CHLOE CUSHMAN
Iain Reid is the author of Foe and I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
It was my older brother, Ewan, who built the baseball field in the pasture behind the house. He used two-by-fours found in the barn and chicken wire to construct the home-run fence. He framed it through a tall elm tree; our own organic Green Monster. It was a lot of work for something we could only use for three months of the year.
Winter’s end activated our own version of spring training. It was the time to anchor the bases, collect tennis balls (which we used because they couldn’t be hit as far), repair the fence, set up the backstop against the picnic table and fortify the dirt pitching mound. We talked about strategy, players and parks, as we transformed the thawing field into a baseball diamond.
In summer, baseball was played, but it was also fully realized by then and imperfect. I loved batting, and the physics of pitching a (nearly) weightless tennis ball was maddeningly fun, but the season’s potential and impeccability had been replaced by unfavourable fact. Anticipation always became disillusion. Yet again, Ewan would hit more home runs, make superior catches. He always won more of our games.
Spring was meaningful then for what it implied: the end of another long winter. I don’t think this was just true at the farm, but is still the leading cultural impulse across Canada. Walk down any street in any city and you’ll hear a steady grumble about “getting through winter.” It has become the most widely reviled season.
Spring was meaningful at the farm for what it implied: the end of another long winter.
Winter started on Friday, officially, but each year, beginning some time in November, we look for ways to endure or escape the cold, dark, wind and snow. Even the mechanics of walking change to a head down, bunched-up, hurried stride. It’s a narrative of accepted suffering, a perpetual desire for time to pass, for spring and for light.
On our farm, spring wasn’t only about preparing the baseball field. It was the time of year when I learned the most about farming. Spring was the busy season. And it wasn’t always cheerful. Most of the chores were banal but explicitly unpleasant. It took three or four mindless days of shovelling and wheel barrowing repellent, semi-frozen sheep manure to evacuate the barn after winter. It was also lambing season.
An understood image of rural springtime depicts a saccharine optimism. We envision flowers in mid-bloom, golden ducklings hatching from spotted eggs. Our farm was never as parodically idyllic. The melting snow and earth became wet, quicksandish mud. The use of knee-high rubber boots was mandatory. Odours were less tulip-y and more bluntly excremental. It was an extremely messy time, both literally and figuratively.
Ducklings, chicks and lambs were all born in spring but never without plenty of complications. Many never made it past their first day. Livestock adversity peaked between mid-March and late-May. One year, we had an entire pen of yellow, day-old chicks eaten by a weasel. The spring I turned 6, I watched a pregnant and prolapsing ewe die in the straw in front of me. My parents had been tending to her for hours, trying desperately to save her and the lambs. The struggle, the outcome, even at six years old, all seemed unconventionally normal. Spring, not winter, was actually the bleakest.
Livestock adversity peaked between mid-March and late-May.
The warming temperatures brought a reality to the farm that was never as present during other times of the year. Spring was uniquely unreliable. It was warm and cool, wet and dry. It could be suddenly joyful or severely dismal. It offered a necessary deceit that the rest of the year never could. It was the start and, often, the end.
The lambs that do survive beyond the first few days, more than any other farm creature I’ve encountered, are dependably buoyant and unmoody. They’re inherently pleasant to watch because of this. Not just during their sessions of energetic spontaneity, but also when they’re just being, lying around, blasé, with the rest of the flock. They reflect the season they’re born into, one moment running and jumping for no reason; the next, lying introspectively inert in the mud.
Some time between mid-March and mid-April, there was a promise of warmth, of renewal, rebirth, but also of sorrow and adversity; a shifting reality, something predictable only in its instability. In other words, something closer to actual existence. Some of the lambs died, some lived. There was little consistency in spring. And all that eventual renewal was reliant on what came before: the cold and the dark. It was winter that offered some needed predictability.
The log farmhouse itself is more than 160 years old. On the coldest winter mornings, whoever was up first had to break up a paper-thin layer of ice that had formed in the toilet bowl wielding a log. Outside in the fields and barn, areas of sensory deluge the rest of the year, became an achromatic place of peace and quiet. Carrying hay or water to the sheep, you could hear your footsteps crunch through the snow, maybe some wind, but that was it.
Winter encouraged a move back inside, to the fire, to eat, to sleep, to be passive. It was okay on winter days to feel tired and unmotivated, to linger at the table, or on the couch, or in bed.
As an introvert, it’s with this gratifying lethargy that I still embrace the cold and dark, perhaps more than ever. It’s never just a bitter season to endure. I do less in winter. I go out less. I devote more time to solitude. I don’t feel remorse for sitting inside, for (essentially) hiding. Winter has become my annual antidote to abundance and revelry. Expectations are adjusted to value long, substantial dinners and early bed times. A walk on a cold night becomes suitable exercise.
Winter has become my annual antidote to abundance and revelry.
Activity and output seems to define a cold climate’s summer months. There’s always so much to do, to take advantage of. The warm weather is too valuable to waste inside under a blanket. But with the constant socializing and activity comes an acceleration in our perception of time. Summers elapse so quickly because they’re fun and busy. Shovelling snow is the type of monotonous task that slows time. Unlike most entertaining diversions, shovelling snow on a sidewalk or lane for an hour feels like an hour.
This time of year in Iceland, the sun rises some time around 11 a.m. and sets before 3 p.m. There’s little daylight for almost half of the year. There’s an Icelandic word, skammdegi, which literally means “short day.” It seems likely that their dark, dreary, short days are connected to their impressive literacy rate, which is the highest in the world. When it’s cold and dark, when daylight and manageable wind levels are scarce, reading inside is done without regret. It doesn’t have to be reading, of course. Just accepting some time of non-activity permits a form of guilt-free hibernation and a chance to be subdued.
Our baseball field always remained freckled with ice and bits of dark snow for longer than most areas of the farm. It was one of the last places on the property to fully thaw out. We’d be ready to play before the wettest parts had dried.
Some time in midsummer, around the time my batting average would begin its annual decline, the grass would start to dry out, especially around the bases and mound. We were never aware of it while we played. It all happened so fast. One day it would have just lost its green colour completely.
By late-August the grass, overused and thirsty, would develop the sapped complexion of pale straw. The chance to play on a reasonable field in summer, relied on the dormant, restorative months in between. It was the same every year. The field, torn up and dried out, would need a long, cold winter of inaction and frozen neglect to fully recover.