Bittersweet Farm

I once had a reader from Vermont write and say that she has always dreamed of visiting Michigan. I have always dreamed of visiting Vermont. Christopher Kimball (The Cooks Illustrated guy) went deer hunting in Vermont and posted a video of a day in the Vermont woods. I wonder how many men just use deer hunting as an excuse to be out in the quietness and beauty of God’s creation?

Here is the first paragraph of his newsletter today:

The day before the opening of hunting season in Vermont is known as “Antler Day,” so Tom and I spent the afternoon up in the woods, looking for hookings (small trees on which bucks have rubbed their antlers), scrapes (areas on the ground that are scraped down to the dirt) and other signs of recent activity, and we surprised two large does in high grass. The next morning, I made a buttermilk pancake breakfast for Tom and his son Nate, and then we were up in our stands by 6 a.m. in a cold, steady rain. I sat for a couple of hours overlooking our summer pasture and then drove over to a neighbor’s property with my portable deer stand. (Portable stands allow you to shimmy your way up a tree in a hard-to-reach spot.) I spent a few hours right next to a well-worn deer trail and saw just one large doe before I came back to the original spot. Around 3:30 p.m., a small doe showed up, a wet ash-gray, checking out the upper field. Then she left and came back with her two yearlings and they grazed for half an hour. I stayed until 5 p.m. before driving home, soaked and chilled to the bone, only to discover that Nate had shot a large 8-pointer that morning. (Nate always gets a deer.) On Sunday, I walked up to the hollow right behind our farmhouse and watched a fog roll in. It was like sitting at the bottom of a shallow sea, the oak and poplar like eelgrass waving in the current, reaching up toward the surface. Two good-sized does snuck up behind me, but that was about it for the day. There is still one week left until black powder season in December! (Hope springs eternal).

Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation of a day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer, 1863:

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.”

We made a few videos for the Evangel Baptist Chruch website. They were filmed in my study by Sue Calvas and they will play on the church website through the month of December. Can you hear the crackling fire and smell the pine?