hiking

Porcelain clues

~ Holly ~ Leave a comment

This summer we found two of them twisted in the marshy grass of the lower pasture. The first was half buried in the ground and after unearthing it, we passed the notched white cylinder among ourselves, taking guesses at what it could be. The second offered clues–it sat wrapped in a length of rusty barbed wire.

“They’re fencing insulators,” my grandfather said when we presented them to him, as triumphant as 5 year-olds with a starfish. He seemed bewildered that we had so many questions. “How old are these?” “How did electric fences work then?” “Were they dangerous?” We asked him if he had installed them when he was a boy, when putting up fencing with his brothers. “Well yes,” he said, “Probably.” And he changed the subject. We stored our discoveries in the junk drawer in the kitchen and forgot about them.

But today on a morning walk I found another, deep in the woods behind the house. This one glinted at me from the cold, frozen earth, its twisted nail still embedded in an old fence post, which was almost was indistinguishable from the fallen, decaying tree branches scattered throughout the forest. A line of barbed wire, each strand twice as thick as modern-day fencing, curled across the ground and crept up the trunk of a small, long-dead tree. There was a horizontal scar on the tree where it had encapsulated the barbed wire over these decades.

I stood beside that scarred tree and imagined my grandfather, my great uncles, my great grandfather standing in this same spot, looking back at the long line of posts they had split and driven into the ground, arguing about where the next post should go, whether the wire was taught enough. Their hands on these trees, on this silly, insignificant piece of porcelain. One of thousands they put up over their lifetimes. “It ain’t no big deal,” my grandfather said, sitting in the shade of the ancient maple trees outside. No, maybe not. But they were once clutched in the hands of my ancestors and so, to me, they are a glimpse–small and fleeting–into this the history of the land, the farm, and, me.

Porcelain insulators

To my grandmother: the land echoes

~ Holly

It’s a bright, clear morning. Funny how after only 3 weeks here, 20 degrees starts to feel like a comfortable temperature for 8am. Today is going to be another warm one–the third day in a row of 55 degree high temperatures in the beginning of February. By the afternoon the very top of the ground will become pliable. But now the ground is silver, each blade of grace and broken stalk crocheted with frost. It crunches softly underfoot, like tissue paper.

Mac and I are starting to weave walking trails around the house in all directions. Today we start in the side meadow, following the road from above. We climb the rolling hills and valleys of the meadow until we reach the tree line at the top of the pasture. From there we walk along the edge of the woods, screened from view by the pine trees, thin and knobby.

Mac in Pine trees

We reach the spring at the corner of the pasture, where a layer of water has frozen over the ground, so slick that you can tell deer have bounded through and slipped and scrambled to regain their footing. We drop into the woods behind the pond after that, walking straight down the hill–Mac goes tumbling past me. He hasn’t quite figured out how to put the brakes on, but when he reaches the bottom he patiently waits, panting, eyes alight. We walk along a much-used deer path that circles the back pond. When the sun warms this ground it will be muddy, but we glide over the hardened ruts for now, the deep gray blue of the frozen pond to our left. We follow the bank of the pond and cross the stream where water from the upper pond falls to the lower pond. It makes a delicate, crystalline tinkling as it tumbles over icy rocks.

We emerge on the far end of the side lawn, and Mac takes off across the grass, green even now. When we reach the house I sit on the porch steps while Mac runs in figure eights at my feet. He barks once and his tiny puppy voice bounces back at him from the mountain. He jumps and stares. He barks again and the mountain echoes his voice, sending it out across the valley. He does it again and again, and I think about all of the sounds this land has echoed, in my time and in yours.