Who knew the recycling center was the hub of village life?

When we lived in the city, we had weekly curb-side recycling for paper. There was no pick-up for glass, plastic, or aluminum – we had to bring that to drop-off spots ourselves. Since nearly every grocery store has at least a drop-off point for plastic, and each neighborhood has more than one glass and aluminum drop-off point (they’re always together, the glass and the aluminum) it wasn’t a big deal, although for the elderly or infirm I can see where it would be a drag and I imagine some of that – especially the cans – ends up in the trash.

Here in the village, we don’t have pick-up for anything. Well, twice a year the school kids come around the whole town and collect the Altpapier, and that deserves a post of its own because it’s pretty awesome, but otherwise it’s drop it off yourself only. I regularly bring the glass, plastic, and aluminum to the grocery store, so the only thing that piles up around the house is the paper and cardboard. Since we live on a farm there is plenty of out-of-sight-out-of-mind storage space for the paper until the school kids come around, but recently I’ve decided that I need more order in my life and that even the out-of-sight-out-of-mind storage was getting on my nerves, so I’ve started bringing the paper and cardboard to the village recycling point, which is behind the fire station.

It’s open one hour a week, and I’ll tell you what: if you want to see and be seen in this village, bring your recycling to the firehouse during the delivery hour. Everybody is there. The parking lot is full, there are plenty of people who come on foot pulling a full Leiterwagon behind them, kids are throwing plastic bottles into the recycling containers. It’s practically a village festival, only without the tent and Bratwurst. Now that Small Boy walks home from kindergarten by himself, I don’t have as many see and be seen opportunities, so I’m definitely going to be a regular at the recycling center.

Less clutter (even of the invisible kind), more village life. Local recycling is a win-win!

The raps are blooming

The raps come and go quickly in Switzerland. Not as fast as the three-day free-for-all of a plum tree, but there is perhaps a two-week window for a field in glorious full bloom. I caught this one just in time.

Spring, taking me once again by surprise

Spring explodes in Switzerland. Is it like this everywhere, the way the green seems to reach critical mass overnight? I watch for signs of spring, I mark them: the first crocuses, the snowdrops, the first daffodil, the sap rising in the rose bushes turning the stems maroon and then the first curling leaves. I watch out my window as the willow tree begins to yellow, blend to pale green. I am not blind to these individual signs of spring, but Spring itself takes me surprise every year. I swear it comes overnight. Is it like this everywhere? This explosion of green, this all-or-nothing, this no more here and there signs of spring but spring, full and dominant.

Everything is green. It happens overnight. I watch for it and yet I miss it, the turning. How is it possible, with all the watching, all the hints and clues, how is it that it still happens overnight? Everything is green. There are leaves on the willow tree, our two plum trees have already blossomed and shed their petals in an orgy of fleeting beauty, nature’s flash mob, and the more sedate apple trees are budding. The fields are green with wheat, the farmers are out planting potatoes in their distinctive raised rows, the Raps (rapeseed, used to make canola oil) are almost full grown and yesterday I think I saw the first yellow flowers, and if you’ve never seen a field of Raps in full bloom you’re missing one of spring’s most wondrous wonders.

Is it like this everywhere, the surprise of it all? The forsythia are everywhere yellow (and the Swiss do love their forsythia), the tulips are coming, the grass is green, the roses are putting out leaves, it is spring, spring, wild full spring banishing memories of the bare brown fields as if they had never existed. On days like this, perhaps for a lost soul like mine only on days like this,  I can almost understand the resurrection story. On a day like today, I can almost believe that the dead shall rise again, life rising again like sap. It is spring, and everything around me is alive again, and in spite of all the watching and all the hints, it is as if it happened overnight. Life, wild and irrepressible.

Is it like this where you live? Does spring come like this where you live, come one night while you are sleeping so that when you wake winter is so surely banished it is hard to imagine winter ever covered the land? What is it like, right now, outside your window, where you live?

Nature, red in tooth and claw

Nature put on quite a display for the boys today. In the morning, the Boychen and I went into the woods to feed the mallards. It has turned cold again and the pond is frozen over except for a small patch of open water where a creek empties into the pond; well over a dozen mallards were clustered there. They hung back at our approach, which is unusual for them. They are not shy ducks – many people walk in these woods and many people feed the ducks – and  they know my boys’ voices well; the bolder among them start swimming for shore as soon as they hear the boys calling “Enteli! Enteli! Mir hai Brot!” (“Ducks! Ducks! We have bread!” They always call to the ducks in German because, as Small Boy tells me, being Swiss ducks they do not understand English.) But today they were hanging back and even when we started throwing bread into the water they remained still. Even Boychen noticed and asked me why they weren’t coming.

Then I heard it, a squawking, a yipping, a howling almost like a cat, more squawking. On the other side of the pond I saw three foxes flashing through the underbrush. More squawking. Boychen and I went to investigate but were hampered by the fact that I was pulling him on a pedal tractor, and the pedals were squeaking. We saw one fox again, but never did find the scene of whatever it was that happened. I’m assuming the foxes succeeding in killing a duck.

Then at lunch time I picked the Small Boy up from Kindergarten. The kids were all outside already, bundled up in their winter clothes and heading into the playground with the teaching apprentice who is spending this week in Small Boy’s classroom. They were hanging up a bird house or bird feeder. Suddenly two birds of prey – I think they were red kites but it happened fast and I’m not good at distinguishing between the kites and the buzzards that also live around here – fluttered and swooped and one of them nabbed a bird and flew away. They were about ten feet away from the kids. Small Boy went running after it, yelling “Hey, Vogel, los lo! Los lo!!” (Hey, bird, let it go! Let go!) but predator and prey were gone.

They boys know about nature. They know that animals eat other animals. They know that things die and they know that things get killed. I’m not entirely sure they needed such a close-up display though.

Bird foot

The boys and I went into the woods this morning to feed the ducks. On the way, in the middle of the path, we came upon a pile of black feathers and, upon closer inspection, a complete bird’s foot. Small Boy immediately asked if he could keep the foot; he’s “always wanted one.” I said sure, he can have the foot. It’s funny: R is the one who grew up on a farm but he’s reluctant to bring into the house all the birds’ nests and feathers and spotted cracked bird eggs we find in the woods. I’m the one who says sure, take the foot. Small Boy picked it up and walked along a bit, and we wondered if it was the fox that got the bird – I think it was a blackbird – or one of the kites or buzzards that live in the woods. Small Boy held the foot carefully and said “I’m sad for the bird because it had to die. But I’m glad I found the foot.”

I love that he thinks the bird foot is cool and not gross. I love that he takes a moment to be sad for the bird. I love the way he is part big boy and part small boy, part crazy wild kid and part sensitive soul. The kind of boy who thinks a bird foot is totally cool, but kind of sad.

A happy ending

I just saw my brother-in-law J head off for a ride on his chestnut horse, the one that has been limping for months, the one that’s been lying down to sleep, the one that J hasn’t let out in the pasture all winter. He has been walking him, gently, with a firm grip on the halter, around the farm for – I can’t remember how long: since the days were warm, I think. Certainly since before the snow. Since well before Thanksgiving. Vets have been out to look at him several times. I have been hoping for a good ending to this story. For my own sake, that I do not have to explain to the boys about putting animals down. For the boys’ sake, because they are attached to the horses, but for Boychen especially, who is crazy about them. For J’s sake, because he loves that horse.

They just headed out, slowly, into the dusk, with light-reflecting bands wrapped around the legs of both man and horse. They just headed out, towards the woods; towards, hopefully, a happy ending.

The Good Shepherd

Boychen and I were coming home from the grocery store when we saw the shepherd with his flock. He was driving the last of them them across the street. His pack donkey was already in the new field with one of the dogs, the other dog was working the stragglers across the road. Cars had stopped. Even when the sheep cleared the road cars slowed, watched. Boychen and I pulled into a (questionable, rutted) service road that bordered the field to look at the herd.

He was a Wanderhirte, a traditional wandering shepherd who even today moves his flock from field to field in search of good grass. From mid-November to March 15 – a time when much agricultural land in this region is at rest – the shepherds have the right to graze their herds where they can find good feed. Perhaps a dozen or so Wanderhirte still criss-cross Switzerland, summering in the Alps, coming down into the Mittleland in search of grass over the winter months. His herd was maybe 150 sheep, but I’m bad at judging these things. They were half-way out into the field, I didn’t have a good camera, so you’ll have to take it on faith: fifteen kilometers outside the capital city one of the last wandering shepherds in Switzerland  tends his flock.

(If you can read German, I found a profile of a Wanderhirte here.)

Just Thursday

It’s Thanksgiving in the US, but in Switzerland it is simply Thursday. For the Small Boy there was kindergarten to get to and tonight there will be a hockey practice. For the Boychen and I there was yard work: raking piles of dead wet leaves and hauling yet more wood to the wood pile. We potted some heather. Boychen helped Grossvati muck out the stalls (my brother-in-law has been sick and both R and my father-in-law have been helping with the horses) with his little plastic wheelbarrow and his little shovel; my father-in-law loves the worker bee side of the Boychen and doing this chore with him made his day. There was a bath, because if you help muck out the stalls you end up smelling like manure and not even a three year old can make that cute; then a bath for the car, because if you have a dirt driveway in this part of Switzerland in November, your car is going to look like you live on a farm. This afternoon I’ll do a shopping run to pick up a few things for Expat Thanksgiving, which we’re hosting on Saturday. Because this is just Thursday in Switzerland, and people had to go to work, and kindergarten, and daycare. But on Saturday, it’ll be Thanksgiving around here.

Happy Thanksgiving to everybody celebrating it today.

Other people’s rhythms

I am sitting at the kitchen table where I like to work in the mornings because of the light that comes through the window, because of the way the light falls on the willow tree, because of the woods across the street. I am watching a delivery of wood being unloaded from the flatbed and added to the wood pile. It means that the chipper will come in a day or two to chip the wood and blow it into the cellar where it is used for heating. Out the other window, the window above my kitchen sink, my brother-in-law is mucking out his horses’ stalls.

It is strange, sometimes, to live on this farm but to be outside of these labors. To be on the farm, but in many ways not of it. It was agreed, when we moved here, that we were not becoming an active part of the farm – R has his job and though I may want a garden I do not want a field – and that’s the way I still want it. All the same, it is a shock, sometimes, to walk into the kitchen and see a tractor with a load of wood in my driveway. To watch, nearly every morning, my brother-in-law muck out the stalls. To judge the temperature by whether he closes the windows on the stalls before he goes home in the evening. To be on this farm and not having quite figured out, yet, how to be part of the rhythm.

Hay is for horses. Hay bales are for little boys.

This is how the boys passed the time waiting for dinner:

running across the driveway and jumping onto the hay bales. Can you see them there, dangling off the hay bales? I didn’t want to get any closer to take the picture – they were in the middle of one of those golden moments when they were running around inventing games and requiring no adult interaction whatsoever, and any parent knows not to get in the middle of that.

The hay was baled last week and wrapped yesterday. That was the first time I’d seen bales wrapped up, and I think the wrapping machine is my new favorite piece of farm equipment. I love farm equipment – there’s a specialized machine for everything. There’s one machine for baling the hay and another machine for wrapping it. There’s a machine for harvesting the wheat and another for harvesting the corn and another for digging the potatoes and whole other machine for digging the sugar beets. No small farmer can afford all that machinery, of course; J hires the machinery he needs at harvest time and he hired the wrapper for the hay.

Silage, rather than hay, would be the proper term for it actually, and would you believe that Boychen taught me that word (which happens to be the same in German and English)? It makes perfect sense actually, since he is growing up on a farm and I did not; just another reminder to me of how situational language learning is, how situational language itself is. “The wrapping machine,” I wrote and I wasn’t far off: it’s a wrapper or a bale wrapper, and I’m currently as enthralled by it as any child.