when I checked. He and his good horse friend kept it their secret.
Making not a whimper or a bark when I called out his name, passing that stall at least 10 times looking for him, he just patiently waited for me to open the door and set him free.
It’s a Good Friday.
The lost was found even when he never felt lost to begin with.
Yet he was lost to me. And that is all that matters. We have no idea how lost we are until someone comes looking for us, doing whatever it takes to bring us home.
Sam was just waiting for a closed door to be opened. And today, of all days, that door is thrown wide open.
photo by Nate Gibson
Though you are homeless Though you’re alone I will be your home Whatever’s the matter Whatever’s been done I will be your home I will be your home I will be your home In this fearful fallen place I will be your home When time reaches fullness When I move my hand I will bring you home Home to your own place In a beautiful land I will bring you home I will bring you home I will bring you home From this fearful fallen place I will bring you home I will bring you home ~Michael Card
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It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty.
To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives him glory too. To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dung fork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give him glory too.
He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should. So then, my brethren, live. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins fromSeeking Peace
Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message. ~Malcolm Muggeridge
I’ve banked nothing, or everything. Every day, the chores need doing again. Early in the morning, I clean the horse barn with a manure fork. Every morning, it feels as though it could be the day beforeor a year ago or a year before that. With every pass, I give the fork one final upward flick to keep the manure from falling out, and every day I remember where I learned to do that and from whom. Time all but stops.
But then I dump the cart on the compost pile. I bring out the tractor and turn the pile, once every three or four days. The bucket bites and lifts, and steam comes billowing out of the heap. It’s my assurance that time is really moving forward, decomposing us all in the process. ~Verlyn Klinkenborg from More Scenes from the Rural Life
He <the professor> asked what I made of the other Oxford students 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)
It is done by us all, as God disposes, from the least cast of worm to what must have been in the case of the brontosaur, say, spoor of considerable heft, something awesome.
We eat, we evacuate, survivors that we are. I think these things each morning with shovel and rake, drawing the risen brown buns toward me, fresh from the horse oven, as it were, or culling the alfalfa-green ones, expelled in a state of ooze, through the sawdust bed to take a serviceable form, as putty does, so as to lift out entire from the stall.
And wheeling to it, storming up the slope, I think of the angle of repose the manure pile assumes, how sparrows come to pick the redelivered grain, how inky-cap coprinus mushrooms spring up in a downpour.
I think of what drops from us and must then be moved to make way for the next and next. However much we stain the world, spatter it with our leavings, make stenches, defile the great formal oceans with what leaks down, trundling off today’s last barrow-full, I honor shit for saying: We go on. ~Maxine Kumin “The Excrement Poem”
It isn’t unusual for a mid-March cold snap to sweep down from northern Canada, freezing daffodils in mid-bloom, withering berry plant and orchard branch buds, causing general mayhem in our region. After a few weeks in February of rain and temperate weather up to the high 50’s, the low temperatures felt cruel indeed.
Our barn is fairly draft proof, but in northeasters like this, the water buckets ice up and the manure sits in cold hard piles, like so many round rocks. It is a great temptation to put off the stall cleaning when the weather gets bitter cold; I push the poop to the walls for later pick up when it is warmer. After all, it doesn’t smell when it is frozen rock hard, and certainly loses its “squish” factor, so the horses seem to not mind too much.
So then I start the digging out process, with several days of accumulation to contend with.
As I wheel the loads out to the manure pile, and dig into the pile to tidy it up, the steam pours out into the frigid air–there is nothing left frozen there. It is hot and getting hotter–its destruction assured through the composting of so much organic matter. No wonder the barn cats find a nice sunny spot to stretch out next to this smoldering mountain of poop. It is as comfy as a tropical vacation spot.
How often have I similarly piled my own metaphorical “poop” in piles to deal with another time? Frozen it seems innocuous, inoffensive, not worthy of my attention, not enough to bother with. It is so tempting to pass on cleaning up my messes, by shoving mistakes and errors to one side or “under the carpet” – ignoring the growing mounds in my own nest, especially less-visible “respectable” sins like impatience, anger, pride, greed, gossiping, worrying, grumbling, etc.
Like frozen poop shoved aside and not dealt with, sin eventually warms up. It starts to stink, and generally becomes obnoxious and overwhelming. Once it gets big enough, it becomes its own steaming inferno, burning and destroying everything else within. The only safe place for it is to move it far away from where we dwell everyday.
We must dig ourselves out daily from our mistakes, ask forgiveness for the harm we cause, and prayerfully accept the tools handed to us that make possible the impossible job of getting clean. We cannot do it by ourselves. Our wheelbarrow is too small, our dung forks too inadequate, our muscles too weak. Good thing we have a Savior who is not put off by dung piles and our stench.
Blessed are the barn cleaners: by working together, we find hope and glory beyond the steaming pile.
my “city” nephews learning to muck out a stall
This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:
…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…
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The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “God’s Grandeur”
Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother; Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room, Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb. ~John Donne from “Annunciation”
I know this sound, first birds of morning. As a child, I waited for hours for the drape of night to roll up again. Leaning into the first hint of the fresh day, the fragile lace of hesitant light, the receding darkness dappled with bird song, able at last to close my eyes. I know this sound, some kind of redemption, waking me from scattered sleep, a healing fragment even as the work of the previous day marks my bones in notches. Night leaves its small fur as the dawn pushes, as the birds persist, and morning unfurls like a promise you hoped someone would keep. ~Susan Moorhead “First Light” from Carry Darkness, Carry Light
Our February farm sunrises have always been full of promise over the three decades we’ve been here. The birds are waking earlier each day and when mornings are soaked, dripping with light and color, the air itself is alive.
Nothing though quite matches the phenomenon in February 2015 (top photo) when a fall streak hole or “key hole” cloud formed over nearby foothills.
It looked to me as if angels were bursting through an unfurling break in heaven’s moving veil. Though it didn’t last long, it was seen for miles around us.
When morning breaks the night, it is like the first morning which came into being with His Words:
“Let there be light” — and there continues to be the most amazing light…
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This saying good-by on the edge of the dark And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark Reminds me of all that can happen to harm An orchard away at the end of the farm All winter, cut off by a hill from the house. I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse, I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse By deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse.
I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun. (We made it secure against being, I hope, By setting it out on a northerly slope.) No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm; But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm. “How often already you’ve had to be told, Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below.”
I have to be gone for a season or so. My business awhile is with different trees, Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these, And such as is done to their wood with an ax— Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night And think of an orchard’s arboreal plight When slowly (and nobody comes with a light) Its heart sinks lower under the sod. But something has to be left to God. ~Robert Frost from “Good-by and Keep Cold”
Silence and darkness grow apace, broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods. Songbirds abandon us so gradually that, until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay, we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death. Even the sun has gone off somewhere… Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head. ~Jane Kenyon from her essay “Good-by and Keep Cold”found in A Hundred White Daffodils
For two months now, we’ve heard hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the ducks and geese that have stayed in the marshes through the winter.
The usual day-long symphony of birdsong is replaced by shotguns popping, in addition to hawks and eagle chittering, the occasional dog barking, while the bluejays and squirrels argue over the last of the filbert nuts.
In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth.
The horses confined to their stalls in the barns snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of last summer’s bound hay.
Yet today felt different – today, with unseasonably spring-like temperatures in early February, things feel about to change.
As yet, there have been no birdsong arias. I am bereft, listening for their blending musical tapestry waking me at 4 AM in the spring. And soon, the peeper orchestra from the swamps will rise and fall on the evening breeze.
It has been too, too quiet. I long for the music to return, not just the surround-sound of gunshot percussion, which is no melody at all.
I listen intently for early morning and evening serenades to return. It won’t be long.
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With Cats, some say, one rule is true: Don’t speak till you are spoken to. Myself, I do not hold with that – ~T.S. Eliot from “The Ad-Dressing of Cats”
A true story I wrote 15 years ago…
Considering myself a Dr. Doolittle of sorts, always talking to the animals, I reach out to pet a stray cat sitting quietly outside our barn one evening while doing barn chores. This is a grayish fluffy cat I see around the barns every few months or so–he doesn’t put in frequent appearances and reminds me of a kitten we raised on this farm a few years back, though his markings are a bit different, so I know it is not our cat.
We have 6 cats to pet here who claim “us” as their home and family, so there is no lack of fur balls to love. There are probably that many more who hang out, now and then, considering our farm fair game and looking for an occasional free meal. This cat just seemed to need a reassuring pat at that moment – or maybe I needed the reassurance.
Wrong.
I found myself with a cat attached to my wrist by teeth and claws. It took a bit of an effort to shake him off and he escaped into the night. I then surveyed the damage he inflicted and immediately went to wash my wounds. They were deep punctures near my wrist joint–not good. Lucky for me I was up to date on my tetanus booster.
By the next day the wounds were getting inflamed and quite sore. I know all too well the propensity of cat bites to get badly infected with Pasteurella multocida, a “bad actor” bacteria that can penetrate deep tissues and bone if not treated with aggressive antibiotics. After getting 6 opinions from my colleagues at clinic, all of whom stood solemnly shaking their heads at my 12 hour delay in getting medical attention, I surrendered and called my doctor’s office. I pleaded for a “no visit” prescription as I was up to my eyeballs in my own patients, and he obliged me. I picked up the antibiotic prescription during a break, sat in the car ready to swallow the first one and then decided to wait a little longer before starting them, knowing they wallop the gut bacteria and cause pretty nasty side effects. I wanted to see if my own immune system might just be sufficient.
So the bacterial infection risk was significant and real but I was prepared to deal with it. For some reason I didn’t really think about the risk of rabies until the middle of the night when all dark and depressing thoughts seem to come real to me.
I don’t know this cat. I doubt he has an owner and it is highly unlikely he is rabies vaccinated. My own cats aren’t rabies vaccinated (and neither am I) though if I was a conscientious owner, they would be. Yes, we have bats in our barns and woods and no, there has not been a rabid bat reported in our area in some time.
But what if this cat were potentially infected with the rabies virus but not yet showing symptoms? Now my mind started to work overtime as any good neurotic will do. Last summer a rabid kitten in North Carolina potentially exposed 10 people when it was passed around a softball tournament, no one aware it was ill until it died and was tested. Lots of people had to have rabies shots as a result.
This cat who had bitten me was long gone–there was no finding him in the vast woods and farmland surrounding us. He couldn’t be kept in observation for 10 days and watched for symptoms, nor could he be sacrificed to examine his neural tissue for signs of the virus.
I called the health department to ask what their recommendation was in a case like this. Do they recommend rabies immune globulin injection which should have been done as soon as possible after the bite? I talked with a nurse who read from a prepared script for worried people like me.
Feral cats in our area have not been reported to have rabies nor have skunks or raccoons. Only local bats have been reported to have rabies but not recently. This cat would have had to have been bitten by a rabid bat to be rabid. This was considered a “provoked” attack as I had reached out to pet the cat. This was not a cat acting unusually other than having wrapped itself around my arm. No, the Health Dept would not recommend rabies immune globulin in this situation but I was free to contact my own doctor to have it done at my own expense if I wished to have the series of 5 vaccination shots over the next month at a cost of about $3000. Yes, there would be a degree of uncertainty about this and I’d have to live with that uncertainty but she reassured me this was considered a very low risk incident.
I knew this was exactly what I would be told and I would have counseled any patient with the same words. Somehow it is always more personal when the risk of being wrong has such dire consequences.
I could see the headlines “Local Doctor Dies From Rabid Cat Bite”.
This is not how I want to be remembered.
Rabies is one of the worst possible ways to die. The cases I’ve read about are among the most frightening I’ve ever seen in the medical literature. Not only is it painful and horrific but it puts family and care providers at risk as well. It also has an unpredictable incubation period of a up to a month or two, even being reported as long as a year after an exposure. What a long time to wait in uncertainty. It also has a prodrome of several days of very nonspecific symptoms of headache, fever and general malaise, like any other viral infection before the encephalitis and other bad stuff hits. I was going to think about it any time I had a little headache or chill. This was assuredly going to be a real test of my dubious ability to stifle my tendency for 4-dimensional worries.
I decided to live with the low risk uncertainty and forego the vaccination series. It was a pragmatic decision based on the odds. My wounds slowly healed without needing antibiotics. For ten days I watched for my attacker cat whenever I went to the barn, but he didn’t put in an appearance. I put out extra food and hoped to lure him in. It would have been just be so nice to see his healthy face and not have to think about this gray cloud hanging over me for the next few months, as I wondered about every stray symptom.
No gray kitty to be seen.
Almost a month has gone by now and he finally showed up last night. I could have grabbed him and hugged him but I know better now. No more Dr. Doolittle.
He is perfectly fine and now so am I, cured of a terminal case of worry and hypochondria which is not nearly as deadly as rabies but can be debilitating and life shortening none the less.
From now on, I’ll be contented to just “talk to the animals” like any good Dr. Doolittle. I don’t need to cuddle them.
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