Dispatch From the Cold Front

(I am using this time to tell you secrets...)

I can say this confidently, here with my first mug of coffee before sunrise, that things are going to be okay.

There’s a fire lit in the wood stove, just now. Soon this 46° living room will burn into the fifties, and then heat up into the sixties well before I decide to fry up two eggs. But right now is a lull of fire-tending and hope that happens every morning; and I am using this time to tell you secrets.

But before I do, let me set the scene.

Waking up here in this dark and dreary time of year means waking up cold. The fire burned so warm and hot until midnight, but by that time I was slipping into the kind of sleep that shuts cognitive systems down. I was so warm, beside that fire. On a makeshift bed only used during the two coldest months of the year, but still felt insanely decadent. What other word can you use for laying softly among down and fur, warmth hitting your body so completely blood circulates better? Lullabies of crackling birch bark, the purr of cats, the sighs of an old dog.

Nothing is as much of a soporific as storm prep. My tired, tough little 5’3” body had done such magnificent things earlier in the day. I’d loaded sled after sled of hardwood into the house to stack in the mudroom. I slung an axe until that wood was cut into stove-length and stacked to dry. I hauled hay, water buckets, and feed all over the farmstead by the hundreds of pounds, making sure everything was prepared for the coldest stretch of winter that would slam into the farm this weekend.

Snow is falling outside now. Wind is sporadic but harsh. The titmice on the bird feeder need to cling to the millet in the wind like they are free-soloing El Cap. I glance up from my computer to Fletch, sleeping quietly before the foggy sunrise on her kitchen perch.

I feel a shiver thinking of her alone in this storm without me, and all the young hawks without falconers or the sense to passage south. In an hour or so I’ll take her out to her mews to have breakfast and enjoy some exercise and the snow before coming back in from the cold. It will be -10 before I could watch all three extended editions of Lord of the Rings.

It has been weeks now of temperatures well below freezing without reprieve. When my hay delivery arrived last week, it was a 12° and Derek and I laughed about how comfortable it felt compared to the windchill of mornings -8° a few days earlier. It felt good to grouse about equipment issues and animal appetites with another farmer.

In this cold raising animals becomes double the feed and double the work. But to me, there’s always more peace in raising food that knows to go inside if it’s hailing. Apple orchards and vegetable growers can lose a whole year to bad weather. It’s certainly a more pleasant business than hog butchering, but hogs don’t lose all their blossoms and your hope in one bad night.

All told, I am content. There’s a difference between 46° in the silent dark and 46° in the company of steaming coffee, firelight, and candle flickering filling the dark corners.

I know true warmth is coming. Because I am here. it’s inevitable and I am a very patient woman. I know it certainly as I know spring is coming; that in four weeks we turn the clocks ahead, in 8 weeks I will already be watching the first wild onions and feral strawberries fight for the same sunlight attention I am.

I know things will get better. It’s certain. Nothing remains the same. Right now the crust of the earth is shifting and bubbling, the planets dancing, the weather trotting towards distant seas. Stagnation is a fantasy for the depressed. We make up stillness when we feel paralyzed.

Picture by K. H. of Caer Luna Farm

I often get asked about how I managed a life of slipping back in time like this; to my world of hay and wood smoke, warm eggs in cold palms, and days of axes and buckets, as if I found the secret wardrobe to Narnia.

But homesteading like this isn’t a fantasy nor complicated. The secret is wanting it more than anything else and not giving the tiniest shit about the comforts that bribed you away from it.

I know there’s another version of me that made different choices in another timeline. A woman 20+ years into a corporate TV career with a million dollar home near the Tennessee River. On this February morning, she would be jumping back into bed cursing that the heated floors weren’t working again and could you “please call the guy?!” between gritted teeth to a husband I shouldn’t ever have married. I know that woman is more comfortable at 6:34AM.

I also know she isn’t worried about her snow-caked oak being dry enough to burn hot, or if she has to take a dog and sled up to the neighbors’ log cabin to grab some of their 5-year-old cord wood so dry, so light, you can juggle three logs like tennis balls. All the water has left their corpses. They are nothing but ignition. I can relate.

I pity her. She never made love to a woman during a thunderstorm after a day at the river. She never learned what a decade without alarm clocks or wedding invitations was like. She never got out. She may never even have realized she was trapped.

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At this time in our collective living history, we are told that a life like mine is so destitute, so sad. To need to sleep beside a fire to stay warm. To look forward to seasons the way others look forward to passport stamps and concert tickets. But I am quite happy that my home (now 48° since the first paragraph) will be asking me to keep going through this weekend.

Ask me to give more of myself to the fire, to burn alongside it. And come nightfall, after a day of using my body and feeling the true bite of the cold, I feel the payment upfront in muscles so large it’s hard to find shirts that fit me and a peace soft enough to find slumber drifting off to Tolkien and blueberry tea instead of some Netflix murder documentary and vodka. That this quiet life hidden in the mountains is possible because I avoided the need to keep up with an empty world of consuming and comparison.

I am content with a hot mug and early daylight. And while the headlines gnash and authoritarianism looms, I am reminded that the problem with taking over America is that it is full of Americans. A people ingrained, for better or for worse, with such intense freedom, individualism, and violence.

I don’t care what your politics are. Anyone who is literate and upright hates being told what to do in this country. And I know you can’t turn a pack of wolves into a team of sled dogs unless they volunteer. Few wolves do.

If you’re feeling anxious in this climate of hollow threats from empty men, know you’re reading the words of a single middle-aged woman in a forest who would rather sleep by a fire than ever use an alarm clock again or ask another adult permission to see a dentist.

And I’m nobody. I’m a working-class American, one of countless struggling throngs. But this town, this farmland, this nation is filled with millions of nobodies that all have their own red lines in their bloodstreams they will not cross when it comes to the freedom our Constitution promised. It will be impossible to harness us all. It always has been.

So I sip my coffee. Watch the sunrise. Prepare for the storm, the discomfort, the cold I know is coming ahead. And yet feel the equanimity of certainty that June will return.

It’s going to be okay. Things are shifting, even if you can’t feel it.

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