The Music of Springtime

It’s hard to fathom that we’re headed in this direction. Late summer abundance, including squirrel feasting. Photo by Annie Bingham.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Bare branch, swollen bud. Moon set, tree silhouette. Green swords, snowmelt River. Song Sparrow, cartwheeling Crow.

Maizey the Farm pup lays sprawled on a bed of those soft green swords on the sunny south side of the house, panting as heat reflects from dark metal siding. I call her into the cool of the house. She looks up from where she lays. “No, papa, this is the place to be.” She’s right. My house cleaning ambitions can wait. I lay in the grass with her for a while. She rolls on her back and asks for scratches.

After weeks of chill, we’re on the cusp of the greening here in a way that is becoming difficult to hold in one’s singular body. Perhaps that’s the point. Spring is an embodied co-creation. A reckless symphony of praise song and celebration.

Over the next eight weeks, the perennial grass meadows here at the Farm will fill the air to waist high with sugar-rich leaves and stems. If all flesh is grass, all grass is sunlight and rainfall and soil. The generosity of that Life-giving sequence lifts a silent arm skyward, even as the din of the newsfeed threatens to drown listening human ears. Then South Wind comes and makes music by moving through those standing stalks. That music tells a different story about the way things are. A less exclusively-human story.

I received a call the other day from a human neighbor who I haven’t seen much of this winter. He was on his way to the hospital for testing. I could hear worry in his voice. “Would you feed and water the animals at my place, Adam? I think they’re going to keep me there for a couple of days. I’ve been feeling very weak.” He raises chickens, ducks and a small group of sheep, including the yearling ram I sent over there for breeding last summer and his newborn sons and daughters. As with everyone who grows here at the Farm, that ram never agreed to be put up for sale. “Are you sure I can’t pay you for him?” my neighbor asked me last summer when he came over to receive the ram.

“I’m as sure as I was when we first met,” I replied.

Three years after we first met, in a moment of vulnerability, my neighbor picked my name from his list of contacts. It takes immense courage to ask for help in a society that holds self-reliance in such high regard. I couldn’t have said “yes” any faster. I didn’t cry on the phone when he called, but I felt the weight of it rising in my throat.

A few days later, Sam, who’s just settling into a part-time residential role at the Farm, walked with me and Maizey down the road. A different neighbor pulled in from work, and I was pleased to make the introduction. Sam received a ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ hug and two dozen eggs from her small flock for the road.

A few days later, Sam’s partner Jaecub cracks four of those eggs and whisks them into four cups of cultured skim milk, received as a gift from our friends at the creamery down the road, plus four cups of cheerful yellow meal ground from the dried starchy seeds of the head-high annual grass phenomenon for whom we named the Farm pup Maize-y. In English, we call this plant neighbor by the generic German word for grain: korn. Maizey is planning to protect this year’s patch of flint Corn by giving chase to squirrels and chipmunks. She consults her inner ancestors daily and thus far they appear to be guiding her in a good direction.

Into a preheated cast iron pan, Jaecub drops a dollop of distilled sunlight-become-grass-become-fat on a cow’s back, more commonly known as beef tallow. The baking soda in the batter bubbles wildly in contact with the sizzling fat. After half an hour in a hot oven, that southern-style, fat-crusted, gift-infused cornbread graces the table at the Frolic Supper, where ten folks gather in from the gardens to give thanks for the good fortune of such a shared Life.

When the generosity of springtime becomes difficult to hold in one’s singular body, South Wind might just come along and make music by moving among the standing stems, each one risen from the ground. Some of those stems take the form of human bodies.

I got to overhear a bit of that old music this week, and the hearing has left me feeling immensely grateful to live among such remarkable plant, animal and human neighbors. Bowing and bending alongside such generous folks makes strong medicine, and I needed a dose bad. There is music waiting to be made in the fertile spaces between you and your neighbors—of that I’m quite sure. It’s terribly easy to forget that we already know how to do this—of that I require regular reminders.

May that the music of springtime gather ‘round you in the days ahead.

With love,

Adam

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I love this gorgeous post from

Caroline Ross

. Keen observations and lively prose.

Hearth Person