The Mystery of Swallow

Sky above the Medicine Wheel at Old Frog Pond Farm, Night Photo: Robert Hesse

While in our individual quarantines we hear of mysteries revealed across the globe: In India, people can see the glow of the high Himalayas, fish are swimming again in the dank Venice canals, and above in the night sky, the stars in the milky way glow more brightly. Closer to home, I study tree swallows.

 I’ve been watching an iridescent pair who have taken up residence outside my studio window. They perch on the top of a pine nesting box, one of a dozen my husband, Blase, built from scraps in his woodshop. I have yet to see either bird enter the box to lay eggs. Swallows, like most song birds, don’t lay all their clutch at once. The effort is too much; they lay only one egg a day. During this time of egg laying, the parents don’t immediately start incubating, but wait until the clutch is complete. Of course, I thought, how does she know when that last egg is laid? Maybe the way an artist knows when a painting is finished. It’s intuitive, there’s a satisfaction, a completeness. There’s a whisper, it’s done, it’s out of your hands. Release it, and trust.

This swallow pair must be waiting for the last of the eggs to be laid before they start nesting. They sit throughout the day, though occasionally one will fly, leaving the other alone. Rarely, do they both leave.

I have resisted peeking inside the box to see the eggs, I can only assume the eggs are accumulating. Once incubation begins, the parents will take turns sitting on the eggs for a week. Once born, the babies will remain in the nest for 18 to 23 days. Then, they must develop into expert flyers. For their migration from North America to South America will begin in the fall and will travel 200 miles a day at speeds from 17 to 22 miles per hour. However, storms, exhaustion, and starvation are challenges they will face, and it is estimated that only half will survive the journey.

To my surprise, both swallows suddenly take off. I watch for their return when a bluebird lands on their box, perky, though a little uncertain, making me think it is perhaps its first spring to find a partner and mate. The swallows immediately return, flustered at the sight of this interloper. What to do? Cautiously they fly toward the bluebird, wings shaking, approaching, but not getting too close. I think, why aren’t they dive bombing it? They need to protect their nest. The swallows dare to come a little closer, but the bluebird just twitches. The swallows fly out and back, and out and back, but never touch the bluebird. They don’t seem to be aggressive by nature, but they know they have to do something. Meanwhile, the bluebird doesn’t seem to realize it has landed on a box that belongs to others, or it is simply feigning innocence.

I watch more of their wing wagging, and think, this couple is completely ineffective, ridiculously so. Then, amidst more flutters of feathers, the bluebird departs. The swallow couple land on the top of the box, nudge close to each other, feathers touching, sharing the experience they have survived together. Whew! That was difficult! We best just sit here for a while.

Such mysteries of nature belong to us for we belong to nature; we are part of it. How could we be other? We’re made of the same molecules of water, air, and earth’s minerals. When I become demoralized by the problems on the planet, the greed I witness, the suffering brought on by this new pandemic, I remember that I am this earth, not separate from it. I am this morning’s melancholic rain making circles on the pond. I am the swallows anxious flutterings. Argentina may be 10,000 miles away, but the swallows will connect us. They connect me to you. Isn’t that amazing?

First Swallow, LH

Weeds and Other Gifts

A Small Piece of Land, Watercolor LH, 2020

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”                        —Abraham Lincoln

When I am anxious or out of balance, which is often these days, I turn to weeding. I can always find weeds on the farm. The weeds are tenacious; they want to grow. One definition of a weed is a plant growing in the wrong place. We have lots of plants growing in the wrong places. Most of them need to be dug up. On the farm ‘to do’ list, weeding sits in almost every category: blueberries, raspberries, rhubarb, asparagus, around the apples, pears, and peach trees, the hoop house, and the kitchen garden.

Sitting on the ground, along the rows of blueberries, as if at a banquet table, each of us brings our favorite utensil. Ariel’s preference is the triangular Korean hoe, Holly prefers a claw, and I use a pink-handled small trowel.

Holly weeding young blueberry bushes on a cold and windy day.

We yank, we pull, we dig, leveraging our tools into thick mats of grasses, and tug some more. Grass clumps lift out—these get a hearty shake sending the worms and the soil attached to the roots back into the row, while whatever is left finds new life in the compost pile.

Frederic G. Cooper, 1917, U.S. Food Administration

My mind is occupied by thoughts of farms and food. The largest apple grower in our town depends on two migrant workers, but he has yet to hear from the embassy about their arrival. The commercial vegetable market in California doesn’t know how they will manage not only because of their dependence on migrant workers, but the chain of supply, the connective system, the trucks, the transport, the weigh stations, the middle places where all the packaging happens, are facing their own challenges. Farmers in Florida are plowing under vegetables, and in the Midwest, dairies are dumping fresh milk, though stores limit the amount customers can buy. Small farms feel the pressure, too. The restaurant that bought fifty pounds of greens a week is now closed, and many farmer’s markets have been canceled.

Abraham Lincoln promoted the cultivation of land after the bloodshed of the Civil War. During and at the end of World War II, the American Victory Garden movement created sustainability and health. England had their own movement, Dig for Victory. Maybe the restoration of the world’s psyche after times of great suffering was in part due to the return of our connection to the soil, to food. Maybe, it is a time to build more resiliency into our communities. Food is basic to our needs along with water, clean air, and shelter. We need to return to the basics and provide this for all people on the planet. Let’s give up fighting for causes and beliefs that only divide us. Let’s rally around what truly supports us.

I think about these things, and obviously oversimplify them, while I grab a small clump of grass, and ease out its long root system, pure white and thick, from among the blueberry’s dark, thin roots. Pull too hard and the root snaps. Only by teasing gently but firmly, can I coax out a foot-length root, with grass nodules every few inches, to release its hold. Of course, some weeds will quickly regrow, we don’t get them all, but if we don’t weed, the mass of growth under the blueberry plants will rob the bushes of nutrients. We weed in order to ease the competition for resources, to encourage a bountiful crop.  

Weeding is not glamorous work and It doesn’t save lives, but it offers a connection to something trustworthy that helps keep me balanced. I know not everyone has access to weeds, but even in a city, we can break for a moment, see a bit of earth or touch a tree, and know this is all part of us. Amid slicing an apple, or washing salad greens, we can pause within our anxiety, and connect to this gift from the earth, the ground that sustains us. 

This morning’s surprise: blown by the wind from a pile of old materials outside my studio.

.  

Remembering the Seeds

Hoop House, Old Frog Pond Farm, Harvard, MA April 4, 2020

On this cold April day, many seeds still wait underground, but with a few days of warmth, they will crack open, the tiny rootlets will poke out, find their way to sustenance, and their first seed leaves will appear. A seed at birth is already programed to be the fullest expression of itself. It arrives on the planet with all the knowledge it needs. The seed knows when to grow and how to respond to warmth. As it develops leaves, it takes up nutrients, drinks in carbon dioxide and releases oxygen. The seed is a storehouse for a great reservoir of knowledge, of shared history, and experience. As it becomes a mature plant, it knows what to give another plant struggling nearby and to send out warnings to its tribe of approaching danger. The smallest seed only needs to find itself in a hospitable environment to flourish. For it will respond to whatever it encounters. The influences of the outside environment affect it, be it toxins, or a great flood, hail, a heat wave, or a blessed perfect growing season.

I lived my first seven years in a row house in the industrial city of Chester, Pennsylvania. I didn’t know about seeds, but I was always attracted to one plant. When I was about six years old, I remember walking alone into the alley behind our row house, carrying a metal kitchen bowl. It was the insert from the classic Revere Ware double boiler. Then, seating myself on the concrete near a patch of weeds, I gathered the seed stalks of this plant that grew in abundance. I rubbed my fingers up the stem against the grain, and the seeds, small, elongated, and soft, fell silently into the bowl. Myriads of individual entities.

In my world were my parents, my younger brother, Jon, Albert, a boy who lived across the street, Charlene who lived a few doors away and whose mother was always home when we came home from school, our housekeeper, Louise, and somewhere, further away, my parents’ drugstore where they worked every day. My world was small, but this bowl was filled with the largest number of anything I could imagine. So many small bits all neatly together filling the bowl. When it was almost full, I lowered my fingers into the bowl and trailed my fingers through the perfect seeds. Moving my hand around and through and under, the seeds shifted and tickled my fingers. Soothing and sensual is how I remember the experience. Even at this young age, or perhaps because of it, my hand in this bowl of seeds connected me to something peaceful and true.

Later, after I became an apple orchardist, I learned that the weed was plantain, an herbal remedy for insect stings and other skin abrasions. You only have to pick a few leaves, chew them, and rub them or poultice them onto a wound and they withdraw toxins and soothe. The taste is not sweet, not bitter, not pungent or sharp, just a mash of green leaves.  

Sketch of Plantain Seed Stalks and Leaves, Linda Hoffman, 2020

I am allergic to bees. When I am stung, which inevitably happens several times a year, I know exactly where to find plantain. It grows on the side our farmhouse near the back door. Growing in this most unglamorous place, it doesn’t announce its presence, but it is tenacious enough to grow despite other weeds and grasses. It even survives the mower. In cities, plantain grows in vacant lots and in cracks of the sidewalk. Plantain seems to be totally nonchalant about its closest neighbors or the soil chemistry. It grows both where soils are poor and where they are fertile. It forges a home in forgotten nooks and crannies.        

Plantain beginning to grow along the driveway in front of the Farmhouse, April 4, 2020

Plants offer their unique gifts. For example, poison ivy grows in disturbed areas. It also flourishes in unstable ecosystems like on the dunes on Cape Cod, appearing as if to say, “Keep off of this fragile bank.” When a friend recovering from chemo treatments, mentioned poison ivy had sprung up outside her front door, I smiled and said, “It wants to protect you.” And when I am feeling tired, I lean my head into a tall clump of mountain mint, and its strong menthol scent enlivens my spirit.

 I no longer live in Chester, Pennsylvania, but on a small farm where I can plant seeds and tend the earth. I think of the billions of people who can’t do this, I think of my stepdaughters in their small apartment in Brooklyn, listening to sirens, eating rice and beans, and my grandchildren who have been told not to go out because there is sickness outside. I long to bring them to the farm and show them the rows of seeds growing, to listen to peepers and wood frogs, to share the plumping of the apple buds, and see plantain, the healer, poking out. But for now, this is the way it is.

The myriad seeds in that long ago bowl connected me to something outside myself, to something far beyond my immediate world. As I sit alone now in isolation, I think about this world with more people than I can conceive of—almost eight billion people. Every single person on the planet born a unique and perfect being. Like a seed, we must grow in this imperfect world. We, too, have much innate wisdom, we know what needs to be done.

Catalpa Tree, watercolor, Linda Hoffman, 2019

Pointers for a Writing Life

At the farm, for the month of June, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, I will concentrate on the tasks in front of me. On the other days of the week, as much as possible, I plan to escape to a rental house on Cape Cod. It’s between Wellfleet and Truro on the ocean side, an area I love and where I have vacationed with my children since they were young. My plan is to work on a book I have been writing off and on for five years and more. I would like to finish it, am feeling the pressure to complete this project—or if it seems not-finish worthy, eject it. Send it over and out into the ethers—delete, delete. After all, it is only electronic bits of information.

But thankfully there is Annie Dillard. In her book, The Writing Life, she says, “Writing a book full-time takes between two and ten years.” She offers me relief. I have not been working full-time on this project. I have two other full-time jobs—art and the farm. She also says:

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight . . . As the work grows, it gets harder to control: it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.

I understand this ferocity. At home, I cannot open the book for it might take over, grab hold of a leg and not let go. When I am on the road, or somewhere else, anywhere really, on a train, in a hotel room, and now at the Cape, for some reason the danger is not present and I can turn to it, dive in, and to my astonishment, do the work I love—the search to shape of an event, or an object, with words. And then there is the book itself, becoming an entity of its own, taking over, devising its own life. The two of us now living together.

I am writing about moving to Old Frog Pond Farm, assuming the care of the abandoned orchard, and committing to bringing it back organically. What got me here? Why did my marriage fail? How has my Zen practice braided through the orchard work? And what lessons have I learned that appear in my art?

            Annie Dillard again:

The strain, like Giacometti’s penciled search for precision and honesty, enlivens the work and impels it toward is truest end. A pile of decent work behind him, no matter how small, fuels the writer’s hope . . .”

Yes, she is right, I do have hope. And then I fall short, I fail as I judge what I am writing. I hear myself say, I am not a real writer. I read other writers whose work I admire and see how my writing lacks their skill. How does one learn to write? Annie Dillard, thankfully, answers this question.

The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength; that page will teach you to write.

Other than write, I take beach walks. On my first one, I stopped when I found a horseshoe crab upside down, it’s little pinchers barely moving. I turned it right side up and watched as it began to move. Its long tail spine pointing to where it had come from, its hulk moving towards the waves. It stopped after about ten feet, and I had this sickening feeling that it was dying, right there, in front of me. I touched its pointer, wriggled it from left to right, and it started up again, slowly, another six feet, scraping its way over the sand, leaving its foot-wide trail. We went through this ritual several more times, my teasing the pointer, the crab starting reluctantly to move, but each time it seemed to be moving more slowly.

When it finally reached the waves, I felt this was its most precarious place to be. It stalled. It waited. The surf poured over its hard shell. It seemed to be waiting for something. Then a large wave carried it into the jumble of surf. I saw was the tail spine, sticking up above the wave, pointing.