I have been given these holidays to become human again.

I don’t remember the exact moment when it was that I had stopped being human. Maybe it was when the on-ramp to my local mega-interstate was transformed into an abattoir. Maybe it was when I stopped thinking that I didn’t need to walk or swim or be active every day, that I lust needed to sit in class and sit in my car commuting and sit at my desk at home. Maybe it was when I lost awareness of even the most basic facts of my own life and didn’t even see that self slipping through my own fingers. Dunno. Unaware. Stupided.

Christmas break was my shot at reconnecting, catching, holding, and observing my own breath and then breathing out again. It is all about that. Nothing more than walking outside and playing the nature game. I just said to myself as I took that first step, “What
have ya got for me, now.” Yeah, it’s a little like being a race track denizen and wanting to know what the horse has done for you lately. Selfish, but nature doesn’t seem to mind. As my mother was wont to say, “Get the hell outside and I don’t want to see you till
dinner.”

So how do you plug back into the humanity game.? Well, one way I do it is by keeping a very short list of outside stuff to do. Like four or five things. Anything more and it becomes onerous like a punch list on a construction job or putting up a scaffold to do drywall or building a very standard university online shell course (god help me I really am doing that). More of the same ol’ crap that got me in this mess.

Here was yesterday’s list:

 Here is a more legible version:

• Fence out chickens from under maple tree.
• Clean chimney.
• Seal up kitchen door with clear plastic.
• Bring over firewood in prep for the next Polar Vortex. (I always get ugly weather during my birthday week.)
• Clean Tillie’s ears (one of our sweet, roundheaded drop off kittehs.)

We got all but Tillie’s ears done. Sorry, sweet Tillie. Definitely today.

How else do I reconnect with my humanity? This is seed time. I have been getting seed catalogs for weeks. I am taking my Baker Creek Seed catalog and marking it with post-it flags. I am connecting to the imaginary garden in my head that will become the one my wife and I work in come spring. This seed-time theorizing is the foundation for action. It demands reflection (what worked, what didn’t, what we liked, what we didn’t) and consideration (what will be fun, what is needed). This process makes me human. No, it re-makes me human every January.

This process connects me to our victories and our defeats both short and long-term. For example, do we grow peanuts again this year? They take up a lot of room for what they yield and they are an iffy, long season crop that has a dicey time making it. But…they are beautiful, they grow in an incongruous way that appeals to me (rhizomatic and legumish), and I can make my own peanut butter in small amounts this time of year. This wondering amounts to a long walk in and a cultivation of the garden of my memory that roots me to my humanity, somehow. I can’t say  exactly how, so, like the Roman judges of old, I will just mark that case with an “NL”–non liquet, I don’t know enough to even examine it, at least not too deeply.

How else? It is the time of year for recycling the outhouse barrels. In an age of municipal sewage and hidden technologies for getting rid of solid waste, my wife and I deal with our own humanure. Our grey water goes into an artificial wetlands, but our solids go into a barrel. Yes, a 55-gallon plastic drum. Our outhouse is built pole-building
style above ground. We slide an empty barrel under where the toilet seat sits. Then we commence to fill it up. The expression ‘full of shit’ has a very humanely particular connotation for us. When our barrels are full of poop/leaves/toiletpaper/sawdust/cat litter we back them carefully out of their happy space under the outhouse and slot a new one in place.

Done and done, right? Just take it somewhere to be…handled. Nope. When January comes and the ground is frozen, we load those very full barrels (no ‘full of it’ jokes, please)  onto the back of the tractor, two at a time, and ferry them out to the fields. We dump and spread this night soil onto the pastures that are in most need of their fertility. Since the ground is frozen, we don’t compact it nearly as much. Plus, while I love our humanity, I love it even more in the
winter when I can’t smell it. The beauty of this whole shitty process is that on Google Earth we can see where the grass is growing, as we sheep folk say, ‘more proudly’.

I suppose I shouldn’t have fretted over my own humanity. This re-humanizing process is cooked into the DNA of our farm seasons. I haven’t even spoken of cutting wood, of starting seedlings inside under lights, of preparing hoophouses for early greens, or of pruning and lambing and the half mile of gravel road to maintain. And the damned culvert that channels our wet weather stream. That needs shoring up so that UPS and the LP Gas truck can make it
back to our place. And there is always the walking over the farm, the ultimate best fertilizer there is, our own knowing of a place over time. Better than even humanure.