It's just a hop, skip, and a jump from hand sewing a pirate shirt to creating cordage from plants, right?  A mere matter of, oh, 400 or so centuries into the past. 

In prehistory, plain cordage (aka twine, yarn, two-ply thread) was used for snares, nets, for lashing x to y, and, step by step, into fabric. Many plants –– nettles, willow, basswood, berry brambles, burdock, rhubarb, etc., etc. –– grow stringy fibers known as "bast." 

It's a thing I missed learning as a kid, though I was fascinated by wildcrafting in general. 

The Would-Be Farm has enough bast-on-the-hoof to keep a schoolbus full of crafty cordsfolk busy until the next Ice Age. 

And so during this summer's regatta roadtrips, I have been spinning straw into gold. Rapunzel and that patient sister with the enchanted swan siblings?  They got nothin' on me. 

Wither went I, along came the bundle of dried plant, a glass of water, and piles of chaff. My technique improved with each ell. 

Regardless the state of the world, and the awful things that are going bump in the daytime, the Would-Be Farm is full of urgent and pleasant chores.

It's the first thing on my spring chore list: Clear trail. Which means cutting up fallen logs (both emerald ash borer and something that might be pine beetles are burning through the woods).

​Much farther down the list, but equally important for navigating is to locate the two critical culverts in the big field. Because nobody likes to slip into the ditch.

The grass is more than 4 feet tall in places, so there's an element of fun and danger in scouting the way in the 4WD mule. 

There's other tidying to do, like sweeping up pollen and other detritus at the –– still critter-proof! –– gazebo in the woods.  

And installations! Last December, my favorite skipper constructed two bat houses and a barred owl nesting box for me.

It wasn't chinchy to get this first one mounted on a 20-foot pole and then –– like the mother of all mast-stepping moments –– raising the pole upright and settled into its post-hole, but the result is magnificent.  

We hope the bats find it and make it home. The local populations are –– we hear –– rebounding from  white-nose-fungal colony collapse.

Sadly, since we are only part-time farmers, and because poultry are not notable for excellent traveling habits, we don't plan on adding chickens to the mix.

​Good thing we have good neighbors who could not walk past that stock tank full of tiny chicks this spring at the feed store. And you do have to buy six at a time. 

In addition to being unable to resist the charms of chooks, the neighbors have a 6-year-old granddaughter who has nothing more pressing on her to-do list than to hand-tame the chickens. I'm thinking about sewing them (and her) matching tutus.

This summer's largest project hones Jeff's carpentry and patience both. Without the camper trailer to protect, the shed suffered a bit of a breakdown, or possibly a depressive episode of some kind, drooping visibly and listing downhill.

The strategy that seems to work for us (QED, baby!) when this kind of thing occurs in our lives, is to get help, get to work, and find new meaning.  

Transforming the shed into a barn has meant shoring up the structure and adding a concrete floor.
Followed by enclosing the space and helping it to a new identity by color.

And when not holding metal panels in place while Mr. Linton does his drill thing, I have about a thousand daffodil bulbs to re-arrange.

I started in 2015 by transplanting "Scrambled Eggs" a fluffy double-flowered daffodil, from where the previous owner of the farm had bedded them by the old farmhouse. I wanted them where I could see them, so I stuck them hither and yon. They are prolific and have doubled, tripled, quadrupled in number.

As some may remember, my sweet mother-in-law and I put in 200 or so jonquil bulbs a few years ago. They too have multiplied and started to crowd one another.

Plus she gave me dozens of bulbs to start in Florida this winter. It's not a kind climate for jonquils, so those bulbs also came to the farm.  

I transplanted or replanted maybe 200 bulbs last week. Digging up the plants, feeling for the bulbs amidst the other roots and rocks, removing them feet first through a chunk of turf, then putting each chubby knob back into its own neat divot...I don't know what else will come next spring, but I thoroughly expect to have a glorious crop of flowers. ​

It's not a fancy camera, but it does allow me to take a very close (if not entirely focused) close-up. It's often a surprise when I put the images onto my laptop to see just what turns up in these photos.  

This sweet green plant is a wild garlic (aka "ramp"). I was interested in how the droplet of water holds itself together within the fold of the leaves.
 

Forget Paris, we'll always have midden.

​The Would-Be Farm has at least two separate dump piles full of jetsam. We cleared out a trailor-load this spring, hauling away one and a half broken pot-bellied wood stoves, a white enameled cooking stove (such an eyesore!), miles of metal and wire scrap, and cubic yard after cubic yard of disintegrating plastic junk.

The next layer down revealed a surprising number of unbroken glass items, including this prescient cough medicine bottle.  

​The former inhabitants of the Would-Be farm were brand loyal to Pepsi and Jim Beam, for long enough for the Pepsi bottles to evolve from one shape to another to another.  I suppose they also had diabetes.  

It's known as mud season; moving even the 4-wheel-drive mule across a field is a slippery clay adventure in the spring. As each shoe grows its own brick of mud, a person develops a sort of "Big Lick" walking gait. It's part of the inspiration for my rock stepping stones.
​
Still, looking up, the season also has its crystal-clean moments.

It's the Spring 2022 collection! Can you hear to pop-pop-popping of the cameras? Live from the Would-Be Farm, I give you...a fashion show of sorts.

They prowl the stage.

They have cheekbones to die for.

Some trot. 

Or caper.

Others preen and strut.

Some amble, even.

Many –– so many! –– are ready for their close-up, Mr. deMille. 

​Please disregard the off dates on these game-camera photos. The tiny chip's worth of brains that power the camera occasionally lose track.  Reminding me, uselessly, of the first rule of time travel: ascertain your temporal location.

​

Over the years, we slept like neatly stacked logs in our small bed in Base Camp. We drank innumerable cups of scalding hot tea and watched the weather come up the valley from a drafty inside. We berthed houseguests under the dining banquet. We saw deer and coyotes and turkeys wander by.  

Base camp grew more porous, though while mice found portals, raccoons did not.

Then came the morning when the thermometer outside read 28° F.  The inside thermometer, likewise, read 28 big degrees Fahrenheit. From my cozy nest of wool and goosedown, I said to my favorite skipper, "I don't know what else it's going to be, but the cabin starts with a wood stove."

We finished the interior of the cabin during that first plague summer of 2020, channeling anxiety into planks and nails and paint.

We first tugged and then pushed with the tractor and astonishingly enough, Base Camp submitted to being heaved onto the driveway.

The next morning, hitching the truck up, we relived the koan:  what if the hubs seize up or an axel gives out? what if the trailer's back breaks or the hitch lets go and Base Camp goes sailing into a ditch?

"It's just as easy to call for a tow truck from the side of the road as it is to get them to find us here," we consoled ourselves. 

Our better helmsman took the wheel and, sticking to backroads and driving 45 (sorry speedy little car! sorry guy! sorry big pickup! sorry beat-up Suburu! sorry to you too!) we winced over potholes and gritted our teeth when the suspension rattled. And in about 30 minutes, the truck eased Base Camp into the muddy parking lot of the one salvage yard that scraps campers.

I felt a pang, seeing Base Camp among the wrecks, but that big wheel of dharma will keep turning.

So let us charge our glasses and offer a toast to Base Camp: the best $800 house of all time. This may –– or may not –– be your final resting ground. I suspect you have another season of shelter for humans as well as small rodents in your diminutive chassis. Hail Base Camp! Fair winds to ye! 

As for the shed, we have plans to transform it into a barn over the summer. A red one, as befits a farm.

Every spot on this sweet blue globe of ours has its miracles:  bioluminescent dolphins speeding under a sailboat on a calm night in the Gulf of Mexico like constellations on the move, the sound of peepers demanding the return of Persephone from the underworld, the scent of actual chestnuts roasting on an open fire. They happen all the time, but we only sometimes notice.

For several years, neighbors at the Would-Be Farm regale us with the walleye run. Early in the spring, the story goes, northern walleye gather to spawn.  The walleye –– Sander virtreus –– is a nice little freshwater fish, delicious and sporting to catch, a beefy cousin in the perch family.

"You look for their big googley eyes at night," we heard. It's a natural wonder.  
​

It usually happens too early in the season for Mr. Linton and me. We miss maple season. We miss ice fishing, and generally, we miss the walleye.

But not this year. Spring is dawdling, despite the peepers' chorus. We are here early. Our first nightfall, we bee-lined from the Would-Be Farm to the rapids of the Indian River.

Flashlights revealed ambiguous tan shapes for a moment until our eyes reconciled the truth: those are fish, and those are indeed big glowing googley eyes, as promised. But in such astonishing volume.

SO many fish. 

At the flash of my camera, each googley eye showed as a spangle –– a spark –– a star –– in the madly rushing water.

There's no flinging about like salmon, no crazy aggression, just this seething vision of piscatorial mass. 

We stood by the roar of the river (the waterfalls are just out of frame in these photos, cold and brutal in the dark) for a long while, meeting their googley gazes under the cloudless starry night.  Then, shivering, we chased the beams of our flashlights back to the truck.  

On the far edge of the parking area, the game warden eyed us but didn't bother getting out of the truck.

The locals have been known to fill their wading boots with walleye and then squelch right past the officer, equal parts insouciant and insolent. But Mr. Linton and I might have been wearing big mouse ears. Obviously tourists. Just here to see the sights and move on.

So steps.  

I meant to just put a couple of flagstones into the ground, but then the stones started piping up and the hill was asking for more...

Back in April in that first plague year, under the grow-lights, my sister sister looked at the monarda starts with suspicion. "Are these," she asked me dubiously, "bee-balm?"

​Me, consulting the inter webs: Um, yes.

No wonder these seeds had sprouted: the stuff had taken over a whole corner of her flower-garden. I could have as much as I like yanked out of her garden. For crying out loud. 

Sure enough. Those wee four-leafed starters from last year turned into thigh-high big bursts of vivid color: clear red, pink, deep fuschia. The scent is a bit like oregano, strong and –– allegedly –– unappealing to some of the hungry natives of the Would-Be.

I don't know if deer and rabbits and porcupine and woodchucks and all will continue to avoid the plantings. It's all one big experiment. I've put tasty fruit trees in the midst of all that color, hiding them among the strong scent and bright color until they are tall enough to avoid the predators themselves.

Meanwhile, call them bee balm or Monarda,  them what you will, the flowerbeds are hugely popular with the pollinators

We'll see if they take over the orchard. We'll see if they protect fruit trees. Knock wood, we'll see.

For a couple of months when I was in fifth grade, one of the neighboring horses escaped its field. Even then, the neatly fenced landscape of small dairy farms was sliding away from cultivation. It was possible for a large hoofed mammal like a runaway horse to make itself scarce amidst the uncut brush. It set my imagination on fire. 

* To break the rational universe, yes, the happiest of all combinations in the English language would be the impossible pairing of  "free" + "ponies."
​
But don't be a fool, man, the space-time continuum can't bear the strain...  ​

We were heading down to the river to do some paddling and fishing, four of us convoying our kayaks along a remote stretch of private dirt road when, like a big blue bird of happiness finally coming home to roost, abracadabra! A pony! 

As someone in a dream, I fed my prize a nibble of apple and rubbed her ears. I whipped up a serviceable halter from the bow line of my sister's kayak and dropped it over the pony's head and commenced the long walk to the Would-Be Farm.

My fishing companions had a variety of reactions. The retired state cop, visibly relieved at someone taking action, drove off saying he'd phone in the missing pony.

My sister echoed my exclamations of "A PONY!"  and took photos.

My sweet spouse suggested that I didn't need to move the animal anywhere. He left the second half of the sentence, "let alone bring it home" unspoken.

Do I need mention that it began to rain?  Or that, once at the Would-Be Farm, the pony ate a snack of grits, drank a bucket of water, took a vigorous roll on the newly cut grass, and trotted off in the direction of the wild back half of the Farm.

The first rule of farming? Right after "If you have livestock, you'll have dead stock," is "Fences first."

There is no comfortable spot to stow a beast of burden at present at the Farm.  I found a longer bit of line and made a more secure halter, and when the pony trotted back –– and toward the road –– I recaptured her.

Making sure she was familiar to the limits of being tied (she had showed a great deal of sensibility and calm on our long walk), I anchored her to a handy tree and ate a belated lunch.

The consequences of my actions tossed her sweet head and snorted impatiently. She got a hoof over the line and stood balanced on three until I put down my lunch and rescued her.

She snorted and backed with zero dignity into the tenting platform so that she could rub her butt against the edge of the deck.

She took a bite of the evergreen and theatrically rejected it, tossing her thick mane and blowing flecks of green around. She was bored, bored, bored!

It entertaining program, but not a sustainable one.

I laid the options out to my favorite skipper: "One of us will have to drive up the road and ask a neighbor with a corral if we can put the pony there. The other will have to stay and hold the pony's lead." Into the considering silence, I added, "Which one do you want least?"

He elected to hold the pony. The man surprises me. I gave him a pointer or two –– he generally dislikes the whole family of Equus –– and dashed off.

Luckily, there's a messy farmstead up the way with a handful of cattle and horses, plus chickens, and as it turned out, eight sheepdogs.  Beware the dogs indeed.  Standing on the running board, I asked the woman who emerged from the scrum of dogs, "Hey, have you by chance lost a pony?"

She was standing a couple of yards away from the fence inside which a variety of horses and ponies and cows were calmly eating hay. She gestured over her shoulder and said, "Honestly, I don't know. These are my husband's horses."

I thought: and THERE is a successful marriage.

I told her about my wild pony, and she said, "Hmmm, my father-in-law lost a pony last summer." (The youthful horse-crazy kid in me silently fist-pumped at this additional proof that wild pony herds are possible).

Then she said she'd better come take a picture and text it in case it was one of her father-in-law's. 

Yes. It was one of the father-in-law's bunch of horses, she told me. Name of Daisy.  "She's a wanderer," my neighbor said, "Though usually she stays on the other side of the river. It's a long way to walk."

We chatted a bit, and then my neighbor led Daisy away. "I'll bring the rope back," she said.

I sighed and then said to Mr. Linton, "So, you remember that time we went fishing and I caught a wild pony?"