The Olympic Bell (Part One)

This year for our tenth annual outdoor Sculpture Walk, we are excited to welcome the installation of a new sculpture, the Olympic Bell by Paul Matisse. First installed in Athens, Greece, in 2004 at the Summer Olympic Games, the bell then came home to Groton, Massachusetts, and has since been quietly awaiting its next home.

A few pulls on the heavy rope provides the momentum to lift the hammer and strike the bell, producing a deep, harmonious tone that can be heard for several minutes. My beloved partner, Blase, is doing the work of digging and preparing the ground for pouring the concrete foundation. We are all clearing the forested area of branches and fallen trees to let the stalwart white pines come forward with their presence creating, not the Parthenon, but nature’s own temple.

Paul Matisse is my former husband and the father of our three children. When we separated, I moved to the farm and created a new life here. We rarely saw each other, only speaking briefly on the phone when it involved the children. But over the years I think we both felt that our relationship continued, albeit in another form. The arrival of the bell feels like a reunion of the creativity and beauty that we both believe in and shared during our married time together. I look forward to its first rings echoing out over the pond.  

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem, The Journey.

 One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice--

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do--

determined to save

the only life you could save. 

This bell for me echoes the powerful directive in this journey. How challenging it can be to make a decision to change one’s life. How painful for those connected to you. But when we feel we need to act and we do, we create karma from this action. But the karma is also influenced by how we do it and what intention we hold afterwards. Equally, I believe, what came before also influences the future.

Paul and I shared an apple when we first met in Japan. We were on a long bus ride through the Wakayama Prefecture south of Kyoto when I brought out an apple to eat. Paul asked for it, took out his pocketknife, and cut it into two sections. But the two pieces were not halves like you would imagine; they formed an interlocking puzzle with the halves fitting mysteriously back together, seeds intact, stem still attached, a mysterious marvel. I took the section with the stem and perhaps emboldened by his creativity, I ate my entire half of the apple, seeds and all, then held up the stem. Paul took it from me. 

Paul still has that stem in a tiny jar. He also has many sculptures in cloth I made for him over the twenty years we were together. And we share the continuing lives of our three children. Now, the Olympic Bell will share its deep sonorous prayers with visitors to the farm and stand as a symbol that love takes many forms.

Avoiding Apples

Last week I got an email from our local Harvard weekly newspaper asking about the crop this year.

Hi Linda,

I’m doing a piece this week on this year’s apple crop damage. Frank Carlson is estimating a crop that will be about 50 to 75 percent of an average year’s crop. Are you seeing that kind of damage to your crop? He said his Cortlands were hit the hardest, but Macs are also off. 

Are your raspberries ok?

Let me know, sad year for the orchards, especially those who grow peaches.

Thanks,

 Joan

Frank Carlson is the patriarch of the orchard world in Harvard. When I first decided to bring back our trees, I called him. I felt shy about disturbing the man who was running the largest orchard in town, but I needed to make a connection with someone who knew about apples. Frank told me to come by, but when I arrived, I wasn’t really sure why I was there. It was harvest time, and there were towers of wooden crates filled with freshly picked apples. Frank was a mini-cyclone, answering his pager, cell phone, and loudspeaker calls, but he still took the time to chat with me in between answering questions that came at him from all sides.

Nodding, he said, “I’m familiar with A & M Orchards.” I told him that its new name was Old Frog Pond Farm and that I wanted to grow organic apples. “A small operation that is organic might work,” he continued. I sensed a sympathetic familiarity among anyone growing apples. I appreciated Frank’s openness and drove away with a glimmer of hope.  This year is a different story.

 I wrote back to the Harvard Press reporter,

 Dear Joan,

Yes - a sad year!

Our apples are certainly down 50 percent. It is variety dependent. The late flowering ones are all right, but varieties that flowered early were killed off by the frost.

Raspberries are doing well and it seems like a bumper crop of blueberries.

We have a few peaches…enough for us to eat; but indeed a very sad year for peach growers.

I think climate change is wreaking havoc with our perennial fruit crops. They suffer from these wild temperature fluctuations early in the season when the buds and blossoms are so vulnerable.

Linda

Climate change is the biggest factor affecting all of us. Plants don’t evolve as quickly as climate change is happening. Some good news is that one approach to lowering the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to store more carbon in the soil. The soil benefits, the plants benefit, and the earth becomes healthier. 

Much of the carbon originally came from the soil and was released into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. We have agreed that we need to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere but where can it go? Water covers 70 percent of our planet and when carbon combines with water it forms carbonic acid raising the acidity of the water and killing off plant life. Soil can take back and store carbon if we change our approach to industrial agriculture and land use.

One of the most important practices is to cover every square foot of soil with plants. Erosion is a number one cause of the loss of carbon. The second practice is to avoid tilling the soiling or minimally till. Tilling exposes soil to the air and releases carbon. Plants do the opposite through photosynthesis. Even if our fruit trees aren’t producing peaches and apples, they are removing carbon from the atmosphere.

The French government recently put forward an initiative, 4p1000.org with the goal of mitigating climate change effects through agriculture. Already 28 countries have signed on including France, Mexico, Japan — no, not the United States. The benefit of carbon rich soils is that the plants become more resilient. When we eat the food produced by these healthier plants, human health also improves.

While this year we may not have a good apple crop, hopefully by continuing to support our trees and encouraging their growth, they will become stronger and be able to adjust better to the fluctuations in temperatures that are certainly going to be part of our lives for the next decades. Climate Change Boston has just released their projections for Boston that include 90 days of summer over 90 degrees, which is essentially all of summer.  

Still, it’s a sad year for fruit growers and the reason I have been avoiding writing about apples. The trees may be luscious with leaves, but there is really very little fruit. Truthfully, my estimate is far less than 50 percent, but I hate to say it.  It’s so disappointing, and then I think that maybe I did something wrong, or that I could have done something differently.

Frank Carlson said that people are already calling for peaches. Their annual peach festival attracts a large following every year. It won’t happen this year, but they will be celebrating their 80th anniversary this summer. When the fruit is not as plentiful, your orchards need your support even more. Even if our apples aren’t plentiful, we hope you will come for raspberry picking, vegetables, workshops, our Plein Air Poetry Walk, and Outdoor Sculpture exhibits. This year we  celebrate our 15th anniversary!