Gardening – Lofty Minded in Alaska

An Empire of Earthworms

If you were to come visit us right now, you might feel a little overwhelmed by the nature of our house. Quite literally, we’ve brought nature inside. In our entryway we’ve got a good sized chrysanthemum plant that we’re going to try to winter over in case the ones we planted outside don’t make it. In our living space there’s a crock of sauerkraut burping away and four baskets of mint and marjoram waiting for a turn in the food dehydrator in the next room over. Near our wood stove we’ve got a good haul of onions draped over a clothes drying rack before we put them into deeper storage, and in our pantry we’ve got about a hundred garlic bulbs curing. I hate to admit it, but I’m kind of glad our potato harvest wasn’t terribly impressive this year.

As I was digging our few potatoes last weekend I witnessed something I’d never seen before, which was an earthworm producing an egg sac. What caught my attention about this particular worm was the white ring around its mid-section. It looked as though it had slithered into a small plastic ring or bead, and I watched the worm work to push the ring off its body, going long and skinny and then short and plump until eventually a little pale orb fell off of its body into the dirt. I’ve since learned that the ring was picking up sperm off of the worm’s body as it squirmed it off of itself, and once the sac was deposited onto the soil it contained scores of fertilized eggs. It was something to behold.

Peeking into the soil and seeing a healthy bunch of earthworms wriggling around is deeply satisfying but I’d never given much thought to earthworm reproduction. Anything I might have learned about them in my high school biology class had long since left my brain, so I took a short dive down that wormhole by reading the fifth chapter of Secrets of the Soil, a book about biodynamic agriculture by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird.

The chapter was packed with facts about earthworms and historical anecdotes. Turns out Cleopatra understood the Egyptian valley’s fertility depended upon earthworms and she decreed that they be revered and protected as a sacred animal. Aristotle called them the “Guts of the Soil” and Charles Darwin considered the earthworm to be the “greatest plowman, an animal of greater value than the horse, relatively more powerful than the African elephant, and more important to man than even the cow.”

And did you know that earthworms excrete a kind of mucus that helps them wriggle through hard ground, and that same mucus acts to cement the walls of their pathways, which in turn creates soil structure that’s perfect for retaining water and making space for the roots of plants? Or that earthworms have a gizzard that allows them to digest both organic matter and raw earth, and what comes out as worm castings on the other end is nearly perfect humus that’s loaded with microbes, giving plants what they need structurally, nutritionally and with the right pH?

These powerful, unassuming creatures go about their lives creating the fertile ground that allows us to grow gardens and feed ourselves. They mix organic matter and minerals around and up and down, gradually deepening the topsoil layer and distributing nutrients to where plant roots can reach them. In fact one earthworm can produce its weight in castings each day and can move a stone that’s fifty times its weight. What this means is that if the earthworm population is happy, no rototiller is needed. And that is why when I finished digging potatoes last weekend I covered the ground with grass clippings, nettle, dandelion leaves, comfrey and a bunch of beet greens and cabbage leaves. Then I added a layer of meadow straw that Dean had the foresight to rake and set aside back in May, before everything greened up, knowing that we’d need it now when it’s time to tuck our garden and our soil and all those hungry earthworms in for the winter.

This year’s garden is just about wrapped up. The garlic has been planted and all that’s left in the ground are carrots, parsnips and some kale. Over the next few weekends we’ll get the rest of the beds put away for winter. We’ll add a little compost and a layer of green. We’ll cover them all up with leaves and straw, and then we’ll walk away. In our absence, the earthworms and their microbial cohort will be mixing and churning. When the ground freezes they’ll go down deep. When it starts to thaw they’ll move up again toward the surface, and they’ll bring some of that deep earth goodness with them. In the spring when we peel that layer of straw off the garden bed we’ll find that somehow, even in the cold, the earthworms will have done what earthworms are meant to do and the soil will be ready for the seeds and the plants that will eventually grow into the food that feeds us. No matter how many times I see it or how many gardens I tend, I’ll never stop marveling over the way of it all.

I find that it’s easier to write about the changing seasons and growing a garden than it is to write about God. And I don’t mean God as a bearded fellow ruling the universe, I mean God as The Way Things Work. I mean God as the continuous cycle of death and renewal. I mean God as the all-encompassing glue that makes everything touch everything else. I mean God as that nameless energy that keeps the world spinning and the oceans churning and the earthworms tilling up the ground so that we can grow snap peas and sweet carrots and potatoes and the like. It’s much easier to stick to the facts but I can’t stop thinking about how within the workings of the natural world there’s something supernatural going on. Something so simple, so perfect, so sustainable. Something so honest, so straightforward, so real.

I don’t claim to understand how it all works, or why. I just know that in a world where it’s easy to be distracted by billionaires and politicians and the near-constant barrage of information and opinion, there is something bigger that is worthy of our attention, and that there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by reorienting our existence toward whatever that bigger thing is. To do so we might put our hands in the dirt and our feet on the ground. We might turn off the lights and look up at the night sky. We might notice how we change as the seasons change. We might learn the ways of plants and animals and fungi and each other. With practice we might remember the truth of who we really are.

And who are we, really? We’re humans with physical, temporary bodies that require nourishment and clean air and pure water. We have big brains that allow us to learn from the past and imagine the future. We’re as natural as the earthworms that are digging and tilling away in my garden and yet we have this incredible capacity to give and receive love. Where did that come from, I wonder. And how can we put it to use? There must be 8.1 billion different ways.

***

*** If you’d like to join me for a ten day journaling practice starting on Nov. 1, please send me an email at tsundmark@protonmail.com. Every day for ten days I’ll send out a few journal prompts that will get you started, and then you’ll take it from there. It’s free to join and I’d love to have your company. I promise I won’t share your email with anyone else. Feel free to share with anyone else who might be interested and let me know if you have any questions. — Teresa

Pointing Toward Winter

It’s fall equinox this weekend and this morning a light frost had settled outside, giving a gray hue to the kale and cabbage that’s still in the garden. This week we’ve draped row covers over the peas and chamomile each evening as the forecast calls for the temperatures to dip down to freezing, hoping to buy them a little more time. There’s a lot to do in the garden this time of year with harvesting and processing, planting next year’s garlic, and tucking in all the garden beds for winter. It’s a bit of a push when our energy is waning and our pull is toward slowing down and settling in.

I’m staring out at the landscape a lot these days, and in particular I find myself gazing out the window at our back garden. The fireweed back there didn’t bloom spectacularly this year like it normally does, but now it’s a mix of maroon and orange and red. The cottonwood and birch have turned yellow. The cow parsnip is fading and the alders are browning. A few of our flowers are hanging on, blue borage, purple comfrey, gold and yellow calendula, a couple of deep red poppies for punctuation. I’m enthralled with the colors themselves, but also with the depth of perspective they provide. Suddenly with a change in color it’s as if I can see more. More plants, more variety, more contours, more perspective.

A couple years ago I watched a video of a young man with colorblindness putting on a pair of glasses that allowed him to see colors he’d never seen before. I expected him to be wowed to see certain colors for the first time, and happy to have the visual experience most everyone else has. His reaction though, was one of overwhelm. He immediately burst into tears because it was all so much. He physically didn’t know how to respond to the sensory input he was suddenly tasked with processing.

I’ve also heard stories about people seeing colors they’ve never seen before while on psychedelics or during near death experiences. After the experience is over it’s impossible for them to describe the new colors because there are no words in our shared language for such things, but they have a memory, and an understanding that there’s more out there beyond our perception.

There is a book called Old Ireland in Colour by John Breslin and Sarah-Anne Buckley that features colorized versions of historical black-and-white photos. The book is beautiful and it became a bestseller in Ireland in 2020. But would the book have been a bestseller if it had just featured the black-and-white photos? Or was it hugely popular because of the added color? Does the addition of color allow people to feel a connection to the subjects of the photos – the children, the elders, the landscapes – that’s more profound?

What is it about color that changes our emotional response to a thing? How is it that we’re wired to respond to a smattering of wildflowers against a meadow of green, to alpenglow, to a sunrise? Why do these autumn colors compel me to think deep thoughts and ask so many questions?

Last week sandhill cranes flew overhead in huge noisy flocks, heading east over Kachemak Bay to begin their journey south for the winter. Now the squirrels are dropping spruce cones from the tops of trees in an effort to build their middens. Even my parents who spend their summers in Homer are starting their long drive back to Colorado on Monday morning.

Once again, like every year, everything is pointing toward winter. While I’d like to sit and write all day, the garden and all the bounty it’s offered us still need my attention. There are roots and herbs to dry, cabbage to ferment, and even a few berries still to pick. I know there will be time for more writing and reading soon enough.

While I’m out there I’ll take in all the colors and I’ll breathe in the cool fall air. I’ll work with my hands and let my mind roam free. I’ll feel the changing season and let myself change with it. I’ll feel the longing that seems to go hand in hand with the fall equinox. I’ll keep working, knowing that I’ll never really be done with all the tasks at hand, and I’ll keep coming up with questions I may never be able to answer. By the end of the day I’ll have added a few new things to my to-do list, and technically I won’t be any further ahead than when I started out, but I’ll be glad for how I passed my time.

***

On a different but not entirely unrelated note, three years ago, starting on the Autumn Equinox, I offered a twelve day journaling challenge. I invited people to sign up to receive an email a day for twelve consecutive days with a few prompts to get them going with their own writing. I put the idea out there without knowing what to expect but with hopes that people would discover a few things about journaling that I’ve discovered over the years, which is that it’s an amazing tool that lends itself to self-discovery and personal growth. It’s fun. It’s a way to jump-start a writing project or any creative endeavor. It can help a person work through a few things in their life that might need some attention and it almost always uncovers surprising insights and ideas.

Here’s the invitation I sent out three years ago: https://loftyminded.com/2020/09/16/lost-words-found-meaning-and-an-autumn-equinox-journal-series/

Around forty people signed up and for twelve days we journaled together. Many of the participants let me know that it was a mix of challenging, meaningful, fun, and inspiring. For me personally, it was the highlight of my year. I loved everything about it and I’ve been excited to do it again.

Finally I’ve settled on a start date for my next one. This time the start date will be November 1, 2023 and it will go for ten days.

I’ll send out a more formal invitation as Nov. 1 approaches, but I want to start getting the word out so that everyone who wishes to participate can start thinking about it and looking for that perfect journal. Please send me an email at tsundmark@protonmail.com if you’d like to sign up or if you have any questions, and I’d love it if you spread the word to anyone else you think might be interested.

Like last time, I’ll be offering this as a gift because I want to make it available to everyone who’d like to participate regardless of their financial situation. When it’s all said and done if anyone wants to and is able to offer a gift payment in exchange for participation in the series, there will be a way to do so. It’s 100% free to sign up and participate though, and I hope you will!

Five-Acre Almanac: Here Again

Early November

When I started my Five-Acre Almanac project I meant to write weekly for a year, but I fell a few weeks short. While I’m disappointed it didn’t work out the way I planned, I also believe there’s value in not pushing too hard. In reality working full time, managing a garden, starting a small business and writing a blog post every week proved to be too much and something had to give. Gardening couldn’t wait, and neither could mushroom hunting or summer weekend getaways. And those pesky bills were still due every month.

I never meant to take such a long break, but here I am almost four months since my last post, wondering where the time went and how to start again. My intention was just to ease up a bit on the writing and give my attention to the time sensitive aspects of summer. I thought my writing might become sporadic or less involved, but once I cut myself a little slack, sitting down in front of the computer for any extended amount of time began to feel impossible.

Writing requires vigilance, not just in sitting down and putting words on a page, but also in observing the world. While I can’t say that I missed the hours of sitting, I did miss the way writing puts me on alert and makes me notice things that might otherwise pass me by. I missed the exercise of braiding observations and thoughts together. I missed the magic that sometimes happens when I sit down to write about about one thing and something entirely different and unexpected rises to the surface.

I missed all of you too, and the very real connection I feel when I share myself through writing. It’s sometimes terrifying but I’ve come to appreciate the rewards that come from trusting that there’s a reason why I do this and that it’s not about self promotion or making money or even making it as a writer. I write this way on this blog because it feeds my soul. I do this because the practice has opened me up to something bigger than myself. Even so, this kind of writing is not effortless. I didn’t realize how much I needed a break until I allowed myself to take one.

Now though, I feel like it’s been long enough. Today I woke up early. The house was cold and instead of crawling back under the covers I decided to make coffee and get a fire going in the wood stove. I fed the dogs and stood outside on the porch while they did their business. Then I came back in and nestled into the couch under my favorite afghan and started writing again. It wasn’t until Dean woke up a while later that we realized that the time had fallen back an hour. Today that extra hour feels like a gift.

I guess I always want just a little more time. The nice thing about November though is that now many of the things I want to do with my time can wait. Today after I’m done getting this blog post written and posted, hopefully there will still be time to make some progress on our ongoing garage cleaning project. I also want to make bread and miso soup and maybe run the vacuum before the work week starts again. And while the sun is shining and the wind is calm I’d like to get outside and hang out by our fire pit for a couple of hours. But none of these things I hope to get to are so important that they have to push writing to the bottom of my to-do list.

That to-do list never really gets shorter, it just changes. But at least now the high-demand summer season has come and gone. It was glorious and we’ve got a bounty of food set aside for winter and enough dried herbs to get our fledgling tea business off the ground to prove it. We’ve also got memories of a weekend spent in a cabin on a lake and of running into lots of friends at a music festival. We picked more wild mushrooms than ever before and we had lovely Sunday dinners with my mom and step-dad.

I wouldn’t change anything about the way I’ve spent my time these last few months, but tonight when the darkness comes an hour earlier than it did yesterday, I won’t mind a bit. I’ll draw the curtains to keep the heat in. I’ll pour myself a cup of tea and I’ll find my way back to the couch and my computer. I’ll look to see who’s read these words and I’ll be thankful that I’m here again, back to doing this thing I love.

Five-Acre Almanac: Magic Lupine/Lupine Magic

Week 44

I started this writing project last August when we were in the middle of a tremendously busy summer. It seemed like a strange time to commit to a weekly post, but I did it anyhow because I felt compelled to do so. I knew it would be a challenge but I wanted to put myself to the test and see what I was meant to learn along the way.

I set a few boundaries and guidelines for my writing before I started. First, I decided to allow myself to acknowledge that our society is out of balance in my posts, but I would not dwell on those imbalances or make my posts about my opinions.

The second guideline I set for myself was to share in each of my posts something about the relationship I have with the natural world. Most of my time is spent here on these five acres, so it made sense to keep it close to home.

I also made myself a deal to not get caught up in perfectionism, which is hard. Now that I’m down to my last couple of months of writing these posts I’ve discovered that the harder I try to write the perfect post, the less happy I am with it. When I try too hard to control the direction a piece of writing wants to go, the less room there is for surprise. I know this, and yet I have to learn this over and over again.

One of the best things that’s come from committing to write every week is that I’m learning how to get out of my own way. I’m learning how to listen less to my chattering brain and more to my heart. When I’m successful with this, I’m having fun. When I’m caught up in trying to come up with a clever line or insert my own version of meaning into a piece, I grow weary of my own voice. Like everything, this takes practice, and ultimately that’s what I’m doing with the Five-Acre Almanac. I’m practicing.

It’s a writing practice, but it’s more than that.

It’s a practice in knowing myself and my surroundings. It’s a practice in finding hope. It’s a practice in seeing wonder. It’s a practice in being authentic. It’s a practice in trying to connect with people. Mostly it’s a practice in setting myself aside and allowing for something beyond myself to find its way through.

This week it’s been hard for me to set my thinking brain aside for long enough to sit down and write as I’ve been engaged in imaginary arguments with people whose minds I’m never going to change. I even considered breaking the rules I set for myself when I set out on this year-long writing project in order to make my opinions known, but then I remembered that I set those rules for reasons I can’t fully explain.

This is a practice in setting myself aside. This is a practice in embracing the quiet rather than the noise. This is a practice in trying to live above and beyond my opinions about how the world should be. This is a practice in letting the Natural World, the Way of things, God, the Divine, teach me something new.

***

Some of you who live here might remember that a few years ago there was no lupine blooming anywhere around the Kenai Peninsula. The few plants we found on our property looked shriveled and unhealthy and none of them flowered. Our neighbors commented on their absence and even in places where they were commonly found there were no blooms. But this year they exploded. They popped up unexpectedly in our garden. Roadsides are lined with them from the Homer Spit all the way up the Peninsula. Where a single lupin plant could once reliably be found, this year there are a dozen.

I wish I knew the scientific explanation of why the lupine are having such a good year and why they failed to bloom a few years back, and I’m curious to know if there is a connection between the two. What I do know is that all the conditions that allow them to thrive must have come together at once and the result has been a stunning display of every shade of purple.

There’s a form of alternative medicine that has to do with understanding a flower’s essence and it’s based on the idea that flowers have a healing vibrational energy. When I first heard about it, the idea that a flower could bring any kind of healing seemed far fetched, but that was more about me than it was the flowers. Now I think about plants differently.

Now I think that healing can come in surprising forms.

This year the lupine was so abundant that it seemed like it might be shouting to get our attention, like it was pushing its healing vibrational energy on us a bit forcefully, so I looked it up online to see what its energetic properties might be. The first thing that came up was “Lupine – Challenging the Human Soul to Greater Acts of Generosity and Selflessness.”

For two weeks, the lupine held our attention with its beauty, and that was a gift. But maybe its greater gift was something beyond its beauty. Maybe as our eyes took in all those shades of purple we were taking in something more. I like to imagine it’s possible.

Five-Acre Almanac: A Nail in the Foot

Week 43

When I got home from work on Wednesday last week I was eager to join Dean in the garden. Everything is planted now, but for a garden to thrive it needs some encouragement. Some people might not like the ongoing maintenance of gardening, but the fussing is the part I enjoy most. It’s a lot like the process of revising a piece of writing. With each visit there’s something to tweak, something new to see, some fresh insight as to what might be needed to make it better. Always there is something to learn.

Fussing over the garden is always different. It might involve checking on newly planted beds to see what’s sprouted or poking around in the soil to see if it’s dry. It might lead to picking dandelion greens and horsetail to add to the mulch mix. Sometimes it’s watering. Sometimes it’s weeding. On Wednesday evening my garden check led to plucking the tiniest of tiny slugs from my carrot and parsnip bed and plopping them into a jar of vinegar that I’ve always got nearby. I was completely consumed by the task of saving my seedlings from the destructive gastropods when I stepped on a nail. It took a few seconds for my brain to get the message of what had happened, and then another few for me to remove it from my foot.

We shouldn’t have used that old piece of wood with a nail still embedded in it to hold down the row cover that we’d draped over our sprouting beets, but we did. I shouldn’t have worn flip flops in the part of our yard where such pieces of wood are being used, but I did. I should have been more careful in how I placed the board when I moved it, but I was focused on eliminating the slugs. What a shock it was to feel my foot being impaled by a nail. What a way to be brought back from the reverie of my single-mindedness.

My first stop on Thursday morning was the Homer Medical Clinic for a tetanus shot since I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had one. After an hour and a half I left with instructions for how to care for my wound and the reassurance that I wouldn’t succumb to lockjaw. Then I hobbled around for a couple of days in a fair amount of pain, feeling perturbed all the while over my carelessness.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy putting my feet up from time to time, but I don’t like it when I’m forced to do so. Still I took the opportunity to start reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. In the introduction he writes, “In Buddhism, it’s said that a teaching is like ‘a finger pointing at the moon.’ The moon (enlightenment) is the essential thing and the pointing finger is trying to direct us to it, but it’s important not to confuse finger with moon.”

The nail in the foot brought all of my garden ambitions to a halt for a few days and even though the setback was temporary it gave me cause to consider losing my ability to do the things I love to do. What if one or both of us could no longer keep up with the demands of this lifestyle that we’ve chosen? Would we be adaptable? Would we lose heart? When I read that passage by George Saunders I was reminded that everything we do and learn and try to achieve in this life is just pointing us toward the essential thing.

Already by Saturday the pain in my foot had subsided and I was able to resume making my garden rounds. My first task of the day was to collect dandelion flowers for pancakes and more syrup. My second task was to scour the upper garden for any more boards that might be lying around with nails sticking out of them.

On Sunday I picked strawberry leaves under a pink haze of smoke from tundra fires burning in Southwest Alaska. The tinted sky changed the lighting of everything and somehow it seemed like the colors became more of themselves, the purples more purple and the greens more green. Under these conditions I checked to see if the roses in the meadow below the house were blooming yet. I gathered a pile of last year’s alder leaves from under the trees to use for mulch. I gave the apple trees and the thirstiest of our garden beds a good soak. I reseeded some peas and carrots and beans and hoped for better germination the second time around. More than once I stopped to peek under the straw that’s covering the new garden bed I made a couple of weeks ago out of layers of manure, dried grasses, cardboard, weeds that hadn’t yet gone to seed, dirt, and compost. Already it had come alive with spiders and insects and microbes. Earthworms had moved in and started the work of churning and mixing it all together, and of course there were a few slugs.

Seeing the slugs reminded me of the arch of my foot, which was feeling pretty good considering it had just been four days since I’d punctured it by stepping on that damn nail. I’d taken care of it the way I’d been instructed and I soaked it a few times in hot water infused with yarrow and now I was out in the garden again, fussing over seedlings and pulling a few weeds and checking on the progress of various plants.

Nobody would look at our garden and think that we’re people who have it all figured out, but I go to it each day like I’m its student and it’s my teacher. I do what I can to usher it toward productivity and in return it offers me beauty and delicious, nutritious food. When I pay attention it provides me with the opportunity to witness a million small miracles. It points me in the direction of what’s essential.

Five-Acre Almanac: Back in the Garden

Week 41

I’ve lived in Alaska for thirty years now but I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the way two week’s time can take us from the end of winter to fire season. May brings us from snow, to exposed dry grasses, and then to some of the warmest days of summer. At least that’s true for this year. When I came home from Atlanta two weeks ago a berm of snow three feet tall piled up behind our house and our driveway was still too mushy to drive on. Now the snow is gone and our rain barrels are nearly empty and the sign in front of the fire station on East End Road says fire danger is extremely high. It’s not an exaggeration. The days have been sunny, the afternoons windy, and it would only take one mistake to set the forest ablaze.

Three days ago there was a small wildland fire to the east of us. Before I was even home from work two tankers and a helicopter with a bucket had it under control and that evening as we worked in the garden a different helicopter flew back and forth from town shuttling a twenty-person crew to the scene. Because of the quick response, we’re breathing clean air on these hot, dry days. It’s something I don’t take for granted.

I’ve talked with two different people in the last month who moved to Alaska to escape the smoke that seems to have become a permanent feature of summer in the western United States. It can happen here too. I hope everyone is careful over the long weekend.

I’ve barely been able to bring myself inside long enough to check my email this week, much less write a blog post. I took a couple of days off of work before the long weekend in order to spend some time in the garden. On Thursday I built a new sheet mulch bed for planting potatoes. It looks like a pile of straw, but it’s a culmination of eight buckets of chicken manure, nine cardboard boxes, seven bags of chopped cow parsnip, straw, six buckets of compost, more straw, eight buckets of soil and yet another layer of straw. I hauled it all uphill and got good and sweaty and dirty and was reminded of how much I love that kind of physical work. It’s good for my mind and it’s good for my body and when the realities of the world are intense, the physical exertion gives me an outlet for some of the energy that would just sit around and fester and keep me awake at night. I also think about what I want to write when I’m digging and hauling and raking. Sometimes my ideas make it onto the page but most of the time they don’t. Either way the writing seems to come more easily when it’s paired with physical labor.

By the end of the day today we should have this year’s garden completely planted. It will be the biggest garden we’ve grown to date and this will be the earliest it’s been in the ground. The beds we’ve worked hard to create in previous years made this year’s planting easier and now we just have to keep everything watered through this dry spell. We’re keeping most of our beds under row cover to protect the plants and to keep some of the moisture contained, but we frequently peek under to see how things look. So far most of the garden starts are doing well and the carrot and radish seeds are sprouting.

The season for stinging nettle is winding down with this heat, but it’s been a good harvest so far. I like to get as much as I can because it’s the base for many of the herb tea blends we make for our business and because we incorporate it into our meals throughout the winter. We knock ourselves out growing a garden, but nothing we can grow is as nutritious or abundant as the stinging nettle that just pops up out of the ground.

A couple of years back a wild black currant popped up inside our fenced garden. We’ve staked it and watered it on occasion, but other than that we’ve done very little to encourage it’s growth. Already it’s three times the size of the domestic black currants we planted four years back. It’s a reminder that the indigenous plants around here have evolved to flourish in this northern environment. We’d be smart to incorporate them into our lives and reap the benefits they have to offer.

The absence of chickens has been a bit to get used to. Besides missing their presence and the eggs they provided, they ate a lot of our kitchen scraps. Chickens are a part of the garden system that we’ve created around here and our plan is to give ourselves a break for a year and then design a new setup that will be safer for them and easier on us. Whatever we come up with will definitely involve an electric fence the next time around.

Today I’m off to the farmer’s market with my mom and then back to bask in our yard again for another three days. Over the long weekend we’re going to try making nettle beer from a recipe we found in the book Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers by Stephen Harrod Buhner, and if time allows I’m going to make some dandelion petal syrup. There’s more to do than I’ll have time to do, but this time of year is about potential. There’s so much that the earth is offering up to us and the sunny days make me feel like everything is possible.

Five-Acre Almanac: Eastering

Week 37

I don’t think about it much anymore, but when we bought this property we were recovering from a bad decision. Without going into too much detail I will just say that before we landed here we had a bed and breakfast in town. It all looked good on paper when we bought it and we did our best to run it for a couple of years, but we were young, we were in over our heads, and the stress of trying to maintain it and keep up with the demands of guests and two small children nearly tore us apart. We reached a point where we had to make a choice between getting a return on our financial investment by sticking it out, or count our losses before we lost more than just money.

Our daughter was born at our bed and breakfast home on Thanksgiving. It was a fast and easy birth and after our midwife and doula left, Dean and I found ourselves sitting on the couch with a newborn and a toddler and it was there in the dark hours of that early Thanksgiving morning that we decided we had to make a change. It took a while to extricate ourselves from that house and business, but when we finally did we were nothing but relieved.

When we saw this simple house on five acres of land it seemed like a place where we could begin again, and thankfully we still had enough money left to make a down payment.

There’s a lot of shame involved in losing money and it’s not something we’ve talked much about with other people. But as the story goes, we had a chunk of money from an inheritance and then we lost most of it and then we spent a lot of years of our lives beating ourselves up over those losses.

Once I took a writing workshop from Luis Alberto Urrea and he said that forgiving our former selves is one of life’s most difficult tasks, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard truer words. But I can say that it’s worth the effort it takes to do so.

Now our lives seem so sane. Our children are grown. We have steady jobs and enough time to pursue the things we love. The dreams we had when we bought this piece of property have been slow to come, but they are coming. I say all of this because sometimes the way it’s all working out still surprises me. Our grown children still seem to love us despite our imperfect parenting. While money is not growing on any of the trees we’ve got around here, we can pay our bills and afford the inevitable car repairs and winter tires. We’ve got steady jobs and friends and family members who’ve got our backs. We’ve still got each other too, which wasn’t always a given.

One of my favorite novels from the last couple of years is This is Happiness by Niall Williams. Besides being exquisitely written, it’s an homage to a simple life. It takes place in Ireland and it’s told from the perspective of a young man living with his grandparents in a small village during the time when electric lines were making their way to the rural parts of the country. There is a custom in the springtime of the year in which all of the villagers’ household belongings are taken outside and set in the yard for a good airing out in the sun. Then the empty houses are scrubbed clean. The cleaning and airing out is to prepare for the Easter holiday and the custom itself is called Eastering.

We’re not quite at that stage of the game here. Our yard still has too much snow and where the snow has melted the ground is mushy. But the scene from that book stays with me. I imagine the house would smell like freshly laundered sheets and sunshine after that kind of a cleaning. And I try to imagine a life so unencumbered by stuff that it would be an easy enough task to haul all of our belongings out into the yard in an afternoon. Mostly I love the idea of letting air and sunshine work their way through all the indoor things that are prone to dust and darkness.

Journaling for me is a form of Eastering. With each entry I haul out something from inside myself that could use a little fresh air and sunlight. When it’s laid out on the page I can see the dings and the dust. More importantly I can see how small it is when it’s juxtaposed against a larger landscape. Once it’s no longer cluttered inside the shadowland of my interior self, there’s space for me to do some cleaning. Or forgiving, as the case may be.

Then, once I’ve looked at whatever it is in a different light and from a few different angles I can decide what to do with it next. I might choose to let it go or I might decide to hold onto it differently. I might file it into a new category or I might connect it to things that at one time seemed unrelated. But after each airing out I’m ready to begin again, which is what we all do. We begin, and then we begin again, and hopefully as we look at the pieces of our lives that brought us to where we are now, we’re able to offer ourselves and each other some grace.

Fire safety/improved view/next winter’s heat all wrapped into one job.

Five-Acre Almanac: Small Joys

Week 35

It’s Sunday again, the day I’ve designated each week to write a post for this yearlong project. Facing down a blank page with the intention of sharing the words that materialize over the course of a few hours requires courage because while I’m writing about some aspect of life here on our five acres, I also want something more to come from my writing. I never know if what I’m hoping for is going to show up though, and the courage comes in trusting that something will reveal itself at some point along the way.

Writing about the work we do, the gardens we grow, the wild foods we harvest, the antics of our homegrown food experiments and our animals is the easy part. Writing from a deeper place, a place where the physical world connects to that place within me that is searching for meaning, is much more difficult.

This is all to say that this week I’m struggling to know what to write. In one hand I’m holding all the hope that this time of year brings, and in the other I’m holding sorrow. I believe that’s true for most of us. To pay attention to what’s happening in the world is to know grief. To see spring chives poking up out of the ground is to feel hope. Watching our beloved dogs grow old exposes our hearts to a tenderness that’s both beautiful and sorrowful. To have the time and ability to work on the things we find meaningful gives us deep satisfaction. Every day is a mix of small joys and deep sorrow, deep joy and small sorrows and writing this post each week becomes a balancing act where I try to lean heavy on the hope and joy but stay grounded in reality.

Earlier this week Dean and I signed up for a year-long gardening course offered by local gardener and teacher Saskia Esslinger. The way it works is that Saskia hosts a Zoom meeting once a week to talk about some aspect of gardening and a person can join the course at any point in the year. We signed up because even though we’ve been gardening for a long time now, there’s always more to learn and as we look at expanding, any efficiency we can implement now will help make this a sustainable endeavor rather than one that wears us out. Also, we get to talk about gardening and related subjects every Saturday morning for a year.

Yesterday was our first session and the topic of the day was greenhouses. We have a greenhouse, but already after just one class we have some simple improvements in mind that will likely make it better. Even if we don’t have the time to make the changes this year, we have an ideal we can work toward, which is exactly the kind of thing we were hoping for when we decided to sign up for this course.

Dean built our greenhouse off the back of our chicken coop five summers ago. He used old windows, a door one of our friends salvaged from the dump and scrap lumber from an old structure that was here when we moved in but needed to be torn down. It’s a funky little greenhouse, but I love it and now we have a place to grow a few crops that don’t typically grow outside in Alaska and a place to hang out and enjoy the view this time of year before it’s full of plants.

On Thursday I went out to check on the chickens in the early afternoon and heard something scurry up the side of the coop. I’ve suspected that an ermine has been stealing our eggs and finally my suspicions were confirmed. I rearranged a few of the laying boxes and plugged up a hole that might have been the entry point. Since then I’ve been getting four or five eggs a day as opposed to zero or one, but I’m not convinced that the ermine won’t find its way back in. They seem like smart and scrappy little creatures that would be quick to find a work-around to any obstacle that’s put in their way.

On Friday an unexpected package arrived in the mail from a friend. She sent me a chicken poster with a handwritten note explaining that she saw it hanging in a bookstore window and immediately thought of me. She asked the proprietor if they had another poster for sale but they didn’t. They did however have one they were willing to give her. She also mentioned that the poster is meant to be hung in the chicken coop to inspire the hens. I’ll get down there soon for some deep spring cleaning and muckraking and ermine-proofing and I’ll find a place to hang it then, but in the meantime I’ll keep it inside where I can see it and be reminded of my friend, and the fact that she thought of me and acted on her impulse to spread some joy.

And I guess that’s what I’m landing on today, the importance of those small joys that make up a life. Interesting classes, the kindness of friends, fun surprises, spring greens after a long winter, sitting in a warm greenhouse on a cool but sunny afternoon, solving problems, time spent pursuing passions, great conversations, beach walks, good music. These things don’t take away the sorrows of the world, but they ease them a little. They don’t give us a solution to every problem, but they point us in the right direction. If enough of us follow where those small joys lead us, maybe it will make a difference.

Five-Acre Almanac: The Fullness of it All

Week 34

I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the line Dean and I became the kind of people who have a well-stocked pantry. It makes sense here in earthquake country, in a state that gets most of its food from thousands of miles away, but we haven’t always been this way and so we’re still figuring out how to do it. Yesterday I started the project of organizing it. We try to do this every now and again to remember what all we have and to bring the stuff that’s been sitting around for a while to the front of the line. We’re realizing that there’s a fine line between having a well stocked pantry and hoarding, and we don’t want to cross that line.

The process of working on the pantry was painful, and as those kinds of jobs often go it got worse before it got better. A couple hours in and the kitchen table and counters were covered in all the things that had been on the pantry shelves, and with each item a decision had to be made. Are we really going to use that five year old rhubarb butter or is it time to give it to the chickens? That weird sauce that has the questionable ingredients in it, yes we bought it for some strange reason a few years ago but now that we know what’s in it will we ever use it? Probably not.

Between the pantry job, the disheveled nature of our house while it’s undergoing some minor remodeling and garden starts filling every horizontal surface that gets any light, the clutter nearly sent me into a state of overwhelmed-ness that bordered on despair. The fact that I’d been reading the news earlier didn’t help. The pantry job also had me going in and out of our garage which, even after a few sessions of sorting and getting rid of stuff, is still packed.

A few years back we got rid of a raft that we bought in Montana shortly after we got married. It was worn out and no longer useful but we held on to the rowing frame. The frame had been knocking about in the loft of our garage for years and we kept it even though the likelihood of us ever using it again was next to nothing. Finally a couple of weeks ago we loaded it into the back of our truck, but not before I imagined how it might be put to use for a cold frame for our garden or for a makeshift bench by our fire pit, and that revealed another problem I have which is that I feel guilty for adding more stuff to a world that’s already overwhelmed with too much stuff and in an effort to assuage my guilt over being a consumer I try to envision the potential reuses for every single thing, from used yogurt containers to old rowing frames.

Another problem with getting rid of things has to do with the stories that are attached to them, or more accurately, our perception that stories are attached to the objects we hold on to. Storing the raft and frame in our garage added nothing to the memories we have of floating the Smith River or fly-fishing our way down Rock Creek. Letting them go was not letting go of the people we used to be, as those younger versions of ourselves had already moved on. The raft and frame weren’t keeping anything alive, they were just taking up space.

We’re having a bigger dilemma trying to decide what to do with a huge collection of leather bound Franklin Mint books that once belonged to Dean’s dad who died at age 48 just a month before Dean and I met each other. Ken was a pilot for Braniff Airlines, and then after Braniff folded he and a partner started Sun Country Airlines. He valued the idea of reading classic literature but as a driven businessman he didn’t allow himself much time for that sort of thing. He told Dean that his plan was to make his way through those books once he retired.

Ken’s untimely death meant that most of those books he looked forward to reading one day were never opened. When he died they went into boxes, and then into storage, and then onto a barge that brought them to Alaska where we’ve continued the tradition of not reading them. We displayed them on our bookshelves for a while, but they weren’t the books we wanted to read so they just collected dust. Now they’re back in boxes in our garage, taking up space.

It’s good to remember that we have some choice over what’s meaningful in our lives, and that we’re allowed to change our minds and evolve and let things go when the time is right to let things go.

Yesterday I let that old rhubarb butter go, along with a half-full mystery box of croutons and bag of sorghum flour that I was never going to use. I said goodbye to the three year old box of yellow cake mix and eight jars of dried herbs that were well past their prime. Then after I got the pantry put back together and cleaned up after the project, I went outside and wandered around for a while with Dean and the dogs. We loaded the wheelbarrow with firewood and shoveled snow off the yurt deck. We checked in on the chickens and stood inside our greenhouse for a while to enjoy the extra bit of heat. I stayed out long enough to lose my sense of being overwhelmed, then I came back inside and turned on Radio Paradise and made dinner.

Sometimes I want everything to be orderly and I want it now, but the nature of this life that we’ve chosen is that it’s messy. We make repairs as we can afford them. We sort through the stuff that’s accumulated as we’re able to. We cook and make a mess of the kitchen, then we clean it up and do it all again. We reuse jars and plastic bags. We have dogs that shed. We ferment things. We grow a garden that takes over our house for about a month every spring. We put chores on hold in order to write. We make time to go for walks and practice tai chi and listen to music.

There is no future date when everything will be perfectly lined up and all the tasks will have been completed. There is just this day and the next. We’ll make a little progress in some areas and fall further behind in others. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the fullness of it all, but when I stop to take a breath I remember that we’re having a pretty good time.

Five-Acre Almanac: Breakup Season

Week 32

Breakup is the Alaska term for when winter loses its hold. It’s when the snow and ice begin to melt and the ground begins to thaw. It’s a process that can take a couple of months and during breakup there can be beautiful blue sky days with perfect snow conditions or there can be days when it’s sleeting sideways and the streets are lined with dirty piles of mushy snow that’s melting into pools of water with no place to drain. It’s when new dips in the roads materialize overnight and driving becomes a focused exercise of avoiding potholes. Normally breakup starts toward the end of March and continues through April but this year it started in February. Now we’re all waiting to see if it’s here to stay.

Yesterday Dean started planting our garden. He started pepper, leek, marjoram, oregano, sage, marigold and sunflowers seeds that will eventually be transplanted outdoors. Last week he started goji berries, tomatoes, and spinach. I started some seeds too. Fifteen years ago when my dad died I collected wildflower seeds from the cemetery on Wilson Mesa where his ashes were scattered and brought them home to Alaska. They’ve been in a jewelry box on my dresser until last week. Now I’ve put them in a damp paper towel inside a Ziploc bag to try sprouting them knowing that even though seeds can last a long time, especially ones like these that have a hard outer shell and have evolved to grow in the harsh high country environment of Western Colorado, I might have waited too long.

We still have snow in our yard but we’re starting to see the ground again in certain places. Our two hugelkultur raised beds are completely uncovered and I hope the little knobs of rhodiola rosea I planted last fall will start to emerge. They’re the most cold hardy of plants and just might be able to withstand another bout of winter, should it decide to return.

Another sure sign of winter’s end is the eagles have been swooping about the neighborhood the way they do when it’s time for them to build a nest. Last summer a pair of bald eagles raised two eaglets in a cottonwood tree in our neighbor’s front yard but yesterday when I was out I noticed that the top half of the tree has broken off and the nest has been destroyed. It must have toppled over during one of our recent wind storms.

Wind can be a destructive force around here but our own place doesn’t seem to be as battered by it as it was when we first moved in. I can’t tell if it’s because we don’t have as many windstorms as we used to or if it’s because our trees have grown tall and we now have a windbreak. It’s also quite possible that I’ve become used to the strength of the windstorms that blow in from the Gulf of Alaska and they no longer freak me out the way they used to. One may come along on occasion that keeps me awake at night, but the wakefulness is due more to noise than it is worry over the potential destruction.

It’s been hard seeing images of all the destruction that’s happening in Ukraine. Apartment buildings destroyed, streets rendered impassable from bombings, school yards blown to bits. The physical damage cannot be compared to the loss of human dignity and life, but still I can’t help but think about what a waste it all is. All the resources and energy that went into creating what’s useful and necessary, maybe even beautiful, reduced to ruins.

I try to imagine having to leave this place behind. These five acres that we’re still paying for, that we’ve raised a family on, that we plant a garden on and harvest food from. This piece of land that because of a monthly money exchange and a few pieces of paper we can call our own. I try to imagine a bomb tearing through our roof causing the house to be uninhabitable or sinister forces moving in and taking the things we’ve worked hard for for their own. It’s happened to plenty of people throughout history. It’s happening now, just not to us.

Then I take it further and try to imagine losing the town I’ve come to call home. What if a military invaded and took over the harbor and the airport? What if they destroyed the roads we would need to drive on should we feel compelled to escape? I don’t imagine these scenarios in order to wallow in pain, but as an effort to try to identify who I would be if all the things I’ve come to identify myself with were no longer mine. Who would I be when separated from the place I call home, with no prospect for a new one?

According to Amnesty International there were 26 million refugees around the globe in 2019. Just within the past few weeks there have been another couple million added to that number. These are people who have been displaced from their homes due to violence, insecurity, food shortages and persecution, and half of them are children.

Those numbers make me feel the privilege of being a person who’s able to write about what it’s like to live on these five acres of land. Gratitude is one piece of it, as I’m thankful for my life. But there’s something more that I’m having a hard time putting my finger on, and maybe it has to do with the fact that I’ve always felt cared for. I’ve always had shelter. I’ve always had enough food. I’ve never been displaced. And because of this I’ve always trusted that things will turn out okay. How much greater a person’s trust must have to be when all the structures of their lives have been pulled out from underneath them. Does this make them feel like God or the Universe has abandoned them, or does it make them feel closer to the source of their humanity?

These are heady thoughts, which seem about right for these heady times, and for Lent, and for breakup season, while we’re waiting for something to give.