Six Arrows Farm Update

Remember farm dinners?  Some of you may…the kind where good real food is abundant, jell-o with fruit and whipped cream is a prerequisite and coffee and bread pudding follow in abundance.  The ponderous farm table where you can talk for hours companionably on every topic, profound or mundane.  Aubrey added strawberry jell-o with bananas and whipped cream to our hospitality menu last night.  Dressed up in a pretty bowl and garnished with citrus zest, it reigned like a sovereign over 

every other viand on the table and completed a tradition that has grown through generations of family meals.  Farm dinners are wonderful not because they are remarkably extraordinary, but comfortable.  Like afghans and hot buttered toast and frost in the corner of the window and sun warming the floor in the morning and gloves drying by the stove.  Like that splash of summer on our toast when plumb jam glows like gems on golden bread, or the way my heart leaps with Cappy every morning that she hurtles bright-eyed out of her kennel and eats up snow with her pattering paws.  These are little “gratefulness-es” that grow out of great joy in small blessings.

People often notice the aroma of the fire when they step through our door.  We added another smell last night and Daddy knew it when he came home, farmer-man that he is.  Soil.  Not to be confused with dirt, its spent and lifeless counterpart, soil is pungent with life.  The scent is full and rich and tangy with a vitality that grows into the air and makes you sit up straight for a better sniff.  Aubrey and I buried our hands in it and shook it into flats last night.  Pressed down and running over we filled the cells and hollowed beds for those plain brown time capsules of rosemary and thyme, sage and chives.  

The skills that arise from planting seeds are like any other seemingly simple proficiencies.  They grow from simple lists of factual knowledge into real understanding.  When you know how much to tamp the soil in a flat so that roots will go deep and strong without suffocating; when the arrangement of seeds in each cell is precise; when you can’t bear to wear gloves because you prefer to test the consistency of the earth with your finger tips; when you 

can measure how many black grains of thyme are between your thumb and finger; this is when you begin to understand and really love sowing seed.

Huge flakes whirled all afternoon yesterday and flashed in the sun from the ground this morning in a velvety blanket.  My favorite part of winter mornings are those snow-shadows of baby-est blue that scatter over every dip and rise, cling to the rims of drifts, sink into the caverns of boot-tracks and strike out from the foot of every tree.  Having firmly established my love of winter, I now feel free to admit that I am guilty of putting very green and glowing summer pictures on my desktop.  The bubbling water-falls and rolling pastures smile at me a bit mockingly, I’m afraid.  Not to worry, though.  If I can put up shots of icicles and white-capped mountains this summer, I may be able to redeem myself.  In the meantime, Aubrey and I have schemes of all kinds to cultivated that living green color we are pining for indoors.  By eating up every inch of space with terrariums and over-abundant flats of flowers and herbs, we will manage to drive Garrison (of the very tidy sort and a veritable cleaning machine) batty...until the greenhouse opens.

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows