Traditions

Stick season. Not just a song: a reality. When the majority of foliage is underfoot, the hillside palette reduced to Beech yellows and rusted oaks, we are officially in stick season. For me, there is something beautiful in the stark reduction from foliage to barren. A reminder that everything, and everyone, has their season.

When I awaken and open the shades, the sheep are standing at the fence looking back at me: waiting. I send a slightly frenetic wave so they see my hand, and hurry about pulling on boots and struggling into my barn coat to open the chicken coop doors and drop hay for the flock. This is our new winter routine. That the fields are clipped and manure spread means the sheep can no longer graze so they are up in their winter paddock. The chickens delight in their company and spend long fall afternoons lolling in the wool on the ewes backs.

Each day we incorporate chores to tick off our list. We have fixed broken gates, sheared the rears and trimmed the hooves of the sheep. Studs on our winter tires clackety-clack down the road and we’ve both sat on folding metal chairs at the pharmacy waiting to have flu shots.

Heaters are plugged in to keep buckets from becoming miniature skating rinks. Christmas cards and neighborhood holiday gathering invites are at the ready. Whole chickens from our friend Paul’s farm are tucked into our freezer next to tall jars of bright red pasta sauce and basil green pesto. Bags of shrunken kale rest atop tightly wrapped zucchini and pumpkin bread. Crates overflowing with bulbs of Music garlic and softball size red and yellow onions are stacked in the corner of the dirt floor part of the basement.

A pumpkin carved with our can’t-think-of-anything-else square-toothed smile stood lit last night, Halloween, as orange greeter on our stone wall.

So begins the season of traditions.

This morning Paul stood, holding the wooden ladder as I climbed, arms full of Halloween decorations, up to the loft above our garage where cardboard boxes sit, still stuffed with misfit decorations that didn’t make the cut this year. I teeter precariously while pushing our ceramic pumpkin back into the cushioned spot where he will spend the next twelve months grinning eerily into the darkness.

We climb into the truck and head for the same Christmas tree farm we go to on the same day each year. I carry a marker and round roll of orange tape in my pocket next to my camera so that we can record our trip for our sons who used to make it with us. As I step out of the truck I feel nostalgia mixed with melancholy, missing the sound of four boys hitting the ground running to find the best Christmas tree. Now Paul and I let Seamus hit the ground running while we stroll the fields.

When I am tired, my head too full of details, I wonder why we insist on doing things exactly as we have done them year after year when much of why we did them has, naturally, changed. And then we see it: the tall thin balsam with the spindly top and I remember. Paul quickly takes out the tape measure and makes sure it is not too tall but not too short. Just right. We grin at each other, envisioning what it will look like when we finish draping it in decorations and memories. We carefully write PERLEY on the tag and tie a bright orange piece of tape on it for good measure. We make a mental mark as to where the tree stands, so we can return to the right one the day after Thanksgiving.

I make many of the same foods my mother and grandmother did for their Thanksgiving tables. Green bean casserole holds pride of place in that one meal a year. I use my own green beans and that is the only difference. If I attempted to make it healthy I would hear about it. Endlessly.

When we begin decorating for Christmas our son in LA insists on a Zoom-tour. The first year he saw white versus colored colored lights on our tree he told me to end the call. He was kidding…and not kidding.

We sort through ornaments belonging to my grandmother and a box of real aluminum tinsel that I don’t use but keep. Kindergarten-made paper ornaments with yarn hangers, instruments with children’s faces and a paper-mache Santa tree topper that our son Micheal created in graded school. All there. year after year.

This year on Halloween we drove up through the Champlain Valley to Vergennes. We wandered around, poked into the antique store and stopped for Cider-Donut ice cream at Lu Lu’s. On the way home we stopped and took the dog for a hike in the fading afternoon sunlight. Plan was to come home, feed dogs then set out again to a street that is shut off from traffic and where witches, warlocks and goblins race down the street, their sweaty parents follow pushing the baby in a stroller. Houses decorated with spider webs, scary music emanating from inside, it has been our tradition for many years. When we arrived home from Vergennes we hurried into the warm house and I felt the breath sigh out of me.

I turned to Paul and said, “We don’t have to go.”

We looked at each other, both surprised by my statement. “But we do… don’t we?”

We didn’t and we didn’t. One of the things Paul was afraid would happen was that I would feel an emptiness the next day for missing out. We lit a fire and a candle, ate dinner on our little black card table then watched a spooky movie.

“Let go of the rope,” was a term my dad used when I was beginning to water ski as a small child. I was always instructed, if I felt danger, to “Let go of the rope.” In letting go, I find there is a whoosh of freedom that fills me. A realization that there is a difference between (even a self-imposed) “have to” and “want to”. What I felt was letting go of this particular tradition rope for this particular year was okay and when that happens other things become okay to let go of as well.

Traditions are beautiful as long as we don’t use them to hang onto a rope to, as an example, our kid’s childhoods.

In farming I have learned how to be flexible, to know when to try one more time to catch that ailing ewe or resigned to rain on garlic planting day. This has permeated other parts of my life and for that, this month of Thanksgiving, I am grateful.

Just don’t ask me to give up the green bean casserole.