The other day, a question arose: How deep is my well? That's the kind of number I should know by heart, if only because it's so interesting to talk about wells with other well owners — a conversation that barely gets off the ground if you don't know how deep your well is. I remember having work done on my well ages ago when a check valve failed. Surely on the bill someone had written the depth in feet. All I had to do was find the bill.
It had been a long time since I'd looked in the farm drawer in the file cabinet, a long time. I still file bills and invoices there, but I do it with eyes averted, just dipping a hand in. So a search for the bill meant going through it all, more or less.
It was like seeing the farm jobs of 15 years taking place all at once. Here were fences going down and up. Here was the sweet potato crop that failed and the Indian runner ducks that eventually went to a good home in Dutchess County. I had forgotten how many heathers I bought, not to mention Japanese maples, not one of which survives. Here were loads of pea stone, the purchase of piglets as well as nipples for building a pig-drinker. Here were chickens galore, and an incubator for making more chickens. Here were my beloved Pilgrim geese.
Some of the bills were for labor, of course — reroofing, rewiring, pumping the septic tank — but most involved labor on my part: the chain saw, the posthole digger, the 50-pound bags of ryegrass seed. That labor has not been forgotten, but it no longer seems to be something outside of myself. The stacking of all those hay bales is no longer something to dread or to rejoice at having finished. It is simply part of my musculature, part of my nervous system.
The farm itself doesn't reveal my mistakes. It merely looks the way it does. But here, in the farm drawer, are all my mistakes on record. I won't begin to list them, except to say that the newest bill is grease for the grease gun that keeps the tractor working smoothly. I'm still chafing at the fact that last week I put the grease in the grease gun the wrong way — something it is barely possible to do.
The farm drawer seems to suggest how much I've learned over the years. Experience sometimes says otherwise.
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