Gestation

Woodsmoke from the neighbourhood’s chimneys hangs in this dip in the hills. It’s early morning, still dark, and I’m wrapped in all my bedclothes against a damp chill with the door of our one room, old stone barn wide open to the black before dawn while I fumble to light the fire. A downdraught pushes smoke through the stove vents into the room. I nurse the flames, feeding them dry tinder until they start to crack and spit and generate enough heat to push back against the downdraught, send the smoke puffing up the flue pipe, and I can close the vent. Smoke clears slowly from the room. It swirls through the rafters, puffs lazily out the open door to mingle with dawn mist that rises off the fields, as black night slowly lifts through inky blue to the monotone grey of day. The fire crackles. The woodstove pops with expansion as it warms. I smell the damp drying off the air. My body softens into the warmth.

Little tabby cat, Twinkle, twirls around my ankles, vibrating softly against my legs, letting out an occasional, purring meow for my attention—don’t I know it’s breakfast time?

Glitter Sparkle, house goat extraordinaire, will be up and waiting keenly at the gate of the pen she shares with her family group, ready to trot out to be milked and gobble up her morning feed of alfalfa and seaweed—the extra boost of green protein and minerals she needs to keep her milk flowing and her condition up through the dark season, when fresh green forage is hard to come by, when the land has retreated into damp, dark earth, back to the bare bones of winter.

We’re all on the homestead now, except the rams and bucks wintering in their own house on the hill. The land can breathe. When I’m out there I can feel it, earth expanding beneath the surface cover of spent moor grass and low-lying heather. Opening. Absorbing. Soaking up rainfall like a sponge. Green things that bloom in the ponds and flooded wetlands have their season to show now, floating in their watery world, flourishing in the rain. Grass cover lies dormant, holding the floods, holding the structure of the soil. Expanding it. Roots and rhizomes swollen with starches and rain, stored away calories for next spring’s fresh growth. Dormancy is an illusion. Beneath the surface, life gestates. Foxes and snipe leave footprints in the mud paths worn by sheep and I in summer. Wild things filling in the absence of our footsteps even in this silent, wet, slumbering season.

No sooner had we moved out of our shepherd’s hut on the open hill and left it to the weather, mould moved in to begin the process of reclaiming the raw, untreated timbers we used from the sawmill over the hill, of engulfing the memory of our living there into the land. We’ll clean the mould and use it as a farm shed for as long as we can, then salvage or scrap whatever won’t rot, and then, eventually, without the life and heat of us and our woodstove it will succumb to decay, as all things do. I wonder how long that process will take. How many winters of wet and rot until the memory of our little home on the hill has composted back into the land, consumed, digested, gestated into new form. Perhaps we’ll plant a tree there, to mark our memories, to grow from the compost of our life on the land. Until that, too, succumbs to a winter of wet and rot and is resorbed into the land.

Molly is heavy with kid. Molly is blooming with kid. Belly swollen with the quickening life she bears. Due any day now. Winter babies, conceived and gestated from summer heather on the hill and ivy and brambles cleared from the composted garden of this old homestead. Soil and sunlight transmuted into goat and soon to gush from the watery warmth of their mother into the chill of a grey, winter’s day. We’re ready to welcome the out-of-season newborns into a warm straw bed with dry towels and their mother goat full with milk. There are no promises, birth dances close to death and never closer than out of season, or I might just miss the whole thing and come out in the morning to bouncing babies all fed and dry, but I will do my utmost to have photos of fresh newborn baby goats for you next week.

We’re two weeks out from the winter solstice. Short, grey days heavy with mist melt into long, black nights that draw in discernibly closer each evening. It’s in this dark season when the work is most demanding. Winter work of keeping animals fed and dry, hauling out hay and feeds through mud, wind and rain twice daily to a hungry mob of herbivores with sharp hooves and horns intent on knocking me off my feet and diving into the bucket of beet before I can spill it into the trough saps the daylight hours and just about all the strength and output I can muster. The work is heavy. Rain is heavy. Mud is heavy. The rhythm of these short, dark days filled with monotonous, heavy routine lulls me into the restful sanctuary of long, fire-lit nights doing nothing much at all. My body craves this darkening season for sleep and deep nourishment, for retreating into the dark, melting into the nourishing warmth of a woodfire, to emerge anew from the ashes when the willow buds begin to burst in spring.

I set a pot of bone broth to bubble on the woodstove for the day. That will form the base of a thick, winter stew of starchy roots and fat mutton—a four year old ewe from our flock who gave us lambs before she gave us her life—the dense, full-flavoured meat of a life well lived as a sheep should live on the open hill, fat on flowering heather—nutrient-rich calories packed away in summer to nourish our bones and keep us pushing on through the grinding physicality of winter’s work.

The morning is as light as it’s going to get through a cover of thick, grey mist and Glitter Sparkle is calling. I am summoned to bring her breakfast, and Molly’s too, to wait on my ladies and fetch the morning’s milk steaming from the udder of a happy little house goat. Thirty-two ewes will be all lined up at their trough, impatient for it to fill, ready to mob me for the bucket like a pack of hungry little hooven wolves. The boys in their house on the hill need feeds and hay brought up to them, too. After my feeding rounds I will gather firewood. I know it’s woodsmoke from the neighbourhood’s chimneys by the sweet, woodsy aroma, and also because this dip in the hills is thickly wooded and everybody cuts and draws their firewood from the land. Our winter warmth too, is drawn from the land in the form of stored sunlight to be released as heat before it’s composted back again as mineral-rich ashes returned to the soil. Now is the time to cut and gather, trees laid bare, leaves and sap and life given back to the soil where spring gestates.

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