Blogs →
Today at Mary's Farm
Edie Clark has written extensively about New England in award-winning feature stories for Yankee magazine for the past thirty years. Her column, Mary's Farm, has been a popular feature in Yankee since 1990. A collection of those essays, The View from Mary's Farm, was published in 2005; a new collection, Saturday Beans and Sunday Suppers, Kitchen Stories from Mary's Farm, was published last year. A new edition of her memoir, The Place He Made, has just been published. This and her other books are available on www.edieclark.com.
Winter's Fire
The Work in Cordwood
February 4, 2010 at 8:08 AM | 2 Comments | Post a Comment
Farmer Jay has been clearing logs from around the edges of the big field to the southeast of my house. He's gone back into the cordwood business, he tells me, after a brief hiatus. He did not say why but I assume the favorable price of cordwood might have something to do with it. Cordwood is expensive (I can remember paying $45 a cord, years back, but I've heard of prices as high as $275 a cord more recently) but there's also a lot of work in it. I don't think the hourly wage of anyone who cuts cordwood for a living is very high. Plus it's dangerous work. Still, it's a good way for a hay farmer to earn income in the winter. So the familiar whine of the chainsaw began. He works alone but within sight of many of my windows so I glance out from time to time, an interesting diorama to watch when I look up from my desk. He works with a skidder, cutting the tree first, limbing them and then dragging the trunks across the field, stockpiling them up by the road. Standard logging practice. Looked to me like a lot of maple and ash but I didn't look too closely. I could see from the fir boughs that were mounting beside the stone wall that he was also cutting pine. Though these fields belong to my neighbor, Jay manages them, keeping the edges trimmed and picking up trees that go over in wind and ice. This makes it easier for him to get as much hay as possible from these big and mostly productive meadows. I don't know of any nicer fields in this town or the next. Aside from the fine horse hay it produces (I am told it is very good quality) and now the harvest of hardwood, these fields provide a great beauty, which is no small product.
Chicken Pie Recipe Revealed!
It's all in the biscuit
January 23, 2010 at 11:12 AM | 9 Comments | Post a Comment
At the very end of my book, Saturday Beans and Sunday Suppers: Kitchen Stories from Mary's Farm, I make reference to a chicken pie that I like to make on cold winter evenings, such as it will be tonight. Ever since, I have been chastened by readers who lamented I did not include the recipe. Today, I am responding to those many requests.
The Death of Stephen Huneck
Dog is Love
January 10, 2010 at 10:20 AM | 6 Comments | Post a Comment
I am haunted by the death of Stephen Huneck, a wonderful and unique Vermont artist who died this week by his own hand. I may have been one of the first to write about Stephen, back in the early 1980s. A big bear of a man, he was outgoing, enterprising, not your typical artist but that worked to his advantage as he made his way into the complicated system of the art of selling art. For one thing, he looked more like a blacksmith than an artist. His art was various. He was a sculptor, a printmaker, a wood carver, an innovator. When I visited him that day, so long ago now, it was not to Dog Mountain, but to a red farmhouse in the hills north of St. Johnsbury. He was there with his wife Gwen and there were a million things going on. We were the same age and his lifestyle was similar to mine so we struck an immediate rapport. He had been an antique dealer and what he was doing then was what most of the young idealists were doing at that time: trying to earn a living in a way that kept him true to his gift: carving.
A Prayer on the Day After Christmas
All is calm, all is still
December 30, 2009 at 2:13 PM | 9 Comments | Post a Comment
The time between Christmas and New Year's is a silent time, a time of grateful stillness. At least it is here, at this place that is known in the magazine and to the folks in town as Mary's Farm but that I call, privately, Stillpoint. Since the first night I spent here, the place here on the ridge has always seemed invested with profound peace, from the moment the morning sun first touches the mountain, throughout the day, when just a scattering of cars pass by, to the flare of sunset behind the trees, to the deep stillness of the middle of a star-filled night -- there is little change in the tempo of stillness, to the reality of peace. The only noticeable change is the light, as the sun moves across the sky and then slowly moves offstage to give the magnificent night its chance to perform.
Happy Solstice!
A "New" Holiday We Can All Share
December 21, 2009 at 11:16 AM | 2 Comments | Post a Comment
Happy solstice, a somewhat forgotten mark of time and the movement of the planets. In the northern hemisphere, today is the shortest day of the year and the longest night; it is also the first day of winter. No one seems to want to celebrate that as much as we like to acknowledge the first day of spring or summer. And it is certainly overshadowed by the much greater and now mostly commercial holiday, Christmas, which is barely four days away. Like everyone else, I am scurrying to meet that deadline. It is a Christian holiday and is so celebrated in churches throughout the world but it has always seemed to me to be more of a Capitalist Holiday as the weeks and days that precede it mark the most scrutinized and analyzed shopping days of the calendar year. If you listen to the news, this slow turn of the planet on its axis seems a lot less important, by a long shot.
