Five ways to tell it's winter in a country farm house

The years have a way of making technology lose its luster and bluster. And so do the centuries. When my Michigan farmhouse was built, the latest in on-line hardware was a telegraph key. With that, a hayseed hacker might've tapped out a Morse code missive to the White House -- which was then occupied by President Abraham Lincoln.

We've lived in our two-story brick home for 16 years and have spent more money to renovate the place than we did to buy it. As for the technological upgrades, they've been more third-world than world class. In lieu of gadgets, we've added heat registers; electrical outlets; a flush toilet, clothes closets; and (my favorite) windows that actually open. The upstairs had none of these FDR-era amenities when we moved in.

Even now, in some rooms and corners, it still feels like 1860. There's a certain wilderness within that will not be tamed, no matter how we try to refurbish the house into submission. It's a primal force, an indwelling native spirit that refuses to yield. You feel it whenever the hawkish winter wind keens around the eaves and rattles the 12-pane windows. You see it personified in the tree-trunk floor posts, their bark still on, that stand like petrified sentinels in the cobble stone Michigan basement.

When I was younger, stronger and dumber, I figured to have everything modernized in three, maybe four years, tops. Now I know it's a battle I'll never win -- and perhaps am not meant to. As long as I'm here, I've decided to leave some regions of the house forever wild. Which is to say cold, dark, dirt-floored, unpainted and congenial to over-wintering rodents. From December to late March, that means the outdoors will often be as close as the next room. Although even without a calendar, here's five ways to tell that winter has come to stay:

You can see your breath in the back living room: Officially -- here's the irony -- it wasn't called a living room but a summer kitchen. Meals were cooked there during hot weather, so that the main kitchen's woodstove wouldn't overheat the house. Our summer kitchen was built above a dirt-floored crawl space. I went down there once to insulate and got briefly and terrifyingly stuck between the hand-hewn timber beams and the bare earth. (It struck me then as the kind of dark, forgotten cavity where a serial killer would hide dismembered body parts.) Anyway, we've since made it a comfortable living room and added a cheery, wood-burning fireplace. When it's ablaze, we can raise the temperature to near 70. During the week, when there's no fire, temps hover in the upper 20s. The bright side? It's yet to snow out there and there's virtually no wind chill.

Your propane gas bill is higher than the mortgage payment: OK, I've admitted it publicly, but refuse to disclose more details than that. So please: don't try to sell me on geothermal heat pumps, solar panels, windmills, corn burners, wood pellet burners, methane gas digesters, or -- especially -- outdoor wood-fired boilers like my brother has. There's tradeoffs and complicating factors to all these that make the costs shake out about equally. Suffice to say that you've got to pay through the nose to keep your feet warm in an historic domecile. Living in the past ain't as cheap as it used to be.

The Mouse Drawer has full occupancy: To keep all rodents out of a 19th century farm house, you'd have to encase it in concrete blast walls like those around the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Absent that, and because my three indolent cats could care less, I've become the resident mouser. It's a typical case of asymmetrical warfare. I come armed with my human hubris and conventional American weaponry -- i.e. traps baited with peanut butter (crunchy works better than creamy). And the mice, like militant peasants everywhere, know and own the local terrain. I'm an invading infidel whose been here a mere 15 years. Their kind, thousands of generation's worth, have occupied this porous-walled homeland for 160 years.

I usually trap 6-7 under the kitchen sink, after the cold weather has driven them indoors in the fall. Then after those early victories, a defiant little band retreats to the dreaded Mouse Drawer. It's a narrow rectangle of impregnable high ground just left of the stove, a Khyber Pass where all my attempts at homeland defense meet with futility. We do keep some old utensils there, but my wife considers them accursed and unclean. Trust me: no measure of disinfection could render them touchable. The chilling phrase, "That came from ... the Mouse Drawer?" ends all discussion about the topic.

The storeroom doubles as a refrigerator: This one's more a convenience than a detriment. Don't have enough room to cool a six-pack of beer or few liters of pop? Got a big leftover kettle of soup that's still too hot to set in the refrigerator? Or bags of apples, baskets of summer squash, bundles of sweet onions and clumps of dried dill and basil? Then let winter work for you for a change. Transform (probably too grand a word) your store room/mud room, garage into a walk-in cooler. Yes, you've got to overcome the prudish, bourgeoisie notion that it's unseemly to store edibles next to a volleyball net or rusty tool box. But what's the difference between 35 degrees in a refrigerator and 35 degrees in a mudroom? You think the food cares? Besides, we've had no problems out there with mice; they'd rather stay in the main house where it's warm.

The reign and ruin of the icicle kingdom: As earlier mentioned, old houses leak heat the way press secretaries leak scurrilous news tips. When heat migrates to a cooler surface it surrenders its latent energy to cause condensation. On a glass of iced tea in June, that process raises those delightful beads that trickle down to dampen your drink coaster. On a steel roof in January, it melts the snow to form rivulets of distilled water that drip from the eaves and form icicles. Everyone loves how they look; elegant cylinders of tapered crystalline that refract the clear winter sun like fine quartz. Even the melodious drip, drip, drip can be a meditation on a drowsy Sunday afternoon.

Under the right conditions, I've seen icicles that are six-feet long and as big around as a girl's waist. We grow them that big in the L-shaped crook of our house. And there they hang, homicidal stalactites on the cliffs of doom. Until, at about 1 a.m. on some foggy February night, they crash and boom to earth like calving icebergs in a Norwegian fjord. Startling in the extreme, but not altogether unwelcome. It's simply the Lord's own water music, come to tell the old house that winter has loosened its icy grasp once more.

A New Year in the Garden of Good and Weevil

The term winter gardening sounds like an oxymoron. A garden's usually a dismal sight in winter, with its exburant greens, yellows and reds all withered to fetid brown or funereal grey. It's the cadaver of summer left uninterred.

At least that's how a gardener in southern Michigan feels until the January thaw seeps in. It brings a tantalizing respite, a fool's gold glimpse of spring even if it only lasts a day or two. This year it jumped the gun and showed up on New Year's Eve. By 8 a.m. the next day, the thermometer outside our kitchen window read 42 degrees Fahrenheit -- and would climb to a sunny 53 by day's end.

Most spring-like of all was the wind: fresh, bright, clean and alive with all the unsullied hopes of a new year. It drove away my early winter doldrums, not to mention the scrum line of minor litter (school papers, junk mail/junk food wrappers) that emanate from our van's driveway parking space.

A few bits of trash blew downwind to the garden, which is where I noticed an oasis-like patch of true green. It wasn't a complete surprise. I'd planted a row of turnip and carrot seeds in late August and planned to harvest them by Thanksgiving. It had simply turned too cold, too fast in December for me to do that. Since I neglected to cover them with leaf mulch, I assumed they'd be turned to mush.

Yet with the snow melted, the hearty turnips came eagerly from the soft soil. And what a cheery sight they were: softball-sized globes of firm flesh, with purple flanks and baseball-white undersides. Even so, I'm a recent turnip convert. As root crops, they've got a Russian babushka with chin-whisker image that took me awhile to overcome. Now, I'm hooked. Turnips are a zesty substitute for potatoes when diced for soup and make great "carrot sticks" when sliced lengthwise.

As for the carrots, they were still babies: three inches long, not much bigger around than a fat pencil. But they weren't the bogus "baby carrots" sold in stores. Those are simply big (and tasteless) clunkers that some machine has whittled down to finger size. No, these little fellas were crisp, sweet, tangy -- a delicacy almost too pretty to eat. Almost.

The wind died down later and there was just enough daylight for a late afternoon walk. And, for another incantation of January-thaw mojo. Halfway into my walk, I spotted a rather curious onion by the road, where a snowbank had been. Then another and another until I realized ... they weren't onions. They were flower bulbs. Dozens and dozens of them. Gladiolus, to be precise. I stuffed my windbreaker's pockets until I looked a squirrel with his mouth full of acorns.

It's a mystery that's easily enough explained. There's a gladiolus mail-order house nearby and last summer they farmed a 60-acre field just south of our place. In July, it was awash in a pastel tide of salmon, lavender, raging pink and purple. Then for two weeks in October, an endless convoy of tractors and farm wagons heaped with bulbs rumbled past. Enough excess bounty must have fallen off to turn my garden-variety walk into a cheapskate's treasure hunt.

The next day being Sunday, the church celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany. It's an old Greek word that means manifestation, as in when the gods and godesses made their fearful presence known to mortals. Of course it's presents that we know Epiphany for today, to recall those brought by three Iranian astrologers to a God-child Bethlehem.

Alas that observance has become a forgotten footnote to the cash-register Christmas, which rings in not the holy days but a feast of the marketplace that ends -- instead of begins -- on December 25. By time the seers' dusty camels arrive, we've already stashed our decorations in the attic and hauled the shiny paper to a landfill.

During the priest's homily on Epiphany, my mind wandered (sorry, padre) back to my unexpected gifts from the day before. The carrots, little flowers to be enjoyed at once, orange slivers of instant happiness. The turnips, honest and enduring, could last until real spring if stored in a root cellar or refrigerator. And the gladiolus? The gardening books say my gleaned bulbs won't make it; they should've been dug, dried and stored in a dry place after Halloween.

We'll see. I've seen the pulse of life turn-up where we least expect it. If a dormant garden can still share its gifts in January, why couldn't an orphaned flower bulb find a reason to resurrect in April? Epiphanies aren't just for guys in pointy hats.

The Timeless Appeal of X-C Ski

After 30 years as a cross country skier, I've finally realized why downhill skiing has never appealed to me: it's because hills alone are not enough. For me, downhill skiing offers too much of a good thing. It's like a basketball game that's all slam dunks with no dribbles, passes or rebounds to set up the big plays.

On a good cross country course, hills are never the main attraction. The sights and sounds of nature are the largest draw. You want it quiet enough to hear the five-note song of a chickadee, or the castanet-rustle of oak leaves in the somber winter breeze. And wild enough -- this actually happened yesterday -- to run across a fresh green clump of turkey poop on the trail.

Downhill skiing has an assembly line mentality to it that's harder for me to appreciate. It's essentially a single-minded race to the bottom, where in Sisyphean fashion, a clanking chairlift awaits to forever take you uphill again. It doesn't help that many ski resorts have a synthetically landscaped air that makes them resemble an arctic golf course. Typically, acres of native trees have been shorn away and the terrain reshaped by bulldozers. Flood lights, manmade snow and alpine condo kitsch either completes or desecrates the scene, depending on your point of view.

What prompts this comparison was the cross country ski trip we took yesterday to Love Creek County Park near Berrien Springs, Michigan. My wife and I escorted a Christmas break crowd of six cousins and nieces, two of whom had no previous experience.

We rented the park's first-rate Rossignal ski gear, which was virtually new and ultra-reasonable at $5 for kids and $10 for adults. Beyond that, we had little in the way of outdoorista apparel. I wore my ancient wood-cutter's windbreaker. My neice sported a thrift-store chic wool overcoat that could've come from the trenches of World War I. But we fit in just fine with a crowd whose fashion choices leaned toward sweatshirts and chunky jeans. On a cross country course, the fuddy-duddy earth tone types tend to greatly outnumber their polyester peacock brethren.

Outside the lodge, we geared up under a cerulean blue sky dotted with junco-grey clouds. There was no line and the trail began 20 feet from the buildng. Then we set out for the green and yellow route, as advised by a gregarious park ranger who rightly pegged us for slow movers.

The course lay gentle on the land, little more than a hiking trail with natural snow cover. The path first dropped down to cross a footbridge over Love Creek, then turned into the woods where it hugged the lip of a heavily timbered ravine. It circled a marsh where a goshawk cruised overhead, eager for some careless vole or rabbit to make a fatal, but providential (for the hawk anyway) appearance.

There was little in the way of pulse-throbbing excitement. The meager hills, and you could scarcely call them that, would stir no downhiller's heart. Nothing much seemed extraordinary, save the enormous and venerable sycamore tree that we hugged for a family photo. So why did we all enjoy it so? What kind of dullard would prefer miles and miles of horizontal sameness to the mad-dash, vertical thrill of a high-speed run?

All I can say is give it a chance. Newcomers tend to underestimate the deep, kinetic satisfaction that comes from the kick-pole-glide motion that's the mainstay of cross country skiing. It reminds me of the first time I paddled a kayak. From the first few strokes, it felt almost magically intuitive. And for good reason. A kayak paddle, like a pair of cross country skis, comes encoded with several millennia of accumulated wisdom and design. It works right, and feels right, because the body mechanics were long ago perfected by our ancestors.

When so used, we can reconnect with the ski's original function: not just as a toy for sport, but as a means for transport. It's for this reason, 5,000 years ago, that some primeval genius invented a new tool which would leverage the use of his arms and legs as a way to navigate the snowy landscape. Even today, that's still the raison d'etre for cross country skiing: a walk in the winter woods made easier by the long, skinny flat things that you've strapped to your feet.

Beyond that I love how a cross country ski enterprise can be as seasonal and ephemeral as an Indian hunting camp. Come spring there'll be no signs at Love Creek (except for some little trail ribbons) that anyone on skis ever passed this way. And there'll be no footprints at all of the high-impact, hydrocarbon variety. In an age when even our peaceful past times can denude the earth, it's hard to imagine a better way to cross the country.

Why Christians Don't Know Beans About John the Baptist

Yesterday marked the last Sunday of Advent, and like the Hebrew prophets of antiquity I can hold my tongue no longer. I've got to set the record straight on a Biblical matter that about 97.8 percent of all western Christendom gets wrong. The facts in question have more to do with tree-ology than theology. But that's all the more reason to spill the legumes, as it were.

At issue are the dietary habits of one John the Baptist. His earthly mission, as you may recall, was to proclaim the coming of Jesus Christ. John called for widespread repentance and he baptized believers, including Jesus himself, in the Jordan River.

John's travels often took him into the rocky hills and badlands of the Judean Desert. It was ideal terrain for an itinerant preacher and ascetic who often locked horns with the civil and religious authorities. But it's here that the New Testament's eytomology has faded away like footprints on a windswept wadi. It's this particular verse, Matthew 3:4, that causes the confusion:

"J0hn wore clothing made of camel's hair and had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey."

As a kid growing up in Florida, I couldn't imagine anything more revolting. We had Spanish grasshoppers down there. They were red, yellow and black; monstrous things some four inches long. And you're telling me that John the Baptist dipped these things in honey for breakfast? That disturbed me more than the hairy-legged nun I once saw order a plain McDonald's hamburger (no ketchup, mustard, onions or pickle -- just a heroic helping of self-denial.)

In fact, John the Baptist did not eat insects as the English translation suggests. He almost certainly ate from pods that come from the locust tree. The pods, about a foot-long on honey locusts that grow in North America, contain leguminous (bean-like) seeds. Around the Mediterranean basin, the tree goes by many names: locust, carob, carob bean, sugar pod -- and drumroll, please -- St. John's bread. Apparently, they've known all along.

So these are the "locusts" that John dipped into honey. In arid lands with scant pasture, the high-protein locust beans have long been an important food source for livestock. People can eat them too, although it sounds like they're an acquired taste.

On a family walk two weeks ago, we came upon a nice stand of honey locusts. Given our temperate climate and rich soil, some of these had reached heights of 60-70 feet, much taller than their Palestinian cousins. In summer, their fern-like foliage will cast a shade that's cool, but pleasantly mottled. The honey locust's fine leaves can be easily swept and won't clog storm drains, which makes them popular as urban street trees.

The wild trees we saw, however, had a signature trait that nursery-bred locusts lack: an arsenal of indomitable thorns. We're not talking here about little prickles, as you'd find on a rose bush or raspberry cane. No, the three-inch pig stickers on a wild honey locust are as stout and brutally sharp as a bayonet. There's three by my writing chair and each time I pick one up (like just now!) I manage to poke myself.

So why would such a large tree need such a hostile defense? What's it afraid of? It's got bark as thick as an elm, ash, oak or maple. Shouldn't that be body armor enough? No resident bird, squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, possum, or even bear could cause a honey locust harm. Indeed, the honey locust's over-the-top nasty thorns seem more offensive than defensive. They project an aura of gratuitous evil -- something you'd expect more from humanity than an innocent tree.

Could it be that trees need salvation, too? Some process of rebirth or re-creation to amend the flaws of their imperfect, earthbound evolution?

I'll leave that question to someone above my pay grade. For now, I'm content with the seed pods we collected on our walk. They'll over-winter in the barn, and I'll see if I can get seedlings to sprout from them in spring. It seems only right to have a wild honey locust on our property, a thorn among the roses of our benign shade and fruit trees.

Most important, the tree will stand as an alpha to omega remembrance of the gospel story. The tree recalls a wilderness holy man, the herald of a divine king who was born to serve the poor and oppressed. And that king, in his defining moment, would wear a crown of thorns that were as painful, ugly -- and thereby necessary -- as these in my hand.

For little maples, a big move to ponder

Trees are the ultimate homebodies. And with age, they become even more obdurate in their stability. Season after season, their spidery, snaky roots auger ever deeper into the dark womb of the earth. Hardwood trees, like oaks and hickories, sink vertical tap roots that often extend as far underground as the tree is tall.

That makes them about as unwilling and difficult to move as a 35-year-old video gamer who still lives in his parent's basement.

You can imagine, then, how aghast the little clump of innocent saplings must've been when I assailed them last Saturday with a rusty shovel. Especially on this quiet fall day, when their bare limbs and branches had already gone to sleep for the winter.

The specimens at hand were sugar maples, all in the 3-5 foot range, still easy to move by hand without serious injury. They were clustered like woody weeds under the hulking trunks of an Osage orange hedge across from my brother's house. The prevailing west wind had born them there as tender green seedpods, and in anchorite fashion, they'd taken up permanent residence.

It's been unusually dry this fall and once I dug past the leaf litter and meager humus, the soil was baked hard as clay pottery. I scraped, chipped and finally dug with my fingers to pry little musket ball clods away from the white, veiny roots. Then with hand pruners, I snipped off the long, rubbery laterals and wrenched the trees loose from the brown sugar-like subsoil.

By dusk, they'd all been transplanted to a new fencerow that will help shelter our beehives from the north wind. The saplings' spindly shanks made them seem painfully exposed, what with the 15 feet of elbow room on either side and the 1/2 acre of open sky overhead. But a few scoops of composted goat manure, several five-gallon pails of water, and a six-inch blanket of straw for mulch (purloined from the dog's pen) helped to finish the job rightly.

Or at least that's my side of the story. What I saw were some sorry, stunted trees that could better reach their potential on my property. Any homo sapiens with an opposing thumb and a factory-made shovel can win that argument.

Yet for their part, the trees also deserve some consideration if not contemplation.

In a world duped by the suicidal promise of endless economic growth, it's easy to project onto nature the equally flawed notion that all creatures must perform at peak market value to justify their existence. In truth, it's never just the strong who survive and bring good to the world. Even in their former location, the diminished little trees rendered some valid ecological benefits. And if nothing else, you've got to admire their stoic character. Even dwarfed and starved for sunlight they stood and served. In nature's economy, the meek can still find full employment.

As fresh transplants, my foster saplings are no doubt aware of their new surroundings. (Although at first it may feel more like a rude exile than relocation opportunity.) Trees may not be sentient beings, but there's a whole lot of applied science at work in their woody craniums.

How so? Well, they've got renewable, expandable skin (bark), and sap that can miraculously turn into antifreeze for the winter. They can antiseptically heal heal themselves from the wounds of fire, hail, insects and windstorms. They can, through daily feats of vegetative calculation, dispatch new roots to the surface in rainy weather, and plunge them deep to tap subterrranean moisture in times of drought.

Much more astutely than I, the sightless trees will come to see their new home for exactly what it is. With weekly watering in spring and summer, I'll do my part to ease their transition. But my benign interventions will guarantee nothing. Each tree must find its own answers, must live out its own adaptations and compromises with the local world. Anyone who's rooted, or wants to be, can surely understand that.

November and me -- good and grey around the edges

It's a bogus invention, day light savings time. But in June, you won't hear any complaints from the likes of me.

That extra hour in the garden and on the river – that's the beating heart of summer itself. It makes my office servitude almost bearable to know that the real, green world, and the sun that makes it so, will linger in the sky well past 9 p.m.

Tonight, the calendar pulls the rug out from under this charade. In Michigan, the sun respectfully reverts to the creator’s timetable. It’ll be dusk at 6 p.m. come Sunday evening.

To mentally prepare, I took the dog out for a three-mile walk tonight in what tweedy poets once called the gloaming.

The woods along the road were hushed, as only they can be in November (at least until deer season starts on the 15th ). It’s a lovely month, November, and greatly undervalued. The whole thing merits a true thanksgiving, not just an over-stuffed observance and consumerism feast day. The gaudy flourish of autumn has faded, scattered now around the trees like confetti in the streets after a Mardi gras party. November’s dominant hues are grey – but a good grey, steadfast and serene. November knows that there’s nothing left for the year to prove.

The dog and I drank all this in, but it was dark by the time we turned back and headed home to supper. Yet it was a comfort to see the grey still there.
It had seeped from the woods to the sky above, now pricked with stars. It was the grey sky that made the tree limbs appear black as they stood in bony-fingered silhouette against the endless canyons of universe overhead. I suppose what we perceive as grey comes from the ambient light that's reflected light by mother Earth. Good thing whoever’s in charge of light years doesn’t have to factor in daylight savings time.

Overall, I’d still rather be smallmouth bass fishing – or sweating out my workday toxins in a garden verdant with sun-warmed tomatoes and the sweet snap of green beans.

But for now, I’m content to savor the now. If I can’t be as profligate with the sunlight as I am in summer, maybe that’s not all bad. I’ve let myself get too frayed around the edges this year, with more effort than output to show for it. A good and grey November, as becalmed and reflective as an old monk, may be just the color I’ve been been looking for.

40 lbs. of honey -- why ask for more?

I've fed the bees their last draughts of sugar syrup for the season. I'm not sure they need it, although the books and experts say they do. So I bought 15-20 lbs. of the cheapest sugar I can find, mix it 2:1 with hot water and Fumigillin -- a mild antibiotic – and dispense it via one-quart feeders that sit near the hive’s entrances.

And the bees go nuts for it. They envelop the feeders in fuzzy, soft ball-sized clusters, ecstatic with saccharine lust, maniacal for the one thing that will insure their winter survival: more honey for the hive.

I'd rather forego the antibiotic, but last year two hives contracted nosema. It's basically bee diarrhea, which means they poop themselves to death. It's as messy as it sounds, inside and outside the hive, where the mustard stains from their cleansing flights speckle the snow. Yeesh.

Still, there’s much more I could do, and most would say should do, to winterize the hives. Have I installed mouse guards? Drilled ventilation holes in the upper supers to prevent condensation? Applied miticide to kill tracheal and varroa mites? Cleaned the bottom boards? Stacked straw bales to blunt the steely knives of the north wind?

Well, uh, I do plan to put up a straw-bale windbreak.

But to paraphrase Tip O’Neil, “all beekeeping is local.” Call it a fatalistic cop-out, or a lazy man’s rationalization, but I’m not so sure that my meddling helps much. After all, the practices that some veteran beekeepers swear by others swear against. What works here doesn’t work there -- even when “there” is a mile up the road. What causes these variations? The bees or us? Perhaps what we bring to beekeeping – as with most human endeavors – is largely a mirror of our own talents, desires and peculiarities.

As a minimalist, I am inclined to mistrust things overly mechanical and scientific. The pine-box simplicity of beekeeping, scarcely changed since the 19th century, appeals deeply to me. A hammer, some short nails and wood glue are all that’s needed to assemble a hive. A pair of cotton coveralls ($6 at Big Lots) elbow-length leather gloves and a veiled hat comprises all the necessary clothing.

But my sentimental favorite is the bee smoker. It’s like a stainless steel coffee can, with attached leather bellows and a conical lid that could’ve come straight from the Tin Woodsman’s head. Add a fistful of dry straw and it will puff away as agreeably as your grandfather’s pipe.

Nevertheless, the ways of a minimalist can also yield minimal results. This year, we gathered 40 lbs. of honey, enough to fill about that same number of 1 lb. bottles. A rigorous, meticulous beekeeper might get 6o-80 lbs. from the same three hives. How much more, though, do we actually need? We’ll keep a dozen bottles for personal use, more than enough, and sell the rest at Church sales or give it away at Christmas. (Maybe you’ll get some instead of a scarf or snowmobile socks -- you know who you are.)

The rain will meanwhile fall on the just and unjust, as St. Matthew (5:45) points out, and the inscrutable bees will fulfill their sacred duties for reasons known only to them. Yes, it’s true that skilled human intervention will usually increase their productivity. Yet in the end? No matter how much we fret and tinker – or don’t -- the honey that comes from even the humblest of hives will taste every bit as sweet.