fell gently on the farm. I scanned the trees for abandoned nests, the fledglings flown long ago; the week before I had found an oriole nest, like a felted mitten, blown down from the branch where it had hung. Crossing the bridge of the middle ditch, we surprised a red-tailed hawk in the boughs of an old cottonwood, then five minutes later were surprised ourselves by a bald eagle flying south and then east in the graying twilight. Walking with the goats to check the dwarf plum and apple trees, we saw an owl land in a tree along the ditch, taking off low from the branch minutes later. As we turned the goats into their shed for the night, we could hear the owl’s hooting through the soft, snowy evening, answered by geese in a long line heading south. We brought in armfuls of wood to warm the kitchen and living room for a quiet evening, a promising beginning to the new year together.
A week later, I’m working in my study when I hear the pair of great-horned owls that have graced the farm for years calling in the trees to the east of the driveway. They’re close, so I throw on a jacket and tall boots to run outside in the snowy dusk. With just enough light to see, I follow their calls, one deeper, one higher in response, to the tall pine trees off the parking lot in front of the house. But by the time I reach the trees, the pair has moved to the other side of the ditch, so I walk up the driveway and head into the thicket of overgrown elms and pines between our farm and the neighbor’s.
It’s quiet now, but I keep walking in the silent woods. Suddenly, I hear one owl hooting nearby, so I start up the bank toward the higher ditch. I wait, but when I don’t see an owl silhouetted against the rising moon, I scramble back to the path. I try to walk softly, but the snowdrifts are stiff and I crash through with a crusty crunch. When I come to a place where the bushes have grown across the path, I part the branches with my hands to step through—and I’m facing an owl in the crux of a branch just ten feet in front of me. The owl is scanning the forest, moving its great-horned head from side to side like a lighthouse beacon. It perches sphinx-line on the pine’s lowest branch, its head thrust slightly in front of its body. I’ve never been this close to an owl before, close enough to see its white face and brown markings.
I try not to move, but the owl sees me anyway. The vast head stops rotating and the eyes stare without alarm, noting my presence with feigned curiosity. “Hello, Owl,” I whisper softly. We stare at each other for a few seconds until its mate calls from the other side of the creek. My owl lifts its wings like a cape, pushes off from the branch, and flaps just enough to glide through the trees. I glimpse its golden underside, and then, it’s gone. As I turn and walk back through the snow to the warmth of the house, the owls, reunited, call behind me.
In winter, we look for any reminder of summer’s glow. Dried grasses caught mid-wave in the snow’s fall stand yellow against the glaring white: frozen rays of sunshine left over from a summer warmth. Long and curving against the snow, they ripple beach-like, the whiteness of the snow like sand on the shore in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: “. . . and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.” Winter’s yearning for summer warms us, like a candle’s flame promises a campfire’s glow, but it’s still winter and the light is still as well.
From winter, I’ve learned the lesson of resting and all the “re-” words that go with it: rebirth, renewal, restore, renovate, regenerate, and, most of all, reflect. Winter is a time at Stonebridge when both the land and the farmers rest. The land sleeps under a coat of white. Small mice and voles tunnel under the snow for harvest remains; red-tailed hawks with their snowy breasts survey the fields for any movement that portends dinner. Inside the house, we knit, spin, write, and catch up on our sleep. We pile thick quilts and down comforters on the beds and wait for our own heat to thaw the flannel sheets. We warm our insides with tea brewed from farm herbs and thick stews simmered from the vegetables stored last fall in the freezer, pantry, and root cellar. Mostly, winter is a time to rest from social obligations and the busyness of our lives so we can slow down and take stock of all we have accomplished. The winter wipes clean the slate of last year’s misgivings, knowing spring will offer us a new chance to re-write our dreams. In the quiet of the farmhouse, we plan again, grateful for another season of farmgiving on its way.
Tonight we walked outside at dusk to find the full January moon, called the Winter Moon by colonial Americans, the Wolf Moon by some Native tribes, and the Old Moon in England, rising over the tree line as something hooted in the cottonwood outside the house. Backlit by the moon, a great-horned owl perched in the leafless cottonwood on a branch high above the garage. But then, the call came again from further away, so we searched the horizon to the south. There, on the transformer tip of an electrical pole, balanced a smaller great-horned, its cat-like ears silhouetted against the twilight. We stood under the first owl and hooted in reply, hoping to see it take flight, but it only stared back unflinchingly with its great round eyes. Finally, the second owl flapped off the pole, across the yard, and over the tall trees to the east. Ignoring our calls, the first owl soon followed in the lunar light and the night was still again.
In winter, it is light we crave as much as warmth. Living according to nature’s rhythms provokes us in winter with cold and snow, icy roads, dark days, and long nights. Wool-wrapped and woodstove-huddled, we must look deeper to find winter’s gifts of solitude and rest while we yearn for warmer times. In the last, lingering rays of the solstice sun descending over the blue shadowed foothills of the Rockies, the long snowstice shadows throw a mantle of stillness over the land, as if the world has slowed for a time, like the solstice sun stuck in its rise and set until the earth’s insistent circling sets it free again.
In early spring, flats of seeds germinate quickly in the warm greenhouse.
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
—Lao Tzu
The first workday with the bartering crew at Stonebridge Farm falls in early spring with snow almost invariably on the ground. But this year the day is uncharacteristically sunny, although the mountains had threatened to send snow our way the day before. We need moisture, but the warmth is welcome too on this first day as we set the new farm season in motion. Here we are again, ready to make soil and plant seeds and clean the winter-deadened debris from the land.
Before we get to work, we gather around the woodstove in the Sunflower Community Room with cups of tea and coffee, saying hello after a winter’s absence and sharing stories after four months of Saturdays not spent in the garden together. Sometimes a new baby, new job, travel overseas, or, sadly, the death of a loved one, have brought us to an altered phase of our lives, yet the farm and its cycles of care mark a continuity for all of us. Because Stonebridge is a community supported agricultural farm, we like to say we emphasize the “C” in “CSA” since the work we do here is as much about people as produce.
Spring at Stonebridge wasn’t always such a joyous return. In earlier years of the CSA, the fall fields were often left unturned and no cover crops were sown to prepare the soil for the next spring’s planting, as if the farmers had thrown down their tools one autumn day and wandered off for warmer climates. In those earlier times, before the barterers provided stability for the farm, the strain of finishing the season was so great, no one could imagine doing it again just a few months later. With full-time jobs outside of the farm, John and I couldn’t do all the work ourselves after the partners we’d had along the way left for jobs or farms of their own. We knew that we wanted to keep the community focus of Stonebridge, rather than market our produce off the farm, so we turned to that community for help.
In 2000, John and I initiated a bartering structure at Stonebridge that asked a handful of members to exchange farm work for their seasonal share of vegetables. We had read about bartering at Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts, the first CSA in the United States, and it seemed to us the perfect way to build the social structure of the farm. To our surprise