One of our favorite history lessons with the girls was to walk the dirt roads and through the forests and fields, studying the historical clues:  the stone walls and foundations that made the first homesteads and paddocks, the barbed wire that followed the civil war, the monoculture timber that came in the great depression, after the land had been abandoned… And then there were the cemeteries.  They’re tucked all through the hills around here, derelict family and community plots with faded etchings, their stories grown over with lichen and brush.  But we’d urge the girls into their fold, asking them to read the dates, to imagine the settlers who gave rise to these monuments.  Then Bob would ask them to scrutinize their death dates.  The girls would run from stone to stone, offering wild flowers to our deceased neighbors, then noting the seasons of their demise.  Without fail,  each cemetery we visited in these scrappy hills whispered the same answer:

Spring, spring, spring.

We may celebrate the season of death in late fall and winter, but spring has always been the truly dangerous time.

The girls have no time for our lessons now.  Saoirse graduated last year, and Ula refuses to crack a book once the sheep are shorn.  They both tremble in glee with anticipation of what’s to come:  the arrival of the chicks, and lambing season.

And as the buds start to swell on the trees, and the bravest dandelions pop their rumpled heads from the ground, the growing season erupts.  The first batch of chicks arrive in the mail, and they have the brooder ready to welcome them.  The geese who guard the laying hens in the pastures lay a nest of eggs, promising to increase their ranks.  The first lambs are born, stocky and strong, looking ready for market before they’ve even begun suckling their mother.  

But it’s not just the geese and the chickens and the ewes who are birthing.  So are the coyotes across the creek.  And they need food.  When the hens and geese are rotated to the field just across the water, the clever creatures find their way around the electric fencing, taunt the guard geese to attack, and then outnumber them and kill them.  We lose four in one night.  Dad doubles up the fencing.  It doesn’t help. We lose four more.  Dad and Saoirse move the hens to a safer pasture.  They round up the remaining geese at night and pen them in the barn.  Meanwhile, Ula takes the lead in the lambing barn, sorting ewes and lambs, making sure each newborn latches on for its first sips of colostrum, evaluating which ones are too weak to survive the unrelenting cold and rain, and bringing them inside to nurse.  She takes a special interest in one with a crooked neck.  She asks our good friend, a chiropractor, for advice on how to manipulate it back into place.  When that fails, she determines there is something more severe wrong, and finally surrenders and asks her grandfather to end its suffering.  And while all this is going on, Mom waits for a call from the post office.  The second batch of chicks were due in Monday.  No one knows where they are.  Their trip through the mail has historically taken 24 hours.  But the “new efficiencies” in the postal system result in them getting lost in the system for the better part of a week with no food or water.  When they finally arrive, everyone mobilizes to resuscitate them, gently lifting their failing bodies and dipping their tiny beaks into water, trying to induce them to drink.  At 9am, 70 of them are dead.  By noon, 90 are dead.  By quarter to three in the afternoon a third of them have perished.  

Spring is treacherous.  Healthy births have become such a commonplace occurrence  in the human world that we forget its perils.  One life must be cleaved so that another may begin.  And nature is ruthless.  The first week of life is really a non-stop negotiation with death.  Furthermore, there is a battle between the species:  who will live, and who will become food for another’s babes?

But there is an even greater danger: that the despondence, fatigue and despair of this season will drive my kids away from the land; that the raw emotional shrapnel that flies through the air as members of my family face one death after another will blow us apart.

Bob and I are not at the farm through this.  We are working at the cafe, meeting with contractors, buyers, butchers, tenants and cleaning out the self-serve shed to ready for construction.  Our job is to keep everything moving forward with the business while the farm goes through its annual maternity pains.   But at the end of the day, it’s our job to bring it all back together.  

Bob builds a great fire.  I slide a chicken into the oven for dinner.  While we wait for the dampness to wear off the house, the girls and I pile onto myf bed with a heap of dogs and cats.   The moods are dark.  Their hearts need warming.  While dinner cooks, I turn to vulgar language.  I let one nasty word after another bubble up to my lips, then blow them into the air.  As they rise into the space between us, Saoirse and Ula join me and we giggle and bat them around, shouting them out as we nuzzle the pets.  We take to looking the words up online and reading aloud the sentences Urban Dictionary uses as examples.  We find them hysterical.  We laugh until our cheeks are wet with tears.  Then we come down for supper and I watch color return to their cheeks, a spark to their eyes.

“It’s spring,” I chime as we  move from the table to settle in by the fire.  Spring isn’t just sunshine and flowers.  It’s rain, and cold, and death.  Bob reminds us of the headstones.   It’s always been this way.  It will always be this way.  Spring is a game of playing the odds.  If you have more life than death at the end of a day, that’s a win.  Our own survival relies on our understanding of this game.   If we mourn every loss, we’ll be paralyzed.  But if we keep moving, we will move forward.  The leaves will unfurl, the sun will warm the ground, and the lambs will take to the meadows.  We’ll continue to negotiate with the coyotes and their pups, the chickens will make it to pasture, and we’ll soon find our way to the farm pond, where we’ll swim away the heat of the day, and maybe even close our eyes for a few minutes, listening to bull frogs and the kisses of the fish as they jump for mayflies on the surface of the water.  From there we’ll move to the harvest, through fall, and into the deep sleep of winter …where we’ll forget the hardships we’re facing right now, and once more dream of spring.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Folks, I’m thrilled to announce that my newest book, Redefining Rich: achieving true wealth with small business, side hustles and smart living, will be launching through BenBella Books this August. Toward that end, I’d like to enlist your help. We are looking to put together a launch team of volunteers who can help promote it. If you’re interested in joining, details are at the top of the blog page at sapbush.com but basically, you’ll 

• Pre-order a copy of the book
• Fill out our launch team form, which is found at the top of the sapbush.com blog;
• Promote the book through your social media channels
• Request the book at your local bookstore and library
• Leave a review wherever the book was purchased

But WAIT!  It gets better!  As an expression of my thanks, here’s what you will receive in return:

• A 15% discount code for anything in the online store at sapbushfarmstore.com, good through July 31, 2021
• A free digital chapter from the book in advance of the release date
• Entry into a giveaway for a signed copy of the book and a throw blanket from my store
• Official graphics for sharing on social media
• An invite to an exclusive virtual book club meeting so I can answer any questions you may have once you’ve received your copy. Note: Book club sessions will be limited to ten participants per session to ensure everyone has a chance to talk — we will keep adding on additional sessions until every launch team members who wants one can get it.  So, everyone get’s a chance to have an intimate hang (bring coffee or cockails, depdending on the time), and we’ll have a lot of fun together.  So please sign up – just go to sapbush.com, click on the blog, and the details are at the top.

This blog & podcast happens with the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Tali Richards and Suse Bell.

Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you!  If you’d like to help support my work, you can do so for as little as $1/month by hopping over to Patreon and looking up Shannon Hayes.