How I'm Spending My Summer Vacation

When I started this blog, it was not clear how I was going to find time to do it. It's like a pet that needs to be fed regularly to keep it alive. As the chickens and my dog, Pilot can attest, I'm not really perfect in the care-for-pets category.

My dentist had recently told me that, if I was to have any hope of dying with a full set of teeth (which is actually one of my goals), I needed to brush at least twice a day for four minutes each time. "That's fifty six minutes a week!" I told him. "I don't have that!" He just looked at me blankly. I think maybe when you're a dentist, you're not exactly burning the candle at both ends. But I like this blog and I want to die with my teeth, so I've been making time. Until now.

So I thought I'd write about what I've been doing that isn't writing on the blog. Here's how my summer has been going:



Almost every morning I wake up and think, "The fucking chickens are on the lawn," and get up to chase them off. More often that not, Oliver wakes up just as I'm slinking out the door and wants a little snack. I nurse him, trying to communicate patience and sleepiness while I am jumping out of my skin at the thought of the fucking chickens in my herb garden, shitting on the lawn. Sometimes, just as I'm inching away silently, Buster lets out a long crow right under the open window and wakes Oliver up. Why we have not eaten Buster Pot Pie, I cannot tell you. '



Then I come downstairs and throw shoes at the chickens. If everyone was awake, I would make my chicken-getting-eaten-by-a-large-and-terrible-monster noise, which makes the chickens run away very fast. Since this is a very loud and very annoying noise, I throw shoes instead. As the summer progresses, I am getting more accurate. I adjust my technique for different shoes. Cliffy's and Jackson's are my favorites, fitting nicely in the hand with enough heft to travel. The lawn is littered with shoes.



So then I'm up and I try to get a few things done. This morning that is going to mean folding the creamery laundry (t-shirts and hospital scrub pants the crew wears in the production room). Mostly I clean the kitchen. Then the kids filter down and there's clothes to find and breakfast to make. Earl comes back from the barn and we go over the day. Some days we have separate plans and somedays we work together, shuffling kids and car trips and house time around haying, tractor parts, fencing, employees and office work. It's not very glamorous and I'll spare you the details.



Earl comes in for lunch around twelve and either eats something fabulous that I've made or scrounges around for things like canned smoked oysters and crackers. Sometimes I bemoan the need to think about all three meals, every day, for six people, but it really is nice to have a few minutes in the middle of the day to check in. Sometimes we talk about farm or creamery stuff, but mostly we talk about something that one of us sees in the newspapers or magazines that litter the kitchen table. The newspapers are the Vermont Agri-View, Country Folks, or The Wall Street Journal. The magazines are The Atlantic, Harpers, Hoard's Dairyman or National Geographic. Erik is an amateur science guy and he contributes his latest musings on the origins of the universe as he makes his way through his Tupperwared lunch.



The kids generally disappear out to the mudpit that used to be their sandpile. At least that's what they used to do before their hose privileges were revoked yesterday after Jackson got mud in his eye. The mud in the eye was only the straw that broke the camel's back. For weeks now, I have been ushering them into the house to shower before supper, having them hold their hands straight up in the air, walking on tip toe, to touch as little of the house as possible en route. I tried hosing them off with cold water outside, thinking they would be motivated to stay cleaner, but they LOVED it, laughing and squealing and totally blowing my whole strategy.



Some nights the kids and I start milking, if Earl is haying or the cows have gotten out or we've been somewhere and are late getting back. Sometimes when I'm not milking, I'll start to think about supper and then I think about how nice it will be when the garden starts to produce vegetables for dinner and then I decide to go check on the garden and then Earl comes back from the barn just before seven to find me squishing potato bugs, weeding, and planting succession corn, radishes and beets. He asks if I have a plan for supper and I slink back to the house, shamed, and we make waffles.



Sometimes the kids are clean enough to get in bed as they are and sometimes they require additional bathing. They love baths, but most of the time they would only make a tub full of dirt soup and come out only vaguely cleaner. I wonder how much dirt the shower drain can handle.

In the midst of all this, we have put in hay for ourselves and a neighbor whose family is going through hard times. We have gone to all three days of a fabulous three-day wedding for a couple who met in the barn a few years ago when the bride was milking for us (more about the RockBottom Love Boat another time) including catering the post-nuptial brunch and supplying ringbearers who mostly stayed clean. (Note to self in the future: bumpy dirt roads make whipped cream start to turn to butter--underwhip!). Cliffy has learned to ride a bike. Jackson went to science camp. We have hulled fifty-five flats of strawberries (that's 440 quarts) and picked, destemmed and processed several bushels of mint to make into ice cream. The mid-sized heifers are summering over the hill on land we lease in Tunbridge and have been getting out almost every day. The fencer is giving us trouble and we're about ready to try garlic and a priest.

We made over a hundred ice cream sandwiches and sold them and scooped ice cream cones on the Strafford town green for the Fourth of July celebration. Earl cooked chickens with the fire department and the big kids ran around, mostly nearby, looked after by their friends' parents and the benevolence of a small town on holiday. Oliver rode on my back and flirted with our customers. We also took a day to go to Burlington and visit my sister and my new little niece, Amelia Jane, who was born on Thursday. The boys went to see fireworks with Helen, who might just love fireworks more than anyone on the planet.

In any spare moments, we have been in the gardens, wedding, mulching and succession planting in hopes of getting some food to ripen in our garden before frost.

So we've been really busy, We're tired at the end of these long days, but we're getting a lot done.