Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town Read online

  That day when snow peas go into the ground is one of my favorite days of the year, an hour-long chore that I extend--methodically, but joyfully--into a two-hour ritual. It is, for me, my own personal May Day.

  It is not the May Day of labor rallies--although gardening is certainly about labor, and the fruits and vegetables thereof--but the May Day that celebrates something more primal. Rebirth. Renewal. The reassurance that we have survived another winter, no small accomplishment here in Vermont.

  That's why I use few tools and no gloves: I want to be, literally, in my garden. I want to feel dirt on my hands.

  Some years, my peas may go into the ground as early as today, April 24; some years, I may have to wait until Mother's Day. My May Day is hostage to climate, not calendar.

  This spring, the ritual will be especially meaningful. For the first time I will have a child with me, a little girl who will be a few weeks short of six months when I plant. The ritual this year will feel different because I will have with me an audience of one, sitting in something called a Summer Seat: a canvas chair with a back designed to support a small baby's back and spine.

  During my own private May Day last year my wife was pregnant, but the distance between expectation and parenthood was as incomprehensible as the chasm that exists between a seed and a plant. I am always amazed at the way the seeds I grasp in one closed fist can become a flowering row of bushes thirty feet long and three feet high.

  In my fantasy, the ritual will begin this year not with the moment I tear open a packet of seeds, but when I place my daughter in her chair at the edge of the garden. In my mind's eye, one of her hands is in her mouth, the other is pulling at the cuff of her sweater. Her feet, in tiny corduroy slippers, touch the grass.

  She watches me as I work, her eyes wide, and because she is watching I may decrease the time the ritual takes--a small concession to an attention span that is short. But it is also possible that this first planting may take even longer, as I pause to explain to her exactly what I'm doing, placing her on one of my knees as I show her dirt and seed and hoe.

  My parents never gardened, and so I'm sometimes surprised that it has become for me such a passion. I like vegetables, but it is the act of gardening itself that I love. I have no idea if my daughter will share this interest, if she, too, will derive satisfaction from planting and watering and pulling the damned from the ground so that the chosen may prosper. On one level, I hope that she does.

  But on another level, I know if she gardens with me my May Days will become clouded with the annual recognition that she is growing up and I am growing old. Last year she was in utero, this year she is in a Summer Seat. Next year she will be walking, and the year after that she may want to help: How many seeds can a two-and-a-half-year-old hide in her fist?

  I expect I will learn. And I know I will be moved.

  Chapter 3.

  THAT ROOF DIDN'T COLLAPSE:

  IT'S A HOME IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

  I JUST CAME off the roof. Again.

  I'm thinking of putting a tent up there and staying until June. I've never been a private person, but remaining on the roof might be easier than hauling the thirty-two-foot extension ladder through three-and-a-half feet of snow from the barn to the house on a daily basis.

  Like many Vermonters, I've spent a fair amount of time this year--and, yes, this past week--shoveling snow off the roof. The other day I shoveled or used the snow rake to pull snow off the roof over the front door, the roof over the screen porch, the roof over the glass porch, and the roof over the back of the barn, the walls of which already are bowing like the letter "C" on Sesame Street.

  This winter Vermonters have had two approaches to all that snow on our houses and barns. There has been the approach taken by my friends Greg Vitercik and Carol Murray of Lincoln, which has been to use the snow as a home improvement tool: They planned to remove the decaying, old carriage barn by their house this summer, but decided instead to let the piles of snow do the dirty work and drive the old structure into the ground.

  My wife was actually there the morning when the mountains of snow finally caused the mass of tired wood to groan, sag, and then collapse in slow motion. It reminded her of the way ocean liners always sink in the movies, sliding slowly underwater with the grace of a dolphin.

  Next up for the Murray-Viterciks is replacing the floor of their front porch. It sags pretty badly, so Greg asked if I'd mind sending some of that snow I took off my roof his way. He believes he needs just a little more weight to turn the porch into Pompeii and make its recovery an architectural dig.

  On the other hand, some of us--including yours truly--have been removing the snow from our roofs with more energy than we have ever put into a real job. There have been whole afternoons (and evenings) when I didn't write a single word, because I was too busy pounding at the ice jams in the valleys of my roofs, and figuring out new ways to approach the ice at the peaks.

  The purpose of all this activity was not simply because I would rather stand on a slippery porch roof in the snow at seven at night than write, or even because I feared this old house was about to become a Bob Vila restoration special. It was because the snow and ice was actually melting, and it was melting right into the kitchen and the front hall.

  There have been times this winter when I've had to be a very determined and clever lad. One time I was standing on a porch roof about fifteen feet off the ground, banging away with a hatchet at the bottom edge of a two-foot-thick glacier coming down a valley in the roof above the attic and the second floor. I had surrounded myself with the snow I'd pulled off the higher roof so that if I fell I would merely fall into the snow on the porch roof, and not onto the ground.

  Sure enough I slipped and fell right into that snow, which (thank you very much) did indeed prevent me from falling into the yard.

  Then, of course, the hatchet--which I had tossed reflexively into the air when I slipped--came crashing down and conked me on the head.

  Fortunately I was hit by the blunt end, so I am (as my wife observed) "neither disfigured nor dead."

  Although this snow has been hard work, I'll miss it when it's gone--especially since it will leave behind rivers of mud when it melts.

  On the other hand, all that mud won't wind up on my roof. At least I don't think it will. After this winter, I probably shouldn't be too sure about anything.

  Chapter 4.

  LOVE BLOOMS OVER THE SEPTIC TANK

  MY WIFE IS an incurable romantic, and so for our thirteenth wedding anniversary she wanted our septic tank pumped.

  There were other things she wanted too, of course. She's not insane. But a freshly pumped septic tank was top of the list, because in her opinion an ounce of prevention is worth seventeen tons of septic tank overflow on your bathroom floor, or in your backyard, or wherever it is that four years of flushing will go when there's no more room at the inn.

  And so a few days before our wedding anniversary in October, I ventured gamely outside, my shovel in one hand and a map in the other. The map had the precise location of the septic tank.

  I'd made the map myself, which should have been a pretty good indication that it wouldn't be long before I'd be informing Mission Control we had a problem. But the arrows and numbers looked accurate, and the landmarks seemed in the right spots: The mountain ash, the corner of the house, the outdoor spigot for the hose.

  More important, I remembered my resolve when I'd made the map four years ago, after losing our septic tank for the second time in a decade. I'd spent a day digging and dowsing (yes, dowsing), and failed to find anything more valuable than a garden trowel.

  With the resolve of Scarlett O'Hara at the end of the first half of Gone With the Wind, I'd stood that day at sunset with a clump of dirt in my hand, and vowed I would never, ever misplace our humanure humidor again.

  Well, I was wrong. I did.

  I wasn't quite as pathetic a spectacle this time as I was four years ago: Then I'd had to randomly dig holes throughout the back
yard, and still I'd accomplished little more than the creation of a scale model of the mountains and valleys that bisect our state. Eventually, we'd had to wait for the snow to fall and melt before we could find that all-important patch of warm earth above the poop pantry.

  This time I knew more or less where the tank was, and after about an hour of digging I actually hit the cement roof. I did not, however, hit the lid. I did not grab that all-important brass (wrought-iron, to be precise) ring.

  But I was nevertheless savoring no small amount of satisfaction: Even if my map was in error, even if I was off by a few feet, I had still made progress in my quest to become a competent homeowner. Whereas a half-decade ago I had managed to misplace a whole septic tank, this time I had only managed to lose the lid.

  The problem--and I tried to convince myself that problem was way too strong a word--was that I wasn't sure in which direction I should dig to find the lid. Moreover, I hadn't a clue whether the septic tank was eight or eighteen feet long, or whether it was shaped like a rectangle or a square.

  And so I started to shovel. I dug toward the house, driven by a vague recollection that I was standing near the far side of the tank.

  I didn't find the ring right away, but it didn't take long before I found a second edge--which meant I actually had two sides of the tank. Even a geometry-challenged goober like me can find a septic tank top when you have two sides of the box.

  And, thank you very much, soon enough I did, indeed, unearth the lid.

  It wasn't the most romantic of anniversary presents, and it certainly wasn't aromatic. But it was exactly what my lovely bride wanted, and far be it from me to deny her the peace of mind that comes with a spanking clean doody bin.

  Chapter 5.

  SCENIC BARN IS REALLY A SCRAPYARD

  MY BARN IS a biohazard. OK; maybe that's harsh. And imprecise.

  My barn makes an auto graveyard look like a playground for preschoolers.

  I discovered this during Labor Day weekend, when I made the mistake of cleaning it. A friend of mine was about to begin repairs on the barn so it didn't sink so deep into the earth that I could no longer park a Chevy Cavalier inside it, and he'd suggested that I move everything from the back of the barn to the front.

  The floor at the back of the barn is made of wood. The floor at the front is made of cement.

  That means the front is a downright suburban two-car garage, while the back is a magnificent and fascinating collection of horse stalls, corn cribs and feeding troughs. There's hay back there from the Hoover administration.

  Over the last half-century, the back of the barn served two purposes: It was used by roaming cats as a truck stop, and it was used by people for storage.

  A little over a decade ago, when my wife and I moved to Lincoln, we added a third use: transfer station. Whenever we had something useless that was big or metal or merely frighteningly toxic, we hauled it off to the back of the barn. Old empty paint cans went there to die.

  Our intent, usually, was to bring the debris to the dump come Saturday morning. The problem? Until my wife's recent acquisition of her spacious, powerful, and deeply suburban minivan, we always drove very small vehicles. Sunbirds. Colts. Cavaliers.

  Have you ever tried to get the metal frame to a sixty-two-inch-long storm window into a 1983 Plymouth Colt? It's not a pretty sight, especially since we had four of those storm windows to take to the dump one Saturday, and every single one of them had dangling shards of glass.

  So we gave up and hauled them into the back of the barn.

  Same fate for the rusty metal gate we took down in the backyard. That gate is ten feet long and four feet high, and it's a tetanus shot waiting to happen.

  The embarrassing thing is that eventually everything my wife and I couldn't deal with wound up in the back of the barn. When I cleaned it out, I found tires and spares from cars we no longer own (a total of seventeen tires), roughly forty feet of metal gutter (much of it speckled with house paint), and easily two hundred books too horrible to donate to the Lincoln Library (a library that lost eighty percent of its collection in this summer's flood).

  Just how ridiculous are the books back there? They range from a waterlogged poetry anthology that I bought in the fourth grade because the cover was an image from a lavishly produced movie version of Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, to a few volumes of the antiquarian Messages and Papers of the Presidents, each of which has been saturated with feral cat pee.

  While some presidential missives might be improved by the stench of cat urine--especially the ones between presidents and their interns--my sense is that James Madison deserved better.

  What else is back there? No fewer than seventy-five plastic flowerpots, two massive wooden barrels--one of which is filled with the bobbins the Lincoln mill once produced, and one of which is now the home to our two broken mailboxes--and fifty-six ancient wooden shutters.

  Whenever someone in Lincoln sneezes, flecks of paint fly off those shutters, and the air must be filled with lead chips and mercury. Those shutters are old, and that paint is very scary.

  Consequently, later this fall I will bite the bullet and borrow a pickup, and haul the rubble to the dump. I'll air out those books, and cart the ones that can be salvaged to the library. And while the cats will miss their bookstore-cum-urinal, at least they won't have to fight for space in the corn crib with a paint can.

  Chapter 6.

  DEAD CLUSTER FLIES SERVE AS WINDOW INSULATION FOR THE INEPT

  I AM IN the midst of an important experiment. I'm testing to see if dead frozen cluster flies seal a window as well as weather stripping.

  Like many theories, I came upon my idea that cluster flies might serve as window insulation entirely by chance. I made my annual December trek to the attic to press my Mortite brand caulking cord around the two windows up there and discovered--lo and behold--that there were so many dead, frozen cluster flies around the frame and midsection that the windows didn't rattle in their frames. I would have needed a garden trowel to get down to the bottom sash.

  Consequently, I took my coils of Mortite and went back down the stairs.

  Now a lot of guys would have had their houses securely sealed for the winter by mid-December, but I'm not a lot of guys when it comes to home maintenance. A toddler with a plastic hammer is more competent than I am when it comes to keeping a house standing.

  In all fairness, I had caulked the first- and second-floor windows by Thanksgiving, but I avoid the attic like it's a big petri dish filled with the Ebola virus. It's cold and messy, and there are exposed nails that extend down from the ceiling timbers like icicles and rise up from the floorboards like stalagmites.

  Some months of the year, it also houses a pretty wide array of wildlife. Sometimes there are mice, and sometimes there is something considerably larger: Based on the stomping, I'd guess it's either Barney the big purple dinosaur or an Olympic wrestler in clogs.

  One time a bat flew out when my wife opened the door. In August there are hornets.

  And, often, of course, there are cluster flies.

  In any case, I hate venturing up there, which is why I never insulate the attic windows until mid-December.

  This is the first time in a decade and a half, however, that I got up there so late into the heating season that the cluster flies had frozen to death. I must confess, I suspected something was different the moment I opened the door and didn't hear the familiar drone of several hundred thousand bugs flying headfirst into window glass, window frames, and each other.

  When I saw what had occurred, briefly I considered getting a spatula and prying the frozen mess away from the sills and then vacuuming up the corpses, but my wife said we only had one vacuum bag left and it was clear to us both that I was going to need a half-dozen at the very least.

  And so I did the next best thing. Nothing.

  Then I got a thermometer and hung it smack in the center of the attic. It reads forty-four degrees as I write. I have been taking the tempera
ture once a week, and I will have an average by the end of winter. At the same time, I am keeping a journal of the temperature outside on my front porch.

  In the spring, when the cluster flies thaw, I will remove them. Then next fall, before the cold has arrived in earnest, I will caulk the attic windows with Mortite. No cluster flies this time. I'll use the good stuff.

  Once again, I will monitor the temperature both inside my attic and outside on the porch, so I will have a sense of how the coming winter has differed from this one. In the end, I believe, I will know whether I should bother to caulk those attic windows or simply depend upon what just might be nature's own brand of insulation: the dead frozen cluster fly.

  I'll keep you posted.