Surprise

The work never goes as you imagine.

It’s not worse. Just different. Sometimes it’s gloriously generous, like when your 90-year-old neighbor offers to lend you his tractor, the one he bought on a lark a decade ago and only used for a couple hundred hours. The one he has cared for like it was a vintage corvette, oiling it more often than it needed, and polishing the bits of chrome as if waiting for a day someone would walk up and ask, “Would you consider letting us use it?” When we did, he smiled, oiled it up again, and had it waiting by the next morning.

It’s a small tractor, a compact as they say, just right for us to learn on. And learn we do. How to use a three-point hitch, how to attach a power train, how to drop an auger at just the right speed and depth to punch the 300+ holes for the fenceposts that await.

Our borrowed Kubota L3200. Thanks, James.

Sometimes, the work is hilariously unpredictable. By hilarious I mean: what else can you do but laugh? Like when the guy you hire to pour the concrete footings that will hold your steel arena, a Canadian fella whose been in the states for 30 years, travels to Toronto for a family funeral, only to find upon his intended return that a college bar fight back in 2001 is the kind of thing that these days keeps one from being let back in the country. Or when you try to find a new concrete guy, while your poor Canadian friend stares down months of dislocation and administrative torture, you learn that nobody can get concrete because the data centers have a lock on supply.

A 3×3×3 concrete footing. Never so beautiful as when, two months late, it’s at last poured in place.

Sometimes, it’s like someone designed a game to teach you emotional self-management. Like when the grass you planted in October struggles to establish, stunted by historic drought, until finally the rains come in electric clouds, and the grass begins at last to look like pasture…only to be outpaced by the marestail, a noxious weed that will harm the horses when it’s time for them to graze. And so you’re atop your mower for endless hours, slicing the tops of the weeds before they seed, while keeping the blade high enough to give your precious grass only a tiny trim. And then, when you look across a field in sighing satisfaction at grass well-tended, you spot something else: low-lying nightshade, a horse’s kryptonite, that grew too low for your spinning blade to touch.

Sowing teff seed to compete with the weeds and give our pasture grass a chance to win.

Or when you labor for a hundred hours to build an electric fence to guard your sheep and chickens in their luscious new shaded woodland home, only to watch them, in the moments after you switch on the current for the first time, promptly ignore it altogether and escape, bounding carefree across the field.

Sometimes, it feels like more than you can handle. Then sometimes, it feels like more than you could ask for.

Like when the purple martins, thrilled by the magical way your mower drives a feast of grasshoppers and dragonflies into the air, dive and dart in multitudes around you, and one, an athletic male, hovers just ahead of your machine, nabbing a grasshopper in mid-leap, a feat of perfect timing no engineer could replicate, not three feet from your sunburned face.

Like when, at dusk, you walk the new fence line, epic cedar posts standing at attention in the open fields, and spot, atop each pillar, a bluebird, scouting the pasture, swapping places like it’s a game, and perhaps imagining what it will be like when the birdhouses are built, and they can each call one post a home.

Or when, after a summer rain, the stream rises and the frogs are so multitudinous, you cannot have a conversation with the person walking next to you. Their breeding chorus is so immense and determined and earnest, you hate to interrupt it. But you must. And as you leap over the trickling stream, the frog songs halt in a record scratch. And then a hundred splashes: frogs disappearing into the rainwater river. Before you are ten strides away, the chorus is starting up again, the fireflies in syncopation.

Or when the rafter of wild turkeys, all moms and aunties with their poults bounding clumsily behind, not a male in sight, stop to stare at you in the morning light, before disappearing into the understory, chattering about the curious visitor.

Or when the bald eagle, when you have stepped perhaps too close to its perch, drops like a rock from 100 feet up in the pine, and screeches her warning. Or her greeting. Maybe she is leading you someplace.

The sheep and chickens and dogs have made the silvopasture their happy home, and have halted their clandestine escapes. Our fencepost count is at 103, with a mere 197 to go. The Earth Houses, composting toilets that are cuter than an outhouse has a right to be, hold the eastern line. The arena crew is busy this week, erecting the beams and roof that will host horse work and human gatherings. The treehouse surveys all our effort, the stained-glass windows on the Western side daring you not to imagine this land as sacred. The herb gardens are in such a state of flourishing within one season that their growth has eclipsed our grand idea: you can no longer tell the beds are in the shape of our logo.

The work — remarkably, delightfully — never quite goes as you imagine.