Diz had kept a shelf of books and periodicals about gardening, including, surprisingly, a few issues of a magazine about orchids. Another shelf held cookbooks and some large volumes of photographs—“coffee table books”: The Wonders of Paris, The Mysteries of Egypt, The Amazon Rain Forest, Historic Savannah, and Earnest’s Washington, DC: America’s Historic Heritage. I wondered whether he had given her all these, and whether they signified an inner yearning for those faraway places, some hint of a life’s unfulfilled longings.
I dwell on these artifacts because in total they were shockingly few. Her collection of personal things was hardly bigger than my own, up on the hill. To me it said that she had been so fully subsumed by the apparatus of life on the farm that there really wasn’t time or mental energy left over for a personal life.
This terrified me. Whatever personal transformational trajectory I’d envisioned, it did not include becoming merely a part in a machine, even a machine as worthy as a farm and an inadvertently adopted family. Making Brassard’s farm functional had cost her everything. Even my heartfelt vow to take care of the men did not encompass that level of sacrifice. It would not.
The farm-related details of that spring and early summer are vague in my memory because it was all so centered on Diz’s dying, and so devoted to work, and the work was so repetitious, that days blurred together. Theo’s younger sister Robin graduated from UVM and moved in with them, and we hired her on a regular basis for the afternoon milking rituals. Earnest was there more often, Will came and went but worked hard when he was there. Brassard mainly did tractoring and truck-driving chores and the business side of things, whatever didn’t put stress on his joints. Nobody tended to Diz’s vegetable garden, so weeds moved in, the lettuce and asparagus bolted early; later, some pest got into the tomatoes so they puckered and paled. The lawn often went unmowed; I forgot to water the flower boxes at the windows and they browned and died. The place wasn’t as “respectable” as it used to be, and Earnest said he could hear Diz spinning in her grave.
But cows got milked. Milk pipes and tanks got sterilized. Calves got born, fed, weaned. Corn and hay got put in. Tractors and their attachments got fixed. The Agri-Mark tanker came and went. By unspoken mutual consent, I stopped counting my hours; Brassard knew I was more than repaying him for the land, and I knew I would quit when the payoff time rolled around, late next winter.
But my life had divided into two distinct halves, and if the farmwork got blurry, my life on the hill was distinct and keen. Some nights I was just too tired to hike up, but mostly I made it to the tent in time to enjoy the late sunlight and lush evenings. Also, Brassard knew burnout all too well, and he insisted I take at least one day a week off, two if possible. He quoted some maxim from one of his books on modern management techniques, how having a tired and disgruntled staff cuts productivity.
Eavesdropping from nearby, Earnest nodded sagely. “And is bad for retention,” he added. A joke for my benefit: As if I didn’t already want to quit! Brassard had no laughter in him.
And as far as disgruntlement went, I was simply too busy to be disgruntled.
Life on my hill was easier now, in part because I was hardier and in part because, by increments, I was making my camp more civilized. The most important improvement was figuring out how to get running water into my kitchen sink. I couldn’t dam my spring, but I did manage to trick it into delivering some of its flow to the campsite. I cut the bottom off a plastic one-gallon milk jug to make an oversize funnel, staked it in the streambed, then attached almost four hundred feet of garden hose that gravity-fed water to my kitchen. The stream didn’t seem to mind this borrowing of water as long as I didn’t try to stop or slow the main flow.
It was hardly a Roman aqueduct, but I was proud of my ingenuity. And, turning on the faucet for the first time, watching the water spill from the sink drain and soak into the soil beneath, I experienced a lovely epiphany. It’s just common sense, but then, the deepest insights usually are: The spring’s waters, separated briefly by my hose, would reunite downhill. Eventually they’d merge with all the other waters from these mountains, in Lake Champlain, I suppose, or maybe the ocean. Things separated connect again.
Having running water on demand, in my outdoor kitchen, seemed almost embarrassingly high-tech.
If you are not already familiar with the woods in summer, I will not be able to convey to you how alive they are. Everything moves. The trees sway and billow, shift and shimmer, bees hover and zip as they tend the tiny forest flowers, birds flit and glide and racket in the treetops. Gnats float in clouds above sun-warmed spots, tiny caterpillars swing from invisible threads. A porcupine trundles into the clearing, oblivious, then notices the human presence, hesitates in a befuddled way, and ambles off. Red squirrels scold the human interloper with a machine-gun chattering trill and barking squeaks. The weather seems alive, too, as cloud shadows drift through the woods, and the forest light goes from shy to bold to shy again. When the sun is bright, tossing leaf shadows turn the forest floor into a freckling surface that moves like wavelets on a small pond.
Even on the most windless of days, seemingly dead still, you’ll see one single paradoxical leaf waving back and forth, elastic on its stem and caught just so in an imperceptible movement of air.
Most people have hiked in the woods, have cut firewood, gone hunting,
