Autumn goes to the dogs for the birds

Things are getting back to what passes for normal around here. The tractor and mower deck are back home and functioning. We'll get more grass cutting and related chores done over the next several days, but first there are more storm-thrown dead branches to be picked up. Up until recently, we had never really put yard chores in the same category as stewardship. That's a major oversight on our part.

We suspect we may have been lead astray in our younger days by one of our favorite authors, Gene Hill, and his story When pheasant season was from chores 'til dark. Here's a sample of how:

One of the important jobs a farm dog has to undertake is to raise a boy. He has to accompany hime on his chore rounds, trap lines, general excursions and hunting trips. In the times before yellow dragons swallowed up children and carried them away, the dog was allowed to follow him to school and wait outside until recess. (Some dogs I know became fairly reliable centerfielders in this way.) But the sight of a gun always made the dog's eyes sparkle.

Winter pheasant

Photo by J. Harrington

Chores were clearly in a different class than fun in Hill's world of farm boys. That's how we used to see cutting grass and similar stuff. Now we live, not on a farm, but on a piece of country that has an occasional pheasant and an even more occasional grouse. Uncut grass, unlike in the city or its suburbs, becomes a place where ticks lurk, and the dogs don't always collect the lurkers before they's latched onto and into a human's skin. Self preservation doesn't make cutting grass fun, the fun part comes from riding on the tractor instead of pushing a lawn mower. To that we can add the pleasure of listening to our own playlist through our bluetooth-enabled hearing protector ear muffs. (We'd rather listen to bird calls, but the sound of the tractor engine drowns them out.)

We think our shift from chores to stewardship may have started with another author, one we first read but a few years ago. Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass

... shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

roadside ruffed grouse

Photo by J. Harrington

We've learned enough over the years to be able to put together the need to protect the habitat of those "other beings" if we want to be able to rely on their offering their gifts to us. No farm fields and sloughs, few, if any pheasants. No aspens of mixed age stands, few, if any, ruffed grouse. Protecting habitat, whether our own and/or that for there beings, because we do share a lot of habitat with nonhuman persons, involves work, but we no longer see it as being a chore. We're learning to turn much of it into some form of fun. It's all in how we look at things, right?

Chores

byMaxine Kumin

All day he’s shoveled green pine sawdust
out of the trailer truck into the chute.
From time to time he’s clambered down to even
the pile. Now his hair is frosted with sawdust.
Little rivers of sawdust pour out of his boots.

I hope in the afterlife there’s none of this stuff
he says, stripping nude in the late September sun
while I broom off his jeans, his sweater flocked
with granules, his immersed-in-sawdust socks.
I hope there’s no bedding, no stalls, no barn

no more repairs to the paddock gate the horses
burst through when snow avalanches off the roof.
Although the old broodmare, our first foal, is his,
horses, he’s fond of saying, make divorces.
Fifty years married, he’s safely facetious.

No garden pump that’s airbound, no window a grouse
flies into and shatters, no ancient tractor’s
intractable problem with carburetor
ignition or piston, no mowers and no chain saws
that refuse to start, or start, misfire and quit.

But after a Bloody Mary on the terrace
already frost-heaved despite our heroic efforts
to level the bricks a few years back, he says
let’s walk up to the field and catch the sunset
and off we go, a couple of aging fools.

I hope, he says, on the other side there’s a lot
less work, but just in case I’m bringing tools.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.