Still life with thresher

Agricultural workers are exempt from the fairly strict Sunday work and noise regulations in Switzerland. If the crop is ready to come in, the crop is ready to come in; if the weather is fine for threshing, the weather is fine for threshing; and if somebody is threshing on a Sunday – a Sunday that is also the national day of Switzerland – complaints about it will go unanswered. In the farming village we lived in when I first moved to Switzerland, the people who bought the houses that had been newly constructed on the border of a farm had to sign a covenant stating that they were aware that they were buying a house in an active agricultural zone and they could not complain about the routine necessities of farming life: sheep and/or cow bells, the smell of manure, tractors driving on Sunday, the threshing going at all hours of the day when it’s time to get the wheat in. I wouldn’t be surprised if the owners of the houses that border J’s fields – houses built on farm land my in-laws sold as construction land – had to sign on to something similar.

Wheat is an extremely time-sensitive crop (one of the many things I’ve learned since marrying into a farm family): once the wheat is ripe there is a very short window – a few days – before the grains starts falling. And you need fine weather for threshing. Wet wheat stalks fall over and do not pass easily through the thresher. Wet wheat also brings a lower price if you are able to harvest in the rain. So when the wheat is ready and the weather is fine, it’s time to thresh no matter what day it is.

Which is how my father- and brother-in-law came to be threshing on not just any Sunday, but Sunday August first, which is Switzerland’s national day. Most small family farmers don’t own their own threshers (a combine harvester can run about $250,000) – they hire a thresher, and the farmer who owns the machine does the actual driving. The farmers who own the fields ferry the tractor-trailers into which the grains are emptied back and forth to the barn. So strictly speaking, my brother-in-law was not threshing; N, who owns the combine, was threshing. He let Boychen and Small Boy ride along for a few passes. 

I feel like such a kid when the big farm machines come out. I get as excited by them as the boys do.

Clinging to life

A few of the apple branches on the wood pile are starting to blossom. They do not yet know that they are dead.

More notes from spring, illustrated

Kristen asked for some pictures from The Farm, and I’m happy to oblige.

Boychen and I spent the morning moving more rocks, bringing some dead plants to the Mist (I don’t know the English word for this: it’s where my brother-in-law dumps the old straw after he mucks out the horses’ stalls), and wandering around the farm. We blew soap bubbles and ate our morning snack outside in the sun, sitting on the rock wall my husband sat on when he was a boy.

To bring the rocks around to the rock pile, we’ve traded in the wheelbarrow for something with a little more horsepower:

Now if we could use this, we’d be done in no time:

* * *

About a week ago, I noticed that the moths had returned, beating against my kitchen window as I stood at the sink rinsing off the last of the dishes. Today I noticed that the butterflies, too, have returned.

* * *

While Boychen took his afternoon nap, the Small Boy (who is no longer so small and who will need a new pseudonym soon) and I played hockey in the driveway.

Between periods, he planted sunflowers.

* * *

And there was this:

and this (can you believe that sky?):

and this:

* * *

A farm country almanac

I think it is real this time, this turn towards spring. People who know better than I – the farmers who live in and around this village – are becoming active. On the twenty-minute walk to the school to pick up the Small Boy from Kindergarten, Boychen and I saw four tractors driving down the main road and two more on the way home. Then there is the one my brother-in-law cleaned today behind the barn, hosing everything down, tuning up the engine. In the afternoon he paced off the fields for plowing. The pace of life has very suddenly quickened in this farming community.

* * *

I am digging up more rocks, making another flower bed, this one on the other side of the kitchen door. Boychen brings the smaller ones to the rock pile next to the barn in his wheel-barrow, three soft-ball sized rocks at a time. It is slow, but heart-wrenchingly adorable.

* * *

The boys save their chicken bones for the fox that lives in the woods next to our house. Its den is right next to the foot path we take to the duck pond, and the boys and my mother-in-law have protected it from the many dogs that get walked in these woods by criss-crossing downed branches over the entrance. This is the fox that made quick work of five of eight ducklings last summer, something Small Boy knows very well, but he loves it anyway.

* * *

Yesterday I strapped The Boychen into his bike-on-a-stick and ran him up and down the hills on the mountain bike course in the woods. He now thinks I am the coolest. mama. ever! 

* * *

It was a long winter. Much, much too long. The farmers are out; half the gardens in the neighborhood are showing freshly turned dirt. The bees have found my crocuses. It was a long winter, but I think we’re turning the corner.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

I spoke too soon. I always do. The first warm day always does this, the first buds, the first bees. We saw bees on Monday, bees greedily visiting our pocket of crocuses by the rose bushes, and my mind turned to spring, turned sharp and sudden. It couldn’t last, of course, this is March in Switzerland; we can get – have gotten – snow on Easter, after all. I know that, after all these years I know that a warm day can be followed by snow. But that first day, that first post card from spring, always sets my head spinning.

Remembering spring

I came back from the mountains to find the first hints of spring, spring at last after this long grey winter. Every year I forget: forget how grey the winter will be, forget the dense fog that blankets the sky, forget the dismal way the fields look when they are only half-covered with snow. This year there have been new things to learn about winter. How the gravel road leading to our house becomes pock-marked with holes. How our driveway becomes a river of mud. How our car gets covered with splatter and spray. How the boys track little grains of salt into the house however many doormats I lay down.

But this morning there are signs of spring. The snow has melted away to show the green grass. The snowbells are up under the willow tree. The bulbs I planted last fall are beginning to sprout. My thoughts have turned to the garden and the plans I must make with my mother-in-law. Today, at least, the sky is blue and the sun is shining into my kitchen and there is a bird singing out my window. Today, at least, I remember what I had forgotten, what it seems impossible to forget and what I forget every year: it ends. The fog burns off, sooner or later, and spring returns.

Late bloomer

Late in life – she will turn fifteen next summer – our cat has turned into a mouser. Two days running now, I have stumbled upon dead mice. I found the first by accident, in the laundry room. It was lying on a towel on the floor that Miss Cat appropriated quite some time ago as a soft place to curl up and hide from the boys, and I glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye. The laundry room is downstairs, next to the boiler room, and I’m sure the mouse came from the boiler room; we do all of our living on the ground floor, so a mouse or two in the boiler room doesn’t bother me much. It’s a farm; it’s inevitable.

This morning there was a dead mouse lying next to my bed when I woke up. It makes sense now, the way the cat jumped onto our bed in the middle of the night, pranced a little circle around me, and jumped down to the floor again with a soft cat thump. Then back to the bed, a circle, a thump. It is what she does when we accidently shut the bedroom door with her in the room, but the door was open, and it was four o’clock in the morning and I was annoyed and I pushed her – hard – off the bed. Then this morning, the mouse. Ah, yes. She had wanted  to show it to me, in the middle of the night. (Please, let’s all assume that the mouse was not in her mouth when she jumped up on the bed. Nevertheless, the sheets, they are being washed.) I’ve just finished reading The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig, and allow me to steal an expression from his character Rose: I take exception to mice – live or otherwise – in the bedroom.

Miss Cat has lived nearly all of her life in urban apartments. Now, in her old age, the farm is speaking to her instincts. Good for her. Just not in the bedroom.

This, again

Every year I forget what autumn in this part of Switzerland is like. This part of Switzerland, where we can see the mountains but are not in them. This part of Switzerland lying at 500 meters above sea-level, this moist and temperate section of Switzerland. Every year I forget this, forget about the low-lying fog, the weak sunlight failing to break through, the damp air. The rain and the grey. The way the chill sinks into everything but temperatures do not fall enough for snow. Bare trees, sodden limp brown grass. Now that we’re on the farm our driveway is a ribbon of mud: there is not enough sun to dry it, not enough chill to at least freeze it hard. Every year I forget this, forget that from now until spring, sunshine will not come to us. 

From now until spring we will be chasing the sun, gaining elevation, getting above the clouds. When we can. Work, Kindergarten – these things keep up in the flatlands. Hockey practice bang at noon steals our Saturdays. I look out the window of my studio – the studio with walls the color of Idaho skies, and now I remember why my heart chose this color – and cannot see our nearest neighbors half a kilometer away. Every year I forget this, this grey blanket. I can remember the exact color of light shimmering across Swiftcurrent Lake the summer I was nine, but from one year to the next I forget the color of this fog.

* * *

Honestly compels me to confess that the mornings are worse than the afternoons, that often, by mid-day, even the Bernese Mittleland shrugs its shoulders and shakes off the mantle of fog.

Raspberries

Also from several weeks ago…

A walk in the woods

We live next to the woods. Some of it is privately owned and occasionally harvested; some of it is a nature preserve with a pond, a brook, and ducks. There is a fox, there are herons. The boys treat it as their private paradise and go into the woods almost every day; it is my mother-in-law’s favorite thing to do with them. This afternoon we went on a mushroom expedition, or, as the Boychen said “memli looga” (Schwemmli luega, Swiss for looking at mushrooms). There was also dancing and tree climbing.