Years ago, Kate and John, my neighbors, had a a very large, old Jersey cow with curling horns, protruding hips and beautiful thick brown and yellow fur. People stopped as they drove through our village having come to see the historic sites, the Morrill Homestead and the Meeting House, to photograph the old cow.
Kate and John called her “the cow,” but my husband, who had a penchant for naming things called her “Felicity.” Twenty years earlier, she had been born a twin, a freemartin with a male sibling, so she could never be bred, nor milked, just purchased cheap to keep the grass cut on a steep Vermont hillside.
I loved the old cow, the way she licked the salt off my hand with her sandpaper tongue and threw her head around as if to frighten you with those horns as you fed her apples. I made paintings of her, selling them to people from the city who wanted a cow to hang over the couch.
Eventually, starting to feel some ownership, I would suggest how she might be better cared for. For Christmas, one year, Kate and John gave me a children’s book called “Who Owns the Cow?” Was it the farmer who milked the cow or the little girl who fed her clover and petted her head or the artist who painted her?
Felicity is long gone and now my neighbor’s children and grandchildren live here. I walk the woods they own and the woods my other neighbors own. In fact, I walk through all the woods around Strafford that I do not own.
May is my favorite month to walk in the woods. The little brown dogs and I start every morning with a hike up into a rich, seepy forest. Moss-covered boulders and unfurling woodferns mark our way. We climb uphill through hepaticas, blue cohosh, spring beauties, ramps and toothworts, serenaded by warblers, thrushes and vireos, some just passing through on their way to the boreal forests of the north, and some nesting right here.
We are blessed to live among such healthy forests, and I am grateful to the people here who let me walk their land, for I barely own the postage stamp under my house. The Japanese call the happiness we feel being calm and slow in the woods “forest bathing,” but long before I heard that term, I knew that being in the woods or wading in the river or floating on a pond meant feeling good.
Nature is full of surprises. I must listen well to hear the birds I’ve forgotten over the winter. My eyes scan the ground for ferns and flowers that I have not seen since last summer. I stay focused not to go slipping into the muck or hit my head on a rock.
As for not owning any land, I have long ascribed to the principal of usage, which says things belong to those who use them, who love and care for them. It drove my husband mad that I would take neglected things from a pile and give them a new life. Books, nicknacks, legal pads, anything that had been sitting unused growing dusty.
The first humans to live in North America were hunter gatherers and agriculturalists, moving with the seasons. The European concept of owning a piece of land must have been puzzling. To pay my debt for usage, I pull buckthorns, hanging the hairy black roots in trees to dry. An introduced species, it tolerates shade and wet soil and can take down a healthy forest if left to spread. Its berries are not nutritious to wildlife and as the Latin name, Rhamnus cathartica implies, are cathartic.
Who owns these woods? Is it the birds and insects, the fox, moose, squirrel, bear and fisher who have nested and fed their young here for tens of thousands of years, or the first humans who arrived as the Earth warmed, or the Europeans who came so recently and purchased parcels of land with pieces of paper?
Or does the land belong to no one and to everyone who loves it, uses it, and takes care of it? I like to think it is that.
Micki Colbeck is a naturalist and writer who chairs the Strafford Conservation Commission. Contact her at mjcolbeck@gmail.com.
