I try to avoid politics on this website, but there has been so much hand-wringing this week in the sustainable agriculture community about Barack Obama’s agriculture choice for Secretary of Agriculture that I feel compelled to respond. I can’t find much good to say about Tom Vilsack, but I have low expectations for the job he’s filling, and I would have been surprised had Obama picked somebody I really liked. Read on

The weekend’s storm tore the remaining leaves from the trees: in great clouds fluttering like blackbirds taking wing, were the world turned upside-down. Lonely survivors cling to their branches while the bodies of their brothers, summer’s corpses, lay strewn on my windshield. I should put dimes on their eyes to mark the season, but they have none, and there are too many. The wipers flash, tick-tick, and it is winter.

Saturday we had significant snowfall for the first time in four years: only an inch and a half, but enough that I no longer need fear that the Monkey will begin to think the stuff a fairy tale, like Santa Claus and supply-side economics. In a normal winter we get a little snow — seven-plus inches is the annual mean — but it hasn’t snowed as much as an inch since 2004. Having grown up with doorknob-high drifts and blanket forts on snow days and twice-layered jeans that soaked through sledding and left crimson cold burns on my thighs, I’ve had to lower my standards for “significant snowfall” these latter barren years. Now I get excited by flakes no bigger than my dog’s dandruff, and my daughter, having no standards at all, makes do with whatever she finds: the five inch-high snowperson adorning our porch rail attests to the determination of a child who can read chapter books about polar bears but has never set foot in snow deeper than the tread on her boots:

Sad, but one has to make do with what one has. I filled the bird feeders, gave the ducks fresh straw, checked to make sure I still owned a snow shovel, and settled in to enjoy the show. Even the basset hounds, who had never seen snow either, loved it — a clean slate for scents, I suppose — although if we get a real snow one day, I am going to have to knit poor Everett a jock strap.

We lost both our dogs last year, and although Sadie, the new girl, is a wonderful dog, a house isn’t a home without at least two basset hounds. And so:

This guy happened to be available five days before Christmas, and so here is is. We named him Everett, after Ulysses Everett McGill in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but should maybe have named him Marvin, as in Starvin’ Marvin, because he approaches a bowl of food like a Visigoth to Rome. When not hungrily eyeing herds of cattle he has a quiet confidence that I think will make him an excellent dog, and he seems to be pretty smart; at ten weeks old he will already sit on request. (Not “command” so much because he’s only ten weeks old, and also because he’s a basset hound.)

Sadie adores him and has played with him constantly, when she isn’t sleeping on the couch with him. They’re already Best Friends Forever. One dog is a pet; two and you really are sharing your home with another species. I missed that. Merry Christmas to me.

Mid-afternoon a tree fell in the yard. No wind, no rain, only the slow crescendoing crack of something gone very very wrong and then a rustle and — wait for the thud, but no thud. The tree hung over the yard, balanced precariously in the crotch of a low shrub and, twenty feet higher, a branch of a poplar. From the house its support was invisible and the angle of its pause impossible, as if it had thought better of its fall once begun. A heavy tree, dead for some time but unrotted and still solid, and if it was coming down soon enough one way or another I preferred it not fall on the dog’s head or on mine, so I dragged out the chain saw and trudged through the underbrush. I had to cut the tree on the upstroke, the saw at the height of my head, to keep it from crushing the fence when it fell, but it split neatly and the two logs fell on either side of the fence, one only slightly bending the wire. We need to rebuild a couple of our garden beds if we intend to use them again and now we have logs to bound them, and the work made me feel sufficiently useful that I felt justified in having a Manhattan, with two cherries, before dinner.