How Much Is Enough

The difficult days are the ones filled with the “why me?” or, maybe, “why not me?”

We all know what it is to have someone make comment from the corner of their mouth; wondering how you possibly manage to live in a house with “only” one bathroom, drive a car that a family of four couldn’t possibly live in, exist on your income, work for yourself, be happy..things like that.

Even when I quiet my immediate single-fingered response and recognize where the actual insecurity lies, I’m still triggered. I begin looking at my house, my car, my kids, my hair, more critically. It can shift my day, my year, at times, my life.

When we moved into this house it came with several large outbuildings, a lot of open land, woods, even an old hunting camp, perfect for filming scary movies in, and one bathroom for six people. It sits off the road surrounded by beautiful hardwoods and conifer from the depths of which the crystalline call of the Hermit thrush rings all summer. While others suffer the unbearable heat of August, we listen to the leaves brush past each other cooling our darkened rooms. It is an amazingly beautiful place to live and yet some people can’t get past the one bathroom. We knew that, one terrible day, the banter and chaos of four wrestling boys would disappear and so, while we initially added bedrooms off the back, we left the one bathroom, secure in the knowledge that patience is a virtue and money could be better spent. It was, and still is, enough.

Our cello shop serves as both work space and showroom. Many a time you can catch us racing around, vacuuming wood shavings before, or as, a customer drives in. Adjacent to the shop is an old garage into which we moved large table saws and other woodworking equipment. When I see someone arrive from a more urban setting, I sometimes wonder what it would take to turn that garage space into gleaming showroom resplendent with ticking clocks and hanging lab coats. But, over eggs, we line up our ability to ride out business storms with no large loans to repay, against the gleaming and ticking. And we begin vacuuming shavings again: comforted by the sound and the fact that it is still enough.

For my birthday this year, Paul planned out the day. After working youth orchestra in the morning we sat down to pastries and hot chocolate at our local bakery which had just reopened after the flood. It felt comforting to be back in that space, licking my fingers, powdered sugar on the front of my shirt.

We headed down the Champlain valley watching the villages quietly spread out into farm land, enjoying the golden glow of the November Beeches. Some of the fields have been turned over and manured, the soil black as ink, the land roller-coastering down the gentle slope, ending as if dumping the fields into the lake. To our right rise the Adirondacks, sharp and muscled. To the left, the Greens, softer, the afternoon sunlight darkening them deep blue. This is where farms live. Large, industrial farms, functional and square: we can barely make out the cattle that never venture outside anymore. Big old farms, their happy red paint peeling. The fields dotted with rusted equipment and tractors, not so much stopped as finished. Farms generations old: the farmhouses with white porches where an unknown great grandfather brought his young bride to begin their life in a time when you could purchase land with meager savings and a promise to make it work. Now the great-grandchildren still farm but work in collared shirts during the day, milk at night in coveralls and wonder, through their fatigue, how they can possibly ask their children to take this all on.

As we drive past, their stories hum through my mind and I think about what would have been different had we begun earlier. Wishing for those white porches and a barn that had space for some pigs.

But when we pull again into our dirt driveway I see our small wooden barn, built on the dreams of ten sheep, space enough for their winter food. I see Paul drawing it all on scrap paper after dinner and pulling scratchy, stiff pieces of hardware cloth around the corners of each chicken coop, our neighbor, Mark climbing around the rafters, hammer hanging from his belt. It was built this size to keep us from growing too much, too quickly. To make sure that we took the time necessary to really learn how to care for the animals we had chosen to shepherd, to fall within a limited budget and make sure everyone, including us, could eat. Because of this planning it was, and remains, enough.

This morning I grab the bag of tiny clover seeds I bought to help add nitrogen to our pastures. I carry it down the road to the fields, opening the metal gate, pausing for a moment to look over at the fresh dirt under which our dark ewe Charlotte sleeps. I look back up at the sheep’s winter paddock and see one of the ewes standing at the fence, watching me. I begin wandering across the field, dipping my hand into the paper bag, lifting it out and broadcasting. The light, cold breeze lends a hand. Muir flies past me to stand at the stone wall and bark at a chipmunk.

We don’t have a mechanical seeder to pull behind our Farmall. We have me, in my wool hat. I can only afford a relatively small amount of clover seed so I have to be selective about what parts of the pasture need it the most. After walking back and forth throughout the field in the early afternoon sunshine, my cheeks cold from the wind, I’ve saved a fistful of seed and walk over to where Charlotte lies and broadcast over her. With a tractor, or without, the field has been seeded. And come spring, it will be enough.

Happy Thanksgiving.