It is the season, or so the old saying goes, to turn one’s thoughts to love.
Here, it turns our thoughts to labor.
Spring is, for us, the busiest season. Winter may be more difficult, tasks made more laborious by bitter cold and deep snow and crammed into shorter periods of light; summer and fall are filled with work, cultivation and harvest and a thousand other things.
But for sheer volume of tasks, and the degree of physical labor required, nothing here compares to spring.
It’s a time for readying the land, and that itself is not easy: The ground here is hard even in warm weather; after a long winter, it’s doubly difficult, the soil frozen deep. We sit here upon ancient bedrock, a riverbed from the time before time, and one need not dig very far for the shovel blade to meet solid stone.
Once the ground is dug and tilled and irrigated at least to a small degree, it’s time to plant, and we will be doing that this week and next. For just the two of us, we maintain relatively large gardens: corn and beans and squash; other vegetables and fruits; herbs and flowers. We spread them, typically, across four separate gardens or so, all small enough to till with a tiller, but large enough to require significant work.
It’s nothing, of course, like the planting of our respective childhoods.
Back then, it was tractor and plough. My father used the former, a beautifully ancient iron beast that dated to the ’30s or so, with a metal seat and a small round steering wheel that he would let my three- and four-year-old self pretend to drive even as he did the real work. Wings’s father used an older method yet: a plough made of cast iron, deep blade and wooden handles and leather traces that he would place over the horse at the blade end, over his own shoulders to steer (my father, as it happens, was equally familiar with such efforts, having farmed that way in his youth). And with these tools, they planted acres of land with hay and corn and other crops.
Today, the tractor is long decades gone, but the plough sits over by one of the old garden plots. The metal is the color of an ancient rust, but it is still solid — oxidation, but no corrosion to any significant degree. The wooden handles have fared less well, weathered gray and splintery, but they still work. Extensive ditching is now done with modern tractors and implements, and they can go deeper at a far faster rate . . . but in a pinch, the plough blade still works, even if it requires more sweat and elbow grease to do it.
For now, though, it sits, at rest, weighted by a collection of stones that look like the eggs of some great and ancient beast. It has earned its retirement, even if we are not ready to retire from the tasks that once employed it. To some, it is just an artifact, an interesting collection of metal and wood and leather from bygone days.
To us, it’s not even history; it barely qualifies as “past.” If it’s an artifact, it is one of our own lives, lives still being fully lived, still performing the same labor, albeit with newer tools.
It is, in the end, simply another intermediary, an intercessor with the earth. In a few days, when the time comes to plant, there will be no more need of mediation; we will communicate directly, my hands in the soil, soil around my hands.
But for now, some distance remains, some labor yet to perform before the earth will be ready to work with us. Old tools or new, they will mediate on our behalf, intercede for the seeds we soon will plant. It is, in its way, a process of supplication.
Did you know that a plough is a prayer?
~ Aji
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