My gardening heros, the Davises from Denver, used to send me homemade jars of rhubarb in exchange for some favor or another.

​I don't remember the chore, but I do remember the treat: that nearly chalky, stringy goop with a sour/sweet flavor that reminds me so much of springtime in the North Country. 

I know, sounds delish, right?  But no, it is.

Consulting my notes, I see that it took me until 2017 to put in rhubarb plants at the Farm. It takes them a couple of years to get their feet under them, but they've done quite well.  Enough for us to have a half dozen or so desserts in the last couple of years. 

But is that really enough Rheum rhababarum? No.

Obviously.

Still, it was an extra surprise bonus that we acquired another patch of rhubarb this past summer.

The nearest small town (pop. 650 people) did earn a mention in a Neil Young song, but frankly, the Would-Be Farm is located somewhere just this side of Beyond. The wild-and-wooly frontier nature of the place is mostly lovely, but it does have the occasional drawback. 

For instance, our former neighbors just to our north...nice folks, perhaps, but considerably more gun-happy than makes us entirely comfortable. Sure, fire your gun at a target, a varmint, dinner. But random gunfire? Combined with a LOT of empty bottles and very loud (and frankly awful) 1970's rock'n'roll? Oh boy.

So for the past couple of years, when these neighbors were in residence, my favorite skipper and I simply avoid the north section of that one field. Discretion being the larger part of not catching a piece of lead. 

It's not generally part of the culture out there near Beyond to call the coppers. Or at least not until things have escalated to the sort transgression that does deliberate physical harm. Holding a hootenanny at midnight on a Tuesday, well that's annoying, but live and let live. Letting your toddlers run loose at night –– well, that goes too far.

Anyhoo. Those lively neighbors with the large supplies of ammo moved along, leaving a "For Sale" sign behind them.

Things sometimes work themselves out.   

Which is how the Would-Be Farm grew a little over the summer.  We gained an additional 40 or so neglected old apple trees, an open field, and a honking big patch of rhubarb.

His reserved "hello" morphs into a grinning, winking welcome. "Oh! If only..." he always ends up sighing. Charming Aunt P makes conquests left and right. 

​I know she had the quarryman and his crew move and readjust rocks over and over and over again until she had her flagstone patio just the way she liked. It's to her credit that the quarryman made it beautiful and remembers her fondly.

​You have to listen to them or learn to live with some half-assed, unbalanced construct. 

What can be more beautiful than an elegant old stone wall?  ​Running mostly straight, like a seam across a landscape -- ooh, ahh.

Putting words on the screen and trying not to be too judgy-judgy about whatever my creativity chucks out...

Like sunburned beachgoers storming an ice-cream parlor, the tiny leaf-shaped fires spread a conflagration of color across the woodlot.  

Inside the wood, under the bright canopy, the leaf-strewn floor shines brighter yet. Rafts of bronze-backed turkey drift through this orange world. Devilish tuft-eared black squirrels add a Halloween accent, digging with only the barest pause to glare at an intruder.

A pair of leggy yearling deer skitter around a doe. She rarely stops moving, nosing through the leaves for beechnuts, for tender branch-ends, for windfall apples. 

Prey animals are changing color from spring chestnut to ashy brown. In a week they will disappear into a stand of dead grass simply by standing still, but just now, in this pumpkin-spice week of peak color, they pop.
​
 

Once we discovered the neglected rows of apple trees on the Would-Be Farm and started their rehabilitation, the first question was always, "But what kind of apples?"

And for six years, I've answered (at painful, literal length), "We aren't sure."

​Because, long story short, we have had one dang thing after another.  Most critically, we've never been on hand when the fruits fully ripened without a late frost that nipped the buds, or that plague of tent caterpillars, or the zombie apocalypse, et cetera. 

But this year --!

​First, aside from the considerable matter of a drought, it was a good year for fruit on the Farm. We had the first ripe apples in late August. 

And with fruit in hand, it's possible to start identifying them. Not to mention eating them.

To figure out what kind of apple it is, one starts with looking at the size and shape of the fruit, the color and texture of its skin, the quality and color of the flesh, and finally, the flavor and juiciness of the apple. Phew.

I spent a lot of time sitting with a pile of apples, leafing through my reference book.  I'm only sure of a few varieties ––  but it's a start.

So much happened over the summer on the Would-Be Farm, and so little of it has anything to do with us humans. 

This is the longest stretch in his adult life that my favorite skipper has spent away from sail boats. 

For decades, we schedule our year around various regattas. We've missed weddings and birthdays because of our sailing calendar. As I remember, we'd been together for five years before taking a trip that was NOT related to sailing.  

Because of regattas, we've traveled to Italy and Sardinia and Greece and all over South America. And North America. Hawaii even. The year the Flying Scot North American championship was held in Texas, we planned a summer adventure that took us looping out West.  All for sailing competitions. 

Racing on the bounding main –– it's a sport, a calling, a joy. It's the bones of our life together. 

Then along comes the Covid-19 Pandemic, leaving us high and dry.

​Which is how we've managed to finish the Woodbee in a matter of months. 

When last we left the build, the 600-square-foot structure was dried in, with a pair of walls and a loft accessible by pull-down ladder. Jeff and I had put down flooring, lathered paint on everything that held still, and set the wood stove into place.

When we arrived in late April, the list of to-dos was not inconsiderable: walls, plumbing, electricity, kitchen, bathroom...

And a drumroll, please....

And ––

​But –– 

My favorite skipper eventually called it: mad dash.

It will seem quaint someday how we drove north in a self-contained little world of snacks and Lysol wipes with a U-Haul full of Would-Be Farm equipment and furniture.

It will be just another page in the Quarantine Chronicles how we isolated and monitored.

Perhaps we'll remember how we could only hope our precautions and cheerful masks will have made a difference. ​

​But it seems instead that this is the year we are reminded that Mamma Nature not only holds all the cards, but that she has sharp teeth, and claws at the end of a long reach...

If it wasn't the black bear emptying the bird feeder (effortlessly snagging it with a claw and pouring the contents –– like the crumbs from the bottom of a potato chip bag –– right down the old pie hole), it was porcupine eating the gazebo. Or birds flying down the chimney.

And how does one deal with a 300-lb black bear with a penchant for black oil safflower seed? One puts a decorative cow-bell –– an inexplicable tourist purchase finally coming into use –– onto the formerly lovely red metal feeder.

Pavlov's crazy dog at the midnight clank, one dashes onto the screened porch closest to the feeder, shouting and clashing together an aluminum saucepan and lid.  The noise was like nothing I have ever made before. It worked.

Though of course the raccoons followed the bear in the violation of my bird feeder. They are less shy of human attention. After some weeks of interrupted sleep, I decided the easier –– though not unproblematic solution was to take the feeder inside at night.  Now I only rouse myself to chase things off the unscreened porch. Which happens a lot. 

And how to address the ongoing porcupine issue?  Porcupines eat bark and tree parts...unless of course they develop a taste for pressure-treated lumber. 

Fair's fair. The porcupines were here first. I tried putting rows of hardware cloth around the perimeter, but Mr. Linton took the reins. We call the gazebo The USS Monitor now. The damage has stopped.  

Sidebar fact: tom turkeys sometimes get really worked up by the sound of a carborundum blade working through metal roofing sheets. I guess it sounds like a big sweet gal of a hen.

And as for the bird, we were sitting on the couch in front of the cold wood stove when we heard a gentle tapping on the glass window on the stove door.  

A youthful house-wren politely requesting a hand.

Of course it panicked. All birds do, when confronted with the inside of a house. It flapped into a window, and then briefly fainted in Jeff's hands.  But it eventually regained its senses and flew off, rewarding us for a few weeks –– possibly –– with extra noisy morning songs. 

You know how it goes. Everything peaceful and chill.

Maybe the iPod is playing the soundtrack from Hamilton. Perhaps you're watching Rabbit TV (a limited lineup, but endlessly entertaining).  Maybe you're cooking on the newly functional propane stove. Anyway, it's relaxed.

When EEEEEEEEEE. and EEEEEEEEE. and EEEEEEEE!

The noise is designed to either wake you from a sound sleep or possibly drive you in-freaking-sane.

​ Whichever. It works.  

Okay, you you press the reset button. Two minutes later –– just as the old heart-rate is returning to normal –– EEEEEEEEE!  and EEEEEEEEEEE!

My handsome gallant saves us, holding a thumb over the button repeatedly. It becomes clear that the damn 10-years-guaranteed, never-needs-batteries, save-your-life-and-required-by-law has gone rogue. It will not stop alerting us.

It EEEEEEEs in the bathroom. It EEEEEEEEs outdoors.

Jeff eventually puts it into the van, so it could, as he said, "Simmer down."

All during dinner, an errant wind gave us brief hope, and then, faintly, EEEEEEEEE. and EEEEEEEE.

Dishes done (in a sink! with running hot and cold water! cabin life is better and better!), Jeff betakes himself off and the next thing I notice is that he's taken out the 50-year-old .22 his father gave him.

Whatcha doing? I ask.

He points, and I hear a faint EEEEEEing across the field.  He's put the damn thing into a tree. I admire the dispatch with which he handles tech troubles. 

A clean through-and-through, and by golly the thing has stopped EEEEEEEing.  

​The test button suggests that it's still working, but I'm taking it back to the local hardware store where we bought it.

​I don't mind explaining why.

It's a very good Scrabble day when I can play "jonquil."

Be that as it may, my sweet mother-in-law calls them jonquils, and when she proposed a big honking field of them at the Would-Be Farm, I said heck yeah!  

​Pat is a wonderful gardener, and even in her early 80s, she can out-shop, out-weed, and out-sew me pretty much any day of the week. So when she said she wanted Jeff and me to be reminded of her each spring at the Would-Be Farm, I enlisted her actual aid.

Long story short, we ordered something like 200 bulbs from Holland last fall. Thank you John Scheepers.  We hopped a plane (back in the days when people did that kind of thing without thinking about it much) once the package arrived in the North Country.

We made a girl's weekend of it, staying at my sister's civilized house, eating yummy meals, and playing dominoes at the end of the day.

And we flew South, happy but full of anticipation and the usual worries: Would squirrels eat the bulbs? Would the plants freeze to death?  Would deer eat the bulbs? Would an early thaw fool the plants? 

Springtime is brutal on hopes.  When bright flowers do indeed rise from the cold clay -- oh glory.  

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.