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.

Corn harvest (from the last weekend in September)

So now that I have regained the ability to post pictures, I will be bombarding you with the pictures I’ve been wanting to post since we moved here; there will be more images than words in these next few posts.

A farm morning

I have not been withholding pictures of the new place deliberately; I haven’t been able to upload photos for some time now. Then again, I hadn’t upgraded WordPress for forever, so I finally got around to doing that and lo! and behold! A farm morning.

Winter begins

And suddenly, after a burst of energy, the harvest is in* and the fields are bare. Two weeks ago it was the potatoes, three-and-a-half days of digging the potatoes, the rented machine, my parents-in-law cooking tables and tables of food to feed the people they hired to help with the harvest and sending us plates of lunch every day (since they were cooking anyway); the following weekend the corn, my brother- and father-in-law driving load after load of corn to the Genossenschaft (farmers’ coop), my father-in-law taking Small Boy up in the tractor for a round or two; last Thursday the sugar beets and after the digging is done the boys and I comb the fields for the broken and crushed bits to bring to the horses. Better than apples, chunks of sugar beets for the horses. We come home with a wagon-load and my father-in-law laughs at how these boys, the Boychen in particular, spoil those horses. (Every day it is “Lady. Apple. Lady. Apple.” They perk up their ears now, and reach their long necks out of their stalls when they hear the Boychen’s voice. The Boychen means apples.)

The crops are in, there is a last flurry of work putting the garden to bed and then, although it is October, winter will begin on the farm, season of resting and waiting.

* I want to be perfectly clear that I am a passive observer in all of this; we live here but are not active farmers.

Digging, planting, growing

I am digging a flower bed. Reclaiming it from the stretch along the house that has been neglected since R’s parents moved out of this house and into the new house they built on the property in 2000. Weeding, of course, but also digging large rocks out of the ground, using them as a border, and building up the soil. I pried over a dozen rocks, ranging in size from potatoes to large loaves of bread, out of the dirt yesterday and there are as many again still to go. Then on to the other side, newly exposed last weekend after R hacked down a decade’s worth of overgrown shrubbery that the boys dragged off to the wood pile one branch at a time. It is all rocks over there, and I will do this again, the digging up of the rocks, the making of a boarder, the building up of the soil. Then I will put in my bulbs – I’ve got allium and narcissus, crocus and muscari, three colors of tulips – and wait to see what spring brings me.

This too is why we moved here. It wasn’t just the boys who needed more space. It wasn’t just the boys who needed to be outside. It wasn’t just the boys who needed a place they could call their own, a yard and garden to get muddy in, to dig up and cultivate and experiment and make mistakes. It wasn’t just the boys who needed projects and jobs: hauling the wood to the wood pile, wheeling the weeds off to the compost in their wheel-barrows, weeding, digging rocks, planting bulbs. This too is why we moved here.

In the spring I will have rows in the garden. R’s mother has been keeping a farm garden for fifty years (longer; since she was old enough to help, I imagine) – lettuce and onions and beans and cauliflower; tomatoes and squash and zucchini – and in the spring I will have rows in the garden. (Small Boy is ahead of me on this – for the past two years he has had his own row of green beans that he has taken care of from planting through to plucking.) My mother-in-law is in her seventies now and cannot keep up with a large farm garden; she has been turning over more space to flowers, the raspberry canes have gotten out of control, and she cannot keep up with the weeding. She is more than happy to turn some rows over to me. I am new to all this and torn between diving in and planting many rows and moving more slowly. I want tomatoes and zucchini and eggplant and sweet peas. I do not know how to do any of this, but I have a farm wife, a farm wife who was before that a farm daughter, for a mother-in-law and that is better than having an entire shelf of gardening books. In the spring I will have rows in the garden.

We are digging. We are planting. We are growing.

Down on the farm

It didn’t take long before we were in each others’ pockets; it’s the boys, mostly, who promote this by running up Grossmütti’s walk and through her front door at all hours. They want to play with Grossmütti, and they want to play with her dog, and they have made their grandparents’ house an extension of their own.

I see my brother-in-law J more than ever, just about every day in fact, and hear myself inviting him to dinner. The Boychen has fallen utterly and completely in love with his uncle’s horses (the first words out of his mouth in the morning, after his brother’s name, are “Lay-dee. App-uh.” and he will not rest until we have brought apples to the horses) and J is kind and patient and gentle explaining the horses, showing the boys how to hold out an apple flat on your palm with your fingers close together and bending towards the ground. The boys sit on the steps and watch their uncle lead the horses from their stalls to the pasture to graze; they help him give them their hay in the evenings. They become part of his routine and he accepts these little boys running tag behind him.

But it’s not just the boys knitting these houses together. It’s me, too. Half-way through cooking dinner one night I discover that I don’t have any tomato paste and I send R over to his parents’ house to borrow some. When my mother-in-law goes away for a weekend, I invite my father-in-law to dinner. Sometimes the boys and I eat lunch over there. This morning I sat in their living room and watched the Bundesratswahl (election of a new member of the seven-member cabinet that heads the Swiss Parliament) with them. They knock on our door for something, I go in search of J about a truck that has arrived to pick up a construction container. We borrow their car when I break the driver’s side rear-view mirror on ours, I ask them if they need anything when I make a dash to the grocery.

I’m enjoying this, this being part of an extended family, learning how to do it for the first time in my life. I like getting to know my brother-in-law. After being married to R for a few weeks shy of ten years now, I feel like I am finally getting to know his brother. I’ve seen him nearly weekly for years, at Sunday dinner or Sunday brunch, but this is different somehow, this calling out hello as The Boychen and I take our morning tour around the farm, this watching him muck out the stalls, drive the fork-lift back and forth to organize the barn, this seeing him come and go and live his life. 

I love seeing my sons with their grandparents. I love that they can have this, their grandparents across the drive, their uncle a huge part of their lives, and through them a connection to the rest of R’s family – cousins in his mother’s home village – that I would never, on my own, cultivate. Two weeks ago I sat with my mother-in-law in the garden of R’s aunt, with one of R’s cousins and her children, and Small Boy played with his first cousins and chattered happily in Swiss and I was happy to be there, part of this big messy family. To my great surprise, I am having such a good time getting all tangled up with this big messy family.

Chaos, in a good way

We’re in the house. We’re unpacking boxes. (Opening scores of boxes with a Swiss Army knife while on blood-thinners does give one pause…) We’re having a heat wave. My studio on the ground floor is the coolest room in the house. I am almost all set up in here. I love the walls and the sage growing outside my window and the organization forced on my desk by the act of packing and unpacking. (I am determined to keep it this way.) I haven’t actually written in my writing studio, because there are other room to organize and other boxes to unpack. Boxes and boxes to unpack. We have too many things, R and I, and the act of moving made me realize that the boys have more than enough toys. We have, all four of us, more than enough. It is my project for the rest of the year: to pare down, to simplify. And, once the last moving carton has been flattened, to write within these four walls.

Blue paint

Outside it is raining, the sky grey and compressed by low-lying clouds. Inside I am painting the walls the color of my childhood, the color of my heart, the color of my father, the color that comes as close as I could find to the “high blue windless skies”* of an early Idaho autumn without flying to Ketchum and cutting a swatch from the sky to bring to the paint shop.

I am painting the walls of the room that will be my private studio in the house that will be our home in two weeks. We are moving to the countryside, to the farming village where R’s parents live, to a second house on the farm property. It has been a long time coming, this move, something R and I have walked around slowly, circling closer each time it comes up for discussion. I have loved this neighborhood, this city, these views; I have loved this urban life but it is time for a change.

I am excited: excited to paint, to decorate, to have my own studio. Excited to have a garden. Excited to have space, inside and out, to breathe. I am anxious: I have been an urban creature for so many years now. Before this Swiss life, I lived here and here. I will miss things, I know, I will miss this city I have come to love. But the move will be good.

And my walls will be the color of an Idaho sky.

* Ernest Hemingway