Seasonal Musings Part 2

Autumn - and it IS still autumn - seems to be a time of "getting ready" when you live in the country. If the weather cooperates, and you can get it right, by this time of year - early December - the gardens have been put to bed with a final roto-tilling, a shot of fertilizer and a blanket of straw or leaves. The barn is full of hay and grain for the horses (in preparation for the time when it' s too muddy to transport said items there without risking the chance of having to surrender one's vehicle to axle deep, sucking mud). The summer's veggies are put away in the freezer and lined up on shelves in neat rows of mason jars. Firewood is stacked and drying, and I've got a few more dead trees scoped out for the next cutting day. The windows - at last - have been insulated with plastic where they sag in their 50 year old frames, letting the cold creep in unless we take the unsightly but practical approach of wadding newspaper or bubble wrap into the gaps and covering the whole mess with insulating plastic sheets. Yes, the ends of the plastic are right out there, waving in the breeze and just asking for lab puppy Jasper to grab them and pull - but perhaps he won't notice. There's extra plastic, anyway, and it is definitely much warmer once the plastic is up.

When we first moved out here, Dad fashioned wood frames that fit over the whole window (instead of the bottom half we covered up today), with the result that we spent the entire winter feeling like we lived in a slightly murky fishbowl. When we finally allowed ourselves to believe that spring had come and it was time to remove the frames, along about mid-April, it felt like we could breathe again!

Another seasonal activity, decorating for Christmas, begins just after the last horse teams clopping down the streets of Lebanon in the annual Carriage Parade have been made comfortable in their stalls - it's the putting up of the outdoor lights, white in the front and a splash of color in the back, just for fun. Coming home from work at night to see the yard lit up definitely makes me feel in the mood for carols and cookies and parties and all the good stuff that should be happening this time of year, even though I like to stretch out Thanksgiving as long as possible since it's the delicious beginning of the Officially Really Good Holidays (which incidentally includes my birthday, of course!).

So...on to Christmas, and the wheel of the year continues to turn. The days become shorter and shorter, but not for long - less than three weeks till the Midwinter Solstice and the light will grow again, even though we have to get through those dark cold months which my bardically oriented husband Keith aptly refers to as The Long Dark. Living in the country serves to make me, at least, more conscious of a certain rhythm to the year, and in so pondering I am made aware of a delicate thread of connection that still exists between me and mine and the country people of days long past.

I used to get books occasionally from a history book club, and one real gem that I still treasure is Lost Country Life by Dorothy Hartley (Pantheon Books, 1979). It features a month-by-month discussion of how British country dwellers lived around 500 years ago, and is highlighted by quotes from one Thomas Tusser, who lived in Sussex in the mid 1500's and wrote a number of verse treatises on "Husbandry," that is, managing farms and estates (no, not a book of rules for male spouses, though I am sure those exist and if they don't, they ought to, but that, as the saying goes, is a whole 'nother essay entirely). If you've ever heard the saying "it's an ill wind that blows none to good," then you've met Tusser (and you thought this would be something obscure, didn't you?).

Anyway, in his Points of Husbandry for December, he advises us to...wait for it...get your hay and feed set for the winter, preserve your food, and get your firewood in order.

That done, Master Thomas then advises us about Christmas - which for posterity I pass on:

Good husband and housewife, now chiefly be glad,
Things handsome to have, as they ought to be had.
They both do provide, against Christmas do come,
To welcome their neighbors, good cheer to have some.

Good bread and good drink, a good fire in the hall..
Cheese, apples and nuts, and good carols to hear,
As then, in the country, is counted good cheer.

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It's good to know some things...even over the centuries...don't change - much.