Teams of Oxen
When I first had walked the farm, woodland and meadow had smelled to me like the foothills of the Alps.
Only later I learned that the soil itself when dug, released an astonishing fragrance of lemon! Never smelled it before or since anywhere else on earth.
Mama and I had looked up at each other, from elephant pits we were digging for orchard trees, to see which one of us was losing her marbles.
But we both stood wafted in lemon zest, and knew we'd stumbled out of our depth.
Went to my neighbor Harlon about it. Waved to his wife who would become my great friend. He and I talked market prices for cattle, and I slipped in my question:
"Uh, Harlon, grubbing out a root with a mattock or loosening up the soil, you ever smell anything, well... different?
"Nope, cain't say as I have. Thar's manure smell, and fresh-turned land, that deep crumbly soil in sprang, and sometime a kinda lemony smell, sometime like mint down along the river bottom, all kinda rich wholesome smells, I'd say, but nuthin unusual. Land's alive, is all."
Thought about my neighbor and his generations of knowing as I squatted on my heels tossing aside rock where I'd been digging a tomato hole. Each winter the land frost-heaved yet more rock, but this was a new discovery--
Pulled out a flat stone, greenish, not from around here, a worked stone. It appeared to be a spear point, finely edged. For deer maybe, or bear. I held it in my hand and felt the coolness of the deeper soil where it had lain.
Looking across the meadow, I remembered an old, old man telling me how it used to be in this valley.
He had helped build the grist mill, long since fallen, where even longer ago hunter-gatherers had lived, stalking game, picking elderberries and fox grapes along the spring branch and stream.
He had stopped to talk to me, the old man.
"Do you know what yo're adoin?" he asked. Well, I hoped I was doing alright.
He meant: "You know the way of thangs long, long ago," girl, "how it used to was, wilderness time?"
Busy planting a fireside apple tree by the spring house in a thicket of hoe, mattock and shovel, with a wheelbarrowload of "richening" for the soil, I stopped to listen to his story.
Sat down, paid attention to his sun-lined face and stooped wiry body, work-beat-up hands.
"The valley, all dense wooded back when I were a sprout, they cut down huge old chestnut trees and oaks, black walnut, cherry and maple with axes and two-handled crosscut saws.
"Teams o' oxen were roped to them stumps and the men hollered out commands and cracked whips overhead. Roots, they was broken and plumb wrenched from the land.
"Now back then, white folks new to the land from hardscrabble far away built a water mill where them two bold streams come together--for sawin up timber and for grindin grain.
"Farmers they brought in sacks o' field corn, red and yaller, and wheat, buckwheat. Had it ground up fresh to make cornpone, yeast bread an' sourdough buckwheat cakes.
"It tasted mighty good; had more strangthening to it 'n that light bread folks eats nowadays." (He was talking about puffy white store-bought loaves.)
He looked at the sapling I was about to plant.
"Anymore, don't nobody 'member how t'were. We carried chestnuts 'r a load o' field corn ('r moonshine)" he looked mischief my way, "down the mountain once't a month, an' it took couple days thar and back ag'in on them ol' dirt tracks by mule 'n wagon.
"Didn't nobody much ever come thisaway." He chuckled. "T'weren't safe. Didn't take kindly to law 'r 'ligion slippin in from outside."
He turned and considered the old farmhouse that was my home now. Stood quiet for awhile, remembering.
"I he'ped clear this land, and timber we felled built this house o' yourn. You figurin on fillin the bottom plumb up ag'in? Fruit trees and windbreak evergreens I seen you plantin, 'n I don' know what all.
"You have iny idea, the work it is to open up land to the plow?"
photo: Ross Farm Museum
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