chipped front tooth, deviated septum, destroyed cuticles, jaundice
flaws, a farmyard starlet, best laid plans
It’s just me, myself, and I—and the shiner I gave myself trying to take apart irrigation fittings. The torque torqued back, and the pipe wrench connected solidly with that hollow right below my right eye. Three days later, the skin there is bruised and ghoulish. My friend thought it was a smudge of mascara and tried to wipe it away. It’s not. Queue some horrible, offensive joke.
No, but really, though. My monastic and gorgeously selfish winter: roasting root vegetables, moving all my books again, walking on an incline at the gym while ghastly world events unfold on the TV. I’m swallowing flower essences before going into any bar to ensure talkativeness, which works supremely well, and drinking dropperfuls of valerian in water to stay calm. Someone makes a comment about my Claddagh ring, “hey…its facing that way,” and notices the missing crystal in the middle. Every time I set out to write one of these I either change my mind halfway through on the theme or get so discouraged that I have to buy myself a latte. I make elaborate plans for the spring, it’s the only thing to do. This new friend was telling me about being in Italy with only a backpack: “Yeah, for a year it was that, just me and her [her being the backpack].” It’s my truck and I, I replied, and later spent a long time just opening and closing the windows of my camper top, trying to plan out the bedroom I’ll build out in there.
bob dylan "ballad of the thin man", live 1966
Last week at the farm this albino hawk alighted on a fencepost. I watched it from inside the barn, standing with a crate of just-washed kohlrabi balanced on my hip. It’s raining. This hawk, a blur against the bleak end of the season that is now saturated brown and dead-plant-green, circled our drenched fields. My private orbit: this bird and remembering poets’ lines and messing up little things at work, annoyingly. The hawk’s moon-white wingspan stretches out, and it swoops to devour a rodent, a rabbit. Okay, carnage is a vital part of farm life, something we’ve all come to accept. In less than a week I’ll be in Vermont learning to process a lamb for Christmastime. Last year I rendered fatback (which made the whole house smell like shit) in my Lodge Dutch oven and watched the cracklings sink to the bottom and get golden, emulsified when ladled into jars, hardening into lard. Swoon. There’s this line in a memoir called Pig Years by Ellyn Gaydos in which she describes emptying pigs’ entrails, silver and glistening like stars, into a metal pail. There is a brutal beauty in the slaughter of necessity, the killing which will feed you through the winter. Last March I knelt on a tarp and plucked goosefeathers from a bird that would, after butchering, grace a dinner table. Suckling honey from a spoon, honey that was cut from its golden comb, spun centrifugally in the extractor, and siphoned into five-gallon food-grade buckets, honey that my dad coaxed his bees to throw up. The amazing thing about abundance like this is that it’s practically free. Hawk-watching is one of those little bonuses, thrown in to gild the lily. And it’s all in this latent work that feels lethally like joy.
There was a time for the finer things. It’s not now.
