We started on this Would-Be Farm adventure with the idea of novelty: new experiences are meant to  keep our brains nimble and what-not. The effort of tackling a fresh set of challenges would be good for us. 

Such as driving a tractor and putting fruit trees into the ground and helping them grow roots. 

Such as returning to the North Country where I grew up and re-learning that country environment. Plus introducing Jeff to some exotic charms: a bullhead fry, turkey hunting, snow. 

​Knowing that, unlike actual farmers, our livelihood and future is not on the line when the dam busts and the crops fail.  

So, round about January of each of the past five years, seed catalogs begin to sprout in my mailbox. Deals from on-line nurseries pop up like weeds. Calls to branch out into new crops... I won't belabor the metaphor any more than I can...bear. Muah ha ha.

Round about April, it's become our happy habit to make our ways North. I try to get there in time for my sister's birthday early in the month, and Jeff generally follows after sailing Charleston Race Week. We usually get a snowstorm or two, maybe an ice-storm, just to remind us that we are mere tourists in the North Country.

It's too early for planting in early April, and it's more than a bit nippy –– though we do have a WOOD STOVE this year! 

Still, even with a crochet throw of snow, you can see the rocky bones of the land early in early spring. And it's an exciting few weeks while plants wake up out of the cold clay and yawn hope into the landscape.

We're not sure when we'll get there this year. What with the Pandemic and all. Of course I ordered plants before COVID-19 was no more than a small cloud on the horizon.

I can't resist those colorful packets of optimism that promise poppies, lupins, chamomile. Plus garlic and seed-potatoes (thrifty hint: if your potatoes sprout in the fridge, put them in the ground --  you'll generally get a smallish bonus harvest a few months later instead of adding to the landfill).

And, because the larger fruit have not flourished under our neglectful stewardship, I have ambitions for Chinese chestnut trees, red currents, bush-cherries, and yet more elderberries. Although elderberries are not a favored deer browse according to experts, empirical evidence suggests that some deer will "sample" an elderberry bush to within inches of its life. 

As with so much recently, we'll just have to wait and see. We'll shelter in place and I'll let my farming daydreams slide me along a little longer. I'm not complaining. 

Practice might not make perfect, but it does generate words...

Story 1 -- Found
She found him well, if a bit pale. Not unexpected given that he'd been underground all this time.

She wondered if he'd turned his face, so like a flower with that hair of his, toward the light that had filtered down there.

What would he see from there? The soles of shoes, the clench of a mittened fist, possibly the odd glimpse up a skirt. And who would have looked down to see him? 


Story 2 -- Sentimental Fools
They were sitting side-by-side, the way young men do, not looking at one another. The one with the oversized sports jersey was saying, "I don't even."

His friend, a skinny kid with an unfortunate haircut, repeated the question, "But did you know that she was out there?"

Sport-jersey rolled his eyes at the question. "Like, somewhere my sweet prince awaits me?"

His friend slid his glass around the tabletop in a circle, making the ice clink. He didn't look up from under the rug of his hair.

"Okay, yeah, I mean I was hoping eventually there'd be someone.   You know ––" Sports-jersey's voice took on a mocking sing-song diction. "Somewhere, out there."

Sporty took a noisy gulp from his glass, pushing the ice away from his teeth with a pink tongue. The two gazed across the flimsy railing that separated the little tables from the rest of the sidewalk. 

After a long pause, Sporty released his breath in a puff and said, "I don't know how I found her, but I was looking for as long as I remember." 

His friend reacted with a single hair-flopping nod. They fist-bumped without drama, the glancing connection casual and unthinking.

Everyone knows someone who is irrationally (well, that's all in the perspective, right?) afraid of, say, legless reptiles or eight-legged wall-walkers.

​Not just slightly averse to these creatures, but seriously, panicky, clawing-a-way-out-the-window fearful.  

Each of my parents had one. For my father and his siblings, having survived a canoeing accident as children where they and their mother clung to an overturned boat while long strands of seaweed brushed their legs, the fear was snakes.

I never noticed Mumsie's issue until that first summer at the cottage. We'd gone to take a quick look at what they had purchased –– waterfront! as is! Bill Bailey blue! furnished with toys and musty furniture! –– on the shore of Lake Ontario. We ended up just staying all summer. Daddo went off to work downstate during the week while the three of us swam and read books and played with the neighbors (each according to her tastes. Mumsie was not much for running around pretending to be horses).

Naturally, given the body of fresh water, the long Northern summer days, and the untenanted nature of the cottage, there were spiders.  But it was a summer cottage. When sweeping, you directed the little pile of debris down that knot-hole in the floor in the hallway. On Thursdays, before Daddo came up, we'd eat ice-cream for supper. It was a Platonic ideal of summer cottage life.

Except for the spiders. One morning, we all scooted out of the house while Mumsie sprayed some sort of aerosolized poison. We must have been gone all day. Or maybe it was stormy when we returned, because while my sister and I, diminutive then, walked into the shadowy cottage without incident, our mother entered to a suspended carpet of deceased arachnids. All hanging at about eye-height from the ceiling. The horror. The horror.

Eventually, she dredged up a memory for me. "It might be this," she said, draping her paperback over her knee. "When I was very little –– on the farm in Springville –– I was playing in the creek."  [The word "creek" in the geography of rural northern Pennsylvania was pronounced "crick." A thing I miss from her.]

She turned her head in the same questing way as when she was trying to recall the details of a dream. "I was splashing the water with a stick and there was an enormous water-spider. I hit it and it burst open and dozens –– hundreds?–– of baby spiders spilled out."

Gulp. Okay then. 

My sister shares the distaste for spiders. We've often agreed that should there be an unfortunate single-car accident in her life, it's a near certainty to have involved a spider emerging from under the dashboard and landing on exposed skin.

​As for spiders?  I understand they won't actually kill me, but I find it hard to casually look away once I've noticed one nearby. I find their globular bodies shudderingly distasteful.

Be that all as it may. I actually meant to write about weird phobias. There's no shortage of oddity in the world.  And phobias are the most common of mental illnesses.

Mental illness. Huh. ​

​I've felt claustrophobia. Couldn't get into an elevator for two years.  It was a side-effect, I think, of a dreadful boyfriend and asthma.

Once I nearly fainted –– and me a farm kid! –– at the vision of a big splinter protruding from someone else's finger. All the blood and guts in the world, and I was about to keel over from a splinter. I couldn't even help her yank it out. 

But that's pretty mundane stuff. What's more intriguing is the fringier fears.