POEM

I was wearing a halo of a farmer, making a lunch

I was wearing a halo of a farmer, making a lunch
appear from the garden and the goat's milk, 
eating outside in the sun, good
& yellow in the blue sky. I remember
the young steamed potatoes just ten minutes 
out of the ground with butter and the fresh cheese
from the morning’s milk. We talked and I saw
my loneliness there with us, so I wept
in that almost way where you look twice
because you can only hear it in my voice.
Then I tried to keep quiet because I know
that happiness isn’t the point, isn’t even the best
outcome, and with that gone it can all become 
so rich and wide.

Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• The ambrosial smell of fresh hay.

• This hilarious, brilliant interview with comedian Meg Stalter.

• A 12-cup moka pot. This hunk of aluminum is a boss-level coffeemaker, producing 12 demitasse-sized cups of concentrated coffee from 60g of ground beans.

• Advil. I hurt my shoulder while mucking out the chicken coop. Repetitive strenuous motion + being 45 years old, I guess.

-Jake

The reason is Muffin. More specifically, the reason is a lack of Muffin. Muffin was our matriarchal barn cat who literally ruled the roost around here. She kept an ordered equilibrium, everyone (animal and human alike) knew and respected her authority, and she quietly managed the pigeon population. But barn cats don’t live forever, and one day we noticed that old age had come for Muffin.

She has been gone for going on two years, and we are still learning how much control she had over this place. The barn was her home base, and she kept it clean. Pigeons now nest in the rafters of the hayloft, squeeze into cracks between the siding, pack nests into open cupboards, and have broken windows to make ways in and out of the chicken coop. Muffin made sure none of this could happen. I never noticed more than one pair of pigeons when she was around. It was nice and idyllic to have a pair of pigeons. She could have easily dispatched them, as well, but she no doubt knew they were part of the balance of the place. Muffin had style.

Although a cat, she had the kind of confident, reserved way of holding herself that communicated her competence without advertising it. I am honestly inspired by her example of how to encounter and move through the world. I am no cat or pet lover, but it wasn’t her cat-ness or pet-ness that I loved. It was her stoic artistry, her calm direction, her impressive natural leadership that gained my respect and admiration. While I fumble around shooting pigeons off the roof with a .22, raking their nests off of planks with pitchforks, and cursing their globs of shit on the hay bales, I think about all the other things she smoothly tended to without struggle or complaint.

She kept the rabbits at bay, held a strong border against rogue muskrats at the edge of the marsh, poached pheasants that came too close to the barnyard, patrolled for field mice around the foundation of the house, and who knows what else, all while being affectionate and friendly.

What a cat.

POEM

It does suddenly feel so brief, life

I just got here and had no idea
there are things more valuable
than doing what other people
want you to do: create a piece
of performance art that is your life.
Doing things that get the desired reactions.
Where do you put desire
that has nowhere to go?
The actor begins to blur at the edges
begins to fray into the frayed world
begins to die but doesn’t realize
cannot realize
how important it is
to die their own death.

Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• Coffee from the moka pot. The Bialetti Moka Express has come and gone as my coffee maker of interest; lately it has reappeared in my life and re-won my heart. In the past, I misunderstood it as a stovetop espresso maker. In reality, it makes a robust and slightly stronger cup of coffee that extracts more flavor and aroma from coffee grounds than other methods. The moka pot can produce deep chocolate tones and comes close to making coffee taste as good as it smells.

• Up close encounters with Sandhill cranes and their young. No doubt due to Muffin’s absence, the nesting pair of Sandhills that return here each year have begun walking through our yard, just feet from our windows, their two colts trailing behind them.

• Young potatoes. The desire for fresh potatoes overcame us, and I dug up some young tubers for our table. The tender potatoes are indescribably delicious, especially steamed with butter.

• The 14th anniversary of my first honey sale. This week, fourteen years ago, I hauled a bucket of honey into the kitchen of the Blue Door Pub on Selby Ave. in St. Paul.

Cheers,
Jake

And the wild is always there, for gardening happens in an uncontrollable environment: the weather. And the weather can be a real bitch. This year, ten minutes of hail set us back ten weeks of work, if you want to think of it like that. In just moments, the ground and the road were blanketed in white. It looked like early winter. The trees were chewed to bits, the tomatoes were snapped, the burgeoning fruit of the apple trees shot through and bruised, the cabbage was slaw, and the rhubarb was shredded to bits—to bits!

As it fell, it was wonderful. It had the feeling of miracle. It had the electric feeling of phenomenon. It was audacious and copious and more than you would expect or imagine. A rare moment. It heaped under the eaves as it slid off the roof of the barn. In the morning, there were still piles of it. And in the morning, as well, we saw all the damage it did to the garden.

Whether or not growing food is virtuous is irrelevant. There is no one to impress. There is no achievement to unlock. There is just the time and effort it takes, and the food. It is painful to see everything spoiled by the hail, but that’s only one small way of looking at it. Can nature harm itself? Does the concept of spoilage exist outside of the human idea? Some things have recovered. The onions and asparagus have stood up again. The squash and pumpkins have grown new vines. All that damage, but is anything really lost? Is time spent doing something you crave doing really spent?

POEM

It does suddenly feel so brief

The soil is full 
of the bones of animals
that have died here.
Many eaten by us.
To dust.
Into the eggplant
into the basil 
into the onions they go.
Meanwhile, the summer
earth is green
in the constant way of the planet.
On and on.
Everything becoming itself
in different ways
over and over.

Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• Rhubarb custard pie. Before the hail and the thrashing it gave, Kerstin made rhubarb custard pie, perhaps her best pie.

• Garlic scape pesto. Soon the bulbs will be ready for curing, but until then, the scapes give us a taste.

• Strawberry goat’s milk ice cream. Berries and milk from right here, it was, it is hardly to be believed.

• Robert Oster Thunderstorm ink. Is it black? Is it blue? Is it gray? Is it somehow a brooding violet? Yes!

Stay cool,
Jake

This softer form of land management, if I must call it that, also feels pleasingly defiant. As the $400,000 tractors and sprayers lumber across the county roads governing every corner of every acre, my dopamine comes from wearing my straw hat and watching the pigweed grow taller than me, and the creeping willows fringe the edge of the hayfield. I like a tidy garden, of course, but only to a certain point. Total control is uncomfortable to me. The returns begin to diminish quickly, and who is to say that coexisting with some “weeds” is a bad thing? Is the pantry still full of tomato sauce? Are there still onions hanging from iron nails in the basement? Do the potatoes still turn up from the cool soil smooth-skinned and abundant?

Yes to all.

The balance that summer brings extends outside the garden, as well, most notably to the saplings. In the winter and spring, rabbits devastate the small trees I plant each year around the yard and the fringes of the homestead. The lush, tender growth of late spring and early summer grasses and forbs are more desirable to the Oryctolagus cuniculus. Every year I think I should resolve to protect each tree with fencing or hardware cloth. And every year I decide to let them fend for themselves in the pitching uncertainty of Leporidae predation.

Even my planting trees is a way of bending land to my desire. Even my disdain of rabbits. But am I not a rabbit? Am I not a tree? Am I not as free and emergent as anything that grows or breaths?

POEM

Spring

Beginning is one way
to look at it
but why do I feel
so tired
if this is just the start?
Spring is rebirth,
but how many times
can you be born
and have the energy 
to become?
I see the tamaracks
pubic with new growth
after their long death.
Spring is not youth, after all.
It is middle age:
the decision to keep going
even if you don’t know why;
even though you know
there is nothing
to prove,
you pull another birth
of self out of the wet ground.
After 30, 40, 50 springs
you no longer thing
this time, this time I’ll get it. 
Let the wheel turn.
let the tamaracks tell you
what time it is.

Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• A door. Our kitchen, after a decade, has a door that I do not loathe. I cut a hole in the wall and hung it myself, laughing at the scale of the project and the massive improvement it makes in our daily lives.

• Rhubarb lemonade. The rhubarb has become a vastness, an enormity, and its most desired use is in honey sweetened lemonade.

• Asparagus. When it comes, it comes—spring has given us asparagus in addition to all of its other delights.

• The aroma of fruit tree blooms. First the plums, then the cherry and apple. Each year our yard becomes more and more a bee-frenzied blooming ground.

Cheers,
Jake

Last week’s bump of warmth spurred growth in the garden, and the mild, cooler days have coaxed the rhubarb and asparagus from their beds. The plum trees are on the verge of bouquet, and the apples aren’t far behind. It is always like this after the long duration of winter, the feeling that everything is happening all at once while in reality it has been steadily progressing. We partake in an almost performed forgetfulness of the inevitable.

On our way home a few days ago, we watched two bear cubs flop across a field. Out from the mud the peepers have dug themselves back into life. It is all gradual, but the moments of warm sun, the flocks of noisy off-key swans, and the green of the grass framed by the doorway on an early May morning make it seem sudden.

The way we use our time and our bodies changes so much with the spring weather. Now we are outside for hours, walking from the garden to the barn, from the shed to the field, the greenhouse to the garden. The sun kisses us. The soil touches our skin. We can smell what we have been doing on each other. There is so much to sense. Everything is awake.

POEM

Morning after
the downpour and gust
before the rose
of dawn there is
a duck egg blue.
Have you seen
one of those?
The small perfect
link between day 
and dew-wet night. 
I think how I want
to feel real,
to feel like I am 
really here.
If I were, I would
be this blue, 
this fleeting,
this kin.
Life, most of it, 
is the weather 
between storms.
But sometimes 
it is the storms.

Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• Electricity. I finally got around to wiring a subpanel in the barn. This kidding season has light!

• I’ve meandered away from checking my Instagram account, only for that time to be replaced by lurking on reddit—in all ways an improvement. The obscure list of subreddits is unending. I currently spend my morning coffee time deciphering old cursive handwriting and chuckling at inside jokes between redditors.

• Baby goat shouts and jumps. Kidding season has begun, and the bright, specific joy and energy of baby goats is upon us.

• Rhubarb. It’s up in a big way.

  

• Poetry. The St. Croix Falls art school started a monthly open mic. Listening to local singer-songwriters and poets has helped me find renewed commitment to my own creative endeavors.

• A stack of records from Down In The Valley record shop on National Record Store Day, including an Ahmad Jamal album!

Cheers,
Jake

To love what you love, the lesson of the potato. I could use that lesson these days as middle age sprouts its blind tendrils in me. Where the cold, dark soil; where the burial trench for me? Things in the cellar storage of youth have been waiting for this time. When you plant a potato, you get more of them. Tuber yields tuber. When I plant myself, surely I will grow more of myself.

The muffled call of the sandhill crane reaches the squat tater through its blanket of dirt; the funneled rain; the meager vibration of the worm. These are the potato’s great joys. These are the things that ripple across its skin and spur something within its depths to grow. Our joys may be as strange, or stranger. I aim to love them like the potato.

POEM

When I see my self (two words)
not myself (one word), not the one
I already know and know and know
I want to go to him and start
chanting or dancing
because I know he will join me.
He’s that kind of guy. Not with words
but by just doing it
I see that all he wants
is permission to be lovely
and only I can give it to him.
How do you get permission to be
a free animal, permission to 
let rip a howl that is not an echo
of the howls you have heard
but to make a sound that is your own?

Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• Bill Evans. Master of the vibe, nobody lays it down like Bill. I go through phases of Billy Taylor, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, McCoy Tyner and others, but Bill is always there.

• Thunder. Spring has brought the first rain and thunder, and has also brought us a new her sire goat named Thunder.

• Fermented onions. Kerstin ordered a vegetable fermenting book and in classic form, I immediately began fermenting two gallons of red onions that we harvested last fall. I caught them before they started sprouting. Our kitchen has been full of the smell from burping jars. We tasted the purple beauties this week and are in love.

• Magda Szabo’s The Door. There are books, and then there are books, and The Door is a book. Szabo wrote it in Hungarian the mid 1980s, but the English translation didn’t follow until 2015. Set in post-war Budapest, the novel follows the decades long relationship between a young woman and her elderly housekeeper. Szabo shows the brute face of love and care, and the lucent, tender, impossible relationships that can form when someone is brave enough and strong enough to do the real work of loving others.

Cheers,
Jake

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The tomato equinox is also a chance to reflect on the bizarre and malleable nature of time. Does mid-August to February feel like the same distance as traveling from February to August? Is distance a valid or useful descriptor for time? Will there be a good tomato crop this year? The equinox also reveals what kind of saver you are. Do you meal plan and coordinate the last jar of tomato sauce with the first day of canning new ones? Will you run out before August and cruise into tomato season with the hunger and gratitude that deprivation delivers? Will you be overly conservative and eat your remaining store in the last few weeks to make room for the new? Who are you? What are you!?

I am all kinds of tomato people. The paste I carefully dole out, wanting it to last as long as able—even a spoonful of it adds punches of flavor to nearly anything. The diced tomatoes I am cavalier with, spending them recklessly, writing checks without knowing the account balance. The sauce, I move slowly on, then pick up steam after the Tomato Equinox.

The political and economic volatility of our times makes these behaviors feel more worthy of examination—if it came down to making resources last, of storing and keeping food until you could grow or acquire more, how would you go about it? It wasn’t so long ago that canning tomatoes, drying and hanging onions, and storing potatoes wasn’t just for fun, but for having food, for living as well as you could. I wonder how many of the things stored in our old cellar over the years were doled out with an eye on the calendar, with a worry or a wonder if they would last long enough.

The ground is already on its way to thawing. The stored potatoes are showing the first signs of sprouting eyes. In four or five weeks they will be in the ground, right around the time we start tomato seeds. There will inevitably be a gap between when the last of the stores are eaten and when the fresh ones arrive. How long will that gap be? How empty? How full?

POEM

With or without

The whole thing feels confusing. The whole thing
being life and what you are supposed to do with it.
One way or another, it turns out
you have to do something, be something.
It is hard to be young and not know
how to do the big thing
you feel that your life 
needs you to do.
The big thing is to live well.
With or without an example. 

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Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• Some Fabriano EcoQua A4 notebooks from Wet Paint in St. Paul. Fabriano has been making paper since 1265! They are impossible to beat for affordability and quality, especially for using with liquid and fountain pen inks.

• Baked goods. During some kitchen renovations, we have been without an oven. Kerstin’s aunt has been slipping us breads, rolls, buns, and sweets to keep us in the baked goods. <3

• Becca Rothfeld’s debut piece in the New Yorker. The Washington Post, her previous employer, recently fired half its staff and eliminated its books section. Rothfeld goes to bat not only for book reviews, but for general interest publications, and their important role in shaping the public they serve and imagine.

• Sarah Bakewell’s biography of the 16th century essayist and winemaker Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, better known as just Montaigne.

• Pelikan’s Blue Black 4001 iron gall ink. This ink is nearly ubiquitous in Germany, or at least in my memory of German inks, and is beautiful, nostalgic, and useful. I have been using it for nearly all of my work notes and first drafts.

Cheers,
Jake

In the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee I saw a drummer serendipitously meet a guitarist who was looking for a drummer sitting right next to him; heard an artist who works at a liquor store let us all know, somehow, about both of their occupations; saw the barista give a focaccia to the toilet paper delivery guy; saw a dog walk in; heard a gen x being gen x.

O my god, we have been lonely. Unannounced. Whatever the reasons—phones, identity politics, the internet, overworked, stress—it is a condition, a spirit, like hunger. How would you describe it? It doesn’t need to be understood to exist. It is a dark power that pools with weight.

We know how valuable good friends, family, good food, being able to create, and enjoying life are. And now we know they are not just small pleasures. Look at what happens to the people who don’t have them, and look what happens when they try to take them from us. They are the most valuable things in the world. Look at the amount of money they need, the amount of power they need to pay for not having having them. Look at what it costs everyone around them. Whatever makes your life good, whatever pleasures, they are the value that everything else only tries to represent. They are full of the value that cannot become displaced, commodified, amassed, leveraged against you or anyone. They are a balance that cannot be diminished. Without it, we see the malnourishment that makes people willing to eat each other.

POEM

Winter in Minneapolis

The cold continues
vacantly.
Its blank durability is a message
from the end.
But it is not yet the end.
Buds, did you know, form
on trees in autumn 
completing the legacy of seasons
past. Thinking ahead, even
as they are dying, using their dying
to prepare for, 
what is spring,
hope?
constancy? 

Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• Iron & Wine’s Ghost on Ghost album. Over the years, this album has taken a back seat, but, delightfully, it has resurfaced for some spin time lately.

• A cursive handwriting workbook for Harvey. When he learned that I learned to write cursive when I was in 2nd grade, he immediately took interest.

• The sights and sounds of our community’s resistance. The anger and pain and disgust is there, but the kindness and solidarity and beauty is the spirit of it, and the examples of it are overwhelmingly gorgeous.

• Doubt and confusion about how to be helpful and wise and useful and beautiful amidst the brutality and fear.

• I Do Know Some Things, by Richard Siken. His 2025 collection of poems about grief, family trauma, sadness, and resilience is beautiful in itself, and a triumph of his recovery from a stroke that nearly took his ability to write from him.

A special thank you, today, to everyone for subscribing and reading this newsletter. It is small (and beautiful, I hope), and it is a wonderful, sublime privilege to write it with your support. Thank you so much for keeping the world full of small beautiful things that are, after all, the most valuable things we have.

Love,
Jake

Can you imagine being that real? That close to it all? The night—and they are part of it, of what we mean when we use the word “night.” I opened the door, cold air pouring in from the pot of night, to listen. Night! The default state of the universe. Lights out. And I, not in the night. Usually in a house or a car. They yip and bark. They root in the compost and take the dead chicken and the eggshells. They come and linger and leave like smoke, like the scent of pine, like hobos and beatniks. They are a wave washing over stones.

In the morning, tracks. Tracks sifting through from the marsh, constellating at the edge of the field. Tracks through the garden, around the barn, in the yard. Seeing their paw prints in the snow, I felt their methodical, persistent survival. They are doing the living for all of us now that we don’t do it anymore. They are in the mud and the reeds, they dig for frogs in the cattail shoots. While we do nothing they are crossing rivers and burrowing into the sunny side of sandy hills. What am I? A little piece of frothing life. Spume. Am I prepared for this other example?

After they dissolved into the dark, their stream of yowls weakening in the distance, I saw satellites moving among the fixed starlight, interrupting the elemental. I’m trying so hard to be real, heating the sauna, digging the potatoes, aging the cheese, baling the hay. All the spray of a wave. In time, a chip of history, a caricature unable to be understood or contextualized. Meanwhile the coyote, the eternal archetype, wisps through the world, immortality leaking through the stars.

POEM

I face the temptation to think
but then consider all the nerve endings in me,
consider my heart, my nose, my tongue.

What I've always wanted: to really be here.

Have I mistaken all of my thoughts for poems?
Have I mistaken everything? So many things
are possible. Can anything be wrong?

My heart, my nose, my tongue. I can feel
everything. I can take a deep breath anytime
and feel: I am not so small to myself, just as small
as always to the world.

Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• Lutefisk. My father-in-law and I are genuine lutefisk lovers, and around the holidays we give it all the pomp it requires and deserves. I recently learned that lye is used to reconstitute, not to preserve, the cod. More southern (and temperate) areas of Europe had better access to salt for curing, and a less harsh winter climate that allowed them greater access to fresh fish. Scandinavia lacked in available salt deposits and had long harsh winters, so reconstituting dried stockfish with lye was an effective way to make their stored fish edible and nutritious. I had always erroneously believed that lye was a preservation agent!

• Monstera propagation. With time and attention, my monstera plants have grown well. I decided to attempt propagation. January is a great time for this as it gives the plants several months to develop new root systems before the longer sunlight hours in April trigger the growing season.

• Robert Oster “River of Fire” ink. One of the best things, maybe the best thing, about using a fountain pen is the nearly endless custom-color ink options. Robert Oster has a knack for finding gaps in the mainstream color palette and creating inks that exploit the depth and variation of those unexplored spaces.

• This exceptional Willie Nelson article in the New Yorker.

• A guitar pick maker that santa gave me this year. The thing stamps out perfectly-shaped guitar picks from any kind of plastic you put in it—old credit cards are especially fun.

Love,
Jakey boy (howlllllllllllllllllllll)

I love snow for all the reasons Minnesotans love snow, and for these additional ones:
-Snow flakes delicately melting in the milking bucket on the walk back to the house from the barn.
-The kids forgetting whatever else they want to do and being hypnotically drawn to being outside.
-The visual understanding of all the life and activity around the farm and in the fields evidenced by the tracks of the otters, muskrats, deer, pheasant, coyotes, fox, and other creatures that waddle and creep.
-The white solitude and pleasantness of country snow, clean and everlasting.
-The ridiculousness of it. SNOW. What even is it?

The snow first brings chaos and reorganization; then comes routine and patterned behavior. The rabbits emerge and eat the bottom, then middle needles and branches of the pine saplings I planted in the spring. The sounds of farm and field and muffled and muted. The paths of deer and field mice are consolidated to narrow lanes. The otters keep their little hole open in the pond, returning along the same tunneled trail through the white-covered reeds and cattails.

The pitted skull of the moon is intensified by the bright white earth. This is all so perceptible, so conspicuously real that it brings a kind of relief to this wishy-washy Midwestern heart. Snow is a directive to act, creates a set of limitations, and adds wonder and beauty—the same recipe for poetry and art and life. Everything is as it was, and yet it is entirely different, entirely new. How often does a circumstance like that occur? How rare.

POEM

The trees, the corn, even 
the neighbor's yard light smudged, 
paled, fogged out in a soup
of winter sky. The flakes 10,000 feet
old, more snow than air, more cloud
more blur more hover more hush.
The ado of it all, the ferment, the flutter.
You couldn't believe this
if it wasn't real.

Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• Mating, Norman Rush’s 1991 novel, and Acts of Service, by Lillian Fishman (2025). These both found their way onto my reading list from Becca Rothfeld’s recommendation in her book of essays, All Things Are Too Small. When I decide to like someone or something, I am wildly eager to adopt their opinions of things (not always a wise quality), and Rothfeld is someone I have decided to like. This made for a mixed bag of feelings when it came to digesting these novels, particularly Rush’s Mating. I found Rush’s prose sesquipedalian and distracting from the plot, though overall I admired the unique story and the tension he maintained in the novel. Acts of Service capture more of my interest, primarily for its confrontation of the contemporary question of consent; Fishman’s novel is classified as erotic fiction but has the Mary Gaitskill or Anaïs Nin quality of being more exploratory literature than erotica. Fishman writes with the ease of someone both very intelligent and socially adept, giving us insight into the complex emotional and cognitive processes her protagonist goes through.

• Redbreast Irish whiskey. After spending the better part of an hour freeing our large buck goat’s head from being trapped (by his own doing) between a fence panel and a barn board, a taste of this xmas gift helped smooth things over.

• Kerstin’s famous ginger stout cake.

• Alternator, voltage regulator plug, block heater, rotors, and brake pads for the Jetta. The old bird has been resurrected from its retirement at the edge of the field. It took some tender loving care to get it back on the road, but it was worth it. The mileage those early 2000s-era TDIs get is remarkable. Despite its eccentricities and continual maintenance needs, I enjoy driving it. Who knows how much more time I have left with it? I must savor these miles.

• The Cranberries record, Everybody Else Is Doing It So Why Can’t We? Dolores O’Riordan’s voice is pure haunting. The turntable stylus has touched nothing else all week.

Happy holidays,

Jake

Soon milking will be done for the season, the goats will rest and gestate in the barn under the scent of a summer’s worth of hay in the loft above. Candles are lit in suppertime darkness. The feeling of living on a farm is the warmest and fullest now in this time between seasons. Onions strung, hanging from nails on basement joists; potatoes sleeping in boxes, coated in the dirt they grew in; apple sauce waiting sweetly in jars on the old pine shelves set on fieldstones in the cellar all feel like spirits inhabiting our home, alive in a way that gives us more life.

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One of my favorite feelings is the sensation of sharing space with the ghosts of a house. How many and who slept, suspended a mattress thickness, where I sleep now? Who smoked at the window? Who sat in the corner where the upright piano is, leveled on a bench, playing music, and how often? What songs? Who sang to their children, cried in the bath, ate from the garden just outside the door? The haunting is thick, the air is saturated in every moment of every ghost of the past. The only thing we don’t share is time—every other intimacy, every other human action, is overlapped.

I can devote myself to this: being a full and proper ghost for the future. Someone looked out this south-facing window and wondered what poetry could come out of him; tried hard with love and confusion to grow and enjoy food; walked with a stainless steel bucket each morning from the kitchen door to the barn to milk and rest his head on the soft sides of warm-uddered does; held crying children; cried himself, many times; set up games of chess; wrote to friends; stoked the fire. With all my love of life, I will haunt these spaces, and if ever anyone wonders while standing here if someone once kissed or read or sang or bawled, their wonder will last only as long as the speed of that love.

POEM

A huge flock of blackbirds, bigger than you would imagine, swelling up suddenly from the trees while jogging through the woods

Their animal community, their animal lives
giving me permission to be an animal and stop
to watch to feel the freedom of purposeless time.
Meaningless, life. 
In the overwhelming ravishment of birds 
the useless, thought-ending knowledge
dissipates. So what if it is true.
So what.
They fly and fly and fly and fly.

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Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• Gerry Mulligan • Paul Desmond Quartet, the 1957 record two of the coolest cats of modern jazz made in a 2am recording session in Los Angeles. Like Desmond says of Mulligan, “he just does all the right things.”

• More coffee than usual. The end of Daylight Savings Time hit hard this year. I’m still sloughing it off two weeks later.

• Pottery from various fall sales in the valley. Notably, a pitcher from Peter Jadoonath.

• New stainless steel burners for the propane furnace. Turns out you’re supposed to check those for corrosion more than once a decade.

• A good New England-style breakfast of scrapple and eggs courtesy of Neal.

Cheers,
Jakey boy

In October, we call the woods the spooky woods. Bare branches are dark and calligraphic against the sky. Scrapes and rubs of whitetail bucks punctuate the leaf-hidden ground. Long shadows penetrate the understories of old oaks and pulpy basswoods. At night, through the scattered trunks of trees and across the opaque slope of the field, the …

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This October heatwave is like watching a film without the score—it looks the part, is recognizable, but gives an entirely different and haunting experience. The absence of colder weather is itself a thing, a new member, a different group dynamic. As spring and summer balloon outward in the year, I am wishing I had written more, remembered more about autumn and winter. It seems likely to come to that: memories.

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It’s like this, too much all at once, one way or the other. The balance of nature is not stasis. It is cresting and falling, undulating and teetering. One way,

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September, my darling—I would, I really would, know you anywhere. I’m not afraid of being old fashioned by writing an ode. What else can be done when you love something with the animal part of you, the part that is real, that is your body?

They are saying autumn, but September, you are my spring. This is the time to come alive, in you reassuring coolness, in your strange heat. Am I gushing?—I’m gushing. Here’s why: there is every single day going by, long or short or both, going by and there is nothing more important than being awake to them. Who does that better than September?

The days go by and people are lost from our lives, but we have the same enormous love to go around. Where can we put it all? Where can it all possibly go but into and onto what we have left.

What we have now is the very best of the year, when the mornings are a reward, the days full of the best light (September light), and any weather we get is good. There is never a better time to wake early. There is never a better time to stay up late. The peach and plum of dawn, the constellated night.

If there is something you know you must do, not the tasks and the lists, but something you must do for your life, do it now in this perfect month, in this month of alchemy and occult; do it while the mists linger and the rain falls as cold and clear as ice; do it while the hives are full of honey, the gardens full of fruit, the ground covered in the bourbon hue of acorns. Do it while asters bloom and snakes seek the warmth of sun-baked stones. Do it while skunks burrow in the prairie and while you can tomatoes.

That thing you know you must do. Do it in September.

POEM

The beard of the billygoat is long.
He is no longer a young buck.
Many years of mating and waiting 
in his pen. Gruff, you could say, but he
has a lonely life, is hard because of it.
Feeding him today, talking to him, hello
old man we say to each other, 
and in the corner of his pen I see a halo 
of a nest and three chicken eggs
clean and smooth in the straw. He's a rough old boy,
so picture a golden hen nestled happily
against the bigness of his body. He is made 
of hard hooves, a hard head, a hard old goat.
I put them in the pocket of my chore coat
and carry them to the house. Soft boiled,
because I repeat a little trick for the kids,
turning the emptied shell upside down in its cup.
I got these from the buck's pen,
we know papa, we saw you talking to him.
We saw you carry them.
You were smiling.

Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• Kairos. Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2021 novel set during the collapse of the GDR and the nascent unification of Germany in the late 1980s. Set in parallel to a complicated and toxic relationship that undergoes its own disastrous and heartbreaking disintegration, Erpenbeck finds ways to convey the painful and mixed feelings that are hidden in the history of one of the world’s most problematic political and economic restructuring efforts.

• The Indigo Girls concert at the Grandstand of the MN State Fair. It was incredible. I wore all denim, obviously.

• A new distributor cap, set of wires, and spark plugs for the VW bus. The van was experiencing intermittent and non-starting on damp or humid days, and after racking my brain for much more complicated diagnoses, I checked the distributor cap only to find a set of the most gummed up and weathered contacts possibly ever seen. The new cap is fresh and clean and the engine now starts like a dream.

• Gallons and gallons of tomato sauce and paste. We’ve been hauling in boatloads, and sending steam out the kitchen windows for weeks.

  

  If February is the tomato equinox, September is the solstice.

Cheers,
Jake

The barn is full of bats. The sleek little brown furred ones with black wings and retroussé noses. We first noticed them by looking down at what they left behind. A strip of guano striped the center of the hayloft, soiling the central bales. On warm days under the peak of the roof, you can see and hear them scuttling, squeaking, and jostling. And in the late afternoons you can watch them scrambling along the rafters, jockeying for position before leaving their roosts for the night.

There are more than you can imagine, hundreds and hundreds certainly, and for all we can tell, they stay through the winter, huddled and packed between the old slab board rafters and roof decking. Twice have I seen a carcass—one stuck to a wide swath of flytrap many years ago, and one like a brown field mouse nestled in the corner of the hay loft as if it were asleep.

The deer flies are particularly bad this year, and if you wander more than 20 yards or so from the edge of the lawn the mosquitoes and flies are relentless. But within a certain radius of the barn there is nary an insect. Between the double duty of the barn swallows and the bats, we are gifted an area of peace.

Dozens of swallows nest in and on the barn, as well. The somewhat ancient thing was built in or around 1850. Under the layers of siding and shipboard are logs, hand-hewn and notched to fit. Who knows what it has housed, what births and lives and deaths is has held. The stretches of vacancy. The stretches of none.

Today, goats, kittens, most days our kids climbing bales, chickens, bats and swallows, and who knows what else. I didn’t build it and I probably won’t see it come down. Same as the previous owner, and the previous, and the previous, etc.

August evenings the marsh and the sky above it rattle with life. I’m rattled, too.

Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• Nearly all the work Fintan O’Toole did to demythologize and demystify the Ireland of our imaginations, Niall Williams has in one go undone with his novel This Is Happiness. The firm ground O’Toole put Ireland on for readers gives way in TIH as Williams ties us to the mast of romance and idyll. TIH is a tale of love, of grief, of nostalgia, and affection—for people, places, music, family, place. If joie de vivre were a book…

• Cucumbers, plums, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, herbs, flowers—the garden in August has the ardor and affection of a love affair. All the pleasures of food, of work, of the miracle of seed to sandwich are bounding.

• Goat milk strawberry ice cream.

• Bud Powell Trio Volume I, At The Golden Circle. The chillest and coolest of jazz vinyl.

• Daikon radish the size of a newborn. Huge root veg, bigger than I can describe.

-Jake

I belong, despite my resistance to being categorized, to a subset of elder Millenials and Gen X cuspers who felt the elementary urge to move to a farm. The desire to grow things, to witness the brute nearness of raw material, to not only use but make ingredients, became a dire urge.

There are academic reasons. The 1980s and 1990s brought a climax of unreal saccharine culture on the tail of a long progressive era. Suburbs, low inflation, Nintendo. Life became, increasingly, a dreamlike state. The unreal became too real, too normal. Somewhere a pod of cartoon dolphins jumps over a neon sunset on a TrapperKeeper. Splash.

That desire—to live in a more real world—invites more than just its main goal.

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Our garden has grown to half an acre this year—huge by our standards—and the momentous responsibility of maintaining it pressed itself on us early this spring. April was a month of spreading compost, shoring up hedges, broadforking vegetable beds; it was a month of mulch and hope. The strawberries woke first, their hardiness always a surprise and delight. Chives thrived in the chilly spring soil. And on the south end of the garden, a train of rhubarb splits dug into the earth like they were sat in front of a Sunday roast.

Rhubarb is hungry. It asks for a lot. Water nearly every day. Buckets of compost. It is a heavy feeder with deep roots and dense foliage. It takes in large amounts of nutrients from the soil to produce its thick, dense stalks, and massive green leaves. All that fuel is turned into fiber, vitamins C & K1, folate, calcium, magnesium, potassium, antioxidants, and phytonutrients.

Rhubarb honors its debts. In return for its expensive demands, rhubarb shows gratitude. Unlike many other vegetables, it retains nearly all its nutrients after being cooked. It is also a digestive aid, lowers cholesterol, and improves calcium absorption, bone health, and liver strength. The American Institute for Cancer Research reports that the high level of anthocyanin in rhubarb provides cancer-preventative cell signaling, along with regulating blood pressure and reducing inflammation. It’s deep roots improve soil structure. And as a perennial that spreads, it thrives when divided and split, lending itself to generosity and community.

Rhubarb is the coyote. It hybridizes easily and its many cultivars and varieties defy categorization, organization, and our awareness of how many there are. The threat of frost means nothing. The cool air and spring wind only make it stronger. Early in the growing season when things are tender and fragile, rhubarb is at its strongest, insistent in the soil, which is often still partially frozen.

When it came to the western world via ancient Rome, the Romans could only guess in what unknown, barbarian soil it grew. Those lands were across the Vogue river, known as the Rha, beyond which barbarians ruled. Rha barbarum—eventually rhabarbarum, Latin for rhubarb—came to be their name for the plant (primarily its roots, which were a prized and expensive laxative 💩). So prized, in fact, that its seeds were among the most valuable and precious imports to the empire, more valuable than their weight in gold.

Now, in the upper latitudes of North America, rhubarb is the citrus of the north. It shows us what lusty living can create. It is reliable and beautiful and enchanting enough to pull us into its ambit. It holds onto what it finds in the earth and makes it better.

Some Rhubarb Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• Rhubarb salad dressing (add its juice where you would lemon and/or vinegar).

• Roasted rhubarb.

• Rhubarb simple syrup (whiskey old-fashioneds with a sprig of mint!).

• Rhubarb-ade.

• Rhubarb soda.

• Rhubarb galette.

• Rhubarb jam.

• Rhubarb crumble.

• Rhubarb crisp.

• Rhubarb tea (compost tea for the garden). Fermenting rhubarb leaves in a bucket of water for a week yields a nutrient-rich compost tea that is also a natural pesticide.

-Jakey boy

Time to rhyme.

Time to be overly ambitious in the kitchen. Time for full-moon witchin’. Time to help friends and pitch in. It’s time for something different. Time to be poetic and belligerent.

Time for doing now that sap is flowing. Time for planting and for growing. It’s time to feel that thing we all feel when spring returns and the earth becomes real.

Pile last year’s weeds in a heap and light them on fire. Watch the flames rise and fall like passing desire. Till the ashes into your garden bed. Grow something new from something that’s dead. Think about this at harvest time. How something is living while something is dying.

POEM

The sun is coming up.
Who knows where we are.
It's been a long time
since we drank champagne
since we respected even the bad
parts of ourselves. 
When did we try to make ourselves perfect?
I didn't set out to copy anyone else, did you?
Copy yourself, it is the only way
to live.
It is morning if we say it is morning
no matter how late the night
how dark the sky.

Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight

• After some digging in the deep freeze, I found a package of pork ribs that had slipped under my radar. A ciabatta, pulled pork sandwich with homemade bbq sauce and honey-pickled jalapeños was in order.

• A monstera youtube rabbit hole. I recently adopted a monstera plant, and fell deep into the yawning chasm of monstera care videos on YouTube. Monsteras are, apparently, a thing. They cast a spell, to be sure, but I had no idea how strong that spell could be.

• A new gasket for my Stanley thermos. I appreciate how Stanley still offers replacement gaskets for their older items.

• Duck eggs. It’s that time of year when the duck eggs start appearing in the corners of the barn, in piles of hay, and just straight up on the lawn. Our funny little flock is down to just two Swedish Whites. They are the comic heroes of the farm.

• Flames. I’ve been making burn piles of old raspberry canes, garden weeds, and sticks in the lawn, cleaning up the garden beds for spring.

Enjoy the spring weather. Let it seep into you like rain.

Cheers,
Jake

At a neighbor’s house recently, I risked asking someone what they were currently reading, know that the question would very likely be turned back to me. I had the thrill and humiliation of answering that I was reading a book of Edwardian era essays. This alone was worth the $1.99 I spent on the book. So what is it, already? The Prince of Minor Writer: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm. And what’s so good about it? They say a joke that you have to explain means it isn’t very funny, and I have the sense that a book of essays you have to justify may mean it isn’t very profound—but it is not profundity that I love about this book. It is the style, the eccentricity, and its uncategorizable nature. What is it, you ask? I also wonder, and I have read it.

Virginia Woolf titled Beerbohm the prince of

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