In this house, when snow falls and stays on the ground it has always been a signal that I should put down tools, come in from the barn, sit at the desk and write something. Anything. Nothing I do in the barn ever generates a profit. It does give me all sorts of ideas and themes to write about, but until I convert those experiences into prose, my family does not eat.
Well, of course, we eat. The freezers are full of chickens, pork and beef and there are all sorts of preserves on the shelf going back a half century. But the point is, my farming is apart-time occupation that must take second place to my vocation which is writing. Writing produces the cash that pays the heat and hydro and buys supplies for the next growing season. The prime season for writing, free of distractions, is the dead of winter.
The notion that farming is supposed to be a full-time occupation is a very modern concept. The pioneers who built my house and barn had any number of sidelines they followed to make ends meet. They were woodsmen and road builders, teamsters and military men. Come to think of it, this farm has never had a resident who would have called himself a full-time farmer. The last ‘farmer’ to live here before me was a welder who lived in the city and came up on weekends during the spring and summer months.
Champlain spent the winter somewhere around here in 1615 and he wrote how his hosts, The Wendat, spent the whole winter in graceful repose, eating out of their vast storehouses of corn, squash and runner beans, smoking and telling tall tales in the firelight. He came to envy the way they lived. Whenever I hear a cash cropper complain about the crushing workload and his 24/7 work week, I wonder what The Wendat of the sixteenth century would have had to say. Their idea of 24/7 was 24 hours a month, 7 months of the year. That put food on the table and left lots of time for ice fishing, moose hunts and naps. Still, for those who do not follow a lucrative sideline off the farm the question of how to occupy oneself in winter can be a puzzle. In the grocery store the other day one of my neighbours laughed about the problem and told me, “If you drive up the 10th Concession and stop into any of those insulated drivesheds you will find them all sitting drinking beer. And they won’t come out till March.”
That didn’t sound healthy to me. But then, sitting by the fire playing crokinole and Scrabble for four months, like my wife does, isn’t that healthy either. This is why farm meetings were invented. The soybean outlook conference and John Deere Days were constructed to pry farmers out of their shops and into like-minded company and they have been operating in various forms around this country since first settlement. A good farm seminar with lively speakers offers all sorts of opportunities to expand our understanding of agriculture. Unless you feel the same way the writer Paul St. Pierre did when his wife told him he might learn something if he went out to a farm meeting. “Hell, honey,” he said. “I’m not farming half as well as I already know how.”
Years ago, an old friend of mine lost his shirt on an investment he made in the cutting-edge concept of onfarm seed treatment. He pioneered the idea of a mobile seed treating machine that would come to the farm and save the farmer the trip into town to wait six hours while the job was done at the elevator. Turns out the farmers liked the trip into town in late February and very much looked forward to sitting in the Legion throwing darts until the bags were ready to be picked up. Mobile seed treatment was never heard from again.
For a writer, winter still offers more than its share of distractions. Keeping the fire fed, the sheep fed, the family fed, the pipes thawed, the driveway plowed and the neighbors supervised can easily morph into a full time occupation. And then there is the Driveshed Coffee Club, my writers group, the Blue Mountain Poultry Club, the Blind Line Stitch and Bitch Club, the ice fishing derby and the dog training lessons I signed up for. If past experience is anything to go by, I will be lucky to emerge in the spring with a first draft of anything.