As the sunlight continues to rapidly increase each day, the unseasonably warm weather of late February returned to the common pattern of freezing cold days and nights in early and mid March. Like previous winters, the warmth of late February was followed again with cold and a little snow prior to the beginning of Spring.

Taking advantage of the soft, warm ground and the time my life is currently allowing, I used the warmth to sow early Spring crops, including peas, spring greens like Arugula, Spinach, Mustard, Kale, and lettuces, and radishes, carrots, beets, and onions. As soon as the cold returned, I placed sheets over the newly sown garden both day and night, allowing the fragile new life to be protected as best I could from the hardships of the season.

During the warm temperatures, early spring flowers including purple miniature irises, whitish-purple Hellebores, purple giant Crocuses, lemony yellow, antique white, and orange-centered Daffodils bloomed in abundance, filling yards and hillsides with displays of early Spring beauty. Along with the blooming flowers the sprouts of early plants emerged with the fragile hopes of early Spring.

Once the winter temperatures returned, a light coating of snow covered the blooming flowers, causing many to bend low. My wife and I brought in the weakened flowers and made large bouquets for our tables. In a brief warming of temperatures amidst the cold days, white, fragrant hyacinths bloomed. We brought them in to protect them from the harsh cold that followed, filling our home with their beautiful, delicate, and rich smell.

In the warmth of late February, we gathered wild onion sprouts with my granddaughter for use in my wife’s recipe of Appalachian French Onion soup. As the weather brought the return of cold temperatures, our meals were again drawn from our diminishing stores of food from the previous season of abundance. With little else than roots left, we made Hungarian Potato and Carrot soup, followed by a soup of potatoes, Daikon Radishes, carrots, and Kale, and a simple Borscht using beets bought at the auction last fall.

At the same time, we continued to brew beer and bottled our Concord wine, using the spare time of the season to create stores of beer and wine that will be our primary source for alcohol in the coming year. Currently at the mid-point in our brewing season, at the beginning of May we will have enough to be suppled with seasonable beer throughout the end of the year.

While I have focused on gardening, food, and homebrewing, my talented stepdaughter has honed her skills with embroidery using designs from Jessica Long Embroidery. Like everyone in my wife’s family, she has a remarkable hand and a gift for beautiful art. For Christmas gifts, she gave her Mother and I exquisite pieces, including an intricate snowflake and a circle of flowers bursting with bright colors and designs. As someone whose hands lack finesse and whose mind lacks patience, I marvel at her achievements.

While our home has been gifted with abundance and good fortune, my mind has turned to a far more difficult idea—that of thinking of boundaries between the heavenly world in our home and the hardship caused by violent men in the world. In part, this outer world of suffering exists in constant news of lethal violence, of advertisements of “entertainment” showing fictional battles and constant violent and sometimes lethal sports like boxing and football, and other outer world violence that permeates the patriarchal culture.

More importantly, the violence of men around our home is a constant reminder of the need to create boundaries between vulnerable people and those who would harm them. Coming from an abusive family in my childhood, an important point early in my relationship with my wife’s family was to exclude the men in my family from my new life, to protect my wife’s family from their domineering and hurtful presence.

In the decades that followed, as we built community around us, time revealed that men in our community were often hurtful, ranging from an executive at Ohio University who sexually harassed women out of jobs to a young man on our block who intimidated people and was said to be a serial date rapist, to emotionally violent men who were “Street Saints/Home Demons”, causing misery to the women who loved them. The goal of building a close-knit and inclusive community is challenged by these acquaintances, neighbors, partners of women who are friends of my wife, and, in a few cases, old male friends who threw fits of temper as their lives deteriorated.

The commonality of male physical, sexual, and emotional violence in our community is part of traditional patriarchy. Most of the men and many of the women they abused grew up in homes with some form of violence and in adulthood these family patterns returned. Women who as children naturally developed attachment to parents and siblings who were mean or very angry found themselves attracted to and in love with men who they were victimized by.

My own reaction is to exclude these men from our lives and avoid dealing with them, but at the same time their presence is so common that they sometimes include old friends of my family, boyfriends of young women in our circle and neighborhood, or others. In one case, a well-respected husband of a friend in our community I recognized as a disturbed, emotionally abusive man while his wife remained loyal and sought to give him one chance after another. In other cases, the abusive men were or are nearby neighbors who I encounter often during walks.

My wife, whose seeks to be as compassionate as possible, tends to ignore the failings of others, even to forgiving some of these men. She sees that many of them are themselves in wrecked lives, living adult lives as legacies of deeply unhappy childhoods, and choosing to withhold judgement while giving them the same kindness she would anyone else. My reaction—which sometimes borders on an anger that is destructive—does not have the patience that my wife has. Instead, I worry for the next generation of young people, especially women.

Like the delicate young seeds that I cover to protect them from the cold, the challenge is to protect the younger generation in my community from the harsh traditions of patriarchy that have victimized women and some men for millennia. Yet doing so, as family patterns slowly unwind in the form of ill-fated love affairs and marriages, is far more difficult than closing the door to our home, relishing the delicate beauty of the art of my wife and her children, and delighting in the innocent joys of our granddaughter.