February Snow

This morning we woke to a light late snowfall lying over the farm. It was like this when we came here in February of 1998. We were thrilled to find snow falling on our farm at 1,100 feet elevation. Our position in the hills puts us about 3 weeks behind the Valley in the spring calendar. Bud break is a little later up here, the crocuses and tulips are delayed, the blossoms of cherry and plum come later. Right now, though, the wood violets are blooming. First signs of the change of seasons. This morning they were blanketed away, hidden beneath that nothing-lovlier-than fresh snow.

[Click the photo to make it bigger]

Flakes fell as I went out to feed the critters. I wear my old felt hat in winter. It was somebody’s expensive beaver felt cowboy hat once . I bought it after its days of glory, in a second-hand shop. The crease in the top is long gone and punched up into a dome. The sides have lost their cowboy curl. They sweep wide over my ears and are most excellent in rain or snow. The back brim is curled up. This is a perfect hat for winter weather. It can be worn front or back forward!

It’s not only humans who respond to the snow. William the mule greeted me with frisky snorts and a jaunty canter up to the barn. It seemed he had a lot to say about the weather. The sheep here jumping around. Yes, they jump, these sheep. More on them later. The hens were, as always, a little grumpy at any sudden change in the setting. They are happiest in high summer when they lie basking in bowls of dust and the weather is the same for weeks on end.

Me, I am still thrilled with the snow. We have it when no one in Town has a inkling of it. We have the flutter of snowflakes at morning feeding, the damped down sound of the woods in the evening, the brighter light that leaps from ground to air after a snowfall, and that slightly metallic smell that always had, when we were small, the barest hope of a day without school.

Of course I’m thrilled. It snowed on our farm!

Choosing the Hilly Flanks of the Fertile Valley

We live in the hills, in the farms and woodlands on the flanks of the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Some of the earliest agricultural societies, it is said, emerged in the hilly flanks of the fertile valleys of Mesopotamia. Though we live above only one river, not among the two of Mesopotamia, we depend on the the mixed gifts of the Valley and the hills. Mixed gifts, I say. In the Valley resides Civilization, all the lures of convenience and choice. And yet, we left it, fleeing with glad hearts into the woodlands, leaving behind the museums, the transit system, the stage theaters, the promise of a continuous 120v electrical supply, water running at all times and purified in a plant designed to care for the massed peoples, convenient convenience stores, natural gas, town center malls, city sewers, sidewalks, police patrols in the neighborhood, fully staffed fire stations, DSL, street lights, bicycle paths, Burger King on the corner, city buses, and all-night pharmacies.

Of course, all that was available still, but it was a 40-minute drive away.

In exchange, we acquired 20 acres of mixed timber and farmland, a jim-crack house with a roof that would soon be leaking, a 50 year-old tractor, a well with a cantankerous pump, a surround of wobbly wire fences, and an expansive sense of having arrived someplace we wanted to be.

At night the coyotes sang and jabbered from the hilltops. I marvelled to hear their canny, wild arias rising into the dark. And the stars, the stars. We could see stars by the billions and, from the rise in the road, could see also the glow from the lights of Town. Town in the Valley, the valley so low…

At the time we had no more livestock than a handful of hens we’d brought with us. But we had plans. They were only vaguely formed, but we knew it was the country life we had embraced.

On the evening we signed the papers for the place, we took ourselves to dinner at the sole eating establishment in Beavercreek, the Hitch ‘n’ Post. It was a name mysterious in its choice of apostrophes. Even more puzzling was the fact that the reader board out front announced

GOOD “FOOD!”

in a way that made us wonder what we might be served inside. But we celebrated there anyway with dinners of overdone steaks and desserts of ala mode baked goods. The waitress slid into the booth beside us to tot up the bill. I know we grinned like idiots at this charming, small-town gesture of ease and familiarity. On our way out of Beavercreek, for we still lived in Portland then, we passed the Beavercreek Grange Hall, and felt we were certainly country people now.

That was 9 years ago. We were about to start learning some things.

 

Copyright on all text and photos in this blog by Susan Layne Nielsen unless otherwise identified.  Copyright on external links is independent of this work.