Sylvia's Farm

by Sylvia Jorrin

  Samantha’s nature is different from her mother’s. Her upbringing as harsh in its own way because I wouldn’t let her in the house. Even after I decided to keep her, she slept on an enclosed porch, never allowed indoors. Sam’s nature is sweet, however, and she sits next to me whenever she finds me seated. Now that I’ve moved outside with my coffee, she is stretched out on a cold stone patio floor wanting so badly to be next to me rather than lying in the sun like her mother. She swims with glee, if a dog could be said to be gleeful, making little happy noises and paddling in the swimming hole while her mother ardently fishes.

  I’ll soon train her for sheep. Last evening she sat motionless on the stone wall while I visited with my flock. It was the first time a “down stay” command was obeyed with apparent understanding of why it was necessary. She’s ready. She flocks her little horned Dorset-Finn cross lamb, Sir Parsley (the origin of his name and why he thinks he’s a dog, sleeps with Samantha, and refuses all contact with his own species is another story). She is showing a herding instinct at about the right age.

  Steele and Cagney, Samantha’s sire, made some beautiful puppies. There were two, though, that broke my heart to let go. Both were prettier than Steele or Samantha, with their mother’s brains and their father’s handsome elegance. One, I heard from Jake Bryden, who trucks livestock every day up and down these country roads, is already bringing in cows at Liddle’s farm in Andes. I had seen him in passing one day, thinking, oh, what a nice dog, before I realized it was he.

  I’m sitting in one of the most beautiful spots here at Greenleaf. The morning brings glory to the color of the flowers. There is a stone window in my outdoor living room with a view of the barn and an apple tree and newly framed leafed ash. The willow against the dark gray carriage house gleams in the sun, gold and green. The wind moves the leaves, making it all almost too dazzling to look at. I’d love to photograph that willow, mornings. It is so enchanting with white fog behind it or as now many shades of green. I’d forgotten how much I’ve loved to sit here. It’s been too long.

  Steele, Samantha, and I walk each morning to my neighbor Nina Juviler’s mailbox and then back home. I’m teaching Sam to heel. She does most times. We look at the progress Henry Kathmann and I have made on my most interesting sheep fence, and at the neighbor’s geese, and enjoy being together. It’s our time.

  COWS

  THE RAIN comes, tin sounds on the porch, the buzz and sizzle of cars driving by, a rat-a-tat-tat on the porch roof, a plaintive wail from a drenched lamb looking for her mother. The sounds usually bringing comfort and joy here in the grass crop country somehow today bring despair. Last year’s hay was unaffected by the decent snow of the prior winter and very much affected by the drought. I couldn’t find hay throughout the summer or fall and was forced into buying hay by the week all winter. This year we have had rain. Days or, rather, nights on end. Major storms accompanied by twisters, tearing branches from maple trees along the creek. Thunderstorms turning the sky slate gray, small steady drizzles. And today’s steady rain.

  Grass is growing quickly in the fields where growth has been slow. The sheep spend their midday naptime directly behind my barn. The runoff has sweetened the field beyond it, and it has become a dark, rich green. But what it all means is that the hay I customarily buy in June is not in the barn. And the July crop was not dry enough, in my judgment, although dry enough in the seller’s.

  The week has had some comic relief, however, in one or two forms. I raised a Jersey calf a couple of winters ago, from the time she was a week old. She had been trained to a pail and had her own spot in the barn. When it got cold I put a hooded sweatshirt on her, and once, when she got too cold, Falvius Mauer took her back for a week to his warm and dry cow barn. I bought a beautiful rolled leather halter lead for her and taught her to walk like a lady. And that was part of her name: Lady Francesca Cavendish. She was lovely. My only mistake was in not disbudding the horns. They grew. At first I looked for pictures of Swiss cows with garlands around them. I even found a beautiful picture of a French sheep with an elegant straw headdress. Oh, to know how to braid that!

  Lady Francesca lived with the sheep and seemed to think of herself as a sheep, albeit, a gradually bigger and bigger one, but a sheep nonetheless. Then one day my sweet docile calf became a heifer. And as her life changed, so did mine.

  The sheep were fence and stone wall climbing in those days over to Tom Connelly’s. Lady Francesca, lumbering along, would follow. But sheep could scoot between barbed wire when encouraged back home, and Francesca just couldn’t. She finally learned to duck her head between double-strand sections in the fence, but on more than one occasion was left bawling on Connelly’s side at the retreating backs of both Steele and me, after I had gone over to retrieve my flock.

  One day Francesca discovered the heifers at Connelly’s. The A-I man from Eastern had done his job and I thought she was bred. But there was something about the sight of those heifers that drew her like a magnet. Tom drove in, in his Bronco, shouting, “That heifer of yours is going to break down my fence so I put her in with my cows. Get her when you want to.” So Steele and I went to Tom’s field to retrieve Lady Francesca Cavendish. She took one look at us and ran away. Again and again. Life with cows appealed to her, I presume, and life with sheep did not.

  I was suddenly called to New York because of an illness and death of a close friend. It was two weeks before Steele and I were able to return to Tom’s field. By then Francesca had become much attached to her new friends and went tearing into the woods at the sight of us. On the fifth or sixth day, my steps now leaden as I trudged over the rise and up the hill, I found the woods and field empty.

  Nowhere was the herd to be seen. Rumor had it that the heifers were sold. Despair filled my heart and failure filled my soul. All dreams for that farmhouse cheddar cheese curing nicely in the cellar and a beautiful new little calf in the fields were gone.

  I called Connelly’s several times and wrote two letters to him in the fall, realizing full well that I’d probably not reach him. Yet there had to be a way to resolve the issue. I knew he was not a man who could live with his conscience if he profited from the sale of my cow. Connelly is a complex man but has his own sense of justice and his own sense of humor as well. But ultimately he honors his values.

  After a few months of thought and procrastination, I made one last attempt. I wrote a final letter describing how Steele and I put his heifers in when they first broke out in the spring. Then, with great care, I broached the subject of Lady Francesca Cavendish. “I know you would be appalled to realize you had profited from the sale of my cow,” I wrote.

  A few days later, just last week, Tom stopped by the house. “What made you think I sold your cow?” he said. “She is in my backyard.”

  “You mean she is still alive? I cried for a week when I heard she’d been sold,” I said.

  Tom danced his Irish jig, or rather I did while he piped for a few minutes. “She’s nice,” he said.

  “I know,” I replied. “I trained her to lead.”

  “What do you want for her?” he said. “You come up and see her.”

  “No, I couldn’t bear it,” I replied. “You decide the fair price, I trust you.”

  “I’ll be by in a few days with a check,” he said.

  The rain seeped into my soul today. The recommendations from the Cooperative Extension yesterday about my fields would be expensive and arduous to comply with. There was nothing I could think of to redeem my day or give any joy to my heart. But then I remembered Tom’s visit and suddenly I knew.

  I called George Thompson who has a Jersey herd over on Dry Brook. “Do you have a four- or five-day-old calf for sale?” I asked.

  “It so happens I do,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “Forty dollars.”

  “I’ll take her,” I said.

  It was the only thing I could do. And suddenly the rain sounds like music and the cool air inspires me to bake some lemon
cookies and brings the thought of having tea when I’ve eaten all meals walking, between chores, for weeks. And all I can do is smile, and the house feels full of joy.

  MY GRANDFATHER, MY GRANDSON, AND I

  MY BROTHER Arnold, my cousin Henry, and I used to play together summers on Grandpa’s farm. We were the youngest of eight children, an oddly small number from my grandparents’ seven children. My grandfather and my uncle Percy farmed dairy, milking cows by hand in the gentle rolling hills of Perkin’s Corners, Niantic, Connecticut, not far from Long Island Sound. The 1790s house and hundred acres held an infinite source of entertainment for us.

  There was a small coppice of a pithy kind of tree on one side of the cemetery wall that bordered the farm. I never did find out what kind of saplings they were. Soft and cocoa colored inside, they invited one’s knife to turn them into a whistle.

  Sometimes we ran across the beautiful flat top of the wall, laid stone and cement, to get to the little coppice. Other times we skirted the wall and slipped in from the side. It sheltered us and gave us a place for our imaginations to roam, away from our parents, each other’s aunts and uncles. I don’t remember what our games were exactly about, but do remember the feeling of daring and expectancy upon arriving there, and the shadows, and the tiny flickering of light between the trees high above our heads, and how close we felt to each other, and how special it was to have this place.

  One afternoon, crossing back to rejoin the family, I realized that the thick black vine now growing up, across, and down the other side of this massive wall had not been there before. It was a snake. A large one. I was the oldest of the three of us, all of six at the time; my brother and cousin were both four. I was terrified of the snake.

  My mother was a farm girl whose mother was a city girl. My beloved grandmother made certain her daughters were raised with the city refinement of being thrown into minor and proper hysterics at the sight of such things as snakes. And so my mother instilled in me a real fear, if not a propensity to have hysteries, of this harmless creature slowly making its way across the wall.

  There I was feeling absolutely responsible for my brother and cousin, facing off a very large black snake that was between us and the safety of our parents on the lawn under the trees. “Run!” I shouted to them, and run I did. They followed, two pairs of short little four-year-old legs moving as fast as they could behind me! Breathless, we told the story and were told that of course we should not have strayed to that little wood in the first place.

  I’m quite certain that the size of the snake was thought to be exaggerated. It wasn’t exaggerated in the least. The last time I turned off the highway onto Society Road, went to the farm, and saw that stone wall, I was as impressed with the size of the wall as I had been that summer day. Somehow, the visits to that wood lost their charm after that afternoon. I had become a bit afraid, and that deterred me rather then enticed me back.

  The lay of the land of my grandfather’s farm is not dissimilar from mine. The meadowland before the hill was shorter and there was no creek. But the flat top of the hill is the same. My great-grandparents lived up there, in an orchard that they and my grandfather planted. I never saw it. By the time I was born, my mother had become far too much a city girl to climb ever again to the top. I tried, alone, each time going a little higher, each time drawing back when I became enclosed by too many trees.

  I know I never saw my grandfather take the dog and rifle and go up into those woods to shoot a fox that had killed some of his chickens, but the story is so vivid in my memory that my imagination has assumed the hue of reality, and I believe in my heart that I did watch him and heard him call, “Nelly, Nelly,” and take his beautiful collie and his rifle up that hill and into the woods. I can see his back to me, his head turned slightly over his shoulder, smiling at Nelly, his rifle cradled in his right elbow.

  My grandson, Mikhael, has a subscription to the Delaware County Times and nearly every week reads about my life on my farm in what he refers to as the news. “I read about it in the news, Grandmumsiedo,” he says. “I read about it in the news!” Will he remember seeing me with my Weatherbee rifle and my dog Steele taking the sheep up the hill to the pasture? Will the stories he’s read and the things he’s seen blend fact and imagination in his mind about his grandmother, turning me into something a little larger than life, or distilling his memories of me into an essence rather than a diluted everyday self?

  I remember my grandfather’s bushy mustache, which I encountered when he stretched out his arms and bent down to kiss me, and my mother calling out, “Pa, don’t kiss her, you’ll scratch her face,” and I not wanting to hurt his feelings, running even faster to him, all the while knowing how scratchy that red brush on his face was going to be.

  I remember how crystal clear and cold the well water was that came from the pump when he drew me a glass, and how I followed him in the fields while he dug potatoes, picking up the tiny ones left behind, and the starburst of crinkles around his smiling eyes when he showed Arnold and Henry and me the baby chickens in the barn, holding them in his hands.

  But what surprises me so is to realize that I am exactly the same person I was when I was a little girl. The memory of the wall and my brother and cousin and the snake exists within me as I am now. It’s hard to explain, but the most simple way is to say how surprised I am to realize I was only six on the day of the snake. Grandpa died when I was seven, and the farm was gone shortly after that. I am exactly the same inside, planting potatoes today as I was picking up those tiny ones next to Grandpa when I was six.

  My grandson Mikhael is now older than I was when my grandfather died. He visits here less often than I visited the farm, lives here when he does rather than being whisked away in the great black Buick, when Sunday afternoon came to an end. I wonder what of my life here he will incorporate into himself, both memory and myth, and what traces of my grandfather and grandmother and great-grandparents shall remain with him and become alive in him. Will the kind of living memory of Grandpa and Nelly and the gun and the fox and the chickens that I never could have witnessed happening become in Mikhael a memory, reality intermingling with images from the stories I write to create a picture of me and Steele and the Weatherbee and the coyote and the sheep, my back to him, my face to the side, smiling, looking down at the dog, my rifle under my arm, walking up to the hill?

  THE MAPLE LEAF

  A WEEK OR two ago, while driving along Route 10 in the early morning on my way to the village, I saw a single leaf on a maple tree had turned red. My heart stopped and panic filled my soul. Then just as suddenly, I realized that it was quite premature, for that tree had been slowly dying for quite some time, and it was not inappropriate to have a red leaf or two. I tried to dismiss the dread of an unprepared-for winter from my heart.

  My daughter Justine and grandson Mikhael were here for all of last week. For a total of nine wonderful days, Justine and I worked hard on the carriage house and the gardens, organizing Mikhael’s room, which had been for too long an ironing and laundry room, painted a great span of picket fence, made nine afternoon teas and nine dinners, twelve loaves of bread, numerous jars of jam, and in general added to the welfare and well-being of Greenleaf and increased the treasure of family memories. Justine did an incredible piece of artwork, enhancing the house. She is a decorative painter by trade and painted a series of leather-bound books appearing as if they were real in a corner of the living room. In other words I was, for a little more than a week, totally distracted from any anticipation of not being ready for winter.

  I went to Cooperstown with a friend this week and there they were and it was. “They” were a handful of orange and red leaves on a few maple trees; “it” was another reminder of winter’s impending arrival. “The first day of winter is the last day of the county fair” is a common saying here. I’d deliberately avoided knowing the date of the fair. I bought some Christmas presents in Cooperstown. We always shop in advance, so that didn’t feel like the onset of winter.
Justine stayed an extra day and we picked chokecherries on the Turnpike to make jam but that didn’t do it, either. I don’t look at calendars and haven’t turned the page from July to August yet and am not quite certain of the date. There is about the month of November’s worth of wood cut and stacked, and the winter’s worth felled but not cut for the hundred-year-old ceramic stove in my room. I’ve all of the fence posts I need and half of the wood needed to build the latest fence, with half of that assembled and up. Two thirds of the winter’s hay is in the barn. The water line is laid, needing amendment but possessing promise. Not much food is put by in the freezer. Three sweaters are knit to wear to the barn, and nearly sewn together.

  Sometimes there is unexpected virtue in not having been able to finish something. I haven’t had time to address the barn floor since spring. It needs mucking out. Sheep require a pack of straw and rotted manure to keep them warm in winter. I’ve not let them in the barn except for specific procedures since early spring. Wonder of wonders! The pack has packed. Much less volume and probably much more weight. The big however, is that it means fewer loads of muck to shovel. In some places it is only six inches deep! I had been shoveling some days quite intensely. But this is a bonus. The barn needs a serious uninterrupted day for it to become functional. It also needs the kind of carpentry I can handle myself. For a change. Some things are better here, almost, and only some are worse. The better is far better than ever, and the worse is far worse.