Seven-mile wind taking us where it would

 

However, I shared a temperament with my mother. Very sensitive; at any time close to an emotion; occasionally overwhelmed by the stuff of life. I had my father’s body and intellect, but my mother’s heart and psyche. Call the former ‘soul’; call the latter ‘spirit’, or lack thereof.

I was not meant for school, at least in that form or at that age. She and I used to take “mental health” days, meaning for me playing hooky to read or watch TV, for her days to lay in the green master bed with the green master bedroom door closed. She used the term ‘decompress,’ and I joked darkly and used the term ‘decompose.’

As in, “I need time off away alone to decompose.”

My nature was to fall apart like that at inopportune times: during football season or fox season or the springtime so warm and blue.

My old man never needed such days and he never agreed with them. When we took our time in the woods or on the water, he was always trying to be productive and effective. How hard it must have been to produce walleye on Pine Lake in a canoe with one boy (me) in the bow and a younger boy (my brother) in the hull between us. No depth finder, no trolling motor, the seven-mile wind taking us where it would. But he would try, and he would never decompose.

Back in that small backyard in the suburbs he and I would work into our garden a dozen black buckets of decomposed cow manure bought cheaply and dug ourselves. And what a garden was produced!

Later, after our family’s split between the soul and the spirit, my father settled onto a hobby farm complete with an excess of hay and straw, and with that we made compost bins out of snow fencing. Twice a year he had me turn them over to oxygenate, and on them I would scatter loam and spray water.

On the Flute Reed Farm I struggle to make composting produce much of a difference. Everywhere the woods honeysuckle and unproductive raspberries and moose maple and speckled alders and beaked hazelnut encroach. The deer eat back the apple and pear and dogwood and pine. The frost kills the cherry. Still, to give them life I mulch and compost our leeks and strawberries and pine seedlings and black-eyed Susans.

I still struggle myself with decomposing, and still I love composting.

‘Spirit’ is related to ‘expire,’ and to ‘inspire.’ The breath of death, and the breath of life.