every day is a good day
There is something calming about a stack of firewood. Each time I slice through the logs and remove a section of wood, new patterns emerge. It’s like watching Tibetan monks erasing an elaborate Mandala, only in slow motion. Every few days the chainsaw erases patterns and reveals new ones. By late spring, much of the stack will be gone, just a memory.
Stepping outside these mornings is a trip into magic. Clear days, clear nights, create the perfect conditions for frost to spin its white web over everything.
In one of the hoop houses, the young chickens have a warm place to sleep and spend these frosty mornings. A little over two months of age, they are looking like young adults. The Blue Laced Red Wyandottes are especially outstanding. They are like living tapestries.
When does winter start? There is the date on the calendar marking the start of winter, but really, once all the leaves are off the trees, it is winter. By the time swans are waddling over the fields, it is winter. When the sun is low and shadows stretch as far as the eye can see, it is winter.
The seasons don’t follow the calendar. They come when they will, the go when they please. Wait for them to arrive and go when they are officially supposed to, and you’ll miss them at their best.
This year, the swans and snow geese have been remarkable. Every day swans go honking overhead, and ribbons of snow geese paint the sky. I was driving home at dusk after delivering tofu, and it was hard concentrating on the road because flocks of swans kept flying by, just above the tops of the trees, on their way to wherever they were going to bed.
After twenty five days of rain, drizzle, and clouds, and minimal sunlight, this morning’s sky is different. The pink clouds aren’t threatening to pour down rain. There are no puddles in the driveway.
By afternoon, the soft winter sunlight is everywhere. Gilda and Gloria are delighted. All the chickens are happy. The forecast is for more than a week of dry, sunny weather. You can’t ask for more than that in December.
The first step to making tofu is to soak the beans. Though what is happening is much more profound. The destiny of any bean is to grow, to find a spot in the earth, drink in the moistness of the soil and stir its roots, and push up through the warm earth to kiss the sun with baby leaves. That is the dream bound up inside each bean.
In the evening, I wash and fill a pot with beans. I turn the tap on just a trickle, and let the beans enjoy the soft sensations of running water all night long. The next day, the beans are alive, plump, happy, and pure.
There is a glow to beans that have spent a night under gently running water, a purity that softens and beckons. The steady stream of water has washed away all impurities, and the beans sparkle. There is one last chance to enjoy their beauty. It’s almost a shame to toss them in the blender and grind them to pulp, to crush their precious dreams of becoming tall bean plants and feeling the summer breeze flow through their sweet flowers, to laugh when the bumble bees tickle their petals.
The beans are no more, transformed into cooling blocks of pure tofu. What is the tofu dreaming? A dream of soaking in a hot broth? Of getting doused with seasonings? Of hanging out in a fridge? They look like blocks of tofu cooling, but something much more profound is happening.