One cold Sunday, Mark came home with a bag of small silver fish. This is Xiang Yu, or ice fish as the locals call it. He had bought it in a shop in the town to the south, opposite where a small village had sprung up on the ice of the lake, a collection of simple wooden houses with holes drilled around them. I've seen a snowmobile ride from the shore to a cabin with a six-pack of beer strapped to the back, like a half-dozen mini passengers. "Sit down and rest," Mark said. "I'll cook." He paid homage to the fishermen by frying diced Onions in our homemade butter and adding a little ground dried sage. When the Onions became clear, he added flour to thicken them and dilute them with beer. He added chunks of carrot, celery root, potatoes and stock, then sliced fish. When it was all done, he poured in the bright yellow cream, made from Delia's morning milk. The ice fish chowder was rich and warm, and I enjoyed it on Mark's lap, my feet close to the fireplace, steam rising from my damp socks. As we scraped the bottom of the bowl, Mark pulled out a piece of paper that seemed to be covered in hieroglyphics, with words and arrows and mysterious symbols. At first I thought it was his latest plan for the farm, then I saw a familiar name. This is a guest list for our wedding. "Oh." I said as I slid down his lap. "We're engaged, you know." He said, not looking at me very much. "Yes," I said, "I know." I started working hard, harder every day, but the nervous little animal inside me jumped up and down, looking for an exit. The deeper my commitment, the more desperate the little animal became. In the matter of love, in most areas of my life, my pattern has been that of a tourist rather than a stable resident. I would dive deep into the pool and come out very quickly. I'm not unserious or a skeptic, it's just that on my personality tests, I score surprisingly high in the search for novel behavior. The word "forever" terrifies me. The farm attracted me deeply, and I loved Mark deeply. But, knowing what I know about myself, I really don't know if these two loves will last. We had tentatively agreed that the wedding would take place in the fall, after the harvest, on the farm. In the early part of October, the food has been very abundant, but the weather is still fine. That time once seemed far away, but it is now less than a year and almost within reach. "Well, maybe we should wait until next fall," I said, trying to sound as casually as if the idea had just occurred to me. "We've got a lot of work to do." We've been engaged for a year and he wants to get married right away. He stood up, bowl in hand, and went to the sink. "I won't wait another year," he said from the kitchen. "If you don't want to get married this fall, I don't want to get married at all." Our first snowstorm came on a Friday. The weather station had made a serious prediction, but the morning was not bad. It was cold, with faint sunlight shining through the thick clouds and light snow falling from the sky. We spent the morning at the farm, preparing for a rainy day. We caged the chickens and pulled the tractor slowly down the driveway to a shelter near the barn on the west side. We locked Delia in the corral, closed all the barn doors, and went back to the house in town to wait out the storm.

The storm continued through the night, but by morning the snow had stopped and the wind was blowing. We walked back to the farm on snowshoes at milking time, with no cars on the road and the setting moon visible through the clouds. The branches of hemlock trees were almost bent to the ground under the weight of the snow, which was ten feet thick in places. My car is no longer a car. It's just a white hill. Now that we have horses, we need equipment for them to tow. We used those snow days to come up with a list of tools we'll need in the spring. The first was the plow. All the land we planned to grow vegetables on was covered with thick grass. We needed a plow to turn the soil. Then more tools were needed. Mark said there was a disk rake, and a spring rake to level the ground and spread seeds on. Once the crops are up, we need to get rid of the weeds, and we need to use a two-horse ploughing machine. If we need a horse to cut hay, we need a horse-drawn lawn-mower. Sam and Silver came in with a harness and a collar, so we needed something like a balancer, which connects the horse's drag rope to the bit of the machine, and a neck yoke, which keeps the bit off the ground. It would be nice to have a sturdy sled that could slide over the ground and drag the plow to the field. Even better would be a wheelie, a simple two-wheeled vehicle with a hook in the back for towing tools or wagons.

We'll also need a seed drill to plant the grain, and a potato digger. There are other things on the list, but this is the bare minimum. Our budget is rather limited. Tractors were introduced late in this sparsely populated area, and many neighbors still used farm horses in the 1950s. Their former gear has been abandoned, sold to antique dealers or rusted in the yard as decoration, surrounded by impatiens in the summer and chrysanthemums and pumpkins in the fall. But a lot of this old equipment was still at home, stored in the back of the barn, and we searched the dusty corners. Sometimes we can find a horse pulling machine with the armature broken off, evidence of the transition between the old tool and the new tractor. We also found other tools that were perfectly preserved, all moving parts coated with oil, untouched for 60 years. We bought some, and others were given to us. Shane Sharp lent us a disc harrow that he had never used since he bought it. An elderly woman who had recently lost her husband gave us her old grain planter and a hand-cranked root sander that allowed us to feed Delia leftover beets and carrots. Then Thomas lafontaine stopped by and brought us a flyer for the auction. He didn't say it directly, but judging by the long list of horse-drawn tools and the location of the farm, we knew it was an Amish farm having an auction. This is a good opportunity to buy something.

One cold Sunday, Mark came home with a bag of small silver fish. This is Xiang Yu, or ice fish as the locals call it. He had bought it in a shop in the town to the south, opposite where a small village had sprung up on the ice of the lake, a collection of simple wooden houses with holes drilled around them. I've seen a snowmobile ride from the shore to a cabin with a six-pack of beer strapped to the back, like a half-dozen mini passengers. "Sit down and rest," Mark said. "I'll cook." He paid homage to the fishermen by frying diced Onions in our homemade butter and adding a little ground dried sage. When the Onions became clear, he added flour to thicken them and dilute them with beer. He added chunks of carrot, celery root, potatoes and stock, then sliced fish. When it was all done, he poured in the bright yellow cream, made from Delia's morning milk. The ice fish chowder was rich and warm, and I enjoyed it on Mark's lap, my feet close to the fireplace, steam rising from my damp socks. As we scraped the bottom of the bowl, Mark pulled out a piece of paper that seemed to be covered in hieroglyphics, with words and arrows and mysterious symbols. At first I thought it was his latest plan for the farm, then I saw a familiar name. This is a guest list for our wedding. "Oh." I said as I slid down his lap. "We're engaged, you know." He said, not looking at me very much. "Yes," I said, "I know." I started working hard, harder every day, but the nervous little animal inside me jumped up and down, looking for an exit. The deeper my commitment, the more desperate the little animal became. In the matter of love, in most areas of my life, my pattern has been that of a tourist rather than a stable resident. I would dive deep into the pool and come out very quickly. I'm not unserious or a skeptic, it's just that on my personality tests, I score surprisingly high in the search for novel behavior. The word "forever" terrifies me. The farm attracted me deeply, and I loved Mark deeply. But, knowing what I know about myself, I really don't know if these two loves will last. We had tentatively agreed that the wedding would take place in the fall, after the harvest, on the farm. In the early part of October, the food has been very abundant, but the weather is still fine. That time once seemed far away, but it is now less than a year and almost within reach. "Well, maybe we should wait until next fall," I said, trying to sound as casually as if the idea had just occurred to me. "We've got a lot of work to do." We've been engaged for a year and he wants to get married right away. He stood up, bowl in hand, and went to the sink. "I won't wait another year," he said from the kitchen. "If you don't want to get married this fall, I don't want to get married at all." Our first snowstorm came on a Friday. The weather station had made a serious prediction, but the morning was not bad. It was cold, with faint sunlight shining through the thick clouds and light snow falling from the sky. We spent the morning at the farm, preparing for a rainy day. We caged the chickens and pulled the tractor slowly down the driveway to a shelter near the barn on the west side. We locked Delia in the corral, closed all the barn doors, and went back to the house in town to wait out the storm.

The storm continued through the night, but by morning the snow had stopped and the wind was blowing. We walked back to the farm on snowshoes at milking time, with no cars on the road and the setting moon visible through the clouds. The branches of hemlock trees were almost bent to the ground under the weight of the snow, which was ten feet thick in places. My car is no longer a car. It's just a white hill. Now that we have horses, we need equipment for them to tow. We used those snow days to come up with a list of tools we'll need in the spring. The first was the plow. All the land we planned to grow vegetables on was covered with thick grass. We needed a plow to turn the soil. Then more tools were needed. Mark said there was a disk rake, and a spring rake to level the ground and spread seeds on. Once the crops are up, we need to get rid of the weeds, and we need to use a two-horse ploughing machine. If we need a horse to cut hay, we need a horse-drawn lawn-mower. Sam and Silver came in with a harness and a collar, so we needed something like a balancer, which connects the horse's drag rope to the bit of the machine, and a neck yoke, which keeps the bit off the ground. It would be nice to have a sturdy sled that could slide over the ground and drag the plow to the field. Even better would be a wheelie, a simple two-wheeled vehicle with a hook in the back for towing tools or wagons.

We'll also need a seed drill to plant the grain, and a potato digger. There are other things on the list, but this is the bare minimum. Our budget is rather limited. Tractors were introduced late in this sparsely populated area, and many neighbors still used farm horses in the 1950s. Their former gear has been abandoned, sold to antique dealers or rusted in the yard as decoration, surrounded by impatiens in the summer and chrysanthemums and pumpkins in the fall. But a lot of this old equipment was still at home, stored in the back of the barn, and we searched the dusty corners. Sometimes we can find a horse pulling machine with the armature broken off, evidence of the transition between the old tool and the new tractor. We also found other tools that were perfectly preserved, all moving parts coated with oil, untouched for 60 years. We bought some, and others were given to us. Shane Sharp lent us a disc harrow that he had never used since he bought it. An elderly woman who had recently lost her husband gave us her old grain planter and a hand-cranked root sander that allowed us to feed Delia leftover beets and carrots. Then Thomas lafontaine stopped by and brought us a flyer for the auction. He didn't say it directly, but judging by the long list of horse-drawn tools and the location of the farm, we knew it was an Amish farm having an auction. This is a good opportunity to buy something.