Mowing

I have been helping to mow our fields these last weeks of August, making long work out of what could be done by an experienced operator in a few days.

 This mowing is far from Robert Frost’s contemplative whispering scythe, though the poet kept his own fields just down the hill from ours some 100 years ago. No, our field is long past hay, if it was ever used for that, and is full of an array of wildflowers and brush and ferns. There is nothing whispering about the tractor, which gives a baritone rev when I turn the key, before settling into a deep mechanical purr. Where a scythe would clang resoundingly, I imagine, should its curved blade meet a boulder, the old bush hog instead grinds to a shuddering stop when I fail to avoid those brush-hidden chunks of granite left by the glaciers eons ago.

Probably I should have helped with the mowing long before now, but I have left the task to my husband, who has much more tractor-driving experience, for all the years we’ve been living here. The truth is that I am a bit afraid of the big, green John Deere tractor, with its noises and levers and giant, churning wheels. But I am getting used to driving it, learning how to maneuver around obstacles, though I have left the more challenging spots – like the tumbledown apple orchard with its trunks and low-hanging branches and hidden stumps – for my husband to mow.

Despite still being a bit edgy behind the wheel as I bump along – sitting on the front edge of the seat to reach the tractor’s pedals – I have found that I like the distraction of mowing, the redrawing of the landscape little by little. And while it is certainly not a quiet chore, I have found mowing can be a contemplative one.  

The first day I mowed, as I nervously watched for rocks and endeavored to avoid overhanging branches, a rainbow arced across the sky at dusk to land behind the mountains. Another afternoon the tractor, crawling noisily along, spooked two deer from where they must have been bedded down in the still-tall grass. They bounded in the opposite direction, down the hill and through the row of old apple trees, all lithe bodies and big eyes, their sleek pelts deep amber in the summer sun.

As I trundle along I am rediscovering the anatomy of our fields from the perspective of a tractor seat. I mow down to Big Rock, site of occasional picnic lunches; around the old burn pile, twined now with growing things; as near to the ancient, tumbling stone walls as I dare creep. I mow over rocks and around trees, through unseen ruts and across surprisingly muddy areas, where the tractor’s big wheels threaten to sink (and, indeed, sometimes do) under its heft into the soft ground.

I’ve watched poor meadow voles scurrying away and leaping mice hurdling over freshly cut clumps of grass to flee the path of destruction. One day I stopped to move an abandoned board left in the field and did some scurrying of my own, high-stepping back to the tractor to get away from the startled and writhing snakes I found beneath the wood. Probably they were garter snakes, but I didn’t stick around long enough to confirm their identity.

Little by little, I have mowed swaths through the tall, dead stalks of lupine that two months ago were filled with purple blooms and are now covered in seed pods dried to a mottled gray-brown. Mingling with these gone-by flowers are lofty tufts of bright yellow goldenrod and late-summer asters in white and purple, which I lament knocking down mid-bloom.

It is not all destruction, though. The patch of blueberry bushes still producing a few fruits I have left untouched, for now. Same with a few of the blackberry brambles, whose fruits are just ripening. If we don’t get to picking them, surely the bears will. The other day I stopped the tractor to break a section of pin cherry off so I could save a goldfinch nest – long abandoned at this point in the season – to admire its perfect cup, which once held eggs and growing chicks, and the birds’ method of affixing the nest to the tree by spider web silk.

And, with the destruction comes rejuvenation. Left unmown, the fields would revert to forest more quickly than it seems possible for trees to grow. In a section of the field that was not mowed last year the pin cherry and brushy willow saplings have grown bold and tall, requiring multiple passes with the bush hog to knock down. In another few years, these trees and others, the berry brambles, the scrubby bushes would align to block the view of the mountains, swallow the old apple orchard completely, change a habitat that has been, if not constant, at least similar for many decades. 

So we mow, contributing to the cycle our fields have grown into: from winter snow to the dull hues of early spring before color creeps back into the landscape and the fields’ grasses and ferns and flowers grow as high as our knees, then our waists, then our shoulders and beyond, blooming into summer before being cut down to do it all again.

There is no whispering scythe here, but the fields hold poetry just the same.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the August 25, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record.

Winter Hardy

I’ve brushed a new layer of fluff off the windshield just about every morning for the past two weeks. My husband has taken to dropping the plow nearly each trip into or out of the driveway, scraping away the snow that has fallen since the truck’s last passage. I’ve lost track of the number of days that have started off with temperatures well below zero and barely warmed.

It’s Winter, all right, and it looks like she’s settled in, which is just fine by me.

It takes a good dose of New England hardiness to survive a winter like this. At least to survive it with some sense of good cheer. There is shoveling and roof clearing and endless plowing and firewood carrying. If you’re lucky (and smart) there is also skiing and snowshoeing and ice skating and sledding and snow fort building. My kids (and I, too) lamented the December rain and the loss of white from our landscape. Cold and brown is no good for a winter-loving soul. Cold and snow is an entirely different, and much happier, thing.

It seems while we head into the white looking for fun, many animals – the hardiest of New Englanders – have hunkered down since the deep snowfall. A few weeks ago our fields were laced with deer tracks and the hopping marks of red squirrels and the canine paw prints of coyotes, along with fox and the elusive bobcat. Lately, however, when I strap on the cross-country skis for a mind-clearing trek through the field and woods, I see far fewer tracks. A solitary deer trail emerging from the trees here, a snowshoe hare track bounding across the path there. The garden compost heap, which had been visited regularly by a bold doe, has been left alone for days, except by the crows.

On the coldest days, even the ever-cheery chickadees wait until well after I’ve had my own breakfast to visit the feeder. A pair of blue jays often sit puffed against the chill on bare branches nearby, their brightness almost startling against a backdrop of white. The other day a barred owl perched atop a dead birch tree in the field, head turning methodically in search of a meal, feathers ruffled by the wind. Eventually the owl gave up and flew away; there were no small rodents moving through the deep snow below.

The only animal who seems unbothered by the cold and deepening snow is the porcupine, whose trough-like trail through the woods crosses the human-made path of snowshoes and skis just where it has the past few winters. Scraping teeth marks appear like brush strokes across several smallish yellow birch trees along the trail, revealing where the porcupines ate the inner bark, a favorite winter meal.

I know there are plenty of people who hunker down, too, closed up in their warm houses waiting for spring through the long northern winter. And there are others whose children have had far too many snow days (while here we’ve had zero snow days and still plenty of snow), wreaking havoc on the already complicated logistics of family schedules. In Boston and other cities, they are running out of places to put all the snow; commuting is an ongoing nightmare, and this winter is a multifaceted headache there.

Here, it is just winter, to be endured or enjoyed, depending on your perspective. Sure, plowing and shoveling become tiresome when they are daily chores, but all that pushed-up snow makes a great foundation for a snow fort. Frigid temperatures can certainly wear a person down after a while, but that cold makes the cocoa all the better. Driving through snow is not much fun, but skiing in it is pure, invigorating bliss.

In mid-February, the days are noticeably longer than a few weeks ago. To some, that means spring is coming. To the rest of us, it means more daylight for basking in Winter’s white glow.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the February 13, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Winter Deer

The garden fence will need fixing come spring. We enclosed our vegetable plot years ago, primarily to keep the dog – and later the toddling children – out of the plants growing there. The wire fencing has been sagging for a while now, between the sturdy wooden posts. But this early winter the fence has been pushed from merely drooping to downright dilapidated by regular visits from a neighborhood deer.

We first spotted her from an upstairs window at the back of the house, the week before Thanksgiving. A shape shifting in the dusk drew my eyes to the rectangle of field enclosed by that slightly sagging fence, where the doe was pacing and sniffing around the garden near the compost heap. The pumpkins that had been our Halloween jack-o-lanterns were at the top of the pile, broken into softening shards, their autumn orange fading but still bright against new snow.

I called the kids – now far beyond their toddling days – and we peered into the growing dark to watch the deer as she examined the fence, repeatedly lowering her head to sniff at its edge, then wagging her ovate tail in apparent frustration, the discarded pumpkin bits just out of her reach.

Two days later she was back, this time as light crept into the day rather than out of it. She repeated the routine of pacing, sniffing and tail wagging. After several minutes of deliberation and scouting her options, the doe gave a final tail wag, twitched her big ears, and with easy grace hopped the leaning garden gate. She stayed within the garden, munching composted pumpkin, until the dog went outside 20 minutes later.

We see deer often in the fields around our house, along with the narrow paths they trod from the field into the cover of the forest. Some seasons we are able to identify the regular cervine visitors to the old apple orchard in the field. Last fall we enjoyed daily visits from a large doe and two smaller ones who came together, always a trio, to pick at the fallen apples or stretch their necks to reach the fruit still clinging to branches. Often they were joined by a young buck who sported only a single spike.

There was an abundance of apples last year, and even after snow had covered the field, the deer came to scrape through the white in search of the frozen morsels below. On the very morning after the last day of the final hunting season, a six-point buck strode regally through the field toward the mountains, not bothering to pause for apples. We’d never seen him before and haven’t since.

This year the apples were not as plentiful, and we haven’t seen deer as often in our field. Our winter deer, the one who raids the compost heap, seems to be our only regular for this season. Often at dusk or before the morning has fully brightened to day, we’ll notice her large ears and twitching tail in the garden out back. She has become quite bold, actually, and we often find her standing just beyond the garden, gazing thoughtfully at us as we come down the driveway after school in the afternoon.

By the time we are out of the car and in the house, the deer is in the garden. She stoops to nose the pile, searching for the best scraps – carrot peels, stalks of wilted lettuce, browned apple cores, perhaps – then raises her head as she chews placidly, dark eyes rimmed in white surveying the landscape, ears turning toward every sound.

When we open the door to let the dog out, the deer is immediately alert, and with one smooth, powerful leap she is over the fence and out of the garden, her white tail waving with each high bound through the field.

She is lovely to watch, and our compost scraps seem easy picking in what must be, for a deer, a very long, hungry winter. But I know we’ll have to break our winter deer’s bad habit. I wonder, as I watch her in my garden out back, if this is the deer who ate the tops off every carrot in the small garden boxes in the side yard, and nibbled every lettuce down to the stalk there as summer faded to fall months ago. There are no fences around those boxes, and we’d never had an issue with wild vegetable thieves before last year. Perhaps it’s time to enclose those veggies, too.

Yes, the garden fence will need fixing come spring, and maybe a jolt of electricity added as well.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the January 9, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Window to my world

In our living room there is a large picture window, spanning about a third of the long room. The three-sided window offers a spectacular view of the mountains, sweeping from the Presidentials in the east toward the Franconia and Kinsman ranges in the southeast, and it is this view which most often catches the attention of visitors. For me, though, the window provides a view more dear than the mountains of home.

Through the window, I see the seasons changing, the days turning from sherbet-hued sunrise to alpenglow dusk, my children playing and growing. This is the window to my world.

From the window, I can see the field where my husband and I stood with our friends and family one sunny, late-August day and promised to love, put up with, and celebrate each other the rest of our lives (not in those exact words, but that’s pretty much what marriage vows boil down to).

When my children were babies, I spent countless hours, fuzzy with sleeplessness, rocking and feeding them by the window. From my perch in the giant recliner, I would watch the sun come up as I figured out how to be the mother of newborn twins and, later, another babe. While they dozed, I would gaze out that big window, watching the chickadees flit from bare lilac bushes to bird feeder, busily surviving in late winter, all of us waiting for the brightness and warmth of spring sunshine.

Those babies are nearly 7 now and spend much time by the window and the bench seats below it. They sit at the table there to do their homework, create artwork, watch the snowcats moving up and down the slopes of Cannon Mountain, and look for animals and birds. The chickadees still come to the winter feeder, along with a pair of blue jays and an occasional passing flock of gold finches or cedar waxwings.

In the fall we look out to see bears climbing the apple trees, and peer into the creeping dusk looking for deer. We’ve come to know the deer who frequent our field: the large doe and her not-quite-grown youngster, the young buck with only one spiky horn, a handsome 6-point buck, and an even larger one who appeared only once (that we saw), the day after the long hunting season ended, walking regally through the field, unbothered by the barking dog.

From the window I gaze into the quiet of early morning, before anyone else is awake, looking for the silhouette of mountains to emerge from the darkness, trying to determine what type of day it will be. Red sky in morning? Sailor (or skier, hiker, bicyclist, gardener) take warning. From the window we watch the clouds pushing through Franconia Notch and the moon rise over Lafayette.

I can watch the seasons change through the window, from the intricately bare branches and snow of winter to the pale pink blossoms that fill the apple trees in spring, then the purple burst of summer lupine, the yellows and golds of late summer, fall’s final surge of patchwork color, and back to white again.

From the window I am watching my children grow, from toddlers peddling tricycles to kids building bike jumps out of logs and plywood. From not-quite-2-year-olds shuffling around the driveway on plastic, strap-on skis to daredevils plunging head-first down the snowy hill on sleds. From babies crawling through the grass to builders orchestrating major sandbox excavations.

Our house could be described as “lived in,” with dirt on the floors, toys often scattered through several rooms, and clutter on the tables. The bumped-out spot where the window is may be the most lived-in place of all, the table piled with kids’ homework assignments, my notes, magazines, crayons, laundry to be folded. Not surprisingly, all three wide panes of the window are perpetually smudged with small fingerprints.

The children push their hands against the glass as they look out at the deer and the chickadees, or watch for someone to come down the long driveway – my husband returning home, grandparents stopping in for a visit, friends coming to play. Someday I will watch from the window for them to return from first dates, college semesters, and new lives in other places.

From the outside, the window also provides a glimpse into home. When we return on dark December evenings, we see the twinkling glow of Christmas tree lights. There are often kid creations hanging in the window – cut out paper snowflakes and painted candy canes in winter, flowers and shamrocks as spring approaches, the favorite drawing of the week. When I return home from a solo outing, I see my family through the window, building puzzles, playing games, reading books.

Whichever way I peer through the glass, it is a window to the world my heart holds dear.

Original content by Meghan McCarthyMcPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings from a Full Life. This column also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the December 27, 2013 edition of the Littleton-Record.