Wednesday, November 23, 2011

A Thanksgiving Farm Update


Mama pulled an old favorite from the love-battered recipe collection tonight.  Pork chops and potatoes take on a character of their own when boiled together with her savory onions and seasonings. The memories of warm winter nights spent in gales of family merriment and deep discussion around the table are called up at every bite.  Scroll to the bottom of the post for the recipe!
We are pulling up more than a few old standby recipes, along with the lists from years gone by that somehow gain value with age. “Remember the year when…?”  jumps out on every scribbled page.  I can read my own history in the nearly illegible cards covered in the well-known hand of Grandma or Mama or Aunt.
Long after the well-known steps to a dish are learned like the measured steps of a dance, those pieces of history...a handwritten inheritance…will come out every year to be touched and perused for their own sake.

Thanksgiving was less than two weeks away when I wrote that and somewhere between then and now the urgency of necessary preparations lit a fire under me.  With a list that grows until ”the eleventh hour" rather than shrinking, my philosophy is that it never helps to get markedly excited more than four days prior to an event.  Admitting anticipation of any kind sooner than that yields only a let-down of energy.  (I take full, and probably sole, credit/responsibility for this “preparation policy” in the Lenz household)  The first of these four days is characteristically spent in ruminating upon and composing the final schedule in a sort of hazy rush.  The third day is swept up in a flurry of dusting rags, brooms, vacuums and brushes.  The second day dissolves in a cacophony of mixers and clashing dishes in the kitchen while the farm out of doors undergoes its final overhauling.  The fourth day the foundation of the house remains alone unmoved as all else makes room for the stupendous dining table the surface of which is instantly requisitioned for extra dishes and fearfully-soon-to-be-wonderful decorations in motley heaps.
Thanksgiving morning is a run-on sentence.  (I know day four looked an awful-lot like one...but that is only because it serves as a prelude for the real thing.  If run-on sentences disturb you, take the matter up with Charles Dickens.  He seems formidable enough to appeal to.)

The plans for colors and table-settings began in October with foraging expeditions to the woods and shopping trips to town in search of appropriate decor and supplies.  Amidst the business of those weeks of early fall we start thinking about the turkey; and a walk through the grocery store will produce things in our cart that are nowhere on a list.   By the first week of November, the requisite additional supplies of flour and butter, sweet potatoes and seasonings are stashed away.  Already the space in the extra refrigerator is nearly hallowed ground reserved for feast viands alone.  In this manner the insurmountable Thanksgiving shopping list never materializes, but goes in and out with the everyday activities of our lives like a tide.  With a habit of opening our door to guests on a weekly or even daily basis, Thanksgiving becomes a climax of hospitality where the heaped-up abundance of a year of giving and receiving overflows into our lives in one short day of merry-giving and good-cheer taking.  Yes, there is a great deal of labor involved...but there is nothing good which is not well worth working for.

The food itself is a merely a gift of sameness given from one to another not only because it took a measure of effort, but because it serves to remind us.  Our beings are made to be fluent in aesthetics.  From an early age habitual languages of tradition pour identity and heritage into us.  There is, after all, nothing magical about the mountains of mashed potatoes, the specially cleaned home, candles or table adornments, or the third Thursday of November.  These are called into living, breathing and speaking eloquence by the powerful truth that overshadows the most simple of commonalities.

Five kernels of corn rationed every day through a winter that nearly obliterated them inspired an intrepid company of men, women and children to fall on their knees and rise again in thankfulness before the God who gives life and takes it.  Abundance of health and comfort should inspire no less in us, yet it often fails to do so.  Rich hearts can often complain of poverty in one thing: gratitude.  How is it that "fullness of bread" breeds in the human soul a bitterness and apathy that abundance of want with a measure of grace rarely brings?  It is my belief that in the receiving of gifts, discontent grows only in the one who cannot and will not acknowledge the Giver.

So, in recognition of what we cannot repay, from our little or great we pour out preparations proportionate to the demeanor of our hearts.  Each year can only succeed if it outdoes the last in some way.  The table gathers round itself a broad array of lives, each with his own loan of life to add to the smaller glow of beauty that reflects the greater glory of the Table "over the way".

Here we pile in bounty the rich and the ripe, savory and sweet.  Steam-shrouded platters of stacked meat overlook lakes of gravy; piping hot rolls amass in heaps beside fathomless bowls of creamed and seasoned vegetables and endless quantities of stuffing.  The language of abundance is expressive and even absurd.  It mocks the lackadaisical and pokes fun at the centrist.  If not otherwise, at least at the Thanksgiving table the lukewarm is worthy of disparagement.  Is this acknowledgement of indebtedness too effusive for some?  I hope not.  I will dare to say that we have yet to find the "fullness of joy" that comes from knowing just how poor we are in gratitude for the wealth we are daily given.

"Thou wilt show me the path of life: in Thy presence is fulness of joy; at Thy right hand are pleasures forevermore." Psalm 16:11
Skillet Pork Chops
(serves 4)
4 pork chops
2T butter
2 T flour
½ t salt
1/3 c parmesan cheese
¼ t pepper
4c thinly sliced potatoes (you don’t have to peel farm fresh potatoes!)
1 onion thinly sliced
3 beef bouillon cubes
¾ c hot water
1 T lemon juice
Coat chops with flour and brown in butter.  Dissolve beef cubes in water.  Add lemon juice.  Set aside. Combine 2T cheese, salt and pepper and sprinkle on chops.  Cover with potato slices and 2 T cheese. Add onion.  Pour beef broth over all.  Sprinkle with remaining cheese.  Cover and simmer 40 minutes or until done.  I find it is done in 20 minutes if I precook chops in crock pot (make sure you add drippings to skillet).  If you have grocery store pork chops you may want to skim the fat before adding drippings.  Also, when we double the recipe we use 4 bouillon cubes and a little more water.  You don’t need 6 bouillon cubes.
We like that we can make Skillet Pork Chops fairly quickly…and there are potatoes, onions and pork chops in abundance on the farm this time of year!

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Dull and quiet, the sky of looming winter hovers close to earth most days now; a blanket of peace settling on a landscape that has ceased to strive in abundance and ebbs to rest in latent age.  No more will the hosts of vibrant colors vie for attention in splendid panoply.  The time of completion and maturity lends to simple monotones of grey a noble elegance and softened beauty.  Highest of births, greatness of growth and experience of fruition will yield the realization of a hoary crown needless of more testimony to labor.
The year is completing its last work in laying away the seed of a new birth yet to come.  Aubrey gave the iris their annual “hair-cut” while I completed the annual window-swabbing yesterday.  The wood pile has grown, albeit a little sluggishly due to the greater looming project of root-cellar building.  We pulled up enduring tomato plants with their cages and posted strong picket lines of the ungainly wire contraptions like sentries around apple trees and blueberry bushes against the onslaught of hungry deer.  Sam plowed the garden under the other day and all that remains of the bounty are ragged scraps of vine and drab mounds of bare earth.  The tractors already sport their winter chains and Mama mulched the blueberry bushes with pine-needles (blueberries love nice acidic soil), while I still need to mulch my hydrangea bush and cut down the last of my flower garden that sports frost-seared spikes.

The lively business of readying for winter around here would probably resemble a disturbed ant-hill from the perspective of an aerial view time-lapse.  All the activity is a tacit acknowledgment of an urgency not unlike the spirit that hastens men to hustle into ranks at the call of a commander before a battle.  No one takes firm hold of a spade unless he intends to dig, or buys seed unless he intends to plant.  Only a fool gathers wood and block to build nothing, or collects books he does not intend to better himself by.  And we never gather everything together and put it all away and tie this down and cover that up without the firm assurance that we haven’t ever done it quite soon enough to beat the invading rush of the arctic.

Especially in the woods, there is the general sense of “battening down the hatches.”  Like the lights of a house blinking out at night, everything curls up and retreats for a long sleep.  The ruddy “berries” on the right are a woodsy herald of fall just as Bloodroot is the first sign of spring.  Some of you probably recognize the brilliant seed-pod of the exotic wild orchid native to Minnesota, the Jack-in-the-Pulpit.  Most don’t know the baneful mosquito proves her worth in being the only species that can pollinate and thus propagated this remarkable plant.  Needless to say we were not short on mosquitoes this year, since forest floor around the farm is literally bespangled with these Christmas-red pods.  Plants and animals, with the blessed gift of instinct from the Creator, know better than to wait until the first snow flies to prepare for the coming lack of food.  This is the second year in a row that our raspberry bushes have bowed under the weight of late autumn berries after the first frost; and yesterday two squirrels chased each other madly across the yard, one with his face full of a nut, the other very apparently wanting one.  Extra bounty at harvest is never a mistake, and the wise observer doesn’t disregard the hint.  The cold is not great yet, but it is settling in with a kind of determined energy. 

The biggest race against time this week was the root cellar roof.  The boys poured a thick concrete slab that will be insulated with at least two feet of earth. If they can manage to put the door in soon, we will have the capability to dispel pyramids of jars and mountains of potatoes among which we are nearly buried.
Frankly, the cellar is an engineering masterpiece.  It couldn’t be anything else with Daddy on the team.  Everything he builds stands as a lasting and sturdy testimony to his painstaking work.  When they troop in to dinner, the men wear daubs of cement with dustings of gravel and sand and scratched and dented fingers permeated with the distinct odors of tractor fuel and musty earth.  I washed Ben’s jeans yesterday and found a few determined gobs of hardened concrete yet clinging tenaciously to them when I pulled them from the dryer.

It is our earnest hope to finish the project in the next few days, and in the spirit of the “lighthearted” Puddleglum the Marshwiggle, “the bright side of it is...” if cellar is finished, as long as we don’t faint from exhaustion in a Minnesota winter tramping the extra 50 yards to fetch a can of tomatoes, at least we won’t die from lack of exercise in the next six months.  “Very likely…” what with being tired of canned tomatoes and mashed potatoes, and having next to nothing to do and living in such close quarters for such a long time, “we’ll hardly notice the weather!”  J

To be quite honest, rather than having “next to nothing to do,” I find that my list of winter projects has grown so prodigiously, I am already relegating some to next year’s toll.  What winter undertakings are on your lists, I wonder?

This year is about to roll over one more time to tuck his chin in under the covers and then we too must nestle in to short cozy days and long warm nights indoors. 

 Dull November brings the blast,
Then the leaves go whirling past.
Chill December brings the sleet,
Blazing fire and Christmas treat

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows

Monday, October 24, 2011


The works of the farm roll themselves up like vines frozen on the crusted earth in October.  Twisted together and burgeoning all summer they climax now with a rush of things to tend to.  The word “holy” may sound a bit too sacrosanct for the farm in light of our modern vernacular, but on the farm we literally "set apart" or "put by" to a certain purpose many things at once before the winter.  This “making holy” can mean neither more nor less than the Creator intended.  The “first-fruits” of harvest were, in times past, more habitually set aside in accordance with His beautiful laws to reflect an awe-inspiring truth about Himself and what He has made.  In this way the commonalities of life, the everyday provisions, become sacred and holy; turning the eyes of our souls back to the divine Provider through the abundance of common gifts given to an uncommon purpose.

These are days when we can revel in the changeful rush of sky and earth towards year’s end.  I love noticing the way a leaf curls close together in helpless and impulsive protest of the frosty chill, or the way the sun rises ruddy and defiant on crisp mornings from his new place and casts a sultry glance down the frosty lawn to challenge the deepening cold of nights growing ever clearer.  I watch the crests of the hills in the rolling farm-land for the tell-tale clouds of dust thrown up from a combine reaping.  Long days of blustering rain and harsh wind out of doors promise warmth and busyness inside.  There are few joys greater than pulling up the drive in autumn dusk to the greeting window-lights of home or yanking stocking caps down over ears and long socks up to knees to tramp over hardened earth and under icy sky.  Here are the days when you can work up a good sweat and a great appetite on the last of the garden work and wear your short-sleeved shirt to dinner when the house is suddenly too close and warm for comfort. 
Our irons are so numerous they hardly fit in the fire, while the largest of them, the root cellar, is coming along well.  The hurry and scurry of our last minute wood chopping, window mopping, supply shopping, can-topping, project stopping, market hopping, brow-sopping, summer-dropping life is nothing short of exhilarating.  We sometimes take a breath just long enough to realize we are making our own heat and can attest to the old adage Daddy posts in his office… “He who cuts his own wood is twice warmed.”

Here’s hoping you are warmed just so every day!

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows

Wednesday, October 5, 2011



It was one of those warm ripe days, the kind where the heat of the sun soaks into the very marrow of you and makes you want to jump up and run for miles and be very still all at the same time.  Breathing the air was like drinking strong wine, so laden was it with the flavors of harvest.  Dappled light was dancing to the music of the lively trees.  Old patriarchs of the woods tossed their lofty arms in a cheery gale, casting leaves merrily into the breeze like clouds of confetti at a celebration.  A broad span of corn field mesmerized my eyes with the shimmering role and dip of the sea turned to gold and heralded the onslaught of the wind with voice of thundering waves. The whole world swayed and whispered with the roar of one mighty crowd in the midst of an overture, peering over the vast edge of a moment of expectation towards an indiscernible culmination.

I was driving home…yes plain-old-ordinary driving home…with these thoughts simmering in my mind.  I thought of what a nice beginning that would be for a really good sit-by-the-fire story; and then remembered how much easier it is to begin a tale than end it, even as “The end of a thing is better than its beginning.” (Ecclesiastes 7:8)  For all the books ever written, there must be a thousand that languish in closets in a perpetual state of infancy. 

Between the covers of a story, that stand out in ripples of poetry, lie the facts in lines of prose.  Here, while the colors of autumn flame and fade, the wood must be chopped and stacked, the last chickens processed, the last grass clinging to living green must be cut, the last fruit gathered.

Already the last of the apples, excluded from regimental rows of cans stored away, are just beginning to wrinkle with age in bushel baskets.  Our pumpkins sport wooden stems cured from once-juicy slips of vine.  The tomato plants are officially spent; resulting in a blending of emotions for those of us who reveled in the treat of fresh tomatoes all summer and survived the late nights and soggy hands of the sixty-quart canning season. The diminishing “side-table” in our family room is reestablished to its former height with new bags of wheat.  It probably comes as no surprise that we decorate with our bulk food-supplies.  In any case, once the stack is leveled with a board and draped with tanned deer-hides, it truly makes a lovely buffet...really.  The only drawback I can discover to edible furnishings is the perpetual fluctuation in size.

Our table groans under bounty of a different kind than heretofore.  Mountains of potato salads and fresh salsas, and heaping bowls of cherry tomatoes give place to pots of hearty chili and savory soup and steaming stacks of cornbread with vegetables from the frozen regions of the freezer.

Autumn is in the lane that leads home now. The bird-songs will trill on a chilled and shortened tune when the wind blows with ice on his breath. The door to the old year is just around the corner.  Very soon it will close, but the wonder of living is the privilege of leaving the old behind and walking on into the time on the other side of the door.

In this sense, a tale never really ends.  I am beginning to think the best “end” to a story must be a closed door, with mystery and promise of the nameless future behind it, since it tacitly forbids the mortal reader to look past the threshold of time into the awesome knowledge of eternity; a thing which none of us can really do…yet. 

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Basil Anyone?!

We have large quantities of fresh basil available!  For those of you who like to make and freeze pesto or dry basil in bulk, we are offering a plastic sack-full of stems for $10.  For those who are interested in the Rochester area, we can bring your order to the Rochester Farmer's Market.  Need a good pesto recipe?  This is a favorite in the Lenz household.  An excellent, healthy and easy winter meal with all fresh, uncooked ingredients.

Pesto
~ 1 cup fresh basil leaves, washed and patted dry
~ 2 good-sized garlic cloves
~ 1/2 cup shelled walnuts
~ 1/2 cup virgin olive oil
~ 2/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (already grated, but purchased in the deli section is fine; no canned cheese)
~ salt and pepper to taste (we do 1 tsp. salt and 1/8 tsp pepper)
~ 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
  1. Combine basil, garlic and walnuts in the food processor or blender, chopping thoroughly
  2. With processor running, ad the oil in a slow steady stream
  3. Turn the processor off and add the cheese, salt and pepper.  Process breifly
  4. Add 2 T hot water and the whipping cream and process again.
We tend to make 6 recipes of this at a time and each recipe in a 1 quart freezer bag.  Set one out to thaw early in the day.  Make 1 lb. of pasta and pour the thawed pesto over the warm pasta (this melts the cheese and it gets nice and “gooey”).  Serve with fresh grated parmesan.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

A Six Arrows Farm Update


The Lenz family never stays in one mode of action long enough to be stuffed into any kind of box of modern identification.  Just when you have us comfortably settled into the musical family mold, we pop out with a day of chicken processing on the front drive.  As soon as you are sure we can’t be anything but farmers, the tendency to dress up and play at history pokes suspiciously through a cranny. It happens accidentally on purpose.  We can’t be satisfied with the hum-drum of a singular occupation when our sheer numbers alone, not to mention the varied gifts and united purpose of the household, enable the most lively kind of economical enterprise and social development.  The danger is not doing too little, but trying to do too much.

Just as we transition a hundred times a week into entirely different kinds of work, our house morphs nearly as often into drastically varied forms of function.  Today it is a bakery, root-cellar, and sorting/packaging facility.  Tomorrow it will be a rehearsing venue for the Lenz quartet.  Sunday it may throw wide its doors for hospitality and Monday it will turn into a canning facility.

True to custom, the last of the tomatoes are gathered into the house in miscellaneous mounds.  From the first vine-ripened fruit to the last half-green straggler time leaps in a few short weeks.  The transient type of glory stored up in the brilliance of the dazzling red tomato is akin to its season.  Just as the abundant snow of winter melts away as if it had never been, so the fruit of the vine grows, ripens and vanishes again.  Seasons are like that.  They are enduring only because they are always sure to come back, for as long as they are ordained to, with a kind of persistence that savors of the changelessness of their Designer.  Since there are no officially designated tomato storage and sorting rooms in evidence on the farm, we establish the cheeky invaders on the floors of our basement and entry-way, honoring the future situation of a guest’s chair with the present habitation of a profuse harvest.

I can admit freely that picking your way from the front door to the stairs over boxes and buckets of tomatoes in various stages of ripening and decay is less than convenient.  And to be quite frank, stumbling blindly over them in the dark of night on the way to the kitchen for a drink is positively dangerous, especially to the toes.  In consequence, Ben, with substantial assistance from his brothers, is digging a 10x12 root cellar into one of our hillsides.  It is our sincere desire to avoid stubbed toes and mad rushes to clear the mountains of produce for visitors in future.  How successful the attempt will be remains to be seen.  We tend to be creatures of habit and, regrettably, often fly in the face of expedience with the traditional modus operandi when it comes to gardening.

The chill air is laden with one of my favorite scents today: fresh-cut hay.  Some neighboring farmer, compliant with ageless necessity, cut off his rich emerald crop and laid it in windrows on the shorn earth for the sun to turn to gold.  Wherever I am when I taste that ripe sweetness of mown alfalfa in the wind, I come home in my heart.  Here to the daily sameness and constant change, the relentless energy, the lasting rest, the old familiar and new every sunrise little taste of heaven.

Monday, August 22, 2011

“I have just returned from Perm’s Hill where I have been sitting to hear the amazing roar of canon and from whence I could see every shell which was thrown. The sound, I think, is one of the grandest in nature and is of the true species of the sublime. Tis now an incessant roar, but oh, the fatal ideas which are connected with the sound. How many of our dear countrymen must fall.” ~Abigail Adams in a letter to her husband John Adams on March 4, 1775

The Six Arrows were not in evidence on the farm the last two weeks.   We believe vacation is absolutely a necessity for those who work, so we took one.  Long before taxes became a burden on the modern American family, God instituted the vacation tax, that is, a family was to set aside for themselves a tithe of their income for a vacation and rest.  The Lenz family also believes fervently that man is made for work.  We believe work, rather than being a burden or curse on men, is actually a gift and blessing.
It was the mixture of these two convictions that inspired many great family vacations throughout my childhood entirely devoid of laying on the beach.  We have no inherent dislike for the said activity, we simply didn’t know how to do it...or how to do nothing rather.  As you may imagine, when there is literally a crowd of us, we don’t tend to do things by halves. Stuffing clothing, sandwiches and pillows everywhere but between our toes in the family “bus” to gobble up thousands of miles of highway has consequently become a habit for our household.

Our first real vacation was a road-trip to Maine.  We tent-camped the whole way, staying in a hotel only once because of a heavy thunderstorm, and made memories of the grandest and best kind.  In retrospect, that vacation inspires admiration and respect in me for my dear parents, since they ventured courageously out on the enterprise with five children under seven (Sam was still on the way).

Such an auspicious beginning, fraught with high-adventure and higher education, could not fail to institute a tradition that is anything but “traditional.” Our avid love for history was birthed, not out of textbooks (because our parents never bought a history curriculum) but out of a vivid knowledge of real stories from books, and even eyewitnesses, brought to life in many cases through our vacations to the places where real life happened.  Standing before the ancient and not-so-ancient landmarks of our forefathers endures as an indelible mark on my mind that far outlives the even the valuable dates and facts I often imbibed at the same time.

My favorite part of vacation was always the site marked with “living history.”  I loved walking onto a replica Mayflower and being questioned concerning my sewing capabilities by a young lady in Pilgrim garb, or meeting “General Longstreet” on Little Round Top at Gettysburg and hearing him talk about the battle ground spread out before us in the early evening light, and dissemble on the existence of an airplane that flew overhead.  I could only dream as a little girl that I might one day be able to do the same thing for someone else.

As I write, we are barreling down the highway a few short hours from Wilson Creek Missouri, the site of a battle on the Western Theatre of the War Between the States.  This is our currently evolved version of “Family Vacation;” fairly unrecognizable compared to its classic modern-American counterpart.  We will pitch our tent in an encampment with a few thousand fellow re-enactors to commemorate and pay tribute to our forebears, many of whom paid the ultimate price for the cause of justice and freedom.  In camp, we laugh among ourselves over the irony of our position.  Twenty-first century Americans don the layers and fashions of a past age and almost exclusively eschew the comforts of air-conditioning and running water to bury ourselves in the 1860s.  For the better part of four days we par-boil in the heat of summer, “climb for our water and dig for our wood,” and wear the distinctive acrid scent of the campfire.  The men and boys drill and march and stand in ranks under an un-blinking sun, and the ladies cook along with the food over the fire.  We laugh at the “misery” because we keep coming back anyway.  Transient reasons like “It’s fun,” mask the reality that we don’t carry the burden of a meaningless heritage.
Now more than ever the lines between education and experience, learning and living, become blurred beyond recognition.  We no longer know how to relegate the circumstances of history to the words and pictures of an encyclopedia, or wonder with disdain at the sentiments and convictions of past generations.

Some say we are “wiser” in the present age; that a “brave new world” is open before us and the advancements of science and technology have forever dismissed ignorance and primitive lifestyles to oblivion.  “Somewhere in the past,” we are told, lie the ghosts of another way of life.  For most, there is only a transient desire to temporarily call them up to remembrance for “interest” and entertainment.  Culture has forgotten that past has given birth to present, and that those “antiquated traditions” and “backward prejudices” were the seeds of our present condition.  

We pitch our tents in the encampment of the past to blast the trumpet of awakening to our generation.  The battles fought yesterday are more pertinent than ever today.  Modern advancements of technology cannot spirit away the war that rages in the heart of man.  We are still more dogmatic in our ignorance, more convinced of our “rights” and more consumed by our greed.  Today, many of my peers are not educated in how to think rightly.  They are often schooled in how not to think at all; to quote Charles Dickens “How not to get it done.”  The gift of understanding of the times, however weakly borne by men, rests squarely in the hand of God and is given through no merit of the receiver.  


Some say that we reenact to glorify war and gore.  To this I answer as follows:  
 


“...For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more.” Luke 12:48
I quoted Abigail Adams at the beginning of this post reflecting on the nature of war in her time.  I personally aspire to be her daughter and the daughter of the women who went before her and those who followed.  It is not allowable for me to avert my eyes from the truth, to cover my ears to the blast of the murderous cannon mouths, or close my mind to the horrors evoked by the grim toll of death exacted and the fears arising from looming personal danger and sacrifice.  The stakes are high and growing ever-higher.  I trust my words do not smack of sensationalism or the conspiracy alarmist when I say so.  I believe I am not far wrong in asserting that, as it has always been, so it is now; that we face an even greater conflict with more deadly implications than have yet confronted the human race.  It may not become a bloody deluge with lead and canons (we aren’t making canon-balls in the basement in any case) but a battle, if not physical, then of principle and jurisdiction, that rages and threatens.  I am firmly convinced that the following lines of exhortation from Abigail Adams to her twelve-year-old son may fittingly be taken as pertinent in principle to our own time.



“These are times in which a genius would wish to live.  It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed.  Great necessities call out great virtues.  When a mind is raised and animated by seeds that engage the heart, then these qualities which would otherwise lie dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.  War, tyranny and desolation are the scourges of the Almighty, and ought no doubt to be deprecated.  Yet it is your lot, my son, to be an eyewitness of these calamities in your own native land; and at the same time to owe your existence among a people who have made glorious defense of their invaded liberties; and who, aided by a generous and powerful Ally, with the blessing of Heaven, will transmit this inheritance to ages yet unborn.”

“Blessed be the Lord my Rock, Who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle- my lovingkindness and my fortress, my high tower and my deliverer, my shield and the One in whom I take refuge, Who subdues my people under me.  Lord, what is man that You take knowledge of him?  Or the son of man, that You are mindful of him?  Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow.  Bow down Your heavens, O Lord, and come down.  Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke.  Flash forth lightning and scatter them; shoot out Your arrows and destroy them.  Stretch out Your hand from above; rescue me and deliver me out of great waters, from the hand of foreigners, whose mouth speaks vain words, and whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood.  I will sing a new song to You, O God; on a harp of ten strings I will sing praises to You, the One who gives salvation to kings, Who delivers David His servant from the deadly sword.  Rescue me and deliver me from the hand of foreigners, whose mouth speaks vain words, and whose right hand is a hand of falsehood- That our sons may be as plants grown up in their youth; that our daughters may be as pillars, sculptured after the similitude of a palace; that our barns may be full, supplying all kinds of produce; that our sheep may bring forth thousands and ten thousands in our fields; that our oxen may be well-laden; that there be no breaking in or going out; that there be no outcry in our streets.  Happy are the people who are in such a state; happy are the people whose God is the Lord!”

Psalm 144

Friday, July 22, 2011


When we aren’t digging in the dirt with our hands, our family loves delving into history with our minds.  Sometimes we do both at once…don’t ask me how, but the most engaging discussions usually take place during the more simple occasions in our lives.   Yesterday in particular, Aubrey and I were puzzling over the number of yards required for an 1860’s petticoat while strong-arming ambitious weeds out from between the tomato cages.  The deliberation was not in vain, since we decided on the correct yardage and “saved,” as you might call it, some fifty aspiring tomato plants. 
As if the garden and farm were not quite enough for a summer, the eight of us recently dove heart and soul into reenacting what many call the Civil War.  Thus while we are up to our elbows in the myriad colors and tastes and smells of high summer out of doors, we are up to our knees in the living room with scissors and pins and bits of bright thread and scraps of muslin "Too narrow breadths for nought--except waistcoats for mice," as Miss Potter’s Tailor of Gloucester said. (Unfortunately, we have no mouse-friends to do midnight miracles and save us the trouble of pricked fingers and aching necks as the aforementioned tailor did.)  And amid the feathery arms of carrot tops and out from between the ranks of onions, old battle songs and rallying tunes ring across the field like echoes from tongues long-silent.
The farmer’s market stand, in the meantime, blossoms into full splendor.  If one didn’t know how little of the beauty is truly beholden to one’s own effort one might be in danger of growing remarkably proud.  Setting out the most brilliant displays of produce is a privilege for those who are not afraid to break their finger-nails and scrub the ever-loving dirt out off their hands and feet, but he who is most familiar with the soil knows full well just how much he relies on his Maker for the increase.
I speak of dirt often, when I write about the garden, mostly because I think it is inescapable.  Yet there are also things there that cannot be described well because of their beauty, nor experienced any other place.  The sublimity and grandeur of even the Grand Canyon or a broad range of mountains is frankly hard-put to be more sublime than the scenes that occur in a garden.  There in our garden I stand often on a day-brink, at the top of our path through still-dusky, sleepy woods, my feet in a misty green sea of dewy grass and my eyes blinded by the million morning suns sparkling in our apple trees, dripping and shedding diamonds. 
There, if you linger till late, the sun will bid the day adieu with a glory of blazing smiles and, sweeping up the clouds with his train, send back a final fiery flash before withdrawing behind his counterpane.  Where but in a garden can you watch the bee at his business in his velvet suit; stuffing his pockets with dusty gold from the heart of the rose?  Where but in a garden can you walk down emerald halls under an azure arch and eat freely on every side a feast of heaven’s own making? Each of us is given good gifts every day so that, surrounded as we are by the dirt we so often stir up for ourselves, we remain unable to forget the goodness of God.
Craig, Karen and the Six Arrows

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

When I was a little girl, Mama used to read poems from play-worn volumes, filled to the brim with lovely, captivating words and the beautiful illustrations of good artists that leapt out of the pages and smiled up at me like old friends. Those afternoons filled with our mother’s low sweet voice drawing us into a beautiful world through verse impressed on my heart a love not only for reading, but especially of the tuneless songs of language we called poetry. They turn over in my head faster than I can name them, these old favorites that steal into the mind with a kind of power of memory that comes with the well-spent golden hours of childhood. The valuable moral lessons they still sing are often indelible. I remember A Good Play (R. L. Stevenson), the kind of poem that makes you want to jump up and play with a will. In The Village Blacksmith (Longfellow) the remarkable integrity, firmness of character and purpose mixed with infinite tenderness and singular love called up the noblest of aspirations. Daddy and Mama hung My Little Sister (“I have a little sister, she is only two years old;” Unknown) on our wall so that I knew it by heart from childhood, and more often than not, considered it ruefully after being less than kind to a sibling.

The poem that fairly leapt to mind again the other day was The Wind, by Robert Louis Stevenson. We were processing chickens, not exactly the most stirring or thought-provoking of occupations, when several great gusts rushed down over the ridge and charged into our valley like an express train, wailing and roaring till the trees looked like girls tossing their hair. It was a strong wind, the rollicking kind that sends your heart into your toes with a foreboding sense of helplessness and then soaring up and away with a wild kind of exaltation.

I saw you toss the kites on high
And blow the birds about the sky;
And all around I heard you pass,
Like ladies' skirts across the grass--
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!

I saw the different things you did,
But always you yourself you hid.
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all--
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!

O you that are so strong and cold,
O blower, are you young or old?
Are you a beast of field and tree,
Or just a stronger child than me?
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!
~Robert Lewis Stevenson
As a child, I never understood the questions at the end of the poem, but I recognized the unspoken mystery of the wind. The wind is one of the first things to teach us our own smallness. We can neither control it, nor ever completely understand it. After all, the weather man may predict it, and the scientist delineate in certain terms how it works, but why it blows…this is beyond the comprehension of human thought, and even little children unconsciously know it. I am reminded in it of the breath of God; that presence that fills the soul with wonderful, terrible fear, boundless awe and ceaseless joy.

I walked my garden in the heat of the day,
And buried my feet in the sun-baked clay;
And smelt the grass ripen, kissed of the sun,
That roams his dominion till day is done.
The wind brushed my arm on his way by
And whispered the strangest of lullabies.
Wild, strong and sweet his song still rings,
In my ears, of the plenty that summer brings.

Wind’s words, though I hearken, he cannot form,
Be his breath a breeze or high summer storm;
Yet perforce plays his melody at the command
Of thundering Word and prevailing Hand.

The earth bears its fruit and sky yields rain
And grass in the fields dies and ripens again.
How much more shall I than the mindless soil
Yield to His glory my heart, will and toil?
~EKL

This summer day is hot and languishing in the sun, the machines mixing bread grind away, and the rich strains of the Cleveland Quartet weave tales of the American countryside through the haunting melodies and harmonies of Dvorak’s 12th and 14th String Quartets. Everybody else is harvesting!

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows

Anyone who reads Gene Stratton Porter will recognize these… A dear friend, who read Gene Stratton Porter to her children, sent these to us. They are prolific, just like the story reads. And they taste like grapes.





Friday, June 3, 2011


  
Many of you have asked for our Six Arrows Farm Party Recipes.   Here are two favorites:

Chili Corn Bread Salad
1pkg (7 oz-smaller works too) cornbread mix
1 can (4 oz) diced green chilies, do not drain
1/8 tsp dried oregano
Pinch rubbed sage
1 c mayonnaise
1 c sour cream (8oz)
1 envelope Ranch salad dressing mix
2 cans (15 oz ea.) pinto beans rinsed and drained
2 cans (15 oz ea.) whole kernel corn, drained
3 medium tomatoes, chopped
1 cup chopped green pepper
1 c chopped onions
10 bacon strips, cooked and crumbled
2 c shredded cheddar cheese
Prepare corn bread mix according to directions and add chilies, cumin, oregano and sage.  Bake in 8 in square pan according to mix directions.   Cool and crumble.  Combine mayo, sour cream and dressing mix and set aside.  Place half crumbled cornbread in 9x13 glass dish.  Layer with half of the beans, mayo mixture, corn , tomatoes, green pepper, onions, bacon and cheese. Repeat layers.  Dish will be very full.  Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours or longer.  12 servings.

Banana Brunch Punch

6 medium ripe bananas
1 can (12 oz) frozen OJ thawed
1 can (6 oz ) frozen lemonade thawed
2 c sugar
3 c warm water (divided)
1 can ( 46 oz) pineapple juice
3 bottles (2 liters each) lemon lime soda
Orange slices optional

In blender or food processor, blend bananas, orange juice and lemonade until smooth.  Remove half of the mixture and set aside.  Add 1 ½ c of warm water and 1 c sugar to mixture in blender; blend until smooth.  Place in large freezer container. (ice cream pails) Repeat with remaining banana mixture, water and sugar, add to container.  Cover and freeze until solid.  One hour before serving; take punch base out of freezer.  Just before serving, place in a large punch bowl.  Add pineapple juice and soda; stir until well blended.  Garnish with orange slices if desired.  16-20 servings.


Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Blood Root, a kind of Wood Anemone, (thus named due to the “blood” that runs out of the red roots, or “rhizomes” when they are broken) is the first plant that blooms in spring here. I don’t truly admit of the possibility of spring until the flower’s tender thumbs poke up across the forest floor. The bright little buds relieve the dull brown of the spring ground like stars on a velvety dark night and the absolute purity and delicate nature of the remarkable blossoms is a glorious pronouncement of spring. As far as I’m concerned…it is now official!

I heartlessly pruned the raspberries last night, chopping away with a large clipper until my sore hands could no longer grip the handles. The work evoked memories of past springs...
I can still see Daddy pruning his trees and shrubs while my siblings and I, curious and adoring lads and lassies, bobbed around his knees, mildly solicitous for the welfare of the “poor plants.” After all, the trees bud so busily in spring, and he was cutting off all their hard work with remorseless brevity.
The first year I was entrusted with the task of trimming our rose bushes, I “executed” the job with a few cautious snips and a guilty feeling akin to that of…well…an executioner. When Daddy checked my work, he was kind, but told me I had failed to accomplish the necessary pruning. I have to admit to my shame that I protested a bit at first. Those bushes had sprouted up and out marvelously and it seemed a shame to cut back the tender green shoots.
My feelings in the matter have revolutionized dramatically, but I believe watching my characteristically tender and loving father trim with care and resolution year after year gave me a new understanding of love as well as the nature of plant growth. Experience taught me that the pruning of growth is a inexorable prerequisite to the bearing of fruit. Season after season showed me the abundance that comes out of healthy plants cut back and branched out.
In fact it is the expectation of fruit proves the love of the gardener for his plants even while he cuts back what seems to be good; because he prunes to make way for what is better. This understanding has brought a kind of joy and satisfaction to the task of pruning that supplants the naive hesitating cringe I used to harbor at every snip. Love knows when to gently cut away what is temporary so that what is lasting may be gained with patience.
So we cut back and train up and plant down and water in with faith and expectation…that the Lord of the Harvest will bring forth the bounty of His choosing in His good time.
Potatoes and Peas, Beans, Beets and Radish seeds are planted, with nothing as yet to mark their final resting place but trim rows of dirt and rugged stakes. Broccoli and Cabbage, frosty of leaf and sturdy in stature are set in neat squares, and feathery Onions march in regiments down the length of the garden. And chicks peep merrily from 207 throats and convulse any watchers with their clumsy antics. Our dear friend Gracie seemed to bring out the best in them!
Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows