Nichole Bernier's Blog

I didn’t know if I’d find them alive or dead. The temperature is -5 when I walk down the path behind our house cupping a small tub of meal worms. It had been -16 during the night, and the hens had never been in temperatures so cold. My husband had wanted to bring them inside. But I dusted off the radiant heat panel, the one we use for chicks and kittens, and had faith it would be enough.

I pull the wire handle on the side of the coop, and the trap door slides open between the coop and run. I rarely close them inside, so even though the cold blast can’t be fun, they’re curious. A few beaks pop out. The two bravest pick their way down the ramp, trusting I have treats, and the other 10 follow.

In our first year of owning chickens, when the overnight temperatures first went down in the single digits, my husband and I thought it couldn’t possibly be safe. Everything I read said New England breeds handle cold weather well. But it seemed too much, so we brought them in the house for the night. We set the ladies up in a tiled room with a layer of newspaper on the floor, and small bowls of water and feed pellets.

They trashed the place. Newspaper confetti shredded everywhere, plastered to the floor from their spilled drinks—a bona fide ladies’ night out. The next night they went back outside. They were more than fine on their roosting bars, downy feather blankets draped over their dinosaur feet. And they were calm again because we’d stopped messing with their program. Sometimes the solution, or what you think is the solution, ends up worse than the thing you think you’re fixing.

I scatter the mealworms for the chickens and lean down to check their water, which is frozen solid in spite of the submerged heating iron. Delilah jumps onto my back like she always does, trusting me to make things right, or just liking to be up high. I give them a trough of warm oatmeal and they start pecking the mush with gusto, fluffy butts quivering in the air. Faith, and trust.

I make sure the water heater is plugged in correctly, so that when the temperature goes down throughout the day it can start doing its work. It will take a while to make a difference. The best fixes seem to happen slowly, painfully slow, sometimes. Then you look up one day and see how much thaw occurred while you weren’t looking.

Mary Stuart Page Stegner died last month. Her obituary ran in a few newspapers, but it came to my attention as a blip in my Twitter stream, tucked appropriately between posts lamenting the destruction of nature in the BP oil spill.

The fact that she was still alive gave me pause as much as her age. At 99, she’d outlived by 17 years her husband Wallace Stegner, who died after a car accident in 1993 on his way to give a lecture in Santa Fe. Their 60-year marriage was a “personal literary partnership of singular facility,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in The Geography of Hope, A Tribute to Wallace Stegner, a partnership in which he did the writing and she enforced the writerly environs. He brought her breakfast in bed; she fed him new interests and fended off distractions. The end of that partnership was like something out of Stegner’s own novel Crossing to Safety. Marriage and longevity. Loss, and carrying on.

Stegner is best known for his environmental writing, which has influenced generations of conservationists, and for his novel Angle of Repose (which won the Pulitzer in 1972), as well as his creative writing program at Stanford University. But my point of entry to his work was Crossing to Safety, published in 1987. I first read it in my early 20s and have returned to it several times, moved by its incisive portrayal of two couples over decades, two interconnected marriages and friendships that unfold with tenderness and tragedy. Because of this, Stegner is to me first and foremost a chronicler of marriage, and a mourner of the lost mother.

Just before his 80th birthday, he wrote a heartbreaking essay, “Letter, Much Too Late,” of his own mother who’d died young:

“My name was the last word you spoke, your faith in me and love for me were your last thoughts. I could bear them no better than I could bear your death, and I went blindly out into the November darkness and walked for hours with my mind clenched like a fist… Your kind of love, once given, is never lost. You are alive and luminous in my head….You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound.”

I read that essay only last year, in a collection of Stegner’s works given to me by my husband on my birthday. But twenty years ago, what struck me about Crossing to Safety was Stegner’s proposition that character remains constant through life: We might become more pliable or more brittle over the years, but essentially, we are who we are—for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, and so on. There in the novel was the perky wife with just a whiff of control freak, doomed in the end by her own stubbornness; there was the solid, sensible other wife, locked by fate in her fortitude. In my 20s, world as my oyster and luck changing daily, I was wide-eyed at the suggestion that we were shackled to our unchanging natures.

Years later, when I read All The Little Live Things (1967), I felt a jolt of recognition. Here was the clear predecessor of the two characters—the earnest manipulator, as well as her foil, the training-wheels version of the solid, bemused partner. My surprise was naïve, but exhilarating: writers revisit their terrain! writers try out themes and prototypes that won’t stop yanking their chain, and return to them until they get them right! I wanted to talk about it to anyone who’d listen. My boyfriends in those days mastered expressions of polite interest.

One isn’t supposed to make assumptions about a writer’s own life based on his characters, but I did wonder. Mary Stegner, it seemed, was of the solid-bemused end of the spectrum. With characteristic wry humor, here’s what Stegner said of her in James Hepworth’s 1998 book Stealing Glances: Three Interviews with Wallace Stegner:

“She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls. Also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse’s ass of myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to agitate my sleeping hours with problems that I would not otherwise attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example) how fortunate I have been to live for fifty-three years with a woman that bright, alert, charming, and supportive.”

Rest in peace, Mary Stegner. May the two of you again amuse and restrain and agitate one another, lasting presences always, every wound healed.

John’s haul

Vacation week, Cape Cod. A guy lumbered out of the water with the rising tide, and dumped his floating basket into the large plastic tub onshore. He was wearing mismatched layers of water-poly clothes, a huge floppy hat, and a face gaiter for gnats.

Me and my rake, little bounty “clam nursery” water hole dug in the sand

“Wow,” I said. My little basket of about two dozen. “How long did that take you?”

“About three hours. Caught the tide before it turned.” I noticed he had no rake. Just big industrial gloves for digging.

“What are you going to do with them all?”

He told me he sells to restaurants and fish shops, loves it. Lives there in one of the most popular Cape towns, and makes a living, more or less, paid by the pound. Always digging, and his hands always hurt.

“You?” he asked.

I said I was a writer and he grinned. “Make a living?”

More or less. Paid by the word, always digging.

 

 

(originally posted 10/2017)

In the latest litter we fostered there was a clear runt, tiny and watchful, all head and twitchy ears. We should have named her Yoda but the kids dug in on Peanut. She was all quiet confidence in a six-ounce package, walking unfazed between the legs of our Bernese mtn dog. She could run and jump and wrestle with the others, she just got tired more easily. After awhile she’d come back to sit on my lap while I typed, crouching on delicate paws and curling herself into a space the size of a child’s hand.

Our job was to fatten her up like her three siblings. They were four weeks old and would be adoptable in a month as long as they reached two pounds. All four were eating canned food watered down to a gruel, and I’d been supplementing Peanut’s diet with hand-syringes of feline milk.

I thought they were all on track, but it wasn’t enough for her. Early yesterday morning I found her laying still and barely breathing in the kitten bed after her siblings had scattered to play. I rushed her to the vet wrapped in a blanket, but brought her home an hour later in a small box. The vet seemed surprised I wanted to take her home to bury her, a foster that didn’t work out, not really mine, not anyone’s. It underscored the fact that she was on no one’s radar. Burying her felt important. She had existed, and she mattered.

When the kids came back from school I walked them to the tiny grave I’d made under a tree circled with stones. I explained “fading kitten syndrome,” the catch-all term used for the ones not robust enough to digest food, fight germs, beat whatever glitch nature and Darwin had thrown their way.

The folks at the shelter where I foster say there’s one in every group; for each litter of, say, five kittens, an average of 3.5 make it to eight weeks old. But the statistics were lost on my kids. They had helped raise more than 10 litters, and though I’d told them about the risks and the rescue losses I’d had when I was a teen, we as a family had never lost one. Standing under the tree looking at the mound of dirt and stones, that achievement seemed to wilt. The kids were sad, and I’d let myself get too attached.

Why do it I thought after we went back into the house. Really, why do it to ourselves? It’s nice to have a hand in turning strays born in the bushes or pulled from hoarder homes become healthy and well-socialized pets. It’s no boast, it’s just a fact. The kittens that do time at our full house leave knowing how to roll with it. And it’s certainly no hardship playing with these adorables for a few weeks. Laying on the floor in the dark with two purring on your chest is the best therapy money can’t buy. I’ve often felt like we had a secret. Sshh, don’t tell anyone where they came from, or everyone will foster and there won’t be enough for us. 

Then there are the times it isn’t going so well — when they aren’t eating enough or develop an infection. And the inevitable big-picture math, if you stop to think about it. For every one that’s rescued there are so many that aren’t, which can make fostering feel like a zero-sum game. I usually don’t see it that way. But yesterday hit me hard, made me wonder whether I’d tried hard enough, watched closely enough, whether I’m too busy as a mom to be a good foster mom. If it’s worth the ups and downs, and if I’m as resilient as I need to be. The Humane Society estimates that tens of thousands of families foster pets every year. If I decided it was too raw for us, for me, the shelter surely had plenty of other foster families who’d take them in.

That same morning, as Peanut took her last breaths in my lap, the news broke that a shooter in Las Vegas had killed 58 people overnight and wounded 500. Mourning a kitten felt a little obscene against that backdrop of loss. Not to mention the suffering in Puerto Rico, where 84 percent of the people still didn’t have power following Hurricane Maria, and 37 percent didn’t have clean water. Mexico was memorializing 370 just killed in an earthquake. It is easy to feel ineffectual when a wave of bad news pummels the world one day and then again the next. It’s hard not to let the scope of need erode your faith that small things are worth doing. Even if small things are the only measure of difference in a zero-sum game.

In the afternoon, an email came from the new owner of Clyde and Flynn, two kittens from a litter born at our house in May. We love getting photos and updates on the kittens when we’re able to know where they’ve been placed. Crazy Clyde and his sidekick Flynn were six months old and behaved like drunken teens at a house party, and their new owner loved it.

“One day I heard a strange creaking sound coming from the hallway,” wrote the woman who’d adopted them. “There was a wooden clothes-drying rack and he’d climbed up and was and swinging from his front paws like a kid on a jungle gym. I’ve attached the video or you wouldn’t believe me. They are thriving, Nichole, and they just love people. I’m so fortunate that they had you and yours as their foster family.”

FELINE GYMNASTICS

 

(originally posted 10/2014)

The other day my six-year-old ran in the house screaming: “A RABBIT IS STUCK IN THE SOCCER NET!”

When I went outside the poor thing was writhing frantic, the webbing wrapped double around its neck. The line was so tight it seemed impossible for it to be breathing. By the time I got there it hardly fought in my hands, less than my cats getting their nails clipped.

I sent my 12-year-old daughter inside for scissors and cupped it still, trying to create any possible slack in the netting. I really didn’t think it would live until she made it back.

She did the cutting, brave girl, shears right against its neck. When it was freed it sat in my hands, sides heaving. Or maybe it just didn’t realize it was free.

“Where did you learn to do that?” my eight-year-old asked.

It wasn’t just me, I told him. We all cut it free.

“No,“ he made a cupping gesture with his hand. “To just….hold it.”

Most people comfortable with handling animals probably say it comes down to some kind of childhood exposure. Pets in the house or barnyard, being allowed to catch frogs and snakes and cicadas. Volunteering in any kind of nature or rescue organization.

But for me it goes back to James Herriot and other books I loved in childhood. These novels and memoirs made livestock and wildlife as familiar as pets in the house, and pets as well-loved as siblings (and at that age, probably more). The country-vet voyeurism of All Creatures Great and Small and its three sequels made a cow’s breech birth as vivid as any movie. In the ’70s, Black Beauty, Old Yeller, and Watership Down were my Star Wars.

They say (you know, they) that violence against animals is a big-time marker for future sociopath behavior. I’d say the opposite is also true. Learning empathy for animals brings an early click of awareness for fellow living creatures subject to the whims human kindness and cruelty, an especially easy lesson when that creature is small, furry, and helpess. In my case it also thickened my skin to squeamishness. Dealing with splinters and cuts as a parent fazes me less since I spent my teen years bandaging baby raccoons and squirrels at a nature clinic.

I don’t hear much about kids reading the James Herriot series anymore. My old paperbacks have ridiculously tiny print and no pictures, so maybe that has something to do with it. Watership Down opens with an entire slowmoving first page describing weather and thickets before we even see a wabbit.

Is it a matter of accessibility, of patience? Of more animated alternatives?

I don’t know. We had screen distractions back then, too — Atari and Intellivision, and The Brady Bunch and The Monkees. And my parents didn’t even limit our screen time.

My eight-year-old just recently discovered the joy of books. He’s a sporty guy who preferred comics, and when the nightly clock monitored the 20 minutes of school’s required reading, they ticked endless.

I’d brought home Dan Gutman (soccer, basketball). I tried Harry Potter read-alouds, which worked for my now-12yo, but didn’t grab him. I wrote and Lulu-published an illustrated chapter book about him, how he saves dinosaurs with his time-traveling jet-pack. But the words were too big, and the sentences too descriptive. (Take that, writer mom.) He liked Wimpy Kid well enough, and in the end, I even succumbed to Captain Underpants.

This past spring I gave him The One and Only Ivan. For the first time, after sitting down with it awhile, he was talking about the characters — a shopping-mall-zoo gorilla and a new baby elephant. They stayed with him. The things they faced with their not-so-nice amateur zookeeper got under his skin. Though it took him a month to get through it, he did it on his own. And the next time we went to our local bookstore, he listened to me read book jackets, and picked two that appealed to him.

Parenting advice books always say parent the child you have, by which they mean, ignore the Brigadoon of the one you don’t. I can’t tell yet what will pull in my youngest two to embrace reading, especially since the first grader is full of bluster (“you spend all this time WRITING books, and you can’t make it easier for me to read!”)

But this much I know. I’m putting my money on the animals.

 

(originally posted 7/2014)

Last week my yoga class decided to meet on the water.

“We’ll go visit the swans,” Erin said as she directed three of us into kayaks. She climbed into her own — well, they’re all her own, she lives on the pond and teaches the class at her home — and pushed off from the shore. “Then we’ll have a little blind paddle, see how it might expand our morning.” Blind paddle?

My mornings tend to start in a not very expansive way, something I’m not proud of. My initial reflex when I open my eyes, in that first lucid moment between dreams and reality, is to do a mental scan of the things I know are in store, and brace myself for the things I don’t, yet. I wasn’t always this way. But experience has shown that by the end of the day there’s usually some unforeseen thing, some blindsider that makes me exhale and say, Whoa, didn’t see that coming. Sometimes I wake up wondering what’s going to be The Thing today. I don’t know if this is common among parents of large families. But I know this isn’t the most healthy way to greet the day.

“There she is,” Erin called back from under the brim of a floppy pink straw hat, and reached back a muscular arm to hand me her binoculars. Not more than 50 yards away, an enormous swan sat on her nest, a camel-neck queen on a pedestal of sticks. Her mate drifted watchfully about 30 yards away. “Last year when I sat here once, the cygnets poked out and walked around,” Erin said. We floated there awhile letting our kayaks drift, then back-paddled away with quiet strokes.

When we reached the middle of the pond, Erin told us to close our eyes. “Point yourself in a direction away from anyone else, set your sights on a far point onshore, and try paddling toward it blind. Don’t peek.”

I have written that way before, fending off distractions by typing with my eyes closed (thank you, rigorous high school typing class). But that’s sitting still. Paddling blind I could ram into one of the other kayaks, into someone’s dock, the swan.

I was never a big fan of pin the tail on the donkey, and I’ve woken abruptly from nightmares about [image error]driving a car unable to see. It’s tempting to invite in labels like “type A” or “control freak,” but let’s not. Let’s just acknowledge that most people tend to be more comfortable with all their senses and limbs in play.

That’s the cornerstone of the control myth, isn’t it? This belief that if you can see it, touch it, hold it, you can fend off disaster. And its corollary, that if you can’t hold onto something with an iron grip, you’ll plummet. I faced this the hard way on a highwire outdoor adventure in December, and by hard way I don’t mean the mortal-danger way, but the tearful mortifying way. Memories of walking that line pop up at the most inconvenient times, usually when I’m clinging vice-like to something and afraid to let go. Control.

I pointed the kayak toward the far shore, a small patch of town beach where my children sometimes swim, and closed my eyes. After less than a minute I became aware of the sound of power tools, possibly too close, and the buzzing of an insect, definitely too close. I cracked my eyes feeling like a kid touching her security blanket. Of course I was only a few feet from where I’d been before, well in the middle of the pond. The insect was either gone, or never there in the first place. The tools were way ashore.

I closed my eyes and started again. Slower, more conscious paddling made me better able to hear which sounds were close and which were further away. I held the paddle loosely and kept my path flexible, listening to the drone of construction and the quieter sounds under them: the other kayakers receding, the birds, my own breathing. I went on for about ten minutes until Erin called us back, and I didn’t peek again. It didn’t feel that there was anything up ahead that I needed to see.

What I didn’t know then was that the day would end with my six-year-old breaking his arm on the backyard swingset, a displacement of two bones that would land us all in the ER for hours — except for my 13-year-old, warming up for the school concert we were now going to miss. Over the course of four hours we had vending-machine popcorn for dinner and made silly iPhone videos, waiting on a gurney between xrays and possible surgery, trying to fenagle the 13yo a ride home from his concert. By the time everyone was back home in bed, surgery scheduled, it seemed impossible that the tranquil kayaking had taken place that same calendar day.

But in the scope of things, the drama was like an ordinary high tide. Up, down, no permanent damage done. The 6yo wasn’t in much pain, and would be fine after readjustment and a cast; the three others with us would live without finished homework and a proper meal, and the 13yo learned that sometimes you have to play to empty seats where your family is supposed to be.

I used to wish I had a crystal ball to help me be better prepared for whatever the day was going to kick up. But knowing the day would hold the ER visit certainly wouldn’t have made my kayaking hour as pleasant, and I doubt the not-knowing made me any less able to handle it on the fly. Ditto the car trouble a few days later that would leave me stranded on the highway shoulder at 10pm after a book event. Things happen. You deal with them as best you can. And usually, the tide recedes with little or no harm.

In my novel The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D., I wrote about the arbitrariness of life, how you can either be paralyzed by the fear of being blindsided or accept the not-knowing, because what’s the alternative? It’s easier said (or written) than done, but it still rings true.

I’m not advocating life with blinders on. But. While it might be true that what you don’t know can hurt you, sometimes knowing isn’t so helpful, either. If I’d known how difficult it would be to write a novel, would I have done it anyway? Would we have children, any of us, if we could be given sneak peek of our most difficult day? Marriage?

Here’s one more cliché with more than a glimmer of truth: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It might just be safer, or at least saner, to paddle blind into each uncertain day. Keeping a loose grip, staying quiet enough to hear what’s happening around you, and being flexible enough to adjust on the fly.

I know cats have a long history as writers’ muses, but I’d like to introduce the role of literary rabbit.

This is Puck. We’re fostering him for the Animal Rescue League of Boston. In the past we’ve done kittens and pregnant cats and puppies and an owl hit by a car and a guinea pig who needed daily meds for a respiratory infection and now… an 8-week-old domestic lop-Dutch mix who needs a place to stay until he’s old enough to be neutered and adopted.

 

 

 

“What’s up Doc? What’re you writing? Huh? Huh?”

 

 

 

He’s curious about EVERYTHING.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Watching him while I work is weirdly addictive, Zen even.

Motormouth

See what I mean?

I’ve been informed that this move is called a “binky.” No fooling, look it up. It’s literally a no-reason random rabbit jump for joy. 

Binkying

Everyone says, “How can you foster? How can you not KEEP THEM ALL?” Believe me, my family petitions for it almost every time. But a) we already have a dog, two cats, six chickens, a snake, and fish, and b) if we kept them, we couldn’t foster anymore. It’s an unsustainable model.

Plus the little-talked-about fact of fostering is that you’re like the proverbial aunt. You can enjoy the novelty of the visiting toddler. And then it goes home.

That said, I’m not sure Puck is going home.

 

This was part of my walk route this morning. Incredible, no? This cemetery is right down the road, but until today it never occurred to me to turn in and go through during my morning walk. Not because it’s creepy, because it isn’t (at least by day). I guess it felt a bit… off, treating it like vista instead of a visit to pay respects.
 
But today I went in. Walking through it is very different than driving by. Beautiful, with nature and topography defining the land. Headstones of different shapes, sizes, and ages follow the hilly contours. Flowers and rows of small pebbles suggest which ones have visitors and which just have vines.
 


It got me wondering how many people are buried vs. cremated these days, and whether there’d eventually be a tipping point — a byproduct of land-use politics, organ donation breakthroughs, environmental concerns. As it turns out, it’s already happening. Three years ago was the first time the number of cremations exceeded burials, and it has risen each year since then (*National Funeral Directors Association). In 2035 it’s expected to be 80 percent. That’s a big leap in our lifetime.
 

I wonder how many people buy family plots anymore? For me the cognitive shift away from burial began when I chose to be an organ donor on my driver’s license, and my concern grew for what we’re putting into the environment. Once the line of thinking drifts from preserving your body to what its usefulness can be, I guess it’s a natural progression. Which might make cemeteries of the future an even more historical and contemplative walk.

 
 
 
 
 

“Mom.” The 8yo is at my bedside early, fumbling with loose baseball pants. “He said he would help me with my belt if I licked the dog. Now he says he won’t help me because I have dog breath.”

 

The 8yo: “It’s amazing what you can do when you really put your mind to it with dares.”

Me, hesitant: “What were you dared to do?”

The 8yo: “Eat these Swedish Gummy Fish off the ground.”

Me […]

The 8yo: “Yeah, that’s where I got the one I gave you, too.”