{"id":563,"date":"2010-03-11T12:59:22","date_gmt":"2010-03-11T19:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?p=563"},"modified":"2010-10-20T03:57:39","modified_gmt":"2010-10-20T10:57:39","slug":"frenemies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?p=563","title":{"rendered":"Frenemies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I love the fence.<\/p>\n

I hate the fence.<\/p>\n

The fence allows the goats to wander around, pooping outside of the barn where I don’t have to clean up.\u00a0 The fence leads the pony and the sheep to the pond to graze so I don’t have to mow the grass on the tractor-tipping slope of the dam.\u00a0 The fence lets the chickens rush through its squares to safety, leaving violent offenders of the leash law barking and foaming at the mouth on the other side.<\/p>\n

But the fence is so needy.<\/p>\n

“Um, I hate to bother you, but there’s a fallen branch pulling me down on the south side.”<\/p>\n

“Hey, I know you have a busy day planned, but the rain has washed away part of the ditch, leaving a big gap along my bottom.”<\/p>\n

“Look!\u00a0 Look!\u00a0 Do you see that huge hole?\u00a0 Right there!”<\/p>\n

Basically, the fence has my number and doesn’t hesitate to call.\u00a0 Anytime.\u00a0 All the time.\u00a0 Even just to breathe heavy and hang up for the fun of it.\u00a0 Fences are like that.<\/p>\n

So when I woke to find the sheep on the deck stairs and the goats in the driveway I knew there was a problem.\u00a0 The fence sagged woefully in the front yard.<\/p>\n

“Did you enjoy your rest?\u00a0 Relax over your coffee?\u00a0 Because while you were nibbling Krispy Kremes, they walked right over me.\u00a0 Right over!\u00a0 Two of my welds snapped off and one staple yanked right out of the tree.\u00a0 Can you imagine the pain?\u00a0 The humiliation?\u00a0 And, by the way, is that really how you look in the morning before you brush your hair?\u00a0 Perhaps, you’d like a minute to get a hair clip before you grab your tool belt, huh?”<\/p>\n

A broken fence is a horrible thing.<\/p>\n

All the days activities were canceled.\u00a0 (I didn’t really want to go to lunch with a college friend anyway.\u00a0 I mean, does anyone enjoy getting off the farm, going into town, and sitting down to an adult conversation without child or animal interruption?\u00a0 Bah.\u00a0 Boring.)\u00a0 I rooted through the supply closet, also known as The-Corner-Of-The-Downstairs-Bathroom-Where-I-Dump-My-Tools-Instead-Of-Putting-Them-Away-Because-It-Will-Only-Be-2-Days-Before-I-Need-Them-for-Another-Farm-Repair, looking for fencing staples and cage clips.\u00a0 I explored behind the wood shed among all the remnants of fencing that were, of course, 6 inches short of reaching the next fence post so they had to be cut and discarded in favor of a brand new roll to scan the distance.\u00a0 I decided I was going to fix the fence problem once and for all and headed off to the local home improvement store.<\/p>\n

They know me there.\u00a0 That’s because I have fixed the problem once and for all a whole lot of times.\u00a0 Whenever I put my purchase on the checkout counter and say “That’ll fix it once and for all,” they just smile and nod.\u00a0 They know I’ll be back again in a few days.\u00a0 If not in just a few hours.\u00a0 But on that day I purchased a satisfyingly vicious-looking roll of 15.5 gauge high tensile barbed wire.\u00a0 A shiny, sharp barbed wire that would make the fence proud and the animals think twice about trying to walk through it.\u00a0 And I knew I wouldn’t be back because the label on the roll even stated “Once properly installed, high tensile fences remain tight for years and require very little maintenance.”\u00a0 Excellent.\u00a0 The label also said “Easier to Install” and “Lasts Longer.”\u00a0 Bonus.<\/p>\n

Of course, I should have recognized that “Easier to Install” and “Lasts Longer”\u00a0 are the hanging chads of the comparison world.\u00a0\u00a0 Easier to install than what, you ask?\u00a0 Well, it was easier to install than wrestling 6 giant porcupines with my bare hands.\u00a0 Instead it only felt like I was wrestling, oh, maybe, 5.5 giant porcupines with my bare hands.\u00a0 It’s not that I didn’t start out with the proper safety equipment.\u00a0 It’s just that I abandoned the heavy duty leather gloves needed to protect my hands and forearms when they became hopelessly tangled in the wire in the first 5 minutes.\u00a0 I carefully slid out my fingers and contemplated the gloves, swallowed by the flesh-ripping coils of the wire and embedded with barbs.\u00a0 I checked the label on the barbed wire roll again to see if there was any fine print.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, right below the “easier” and “longer” claims was this:<\/p>\n

“WARNING!\u00a0 Safety first–use eye, hand, foot, and skin protection.”<\/p>\n

Yes, but what will provide safety for the safety equipment?<\/p>\n

Then in smaller font was the alarming:<\/p>\n

“WARNING! This product contains chemicals known to California to produce cancer and cause birth defects or other reproductive harm”<\/p>\n

What does that<\/span> mean?\u00a0 Harmful if touched?\u00a0 Harmful if eaten?\u00a0 Harmful if\u00a0 little pieces of the barbs break off in my skin leaving me with farmer shrapnel?\u00a0 And why does only California know about this?<\/p>\n

And then, just as I suspected, on the very bottom, in print tiny enough for only the Whos in Whoville, it said:<\/p>\n

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”<\/p>\n

Well, if warnings and death threats could stop me then I wouldn’t be a farmer.\u00a0 I managed 330 feet of a top strand of barbed wire attached to the fence that first day.\u00a0 I know it was 330 feet because my kids measured the trail of blood drops left in the wake of my progress when they got home from school.\u00a0 (Some kind of homework assignment for Middle requiring him to measure distances around the house.\u00a0 Hey, your kid measures the length of the couch and mine measures the flow of my life source left behind in my pursuit of sustainable agriculture.\u00a0 You say tomato, I say tomahto.)<\/p>\n

To keep up my spirits, I chanted “once and for all” to myself while I unrolled the barbed wire, pulled it tight, and stapled it in place.\u00a0 Mother Nature helped out by providing a glorious spring day filled with chirping birds and delicate spring breezes to cool my bleeding brow.\u00a0 By the time I stumbled in the house to see if dinner had magically prepared itself while I was working (it didn’t, but no worries because the kids had filled the need by devouring 2 bags of chips and all the M&Ms in the trail mix), I had the flush feeling of having spent a lovely day outdoors and accomplished a little something along the way.\u00a0 I went to bed happy, which was good.<\/p>\n

Because in the morning I woke to find Mother Nature had changed her course.\u00a0 Storms had passed through during the night, leaving the bolt cutters I left sitting out in need of some WD-40 and the empty wrappers from the fence clips strewn all over the yard and up into the tree branches.\u00a0 Oh, and a huge dead tree laid over the fence, crushing the strand of barbed wire beneath it.\u00a0 Apparently barbed wire doesn’t “last longer” than Mother Nature intends for it to last.<\/p>\n

I love Mother Nature.<\/p>\n

I hate Mother Nature.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Stevie Taylor 2010. All Rights Reserved. <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love the fence. I hate the fence. The fence allows the goats to wander around, pooping outside of the barn where I don’t have to clean up.\u00a0 The fence leads the pony and the sheep to the pond to graze so I don’t have to mow the grass on the tractor-tipping slope of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[92,43],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-barbed-wire","tag-fence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1553,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions\/1553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}