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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. She is the author of two essay collections, The View from Mary's Farm and Saturday Beans and Sunday Suppers, Kitchen Stories from Mary's Farm. A new book, States of Grace: Encounters with Real Yankees, has just been published. This and her other books are available on www.edieclark.com.
Dilemma at Town Meeting
To Pave or Not to Pave
March 16, 2011 at 8:53 AM | 1 Comment | Post a Comment
Last week we had our annual town meeting here in this town of 885 registered voters. New England town meeting is often held up to be "America's true form of democracy" -- but it really isn't anymore, at least not on any grand scale. Most of the important decisions about the way we live our lives or the way our tax money is spent are made now at the state or federal level. For instance, no one calls to meeting a vote on whether or not we should go to war in Iraq or on health care or whether we should still get the social security we worked so hard for all our lives. The issues we vote on have decidedly less impact. It's gotten to the point where some New England towns have even forsaken the whole idea of town meeting.
A Night at the Oscars
Sand Dollars, Crab Trap Take-out, and the Big Snooze
February 28, 2011 at 12:22 PM | 2 Comments | Post a Comment
I always watch the Oscars and it usually gets me to thinking about Georgia at this time of year. My parents made an annual pilgrimage there to a place called St. Simons Island. They rented a place where they sat out the months of March and April in that sun-drenched place before reluctantly returning to their northern home. My mother disliked winter and craved this hiatus in the south. When I was growing up, we used to make a four-day journey to southern Florida in the car, a big station wagon which my father piloted along narrow state roads, past sharecropper's cabins where tenant farmers walked behind mules turning the spring earth with hand-held plows and past gas stations that had separate bathrooms for whites and "coloreds." This was all new to me as none of the public bathrooms at home were segregated in that way. I think back on this as if to another century, not that I feel so old so much as I'm so amazed at how quickly and dramatically our country has changed. My mother hated the concept behind this segregation and we would talk about this in the car as we drove. What she really cared about was a clean bathroom and these were very hard to find along our route. All bathrooms and motel rooms were thoroughly inspected by my mother before any of us were allowed to go inside. We often stopped at many before finding one that she found acceptable. She couldn't do anything about the segregated bathrooms but this was something she could control, at least to some extent.
Buried in Snow
Snowblowers on the Roof and Curtains on the Windows
February 14, 2011 at 11:55 AM | Post a Comment
There is so much snow here now that Mayday, my 20-pound schnauzer, can walk on the crust of the snow over to my living room window and look inside. She puts her paw on the window, a window that most of the year is way out of her reach. I get the feeling she is as surprised by this as I am. The snowbanks are so high that, when I look out the window, I hear cars go by but I cannot see them. A strange deprivation -- there is so little traffic on this road, I am used to looking out and knowing who it is, driving by. If I see an unknown car, I am curious. Of course. But being closed off like this, it is as if one of my senses has been switched off. This morning when I went out with the dogs, I could hear a pack of coyotes reveling close by so I hustled us back inside. But where were they? They sounded close enough to touch. Looking around, I could see nothing but blowing snow.
Below Zero, Not so Cold
Friends Inquire: R U OK?
January 31, 2011 at 11:48 AM | 6 Comments | Post a Comment
A week or so ago, I woke up to remember that I had forgotten to buy milk on my way home the night before. Tea without milk is no way to start the day. I reluctantly emerged from my down comforter, opened the front door, and let the dogs out. WHOA! I took a look at the thermometer on the porch -- which always reads a bit high because it's protected: 18 below zero. I let them right back in, got dressed, loaded up both woodstoves, and started the car to get it warm before setting off for the store. Outside, in temperatures like that, my usual surroundings turn otherworldly. A rim of hoarfrost coats everything, even the ice on the trees. The exhaust from my car rose like clouds from a factory. Nothing moves in this cold stillness. Over the years I've learned that in temperatures like this, if I take a mug of hot tea and throw it into the air outside the door, it will rise up like a cloud. If I blow bubbles out into the cold, the bubbles turn to ice and will shatter on landing like thin crystal. Those are the fun parts. I've also learned to carry essentials in the car with me: extra gloves, hat, socks, wool scarf, snow boots, a shovel, can of sand, container of kitty litter, granola bars and a small bottle of brandy (my father's advice to me thirty years ago when I first started going out on assignment in northern New England -- the bottle he gave me then remains in the emergency kit).
The GPS of Life
Turning the page on another year
January 1, 2011 at 8:25 AM | 4 Comments | Post a Comment
Happy new year to my friends out there. As I write this, it is 2 a.m. on the first of January, 2011. Up here on the hill, it is a fairly mild night, dark as pitch. I am not up at this hour because I've been out reveling. If I were not connected to the rest of the world by internet and television, I would not be aware that this night is different from any other. But it is that strangest of holidays wherein we demarcate the passage of time. Just knowing that other cultures have different calendars should be enough for us to know that ours is by all means arbitrary, ours being based on the Roman calendar laid out more than two thousand years ago, not particularly relevant to today. The Chinese, the people of Middle Eastern cultures, the Celts, all have a different time when they celebrate the passage of another year. Most of these calendars are based on something in the natural world: lunar cycles or solar cycles or, closely related, the cycles of the seasons -- the farmer's year. This is the one that makes the most sense to me. But these are all ancient calendars. If we were to create a calendar now, it would have to be based on the post-industrial age, the age of computers and the internet, which would mean the calendar would be seamless, a 24/7 roll-up of minutes, hours, days and weeks -- everything would be a continuous flow of productivity and distribution, manufacture and shipping being the hands of the clock that moves in its perpetual cycle. No moment in that calendar would be different, one from the other. I am certainly glad that we haven't moved to a calendar that reflects the reality of our daily lives, so divorced from the soil and from the skies, particularly the night skies. I'm also grateful that my life here remains tied to the earth.
