Wild Card Quilt by Janisse Ray

Author:Janisse Ray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2011-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

A Natural Almanac

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years.

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, “LINES COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY”

A farm’s is a meditative kind of existence. One could live many places happily, but some situate you closer to nature and the intricacies of survival; closer to the seasons and the cycles of moon and sun and stars; closer to the ground, which chambers water and is host to essential ingredients of life.

To pay attention to the world, where forests bend according to the wind’s direction, rivers bring baskets of granite down from the mountains, and cranes perform their long, evolutionary dances, is a kind of religious practice. To acknowledge the workings of the world is to fasten ourselves in it. To attend to creation—our wild and dear universe—is to gain admission into life. One can live at the bone. This I wished to do.

Details define the farm: the arrival and departure of birds, wildflower blooms, habits of animals, ripening of fruit, passing of cold fronts. The more attention we pay a certain place, the more details we see, and the more attached we become to it. That’s how it’s been for my friend Milton, a naturalist who has lived over fifty of his seventy-odd years on the family farm near Osierfield, Georgia. Imagine what he has seen there. Some years ago, he attended a conference in the Midwest and was homesick within a couple of days. “I wouldn’t trade the whole state of Kansas for the farm,” he said.

East of my house, beyond the dirt road, rises a five-foot bank of peach-colored clay, and above it a fencerow of young oaks. Beyond them the sun rises every morning, streaming out of the flat field like a gigantic epiphany. One morning at breakfast, clouds began to open up and show pink and orange in the east. “Look, it’s heaven!” Silas said.

The only thing in this flat and stoneless land that aligns with the equinoctial risings, in March and September, is a leaning pine fence post. I have seen the orange sun sit there, as if to burn the post down, attempting to mark a monumental event on the flimsy leavings of our civilization. A historian friend, Dan, sketched the line of mountains circumscribing his Montana home, and on this range he notes the sunrise points on solar holidays. Of course, the equinox could be marked by a restaurant sign, or a rooftop vent, or be blocked altogether by condominiums. But here it is not. Biannually, the fence post flares like a torch.

The equinox heralds the two most pleasant times of year on the farm: March through May and September through November. These are four months of flawless weather, the time to schedule reunions and weddings if you want them to be perfect.

January and February are often characterized by bitter, wet, pipe-freezing cold, down into the low twenties, and on many winter nights Silas and I sleep in front of the fireplace.

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