A Six Arrows Farm Update

I threw the windows open this morning to let in spring and I wish you could be here.  The quiet sky is casting a soft gray blanket and filtering gentle light over a brown world misted with hazy green.  Things can't wait to come alive now.  Everything is reaching and striving and opening into the warmth.  It is all so vulnerable and hesitant, soft and new.  Composers have been writing music for spring for centuries.  Some of my old favorites...Vivaldi's Spring, Mozart's "Spring" String Quartet, Copland's Appalachian Spring are dedicated in title to the season.  But even these fall short of the real symphony that swells between last year's death and this year's life.  The story of spring is almost too delicate for any expression louder than a whisper.  While seemingly cavalier, the relentless and yet winsome power obviously on display makes carelessness and pomp equally graceless.

Poetry meets prose where pleasant weather meets reality.  Talk goes back and forth, some eager, some dubious.  What does a Minnesota grower do with a March Spring?  The orchard owners are justly concerned that an April or early May frost will kill the buds which are so enthusiastically bursting.  Last year, a similar weather pattern eliminated much of the fruit crop in this region.  On the other hand, if the frost wipes out the first of the weed bed in the garden before it goes to seed, we will of course be grateful.  And a lengthened growing season with good rain and sun can only help most crops.

Daddy announced a desire to do some brush clean-up over lunch and the prospect of grubbing around out of doors was so tantalizing that I enlisted myself almost before he finished laying out his plan.  I love to be in the middle of it, when all the world is living the first creation again; when the newborn green creeps up like an old friend and fills my senses with memories come alive; when my eyes drink the lush colors to their dregs.  I glory in the comical way the hens peck and cluck out their satisfaction across fresh turf while the rooster crows stentorianly simply because he can.  I am mesmerized by a single bud, standing there willing it to grow when I know for a surety that I can do nothing to make it mature or drink when I water, and yet it surely will because it lives avidly in obedience to it’s Creator.

To tear away at the old to make way for the new; to rake out, sweep up, and carry away what is chaff and press down and train up and feed what is good is in our nature.  Man is made neither as a foreign creature to destroy, nor a passive member to let lie the world in which he is established.  He is made a husbandman to make it better.  All around the farm are evidences of “natural” decay.  The beauty of untouched wilderness is not in its native disorder, suffocation, and barrenness, but in the potential it is blessed with: a will to grow and come alive under the hands of skilled and diligent caretakers.  That which languished in rampant chaos begins to take on the beauty of shape and form.  The accumulation of death and decay are set aside to give way to redoubled life and strength.  

The soil obeys the laws written in it and knows the hand of man as it’s appointed ruler.  It responds with fertility and abundance under a good steward and withering and desolation under a lazy or greedy man.

Proverbs 20:4 says “A sluggard does not plow in season; so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing.”
So here we go to "plow in season".

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows