Splash

A realtor showed me A & M Orchards in Harvard, Massachusetts during mud season. Winter’s old snow and patches of bare ground met my eye. The farmhouse needed paint, and the outbuildings begged for repair, but I was captivated.  I was leaving a marriage of almost twenty years and looking for a new place to live. A friend suggested I visit this small farm; she loved the place — for she had grown up here.

I asked to see the chicken coop. Inside I picked my way through shit-splattered sawdust, teasing away thick curtains of cobwebs. Some forty old hens squawked, panicked by my presence in their ordered world.

“What is going to happen to all these chickens?” I asked.

“Why? Would you want them?”

Why not? I thought to myself. How difficult could they be to care for?

 “Sure,” I said, not knowing anything about chickens.

“I’ll ask the owners what they are doing with the chickens,” he replied.

“Where are the apple trees?”  I asked.

He casually gestured across the street. We followed an old cart road that bordered the orchard and I gazed down the rows of bare branches.

“What would you do with the apples?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’d have to learn,” I heard myself say. 

“It’s hard to grow apples,” he cautioned.

I could feel a small delight rise inside me. Pears, cherries, peaches are all delicious; but apples are at the center of mythology, history, art, and even religion.

 Could I do it? Can I grow apples? I wondered.

I changed the farm’s name from A & M Orchards named for the prior owners, Art and Marie Spaulding, to Old Frog Pond Farm, after the haiku by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet, Basho. I made a postcard and sent it to friends. It was a photograph of the pond, and floating above it, I added an image of a frog. The caption read, plunging into the unknown.  

I’ve encountered a similar instruction in Zen practice. Daido Roshi, my first teacher at Zen Mountain Monastery, used the metaphor of a child leaping from a height into her parent’s arms to describe the trust we need to cultivate for true spiritual practice. We need to leap, to trust the world, and more importantly we need to learn to trust ourselves. It’s not a leaping away from life; it’s leaping into it, into more engagement.

It was a grand leap for me to leave to leave my marriage and move to the farm, but we make countless small leaps everyday, like in pruning when we have to make a large cut in the top of an apple tree or when we pick up the phone and call someone we haven’t talked with in a long time. It’s living a life where we continuously take small risks and don’t think that the water might be too cold, the person might not want to hear from us, or we might be making a mistake.

I try to remember this teaching of plunging into the unknown, of choosing the way of the unexpected, rather than following a map, but often I forget. Basho’s haiku continues to remind me.

                        Old pond

                                    Frog jumps

                        Splash

Pruning

In the winter months when the apple trees are dormant, it is time to prune in the orchard. The buds, leaf buds as well as fruit buds, spiral around the bare branches. The trees hold only an occasional shriveled fruit. Winter light casts long shadows: the patterns on the snow, a perplexing labyrinth of the three-dimensional flattened into two.

A few days ago I walked into the orchard with a saw in its sheath hanging from my belt and sharpened loppers in hand. I was looking for a row of young trees, something easy, something to get started on, to get my head back into the routine of pruning. I stared at the first tree, a Crimson Crisp, one of the orchard’s new disease-resistant varieties. Its central leader was leaning too far to one side. We prune our trees to a main leader, a single trunk, and shape the branches similar to a Christmas tree, wanting the lower branches to extend farther than the ones above, a way to get light to all branches, to all fruit. Without light, the lower branches will die back and the tree will become umbrella-shaped. The apples won’t sweeten and color well.

With this lean, I stood hesitant. To cut it off would be to decapitate the tree. But to allow it to grow in the wrong direction would be irresponsible. I saw that my neighbor was also outside. Ed abuts the orchard on the east and he has always pruned a dozen trees along his property. We shouted hello like two sailors passing but then I decided to call him over.  “Oh, the lean expert,” he said referring to himself when he saw the tree. A month ago Ed had helped me haul up a fallen tree (Blogpost: The Fallen Tree). At the time, we had debated the merits of how far to pull the tree. I hesitated to go beyond some innate flexibility that I intuited; he wanted us to pull it up straight and tall, the engineer in him. This time his was the voice of reason. He suggested I leave the leaning main trunk for now, but that I tie up a young, flexible horizontal branch to see if it might be trained to become the new leader.

He went back to his side of the orchard and I moved on to the next tree. This one was easier – only a few snips – a removal of a top branch that was already more than half the diameter of the trunk.

Then Ed called me over to one of his trees, a big old one with a lot of wood in the top third. I suggested removing a thick branch, one of those calloused elephant trunks. A large cut in the upper part of the tree rejuvenates. He agreed and I went for it with my saw. Pulling the blade back and forth, smoothly enough so it wouldn’t catch and chug, and carefully enough so it didn’t slip and scar the branch, the saw made a rhythmical rasping sound.

Pruning large apple trees changes one’s sensitivity to one’s own body. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago, after the initial shock of the diagnosis, I was ready for surgery. Take off my breast. Let me be done with it.  I knew from the orchard that quick removal prevents further spread of disease and I trusted that my body would heal. However, when I stand in front of a mirror my body is altered. Maybe I should accept another lesson the trees offer. We’re all lopsided, leaning in one direction or another, keen to hide our defects. The tree wears everything visibly. I can start at a twig tip and follow the growth in years right down the branch counting the unions. Branch collars signify large cuts; the jig-jag in a branch shows the annual reining in of fast-growing wood.   

When pruning, I circle around each tree asking what is growing in the wrong direction, what is shading, where is the best fruiting wood? When I remove a large branch, I always look back at the new shape of the tree. I want to see that it was the right decision, that it was a good cut, that the tree is more open. And then there is that moment when I know I’ve done enough. I leave the tree trusting it will respond and move onto its neighbor. 

I don’t know if the cancer has moved anywhere else in my body. There’s no snipping a branch to see its health. I learn to live with uncertainty. The prunings left in the orchard I will pick up and pile into a two-story mound. The apple buds that will never become fruit and the branches that contain so much history will be kindled, the fire will roar, and in the course of a day, it will all burn down to charred black bits and ash. When the embers are cold, I will rake what’s left and distribute a little to each tree. This dark carbon returns to the soil and the trees will benefit. They give of their bodies; then they receive.

Orchard Ruminants

Thoreau said that you must walk like a camel because it is said to be the only beast that ruminates while it walks. He got me pondering about this word ruminate. Chewing the cud is ruminating and pondering is also ruminating.

Ruminants are animals with multiple stomachs and the largest and first stomach is called the rumen. Cows, for example, have four stomachs. Grazing they fill their first one, the rumen, with barely chewed grass. Then they find a comfortable place to rest. From the rumen they bring back up this grass and chew and chew. They ruminate, they ponder, maybe even ask, “Who am I?” What is Cow?” The progressively smaller bits of grass when swallowed pass into the second stomach and then flow into the other two stomachs. Sharp thorns, crab grass — everything is broken down and all the nutrients are taken up. In this way cows and other ruminants eat plant materials that are indigestible by humans and animals with simple stomachs.

Sitting with Ox, wax: Sculpture, LH

Thoreau knew that camels are the only ruminants that walk when they ruminate. [1] I guess all the other ones sit on their duff.  He chose the camel to chide us for sitting in libraries with our heads in books (or iPads) and not spending enough time outdoors. When he talked about walking and ruminating he meant that we should make the fields and woods our place to see and learn: we should be like the camel, walk and ruminate, be more present as we stride through this world.

Thoreau’s chiding got to me and I pulled myself out of my comfortable chair (away from my laptop), strapped my saw to my belt and grabbed loppers to begin pruning in the orchard. It was Ground Hog Day, an unseasonably warm day. Punxsutawney Phil (the ground hog in Pennsylvania) did not see his shadow, which meant that warm days were ahead. I tasted spring. It was like the instructions an enthusiastic French winemaker once told me for drinking a good wine, “Il faut le macher.” (You have to chew it.) I chewed spring, pondered over pruning decisions, and could even ruminate on the indigestible after a few hours among the trees.  

Only three days later heavy snow fell. Punxsutawney Phil might make better predictions with a little more rumination, but I didn’t care. The snow was beautiful and because we prune apple trees every year they have strong limbs. A camel can carry two hundred pounds, but an apple tree easily holds this weight in fruit, or in snow. There is strength in walking as well as standing. 

An apple tree doesn’t have one stomach or four stomachs, but you could consider the entire tree one great rumen. Sunlight, water, and minerals from the soil are turned into into complex carbohydrates, amino acids, and proteins. Not only do these trees grow healthy fruit, but they build organic soil and sequester carbon. Today Thoreau might say, we must stand still, grow deep roots: we must be more like the trees.

1. Technically camels are pseudo ruminants because they have three not four stomachs.

A Gathering of Seeds

Born in the industrial city of Chester, Pennsylvania, I lived in a cookie-cutter row house with a matchbox size front lawn. Agriculture was not part of my childhood, but there was one experience of the natural world that I remember vividly. Carrying a metal kitchen bowl I walked one day out of the house to the alley behind. Deliberately I sat in a patch of weeds and gathered the long stems that grew in abundance. Entranced by the seeds that grew along these stalks, I rubbed the thumb and fingers of my right hand along the stem against the grain. The seeds fell off in response to this slight pressure and began to accumulate in the bowl.

Dipping my hand into this primordial essence the most pleasurable experience ensued. I delighted in this touch as I herded the seeds from one side of the bowl to the other. A peace emerged from the motion and seemed to radiate out the way prayers flow out from prayer wheels. There was an affirmation that in touching these seeds I was complete and the world was whole. I didn’t notice the iron fence that separated me from the large cemetery abutting the alley. Nor did I think about the tent erected over a plot where three gravediggers were preparing for a burial. I was only attentive to the seeds in my bowl.

Broadleaf Plantain: photo from Herbal Cache

Now I recognize this weed as plantain and when I see it growing, I reach down, pluck a stem, and rub the seeds off the stalk. It’s also our ‘go to’ medicinal plant on the farm. When a bee stung me, Anna Fialkoff picked some plantain leaves, chewed them up, and globbed the macerated green paste on my leg. It soothed the ache and my ankle didn’t swell. Its long list of medicinal uses includes everything from cleaning the liver to treating fungal infections. Plantain teas, tinctures, and salves help with rashes, itching and irritations. It’s a universal cure.

Today I fear for the future of the polar bear, struggling to survive because the ice is melting and for the toothless African frog, endangered because its streams are dammed. Mountaintops are flattened and the erosion of topsoil is destroying our best agricultural land. I wish I could chew some plantain and heal the earth, but I know it’s not that simple.  

However this common plant grows in vacant lots, between sidewalk cracks, in fields, along streams, and especially in poor or disturbed soil. As long as there is sunlight, plantain thrives and we can use it as medicine. You might try picking a stalk, running your fingers against the grain to remove the seeds, and offering them to the wind. I like to think these seeds will carry our prayers.

1/4 lb of rice: sculpture Linda Hoffman