Yahara Winter

"The moon, though slight, was moon enough to show
On every tree a bucket with a lid,
And on black ground a bear-skin rug of snow."
– Frost, "Evening in a Sugar Orchard"









It's easier to tell the stories of what you miss.
As the nights draw down to degrees below zero
you then wake, look out the frosted window
and although the sunrise shines you resist

the same plans of the soft yellow summer,
of taking your daily walk along the Yahara,
the hike up over the pine limestone cliffs
or follow butterflies along the prairie at Curtis.

The winter months turn the mind's eye within.
A soft music there we hope tells us what we love.
We are not so much but half ourselves.
The other, warm earth, long gone, again.

Yahara Winter

"It lifts existence on a plane of snow
One level higher than the earth below,
One level nearer heaven overhead,
And last year's berries shining scarlet red."
– Frost, "A Winter Eden"









For generations I imagine
the first heavy snow meant a long shovel,
from sidewalk side to side or driveway,
country or town, a night's work anyway.

Here tonight the traffic has slowed,
snow mounds curl each curb as if bowed
and lends a certain perfect fortress
around the block a quiet friendly fence.

As I make my own shovel marks across
the walk I find the house prosperous,
the little lights along the courtyard stoop
shining a white world in the dark anew.

The serviceberry bushes I see up close,
as they stand stark and thin and cold,
one last reddish berry hanging crinkled
by the fiber of a twig as if a star onto itself.

Across the street the Yahara River
flows past in waves of silver medallions,
light sprayed down by old street lamps
as they have for a hundred years past.

Fatigue settles down into the lower back,
my hat wet, ears raw, knuckles cracked;
I stop and stand for a moment  and wonder
if inside those old-time passing trolleys
the stories they told themselves they believed.

Yahara Winter

"There's a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest..."

– Frost, "A Patch of Old Snow








Where two days ago the dead leaves
served us with nothing more than questions,
the clouds have now rushed in and spread
their fine white blankets of glitter instead.
How inside the eye changes its suggestions,
and as I walk along the smooth printed
sidewalk footsteps are in jest of someone else,
the crow is like a raucous piece of coal
in contrast to the gleaming whiteout
and no longer do I much care for doubt.
A new painting holds its hope for days,
as you stand it in the corner of the house,
there it sits a new found portal to a world,
strokes and washes teaches the painter
of things you did not fully realize at creation.
And so the arctic mists that sizzle up
from windburned snowbanks seem to soothe
to a blue innocence the mind a day or two.

Notes of a Wannabe Farmer

"Back in his other life, back when he was urban or suburban, it may have been sports cars that caught the newcomer's eye. Or maybe a showroom full of compacts, fresh and glittering from the factory. Now he finds himself eyeing some neighbor's sturdy green pickup with a big load of brush in the back and wondering how much one like it would cost. Welcome to the club." – Noel Perrin, from First Person Rural








There are as many bright images associated with backyard homesteading as there are likely bright images for the real farmer, out there in the real countryside, of living in the city someday. For that real farmer, let us guess that by fifty years of age, after so many thousands of hours of real work, including pre-dusk cow herding or post-dinner milking, there might not be anything more pleasant than to own a little apartment somewhere in the center of the city where a mere short stroll outside of the front doors would lead to places where other people are cooking the food, doing the dishes, staying up until one in the morning before they shut off the lights. For the urban dweller, all this is reversed, of course, because we know that the grass can only greener when finally embedded on the other side. We might not quite be capable of imaging a pig navigating a forty by forty space tied to a leash that would not allow it quite to mingle with the dogs walking along the sidewalks, but what about planting chestnuts or hackberry's where the three rose bushes used to stem? Is it possible that three stalks of true corn might be able to plant inside the widest possible pot? Wheat germ? My own hops? Seven chickens so as not to cross the municipal ordinance? One can only imagine the result of playing through each of these images like such a greedy urban farmer wannabe, and many times, as we see around town in Madison, it does.  I feel I need to cultivate my year old herb garden which was placed last year up along a planting bed stationed at the top of our courtyard fence. There, my cilantro, thyme, sage, rosemary, lavender and basil did quite well and indeed, as the good write-ups suggest, yielded a variety of product months. For my second year, however, I would like to up the ante. I feel well prepared to clip and preserve like I am supposed to. Although there will no doubt come the day when I am able to tie the stalks of my thyme and let them dry from a rack upside down, there are other things that I would like to dabble in. I want to create my tincture, made of Echinacea and ever clear alcohol if that is an option. I want to freeze my basil pesto in ice cube trays then store in freezer bags at the ready to melt and use.  Near the end of the ware season here, I would like to gather my healthiest sets of herbs and transplant to a pot and bring it on inside near a sunny window so that I can continue to snip into the fall and winter months. My own set of images have something more to do with simplifying – perhaps the warm clear glass of chamomile tea at 7 o'clock as the hundredth neighbor walks past the front of the house past Yahara Place Park looking across the street no doubt to see the progress of the farm.

Yahara Winter

"To think to know the country and now know
The hillside on the day the sun lets go
Ten million silver lizards out of snow!"

     – Frost, from "A Hillside Thaw"







The melting days of mid January
has left old piles of golden leaves bare,
alone, unable to fly or sink down
for cover in the frozen solid soil.

These in-between seasons carry
neither sun or snow-white invitations.
Wishes of the mind leap backwards
as if to the first words of a sentence.

The clearer there I see the bright
symphony of purple spiderwort
blooming behind the spiral blazing star,
the sunflowers a sweet ochre yellow.

If I were to reconstruct the words
today the flakes would tumble down wide
and wandering like white envelopes
holding wild white letters of hope.

Yahara in Winter

"But what about the brook
That held the house as in an elbow-crook?"
   – Robert Frost, from "A Brook in the City"









When the days go by in mid January
at the Rutledge bridge the rainy streets
shine at night by streaks a zig zag
pattern of orange lamplight flame.

It's awash over the dull black asphalt
where the buses lurch to stop sign
squeeze their brakes and the dog walkers
pull their slack leashes at the corner.

Underneath again the water flows,
the surface melted, no longer ice.
I wonder what the warm world thinks.
Do the wintering ducks flap their wings

in a sort of once-in-a-lifetime ecstasy?
The fishermen still hold their oggers
hunched over their thinning holes
then quietly slide hooks to blind fish.

Notes of a Wannabe Farmer

"Most country dwellers in New England sooner or later think about doing a little maple sugaring. About nine-tenths of them never actually get around to it." – Noel Perrin, from First Person Rural










One of the biggest differences between a wannabe farmer and the true backyard homesteader is, well, the farming part of it. When the magic landscaping wand comes along that within three weeks turns my tiny city corner plot into the magnificent spread of the ideal homesteader plot, all quartered and halved and fenced and elevated and chickened and permacultured, I for one would be the first to purchase it from Amazon. Furthermore, how, in modern times, do we get to such an evolved plot starting from scratch? One of my favorite books in the world is A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle, the very book that sort of catapulted what had been (before Europe turned more sour on Americans) a new expat culture, in this case into the south of France. Mayle and his wife decide its time to escape the glum gray skies of London and head to wine country, buy an old country house in the Luberon, and, without necessarily initially seeking them out, meet the neighbors, sometimes head on. The book is all charm. Mayle and his wife play the English speaking stooges to some degree and take French rural advice whether they want it or not. The point of these wonderful little narratives that Mayle creates is that, in the end, they learn to farm, cultivate, drink wine, play boules, and otherwise just live like Frenchmen and Frenchwomen by modeling....they had some step by step assistance, albeit sometimes unwilling. The modern it seems, on the other hand, has books and classes.  We've slowly but surely severed our connection with the rural and now spend our time trying to recreate it from the ashes of something that is lurking in us but its hard to get our hands on. And so we have these wonderful new folk schools that teach beads and metalworking; we have permaculture guild that shows us how to commonsensical contour our property for water flow and edibility; we have kits coming out of our ears for preserving, canning, beering and wining. Quite odd to consider all of the stuff we want to learn that might have been taken for granted two hundred years ago – in an age when we want to think we are all forward thinkers, what is closer to the truth is that we are constantly sending our lines backward, maybe not to the mindsets but certainly to the skillsets and certainly to how we used to experience time.  And so I look at the process of making wine. Only two pages in the homesteader book, so must not be too overwhelming. Until the instructions begin to talk about sanitation, bleaches, tablets, wine casks, tubes, bottles, corks, cracked bottles, cracked corks and then six months of waiting for the maybe, all the while the other wine cellar stocked with the guaranteed good stuff. I suspect the backyard homesteader has to put him or herself on a strict sort of assignment basis with self. How's about this for creating necessity in following through with Perrin's sugaring, or the making of wine: 'you will not have another sip of wine or beer until you make your own!' I can just see now how the eyes might scan the instructions a touch more closely, as if your life depended on it.