It’s peony season here at the Truelove homestead. We inherited a surprisingly extensive peony garden when we bought our house, and for one brief and beautiful moment every year it explodes into bloom. It doesn’t last long, a week or two or three depending on the species and varietal, and then the garden becomes just another horticultural burden to be mowed, and trimmed, and taken care of until early summer rolls around again. But while it’s here, it is something special.

I’d never number peonies among my favorite flowers, but certainly I can see their appeal. They are a serious sort of flower: big and flashy and declarative. I wouldn’t call them particularly subtle. The blooms are enormous, the colors bold and lush. Ours are pink and magenta, deep red and sunrise yellow and pure white edged in oxblood. They’re at once both gaudy and fragile, the hefty flowerheads burdening the stalks at times with their bulk, yet then threatening to fall to pieces in the first hard rain. Their smell is sweet, musky, almost cloying, and as evocative as a long-dead grandmother’s perfume. Peonies are beloved of old ladies and ants (and, one would assume, old lady aunts) and their blooming is always something to behold.

Yet it’s their brevity that I actually most admire. A single peony blossom, once it opens, only sticks around for a few days at best, before the soft and silken petals drop away in a torrent. At a time when the world seems to be bursting with flowers – azaleas, irises, even the multiflora rose – peonies are notable for just how brief their moment of glory really is. They are a blink-and-you-miss-them sort of flower. I can respect that. A great many wonderful things are diminished when they overstay their welcome, but peonies are not one of them. They make you wait and wait for the fat, globular flowerheads to acquiesce to openness, and then after a short but powerful showing, they exit stage left. It’s the sort of lesson that perhaps should be taken more to heart in our society. Not that I can’t understand the impulse to preserve that beauty for just a moment longer – my wife and my mother are both experimenting with wrapping the unopened buds and storing them in the refrigerator for blooming at a later date. But sometimes, in our search for longevity, we lose sight of what was special to begin with.

It’s a bitter lesson we see everywhere in our culture, a determination that if something is good for a moment, then we must stretch that moment to the breaking point. We demand berries and tomatoes in the depth of winter, we prefer our pleasures to be mediocre but ever present, we extend our own lives past the point of cognizance or capability or enjoyment…sometimes it’s better to know when to call it quits. Eat all the strawberries you can in June, then let them go for another year. Accept that gas stations shouldn’t serve sushi and the fiftieth Star Wars movie isn’t going to live up to watching Empire as a kid. Let age take you when the time comes instead of flailing away into infirmity. Enjoy the peonies when they bloom. Go take a sniff, pick a few for the table, wander among the colors for however short a time they brighten the world. And when those bright petals fall away, just let them go, and remember them fondly. 

I like bears. I like bears more than I like people, which I suppose isn’t saying much, but still. I like black bears, Ursus americanus, in particular, since they’re our local species, and my fondness for grizzlies is leavened by a healthy amount of dread. My few encounters with wild grizzlies instilled within me awe and terror; my encounters with black bears generally give me a sense of camaraderie. The slow amble, the amiable scratch against a tree trunk, the curiosity that often leads to trouble: the black bear is a very relatable animal. Which is not to say they aren’t deserving of a healthy amount of respect, and perhaps a good dose of fear as well. All large animals deserve a certain amount wariness and circumspection, even the domesticated, as I’ve been reminded of all too often by protective mother cows and pigs. And bears, in addition to being large, and at least partially carnivorous, are representative of the wild that they inhabit. It’s easy to overlook that fact as they stroll leisurely across suburban Connecticut lawns or rifle through garbage cans for old takeout containers, but wild they are, and they bring a piece of wildness with them when they visit. It’s another reason I find them so appealing. And a reason to tread carefully in their presence.

For years, the population of black bears in our area has been increasing, and with it the tension that comes with co-habitating with large, occasionally aggressive wildlife. For me, it’s a positive development. I want to live in a region that is wild enough to support bears, I want to glimpse them on occasion and be reminded of a more primitive sort of existence. Yet I’ll admit that encountering a bear while hiking in the woods or spotting one from a distance is a different experience than having your garage ransacked or your bee hives torn apart. Having a farm, having vulnerable livestock to care for, gave the presence of bears and other predators a good deal more nuance in my mind. They became sources of worry, though not enough for me to sour on them. Our guard dogs, Great Pyrenees, were always enough to keep them clear of the farm, and in twelve years no bear gave us any real problem. When we moved into our new house last year, however, bears became a more central feature in our lives.

Our first full spring in our home, we were seemingly swarmed by black bears. Our land is half of a valley that slopes down to a passing stream, and is very close to a large tract of undeveloped state reservoir holdings. It’s perfect black bear habitat. By my count, including cubs, we were visited by possibly eleven different bears last spring. Most merely passed through our lower field and were gone, but at least one or two brazenly came up to our lawn to pull down our bird feeders. One invaded our garage in search of more sunflower seed, and one even came up onto our second floor back porch to snag another hanging feeder. In fairness, had I realized how prevalent bears would be here, the feeders would never have been left up in the first place. But at the farm, less than a mile away, I’d never even seen a bear, only evidence of their activity on very rare occasions. The bustle of the farm, and the three Great Pyrenees in particular, had been enough of a dissuasion to keep bears out of sight, or at least moving through at a brisk pace. I had assumed that as we continued to turn our current land into more of a homestead, and the dogs came here to live, that the bears would sense their presence and avoid our land as they had the farm. That seemed to be the case, and a warm April this year came and passed with no visitations. But that changed yesterday.

It was mid-morning, slightly overcast and a bit blustery, but a good spring day nonetheless. I was doing a bit of yard work, my wife was inside working, and my mother and mother-in-law were playing with my daughter. We recently fenced in our back field, a three acre parcel, and now it houses our three Pyrenees, nine year old Baloo and three year old siblings Samwise and Valkyrie (as well as three new kid goats, fifteen young chickens, and few ducks). The fence runs along our back yard, then links up to our separate garage, continuing down from the far side of the garage along our side lawn; from along the back yard section, you can’t easily see up past the garage and down the far length. We had all been in the back yard, and the dogs and goats had been along the fence with us, but as I continued with chores the ladies took the baby up to the driveway in front of the garage, and the dogs had circled up around the garage to stay with them. I kept puttering around the back yard. Suddenly, I was startled by shouting, and though I had ear-buds in and couldn’t make out the words, the uproar was unmistakable. My first fear was for the baby, and my stomach contracted and I bolted across the lawn as fast as I could. But as I tore out my ear phones and came around to the front of the garage I spotted my mother-in-law with the baby, both fine, and I heard what my mother had been yelling to me. She’d been yelling ‘bear’.

Ordinarily a bear in the yard would be no cause for alarm, though we’d all drop what we were doing to go have a good look from a respectful distance. But this bear was on the wrong side of the fence, in the interior field side. And the dogs were after it. The bear must have just crossed the four-foot tall box wire because it was only just on the other side of it. The dogs had only scented or spotted the beast when they came up around the far side of the garage, yet they were on it in a flash. I ducked into the garage and grabbed the first stout thing I could lay hands on, a bank blade, for though I didn’t want or expect to use it I wouldn’t go close to the bear without something to fend it off with in the worst case scenario. I assessed the situation as I ran towards the uproar and was grateful even in my panic: the bear was not overly large, and the dogs, barking crazily though they were, were keeping a few feet of distance. Still, they had the bear surrounded, and they backed it up to the base of a hickory tree as I started bawling at them to back away. That didn’t do much good. I would succeed in driving one dog away but couldn’t do anything from the far side of the fence to get them to stay, and as I turned my attention to another, the previously chastised dog would dart back to the fray. I feared that it was only a matter of seconds before the bear had enough of the yapping pack and sent one to the vet, or worse, with a swipe of its paw.

Yet thankfully the bear had more sense than the dogs, and rather than attack, it retreated up the trunk of the tree. It wasn’t particularly big as far as black bears go, not too much larger in fact than the Pyrenees. I’d put the weight at somewhere between 150 and 200 lbs, and it was perhaps a two year old. It stopped about ten feet up the hickory and looked down at the barking dogs in anger. It hissed, made a whining sort of growl, and popped its jaws together in a threat display, but though I found the warning unnerving the dogs were unperturbed. I realized that my only option would be to go in, haul the dogs out by their collars, and lock them up. That would put me unsettlingly close to an antagonized bear. If a vet visit was unappealing, a doctors visit was doubly so. Still, my concern for the dogs was paramount and I had to get them away, so I went into the fencing through the far gate, gave the bear in the tree as wide of a berth as I could, and grabbed Baloo by his collar to pull him away. The maneuver took me closer than I’d have liked to the spitting ursine form, and as I looked up at the bear from a mere few feet away I saw the cause of the whole disastrous encounter. I spotted the cubs.

There were three of them, small black forms no bigger than house cats, and they were perched precariously in the uppermost branches of the hickory, a good fifty or sixty feet off the ground. The bear was a sow, who had retreated up the tree to protect her cubs, and all the warnings about the dangers of a bear with cubs crashed upon me. I needed top get myself and the dogs away from the sow before she decided to come back down the tree and get aggressive. Thankfully my harsh words through gritted teeth and firm hand on the collar were enough to budge Baloo. I led him out the gate and managed, with help from my mother (who had gone into iPhone documentarian mode as she does whenever something the least bit interesting happens) to get him shut in our nearby market van. Seeing the older dog locked away, the two younger dogs seemingly realized the folly of their ways. They gave up the baying and retreated to the gate as well just as I turned around to go and get them. With the three dogs shut away, a sort of calm was restored. The bear had gone a bit further up the tree. She perched in a fork about fifteen feet off the ground, still panting and snapping her jaws. I bent over double and worked to catch my breath and collect my wits.

After watching the sow and cubs for a short time from a slightly more comfortable distance, we retreated till we were largely out of sight. From what I could puzzle out, the bear and cubs must have come across the road and, encountering our fence, the cubs had squeezed through the wire rather than go around as one would have hoped. The sow, obligated to follow, had then clambered over; I could see the slight indent in the top strand of the box wire that marked her passage. That was when the dogs must have surprised them. Thankfully, the cubs had the instinct to shoot up the nearest tree, and bear, bless her, had the level-headedness to not make disemboweling the canines her new life’s mission. Now there was nothing to do but wait for fear to subside and the cubs to descend the tree and depart. It took the better part of an hour, but eventually they returned to earth, and the family of four went on their way. They went down across our field, and encountering the fence at the bottom, the cubs again squeezed through and the mother again climbed over. I shadowed them as they went, and they caught sight of me once more, climbing another pine tree for security, though I was at least fifty yards distant. Eventually I left them in peace and went back to the house. I hoped the morning’s drama had been enough to keep them well clear of our field in the future. Certainly it had shaken me up.

The story has no particular moral or resolution. It was a bit of panic and excitement that ended much, much better than it could have. My enthusiasm for bears remains undimmed, though this was as potentially dangerous an encounter as I’ve had, and as worried as I’ve been of a bear since my days hiking in grizzly territory out west. Perhaps it was a healthy realignment of perceptions. It’s easy to anthropomorphize animals, black bears in particular, and easy to get complacent in their presence. The worst thing for bears is human encouragement: it often ends with a call to DEP and a dead bear. A healthy amount or fear is appropriate for all parties in this inter-species encounter, with perhaps the balance of fear being ideally borne by the bear, since of the two species man is far, far more dangerous. For my part, my concern over the incident was about the dogs, and yet it’s the dogs who make co-habitation with bears possible in the first place. Guard dogs allow us to farm, to raise animals, without worry about predation or needing to resort to extirpation of our neighboring species. The dogs keep our livestock safe, but in a round-about way they also keep the bears safe. The system only breaks down when something unforeseen happens, something along the line of a few headstrong cubs and a too-permeable fence. Luckily, no one was hurt, no dogs, no bears, no me. I hope the sow and her cubs live safely and contentedly, and I hope I don’t see them anytime soon. And yet, paradoxically, longingly, I also hope that I do.

I’m in the mood for comfort food. I always am, of course; aren’t we all? But this week, there’s nothing terribly wrong with my world except some unpleasant weather and perhaps a bit of early Spring malaise, nothing, in other words, that can’t be put right with a sip of something strong and a bite of something wonderful. I’ve been craving something comforting, and for me, comfort is pork. Comfort is a slice of cold smoked pork shoulder.

Though it may be no comfort at all to the pig, I believe I can say without reservation that a smoked shoulder is my favorite of all pork cuts. And, since pork is my favorite of all meats, it stands to reason that a smoked shoulder is my favorite cut of meat, period. Bacon, sausages, pates, roast duck, braised lamb shank, a grilled backstrap of venison…all evoke wondrous and savory visions in my mind. But for me, nothing combines scrumptiousness and nostalgia in such perfect measure as a simple smoked shoulder.

Yet it’s a cut that has perhaps fallen so far out of fashion that it now needs defining. Simply put, it’s a shoulder of pork (typically a Boston Butt but potentially a lower Picnic Roast) cured and smoked like a ham. It’s wonderfully basic. But a smoked shoulder transcends it’s humble nature: while a ham is a lean cut with little marbling, pork shoulder its lovingly laced with ribbons of inter-muscular fat, and fat, as every ardent carnivore know, is the bastion of flavor. The marbling of a pork shoulder is what allows it to shred apart into carnitas or pulled pork with long, slow cooking, but it also is perfect for absorbing the salt from a cure and the smokiness from the smoke-house. It is almost as excellent a vessel for the process as bacon, and that’s high praise. The marbling also keeps the shoulder moister and more toothsome than ham, though it makes the cut less conducive to a long drying process such as with prosciutto or jamon Iberico. Longevity aside, however, a smoked shoulder is a excellent if overlooked choice, particularly if it comes for well raised and well fed heritage breed hog. When I took one of our last groups of pigs to the butcher, I made a point of reserving nearly all the shoulders to have smoked. There were more than a dozen, and I stashed them greedily away in a freezer, terrified of the day that I might have neither pigs nor pork readily at hand. It’s not a cut I ever want to go long without.

My history with smoked shoulders dates to my childhood, when it was one of my grandmother’s signature dishes. It was a cheap cut, flavorful and filling, ideally suited to an Old World mentality and a depression era frugality. My grandma’s shoulder dinners were boiled affairs, pots of potatoes and carrots and cabbage simmering along with the brown and unassuming lump of pork. Leftovers became hash, or stuffed cabbage (pigs in blankets in our parlance), and would sustain us for days. The magic of the shoulder was in its giving nature, its ability to impart flavor to its fellow pot-mates, to be stretched into meal after meal, to elevate the ungainly, pale green, fart-made-substance that is cabbage. Smoked shoulder was utterly unprepossessing, and completely unforgettable.

Still, I went years without it. After her death, no one took up my grandma’s mantle of shoulder-cook, and the dish might have been consigned to the fond but evaporating mists of memory had I not took up farming. But I did, and gradually all things porcine became my metier. Rediscovering smoked pork shoulder was one of my rare moments of genius. The shoulders I produced now were not the inexpensive, industrial cuts from my youth, but products of good husbandry and care. The meat was fattier and more flavorful, the preparation done at a small, local German smoke-haus, and the pigs who gave their all were raised on pasture for their entire lives. My first taste of our smoked shoulder after years without was revelatory. I’m not sure Ive ever had a single bite that was so evocative, that both transported me back in time and made my present seem worthwhile.

I’ve cooked a great many shoulders since, though not usually in that old boiled dinner fashion. A smoked shoulder, like an unsmoked shoulder, does best in a low, slow oven. It doesn’t need as long of a cooking time, since the meat is well smoked already, but you want to let the muscle fibers loosen and the fat that runs through the cut to yield. Even then, slow roasted, it will never be an elegant dish, but it doesn’t need to be: it’s a brick of salty unctuousness, a peasant’s idea of perfection. You want to slice it thin, and you want some hearty accompaniments. When I cooked my most recent shoulder this week I served it with roasted baby potatoes and some glazed parsnips, nothing too fancy. The shoulder itself does best with a bit of good dijon mustard, a few lovely little pickled onions, and a stein of pilsner or perhaps a glass of Gewürztraminer. It’s the sort of meal you want to enjoy by the flickering light of a kerosene lantern while seated on a old steamer trunk after a long day at the plow.

Yet as good as shoulder is as a hot meal, I believe it’s at the hight of its powers the following day. As a leftover roast, a smoked shoulder is without peer. Cold, the marbling of once rendered fat becomes mouth meltingly yielding. Sliced thinly, eaten standing while bathed in the cool light of the open refrigerator, the shoulder becomes the perfect quick hit of comfort on the go. And pressed into service between two slabs of country bread, topped with mustard, a dollop of mayonnaise, and a fat slice of sweet onion, a cold smoked shoulder makes a superb rustic sandwich. I’ll find myself heartened for days by the presence of a leftover shoulder in the icebox, and when i’ve sawed off the last hunk, I’ll think fondly about roasting another just to be once again provisioned. As someone who neither purchases or consumes conventional deli meat, and who misses it dearly, cold shoulder scratches an itch that is not easily scratched, at least not ethically.

It’s silly, of course to wax poetically over a chunk of smoked pork, but this what appreciation looks like. To respect one’s food is to be occasionally caught in its thrall. In these trying times, comfort food is more important that ever, and for me comfort is a slice of cold, fatty ham. I won’t apologize. The cut, smoked and salted, seasoned well with memory, fills me with hunger and nostalgia in equal share. It’s a dish of my humble past and my happy future, and I suggest you seek on out and give it a try. As for me, all this useless typing has worn me out; I believe I’ll head to the fridge for a bit of cold pork with mustard.

Spring in New England is always a mixed blessing. The crocuses break the soil in green spear tips and daffodils burst like new stars, but then the wind howls in the night and sleet squalls from gray skies. When you’re most desperate for it, new life begins to appear like forgotten magic, but it always takes its time, so much time. And the mud is everywhere.

It’s a hard season for me. The self imposed restfulness of winter begins to break up like ice on a river but it doesn’t leave as fast as I’d like it. Invariably, a few preternaturally warm days will roll in early in the season, just to gin up a bit of false hope. Even in early March, you might get out to do a little yard work in shirtsleeves, but snow is always a possibility, and even if it doesn’t snow the weather can be cruel. Before things have the common curtesy of getting better, they always seem to get a little worse first.

For one thing, spring reveals all of winter’s wounds, and then dares you to try to get out to fix them. The yard beneath the snow is littered with sticks and the dead leaves that you missed in the fall, everything as sodden and sickly looking as the remains of a rotisserie chicken thrown out a passing car window. You want to go out to clean and rake and reseed, but the ground squelches with every step and more often than not the wind is about fit to take the skin off your back. Sometimes you have to wait.

My own personal hell has been the flaps of the lawn torn up by the machinery of our recent fence installation. The treads of the skid-steer left chunks of sod flipped back like wounds, and I’m desperate to put them right, but I know it’s still been a little early for grass seed. Ruts from truck and tractor need leveling, broken limbs need chipping, wood needs splitting. A season’s worth of postponed work now reveals itself, begging for those warm perfect days that never seem to be today, not yet.

Everywhere there are signs of the wonder to come. Lilacs begin to bud, grass being its greening up, birds whistle back from their southern migrations. Soon, the robins will flock in the sunshine, and lilac blossoms will perfume the air, but first first comes the rebirth, and birth is a messy occasion. The peepers begin to call, and new life will fill the ponds and vernal pools with clots of frog-spawn. Its a time for slime molds and fungus, for living things in all their primal, repulsive glory. Before the flowers, you find the coyote scat filled with tiny a lattice work of mouse-bones left in the wake of the retreating snow.

Spring always puts me in a melancholic and pensive mood. The last few weeks before the world truly gets sweet can be the hardest to suffer, and waiting has never been my strong suite. The miseries of winter come with a certain calmness. But the miseries of spring are frenetic, all impatience and hunger, the desperation to get back outside and get back at it again. The mud is natural, the world needs the mud, but you hate the mud too, you hate the semi-solid transition from this to that. Maybe it’s a human condition, or maybe it’s simply me. I have been know to be something of a grump, particularly when coming out of hibernation. Still, I bide my time and claw at the walls and live with the imperfect mess of a half made season. I kick the last snow piles apart, and listen for the killdeer. I wait, and wait, and when the waiting about breaks me, the world will break out in beauty and all will be forgiven. But the waiting, as a wise man once said, is the hardest part.

Anyone, at least anyone of a halfway decent sort, who has for a time made the city of Boston their home, will have a well earned aversion to Saint Patrick’s Day. In Boston, or I suppose in any city where the Irish diaspora has chosen to nest, the venerable institution of St. Patty’s feels about as cheap as an oversized, shamrock green top hat, and stinks like a puddle of emerald puke. I’m no puritan myself, I love an excuse for a good day-drunk even more than the next fellow, but one can only listen to so much Dropkick Murphys and Foxborough brogues before one begins to bleed from the ears. It’s enough to make you pine for the good old days of an Gorta Mor.

Even so, I refuse to give up on the holiday just because it’s been embraced by louts. As a celebration of Irish heritage, St. Patty’s is about as authentic as a McShamrock Shake, but authenticity can be overrated, and most things in life are what you make of them. And I want to make St. Patty’s enjoyable. I’ve just enough Irish blood to give me a bit of skin in the game, but beyond that, Ireland is remarkable enough in its own right that it could do with an annual bit of celebrating. It’s a small island, with a tiny population, and yet it takes up an outsized role in the cultural consciousness, and for good reason. Poets, writers, musicians: it’s a bit ridiculous just how much creative potential has sprung from so inauspicious a rock. And the Irish people, too, are remarkable. They are at once the most cheerful and the most dour of folk, the most talkative and the most laconic, the most optimistic and the most steeped in cynicism, the finest of the fair and the most crooked of gob-shite goblins. The Irish are like everyone else, only more so.

So how to go about celebrating a day that was never even traditionally celebrated by the very people you’re celebrating? Drinking isn’t a bad start of course. Much and more has been made of the Irish penchant for drink, most of it amusingly hyperbolic, but at the end of the day the undeniable coin of truth is that the Irish have been know to take a drop or two now and then and we’d all be better if we followed their lead. But for the love of Joyce nothing green, and by God go easy. I personally swear by the fortifying and enlivening effect of a Guinness or two in the bright and wakeful hours before lunch. That’s the time, as well, to start a steady intake of suitable mood music. For me it’s typically the Pogues. I’ll start with ‘Red Roses for Me’, then work my way through the catalogue, pausing at some point to look up and then marvel at the fact that Shane McGowan is still alive. Astounding. The Pogues are a good choice because they strike the right balance between the maudlin and the smash-mouth: I want to weepily bid Kitty farewell, but I also want to break the landlord’s fucking balls. You’ll find it easier to vacillate between the two moods if you’ve started on the aforementioned pints.

As the day progresses, a proper meal or two are in order. Corned beef and cabbage seems to be de rigueur, a hoary old standby trotted out once a year and eaten rather dutifully and without much affection. I for one quite like a nice boiled dinner, and would never speak ill of a few slabs of corned brisket with mustard. But sometimes it all just seems a bit basic. The point of the holiday shouldn’t be to cleave to some invented idea of authenticity, but rather to interperate the conceit of the day through the lens of good taste. Otherwise why not just eat a plate of boiled potatoes and get blind on poteen?

This year, my wife set the menu. She’s as fond of corned beef as I am if not more, but she went in a different direction. If Ireland has any unifying theory of cuisine, it’s probably this: humble fare, but made lovingly and with good ingredients. Think roasts, fresh fish, and the lamb and beef stews that are some of Ireland’s most well know dishes. When you stick to a singular recipe or a particular plate, you venture into the realm of parody. The boiled dinner, ceremonial and oft mocked, is the prime example; it’s a symbolic dish, but symbolic of an invented fiction. Better to take cues rather than prescriptive notions and just make something tasty. Preferably something hardy, and well sourced, and good for soaking up whiskey. The wife decided on a Guinness pie, a lovely marriage of stew and savory pie (a cookery item that we could do with more of in this country). The particular recipe for this pie came from Fergus Henderson, a Brit, but one very much of a mind with the Irish ascetic, and his fingerprint on the dish is apparent from one key ingredient which I’ll soon mention. But basically its a simple dish, simple pub grub, but executed well. The wife started with three pounds or so of our own grass-fed chuck, and to that added the typical carrots, celery, garlic, rosemary, and red onion. I’d never presume to cook a stew without beer (or red wine were I feeling Francophilic), and this one was no different: four cups of Guinness added sweet maltiness. The Henderson touch came with the addition of a cup of ‘trotter gear’, the catch all name for seasoned pigs’ foot gelatin, ‘foot cheese’ instead of ‘head cheese’ if you will. Pigs’ feet, or trotters, once slow cooked off the bone with a few savory ingredients, set up into a wobbly, semi-solid mass of unctuous goodness that can be then applied liberally to bring body and depth to any dish. The trotter gear did the trick here, it proved to be a secret ingredient of delicious efficacy. The stew, slow simmered and then reduced, was transferred to a baking dish, covered by a simple rough-puff pastry, given an egg yolk wash, and popped into the oven. While it finished, I set about piquing our appetites with a dram of something good to sip on.

Two years ago in Ireland I embarrassed myself by trying to order a cocktail in a bar. We were in a fairly posh little seaside town near Wicklow and I presumptuously asked the barman for an Old Fashioned. He looked at me as if I was speaking Swahili. I cleared my throat, and, looking down, mumbled that I must have mispronounced “Jamesons neat”. The barman fetched the unadulterated whiskey and I dutifully drank it and was grateful. It seemed the craft of cocktail making had not permeated Irish bar culture very much yet at all. It was only later, in Dublin, that the wife and I tracked down a bar that was know for mixing up the alchemical potions that I love to belt down with such gusto. It was a quiet afternoon, and the place was empty, but we mounted a couple stools and greeted the bartender. When asked what we’d have, we simply told the young man “dealer’s choice”. The wife, being pregnant at the time, was delivered a stunning mocktail, the rim of the glass laced with freeze-dried rose petals as I recall. I was presented with what the lad called a Tipperary Manhattan, and it was very nice indeed. It was so memorable, in fact, that I decided to mix a few up for this St. Patty’s Day.

It’s not a complicated sort of drink, merely a Manhattan that has substituted a portion of sweet vermouth for green Chartreuse. I make my Manhattans with rye whenever possible, but I had a nice gift-bottle of Redbreast Irish whiskey in wont of using, so I laid that down as the base. I then doled out equal amounts of vermouth and Chartreuse, stirred well, garnished with a few Luxardo cherries, and served. The balance wasn’t quite there, a little Chartreuse forward perhaps, but that just meant I had to dial the portion back and try again with a second batch. Such a pity. It’s a lovely little drink. I’m always happy for a recipe that incorporates green Chartreuse for it’s a wonderful liquore, but its strong herbaceousness can quickly dominate a drink. Here, it reminded me of the hills of county Wicklow, lush, rolling, and green. It was, in fact, the only sort of greenery I’d abide in a Saint Patrick’s Day drink.

Strengthened and made hungry by the cocktails, we were ready to tackle the pie when it emerged from the oven golden and aromatic. A bit more beer was consumed, and the pie was happily devoured. ‘Hell’s Ditch’ was playing through the speaker, and perhaps that was an emblematic musical note to end the night with. It’s not the greatest of the Pogue’s albums, but it has its highlights and it has its merits. Certainly it’s the least traditional: much like the Irish people it sets out to visit the four corners of the globe, and barely seems to look back. Listening to ‘Summer in Siam’, you’d be half surprised that it’s the same band who gave us ‘Poor Paddy’ or ‘The Waxies Dargle’, but if you listen closely, the old tin whistle is still there. It’s just changed, it’s grown into something, it’s Ireland by way of Thailand. Nostalgia for the old songs, the old idea of Ireland, is all well and good, and I for one love the classic melodies and a creamy-topped pint of Guinness in the morning. But change can be nice too. Listen to the tracks off the later albums. Interpret a traditional dish by way of a British chef. Mix up a fancy-lad cocktail instead of drinking your whiskey neat. No people are as prone to contradiction or self-revision as the Irish, and so perhaps no means of celebration is amiss. Whatever brings you joy on St. Patty’s Day, by all means do it; just try not to get green vomit on your neighbor’s shoes. Slante.

The only thing finer than drinking a Manhattan outside on a warm spring evening is drinking two. The perfection of the moment begins to diminish ever so slightly with the third, but it’s still a worthwhile endeavor. And when you add friends to the mix, other honest to god flesh and blood humans, and a happy wife, and a tottering baby daughter, and a few slanting rays of warm evening sunlight, that third Manhattan seems like a positive necessity.

It was a week ago now, or nearly, when the first blush of an early spring showed herself. For a brief stretch of days, the temperature climbed, the snow melted, and the world seemed to soften. I worked outside in shirt sleeves. The iron-hard ground eased into mud and even then I was happy for it. It was a temporary flirtation and nothing more – March is not so free with her gifts – but the weather was no less sweet for being fleeting. In a year like this you take what you can get.

Our good friends, finishing their work day at their new farm-garden down the road, asked about stopping by on the warmest of those few warm days and of course we said yes. We stayed socially distant, naturally, and stayed outside, which was the whole point, and for just over an hour we drank and chatted convivially and watched the baby wander the lawn on coltish legs. We’ve spent countless hours doing much the same, but not recently. It was a simple, everyday sort of occasion made heavenly by longing and symbolism.

An end, finally, is in sight. Well perhaps not an end, since the pandemic is by no means over, but maybe a beginning. A beginning of a period of relaxation, of reconnection, timed oh so karmically to coincide with the coming of spring. This year, winter felt like a winter within a winter. Nearly a year of masks and isolation and discontent calcified into a proper New England winter, replete with snow drifts and days of brittle cold. We all froze, and we froze alone. Boredom, loneliness, the distant memory of sitting cheerfully at a beloved bar, everything was made worse by the howling of the January wind. Never was spring, a spring of the heart and mind as well as the weather, so sorely needed.

And now it’s on its way. That quick outdoor rendezvous was so welcome that we squeezed in another get together with my cousins the following night. The weather was about to turn again, but we lit the chimanea on our patio and pressed our luck with socially distant pizza. The erstwhile party broke up not long after the sun went down, but now we all had the taste for it again. The typical cold March resumed that night, but it’s inevitably on its way out like the proverbial lamb. Spring is springing.

Yesterday, it was announced that the vaccination roll-out in Connecticut is being sped up, and I could be eligible for my shot by early April. My wife and mother-in-law have already gotten theirs, and once I’m vaccinated our home will know a bit more of a semblance of comfort. I can’t wait. I can’t wait for the return of the most basic of joys, of oysters and beer and bookshops and maybe even a movie in an actual theater. Even a curmudgeon such as myself longs for a little idle chit chat with friends, not over Zoom but over a table full of food.

I think we’re nearly there. I took a walk this morning around the old farm. It’s cold still, but not as bad as it was a day or two ago, and the forecast looks promising. It was a gray morning with no sun, but there was little wind either, and that’s always the telling factor. I wandered up over the hill and back down again to the marsh, and there I crept along till I came to the beaver lodge amidst the reeds. There was a beaver there, having come up from below and broken the thin ice, and the dark brown fellow hardly noticed me as I approached. I stood behind a tree for a good fifteen minutes and watched, neither one of us doing anything of particular interest, but both seemingly happy to be out and about. Redwing blackbirds were singing in the cattails, having only recently returned north themselves. Finally I broke the revery of that marshy moment by trying to sneak closer to the water’e edge, and the beaver splashed down through the ice again and out of sight. He came up once more, farther down the waterway, but I left him to his own business and headed home. As I walked I heard, somewhere overhead, the first killdeer of the season, piping in the sky.

Spring approaches, and behind it, summer. We’ve never been more ready. The long sleep of fear and solitude feels like it might be lifting, and the natural world is here right alongside us with its own display of wakefulness and rejuvenation. The days are growing longer, and filling more and more with sunlight and birdsong. Soon we will gather together again and drink Manhattans on the lawn under the warm blue roof of the sky. Very likely we will have two of them and that will be even better. Possibly we may have three, courting drunkenness perhaps, but still it will be magnificent.

There were three deer in the field behind the house this morning. Three young deer, all yearlings by the look of them, and we stood at our window in the early light to watch them, my wife, myself, and our young daughter. It’s always a delight to see wildlife, and as I trained a spotting scope on them I could see in vibrant detail the shaking of their white-flag tails, the twitching of their coal dark noses, the breeze in their fur. They were divided by our new fence, two just beyond along the old stone wall, and one within; it must have jumped the line farther down its length, the box wire being only four feet in height and not much obstacle for an agile doe. We watched the deer for five or ten minutes, sipping our coffee, our morning routine enlivened by the visitors. Then, the two deer beyond the fence line turned and wandered down towards the stream and the forest beyond. The remaining loner watched them depart through the wire, and then, after a moment and with barely an effort, hopped casually over the fencing and followed the others off into the woods.

We won’t see many more deer here. We won’t see many more bobcats like the one I spied last week, or families of bears leisurely poking along our treelike like we observed last spring. They’ll still be in our area, Ive no doubt of that, but they’ll steer clear of our field, fence or no fence, once our dogs take up permanent residence here at the end of the week. The dogs are Great Pyrenees, three of them, one old lad and two younger siblings, a boy and a girl. They have been living for all their lives down the road at my farm, guarding chickens and causing mayhem, but now the farm is coming to an end, and the dogs are coming here, to our smaller homestead. The fencing is new, and we’ve only been waiting for a shed to be delivered so the dogs would have shelter, and the great ivory mutts will be relocated once and for all. I suspect the local wildlife won’t care for the new intruders. Yet change is coming, in fact all life is is change, and so our little backyard safaris must give way to barking dogs and domesticity. The dogs will come first, then we’ll have ducks, and hens in the spring, and a few goats, and sheep, and then a couple pigs, and a handful of turkeys and roasting chickens for autumn slaughter. If the dogs do their jobs, they’ll be nary a bear or bobcat in sight.

It saddens me, to think of losing that connection to wildness. For the nearly two years we’ve had our house, I’ve been able to have the best of both worlds, with a working farm less than a mile away to feed us and a fourteen acre slice of wooded stream valley at home to offer up something a tad less tame. The farm is winding down though, the land up for sale, and providing food for my family still remains of paramount importance to me. It’s regrettably time to un-wild our land and turn it over to our modest sort of agriculture. It’s anti-NIMBYism: yes, in my back yard. If we’re to eat ethically, and locally, it’ll mean in part giving up our little deer viewing parties. We can watch goats and chickens roaming the field instead, yes, and while that will be quite pleasant speculation in its own right, it won’t be quite the same.

The last year has been one of learning to live with change. Rapid change, unplanned change, often unwanted change, and not just for me and my family but for the world. The pandemic forced us all apart and into our homes, and our country only continued to further fracture and warp under the burden of lies, violence, and irresponsibility. Personally, I’m undergoing a massive life shift, the biggest in a dozen years at least, as I give up not just a career but an identity and struggle to figure out just what comes next. I’m still working on it, and, much like many others, I’m taking life as it comes, day by day. Change is coming fast, but it isn’t always for the worst, and there is always more of it. It was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who said that everything is change, everything is flux (and he who remarked that one cannot sep into the same river twice), and that concept more than anything rings true for me today. Changes, large and small, are coming, every minute of every hour of every day, and it is incumbent upon us to adapt to them. The changes for me, here and now, are small but incremental: a new fence, a few dogs with a new home, a few acres put back into use after sitting untouched for years. But each change has a ripple, and I’m keenly away that those ripples add up to waves if you’re not careful. One day I’ll gather eggs here with my daughter, but I won’t show her deer tracks. We’ll pet our dogs, but we won’t watch bears lumbering across our lawn. We will be happy and a bit more self-sufficient and a little less wild. It’s change, change I’ve committed to. The deer can always leap the fence and vanish away into the woods and be content there. I’m the one who now has to live in their absence.

It’s been a slow day on the farm: it’s overcast and drizzly, and there isn’t much work yet to do. We’re very much at the mercy of the seasons, and until we properly turn the corner into spring, we hold tight. The cattle stay in their winter field, the hogs wait for the pastures to dry out. Until the grass returns, until the muddy ground firms up, we wait, and watch the hay supply shrink and manure pile grow. Nature is very much in charge of when and how I get to farm.

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few weeks about the catastrophic flooding in the Midwest, and particularly about the toll that’s been taken on the farmers of the region. Crop land that would soon be planted is still under water, and calving season has been tragically interrupted. Some estimates put the number of dead or displaced cattle in the millions, and what land they have to return to will likely be saturated and covered in sediment for some time. It’s the sort of disaster that keeps anyone who’s life is even remotely tied to land awake at night. My heart breaks for livestock caught in the rising waters, and for the farmers who will return to pens full of dead hogs and fields full of drowned calves.

When I see an event like the recent flooding unfold, I’m reminded again of the true callousness of nature. It’s a mistake to think that nature is harmonious, or picturesque: life is instead comprised of a billion daily atrocities that amount to a sort of balance only through attrition. Life has no purpose beyond it’s own propagation, and it clings to an often forbidding planet through chance and trial. For every organism that lives to multiply, a vast multitude fail and perish. Howling blizzards, tectonic upheaval, and bomb cyclones are the global norm, and, despite whatever malice we might imbue them with, these events are utterly indifferent to the cost. In nature, there is no weeping and there are no cheers, there is only inevitability and hunger.

When the callousness of the natural world changes from unfortunate to tragic is when human hubris tries to exert itself. The moment mankind began to think and act as a species outside and above the natural order was the moment we sealed our fate, not because we stand to lose more than any other species, but because we value what is lost more dearly. And we also have a bad habit of repeating our mistakes.

This isn’t the first time the Missouri and the Mississippi have broken their banks. The rivers flood chronically, perhaps not in such disastrous fashion, but often enough for anyone with an eye for history to have predicted this. But when they flooded two hundred or three hundred years ago, life along the banks would have responded with more flexibility. Bison would have scattered before the rising waters and even whatever plains tribes called those regions home could have broken camp and made for higher ground. There would be death, there would be loss, but without the permanence wrought by modernity, loss would be less devastating. Timber frame prairie houses and barb wire fences brought that sense of permanence, but they also tend to act as a trap when the floods approach.

Of course now we all too often pretend that our ingenuity will save us. We build dams and levees, we divert and drain and dredge the channels and think that the next storm won’t be any worse than the last one. But hoping that something will be ok is no guarantee. I remember in the wake of Hurricane Katrina how doubt about New Orleans’ long term survival was met with anger and scorn. It was as if the mere presence of history and bonhomie and jazz and oyster po’boys would be proof against any future storm surge. But even if the world weren’t warming and the oceans weren’t rising, the idea of a large city built on a spit of land jutting into the sea, half built below sea level, must be acknowledged as folly. It’s absolutely a fine place to visit, to live, to love, but don’t pretend that something so extravagantly at odds with the nature world will be around forever.

The farmers along the Midwest waterways will return to their land and fix their fencing and buy in new stock and press on. If they were lucky, they may have had insurance, but with those companies insure those farms again? Will levees that failed this time be rebuilt stronger? The only guarantee is that the rivers will once again flood. And the true tragedy in the end isn’t the dead cattle or the lost homes or the ruined lively-hoods, it’s the dull sense of inevitability around the whole thing. This will happen again. It’ll be new cows and new homes and a new generation of farmers with no good options, but we’ve fenced ourselves in as a society. We could no sooner abandon those floodplains as we could abandon a city. To do so would be to admit that our dominance over the natural world is a lie. Better to drown and rebuild and drown again. Nature, for its part, doesn’t care. The waters roll on regardless.

 

There’s a reason why, when I decided to start writing again semi-regularly, I landed on the blog title ‘The Edible Complex’: everything about food in the modern era seems in some way complex or problematic. Food, for the thoughtful, is a challenging puzzle served up three times a day. All the pressing issues of availability, convenience, sustainability, economics, and ethics are distilled into every meal, whether or not we care to acknowledge them, or merely slather them in Heinz and chomp blithely away. Most Americans eat with little awareness of just what an impact their meals make, while others still have little choice in the matter at all. Yet even an educated and compassionate diner can be hard pressed to navigate the tangled politics of the plate, for the modern meal is essentially a microcosm of all the ills facing America and indeed the planet. Food safety, food sovereignty, equitable pay and treatment, the legal status of workers, the humane treatment of livestock, the health consequences of diet, pollution, environmental degradation, climate change…the list of challenges goes on and on. Trying to eat a tasty, healthy, conscientious meal can be exhausting; doing so several times a day is near maddening.

And yet I’m someone who loves food and thinks about it near constantly, in all its maddening complexity. I went so far as to start my own farm, largely in response to the ethical and environmental faults I saw in industrial agriculture. If I was going to eat bacon, it needed to be bacon I believed in.  And yet, even though my primary concerns starting out were centered around animal welfare and sustainability, numerous issues both good and bad were inextricably woven into the fabric of the farm from the very beginning. I was supporting the local economy by using local businesses, but my product was comparatively expensive and my own income was unpredictable. The health of the land here on the farm was improving, but I was still buying feed that was grown conventionally in the Midwest. Our animals lived contented and worry-free lives, but they still died so that wealthy soccer moms could have guilt-free porkchops. Nothing turned out to be as clear cut as I had envisioned.

Even eating thoughtfully in my own day to day life proved daunting. Our food system is designed with convenience in mind, and all too often convenience tends to trump everything else. Preparing a meal at home was manageable – some grass-fed beef we raised, greens from market, sweet corn from a local farm – but that was when things were in season. Winter cooking, once a bastion of smoked meat, root vegetables, and preserves, can get tiresome for a modern palate. The fourth beef stew of February tends not to taste as good as the first.  And, as people who just generally enjoy food, we also crave the novelty and luxury of dining out. While the homecooked meal offers up plenty of ethical choices on its own, attempting to eat out thoughtfully really brings the dilemma of choice to the fore. Maybe I can demonstrate with an example of a typical meal.

It’s a Friday evening in late January, and after a long week of work in the Connecticut winter, the wife and I are pondering our dinner options. It’s the end of the week, and our farmer’s market isn’t ’til the following morning. Few things are in season anyway, and none of our frozen stocks are defrosted. Hungry for a change of taste and scenery, we decide to treat ourselves by going out; the problems start there. Where should we go? Is the restaurant locally owned, and if so do they treat their staff well and pay a living wage? Is the kitchen staffed by undocumented workers, like many kitchens in the industry, and if so are we all right with that? Let’s assume we go to a local tavern we know well and love, a place that’s staffed by decently paid and well treated long time workers. Whoever is in the kitchen, regardless of status, is at the least being fairly compensated, and that’s what matters most to us. We’re already navigating the consumer’s maze of options, and we’ve yet to see a menu.

We sit and order drinks – local beer, Italian wine, or a cocktail garnished with citrus shipped from Florida? Assume we stay local for the moment. On to the menu. Steaks, burgers, chicken wings…if none are sourced from an actual farm then they’re all off the table as a matter of course. Raising meat humanely is the first and most basic hurdle than needs to be cleared for me. The modern industrial model of raising livestock is guilty of a host of transgressions and is one of the most destructive and unsustainable sectors of agriculture. In addition to the basic misery inflicted on industrially raised livestock as a matter of course, cattle feed lot emissions contribute to global warming, manure runoff fouls waterways, and the growing of monoculture animal fodder is linked to everything from mass honeybee die-offs to the growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The overuse of sub-therapeutic antibiotics is causing a rise in resistant bacterial strains. Chicken growers are classified as sub-contractors and taken advantage of by large poultry corporations. Slaughterhouses underpay and abuse the service of central American immigrant labor. The list could go on.

So, ruling out most red meat and poultry, we turn to fish. Salmon? Well, if it’s wild caught then sure, but farm raised salmon is an enormous polluter, endangers wild fish stocks, and is a bigger user of antibiotics than most terrestrial livestock farming. Swordfish? Loaded with mercury. Tuna? Being fished to extinction. Ultimately, the pollack used for the fish and chips would be alright, certainly it’s fished more sustainably, but it’s still being shipped in from Alaskan waters. Shellfish or lobster might be a better choice; shellfish aquaculture is some of the most environmentally sound agriculture possible, and lobster from the north Atlantic has few miles between the ocean and my plate. Just don’t ask if the kitchen boils their lobsters alive, or dispatches them first…

The meat and seafood entrees aren’t the only ones under suspicion though. Any dish with eggs or dairy falls into the same ethical parameters as flesh, fish, and fowl. Of course vegans don’t get off so easily either. The increased popularity of quinoa in recent years has been linked to a dearth of the grain among the Andean people who long relied on it as a staple. Winter tomatoes grown in Florida for dinner salads are sometimes picked by migrant laborers living in conditions of near slavery. The recent demand for avocados has led to increased deforestation of critical Mexican Monarch butterfly habitats. Romaine lettuce will literally kill you.

As I said, it can be maddening. The extreme choice, perhaps the purest choice, is to live as close to the land as able, growing, foraging, hunting, and sourcing one’s diet as locally as possible. But that’s difficult individually and wildly impractical on a broad basis. And, to be honest, it’s hard to be a saint: I long for my Costa Rican coffee and my Iberian ham and my Kentucky bourbon. I’m not ready to aim for perfection, but I am trying to strike the right balance between tickled taste buds and a clean conscious. I try to pay attention to what I consume, and I try to minimize the cost as much as possible. The seasoning of knowledge has left a lot of dishes unpalatably bitter, but I haven’t starved yet.

I have another beer, and I study the menu a little longer.

It’s International Women’s Day today, a ‘day’ we really shouldn’t need and yet clearly need more of. I say we shouldn’t need it because it’s ridiculous that there is a designated holiday to call attention to the merits and achievements of over half the human race; it’s a bit like having an oxygen appreciation day or a good night’s sleep festival. Without strong women we wouldn’t be here, they are fundamental to the species. Yet we live in this world, and not a better one, and one day is better than none.

I mention my disappointment at womankind’s lack of regular recognition because women are omnipresent in my life, and all of them are not merely strong and capable in their own rights, but integral to who I am and everything I do. While today might be a designated day of female retrospection, every day for me is one of gratitude. I don’t bring this up as a way of feminist virtue signaling, nor do I want to suggest that the women in my life are only validated by my own identity or approval. Rather, I’m writing because gender roles are something I think about regularly…and still grapple with.

All the primary women in my life, as I said, are ‘strong’ women (though even what that phrase means is nebulous). From my grandmother, mother, and aunt to my sister, mother-in-law, and wife, all have pursued careers, achieved their education, or worked full time, often while raising children. These women have been capable of feeding hogs, killing chickens, loading cattle, anatomizing medical cadavers, or wading daily into the murky frontier of the human emotional psyche. Of those tasks, I’d take poultry slaughter over psychotherapy any day.  Women have raised me, loved me, looked after me, and helped me farm. While I’ve had male role models, women have always, in many ways, been the main role models. There have been more of them, for one thing, but they’ve also always been more willing to offer up their time and energy. And while it might make a certain amount of maternal sense that a grandmother would help raise her grandson, it takes a different kind of generosity for a mother to give up her retirement to help castrate piglets and collect eggs on her son’s farm. Likewise, it takes a remarkable amount of spirit for a woman to embrace a man’s quixotic vision and become his wife, knowing that his pursuits will make life harder, less stable, and great deal muddier. For me, gratitude comes daily.

But there has also been no small amount of struggle on my part to come to grips with what roles come next for me. My wife has taken on the role of the primary breadwinner in our relationship: her career offers reliability, health insurance, and a far bigger paycheck than my farm could ever supply. As we try to find balance between work and home life, it’s long been apparent to me that the demands of farming would need to be subsumed by the requirements of living as a married couple. I’ve begun to rebalance things, shrinking the farm in the hopes of making it more manageable, and taking on more household chores and responsibilities.  As we approach the point of starting a family, my role will no doubt be redefined even more, as part time farmer, and more full time stay-at-home father. Odd then, in a way, that out of all these women who have worked while raising children, the closest anyone might come to being a dedicated, full time homemaker…might be me.

I won’t say that it isn’t taking some adjustment on my part. There’s egoism, for one thing, not so much when I think about this new adjusted norm on my own, but there is when I talk about my intent with others. The societal stigma of the man being the primary income for the household is still present, and I’m still susceptible to feeling undercut. There’s also a great deal of empathy to be felt for the work that’s traditionally been designated to women. Washing dishes, to my mind, will never be more than a form of drudgery, and even cooking, which I generally love, can become another source of stress when dinnertime approaches and the onions have yet to be chopped. The gender dynamic of the work/life balance doesn’t seem to get talked about enough in the farming community: the days when a man could farm while his wife tended house and baked pies seem about as antiquated as the buckboard plow. The new farm economy necessitates that either both partners work the farm together, or one farms while the other takes on a job of their own. Either way, the dishes will still sit there in the sink, caking and accusatory.

Ultimately, the greatest test and the greatest proving ground for me will be fatherhood. When I do bring a son or daughter into this world, how do I prepare them for what awaits? This is a world where we have the #metoo movement but also have a sexual predator in the White House, where we have RBG and AOC but they aren’t as famous as vacuous and waif-like Instagram models, where some talk about gender as a social construct while the societal repercussions of gender have almost never been starker. Raising a resilient young woman or a responsible young man feels incredibly daunting and immeasurably important. I could never do it alone, but thankfully I won’t have to. Today, and tomorrow, and every day of the year, I’ll be surrounded by strong women, and they seem to make anything possible.