The Naked Gardener (2 page)

He was right of course. Two supporting beams for the roof on the north side of the house had rotted through and here and there the old stone foundation had sunk into a maze of woodchuck tunnels. But I had fallen in love.

“You know, we could ignore the house.”

“You mean fix up one of the barns instead of the house?”

The pigpen was beyond use except as a studio for me. If you were a cow, the barn could have been quite comfortable. The faint scent of manure still hung in one corner, although it had a sweet natural aroma that was comforting in some instinctual way. Anyway the barn doors, heavy and pitted with age, didn’t close and to create a livable building out of a barn may look good in some glossy magazine spread but it’s a pricey operation. Salvaging and remaking a building ends up costing more than building new. Since we couldn’t afford either, it didn’t matter.

“We could sleep in the chicken coop.” It was a freestanding rectangular low-ceilinged building down a small sloped field from the barn. “We could fix that up ourselves. And we could use the barn for a kitchen and eating space,” I suggested.

“Kind of like camping out, with a few more conveniences. I could see that. It could be fun for the summers.”

“I just want it to be very simple. I don’t want us to stress over anything. I don’t want it to feel permanent. Or settled.”

“Agreed. As long as we can use the toilet inside the house, I’m game.”

It was hard work, getting to this simplified life. During that first summer, we gradually came to understand just how many things we did not need because to get them was either too costly or too difficult.

The list was long and varied.

Cell phones
(no reception for miles around in northern Vermont)

Internet
(see above – we would drive to the college computer lab when necessary)

Washer, dryer, dishwasher, trash compactor
(are these a necessity anyway
?), iron and board
(we had nothing that required ironing),
coffee pot
(we drank tea
) blender, crock-pot
and assorted other small appliances
.

TV

What we did acquire and use every chance we got was a second-hand canoe. For Maze this was a new adventure. For me it was old news. My father taught me how to swim, paddle, fish, and scuba dive. So I took the stern and gave Maze lessons on the Trout River to our north. We started with quick water and moved on from there. Maze became comfortable but never as adept as I was. I have an innate feel for water.

The chicken coop turned out to be the most intact structure on the farm. Chickens don’t stress a building the way cows and people do. We tore out the roosts. After two weeks shoveling what the chickens had left behind and scrubbing every surface and crevice with ammonia, we moved in. The combined scent of chicken droppings and ammonia fumes almost put me off task any number of times but, when we finally got the place cleaned, it was a pleasant single story space with a low ceiling and wide windows on three sides.

I painted the inside of the coop with bright, bold colors – scenes of birds and ferns and flowers and insects reminiscent of Mexico. Maze lined the low walls with bookcases and built small bedside tables out of weathered walls from a half crumbled shed. This was not cabinetry. It was sawing and hammering and nailing into place. We did buy a drill. And some garden tools.

We built a bed frame and platform out of old wood, carried a new mattress from our ancient Subaru, hung a screen door and stapled screening in front of the wavy old windows that pulled up from outside. Why did chickens need windows? Did they lay better eggs if they had a view to the outside? Were windows necessary for gathering eggs? All I know is, I’ve never seen a windowless chicken coop. We nailed leather belts from Goodwill to the coop’s eaves and attached these by the buckles to hooks at the bottom of each window frame to hold the windows open. When it rained, at least we could thank the chickens and lower our windows against the weather.

Electricity was a challenge. Maze got a how to book on do-it-yourself electrical wiring. He dug a narrow trench from the back of the house, took apart a conduit that led to an outlet inside the back wall of the house, spliced into it, and ran it to the back of the coop. He drilled through the wood and installed a new outlet inside. He patched around the hole and covered it with wood scraps. I painted over the patch. From then on we got by with one lamp and one extension cord that we plugged into whatever else needed electricity.

We scraped the dirt floor flat, laid planks over it, and caulked the planks to control the dust.

“It’s not a perfect solution but for summers, I think it will be enough.”

I was impressed with Maze’s equanimity throughout the whole project. We worked well together. Giving the farm new life, uncovering unexpected uses from worn relics of past lives. Every time he nailed a board in place or dug another foot of trench, I could see the tangible result. It was satisfying. This sense of completion.

We ate most of our meals in the barn at a wooden table with mismatched chairs we found here and there at secondhand stores and garage sales. This part of the barn had small square windows at seated eye level that looked out on rolling green hills beyond the barn. The space felt intimate and I could imagine docile cows in this space munching away on their cud. Occasionally we would find a black snake curled up in a corner in the sun by the barn door. We ate early salad from our own garden, and pickled beets I had put up the previous summer. Maze grilled a fat pike on a steel rack over a wood fire in a stone pit he made the first summer. Every year he restacked the stones in a small circle after winter snows, freezes, and thaws shifted them out of round.

Before we could move in we camped near the barn. Most clear nights we slept out under the stars. Sometimes something would waken him or me in the middle of the night. One of us would reach for the other and then whammo, we’d be rolling all over the grass, moaning. The nighttime creatures must have been snickering and talking about what animals we were.

One night, after we had rolled around for a good long time, we lay on the grass on a small hill between the barn and the chicken coop. When it turned pitch dark and dots of light began to emerge in the night sky, Maze reached for me and sighed.

“This is heaven.”

I had never heard that particular tone in his voice. With our fingers twined together we lay there and witnessed what was unseen in the sky during the day reveal itself slowly, in excruciating detail. How could all those stars possibly have a name? It would be like naming each plankton in the ocean. So it was possible to have these moments, to feel connected to the earth and the heavens and each other all at the same time.

By the time move in day arrived, we had arranged the chicken coop so that it really felt like a summer home. Not exactly the summer palace at St. Petersburg, but we weren’t the Romanoffs.

The still operable toilet in the rundown house was old but reliable, if you jiggled the handle a certain way and prayed. Maze and a friend had reinforced the rotten roof beams. Since carrying water from the house to the barn, where we had set up a kitchen of sorts, became an onerous routine, Maze created a rainwater catch out of an old porcelain bathtub he spotted in an overgrown field where cows once grazed. He built a platform that held it perched on the barn roof and snaked copper pipe from its drain hole into a sink that he inserted into a counter we constructed out of old floorboards from the garret of an attic in the house. Cold water of course. With a shut off valve. Some days we ran out of water in the barn. But when the rains came, we washed everything in sight with impunity. Our friends marveled at the ingenuity of it, spoke with envy of living the simple life, then went home to their tri-levels and colonials with flat screens and central heat and dishwashers and Sub Zero refrigerators.

We built a wooden platform against the back of the house adjacent to the inside bathroom and ran pipes through to the outside wall and connected a showerhead with shut off valves for faucets. Hot water was a treat after bathing in the cold pond. Maze added three wooden privacy panels that spanned from knees to neck with saloon doors for easy entrance. Three hooks on the house wall held a towel and clothes to don when dry. An old wood crate turned on its end held soap and whatever else one needed. For shaving and combing hair we hung a mirror from a tree branch next to the platform.

We arrived in the country in mid May, installed ourselves in the chicken coop, cleaned the bat droppings from winter hibernation out of the barns, Maze did his thing and I stayed behind to tend the garden and whatever else needed doing. I set up a studio of sorts where the pigs had lived and besides painting every day, and once a month packing up discs with illustrations to send my rep in the city – well I still had to have some income – tending to the garden became my main occupation. I soon discovered that a garden was a needy being. Like having quintuplets that cried all the time.

* * *

There is nothing gentle about gardening. One must be ruthless. Even the tools one uses are a kind of weaponry. They dig, stab, claw, rake, cut, snap. Creating a garden in Vermont was a struggle. Each shovel full of earth was half filled with rocks. Rakes ground against stone, trowels hit them with each downward thrust, seedlings had to worm their way around stones and, when pulled up, mature carrots looked like corkscrews. I raked and raked, removed buckets of stone from the flower beds, stacked them in piles outside the garden and still they came, rock upon rock, up from the depths of the earth like goblins emerging from underground caverns.

I planted early lettuce varieties, followed by tomatoes, carrots, sugar snaps, kohlrabi, beets, beans, corn, radish, rhubarb, fennel, leeks. It was my intention to add new perennials every year. But I hadn’t counted on the deer munching their way through everything I planted as soon as it came up high enough. They loved the tender shoots. I cursed them and chased them and yelled at them. Sometimes I got so aggravated, I thought about buying a gun. But every time I thought of shooting a deer I pictured those beautiful eyes, calmly staring at me.

Deer weren’t the only marauding intruders. My garden was a regular animal magnet for rabbit, skunk, raccoon, possum. Maze finally fenced the entire garden with a six foot tall wood frame and heavy gauge fencing wire that kept out all but the most persistent diggers. We added a perimeter of cinder blocks dug deep into the ground as a buffer, used the stones we removed from the garden to build a perimeter wall and that did it. After that the asparagus was reliable and the woody herbs came back with gusto. I planted melons, squash, and coddled the old apple and pear orchard beyond the barn back to life.

Maze created an archway across the path to the garden. I encouraged a wisteria to take root with results that I would regret in future years when its rampant growth required a strict hand every two weeks during the growing season. I planted more flowering vines around the outside. Once the vines had covered the fence, the garden became my private space.

I looked out past the dewy grass and far off, beyond the garden, awaiting me was the pond. But that was for later. Now, I took up my trowel, slipped on my garden gloves and breathed in the scent of earth and green leaves warmed by sun. I planted a straw hat on my head and walked naked in my boots down the path I’d worn through the field of Queen Anne’s Lace to the garden. Their delicate flat white heads bobbed slightly as I brushed past letting their lacy heads caress my skin. I let go of the annoyance, opened the gate and entered my garden.

I leaned down to loosen some weeds that had sprouted around a clump of lettuce and it occurred to me that I probably had no tan lines and, if Maze noticed, he would never know why.

As I worked my way down the row of lettuce, I came upon the crown of a large rock. Rain had washed off its surface, revealing it for the first time. Was this an erratic? It didn’t seem big enough.

I didn’t know anything about erratics until I came to Vermont. The poor old farmer, Mr. Reichelm, walked the place with me before Maze came north to see it. He hadn’t shaved in weeks and took me wandering up and down the hills and valleys. We skirted the woods and, from out of nowhere, came upon a gigantic slab of a stone sticking out of the earth like some leftover from an ancient Celtic past.

“Oh, now that there is what they call an erratic, you know. Aye yuh,” he told me when I asked. “Erratic boulder some calls ’em. Some as big as that barn.” He pointed behind us to the old barn where no cows now chewed their cud and the stalls sat empty. “Some like that, size of a car, right there stickin’ up at the bottom of that field beyond all them springs in the way of everything like that. Come down with the ice they says. It lays in there inside the ice for about a million year or so and then up and melts and the ice goes and the rock stays put. Balanced like what you see there and everything. Too heavy to move so we just plow around him and that’s that then.”

The stones were always popping up out of nowhere. They hide beneath the soil forever and then one day, there they are at the surface. At first I was amused by them. In Virginia, I never encountered a rock in any garden. Clay maybe. Roots. But the soil I knew was rich, red, moist and airy. You could throw a seed into it and watch it take root almost the same day. In Vermont the soil is stubborn, unyielding. I discovered that right away. It is easier to keep weeds down in a healthy soil than one that has been starved. It is easier to excise the undesirable growth if the soil can breathe. I had to breathe life into this Vermont garden, inch by inch, foot by foot, rock by rock.