Hiccuping Into The Season

It's like driving a car that has water in the gas tank. Sometimes you are cruising along at a nice steady speed and then you lose power and you find yourself on the side of the road.  Then you wait a bit and things settle, and you can limp along for another few miles, but there is always the looming possibility of another sputtering stop.

That's where we are, in terms of the season.  Last week we had a string of beautiful days and we got to go outside and work, getting ready for spring. But we knew it was too early for seeds since the ground is still cold, and the forecast was for rain and chilly temperatures.  In the greenhouse, which is artificially steady in its warmth and lack of wind, the plants are thriving, waiting to be let outdoors.  There are thousands of onions, kale, kohlrabi, cabbage plants chugging along. The other day we started the ginger and turmeric, which need tropical conditions to sprout.

In our own house, we are gradually moving back into the kitchen -- we moved every single thing out a couple of weeks ago so we could get all the way to the edges and repaint, install new floors and cabinets and counters. We didn't rearrange anything so it was a quick project (which we actually paid other people to help us with) and now it is shiny and fancy-feeling.  Of course the porch still has stacks of black crates full of stuff that needs to come back inside, or not.

And out in Loudoun a similar project is underway -- we took every single thing out of the kitchen in the Stone House, including the floor, and it is gradually coming back together. The timing was perfect for re-purposing the cabinets that came out of our house:  they loaded our cabinets into Dooley, I drove the van to Loudoun and parked it, and yesterday Stephen and Jon unloaded them into the Stone House.  No wasted motion.

Lots of transition and not so much forward motion yet, but that will all change as soon as the sun comes out and the soil warms up. 

But there is one type of progress, in addition to the greenhouse.  People are getting vaccinated.  In our extended family nearby, everyone has had at least one shot except for Rebecca who is too young and does not work in a hospital so is waiting her turn. Last Saturday night, for the first time in a full year, we sat down around the table inside of Anna and Gordon's house and we ate a take-out meal (before this year, we had never ever had a take-out meal at either of our houses). All winter long we have persisted with our weekly family dinners -- often in the middle of the day to try to be outside when it is "warm" -- on Anna's porch.  Hot pots of soup or stew with cornbread just out of the oven.  Everything cools off fast when you are eating in a 27 degree restaurant, but we have little electric blankets on our laps and a cup of tea in our hands, and doggedly cheerful hosts.  

With the change in administrations, we spend a lot less time going over the latest political crises. This is progress too.  

I have spots of paint on my hands from yesterday's work in the Stone House kitchen, I have unusually agressive welts of poison ivy on my forearms from last week's blueberry weeding, and I am glad to have a day to recuperate while it is raining, but this is actually not my favorite time of year. I have many favorites, and we are on the brink of April which is a peak season in my book, with all the blooming and exploding and new growth, but this particular moment is one of looking forward instead of just revelling in the here and now.  Here and now it is too soggy and cold to work and I am getting tired of indoor domesticity. And who wants to sort through all these crates of stuff that we might not really want in our house anymore.  

I am ready for someone to drain that gas tank and put some nice clean fuel in so we can accelerate into April.

The Spy Vs. The Farmer

There has been just about nothing to report from my own life in the last few months, which makes it hard to think about what to talk about here. I see no need to add to the public conversation about politics and current events. No one in my house has been vaccinated yet, so we are living the same sheltered life, getting very close to the one year anniversary of the last time I hosted book club in our livingroom.  During the off season I have been writing a bunch of short pieces, dug out of my memory, focusing on events that happened almost 50 years ago. I think this is like collecting up a box of old photos -- not held together by a narrative but just a pile of stories.  So, in the absence of any change of pace or venue or schedule, I will just write one of those snippets here.

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My father used to say (with glee), "I break about ten laws before getting out of bed every morning."  Of course, these were not new laws every day, these were the same laws as yesterday. And he didn't break them anew, he just kept on breaking them. Sometimes maybe they weren't actually laws, they may have been zoning rules or maybe vehicle inspection deadlines. 

There are so many examples of these non-flagrant nose-thumbings that I have a hard time choosing one, but we did have a bad, bad, evil neighbor who my father had to tangle with from time to time.  This nasty man also turned out to be a rule-breaker, but on an entirely different scale from my father. 

I just looked him up on Wikipedia to be sure that my memories were at least somewhat correct.  Edwin P. Wilson, CIA operative and double agent, convicted of selling arms to Libya, ended up spending over 20 years in prison before convincing a judge that he had been framed by the CIA. He was guilty, but the prosecution had been so anxious to convict him that they got sloppy. 

Anyway, this man -- who we did not know was a spy, we knew nothing about his work -- owned five wooded  landlocked acres adjacent to our farm and he had a right of way through our property to get to his hillside overlooking the Brooks Field.  Why he ever wanted to own five acres on a hill overlooking a swamp, with no direct access, we will never know.  It turns out he was a millionaire who owned property all over the world, with money he had accumulated through the companies he formed while working for the CIA. 

Mr. Wilson was very tall, with expressive eyebrows and a charismatic way about him, but he also could look fierce and scary. I remember seeing him come through the front door of our house once when he wanted to talk about the mess that was our farm.  He felt strongly that he should not have to go through such a chaotic place to get to his property.  I don't know where he was coming from, geographically, to get here but when he went to visit his 5 acres he came on his horse and rode up our driveway, past our house, down the gravel road and past a lot of agricultural junk. It irked him. He was so tall that I think he ducked his head a bit to come through the door.  My father was 5'10" and it seems to me he remained sitting at the table when Mr. Wilson came in. I remember Mr. Wilson's eyes. They were mean, even if he was smiling.  We knew that his smile was absolutely fake.  My father used to say that Edwin P. Wilson was pure evil.  Turns out he was right (he was arrested in 1983, a year before my father died, so at least Dad got to find out that Mr. Wilson was worse than we ever imagined).

Edwin P. Wilson sued my parents for having a messy farm. He lost the lawsuit. But he didn't give up. He sent the health department after us because he knew there were many buildings in the woods that did not meet the county code. I think he actually had his wife make these complaints because we all knew that Barbara Wilson was the one who was sending the inspectors (his obituary says that while he was in prison he tried to hire someone to kill his wife, and he wanted the wedding ring returned to him, on her finger preferably.).

For several years, we lived in the shadow of these health inspections.  But, remember, my father was not one to follow rules that didn't match his way of thinking, so he was not inclined to just clean up his act. 

On one occasion, he got a warning that the health inspector was coming to look at the buildings in the woods.  He cut down some pine trees and "planted them" in a hedge on the side of the Picnic Shed that would be most visible from the roadway.  He had the workers put piles of baskets in front of the windows of the Tractor Shed (where they slept, certainly illegally) so that from the outside it looked like a storage building.  Then when the inspector came, they took a walk down the road that Mr. Wilson rode his horse down to get to his lot. My dad could be an entertaining guy and he had plenty to talk about as they walked down that hill.  He showed the inspector that this was just a storage shed with tractors and supplies on the bottom floor and baskets upstairs.  I am sure the guy could not imagine anyone sleeping in such a structure, so he believed him.  Then on the way back up the hill (which was steep, with a rutted roadway so not that much of a stroll), just as they were getting to the spot where the Picnic Shed might be most visible in spite of the pine trees, Dad looked down and found a snake on the road. He picked it up and that just kept them very busy until they got all the way back up the hill.  The inspector saw nothing to report.

I am guessing that my parents were much more appealing (as college educated, personable, hard-working young farmers starting a business) than Mr. Wilson or his wife, and that the inspector was not inclined to try to shut us down.  Barbara Wilson had told the county that there were vagrants sleeping in the woods in tents. This was completely untrue. Our workers slept in sheds with roofs and floors. No plumbing, no cooling, but these were not tents. They had outhouses. 

When Edwin Wilson went to jail in 1983, he was suddenly in need of money and he wanted to sell his land.  My parents and the Moutouxs next door decided to divide that property in half, and they each bought  two and a half acres of relatively useless land (too steep to build on, in an environmental quality corridor). It did have a nice view of the woods but there were houses getting built within clear view of that slope by then.  

Now that we know that Mr. Wilson put a contract out on his wife, it is easy to speculate that my father could have been on a list too, but he died first.  The double agent was convicted of arranging to have many people killed while he was in prison.  This man certainly goes down in history as the worst neighbor ever. Pretty ironic that we built Blueberry Hill about a football field away from that piece of ground, creating a solid wave of good neighbor energy to combat those evil spirits.