driving polly + farm rhythms

My first two months at Northland have been an exercise in immersion. Over more than a decade, Donn and Maryrose have built a deeply satisfying life here on their farm. They have worked to create the environment in which they like to live. They have built barns and a house, raised horses and mules and sheep with whom they share the work, developed the fertility of their fields, and cultivated deep connections to this community while expanding on their personal visions of their farm, their lives, and their livelihood.

They are also people who seem to recognize the value in a rhythm and routine. Chores take place at 7 am and 4 pm, breakfast is after chores but before the main work of the day, market is every Saturday during the season, lambs arrive in mid April, and during the summer, the horses graze at night and are in the barn during the day so as to be close at hand. Parts of the systems here have places, times, cadences.

As apprentices at Northland, we become parts of these rhythms. We help with chores, we learn from Donn, and by and by we are becoming integrated and immersed into the lifestyle that Donn and Maryrose have here. Though admittedly I don’t yet wake for chores every day at seven, becoming a part of these farm rhythms feels good to me. It feels like belonging, it feels comfortable, and it’s starting to feel, too, like I have a stake in this place and this place has a stake in me.

Yesterday Scott and I worked with Polly, a percheron mare, without Donn for the first time. The work was not difficult or demanding and took only an hour after breakfast. Taking turns, we moved logs across the pasture to where Scott has been sawing and neatly stacking them to sell as firewood in the early fall. Working a single horse is almost always more difficult than working a team. When you’re driving more than one, they tend to balance each another. When driving singly, there are only two intentions at play, yours and theirs. It is not so much a tug of war, but a patient insistence on the part of the teamster and a willingness on the part of the horse that accomplishes the work you’ve set out to do. Since I’m just learning to drive, sometimes I’m not patient at the right time, or insistent in the right ways, and often I send messages through my voice, and the lines that are opposite my intentions. Because we are new to Polly, she is not always willing to accept our authority. We accomplished the task, though imperfectly, after an hour and afterward, I unharnessed Polly in the barn, removing first the lines, my primary mode of communication with her, then the harness, and finally the bridle and collar.

Today, with Donn and Kristen, we freed the disc from the frozen mud which has held it all winter. With a team of three, we towed it, jangling, across the road and left it at the edge of a field which Donn plowed from sod last fall. In the coming weeks we’ll disc this field, preparing it for wheat and oats and the coming of summer.