Primordial Ooze
Posted on | February 9, 2010 | 1 Comment
Snow is a fleeting beauty. Tree limbs iced with fluff. Pristine stretches of white in the meadow. Delicate flakes against the windowpane. Intricate ice designs on the pond.
But then they cancel school. Sigh. And the hose to the automatic waterer in the barn freezes. Sigh. And the chickens refuse to come out of the coop, pooping all over the nest boxes in protest. Sigh. And the goat stops giving milk. Well, actually she has milk, but I let her have her kid at night instead of separating them so I don’t have to milk on freezing mornings. Ooops, I mean, because no kid should be without her dam when it’s only 20 degrees outside. I’m perfectly willing to go out into the dark winter morning, sit hunched over on an upside down plastic bucket that is so cold it threatens to crack into a thousand icy splinters, expose my already numb fingers to the frigid air, and try to warm myself on my own steaming breath in exchange for for a few squirts of fresh milk. But the health of the herd demands I sacrifice the family milk for the sake of the poor little goat kid. And who am I to argue with proper herd health management? Really. Read more
In Memory of Hannah Nov 1997-Feb 2010
Posted on | February 6, 2010 | 4 Comments
There isn’t much that stops me in my tracks. I have too many things on my to-do list and too many mouths begging for food, attention, and more TV time. So, when a dog gets old, I just start feeding her in the house, let her sleep upstairs away from the kids and daily commotion, and go on with my chores. When she can’t manage the stairs, I move her bed in front of the wood stove and just pat her head as I pass by unloading groceries and mopping up muddy boot tracks. And when the morning comes that she can’t get up and I have to lift her back legs to help her outside, I call the vet and still go on with checking homework, hauling feed bags, and putting dinner in the crock pot. Read more
City Limits
Posted on | January 26, 2010 | No Comments
“That’s cool.”
Yeah, I know it is. It is a dog shelter built from a broken 8X8 kennel, an eight foot pallet, a four foot pallet, two new roof panels, two old roof panel scraps (not coordinated), some plastic sheeting attached with wire, and everything else held together with baling twine. Very cool. It even has a raised lounging platform inside supported by a rock, a piece of 2X4, a cracked concrete block, and a dirt mound. Not just anyone could build this.
The children, recently released from the school bus, prowl the new addition and ooh and ah over the details. Both red and green twine have been used to create visual contrast. The 3/4 roof provides an atrium Read more
A Tale of Two Roosters
Posted on | January 9, 2010 | 1 Comment
What a drag. Sometime while we were running our errands, our rooster, Snowman, ventured over the six foot privacy fence and into the backyard with the dogs. Suffice to say he never made it out again. When I first saw the feathers scattered over the playground, I assumed it was another crazy hen who had given her life in a attempt to find safe place to lay her eggs. I mean, even risking the dogs’ wrath is better than having to use those private, comfortable, clean, and shavings-filled nest boxes attached to the coop.
However, Little quickly pointed out that it was Snowman whose ventures had ended in disaster. “Look”, he said, pulling the severed head out from under Read more
The Nativity
Posted on | December 24, 2009 | No Comments
Of course, I had to pause for a moment. I am tucking in the animals on a winter’s evening. The water is turned off to keep the hoses from freezing. The chicken coops are shut and locked. A peek at the ducks and a visit to the goats to ensure all is well. All of this is usually accomplished as fast as my feet can go in order to get my freezing fingers back in front of the wood stove. But tonight I am stopped in the goat barn, leaning against the hay rack and stirring a finger in their water bucket.
Now I have seen enough PBS documentaries to know that December 25th has more to do with the church calendar and the winter solstice Read more
A Year in the Life of Tomatoes
Posted on | December 10, 2009 | No Comments
December–This is the month for flipping through seed catalogs and choosing from incredible tomato varieties like Green Zebra and Cherokee Purple. No store bought tomato plants for me. The neighbors will be in awe and the children filled with wonder by our unique and amazing tomatoes. Imagine the sweet, juicy taste of a tomato, fresh off the vine. Ordering on the phone just isn’t fast enough so I must risk identity theft, spam, and a double order by using Paypal. Never press the back button while order is processing! Read more
Reflections on a Cold Winter Morning
Posted on | November 22, 2009 | No Comments
You know what a morning like this needs? A nice crackling fire in the wood stove. A gentle glow and a cocoon of warmth right there on the hearth rug where the kids can get dressed before school. They may even have time for a relaxing cup of hot chocolate. Imagine mother and children cuddling together in the early morning, enjoying the soothing heat, perhaps reading another chapter from the The Incredible Journey. There’s nothing like the mesmerizing flicker of flames behind the smoky glass to ease you calmly into a chilly sunrise. And I bet we can fit it in if they hurry up and get dressed already, who used the last of the toothpaste and left this empty tube here, jeez, wasn’t that homework supposed to be put in the backpack already, yuck, why wasn’t this lunch box emptied last night, whoops,…lost my smooth groove there for a minute. Better get that fire started. Read more
“Take every gain without showing remorse about missed profits, because an eel may escape sooner than you think.”
Posted on | November 13, 2009 | 1 Comment
I don’t know what that means. It is a quote by Lope de Vega, a playmaker in the Spanish Golden Age. But I like it because it so clearly captures the emotional essence of making a profit. Your books keep showing you in the red, but your mind keeps telling you that you did just fine. Or at least better than anyone else could have. Or maybe that you should just be happy with what you did earn. Or that it was an important life lesson to be learned and who can place a value on that? Or that it was worth it because nobody’s eel got loose. Right? Read more
Numbnuts
Posted on | November 5, 2009 | No Comments
There’s no remedy for stupid. You can’t change it, you just have to work around it. If you’re lucky you will have one smarty pants in the flock that all the numbnuts will follow. If you’re unlucky you will have one numbnuts and all the smarty pants will be blinded by his charisma and will follow him to their doom. Kind of like political campaigns.
In this particular instance of stupidity, a guinea decided the best place to sleep was on top of the duck barn. Not inside the barn—that combination of wood, tin, and hardware cloth that forms an impenetrable barrier to the Read more
King of the Mountain
Posted on | October 29, 2009 | No Comments
There are some serious advantages to being a farm kid. I don’t mean cleaning the coop in exchange for 30 minutes on the computer or getting paid 75 cents for every hour spent clearing the winter’s fallen branches out of the woods. No, those are just the part of the everyday benefits. Here we have some really big events that can rock their world. Today it was the arrival of the leaves.
The leaf vacuum truck rumbles up the driveway, tips its bed with a 27 cubic Read more
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