I miss fresh food-all of our vegetables and fruits are pickled or dried, except for a few apples and potatoes and carrots. One food has been a revelation, however: Jack put a shovel heaped with dry corn into the fire so that the kernels popped into white blossoms. ‘Popcorn’ is the most delicious thing imaginable. Jack was so pleased I liked it that he made it for me three nights in a row, until Judith chided him.
As mentioned previously, I help with the milking each morning and evening, and it has become much easier now that the cows accept me, and I them. I had always thought of them as all alike-dumb beasts who stand in fields eating grass-but I know now that each has her own character, just like people. It took them some weeks to accept a new pair of hands touching them. Like horses and dogs, they are quick to sense uncertainty, and will play upon it, given the chance. I have learned to be firm with them, and they are now docile. Thee would smile at my arms, for they have grown with muscles I had never used before. My forearms are almost as big as my upper arms, and my shoulders are not as sloped as they once were. I should not care about such things, but my body looks peculiar to me-though Jack doesn’t mind, being accustomed to dairymaids’ arms.
After milking we have breakfast, and while I am clearing up, Judith and Dorcas make cheese and butter from the morning’s milk. When I finish in the kitchen I shell half a bushel of corn for the horses. This is the work I hate most, as it hurts my thumbs when I push the dried kernels off the cob. The bases of my thumbs have also grown as a result, and their tips are crisscrossed with scars. Eventually thee will not recognise me! At times it feels so futile an exercise to shell corn and have it eaten, then do so again the next morning, and the next. When shut up all winter in the barn, doing little other than eating and soiling the area around them, the animals come to seem like machines. I am sure I will be as glad as the horses and cows when spring comes and they can at last go out to pasture.
When we have finished our chores for the morning, Judith begins dinner and Dorcas and I sit by the stove and sew or knit. I am now working on the second red and white appliqué quilt I am making for her. I did not manage to convince her to let me make patchwork, but I do not mind so much now, as I am growing fonder of the simple cheerfulness of the design, especially during these grey months. It goes slowly, however: the cold and the stuffy air and the repetition of each day makes me slow-witted and less inclined to accomplish much. I make more mistakes, and must unpick them. When we were so busy in the autumn, I still managed to sew more than I do now. And it is hard to be so confined together; at times it makes me almost wild with frustration. I feel trapped here, frozen into a house and a family I still do not feel I belong to.
I miss the meadows of Dorset, which remained green all winter. I never appreciated them until faced with the prospect of months of brown, grey and white. I think now that the stunning show of leaves in red and yellow and orange in the autumn was one last gift from God to see us through these colourless winter months.
We rarely see anyone else, for they are shut up in their houses, waiting out the winter. Only occasionally does someone brave the cold and snow to come for milk and cheese. And the milliner Belle Mills came once to visit-in a sleigh! (That is what they call sledges. I have had to learn many new words.) Does thee recall the parrot a sailor once had in Bridport? Her arrival was like that parrot landing in Faithwell-all bright feathers amongst the snow. Judith and Dorcas didn’t say a word. I was so pleased to see her I’m afraid I cried, and Belle teased me, for I cry every time I am with her. She is the only person in Ohio whose friendship approaches what thee and I have-and yet she is as different from thee as American robins are from English ones. Robins here are big and brash, with bright chests, compared to the delicate, more subtle bird thee knows.
Belle brought me some beautiful tan silk I am hoping to use in a quilt when I have finished those for Dorcas. Then I will be able to make what I like, in the spring, when everything will come alive again.
Thy faithful friend,
Honor Haymaker
Sugaring
THE THAW WAS like a fist unclenching, with the world-and Honor in it-expanding in the newly formed palm. It was surprising how little time it took for the cold to lose its dominance. One day Honor woke and the air felt different: still icy but the sharp end of it blunted and less insistent.
She was finishing the quilt for Dorcas, quilting it herself rather than having it done collectively at a frolic, for food stocks were low and it was not the time for such a celebration. As she sat over the small oval frame that held the fabric taut to make piercing with a needle easier, Honor realized she was not holding herself tense to combat the cold. Then Dorcas laughed at something Judith said-a sound Honor had not heard all winter-and she knew others were feeling the shift too.
That night, as she lay against Jack’s warm back, monitoring another change that had taken place deep in her body over the past weeks, Honor heard the hopeful sound of dripping outside. Within a day the track to Faithwell had turned into deep, sticky mud, which was almost as hard to get through as snow had been. On her way to Meeting, Honor stepped up to her knees in it, and Jack, Dorcas and Judith all had to pull to extract her. Even then she left behind a boot, and Jack had to fetch a spade to dig it out.
The next day he put taps into some of the maples in Wieland Woods to drain sap for syrup. After fresh corn, maple syrup was Honor’s favorite food in America. She had not thought anything could taste so sweet and earthy and resinous all at the same time. It was not a taste she could easily describe in letters to her family, and she wished she could send them some.
After the dawn milking Jack took her out to Wieland Woods to collect sap for her first sugaring. Boiling it down for syrup took an entire day, so they must start early, bringing back sap that had dripped out during the night. Honor was glad to have a moment alone with her husband-so rare except when they were in bed. Winter had brought the Haymakers into a tight huddle that at times made her want to scream. Now, perhaps, she could enjoy his company without the press of Judith and Dorcas around them. At least there had been no spontaneous visits from Donovan to raise tensions further. As Mrs. Reed had predicted, there were few runaways in the winter; that, combined with the deep snow, had kept him away.
Honor and Jack worked together in the woods, going from tree to tree and transferring sap from the pails hanging on the taps into larger buckets they carried. With its trees bare of leaves and the tangled thicket died back, Wieland Woods had lost some of its wildness during the winter, and Honor felt more comfortable and less threatened there. In the companionable silence, she decided to tell her husband news that would please him. She had held back during the cold, but the thaw shifted something inside her as well. “Jack-” she began.
At that moment a black man stepped out from behind a bur oak, and Jack and Honor jumped.
“Didn’t mean to scare you, sir, ma’am,” he said, removing his hat and rubbing a scraggly beard. “I heard they was Quakers up this way would look after a man if he asked.”
“We are not-”
“Thee is not far from Oberlin,” Honor interrupted her husband. “It is just three miles that way.” She pointed north. “When thee gets there, go to Mill Street-the second right off Main Street. There is a red house near where the street crosses over Plum Creek. Look for a candle in the back window, and they will help thee.”