Rockbottom Farm

Morning

2010-05-13T05:47:00.005-04:00

I am a little hesitant to write about how much I love morning milking, because Earl is likely to read it and most of the time, I like sleep more.

Every now and then I catch a glimpse of myself through the eyes of my previous self and I shake my head at the long list of things I never, ever thought I would be doing. Milking cows is not one of these items. I was never especially agricultural, but I like to work hard and I don't mind getting dirty, so it's not such a huge stretch as it might be if, for example, I knew how to walk in high heels or had a tinny laugh or anything. But this morning I milked the cows in my pajamas, and that is something I never thought I would do.

At bedtime last night, Earl looked like he'd been run over by a truck. He'd just come in from doing some concrete repair work after a long day of fencing and moving cows around. I suggested we split up the morning chores, one of us setting up the milkhouse and bringing the cows in, the other sleeping a little longer and then coming up to milk. "Naw," he said, "I'll be fine." But when the alarm went off this morning, Earl could barely move and I jumped into my boots and headed off to pasture #4, which isn't actually that far from the barn. I hadn't laid my barn clothes out the night before. Unlike Earl, I only really have one set of clothes I wear to the barn and it wasn't going to help move the world forward if I spent half an hour looking for them, so I went in my pajamas and a sweater.

It was quarter past four when I left the house and I figured I could be back in bed at five. I tried hard not to wake up all the way, plodding along, sometimes with my eyes closed, along the lane. The cows were mostly up and at the gate and I didn't have to say a word to get them moving. The water tub didn't have to move very far and I knew right where the new hookup was. There weren't any new calves and I had remembered to open and close all the right pieces of electric fence. I yawned and shuffled and was right on track until I turned to walk back to the barn behind the cows.

The sky was just starting to color up and the cows were a black silhouette against the pale yellowy green-blue that hovered along the ridge line. The birds, whose noise had seemed pretty chatter on my walk out, were suddenly putting on a symphony. It even smelled good. I took a deep breath of chilly but promising-to-be-a-t-shirt-afternoon air and thought, "Fuck. Now I'm awake."

So when I got back to the barn, I figured I might as well start milking. I had the same first rack of cows I seem to have every morning, Nefer, Cinder, Savanah, Fern, Tanna and Charlie. Cinder was the only high-maintenance cow, requiring some massage and ever-adjusting tension to milk out completely. She was born on our first anniversary and I've always had a soft spot for her, even if she is black and white. Earl came up as I was hooking up the sixth cow and we chatted and milked the next rack together.

The light was morning gold as I walked back to the house and even if I can't buy it in paint, it's my most favorite color and always will be. Since I wasn't going to get back to sleep, I thought maybe I was finally going to get a minute to offer up a blog post. And so I have, but I keep sneaking peeks at the sunrise over my shoulder. Just now, the first beam is lighting up the lashes on my left eye, making me all winky and sheepish feeling.

I'm pretty sure there are people who work their whole lives trying to feel about something the way I feel about the mornings on this farm. When I'm out walking around with the cows, there is not a single particle of my body wishing I was somewhere else. Not even bed.

But please don't tell Earl.

Lost in the Woods

2009-12-29T09:10:00.003-05:00

Yesterday Earl and his brother, Billy, took the boys to check out the logging on the back of our hill while I got some long-overdue paperwork done. I was on the phone when they came back and didn't quite understand the magnitude of them asking me if I'd seen Cliffy and Jackson. Then next thing I knew, they were telling me that Berry was downstairs with Harley and Oliver and they were heading out. I didn't entirely understand that they were going to look for the boys, who I vaguely understood were walking back--along the road from Berry's house, I thought--and should have been here by now. I called after them to ask where exactly they were going, but they didn't hear me. They had already started to worry and were on a mission.

About half an hour later, the phone rang and it was Billy on his cell phone, saying that he'd found the boys' tracks and that they had picked up the snowmobile trail. He was calling to them, with no answer, but he was chugging along and figured he'd catch up with them soon, though he was a little concerned about the impending darkness and his lack of a flashlight. He'd call again if he had more to report. Okay.

It seems that they had all gone to the top of the hill, Kibling Hill, the height of land in Strafford, and that Cliffy and Jackson wanted to walk back to the farm the front way while Earl, Billy and the little boys went back to the car and drove around. They were wearing snowpants, down jackets, wool hats and socks, and new ski mittens. It was twenty-three degrees and not windy. Earl said they could. They wondered who would get back first.

But the skid trails, cut after the ice storm of 1998 decimated the hillside (and our sugarbush), can be a little confusing. And they got a little to the right and when it seemed that they should be going downhill, they ended up dropping off the other side of the ridge, toward the Mannings and Sharon. They found an empty hunting camp (about a mile from the farm), but near it was a snowmobile trail sign with a arrow pointing toward Strafford. So they went along on the snowmobile trail and that's where Billy found their footprints.

I, meanwhile, was completely freaking out. I had a piece of mail that had-to, had-to go out that day, so I called Ben, our tenant, and then Billy to say that I would drop off a flashlight-laden Ben at the road end of the snowmobile trail, run down to the P.O., go back to the end of the trail, park the car there, and run up to join them. Five minutes behind Ben, I started out, frantic and worried. It was getting dark and starting to snow. About 1/4 mile from the road, I found Billy and Ben walking back. Earl had caught up with Billy and then followed little footprints that left the snowmobile trail when it got near the farm. If they weren't back at the house, we would fan out in a grid and head up toward the trail from the farm.

They were back at the house, having arrived a few minutes before Earl. Cliffy rushed into my arms and cried. Jackson was fine, completely nonchalant about the whole thing.

The story is still unfolding. Somewhere early on, Jackson had made a suggestion about which way to go, and when they realized they were lost, he cried and said it was all his fault. Cliffy didn't want him to feel bad, so he said it was both of their faults. Jackson had a hard time keeping up, but Cliffy wanted to keep them moving, so he would go a little ahead, then wait. They left the trail once, but it didn't feel right, then they looped back. They cried sometimes. They worried in their heads that they wouldn't ever see the rest of the family again, but they didn't say anything aloud because they didn't want to other one to feel bad. Jackson said he was the worst brother anyone could ever have, but Cliffy said he wasn't, referencing Harry Potter's brother, Dudley. Jackson thought about it and said he was the worst brother a real boy could ever have, which Cliffy assured him he wasn't. Cliffy told Jackson they would get home eventually.

Then Cliffy recognized a rock outcropping that he'd seen when he was hunting with Earl this fall. The snowmobile trail turned but Cliffy had his bearings and knew they should go straight. They saw a set of cross-country ski tracks (which were made by Ben's visiting brother-in-law a few days before) and followed them into the clear cut, where they saw a house with lights on. They weren't sure what house it was, but they knew that houses usually have driveways and driveways lead to roads, so they trucked on toward it. At first they thought it was a little house up close, but it was a bigger house far away. And then they came across the field and realized it was Ben's house, and that our house was even closer.

And then it was fun again. They walked across the field, trying not to break through the snow. They talked about how they would tell the story. Jackson was hungry. Cliffy wanted to warm up.

They thought we would all be home, worrying. Jackson thought we'd forgotten about them. When they walked in and heard Oliver and Harley watching cartoons, they thought maybe no one was so worried. Then Berry told them we all out looking for them, so they looked for cell phone numbers to call to say they were safe. Then Earl came in and Cliffy saw him and could finally let out all his scaredness and cried.

I got back with Billy and Ben a few minutes later and Cliffy ran into my arms. He told us a little about it, but then wanted to talk about something else; talking about it made them feel that scared way again.

We had breakfast supper (their favorite) with a quadruple recipe of pancakes, sausage, applesauce, and omelets and they ate and ate. Earl told how Billy had left him messages in the snow, with arrows and the time, so he knew not to follow their loop off the trail, and knew that Billy was on the path, too. He told how he had caught up with Billy and how they had reassured each other with recollections of their own boyhood adventures in the woods. Cliffy and Jackson listened, and they liked the messages in the snow, but they weren't, and aren't, ready to think of it as an adventure. It was still an ordeal.

They were happy to crawl into their soft beds and doze off to a special double chapter of Farmer Boy. Cliffy got up around three and couldn't get back to sleep. He'd had a bad dream that gave him the scared feeling again.

And now it's a new day of sunshiny new snow. Cliffy is feeling more relaxed and more bits of the story are coming out. Jackson doesn't want to talk about it. It's hard to know how this will play out in their years to come. I don't think they'll ever forget this, the first time they were scared and no one came when they yelled help, far from home. I hope that they can get over the scared part and look back on it the way it seems to me, that two really little kids persevered when things weren't looking good. They kept thinking, they stayed together, looked out for each other, and they got where they were going. It's a proven recipe for getting out of tight spots and though I hope they won't need to, they might need to employ it again when they're older.

Nearly Artemis and the Milkapaloosa Product Line

2009-08-18T09:58:00.003-04:00

When Cliffy was born, our friends, John and Janine, gave us a green lava lamp to use as a nightlight. I put it at the foot of our bed, which was the only place our recalcitrant newborn would sleep, and spent many all-but-comatose hours staring at it and nursing. When I wrote to thank them, I found myself not just praising it as a diversion, but describing the different formations it would make and my names for them. My favorites were when the wax stuff first gets hot and shoots a geyser of green that immediately cools in the not-yet-warmed-up liquid at the top, looking sort of like funnel cakes, Pennsylvania's answer to fried dough, and when a small bubble gets going fast and blasts right into the middle of a bigger bubble that's cooling and on its way down. If it was an especially eventful night, the little bubble might break the big bubble in two instead of being swallowed into it. Always I was routing for the little bubbles to hold their own.

At the time, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. I'm horrible at getting thank-you cards written, but when I do, I've got the formula down. First you praise the item. Then you describe its cool features and how much it's enriching your life. Then you thank the person for being so thoughtful. Usually you do this on a tiny little card that gives you room for one, maybe two sentences for each part. In the early days of motherhood, however, the idea of a trip to the post office was profoundly daunting. And so I had written an email. With no spatial limitations. And apparently I got a little carried away, three maybe four paragraphs, in my description of the cool features and the enrichment of my bleary new-mommy existence.

John and Janine thought it was hilarious, which confused me.

Earl said that sometimes (he was patting me on the back gently here) the things that are in my head don't make the same kind of sense to other people as they do to me. I had suspected that I was a little out of my mind, so I took his word for it and in the months and years that followed, if I couldn't stop myself from sharing the contents of my brain, I could at least stop being surprised at the blank stares that followed.

So all of this is a precursor to something I've been thinking about in another sleep-deprived state--morning milking. I haven't done much morning milking in the past nine years, seeing as I was pretty much nursing or pregnant the whole time and we had some employee help so Earl had a few mornings each week when he could sleep in (until six, anyway). Now the employees have moved on and Earl is a wonderful guy, but he's somewhat less wonderful if he's doing every morning milking and haying on top of that. My milking in the mornings is an investment in my marriage and familial happiness. Plus, I really like milking cows. And I like being up for a few hours when the phone doesn't ring and my brain is my own. What have I been doing with my brain?

Well, the thing I've been thinking about is making names for rock bands out of combinations of the cow names. I was thinking this the other day when I was writing out the milking sheet for the third rack in the parlor. The parlor has six milking stalls and the cows come in two at a time. Each set of six is a rack and when you get them all filled up, you write down who is in what stall to help track their general behavior (if Kila comes in last she's not feeling well, if Lilac comes in first, she's in heat) and to make sure that at the end you've milked them all. We bring them in two at a time, and when the cows in five and six are hooked up, the cows in one and two are usually ready to take off. So we think of them in pairs. And the other day, it was Nearly Artemis, Scarlet Coffee, and Dixie Peanut. Band names, yes? Two new age, one of them all female with a male keyboardist maybe, and a bad country band that plays the Holiday Inn circuit. This is funny and interesting to me. Some of the names are too weird to work with--Nefertiti, Buerre, Tesla, Urny, Natty, Pompy, Ullie, Snakey Kila and Tracta--but some are great and full of potential--Artemis, Cinder, Ambrosia, Honey, Spring, Peanut, Dixie, Lilac, Nearly, Sweet Pea, Charlie, Fern, and Jasmine.

I find there's really no topping Nearly Artemis for a rock band, but Lilac Spring would make a great air freshener, and Nearly Dixie could be a reduced-fat fried chicken dish. Charlie Honey would be a great title for a book about a boy raised in Virginia by a team of eccentric, doting aunts who make their money running 'shine and sewing prophetic crazy quilts.

This has been a challenging summer, agriculturally speaking. There was just enough corn that survived the crows and rotting under the rain to come up and look dismal. Most of the hay got rained on. Something ate every last strawberry in the kids' garden and Killdeer Farm, our regular supplier of strawberries for our ice cream, didn't have a single quart for us after the late frosts and June rain. But at four in the morning, the phone doesn't ring, there are no orders to take and no hay to bale. It's just me and the cows and the routines and rhythms of milking and a little mental time to play Scrabble with cow names.

The Great Beef Cow Experiment Parts I and II

2009-05-20T05:00:00.005-04:00

Part I

Earl has a scar on his forehead above his right eye. It's fading over time and you wouldn't notice it now unless you were looking, but for a year or so after he got it, Earl couldn't go to a party without someone doing the math on its size and proximity to his eye and brain and asking him, "What happened to you?" What happened was the second-to-last beef cow we tried to milk going psycho-ballistic in the parlor one day.

The Great Beef Cow Experiment began about a year before I met Earl. He was calling the breeder to come breed his heifers and thinking about calving ease. Calving ease is a column on the sire chart; some bulls beget bigger calves than others and smaller cows and heifers will have an easier time in labor if their calves are on the small side. Beef cows, who give birth out on pasture unassisted, generally have small calves. At the time, Earl was selling his bull calves at auction and they're worth more if they look like beef cows. A female beef cow/Guernsey cross wouldn't be worth as much as a straight dairy-breed cow, but her milk would be high in butterfat and she'd get a good price at the beef auction if turned out to be unmilkable. But Earl didn't really believe in unmilkable at the time. He has calmed down some crazy heifers in his time, and the three heifers he was thinking of breeding were from gentle Guernsey lines. And it would be interesting, you know?

Flash ahead nine months. The heifers calve with no trouble. Two heifers and a bull calf. They join the Guernsey calves and are a little stupid and skittish, but not outside the box.

Flash ahead two years to the first summer Earl and I are married. The first of the heifers has calved. She does not like to be milked. If Brandon or Biggie is milking, the phone rings between five and five-thirty in the afternoon. The Angus (her given name long forgotten) is in the parlor and ready for Earl to hook her up. No one else can get near her. This has been the case with other heifers, but Earl has been able to settle them down in a few days. The Angus does not settle down. Every milking involves kicking and tying her legs together with baling twine (just for the ten minutes she's got the unit on). After two weeks, she begins to recognize the routing and relaxes the tiniest little bit. Earl thinks there might be hope for her yet. The DHIA tester comes and samples the cows' milk. The Angus is milking at 5.8 percent butterfat. The next highest cow is Blossom at 4.9. We are hopeful.

And then a few days later, just before the second beef-cross heifer is due to calve, The Angus comes into the parlor, steps up into her stall like she knows what she's doing, and then proceeds to try to kick in Earl's skull when he tries to hook her up. Not a swat to make the pesky unit go away, not a startled reflex. An out-and-out, again-and-again air-let-out-of-the-balloon freak out session that leaves Earl dizzy and bleeding from the head. Fortunately, the next day is a Thursday--when the truck from Addison County Commission Sales is in our neighborhood--and a quick phone call makes the Angi, all three of them, go away. The Experiment is over. We declare success--we are still alive--and move on.

But it's not really over. We have a six-month-old Hereford/Guernsey heifer, the result of the breeder running out of Guernsey semen and Earl not wanting to wait a cycle to get Binka bred. The calf is originally named Bun but by the time she has her first calf and joins the milking string, no one is calling her anything but Fat Butt.

Fat Butt is a little unclear on the milking concept, but she likes to get her grain in the parlor and only needs to have her feet tied together for a few days until she relaxes into the routine. Even I can milk her, despite being pregnant with Cliffy and a little skittish myself. Fat Butt's monthly DHIA butterfat tests range from 6.2 to 5.9. We milk her for a few months, and then her beef-cow sensibilities tell her it's time to start making less milk for her baby and she decides to start kicking the unit off. And then she decides she doesn't want it hooked up in the first place. And then she doesn't want to be in the parlor for a second longer than it takes to finish her grain. This time we can call Paul Stecker to come get her for his organic beef business. Fat Butt sells for steak price but we are still ready to close the beef cow chapter for good.

Part II

When we started the creamery, we had no idea what we were doing, so we thought it might be a good idea to scale back a little in the cow department. We were only milking 26 cows when our truck brought the first glass-bottled milk to market in April 2001 and it was all we could do to find people to buy it. But word got out about the milk, stores started to call us and we had nowhere near enough milk for our orders. Organic cows aren't a dime a dozen, but we picked up a few cows here and there, some Jerseys from Tunbridge and Westminster, a pair of Guernseys from Johnson, two great Jerseys from Butterworks Farm up north in Westfield, including Nectar, whose great depth of body and beautiful well-balanced udder was inherited by her twin daughters, Honey and Ambrosia and then passed down from there. But it still wasn't enough.

And then we saw an ad in the Agri-View for organic Jerseys over in New York State. There were fifteen of them and they were a good price if you bought them all together. Usually when you buy a cow, you go visit the farm, talk to the farmer, see the animals, think about whether they'll transition well to your style of management, and then send a check and arrange trucking. But we had a little baby and it was summer and Earl was flat out and we bought those Jerseys without seeing them. And that's how we got Charcoal, the FBC (the BC part is for Beef Cow).

Charcoal actually wasn't that bad to milk. She's half-Jersey, by the looks of it, and stupider than she is crazy. Her first calf, Charlize, is half-Guernsey and only a quarter Angus and she's jumpy if there's something to be jumpy about, but mostly she's just a regular cow. Since then, though, we've been breeding Charcoal to Angus and letting her raise her calves in little pastures around the farm. Charcoal and her daughter, Cheryl mowed the creamery lawn, the area behind the corn crib, the Jerusalem Artichokes below the house, and the former thistle patch next to the equipment shed. Despite being close by and getting a little bit of grain every day, Cheryl is crazily afraid of people. When she was breeding age, somehow Earl managed to get her into the barn for the breeder, but she didn't take and she didn't want to stay in the fence and then Earl traded her to our neighbor for some lumber.

But Charcoal had another calf in February. Chubby is 3/4 Angus and his sire, I'm guessing, was sitting down after the first word in the regional Angus Spelling Bee. Chubby doesn't understand the fence. Chubby doesn't understand people. He has no idea what either of these two forces are or even how to go about expressing his confusion. He runs away from people and through the fence. He runs toward people and through the fence. For a few days this summer, Earl had Charcoal, Chubby and our next-summer's Bull, Fermin, in a pasture within spitting distance of my garden. I could see them out the windows by our kitchen table, and I watched them like a hawk. Fermin did get out and into the garden one night, but he stayed in the pathways, eating the clover my smart-garden-friend, Shannon, planted for soil conditioning and weed control.

When Chubby broke free the next day and went on a full-farm adventure, it was time to rethink his compatibility with our operation. Aside from the cuteness of two-year-old Oliver looking out the window and calling, "Oh no. Chubby out. Chubby out. Mama. Oh no," the charm is lost on us. Chubby would be a strain on our marriage if Earl and I weren't in accord about how little we like him and how conflicted we are about what to do with him. On the one hand, he is a pain in the ass and a quick phone call would make him go away and net us a few hundred bucks. On the other hand, he's huge for his age, fattening beautifully, and be absolutely delicious next summer. Earl thought maybe someone would want to buy Charcoal and Chubby together if he listed them on the WDEV Trading Post, but no one called. Earl has been talking to his friend, Tom, about taking him, and hopefully Tom won't read this and we'll be Chubby-free in a few months, when he's weaned.

What to do with Charcoal is another story. She's not a bad cow, but not worth milking in the barn. She grazes areas that we would otherwise have to mow. Except for some hay in the winter, she doesn't cost us anything to have around. Maybe we'll breed her to a Guernsey next time round. Or maybe we'll have amnesia, brought about by too many kicks to the head, and think that maybe a Scotch Highlander would be a better option. Stay tuned for Part III.

Hatch Day

2009-04-16T09:24:00.002-04:00

I bought an incubator last spring. McMurrays Hatchery was sold out of chicks by the time I got my order together and I thought the forty bucks for an incubator would pay off handily if I didn't have to buy day-old chicks in the mail anymore. I also thought it might be a little fun.

But a forty-dollar incubator doesn't have a precision-controlled thermostat and I got the eggs a little hot and then put more eggs in and ended up with five live chicks, three of whom lived to adulthood, one of whom, Mr. Feathers, crossed the maturity finish line and pretty much died with the tape still stretched across his feathered breast.

I ordered chicks from McMurrays in the fall and those birds, the Rainbow Layer Assortment, have just started to lay. Some lay white eggs, some brown, but weirdly, about half of them lay shades of blue. The packing slip just says, "Rainbow," and I've spent all winter trying to figure out what breeds of birds I've got out there. I think I have finally identified the colorful Mystery Bird as a white-laying Rose Comb Leghorn by the white feathers around her ears. There's a Blue Cochin who looks like she's wearing 1970s fuzzy apres ski boots, a Golden Laced Wynadott, four Rhode Island Reds, three Barred Rocks, an Anconda, a bald-necked Turken, and a about a dozen Ameracaunas. Hence the blue eggs. In the course of trying to ID the birds, I read the catalog inside and out and got sort of interested in some of the breeds. Cuckoo Maran's lay chocolate brown eggs and I'm rather wishing I had a few of those. I'm even finding myself coveting chickens with the fuzzy head feathers, because a barnyard needs a little comic relief.

I realize, of course, that I'm starting to sound like a Chicken Lady. I just bought a book, The Joy of Keeping Chickens, by our pocket of the world's resident Crazy Chicken Lady, Jen Megyesi. I appreciate the technical components and Jen's storytelling, but when it comes to using the words "love" and "chicken" in the same sentence and the chicken is alive and not, say in Chicken Saltimboca, I just couldn't relate.

But I fear that I might be on the path.

For no good reason at all, I started the incubator three weeks ago. I took a few dozen eggs from my older chickens and a dozen from Nancy's Barred Rocks, filled the humidity tray and plugged it in. I did almost nothing else, except to make a note of when to take them off the automatic turner three days before the expected hatch date. Even as I was moving them, with their non-liquid weightiness, I didn't actually believe there were chickens in there, or if there were, that they would make it out of the shells alive to one day run around the farm and creep me out.

Even yesterday, as the first eggs started to move a bit, I was doubtful. And then there were little beaks poking through, opening and closing, drinking up the fresh air. I quick ran and googled chicken hatching to see if I was supposed to help them, but the internet was silent on the issue. The Chicken Hatching for Dummies website, apparently, was down for maintenance and no one who actually knew anything about chickens would think that a human being should get involved in the hatching process. But I couldn't help it. I'm a scab picker and a life-saver cruncher and on top of that, I thought maybe my chickens lay especially strong eggs and that the poor chick wouldn't make it out on her own. (In the livestock world, they're all female until proven otherwise, no matter how un-pretty they may be.)

So I helped a little bit, peeling back a little shell here and a little lining there, around the hole the chicken made with her beak tooth. Then I got worried about an egg that had been rolling around for hours without a pip. Bolstered by my successful extrication of Live Chicken 1 and Live Chicken 2 (and not humbled by Dead Chicken 1), I decided to crack it open, ever so gently, and help the poor thing out. Bad idea. There was too much liquid, too much yolk, and although it moved around and made a little noise, in a few hours I had Dead Chicken 2.

I tried hard not to keep checking on them, but even if I managed to distract myself and move on to another task, Oliver kept climbing up on the counter, threatening the whole operation with his toddler enthusiasm, singing, "Chicken. Chicken. Baby Chicken. Me see. Baby Chicken." And I should confess that the real reason I'm sitting down to write this on a day when my To Do list reads like an easy month for Heracles, is that I'm trying to keep from checking on the chickens. It's working, but it's hard.

Oh. I hear Oliver singing.

I promised myself I was just going to get Oliver and maybe set him snacking, but then I happened to see two new eggs pipped and one of them didn't seem to have broken through and I worried that my chicken friend had tried to get some fresh air but then got too tired to finish the job. So then I promised myself I was only going to make it a little teeny hole. But then the egg shell was sort of fun to peel off and every bit I did was saving valuable energy that the chicken could channel toward staying alive. But I stopped short of peeling off the lining, thinking that it would be best if the chicken undressed herself when she felt ready. So now there is a weird egg-shaped bag of wet, curled-up chicken in the incubator. Part of me feels helpful and part of me feels really stupid for creating such a pathetic, unnatural sight. And of course I want to go back and peel some more. But I promised myself I wouldn't.

What I did do was to give the dry, but-not-yet-vibrant hatchlings some Gatorade. When I got my first chicks, Nancy gave me this Kwik-Chik stuff that you mix with their water to give them vitamins and electrolytes. I used it a little, but I got it in my head that it wasn't organic and put it away to reconsider for a future batch. This fall, I tossed it in a rare fit of housekeeping (which was pretty much confined to the one shelf that housed this useful product). But a person who lets her kids swallow the toothpaste rather than give them supplemental fluoride is the kind of person who thinks, "Electrolytes? There's more than one way to skin that cat!" And so now we're conducting an experiment to determine the relative benefit of administering America's favorite sports drink to hour-old chickens. Preliminary results seem to indicate that the chickens don't think it tastes very good, but it is at least not fatal on contact.

I just went to turn the oven on to bake some cookies and happened to walk by incubator. The chicken-in-a-sac hadn't made progress, so I peeled her. It seemed like the perfectly right thing to do at the time. The other chicken was maybe getting kind of tired and I hate it when they die halfway out of the egg, so I peeled her two. Now they're resting from the ordeal, no doubt gearing up to be running around, all vibrant-like, when I check on them next, which I'm hoping won't be for a while.

Trying to give myself a project that would take a little time away from Chickenwatch, I took an inventory, to date:

4 eggs that candled clear and were pulled before the hatch
4 dead chickens
4 live chickens with a good, fighting chance
1 sleepy, strong-breathing chicken with decent odds to move to the Live-Chickens-With Fighting-Chance side of the box
2 sleepy, not-so-strong breathing chickens who may surprise me, but probably won't make it
2 wet, peeled chickens who have been completely disoriented by my interventions and don't know at the moment if they're alive or dead, but who happen to be breathing
13 eggs that feel funny if I pick them up, which I'm trying really, really hard not to do.

Symmetry

2009-03-29T21:27:00.003-04:00

When I was in my last semester of law school and a few months pregnant with Cliffy, I got a nasty anti-biotic resistant infection and missed two weeks of classes. All but one of my professors were understanding and supportive. The other one, who taught the largely-ridiculed required class, was not. Perhaps to flex his muscles and to compensate for the lack of students leaning forward, eagerly scribbling down his every word, this professor declared, eyebrows set in their most stern position, that if I missed one more class I would fail the class and not be able to graduate. I was stunned. I couldn't say, having never been pregnant before, whether I was going to have to miss any more classes and I had put rather a lot of effort into getting a law degree to come up empty handed. I figured whatever chip Bad Professor had on his shoulder, it wasn't worth hashing it out with him, so I had a little chat with the Dean of Students, who was kind, but not quite willing to say she'd override him until there was a protest in front of her.

It turned out not be an issue.

I stayed in perfect health, arriving early to every class, taking my post in the back row, where I glared unrelentingly at Bad Professor, who seemed, to his credit, genuinely disoriented to be the target of such pointed seething. (At least he didn't habitually thrive off student hatred.) I was prepared to glare until graduation--being a girl who can hold a grudge--but I didn't get the chance. The Patron Saint of Knocked Up Law Students took things into her own hands, and two weeks later Bad Professor got some sort of horrible illness of his own, missing the whole rest of the semester. The school scrambled to cover the classes, but much time was missed and in the end the make-up sessions were made optional and we were offered a pass/fail, take-home exam.

The point of all of this, is that this led me to believe that there is a God and She is vengeful.

And last month I came to believe that there is a Chicken God, too.

Mr. Feathers, as you may remember, killed his father, Buster, and took over rulership of the coop a few months ago. Grawp, Mr. Feathers' smaller, skinnier, less-impressive brother, might have moved from gamma chicken to beta chicken, but you really couldn't tell. Mr. Feathers did the crowing. Mr. Feathers did the mating. Mr. Feathers puffed himself up and preened himself while he blocked access to the water bucket or grain feeder. Mr. Feathers took over Buster's spot on the highest roost. If Grawp roosted at all, it was on top of the nesting boxes, with the hens.

And then one day Mr. Feathers was dead. Just like that. He woke up, crowed his little chicken head off, and then apparently fell over, dead. No sign of malice. No sign of disease. He was still big and heavy for his size when I got his body out of the coop. Maybe a heart attack? Hard to say with chickens. In any event, the coop was silent for a day while the hens gave their thanks to the Patron Saint of Chickens Who Don't Want to Be Led About By a Vain, Patrocidal Rooster and also to the Chicken God, who doesn't like to see the jerks win anymore than the rest of us do.

The Deer Butchering Ordeal or Another Thing We Won't Be Doing Again Soon

2009-02-05T20:07:00.008-05:00

Sometimes I have bad ideas. When Jess shot the deer this fall and I thought we should cut it up ourselves, that was one of them.

It wasn't just any old deer, it was the mythical Monster Buck of the Brook Road and it dressed out at 168 pounds, second biggest to check in at Coburn's Store all season.

I had first seen The Monster Buck four years earlier when he and a girlfriend ran across the road on the last afternoon of rifle season. We were on our way to the hardware store, but I threw it in reverse, bundled baby Harley in the backpack (the older boys were with my folks) and Earl hatched the plan. I would walk the ridge line on the far side of Field B and try to give the buck a reason to turn left into the thicker woods. Earl would get his gun and take the truck to the end of the road and head in on the snowmobile trail. We were out the door in less than a minute, all oranged and excited, but all we found were hoofprints that were so far apart they must have been made by a mock-speed deer who crested the ridge before we took a step in his direction.

We'd seen him a few times since then, with his distinctive curved rack, standing in the road the day after hunting season, proud and defiant. In the middle of Field 19 in the middle of the summer, enjoying the alfalfa we grew just for him. Under the apple trees on the hill, feasting unafraid. The rest of the Brook Road hunting community had seen him too, and talked about him in the guarded, give-nothing-away manner of hunters, mushroom gatherers and bargain shoppers everywhere. He was the deer that was too smart to get shot and everyone wanted to be the one who was just a little bit smarter.

Well, not everyone. I might walk a ridgeline on a little mission to help Earl, but when it comes to actually seeing a deer in the woods, I'm thinking Bambi more than supper. It would have been fine with me if the monster buck continued to entice and thwart the hunters for the next decade. The thing is, though, that the La Fleurs were after him too, in force, and it got to be important that that buck end up hanging in our rafters, not theirs. I'm not so keen on the La Fleurs because the patriarch once, inexplicably, called Earl lazy for taking a nap at the end of a 100-hour work week and because they drive on our fields and road hunt.

My sister, KJ, and her husband, Jess, live in Shelburne but they spent ten years in Jackson, Wyoming and Jess spent a lot of his time fishing and elk hunting around Teton County. Now they have 9-acres and see the occasional deer in their woods, but it's not the sort of place you could have a Hunting Adventure, so they've come down to the farm for the first weekend of hunting season since they moved back East. I make what I think are hunter comfort foods and KJ and I discuss the great issues of the day while kids run around. Jess and Earl don't usually hunt together, but they make plans and compare notes and share what they see.

The first day of hunting season was wet and miserable, but they went out anyway, to no avail. The second morning started with a deluge, but then they thought it was starting to taper off and Earl and Jess went into the woods to be between where they thought a deer might want to spend two days of rain and where they thought he might want to go when it let up. And Jess was right.

I heard the pop around seven-thirty and got the kids up and dressed in case there was hauling to be done. Earl came back when he heard the shot from Jess' direction. By eight they were on their way to pick up the deer on the Ranger, Cliffy and Jackson squeezed in the middle of the bench seat. They gutted it in the woods and brought it back to hang in the heifer barn.

The rest of the story should have been that we bled it out, loaded it into the truck and brought it to Hill's Meat Cutting to be picked up week or so later, cut and wrapped. But the Hills didn't answer the phone and we were hesitant to drive all the way to Fairlee with my not-unproblematic pickup.

So I suggested we cut it up ourselves. I have this new kitchen in the slab (this area in the house that in a house that wasn't built by hippies in the 70s would have been a garage, except that it's never had any cars parked in it and for the previous ten years was mostly a home for chest freezers and spiders). It's not fancy or anything, but it has a big 3 X 6 worktable, an electric knife sharpener and an industrial meat grinder left over from when Earl's mom butchered all their meat when he was a kid. I'm a girl who gets excited about having the right tools for a job and I like to use them. Come on, I told them, we can do it! Isn't it part of the primal experience? How long could it take? With three of us working? (Three of us meant me and Earl and Jess. It's pushing KJ's comfort zone to take a chicken out of its package and extract the little bag of innards.) They weren't convinced and still thought the Hills would call back, so Jess and KJ went home and the deer hung from the rafters. Turned out later that the Hills' plan for not getting too much work in a year when Clint has a new baby was to not answer the phone for a few weeks and only take drop-bys.

So six very cold days later Jess drove down and we had a cutting-up party. Sort of. The problem was that the deer was frozen, so Earl thought maybe if he put it in the unfinished outer room on the slab that the radiant cement floor would thaw it.

And so the deer hair entered the house.

For three hours, the boys rolled the deer every twenty minutes, to almost no effect. When Jess and Earl went to skin it, the task involved vice grips and much swearing. They tried to be really careful, but when the big hunks of meat came off the deer, they had hair on them, and what should have been a fifty-minute job of slicing steaks and grinding burger instead became a four-hour hair-removal project. Earl seemed to think that the hair would dissolve into its essential proteins in the meat grinder, but I was dubious. I know my little sister and one deer hair would be a deal breaker for her, so I dutifully pulled the multiplying-under-my-eyes strands off every bit of the wet meat that passed before my eyes and intercepted several batches that Earl had deemed good enough for the grinder.

There's not much more to say about it. It sucked. And it sucked for a long time. Earl left to do chores and I had to put Oliver down for a nap and Jess was so demoralized by the project that he was unable to carry on in my absence. Finally, at almost six, Jess loaded his measly beer box of meat and the still-frozen deer head (for possible taxidermic mounting if my sister relents) into the back of the truck and headed out, no doubt hoping he wouldn't have anything to do with me or my great ideas for quite some time.

Later that week, I took the car to get its oil changed. As I did my best to keep Oliver and Harley amused and out of trouble, I happened to see a flier taped on the door. "Got a Deer?" it asked, and listed the prices for cut and wrap services on different-sized animals. 155-170 lbs. was seventy-five dollars. Seventy-five dollars? Jess bought lard, freezer paper, and freezer tape and drove about 170 miles in a big truck back when diesel was through the roof. I just started to do the math, but I had to stop when I got to us having paid thirteen dollars for the privilege, never mind the other work that didn't get done.

And then there's the deer hair. It's February now, and I'm still finding hairs. In the venison jerky we made. On my sweaters. In the bottom of the toy box. Between the couch cushions. In Oliver's diaper.

Our beef supply is getting low and soon it will be time to put one of the steers in the freezer. When I mentioned to Earl that maybe we ought to do this ourselves, he looked at me like I was crazy. But you know, I'm a terminal optimist, which Earl defines as persistence in the face of overwhelming evidence that success is unlikely. But I've got this great table, a knife sharpener and an industrial meat grinder. And I figure we've learned a few things. The cowhide, for example, would not enter the house.

Cooking at RockBottom & the Mythical FTS Cookbookbook

2009-02-03T20:18:00.003-05:00

The following entry, as Earl pointed out, has essentially nothing to do with the creamery and would not inspire anyone to buy our milk and ice cream, which, if you don't know, are truly amazing products of great effort by hard-working, interesting people and beautiful and patient animals. None of which will be discussed below. And so I will be calling the Web Guy in the morning and asking him to take down the link between the creamery website and the blog. Because it's really important for people to keep buying our products (and it would be great if just a few more families, like maybe 162, started drinking our milk regularly), and because I only like writing the plucky stuff, I think I had better break the link then spend some time writing copy for the website itself.

I'll get started on that first thing tomorrow. Tonight, however, it's all about The Cookbook.

I heard on the radio a few years ago that the average man thinks about sex every seventeen seconds. I asked a few men and they said that seemed about right. One, who I had previously suspected of using his time to ponder the future of agriculture in Vermont and the nature of true sustainability, said, "Well yeah. At least." I'm still pretty surprised about that, but informal research seems to be supporting the idea. Go figure. Me, I think about food.

If I had to put a figure on how much time I spend cooking or thinking about cooking, including animals and vegetables yet to born, grown, harvested and eaten, I'd say maybe 30% of my waking hours, maybe more. Some of that is because of the sheer volume of food that gets consumed around here--three meals, plus snacks, for six people and guests, every single day. The rest of it is because food is simply the most interesting thing I can possibly think of. If I can't fall to sleep at night, I play the alphabet game, thinking of ingredients that start with each letter--(Artichoke, Banana, Cassava Melon, Daikon, Eggplant) or recipes I hope to master someday (Asparagus Risotto, Banana Cream Pie, Chicken Cordon Bleu, Dal, Eclairs). I always fall asleep before Zebra Tomatoes or Zabaglione, but I have them at the ready and sometimes ponder whether the Zebras, which are ripe when they're green, could hold their own in a blind taste test or how Zabaglione differs from more traditional English custard.

When I don't have a specific food quandary, I think about the FTS cookbook. FTS stands for--WARNING, PROFANITY AHEAD, GENTLE BLEADER--Fuck that shit. As in, "Divide cold butter into eight pieces and blend into flour and baking powder with a pastry cutter until mixture resembles a coarse meal." Fuck that shit, man. I will instead suggest putting the butter in your back pocket while you do five other things and then, when it's good and soft, stir it into the flour with a whisk. Put the bowl outside in the cold or in the freezer while you do three other things, then dump the milk in, and you're most of the way to fluffy biscuits without ever having to chase a cold lump of butter around with the constantly bending tines of your pastry cutter, if you even have a pastry cutter.

Then I think about how anyone who would benefit from my time-saving biscuit trick would probably be put off by the extra step of putting the butter in his or her pocket. Perhaps even just the length of the explanation itself would be off-putting. Then I think that maybe I should just write my suggestion to Cook's Illustrated magazine and try to win a free year's subscription and hope that the people who used to make pastry cutters can find meaningful work in another sector. But I can't quite bring myself to mail it in, because if I give all my tricks away, even for a $24.95 subscription to a great magazine, what will I have left for the cookbook?

There are other suggestions and recipes, of course. There's Meatballs With Clean Hands and Tofu That Doesn't Suck and a whole imagined chapter on Cooking With Ketchup. The tips include how to shop with children (You are a military outfit on a reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines. The general has given us a list of the items we need to bring back to headquarters. They must be smuggled out by jeep, driven by corporal Oliver, who cannot be trusted and must not see anything that he will want to eat right away.) and how to buy your beef--whole animal, in the freezer, take out three cuts at a time, hamburger for right away, steak for the next day or two, and a roast to throw in the slowcooker for the weekend so the house smells like heaven on earth when you come in from skiing or milking the cows.

The Cookbook could also be a pathway to character development. I envision the personal growth that would come from working on the seafood section. Currently, my recipe for family-style fish involves driving the family to a restaurant that I have called to verify has at least one item on the menu that had legs and letting Earl and the boys indulge their oceanic appetites while I eat a hamburger or piece of chicken. I just don't think of fish as food, and I know that's rather pathetic. Fish is a super-healthy, very-interesting-in-recipes protein source and I would do well to suck it up and learn how to cook it. The mythical Cookbook's hard-nosed hypothetical editor would force me to include fish and I would become an expert at cooking swimmy things, maybe even start eating them myself and the big empty spot in my repertoire would vanish.

So that's it. The cookbook. You'd think I might spend a little more time on developing the business and work on positioning us to withstand the hard times ahead. Or how to get through to Harley that plugging in the Christmas lights is an inappropriate activity for a four-year-old, even if he is Being Very Careful. And I do try to concentrate on the bigger picture, but then I get hungry. I glance briefly in the fridge, but then find myself spun around, staring at my cookbooks, wondering at the possibilities within.

27 Random Things

2009-01-29T15:23:00.004-05:00

1. There is a chicken in a cardboard box in my kitchen.
2. The vet says the chicken's knee is dislocated and that she will need to be in the box for quite some time.
3. This is not a situation without olfactory impact.
4. Oliver is starting to talk.
5. Just now he has come to say, "Need Help." Much pointing. "Stuck."
6. The toy is rescued.
7. We are back in business.
8. The market for our milk and ice cream, so far, is staying strong.
9. Thank God.
10. Thank Vermonters.
11. We have ordered enough seeds to grow food to feed our family for the whole year.
12. If the yields are decent.
13. If we manage to get it all harvested and put up.
14. Lot of ifs in this farming game, that's for sure.
15. Chronicle, the Boston TV show that did a thing on the farm and creamery, just called to say we'll be on next Monday at 7:30.
16. I was sort of hoping my fifteen minutes of fame would be for something more thrilling.
17. Involving skiing, or helicopters, or firefighting, a fabulous invention or a book tour or maybe all of them at once.
18. At least the high school classmates I saw at the reunion can see that I wasn't making it all up.
19. Because when you tell tall tales of your fabulous success at high school reunions, naturally they would be about milking cows and gutting chickens.
20. Earl is at the Vermont Farm Show today, talking with farmers and feed dealers and equipment salesmen who stand, universally, with their feet very far apart.
21. When I went to the farm show, years ago, I was glad I didn't have Tourette's Syndrome.
22. There were all these men, puffed up, standing in front of posters of the daughters sired by the bulls whose semen they were peddling.
23. They call themselves Genetics Brokers or AI (Artificial Insemination) Technicians, but we call them cowfuckers around here, and I was glad I could keep that to myself.
24. At the co-op today, someone asked me about the cow I'm feeding in the poster of us on the wall. I didn't recognize her markings and puzzled for a minute until I noticed a shadow in her undercarriage.
25. "Oh, that's a steer," I told him. "We ate him."
26. And you know, it didn't go over so well.
27. I wish vegetarian idealists would wear signs or something.

In Search of My People

2009-01-14T13:54:00.004-05:00

I was at my 20th high school reunion, telling my second story of the night about people who had tried to claim me as members of their group, but who I wasn't in a position to understand or appreciate. "These are not my people," I explained. Wendy, who I grew up with but hadn't seen for twenty years, said that there seemed to be a lot of people who weren't my people.

She had a point.

I thought it best not to try to defend my orneriness, which at least I realize isn't defensible, so I told her The Green-Armed Sweater story, which goes like this:

When I was 19 and taking a little break from college, I moved up to my parent's ski house in Jackson, NH to be a ski instructor. One rainy January day, the lifts closed early and I went to North Conway to buy a chunky Guatemalan sweater that my parents had given me the money for as a Hanukah gift. The store I went to had just opened that fall and was in a little building behind the Eastern Slope Inn that probably used to be a carraige house. It was owed by a brother and sister named Michael and Michelle and was filled with wool and cotton, batik and fanciful weaving. It was heated by a small woodstove and smelled like wool and patchouli.

Michael was the only one in the shop and was delighted to have a customer. He joined me by the sweater display and decided that I should sit on the bench by the woodstove and he would show the sweaters to me until I found the exact right one. I've never been all that particular about my clothes, but I accepted the offer on its friendliness and sat down. There were over 100 sweaters and as we made our way through the stacks I felt like I had to make some comments about them. This one was perhaps too groovy earth-motherly for me, another perhaps not enough. You get the idea. Then Michael began to unfold a sweater that originally held great promise. It was mulberry red yarn with a natural-wool yoke flecked with ochre and the brightest blue. And then Michael shook out the arms. And they were inexplicably green, like the sea green crayon in the Crayola pack, from the elbows down. There was nothing to do but laugh in ridicule.

Michael laid the sweater out and explained that he was also bewildered by this sweater when he first saw it at the show in Boston, but then he thought that it was the exact right sweater for someone. He told me he didn't care if it stayed on the shelf for 10 years before that person came in, but he wanted it to be there when they did. I'm not sure if Michael was hoping that I'd be the sweater's person, but it was clear that I wasn't, and clear that the sweater needed to stay on the shelf, waiting for its home to find it. I bought another sweater and went home.

"So you see," I told Wendy, "there are people in the world who are perfectly nice, interesting even, and yet they're just not for me. Best to steer clear lest I distract them from finding true appreciation in someone else." I thought it sounded good. But then the reunion was over and Wendy didn't answer my emails anymore and it was time to rethink.

On the one hand, everyone wants to find a few people, or maybe even a group of them, who understand and appreciate them. On the other hand, it's sort of a cheap and easy way to not deal with people to waive them off with a promise of greater appreciation elsewhere.

Now, it's not like there's a line of potential friends outside my door. This all happens in my head, after all. Still, I like to try to make the best use of my time on the planet, morally, ethically, spiritually--all that. And when I think back to the people I thought were green-armed sweaters--Michael (the sweater guy himself), some coworkers and classmates, the entire state of Oregon except for Gloria and Kori--it sort of occurs to me that it's likely I was far less charming to these folks than they were to me. And with that comes the inescapable truth--it is I, not them, who was the green-armed sweater. And when I think back on high school and a lot of college and the not-so-great jobs and the boyfriends who were incapable of abstract thought--that was time on the shelf.

All of which leads me to the feeling that made me try to write this: enormous, eternal, fill-the-room, holy-shit-think-of-the-alternative gratitude to Earl, who understands me perfectly and loves me anyway. And to Kate, Margaret, Bernadette and my sister with whom I can negotiate the big questions of the day and never fail to be amused, inspired, or humbled. So while I proceed through the world leaving a wake of snickers and perplexed expressions akin to a dog hearing a high-pitched noise, it's nice to know that our world of diversity has room, even blog space, for those of us who are knit with incongruent yarns.

R.I.P. Buster

2008-12-26T16:39:00.004-05:00

Buster, the rooster, died on Christmas Eve. I thought I'd write a few words of fond memories, but I couldn't really think of any until today. In the three days since Buster's passing, I have found a new appreciation for the scrawny little loudmouth. Although he was annoying and loud, he wasn't aggressive and he probably didn't eat very much. Mr. Feathers, his successor to the Chicken Throne, is making Buster look pretty good by comparison.

An hour or so after Cliffy discovered Buster and took him out of the coop, I went to feed the chickens the lobster shells from Jackson's special birthday lunch. Mr. Feathers, who used to just cluck and peck at his food or water like the rest of the chickens, was strutting and attacking the hens and generally making a big show of throwing his weight around. My first thought was that I missed Buster, but I was already kicking Mr. Feathers across the coop, staring him down and then tipping back my head in a pretty good rendition of Buster's most triumphant crowing.

I don't really want to be Alpha Chicken, but I can't have an aggressive rooster around my kids. The options are to put Mr. Feathers in his place as perpetual Beta Chicken, or eat him. It's sort of cold to be plucking a chicken outside right now, and after the Deer Slaughter Ordeal, I am not allowing dead animals in my house without first removing their fur or feathers. So I'm giving Mr. Feathers a chance by being a jerk to him. If it doesn't work, maybe we'll get a day in the twenties to make quick work of him. I could make Coq au Vin, whose name I think has been shortened from the original French for "Aggressive Fucking Rooster Cooked in Wine."

But this was supposed to be about Buster. Buster was a skinny chicken with white feathers, gray-green legs, and a plumey black tail. He liked to crow and he didn't bother the hens or people. He didn't eat much and I never had to kick him. Rest in peace, Buster.

Oedipus the Chicken

2008-12-21T03:36:00.002-05:00

Every night each of the boys chooses a bedtime story that Earl or I read to them. Cliffy is making his way through the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Harley likes Richard Scarry or Jan Brett. Oliver is all about his little tractor board book. And Jackson likes Greek Mythology. We've made our way through Mt. Olympus and the trials of Heracles and Hera and Zeus' little love spats and I've noticed a few trends. For one, the honorable figures are not always, or even often, victorious in their conflicts. Secondly, the Oracle of Delphi seems to foretell all the bad stuff that's ever going to happen, but the doomed characters fight like the dickens anyhow. And I've also noticed that sons end up killing their fathers on a regular basis. I've been figuring this is because mythology takes the stages or conflicts of life and personifies them--the unattractive Hephaestes got dealt a bad hand in the looks department, but he works long hours at his gold- and silver-smithing and makes articles of stunning beauty. Gossipy, shallow Echo ends up nothing but a voice following a self-centered Narcissus around until he is so spellbound by his image in a glassy pool that he grows roots and becomes a plant that leans over to admire its reflection in water. And tyrant fathers who rule Olympus, or Thebes, eventually get ousted by their sons. The author doesn't offer up moral lessons so much as he just seems to be saying, "Hey, it happens." And fathers who think they're all powerful will eventually start to weaken with age and their sons, who've grown in that image, will have to be a bit forceful out of the guns if they're to be respected by the populace. Killing, well, that can be a metaphor, but a little bit of public roaring is usually in order.

So tonight, when I stopped in to refill the chickens' water bucket on the way back from the barn, I saw that our chicken coop is locked in a little Zeus/Cronos drama of their own. This spring, I incubated about thirty eggs and ended up with three live chicks who have since grown to adulthood, a white rooster, a black rooster, and a speckled hen. Lacy, the hen, just started laying, which is a pretty good indication that Mr. Feathers and Grawp are also sexually mature. They are all big and flashy and have magnificent combs. Mr. Feathers was the first to sprout his rooster decorations and is by far the more dominant of the two. I thought they might start fighting soon, so I didn't let Grawp in after the last warm day I let them out, and he seems happy to roam about and make boastful crowing noises signifying nothing. Mr. Feathers and Buster seemed to have worked out some sort of arrangement and didn't seem to be paying much attention to each other.

Until tonight.

When I was closing the coop door, I heard an awful squawking and thrashing from the corner of the coop. I looked behind the door and saw a skirmish that at first looked like one chicken with its head stuck, trying to get loose, but was really Mr. Feathers beating up on Buster, who had his head stuffed in the corner. And yes, all their feathers were ruffled.

I'm not sure how old Buster is. He was with the Rhode Island Reds I got from Berry when Cliffy was in first grade and I think he came from a coop of older birds. He can't be any younger than five, and is probably six or seven, which is getting along in chicken years. Lately I've noticed that his plumage is looking a little shabby and that, next to Mr. Feathers anyway, his comb seems a bit droopy. When I pulled him from the corner, he seemed defeated, which I guess he was, but he wasn't that upset about it.

Mr. Feathers, for his part, was all puffed up and threw back his head for a long crow. And though I'm exactly Buster's biggest fan, this pissed me off. It might be the natural order of things, but I am part of these chickens' order, and I gave him a little shove with my toe and crowed right back at him. After three years of Buster's incessant announcements, I do a pretty good imitation and Mr. Feathers was suitably alarmed. I thought I watched his status with the hens drop a notch and I thought about putting him in exile to roam the heifer barn and manure pit until Buster passed on from internal failings. But then the idea of being alpha chicken to these birds hit me and I made a hasty retreat. I take care of them, but I don't want to, you know, get involved.

I don't know what I'll find out there tomorrow. Could be Mr. Feathers was just establishing his dominance and will leave the bumbling old Buster to himself. Or maybe in chicken politics, Buster has to go. Maybe Buster will rally and Mr. Feathers, impressive comb and all, will find himself at the bottom of the pecking order again. Regardless, my plan is to bring grain, change water and send a well-gloved Cliffy to collect any carcasses.

We Are Powerless

2008-12-13T05:24:00.003-05:00

The power went out yesterday morning just after four. I know this because I had woken up with Earl, who was on his way out the door to the barn, and was thinking through the day, wondering if I should get up or go back to sleep. I did eventually get back to sleep, but power outages come with their own work list, and first I had to find and hook up the corded telephone, light a candle in the boys' room so they wouldn't be scared if they woke up, and call the power company. The power company has a new feature where every call registers as a customer effected by the power outage, and you get to hear the running total at the end of the call. I was caller number one. Later, when I called with the account numbers for the barn and creamery, we were up to five and then ninety-two.

The corded phone was a bit of an issue. We used to have only a corded phone a few years ago but then something mysterious happened to its jack and then the kids were playing with the phone started working sporadically. I bought some cordless phones and now the Find-the-Phone Game is so deeply entrenched in our family dynamic, we wouldn't know what to do without it. I found the phone and hooked it up, but didn't get a dial tone. I remembered all the abuse the handset took from small children who like to pull on squiggly cords, so I thought maybe I'd try replacing it with one from the old fax machine. Bingo. We had a dial tone, but the new handset wouldn't fit in the cradle to hang up the phone. Hmmmm. What to do? I thought about trying to make a clip of some sort, but then, in a rare moment of embarrassing clarity, I realized I could use the broken handset to press down the button. So when the phone rang, which it did about 87 times yesterday, I ran over to it and said hello in the dead handset. Every single time. I tried to practice, even, rehearsing what I would do like downhill ski racers mentally taking themselves through the course at the top of the hill. No use. If you called yesterday, you probably heard a distant hello followed by confusion followed by my frustration at being an old dog unable to learn a new trick, then a cheery, "Hello!" to cover it all up. And if you called back five minutes later, you probably heard it again.

I used to love power outages when I was a kid. We ate interesting things cooked on the woodstove or the stove in my mom's camper van. We used candles and extra blankets and the house was so unbelievably quiet. I don't remember the power ever being out for that long, maybe a few hours. Certainly, it was on by morning. I still loved power outages when I met Earl, and we fell right in step with the Y2K drama, planning our post-electrical world. Then the power went out for four days after the remnants of a September hurricane came through and I handled my desperation for a shower so poorly that Earl, who had married me only a few months before, was no longer enthusiastic about our unpowered future. Thank goodness it was all hype. I know I could do it if I had to, and lord knows I don't get a shower every four days anymore, but those nice appliances do a lot of work that I just can't imagine having time, or inclination, to do. I don't mind washing dishes by hand, but laundry? I like to press the beepy buttons on my front loader, toss in a tablespoon of soap, and move on with my day.

I think the boys are enjoying this outage, though it's hard to say. They were home from school and played with Legos and art supplies all day, with frequent interruptions from me to pick up the floor, lest we step on pointy toys in the dark. They got a metal bowl, filled it with snow and melted it on the woodstove so we would have a way to wash our hands. They stirred it with spoons, slurped it like soup, and eventually decided to add the soap right to it, mostly because the idea of not adding something to a pot of water didn't seem right in BoyWorld.

They are nestled in extra covers right now, Saturday morning, and seem unbothered by the rumbling generator or anything else. Today I think I'll read to them from Little House on the Prairie and maybe we'll make bread and bring it to people who have electric stoves. Or maybe the power will be on, and we'll watch the Muppet movie that just arrived from Netflix and air pop some popcorn.

The Best Parts about Being a Farm Kid by Cliffy Ransom

2008-11-30T08:15:00.005-05:00

One of the best parts about being a farm kid is catching chickens. They go lots of weird places and we have to chase after them. We jump over things and run down hills. Then we grab them by their legs and put them back in the chicken coop. It's fun to chase them all around and jump over stuff.

Another good part about being a farm kid is riding in the delivery truck with Daddy. Sometimes Larry is sick and I get to ride with Daddy when we take the milk to stores. I do the part where I carry the clipboard and crates that aren't all the way full. It's fun because I get to listen to the iPod and talk to Daddy and to see what's in the back of the stores.

Another good thing about being a farm kid is climbing on the machinery. You can see in the tops of stuff. I like to climb on the grinder-mixer because it has lots of things to climb on and the corn picker. I drew a picture of me climbing on the corn picker. The triangles are the things that the corn goes into when the picker pulls them off the ground. Daddy says they're called snoots.

I also like going to the barn to milk with my Mama or Daddy. I like to go to the creamery to get chocolate milk and to throw down hay and to turn the grain auger on to fill the grain bin. I don't like it that my brothers don't help much, but Mama says they'll help more when they're bigger.

So you can see, it's fun to be a farm kid.

Timmy Takes the Controls

2008-11-11T03:57:00.002-05:00

I didn't burn down the house today, but I came close.

I had some milk and sugar on the stove for some cakes I'm making for a teacher-celebration thing later in the week. Harley and Oliver were playing with stuffed animals on the kitchen floor when I went to get the cocoa powder from the pantry. Ten seconds later I was back, scooping the cocoa out of the plastic bag I had set on the cold burner next to the pot. I was on cup number three (this is a big celebration requiring lots of cake) when POOOOOOF the burner under the stove ignited, instantly melting the bottom of the two-gallon ziploc bag. I quick threw the bag into the sink, not realizing it was bottomless, and cocoa powder went flying everywhere. The good news was that the five-inch-thick layer of cocoa powder extinguished the fire before I could see that the burner was on and turn it off. The bad news was obvious, and everywhere.

Apparently, either Oliver had turned the knob or I had somehow managed to it with hook my pocket, but the gas to that burner was turned on a little bit. It must have collected under the bag enough to pool over into the neighboring flame. I'd like to see the play on tape, but alas, the episode remains un-photodocumented.

I still had a cake to bake, though, so I measued out the last of the cocoa powder, stirred it in, and set about cleaning up. I was able to salvage a few cups of the cocoa before it was time to get the vacuum cleaner. We bought our vacuum cleaner at a janitorial supply store and it has a nice long hose for just this sort of thing. Most of the cocoa powder was on the pooooof burner, but some had gotten near the cake-pot and I noticed that it glowed a little when I sucked it up. No worries, I thought, all the cocoa powder I'm sucking up behind it will put it out, no problem.

When Earl came in the house, having smelled what he thought might be burning flesh from the heifer barn and called for me, expecting the worst, I didn't answer because I had the water running and the fan on. He looked all around the house, imagining some horrible scene. When he found us out in the new kitchen on the Slab, I had a new bag in the vacuum cleaner, was wiping down the last of the burners, and had transferred the cake batter to a mixing bowl. I could have been whistling. The old vacuum bag was outside the french doors, finally extinguished after three pots of water, and Harley was all excited to tell how he had crawled--randomly, like a baby showing off--when he saw the smoke, because that's what you do in a fire.

Earl pointed out, of course, that the vacuum cleaner pulled a lot of air, and oxygen, in with the smoldering cocoa powder. Did I remember the fire triangle? Heat, fuel, oxygen? Well, yes, just not in the moment. But my lightning-quick reflexes had the vacuum cleaner dismantled, bag out and out the door before the plastic started to melt. And there really wasn't all that much smoke. Our vision, for example, had not been obscurred.

It's not coming across so well here, but the whole thing felt like random weirdness in the midst of me baking this cake--which turned out beautifully and proceeded through its steps without a hitch. I've been reading this book about a college for evangelical christian kids who think of God as guiding their every step. I've been imagining God as sitting in a room full of switches, like an airplane cockpit or the radio station I worked at in high school, only bigger to handle all the infinity. So I'm thinking that maybe, for a nanosecond around twelve-thirty this afternoon, God got up to take a little well-deserved coffee break and maybe his visiting nephew, Timmy, happened into the room, knocked the auto-pilot control-lock switch with his elbow, and started pressing buttons.

Maybe tomorrow's news will be full of stories from the AP wire,--cats inexplicably trapped in refrigerators, cars that come out of gear and roll off embankments, random small explosions (Timmy's favorite red button)--across the globe. The New Testament seems to be carrying the day, because there hasn't been any lightning or earthquaking. Timmy, and I, have apparently been forgiven. The house, after all, didn't actually burn down.

Chicken Harvest, Round One

2008-11-11T03:14:00.005-05:00

This all started innocently enough. We were at Michael and Margaret's house for a party Memorial Day Weekend, and Michael mentioned that these interesting meat chickens that he thinks he'd like to try this summer are much cheaper if you buy 100 or more at a time. Would I want to go in on an order? I don't think about where I might put these chickens, what I'm going to feed them, or how they're going to get dead. I think, roast chicken is an easy, healthy meal that the children love! A chicken each week, with a week off for camping and another for Thanksgiving is fifty birds? That's great. I'm in.

But really, we're in, because where to put them, what to feed them and how to get them dead are all things that I figure Earl will have some good ideas about. I know I play my cards and Earl knows I play my cards, but I also know that if I ask Earl about if has any thoughts about where we might put 50 meat chickens, he will. And he'll make it happen and I will be very grateful and he will tell me I'm easy to please. I suspect that sometime before Earl met me, someone told him that wives require lots of careful handling, have long lists of home-improvement projects, and require regular gifts of diamond jewelry. I'm not like that, of course, but I sometimes think Earl is holding his breath, waiting for me to walk past a store window and say, "Oh, honey, look!" So when I ask if we have a place to raise 50 chickens for 12 weeks, he takes care of it and think he's getting off easy.

And so, when the chickens that Michael had graciously offered to brood were ready to pick up at the beginning of August, Earl had moved the mobile coop, aka The Moop, into place. He and the bigger boys even went over and caught them and carried them back across town in cardboard boxes. We set up a play yard and a feeder and an automatic waterer and we were in business. Those chickens ate their weedy yard down to putting-green stubble and ate every bit of food scrap I set in their dish, leaving behind only the PLU stickers on citrus peels or the paper-thin rind of the watermelon. They clucked and ate and grew and got out and Cliffy caught them and put them back in. And then the roosters started to crow and even the smallest bird looked, to my x-ray imagination, like it was bigger than a supermarket chicken and it was time to think about moving them into the freezer.

We didn't actually have 50 birds. Tom and Jessica wanted some birds, too, so we ended up with 37, but one died in the first few days and another one died about a week before Harvest Day. I asked Earl once what chickens die of and he just shrugged. He can list off 100 bovine illnesses and potential causes of death, but chicken health, even to someone who has had chickens around most of his life and helped his brother with an 800-layer operation, is not a matter of interest or concern. Individual chickens just aren't valuable enough to worry about; if they start dropping en masse, then you can the vet.

We did Michael and Margaret's birds first. It was the same day as Earl's birthday party, but we figured we could make it work and I, for one, was grateful for a reason to get away from my looking-way-too-messy-to-have-a-party-in house.

I had wanted to know a little about what I was doing before I got there, so Earl took the boys' chicken puppet and demonstrated the gutting procedure. Earl had described the whole process, catching, killing, scalding, plucking, gutting, and bagging, to me and I was, and am, completely sure that killing is not for me. I would like to think that I'm biologically predisposed to protecting and nurturing life, but really, I'm just a wuss. The moment that life leaves an animal, even a fly, is horribly magic to me and I don't see as I have any business being involved in something so cosmically charged. I apparently have no problem asking Earl to do it, though, which suited us well because it turns out that Earl thinks gutting is the least desirable task. I was so grateful that I wasn't going to have to chop any chicken heads off to keep up my end of the bargain, that I decided that I was going to be a willing and efficient gutter if it killed me.

And I was lucky. It was a sunny day so I could wear sunglasses (for protection against some unknown, visually-communicative bad chicken thing that could happen to me if I looked directly into their eyes) and it was cold so I could wear layers of chicken-contact-preventing insulation. Earl found some latex gloves that went most of the way to my elbow and we were in business.

In addition to being a poultry guru and super-great guy, Michael is also a doctor and a teacher and his gutting demonstration was detailed and perfect. Within a few carcasses, I was scraping out the lungs with two fingers, blooping the gizzards into the bucket in one swift scoop, and wrapping the esophagus and trachea around my fingers and yanking them out from the back.

I was, and am, totally amazed at how easily the interior parts of a chicken, and I guess a great many animals, come out. I liked to think of one's internal organs as anchored in place, perhaps able to sway a bit, like a suspension bridge, but occupying a definite address within the body. Turns out, though, that "to spill one's guts," is an entirely apt expression--all those intestines and livers, kidneys, and stuff just come pouring out when you open their encasement, like a mixture of just-caught fish and wet spaghetti.

It probably should have seemed gross to me, but it was just so interesting . I didn't even squinch my nose, except for the time that I didn't make my lower cut deep enough, and the chicken's rectum stayed anchored so my scooping motion emptied the contents of the intestines instead of the intestines themselves. I was nicely positioned to avoid the stream and managed to keep the ickiness entirely on the outside of removable parts. I squinched, then took a deep breath and moved on to the next bird with the grateful feeling of crisis averted.

I had been prepared to be freaked out and to deal; I figure that after four rounds of childbirth, I can breathe my way through just about anything. But really, it wasn't that bad. I even flipped my sunglasses onto my head so I could see better inside the body cavities; turns out that a chicken without a head can't make potentially-fatal eye contact. I still couldn't imagine touching a chicken leg bare-handed, but I had my gloves and you know, those legs a convenient handle for moving the birds from station to station.

Even if I wanted to freak out, which Michael and Earl would have no doubt understood, Michael's neighbor, Ann, was there--just because she was interested in the process--and I felt I had to uphold an imagine of farm life that does not include chicken-induced hysteria. At one point Michael mentioned, as I was gutting away, that he was surprised I wasn't in the house with Margaret (who was the all-important babysitter of the team), after reading about my chicken issues on the blog. Ann looked a little confused to be hearing about cyber matters at the gutting table, and I quickly swept the matter aside with some tough talk about being up for anything, lest my cover be blown.

We plowed through those twenty-something birds and were on our way home by one. We did a little work on the house and I frosted the cake. Our friends all came over that night and Earl was all aglow with a house full of people wishing him happy birthday. I thought I would tell lots of stories about the chicken harvest, but there wasn't that much to tell, and I wasn't sure how much gut-spilling talk was appropriate over plates of pork vindaloo and macaroni and cheese. Still, I have to admit that even with the wonderful party, gutting chickens was the highlight of my weekend--a new skill, a tough-girl skill even, under my belt. Round two was scheduled for our house the following weekend.

Bring it on.

The Things I Learned From a Dying Chicken

2008-10-20T00:11:00.002-04:00

We have these five-week-old chicks, my impulse buy, that will hopefully someday relieve my anxiety about whether the chickens will have laid enough eggs for me to bake a cake. There are 30 of them, the Rainbow Layer Special pack plus 5 Barred Rocks. The chicks live in a nice little pen in the outer reaches of the Slab and are generally growing well.
One of the chicks, an Araucana, had a deformed beak that didn't match up to close properly. It looked sort of like the curved clippers you use on dogs' toenails. I've only raised two sets of chicks and I've had an Araucana with a messed-up beak in each one. In each case the chicken seemed to do just fine for the first five weeks or so, until the other birds got old enough for social ordering and started to pick on her. That's what happened with this one. I was looking at her in the morning, noticing that she wasn't growing quite as well as the others. I thought about separating her but, as Earl pointed out, her beak wasn't going to fix itself with nurturing and she'd either work it out or she wouldn't. When I checked back a few hours later, I found her smushed into the shavings, other birds stepping over her.

I thought she was dead and reached to pick up the body. And she moved. Of course, I was reaching to pick up the body with a paper towel because I am convinced that skin-to-chicken contact could be lethal to me. Especially skin-to-dead-chicken. But she was only mostly dead, and I set about trying to revive her. I got out some warm water and dissolved some sugar in it and, in the absence of an eye dropper, fed her some drops with the finger-held-over-the-end-of-a-straw trick. I brought her in the greenhouse where it was about 90 degrees and I tried to get some life in her. I won't keep you in suspense. She died anyway, but she seemed to breathe more comfortably for a short time. I'd like to think I brought her some comfort in her final hour, but I can't say that with confidence. I did, however, get to spend some time close up with a chicken that I was sure wasn't going to move and make fatal contact, so I learned a few things.

First, I learned that chicken eyelids are below the eye and come up to close.

Second, I learned that chickens can snore. Or maybe just dying chickens who have been fed drops of sugar water with a straw can snore, hard to say.

Third, and most notably, I got to see a chicken's tongue. I don't know that so many people have seen a chicken tongue, but I'm pretty sure the producers of horror movies have seen them. You know in a scary movie how sometimes a person will be walking through the woods, la dee da, and notice a hole and wonder, "Hmmm, that's odd. I wonder why there's a hole here?" And suddenly this long, pointed tongue will come out of the hole and wrap itself around the person's legs, dragging him/her to a horrible death? That tongue was a chicken tongue. And if a character was fighting his/her way through a host of horrible and fantastic creatures, and just when it was looking good for our hero, one of them appeared out of nowhere and roared a terrible roar, opening its mouth to reveal hundreds of razor sharp teeth and a skinny, wiggling tongue that you, the viewer, will see in your nightmares for weeks to come, that tongue was a chicken tongue. It is a truly frightening body part and I hope my experience with it is limited to this one episode.

So there you have it. Perhaps these little tidbits of information can help you win a trivia game in the twisted future our country seems headed for, though I, for one, hope it never comes to that.

Taffy

2008-10-19T19:23:00.004-04:00

I know, I know, I haven't been writing blog entries lately and I'm letting my committed readers, both of you, down. I'm sorry.

The problem is that all the decent stories of late are unbloggable, either because they hinge on the such a thorough immersion in farm life that they would never resonate with the general public, both of you, or they involve other people in way that I won't write about.

There haven't actually been that many good stories anyway. The current farm routine is for Earl to wake up and milk the cows, come back and help get the kids off to school, do farm stuff all day, except for lunch (or the occasional break, like yesterday when we took a decadent hour in the middle of the day to watch the last innings of that miraculous Game 6 that we were never going to stay awake to see, even if it hadn't seemed so hopeless for the Sox). He fixes machinery and gets it ready for the winter, builds and moves fences to get the cows out onto hayfields and to make the most of all the grass before the cows go on winter feed. Then he comes home around 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon and either helps me with supper or sits on the couch, depending on where I'm at and how completely whipped he is. For my part, I wake up and try to think if today is the day I'm finally going to get the onions, carrots, beets and potatoes out of the garden, or get the bills paid, or get the floor scrubbed. I get up and wake the kids and help with breakfast and pack lunchboxes and help the kids get dressed, hunting down socks and shoes and warm jackets, all of which have been tossed aside in the warmth of the previous afternoon. Should I go on? Aren't you bored? I feed and water all my different chicken projects and I talk on the phone and answer e-mails about business stuff, or the million things I keep trying not to volunteer for, or sometimes, even, to a friend. I take care of Oliver and try to make sure he has at least five minutes of laughter every day so he won't grow up to be a grumpy old man, and if Harley is home that day, we try to make cookies or do some project so he's not just constantly being schlepped around my work. Before I know it, it's dinner and bedtime and I fall asleep nursing my unweanable youngest child thinking maybe tomorrow will be the day that I finally get the garden in, pay the bills, or scrub the floor.

Yup. Sorry about that. I had tried to spare you.

Instead, I have decided to find some safe ground and do some cow profiles. I can slander the herd without hurting their feelings or disrupting my social future, and no one but Earl will know if I embellish.

I thought I would start with Taffy.

Taffy just turned nine, which is pretty old for a dairy cow. She looks great, though, and has the strong leg set and good body depth that are associated with bovine longevity. She makes a lot of milk and it's high in butterfat and very high in protein. Lifetime, she's 3.94 % fat and 3.45% protein, compared with national averages of around 3.3 and 3.0, respectively. It's not off the charts by any means, but spread out over her seven lactations, it's a solid performance.

Taffy wasn't born on the farm. Some of our favorite cows--Sweet Pea, Buelah, and Grushuna--have started their lives somewhere else. They happily joined the herd and understood that Earl was there for them and they, in turn, have been there for him. Taffy is a different story. She was born on Livewater Farm in Putney and apparently liked it a lot better than she likes it here. She was a few years old when she came here, and she's been here for almost five years, but she's still not over it. If you meet her gaze, which is hard to do because she mostly refuses to acknowledge our presence, her look is one of resigned contempt. She is not a favorite cow.

Taffy kicks. Not always, not even often, but sometimes, and there's no telling when that's going to be. Usually we say, and truly believe, that the cows are never the problem. If they are unhappy, it's because someone, or something has made them that way--an unpredictable action on the part of the humans, physical discomfort, or a disruption to their routine. Taffy, however, can come into the barn on the calmest, most routine day of the year, leaving one lovely pasture, about to return to one even lovelier, step into the parlor, wait for you to get close, and then try, with one swift, well-aimed shot, to smack you across the barn. Two seconds later, she acts like nothing happened. If she could, she'd be whistling.

Taffy is a Jersey and that may be part of the problem. We bought her at a time when we were very short of milk and saw an ad for organic cows for sale. Organic dairy cows are rather hard to come by, and Bill Acquaviva, of Livewater Farm, is known to take good care of his animals and to be a good guy. Organic Guernseys, our favorite cows in milk composition and temperament, are very hard to come by, so a Jersey like Taffy, who at least would have high butterfat, was very interesting to us. We worked out a fair price and Taffy has stayed healthy and milked well, so financially, she's been good for us.

From a having-fun-in-the-barn perspective, the only good thing about Taffy is that she looks a lot like Selma. Sometimes I'll milk Taffy and think I'm milking Selma and I won't realize until Selma comes in later that I was actually milking Taffy, only without the usual fear for my life.

Earl came back from the barn this morning and I told him I was writing about Taffy.

"Taffy is a bitch. Why do you want to write about her? he asked.

"Because she just calved and she's timely," I replied.

"Sylvia just calved and she's a sweetheart."

"Yeah? How many paragraphs could you write about Sylvia?"

"Um. Maybe one."

"How many could you write about Taffy?"

"Probably three. At least."

So there you go. Profile on Taffy.

Cock-a-doodle-doo

2008-10-16T21:55:00.004-04:00

I read somewhere, in what was supposed to be an excerpt from a spy manual, that the real way to make people crazy, like lose-your-cool-and-spill-all-the-secrets, don't-know-who-to-trust crazy is to sneak into their bedrooms and make very, very minor changes, moving things a few inches one way or another, and then to slowly increase the changes until the target loses all faith in his memory and ability to understand the world and everyone he complains to says he's crazy and then he believes it and there you go.

That might be a good way to take down a spy, but if you want to take down a mother of four young children, set up a coop of meat chickens behind the house and let them get old enough for the roosters start to crow. They don't crow like Buster.

Buster came to us a full-grown rooster, so I don't know what his early vocal experiments were like, but now he has the classic, almost musical except that it's really, really annoying, rooster crow. It's not cookadoodledo, but it's a close Raaa-raa-raa-raaaaaaaaaaa. Actually, the English language does not have characters for the sound, but if you scrunch up your nose and upper lip like you want to make a pig grunting noise, then try to make your mouth tall and narrow like a fish, tip your head back and then try to make the Raaa-raa-raa-raaaaaaaa noise, you'll just about have it. It's loud and awful at three o'clock in the morning, but it's unmistakably a rooster crowing.

The meat birds, on the other hand, sound just like an unhappy child. Their crows sound something like waaa-waaaaaa and are made with one's face in the unhappy-child-pouting position. There are 36 birds out there and about half of them are roosters and some are bigger than others and between them, they have the first two notes of child-distress covered for children ages 8 to 18 months. Possibly, they can do older and younger children, too, but Cliffy is eight and Oliver is eighteen months and, along with five-year-old Jackson and three-year-old Harley, they all sound like they're having big troubles about every five minutes, sunup to sundown.

These first two notes of crying, as any parent knows, are the ones that tune one's ear to listen for whether the problem is hunger, frustration, disappointment, injustice, physical pain, actual injury, existentialist angst or mortal peril. The silence following those notes can be a child who is very, very upset taking a big breath for better screaming, the airway closing, or the child getting distracted and moving on. I think if you added up all the seconds I've spent, ear strained, listening to the post waaa-waaaaaa silence, you'd have the tensest ten hours of my life.

And now, since last weekend, the chickens are doing it to me, too. Oliver took a three-hour nap today, but every few minutes, I was sure he was up and sad. You'd think I would get used to it after a while and learn the difference between chickens and children, but they sound exactly the same and the one time I don't react would be the one time a kid really needed me.

We'll be rolling out the chopping block before too long, and I'd like to think I'm a mentally strong person, so I think I can make it. As long as no one moves the stuff on my dresser or rearranges the spices, I think I'll be okay. Later, when the coop is silent, I can relax with a hot bowl of chicken soup.

Athletics and Chicken Catching

2008-10-02T06:39:00.004-04:00

Cliffy had a soccer game yesterday. His team won 6-2, prevailing mostly by way of teamwork, athleticism, and the never-say-die attitude of a great many of the players. Sam is fast and strong and knows how to position himself on the field. Harvey is big and tricky and lets the little guys run all around him while he calmly takes the ball right where he wants to go. Donovan is an opportunist and takes a great shot on goal. Graham is a classic soccer kid, skilled and fast, bursting on the ball and moving it down the field. Iva and Olive are afraid of nothing and fast. Molly can clear the ball halfway up the field. Nick is the athletic equivalent of a squirrel, zipping impossibly all over the field, stealing the ball away from the other team, delivering it to one of his teammates, and disappearing again into the pack. And Cliffy. Well, Cliffy likes to be out there and he had a shot on goal yesterday that was only a little wide. He likes his cleats and his shin guards and his silky shorts. He has fun and he doesn't care about his performance. It's not like catching chickens.

Cliffy could go to the Olympics for chicken catching. And chicken catching isn't easy. They are hardwired to scatter in all directions when threatened. I had to catch chickens when we first got them from Earl's brother, Berry. Berry had given away most of his chickens and there were something like forty left and Nancy and I were splitting them. We went over after she wrapped up the Creamery work for the day. It was late afternoon in February and I was more than seven months pregnant with Oliver. Kathy, Berry's lead caregiver and one of the most-capable women on the planet, was there and we had some big cardboard boxes that we were filling with chickens. I was wearing nice heavy winter clothing, complete with thick gloves, all the better to insulate my hands from actually feeling chicken parts. Nancy has a gentle, kind soul that animals recognize instantly and she proceeded to fill her box by cooing gently to her hens and then cradling them in her arms, lowering them into her box with scarcely a cluck. Kathy and I had a different approach and went for the all-out chicken rodeo. We had a net. We cornered them. We lunged. We ran fake plays and tried to sneak up on them. I'd get a few in the net and Kathy would fish them out by their legs and drop them in the box and we'd start again. The whole coop was full of feathers and clucking and the morbid laughter of three women who absolutely did not have chicken catching in their post-graduation career plans. Nancy filled her box way before we did, but she helped with the rest and before too long we were loading up boxes of chicken and I was heading back to the farm.

Cliffy was only six at the time and just starting to grow out of his little-boy-who-plays-on-the-floor-with-blocks body. Eight-year-old Cliffy, the current model, is a chicken catching machine. He would have made quick work of the chicken boxing and those Rhode Island Reds wouldn't have known what hit them.

Our current chicken catching project involves the meat chickens who are living in the Moop (mobile coop) for a few more weeks. The Moop is on skids and it doesn't sit exactly tight to the ground and these birds are either crawling out under the chicken wire or flying over the fence in their play yard. It's hard to imagine anything that fat and non-aerodynamic crawling through a small opening or flying, even over a four-foot net, but the chickens don't have a whole lot else to focus their energy on and somehow about five of them seem to be out every day by mid-afternoon. I have a few ways that I've used to lure them back in through the people door, but the best plan for getting them is to wait until Cliffy comes home from school.

He walks near them, looking at the ground, hands in pockets, talking softly around the lines of, "Oh no, Mrs. Chicken. I'm not going to catch you. I'm just going on little recreational stroll here. Nothing to worry about." And then he turns like lightning, grabs a leg, and tosses the chicken over the fence. Then his hands are in his pockets again and it's, "Oh. I'm just stretching my legs here, Chicken Friends. Just taking a little walk..." Sometimes the chickens catch on and do their scramble thing and he'll chase them, staying with their panic until they have a moment's hesitation and then he swoops in and grabs a leg.

And like all athletes, he likes to develop his skills. Especially if Pemma is here. They bring the dog inside, who doesn't understand it's just a game, and they ask if it's okay if they round up the laying hens and put them back in the coop. I let them catch the old Rhode Island reds because they don't lay hardly any eggs and if they died of cardiac arrest, it would save on the grain bill. Cliffy and Pemma run and laugh and hatch plans and they catch the chickens and come to tell me the thrilling tales.

I'm not a parent who needs her kid to be good at sports, but I'll admit that there is a part of me, maybe even a big part, who wants them to try. I want them to practice and get better at things and practice more and maybe even get really good at something. I want them think of themselves as improvable. This is a big deal with me and has carried me through a great many tricky spots. I have never been the fastest, strongest, most graceful, or most anything. I have, however, been willing to work myself into the ground to make a respectable showing. The thing is, it starts with caring about making a respectable showing. I think Cliffy and Jackson care about this a little, because it bugged them when they couldn't ride a bike when their friends could and they were willing to get back on after some spectacular crashes to learn. They don't seem to care about soccer. But Cliffy does care about chicken catching. He rubs his hands together in that time-honored gesture of Showtime as he struts out to the Moop. If the chickens are scattering, he doesn't give up, knowing in his heart that he's smarter, faster, and more persistent than they are. I have even heard him, dragging a struggling bird out of the chicken wire, say, "I...will....not...be...beat....by...a...stupid...chicken."

There was a farm boy who won a gold medal at the Olympics before last. He was a wrestler and he beat some Russian guy who hadn't lost in years and who had weighed over 15 lbs. when he was born. The farm kid, who was from Wyoming, said he grew up pushing cows around and the Russian guy wasn't much different. Later on, that same guy survived some dire-sounding plane crash on with a similar attitude of expecting to overcome difficulties through sheer strength.

I'm not sure how chicken catching might help Cliffy in the future, but as I was writing this, I noticed one of the meat birds had gotten out. I mentioned it to Cliffy, who said, "But I'm doing my HOMEWORK, Mama." I gave him a look, the Are-You-Crazy-to-be-Passing-Up-a-Beloved-Activity look, and he looked out the window, saw the chicken, and was off like a shot, calling over his shoulder, "You should take a picture for the bloggggg!" Jackson volunteered to take the picture and ran after him. Cliffy opted for the direct run-from-the-outset approach and went a lap and a half around the fence and and Moop before he zoomed in for a leg. He was faster than Jackson, though and had to wait, beaming, chicken aloft, for Jax to scramble out there and take the picture.

Later when we eat these chickens, and especially when we eat the last one, Cliffy will be our dinner-table hero, for all the birds who stayed safe in the coop at night, protected from coyotes, so they could make their way to our plates. And who knows, maybe at one of those dinners we'll be celebrating a particularly good outing on the soccer or baseball field.

I Am One of Them

2008-09-08T22:51:00.005-04:00

Last week I did something I said I would never do. I keep waiting for the world to be different because of it, but so far, not much has changed.

The thing I did was pluck a chicken. Truth be told, I only plucked a little bit of the chicken, but it still involved using my fingers to pull feathers out of a freshly-killed carcass and I was starting to get the hang of it just before I got too wigged and Earl had to finish up. I actually would have been fine, except that Earl was going to leave to go to the fire department meeting and I wasn't going to let him go until the chicken was in the pot. To my way of thinking, there is a big difference between plucking a chicken with Earl, who knows how to do it, right there, and me, the only adult on the farm, plucking a chicken at the sink with four little kids running around at my feet. Like drinking, plucking is different if you have to do it alone.

We were plucking this chicken because my mom was sick and I said I wished I had a chicken on hand so I could make her soup. And Earl said, "Want me to kill you a chicken?" We had just been talking about the old Rhode Island Reds being essentially worthless, non-egg-laying, grain-devouring parasites, and it seemed like a good idea. The kids were intrigued and jumped in their boots to watch. Half an hour later, they appeared with a chicken.

I didn't expect it to look like a supermarket chicken, but I have to admit I was really hoping it would. No such luck. The wings, Earl decided, were too scrawny to be worth plucking and still had feathers on them. The rest of the body was mostly bald and dimply, but there were about a hundred stubby little feathers still left on the bird. We set the carcass in a clean sink, washed up and had supper. When I was done eating, I got up to try to finish the plucking so I could put the soup on.

I cut off the wings, no problem, but then there were feathery chicken wings in the sink. I didn't want to touch them, so I took a small paper bag, turned it inside out, and scooped them up and folded the bag over them. In a nanosecond, I was out at the furnace, tossing in the bag. A few minutes later, the woodsmoke took on the faint smell of fried chicken. This is one of the beauties of running a wood furnace (for hot water) year round.

Then it was time for the actual plucking.

The stubby feathers were surprisingly hard to pull out. I twisted, squeezed and jerked and made some progress, but I had to motivate myself with the Little House on the Prairie Example. Ma Ingalls would never have scrinched up her nose at the thought of plucking a feather-bed filling, fresh protein source. Mostly, though, I thought of how I'm really glad there are machines that can do this, one of which we will be borrowing for the Big Chicken Harvest that's coming up in a few weeks.

I have never seen one of these machines in person, but I understand that there is a drum and there are rubber fingers and one holds the bird by the legs and maybe tips a bit this way and that and the bird is bald in about a minute, less with practice. Sort of like swirling cotton candy, but with the reverse effect. Apparently, the bird must first be dipped in 145 degree water, which miraculously makes bird skin grow indifferent to its feathers. Then the tub does its thing, you chop off the legs, and we're in my comfort zone--supermarket frying bird.

The machine we will borrow, from our dear friends and personal poultry heros, Michael and Margaret, is called the Feathermaster Pro and I have just learned that one does not hold onto the chicken's legs when plucking with this model. One simply tosses in the dead bird, roulette ball style, and after some bumping with the rubber fingers, one is able to pause the machine and fish out a bald chicken. Out there on the market, I hear, are also the Whizbang Plucker and a unit called, no joke, The Mother Plucker. (Mother Pluckers, incidentally, is also the name of a group of middle-aged women harpists in Texas.)

Well, that's really all there is to this story. I made the soup and sent it to my mom and she was feeling so much better that she went out for Chinese food instead, which I'll take any day. Meanwhile, I have crossed a line. I can't say anymore, when describing how farm life is for me, that I happily milk the cows, can drive a tractor in a pinch, but that it's not like I'm plucking chickens or anything.

I've been expecting a min-van, or maybe a crew-cab pickup to pull into the dooryard and a small flock of ladies in calico dresses or overalls to get out and give me my membership materials. A few years ago, I probably would have made my way out the back door screaming, but today, if they show up, I think I might ask them for advice on those hard-to-pluck pin feathers.

The Birds

2008-09-06T06:21:00.005-04:00

I'm got up early this morning to enjoy a few minutes of quiet house before the kids get up and we work on our projects for the Tunbridge Fair, which starts on Thursday.

And the house is quiet, but the farm is a fucking riot of bird noise.

There is Buster the Rooster, whose ninety-decibel crow is only slightly muted by the walls of the heifer barn. There is the new little rooster, christened Mr. Feather by Harley, who hatched from some eggs we incubated this spring. He is Buster's son and likely on his way to a new level of rooster operatics, but he's just starting with his first raspy crows this week. I think it's hard for a rooster to be outcrowed, and Mr. Feather answers every one of Buster's calls and then practices in between.

The roosters are making a lot of noise, but the crazy loudness is coming from the field in front of the house. There are maybe a thousand birds, maybe more, flying and cawing. At first I thought maybe there was a migration going by, but migratory birds usually stay higher than this and they usually save their energy for flying, emitting only the occasional honk, chirp or quack. These birds are flying in groups, but they're just flying back and forth across the field, from the trees on one side to the trees on the other. Sometimes the whole group does a swoop up high or down low, but mostly they are just zooming back and forth, sometimes running their groups right through each other, like a bird game of Chicken, except that no self-respecting bird would give the name, "Chicken," any place in a game of fancy flying and mock aerial combat.

The birds are definitely cawing, but they aren't big enough to be crows. They don't look big enough to be making such a deep noise. They look about the size of grackles, but I didn't think grackles did the flock thing until I just looked it up on Wikipedia and learned that joining up in a big gang and making a boatload of noise is what grackles do in the fall. What fun. Well, if it's grackles, that explains a lot. Grackles are sort of fun to watch, once you get over the part where they are nesting in the house, waking the baby with their 700 tph (trips per hour) nest making and baby-bird feeding, and filling the soffits with their toxic bird shit.

I get great comfort, when I am lying in bed desperate for twenty more minutes of sleep or sitting at the computer desperate for twenty minutes of focused work, that the world is full of people, stacked up in apartments and offices, who regularly sleep and work through traffic, sirens and maybe even the occasional human riot. I should be able to sleep through a few hundred rooster calls or work through a game of grackle Red Rover outside my door. Maybe it's different with birds, or maybe I'm just hardwired to take their calling personally. If Buster is crowing at 4:15 and Earl is already gone to the barn, I think, "Up with the rooster. Up with the rooster. I'd be a more productive person if I was up with the rooster." If a flock of geese fly over, on perfect seasonal schedule, I fret over all the things I haven't done to get ready for winter. The grackles don't move me to self improvement, but they do piss me off with all their raucous, unmannered fun.

Well, now the kids are up and the grackles have gone to show off for someone else. I was up with the rooster but made no progress on the seasonal program. I have, however, supper all planned out.

Revenge might be a dish best served cold, but we'll be having hot, steamy chicken pot pie.

Impulse Buying

2008-08-24T08:26:00.003-04:00

When I was in law school, my classmates were forever using the Send To Everyone e-mail option to promote their ideas for the betterment of the world. We were urged to boycott military recruiting (no problem), hang our laundry on a clothesline (good idea) and, for one day honor National Buy Nothing Day. The last suggestion came a week in advance of the holiday and came with a list of helpful ways to get through the day as well as the promise of raising one's consciousness by spending 24 hours outside of the retail universe.

I had to laugh, and once again shake my head at Vermont Law School and its environmentally-minded student body who, for the most part, just liked the idea of the environment and had spent precious little time out in it. There were Masters Studies in Environment Law (MSEL) students who had never, not even once, slept anywhere but in a building with road access. Apparently, there were also students who, since becoming independent commercial units, had never gone a whole day without buying anything.

For me, right now, I haven't been buying much of anything. I ordered some school clothes for the boys and I took Jackson and Harley to the general store on Friday to spend the money Cliffy gave them for dressing up as stripes of the Neatherlands' flag for his soccer camp tournament. (Oliver, the blue stripe, performed gratis.) Our daily needs right now are being met by the flour I buy in 25 lb. bags, the beef in the freezer, and the garden, creamery and laying hens. For years, whenever I would ask Earl if he needed anything at the stupidmarket, he would say, "Milk? Meat? Eggs? Maple Syrup? Nope. Can't think of a thing." This, of course, was his cutsie tactic for avoiding spending any mental energy on the pantry, but it highlighted the point that we didn't actually NEED any food. The last few years, the un-shopping list has included potatoes, frozen corn, and carrots. We've also stopped buying heating oil for the house, running all our heat and hot water off the outdoor wood boiler.

I like living like this, of course, but I was raised in The Land of Commerce where hardly a month passed without at least one day of recreational shopping mall time. So sometimes it's like a timer goes off with me and I just sort of feel like buying something. Last night, that something was chickens.

Yup. Chickens. As if I don't have enough chickens already. We have seven old-past-laying Rhode Island Reds that Berry gave us when he gave up chicken farming in February 2007. We have seven should-be-laying-in-their-prime chickens who are good for maybe three eggs a day, collectively. Maybe just two. We have Buster, the rooster, whose internal clock is apparently floating in the middle of the Atlantic, where dawn is heralded in at 3:30 am, our time. We have a young rooster, a young hen and a sex-yet-to-be-determined chicken from the thirty-one eggs I tried to hatch in the incubator this Spring. And we have thirty-six meat chickens who should be fattened and moving to the freezer in about six weeks.

Six weeks from now is four weeks from the next ship date for McMurray's Hatchery's Rainbow Layer Assortment. Four weeks is about how old chickens should be when they're ready to move out to the coop. And the Barred Rocks, whose black-and-white variegated feathers I have always admired, were available too! Doesn't that seem providential?

Well, last night when Earl was at the barn and the kids were playing with Legos and supper was cooking and my e-mail inbox was empty for the second day in a row, it seemed like such a good idea. I love fresh eggs. The birds who are supposed to be laying really well aren't and, if I had some big baking projects to do, I might have to, gasp, buy eggs. Now, you might reasonably ask if maybe the reason that these birds aren't laying so well is if perhaps they are getting somewhat less than optimal care. And yes, it's true that they are eating 10% protein dairy pellets instead of the 18% layer mash that would be best. And sometimes their water gets empty. But they're running all over the farm and it's not like they can't find bugs to supplement their protein needs or water from a puddle. And the truth about their laying is that it's entirely possible that they are, in fact, laying an egg a day each. They're just laying them in some tucked-away spot that we won't find until we're feeding out hay and come across a clutch of forty frozen eggs, like we did last winter.

But these next chickens will be better. They'll live in the Moop, a mobile coop that Earl's dad, Woody, designed for Berry a few years ago. It's on skids and Earl pulled it over here with the bulldozer to put the meat birds in. It has a built-in grain bin, laying boxes, roosts, and a whole slanting wall of Phylon translucent fiberglass that makes the Moop like a little greenhouse. It has an automatic waterer that will work for the non-freezy months and twelve laying boxes with a drop-down back door for easy collection. Isn't that perfect?

Well, we'll see. I entered my shipping and billing information and they're coming the week of September 8th.

Big Steve

2008-08-20T07:12:00.006-04:00

It used to be, if you wanted to climb Pooh, a classic 5.7 on Cathedral Ledge in New Hampshire, you went first to Yesterday's restaurant and talked to Willie Zeliff about borrowing Big Steve. Big Steve was a camming unit, like the one at the right in the picture, that fit perfectly in the roof of the overhang and would hold the rope, and keep you alive and happy, if you fell trying to get on top of that chunk of rock that sticks out, an awkward move infamously known throughout the Mount Washing Valley climbing community as, "Mounting the Horse." Big Steve was far too big and far too expensive for most people to have on their racks, but Willie had it, and he was a kind and generous man and happy to lend it out.

I climbed Pooh twice. Once, when I was first learning to climb, with my then-boyfriend, Pete, who was the human equivalent of a squirrel. He was small, agile, and moved quickly, from place to place, rock to rock, and subject to subject. That wasn't really much following him, but I tried for a while, and Pooh was one of the places I followed him. Pete didn't believe in doing things the easy way (like filtering giardia-infected water when backpacking, staking out the tent when high winds were forecast, or opening a beer with anything other than his teeth) and borrowing Big Steve was as unthinkable as owning an umbrella. It made no difference to me, though, because I was just following up the rope and if I fell I wasn't going anywhere. Pete was not going to fall on a 5.7 climb unless God Himself peeled him off, so we climbed Steveless without issue.

The second time I climbed Pooh, I climbed with a woman friend. Let's call her Maggie. Maggie had this great idea that we would do this Great Feminist Thing and climb Pooh together. I think she thought maybe we would have some notable adventure and go to the bar afterward and talk about it like we'd red-pointed Liquid Sky or something. As it turned out, Maggie was a bit of a dub, freaking out at the hard parts, using unethical (and bad-for-my-rope) techniques to inch her way up, and then proclaiming proudly at the top, "See. We didn't need men for that!" Well, perhaps not, but we did need Big Steve, who had made my own overhang scramble much safer, though not quite as safe as if I'd had a partner who understood the gravity of the situation. In her Go-Sister enthusiasm, I thought I heard her clapping in encouragement, which cheered me not at all. (Belaying your rock climbing partner is absolutely a two-handed job.) I was happy to return Big Steve to Willie, thank him, and spend the rest of the summer climbing with my real sister and the occasional self-absorbed man.

I don't know how Big Steve got its name, but when you're looking at it, the name, and the need for it to have a name, are obvious. Big Steve is anything that is disproportionately bigger than its usual form.

Since then, Big Steve has become the commercial mixer that I bought a few years ago, looking just like the good-sized countertop model I already had, only three times the size. Big Steve is the fly swatter my mom found for me at Ben Franklin that has a 10 x 6 head and a two-foot handle. Big Steve is Earl's sledge hammer, my biggest whisk, and the metal salad bowl.

When the 1000 rpm tractor was broken a few years ago when the power was out and we needed to rent a tractor to run the generator at the creamery, the only one that would fit the bill was pretty big, with eight-foot rear wheels. Earl called from the road to let me know that we had a solution to the problem and added, "I am driving Big Steve."

The boys have picked up on this and Big Steve has also been a strawberry, a cucumber, and a corn flake.

Sometimes we are looking for Big Steve when we don't have him, as in, holding up an adjustable wrench, and asking "Do we have a Big Steve one of these?"

I don't know if Willie still has Big Steve, or even if he still has Yesterday's restaurant. I'd like to think, though, that it's still there, behind the counter, waiting to climb Pooh, over and over again, with Willie's friends and acquaintances. Someday, when I swap out Big Steve, my climbing duffel for Big Steve, the diaper bag which lives in my back seat, I may just go make the inquiry myself.

You Learn Something New Everyday

2008-08-07T13:37:00.002-04:00

One of the great advantages of being married to Earl is that he's like an encylopedia of random information. Long before you could ask Jeeves, you could ask Earl.

Today, for example, Oliver crawled up on the table and was hitting the squeezy bottle of mustard with a butter knife. (When you're sixteen months old, this is high entertainment.) Earl was eating lunch and called the rest of us over and we watched to see if, in fact, Oliver could cut the mustard. Alas, he could not.

So I asked Earl where the expression came from. I didn't ask him if he knew, because I was pretty sure he did and since I have only recently stopped being pissed off by his bottomless knowledge, I skipped the part where he apologetically tells me that, yes, he does know the answer. Earl switched into Professor Mode (it's what he was going to do if he wasn't a dairy farmer) and replied, "It's an agricultural idiom, owing to the strength of the mustard stem." I asked him if the mustard that we just mowed (because the fucking crows ate almost all of the corn seed and mustard came up instead) had dulled the mower blades and he said yes, but that they had been very sharp before he mowed those fields. If your blades aren't very sharp, you won't cut the mustard.

So there you go. Perhaps when a hay mower was a person with curved knife (like in the Van Gogh painting), mustard was part of the job interview.

That's my new thing I learned today. Maybe everyone else already knew about mustard cutting, but I didn't. It does me not a lick of good--the crows still ate the corn and the nearly-worthless mustard still took over the field and the expensive mower blades are still needing to be replaced. But like a good consolation prize, I do feel a little bit better.

Maybe next year I'll learn to shoot a moving target from 100 yds. and I'll take care of our crow problem. Maybe I'll make them into pie. Come to think of it, I'll bet that's the origin of that nursery rhyme. If I had four and twenty dead blackbirds, I would likely have my sixpence (or $800 in corn seed anyway) and a pocketful of rye (a favorite of crows of yore). I'd be singing and my husband would feel like a king. Like all the best times in a farmer's life, this would be the celebration of a crisis averted.

Potato Bug Economics

2008-08-01T18:43:00.003-04:00

This has been an expensive summer. There's the fuel prices, the payments on the new round baler, all that. And then there's the potato bug eradication fees. The kids, and their visiting cousins and friends, have squeezed more than thirty bucks out of me since the beginning of June. I pay 25 cents for an adult or a group of babies (aka larvae) or a bunch of eggs and 5 cents for a lone baby. Jackson counts his own. Cliffy tabulates for the two of them and Harley usually finds eleventeen or four-seven-one hundred, so he gets a small handful of pennies and nickels and is happy. The potatoes are the hands-down success story of the garden; the mere mention of money or potato bugs sends them out there at a dead run.

They're just little kids, and I understand that I'm paying more than the going rate, but it seems to me I have a critical mission with these kids; if they don't grow up thinking of tending plants and animals as a profitable enterprise, they'll not very likely to want to farm when they grow up. This raises the question, of course, whether I should be having ideas about what my kids will do when they grow up, or whether I should try to give them good solid life skills to take out in the world in whatever professions call to them. The thing is, that I'm pretty sure that the world is going to need farmers in a rather huge way in a few years. There are more farmers leaving the profession than entering it and, unlike a great many professions--law, for example--it's not the sort of thing you can pick up in just a few years of higher education. I may be a little alarmist about this, but it seems to me that if I want to raise kids who won't be worrying about where their next meal is coming from, the best way to do that is to teach them to grow their own food and to want to keep the farm going so they'll have a place to grow it.

I'm not sure what would happen if I didn't have their help with the potato bugs. Certainly, we would lose some plants. Maybe we'd even lose the whole crop. There's about forty-five feet of double-wide potato hill out there, enough to feed us for the whole year if we get decent yield. Potatoes aren't especially expensive, but I would definitely go through at least $200 of them next year if I had to buy them. So the kids might actually be a bargain.

Sometimes, like this morning, I ask the kids if they would like to use some of their money to buy a toy. I open up amazon.com and run searches for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, remote-controlled robots, or Legos. They ooh and aah and point to say what they want, but they never want to spend their money. They say, "Twenty dollars, for that LITTLE TOY?! What can I get for four dollars?" Then they say they want to keep their money and they think ahead to the pumpkins they planted, and how the financial outlook for the Fall is rather good. They can get the robot if they sell ten pumpkins. And they'll have some money left over for seeds in the Spring.

Kid of the Week or A Farm Treatise on Post-Moderism

2008-07-16T00:05:00.006-04:00

I didn't think it would be an issue quite yet, but I am having to make decisions about what to let my kid look at on the internet.

Cliffy likes to read the blog.

Hmmm. There is the language, which I would like to pretend he doesn't hear from me out loud. (We talk about how his mama is a potty mouth and how that's sort of okay because she's a grown up and doesn't really have to impress anyone in her line of work, but that he's a kid and his future is still open and he'll have more high-quality wife options and better jobs if he learns to express himself within the pages of Webster's Unabridged.)

It's not the language. It's the idea that there is a narrator to this life of ours.

My absolute favorite college professor at Oregon, Michael J. Clark, had this example he used to illustrate the Post-Modern Condition: a post-coital couple is lying in bed, maybe smoking, and the woman says, "This must be ecstasy we are experiencing." This line, from a book he never had us read, made him physically jumpy. I could never tell, and still can't, even though I'm older now than he was then, whether he was impressed by the savvy of the author, showing a bit of his craft (it's not ecstasy unless I, the writer, say it is) or he thought the world was going to hell in a bucket because people in this post-modern era can't experience anything directly, without first putting a word on it so we know how we're supposed to feel and act. Probably it was both. Funny that Post-Modernism was so intensely interesting to Michael that I think he forgot himself a little, pacing around the front of the classroom, all elbows and half-laced Doc-Martined feet, flipping his long hair out of his eyes, trying so hard to communicate to his public university students the idea that words can be mittens that keep us from really feeling the world at the same time that they frame its meaning.

Professor Clark's 20th Century Lit class lurks in a troubled corner of my brain. On the one hand, there's just my life and the kids and farm and all the stuff that comes with it that, as we are fond of saying around here, we can't go over, can't go under, so we just have to go through it. On the other hand, there's the blog. There's me trying to e-mail pictures off the cell phone to post here (they came out upside-down and blurry--be good in this life or you might have to come back as a cell phone that Earl carries around in his farm-junk-laden pockets) while the heifers are stuck in the manure pit and the plan to return them to their pasture is only half hatched. Even the kids are caught up in this, looking over their shoulders at me saying, "You should put this in the blog."

The other thing they think I should put in the blog, and what I originally set out to write about, is the Kid of the Week program around here. I've lost track of how it started, but a few weeks ago, Cliffy put on his super-suit and seemed to decide he was going to be a good sport about everything and make the summer great--for him and everyone else. He read books to his brothers, he let Jackson use his special plate, he reached things that were too high for Harley, he asked Oliver if he would like to knock over towers and then offered them up for destruction, again and again. He kept the compost empty and the chickens watered and the dog fed and appeared at my elbow when I was cooking supper, reading my mind and handing me the vegetable peeler just as I was wanting it. He picked strawberries for dessert, got milk and cream from the creamery when we needed it, and motivated his brothers to zoom around the house, putting toys away, so I would say, "Wow," when I saw it. You get the idea.

Sometimes Earl and I worry that Cliffy wants so desperately to please us that he loses track of what he wants out of the world. Mostly Earl worries about that. I am counting on the genetic impossibility that a child who hails from such a long line of ornery people could be a yes man. I also see that Cliffy gets what he wants, appreciation, prestige and money (I pay by the bug for potato bugs and their eggs and Cliffy, his math skills and the potato plants are doing very well with this arrangement.) He also gets to choose some of our activities and where he sits in the car, because Kid of the Week has some privileges.

My mom, who worked her childhood ass off taking care of her seven younger siblings, says that her parents would sit outside her door every night and say, "I don't know how we'd manage without Helen. She really is a blessing." And because we are all just repeating our childhoods (unless we get a lot of therapy to overcome them), Helen is still saving the day for the people blessed enough to have her in their lives (like me and my sibbies). And that's the good thing words can do--they can transform, "Here I am, sweeping the dirty floor again," to, "Here I am, with my broom and dustpan, holding the world together."

I guess whether he reads about himself in the blog or not, Cliffy will find his own level of self-narration. He may, like me, find his early adulthood punctuated by deliberate efforts to shut off the voice-over in his head by putting his journal in the basement and dating someone incapable of abstract thought. Or he might dedicate himself to his Facebook or MySpace pages or post YouTube instructional videos. He might even keep a blog.

Heifer Rodeo

2008-07-14T08:13:00.006-04:00

Let's see. I guess the beginning of this story is why there are heifers over the hill in the first place. There's this property tax thing called Current Use and it means that if you have 25 acres or more that is being actively used for agricultural purposes, either as a managed woodlot with a forestry plan and regular cutting, or hayed or grazed or plowed by a farmer, than you pay taxes on a set agricultural value, not on the development value. If land has been in Current Use and then it gets taken out, then the owners have to pay back some of the saved taxes, which can be a lot of money. The idea is to reduce the tax pressure on farmers. A nice side benefit, from our perspective, is that people ask us to hay their land so they can keep it enrolled in current use. Marc and Ella are two of these people. They bought an old farm just over the hill from us, in Tunbridge, a few years back and asked us to hay their fields. Last summer, they asked if we had any animals to graze the un-mowable pastures. Earl brought over a group of heifers and they did pretty well for the summer.

This year, Marc and Ella are having a lot of work done on their house so they can retire and live there full time. The barn where Earl plugs in the fence charger doesn't have its own power anymore and the contractors, needing the outlet for their tools, unplugged the extension cord, and consequently unplugged the fence. Sometimes they forgot to plug it back in. Or they plugged it back in, but it's a GFI outlet and it tripped and then the fence was off again. Eventually, the cows figured it out, then they escaped. Then one of the neighbors, or one of the contractors, or Marc and Ella who have come to check on the progress, would call us and tell us they're out. Then we'd put them back in. Then they'd get out again, having developed a teenager's disrespect for the fence.

I think we've been over there about thirty times in the last month, maybe more.

We've tried things. We put them in the non-electric pastures. Of the three pastures (the heifers graze bigger pastures for longer than the milking cows) only one relies on the electric fence. The other two are surrounded by barbed wire that was put up by the previous owners of the farm. The barbed wire does a better job, but one of these cows is Tasha's daughter, Tana, who, like her mother, is smart, crafty, and a bit of a ring leader. Tana has it in her head that this is a summer without fences and she's getting out of the barbed wire, too. We walk the perimeter of these pastures, looking for gaps or trees on the fence. We stay and watch the cows graze and make sure they respond appropriately to the fence. While we are there, everything is in order.

So yesterday, an otherwise slow-starting Saturday morning, was punctuated by a phone call from someone who had cows on his lawn. This time the call was from Gilly Hill, off the back side of Marc and Ella's property. Earl took the Ranger (our nifty little four-wheel-drive, bench seat, three-foot-bed ATV-like workhorse) over there. He tracked them up and around and over the hill, trying, unsuccessfully, to see how they got out (always the first step). Then he drove over to Gilly Hill and found them. He wasn't 100% confident about the Ranger on the trails through the woods, so he decided to take them back over the road. He had taken a cell phone along and called to ask me if I could come over and direct the cows through the intersection at the corner of Kibling Hill and Potash. I loaded up the kids and drove over. We got in position and called Earl for instruction. He said he was at the Pease Farm, about 100 yds. up the road, and that I should probably come over there, because there were three heifers in the manure pit and it was going to take some doing to get them out.

We were there quick enough and piled out of the car. For a while, all we could do was stare. The manure pit was maybe four feet deep and three of the cows (including Tana), thought they had outsmarted Earl and found an escape route They had run in about fifteen feet each, up to their shoulders, and then couldn't move any more. They were like little pathetic islands. Cows are fatalistic animals and when things are going poorly for them and their options seem exhausted, they give up hope and act sort of dead. So when Cliff Pease backed his tractor up to one of the cows (with the manure up to the top of the four-foot wheels) and Earl hopped off the fender, onto her back, straddling her as he put a halter over her head, I'm pretty sure she was thinking, "Oh. This is what happens when you're dead. Someone climbs on your back and then puts a halter on you. Oh. And then pulls you by a chain through the deep manure, which I think I'm glad to be dead for." After the cow got back on dry land, she just lay there for a while until it crossed her mind, in the dimmest of ways, that she might not actually be dead, at which point she stood up and followed Earl, who tied her to the Ranger and then went, with Cliff and the tractor, to get the next cow.

The boys and I weren't much help for this part. We tried to take some pictures, but the cell phone spends a lot of time in Earl's pocket and the lens isn't exactly optically sound anymore. So we just watched, the boys open mouthed with wonder at the coolness of getting to see something like this and me fiddling with the phone, texting in the e-mail address to send the pictures back to the computer. I'm sure my tapping away on the keyboard like a city girl (really, it was only the second time I've taken a picture with a camera phone) figured into Cliff's telling of the story back at the Pease compound. We did help put the cows into the trailer, which Cliff generously offered to transport them back to their pasture.

The cows that weren't in the manure pit ended up in a barn with the Pease's youngest heifers. Cliff was able to get the trailer most of the way to the door, but the boys and I had to be a wall to channel them in. Moving cows always consists of one person who is the Chief actually moving the cows and telling the other people where to stand and act like walls. Not the quiet kind of wall, but the kind of wall that is inhospitable to cows because it is making noise or waving around an arm or stick. At one point, Harley and Cliffy (our seven-year-old, not to be confused with Cliff, who is in his early thirties) were being a wall and the heifer they were channeling had the thought that Harley wasn't much of an obstacle and took a few steps to get past him. Earl was quicker and closed the gap before she could bolt and Harley got knocked off balance and fell down. He had been standing his ground, though, and popped right up, waving his stick and staring her down. It really is great fun, when you're three, to pretend you're a ninja warrior, wave a stick and make an eight-hundred pound animal go where you want her to.

When we got home, the phone was ringing and it was Clint, the butcher, calling to say the steers we sent him were ready. Earl's sneakers were on their last legs before the manure pit experience and beyond my willingness to clean them afterwards, so the boys and I decided to go to Farm-Way when we went to pick up the meat. Farm-Way was crazy busy with the sales tax holiday, and we took advantage of it to buy a solar-powered fencer which hopefully will get the heifers rehabilitated to electric fencing.

When I first met Earl and was learning all about the farm and the names of things, Heifer was a tricky concept for me. A calf that is born is either a heifer calf or a bull calf, and the heifers stay heifers until they've had a calf, at which point they join the milking string and are cows. Except that you can still call them heifers to distinguish them from the older, more mature cows who know what they're doing--ie. "Milking was going along just fine until that heifer, Cocoa, came in and thought she should go in stall four like she did last night, except that Bizkit was already there and she got her head underneath and got her ears all tangled in the hoses." There is such a thing as a first-calf heifer and I've even heard someone say second-calf heifer, but that's no so common. At some point a cow will settle down, get into the routine and you feel like you've been milking her forever, even if it's only a few months, and you don't have a pang of dread when she comes into the parlor. Then I think she's a cow and not a heifer anymore.

When I first came here, though, I was still translating these foreign-language words back into Amylish in my head. Tedder was Hay Fluffer. The suction intake on the liquid manure spreader was a Poop Straw. The fence charger was the Zapper. And heifer, to me, meant Teenage Cow. Teenagers, of course, alarm me. They are really quite capable, and yet, they don't know what to do with themselves and they aren't much wanting input or guidance. They are annoying and it's tempting to not put a whole lot of energy into them, but they're the whole future of the world and you have to take good care of them, even as they hold you in contempt, until they ease into the reasonableness of adulthood. And so it is with heifers. Someday, Tana and her buddies are going to be big, beautiful, stoic animals who seem to have all the mysteries of the world figured out, perfect examples of bovine grace and calm. They will pay the bills and the tractor notes with their milk.

This is probably good practice for the thirteen years we will be the parents of at least one teenager and for the one year when we will be the parents of four of them. Note to selves: Remain calm. Keep an eye on the future. Stand your ground. Act like a wall, the kind that makes noise.

And if they get in deep shit, climb on their backs and pull them out.

Swatting Flies

2008-07-07T06:54:00.006-04:00

Six years ago, when Cliffy was just about to turn two, he spent a few days in Shelburne with my parents. He was a pretty with-it guy for a two-year-old, with lots of words and some big concepts figured out. His little vocal cords weren't quite keeping up with the ideas in his brain, though, and it could take some effort to understand him. So I still maintain that Cliffy was just talking about swatting flies, but the message my dad left went like this, "[Laughter.] I just want you to know that the apple has not fallen far from the tree. Your son has picked up a fly swatter and is walking around the patio room, banging the windows, saying, 'Fucking flies.'"

The reason I don't think Cliffy was saying, "Fucking flies," is that, although I detest flies and want my house and possibly the world rid of them forever, I don't complain about them when I'm swatting them. I might make a face when I walk in to a buzzing house, but when I pick up my swatter, I am a Woman on the Hunt, moving silently, weapon raised and ready.

I debated whether or not to admit to this publicly, but I like to let myself believe that if fly swatting was an Olympic event, I would medal. I am almost 100% accurate at Still Fly on Flat Surface. I can swat them between the rungs on the shaker chairs. I have a move like a karate chop for flies in the corner of the windowsills. I have a wrap-around move for flies on the round arms of the chandelier. I can even, with greater than 50% accuracy, get them in mid air.

Obviously, these skills are the result of a lot of practice (and a slightly overactive imagination). Flies are a fact of life on a dairy farm, especially when the prevailing winds run from barn to house and the heifer barn is 100 feet across the road. I don't know what other farm wives do, because I don't really know any, but if I don't want my house to buzz with disease-bearing creepy flying insects, I have to spend a fair amount of time swatting them. Because I don't really have a fair amount of time for anything, I have had to get accurate. I think I've said this before, but the best parenting advice I've heard was from a letter a marine in boot camp was writing a friend who had just enlisted. "Get better and faster at everything," he told her, "including eating and brushing your teeth."

I was worried for a while that I was creating a race of Uber Flies by killing all the big dumb slow ones while the zippy fast ones lived to reproduce themselves ten thousand times over. There is always a fly or two that eludes me, but in nine years of ten-day life cycles, the flies don't seem to be getting any smarter or faster. So I think I'm safe.

I would like to think that there are less flies on the farm this year than there were last year, that I am making steady progress and will someday rid the farm of flies. I could be like St. Patrick and the snakes in Ireland. I could be interviewed by Country Folks weekly. I could be sponsored by a fly swatter company. The fly swatter companies right now don't even bother to stamp their names in the plastic web, but maybe that's about to change. If I single-handedly bring branding to the swatter marketplace, I could even be in the middle column of the Wall Street Journal. Hmmm. I'm not sure I want to be in the middle column of the Wall Street Journal. That's where you get written up if you are the guy who removes dead livestock from the streets of New York City or if you translate the Bible into Klingon. So perhaps my imagination is more than slightly overactive, but it keeps it interesting.

I am a hopeless optimist about my ability to improve the universe. I think often of the traditional close to a Passover Seder, "Next year in Jerusalem," meaning not the actual center of Middle Eastern conflict, but the mythical Promised Land, where the people and their rulers agree on things and the days are productive and free of strife. I'm not sure about the real Jerusalem, but in my mythical one, a golden swatter hangs by the door, reminiscent of harder times behind us, and the air is empty and silent of the buzzing of even a single fucking fly.

How I'm Spending My Summer Vacation

2008-07-01T06:45:00.006-04:00

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.

Being Careful What I Wish For

2008-06-17T13:30:00.002-04:00

Last Monday, with first cut stretching ahead of us and lots of school activities that I'd be flying solo for, I found myself wishing for a few minutes that I had a pause button, or maybe a rainy day, so I could get a few things done before the proverbial hay wagon parked itself in the middle of our lives.

When I left to pick up the kids at school on Tuesday afternoon and take them to doctor's appointments, it was terribly sticky hot and Earl had half the fields down in hay and the 6200 was still not back from R.N. Johnson's. Travis was raking, Earl was baling, Erik was driving the big dump truck and there was lots of that loud and urgent talk that gets hay into the barn. There was a storm forecast for the afternoon and they were scrambling to get the hay up and wrapped before it got wet.

I'm not going to write about this next part very well, and debated writing about it at all, but if this blog thing is actually going to chronicle what happens here, it's too big a thing to leave out.

A few years ago, this other organic dairy farmer we know had a tractor accident. He was leaning over to the side in his seat, looking for the source of a rattling noise when his tractor hit a bump and he fell off and found himself underneath his baler. His hired man kept his farm going while he healed and he's back together now, but I saw him at a conference that winter, barely recognizing him for how much older he looked, and I could hardly sleep that night for fear that something like that could happen to Earl.

Winter before last, Earl borrowed a trailer from our friend, John, to take some pigs to market. It was spring and the trailer was down in the snow enough that the hitch needed to be picked up with a tractor to reach our truck's bumper. All the pieces were lined up and Earl was putting in the pin when he heard screaming and turned to see John face down on the ground under the rolling tractor's wheel, having caught his sleeve on the gear lever as he reached to turn the tractor off. Earl ran over, put the tractor in neutral and rolled the wheel off John by hand, too afraid to add his 250 lbs. to the weight on top of his friend. Earl thought John was dead, but then he jumped up and started swearing. The tread marks on his jacket stopped halfway up his back, but the only injury was some badly bruised ribs and John was back out skiing the next week. For a few days, Earl and John talked about it a lot and then, once the normal routines took over, they didn't want to talk about it any more, at all.

Sometimes when Earl is late coming back from the barn, I think maybe a cow tipped over on him or some other awful thing and I start to freak out and pack up the kids to go check on him. So far, he's always appeared before I get out of the yard and I joke about how my freaking out is how I get him to come home and help me get the kids fed. Really, though, there are things we do every day that could go horribly wrong. I suppose that's true for everyone, even people who telecommute from ranch houses in suburbs of small cities. Still, when you work with twelve-hundred-pound animals and heavy equipment, it ups the ante.

When I got home Tuesday afternoon, I wasn't thinking about any of this. I was weighing the cost of fixing the air conditioning in our dumpy nine-year-old Volkswagen against the cost of a psychiatrist or a defense attorney, either of which might become necessary if I had to travel with small children in sticky hot weather on any regular basis. When Earl came down the hill, I asked him how things were going. He said, "Well, it's okay now," and I thought he meant maybe that he couldn't find some wrench and then he found it (this happens a lot) or that he ran out of twine and the twine they had was the wrong twine but then they found the right stuff where it shouldn't have been. Something like that. When he told me he rolled the tractor it didn't even hit me at first that this is a Very Bad Thing to Do. He was saying it so nonchalantly that he could have been telling me that he broke the glass in the tractor door (another frequent occurrence and only a few hundred dollars to repair), or that the tractor was stuck in the mud or something. I was still puzzled, thinking, "Rolled. Rolled the odometer?" when he showed me the pictures. The tractor was on its side and the round baler was completely upside down. It was ninety-five degrees out and I felt cold. I kept looking at the pictures and then looking at Earl, trying to understand how both things--tipped over tractor in the field and normal-looking, normal-acting husband standing next to me--could be true. He had been baling on the counterslope, he told me, and took a corner just a little too fast and tight. The ground was soft and the round baler started to tip and when it rolled, it took the tractor with it. Rolling a tractor is the sort of accident that can have a horrible ending, but Earl was in the cab tractor, protected on all sides and his only bodily complaint was a sore toe that he apparently stubbed on the steering column as he was climbing out.

The aftermath was the good part. Of all the fields we hay, the one in front of the heavy equipment operator's house was the best one to roll a tractor in. The tractor was leaking diesel so Richard came over with his skidder and set it right. If that hadn't worked, he had an excavator or a bulldozer, all of which he operates with the skill and sensitivity of a surgeon.

The insurance agent came out the next day and said it was all covered, even the rental of the tractor Trottiers agreed to loan us, even though they don't usually rent things out. Greenwoods came to pick up the probably-totalled round baler (which we'd paid off not ten days ago) and brought a brand-new baler that we'll buy with the money from the claim.

The storm Earl was scrambling to get ahead of came through that night with high winds forecast as the primary concern. The power around here goes out whenever two people sneeze at once and we were worried. It was still over seventy degrees at nine o'clock and we have a freezer full of ice cream and all the milking equipment dependent on a back-up generator that can only be run off the rolled tractor's 1,000 rpm PTO. We heard the thunder and felt the winds, and checked the radar on the computer. I generally reserve my spiritual pleading for air travel and childbirth, but ten thousand pints of ice cream and the future of our business made me utter a few pleadings to the Ultimate Authority. Our lights flickered for the better part of an hour, but they stayed on.

And so here we are, a week later, pressing on, making our way through the t-ball and b-ball barbecues, milking cows, making hay. There's not really much different, except that I'm being extra good, trying to parent and manage and be a friend with my best, most honorable self, quicker to give, slower to take. If I need to be calling for help from the higher powers any time soon, I'd like to feel in a position to ask.

Making Hay While the Sun Shines

2008-06-08T11:32:00.000-04:00

I don't really know how to write about first cut. It's a big deal and largely determines the economic health of the farm and even though we're generally easy-going people, it's hard not not to get worked up when things go poorly.

I'm pretty sure that things are going poorly right now, although the gods of farming tend to make fools out of anyone who thinks it couldn't get worse. For two weeks, there was rain forecast every afternoon and Earl held off mowing, only to have it stay dry. Then the forecast was for hot, sunny weather and he mowed a ton of hay, only to have it be cool and wet, the first real good hard rain we've had. Today Travis came in to rake the rained-on hay over and Earl went out to bale after him, taking Harley with him. When I came to pick up Harley an hour later, the single bale they'd managed to make sat lonely and sad in the middle of the field. Harley was full of information--"The baler BROKE. And Daddy FIXED IT. It made a BAD NOISE. I ate all my peanuts and Daddy and I shared ALL THE M&MS!. Earl thought he had the baler going, so I left Jackson with him (they were taking turns while Cliffy was at a birthday party) and hoped for the best. When they came back a few hours later, they parked at the shop, not by the fuel tanks; this was not a good sign. When I asked what was wrong, Earl said, "Look at the pickup." And I asked, "Is it supposed to look like that?" which is maybe number 3 on the list of Ten Dumbest Questions to Ask a Farmer Whose Baler is Broken in the Middle of First Cut, just behind, "Is it broken?" and "Is that bad?" and a little ahead of, "Is there anything I can do to help?" I did ask if I could help and after a pause to register the stupidity of the question, Earl did say I might help look for another one of the bent parts in the shop. I turned to look at the quagmire of tractor parts, fencing supplies, inventions, sockets, axes, shovels, and tires and asked if there was an organization scheme. This question just barely missed the Dumbest list and the answer was an obvious no. The search yielded no part.

After we abandoned the mission and Earl was heading to the barn to milk, he stumbled across the parts in the grass. They were the ones he'd taken off when he replaced them with new ones last summer, but they were in better shape than the twisted and broken one that's on the machine now, so they held some promise. Apparently they were in the grass because Earl couldn't decide whether to put them in the parts pile or the scrap metal heap, so he left them in between. That's sort of an organizational scheme.

There was some talk about me milking so Earl could work on the baler and maybe go back out to bale, but Erik wasn't going to stay long enough to wrap them and the hay will maintain its nutrition better on the ground than baled and unwrapped. So I came back to the house to worry about supper and the Red Sox. It's not a fair trade, but sometimes there really isn't any way around it. We have this thing that when there's suffering to be done, we do it together, but it wouldn't gain us any ground if I went to milk and Earl went back to the house to conjure up supper and keep our hot, grumpy kids in line while fretting about the baler.

Now it's the next morning and Pam milked so we slept in ('til 7) and now Earl is out welding the baler and I'm taking a few minutes to wrap this up before I see about breakfast. Everything seems easier this morning. Travis is coming in at eleven and the big finger wheel rake that I gave Earl a rather hard time about buying (we already have a rake!) will make quick work of rolling over the hay. I'll cut up the watermelon and make grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and bring some to Earl when I swap out the kids as they take turns riding on the tractor.

Someday soon Earl will change his state-of-the-farm announcements from how far behind we are to how close we are to done. The third tractor will come back from R.N. Johnson's, finally, and we'll be in good shape, looking ahead to second cut.

Why the World Is Not Overrun By Chickens

2008-06-02T10:44:00.006-04:00

We never really set out to have chickens, but when Earl's brother, Berry, was ready to disband his chicken operation, we couldn't bring ourselves to buy eggs, so we brought a handful of the chickens over here. They didn't really lay all that well over here, like a dozen eggs a month if we were lucky, so last spring I bought some chicks.

Nancy, the organizational genius who runs the office and basically holds the creamery world together, and I went in on a chick order together. We split a box of 25 chicks and my twelve were looking pretty good for a while. They lived in a big cardboard box with a water thing and a grain thing and a heat light and they all slept in a cozy heap at night. Then they started to kill each other. It was late June and warm and we thought we'd try them in the coop with the big chickens. There can sometimes be issues with older chickens pushing younger ones around--that whole pecking order thing--but the big chickens hardly noticed the remaining ten little ones for the two days they shared the coop. Then the little ones escaped out of a space between the boards and spent the rest of the summer roaming about the heifer barn and hayloft. We'd catch glimpses of them here or there and they seemed to be growing and we were sort of busy and they weren't costing us anything, so we figured we'd let them be and worry about how to get them back in the coop in the fall.

As it turned out, it wasn't that hard. One November night, after the kids were in bed and the old chickens were in the coop, I went out with a headlamp and picked up the seven remaining pullets (that's what teenage chickens are called) and brought them into the coop one at a time. I wore thick gloves and ski goggles and Earl's coat to protect me from my irrational freakoutedness that comes with touching birds. I walked right up to where they were roosting (on a dividing gate in the heifer barn) and picked them up with my hands over their wings, chicken heads and all their prehistoric scariness facing away from me. The pullets weren't all comfortable and happy with the process either, but after about five seconds of being handled they figured the world had ended and that they must be dead. That's how it is with chickens--no continued struggles, no looking for their chance to escape--they freak out and then all the fight goes away. It's sort of spooky.

The first time I handled chickens was when I went to get the older birds from Berry's barn the week he gave all his chickens away. There were thirty birds left and Nancy and I were splitting them. Nancy is a chicken whisperer and could move slowly toward them, talking softly, and pick them right up. I, on the other hand, used a net. I was seven months pregnant and not at my most agile, but I eventually managed to catch some chickens. Once they were in the net, I reached under and grabbed hold of their legs, holding them upside down the way I'd seen Kathy, Berry's caregiver and another animal genius, do it. When Kathy carried the chicken and it was still, I thought it was because she was handling the chicken with such confidence that the bird couldn't help but be okay with the situation. When I carried the chicken and the fight went out of it, I thought it had had a heart attack. And because I'm me and think the only thing worse that a live chicken is a dead one (until it's ready to cook, anyway) I stuffed it in the box anyway, hoping Earl would help me when I got the box back to our place. I kept filling the box with chickens in cardiac arrest and then it was full and I could get out of the chicken coop. Kathy and Nancy wouldn't let me carry the boxes of chickens and although it wasn't that heavy and I generally resist the coddling I'm offered when pregnant, I accepted this help gratefully. Thirty pounds doesn't worry me. A box of dead chickens that started to make noise when it was picked up, on the other hand, is fuel for a week of nightmares.

I know. I know. Chickens freak me out and yet I was undertaking their care. What's more, the make-shift coop that Earl had put together in the middle of this colder-than-living-memory February was in this garage-like space off the kitchen. Not exactly in the house, but not exactly not in the house either. And my plan to deal with a box of dead chickens, which of course weren't dead at all, was to bring it to Earl. Fortunately, my marriage can take this sort of thing, occasionally anyway. My paranoia amused Earl and he said he stood at the ready to deal with boxes of dead chickens, real or imaginary. It happens sort of regularly that Earl gets to rescue me from some peril that was only in my head, and he's rather patient about it. So it's not exactly a recipe for success, but you know, it's working.

All winter and spring, the chickens have lived in their coop in the heifer barn. I let them out most afternoons and Harley helps me chase them off the lawn. The boys help me collect the eggs and fill their feeder and keep the water bucket fresh. It's not hard work and it yields the most amazing eggs. There are the seven pullets, eight of Berry's old Rhode Island Reds, and Buster, the rooster. We get about eight eggs a day, which probably means that the pullets lay six eggs a week each. That's how often my Aracana lays her blue eggs, anyway. I have no idea about the old birds; they all look alike to me and they lay brown eggs, just like the Buff Orpingtons, the Silver Lace Wynadotts, and the Black Australorps. We sell a few eggs. We make a lot of homemade pasta and challah bread and crepes. I bake cakes and cookies. Sometimes Cliffy and Earl have fried egg sandwiches for breakfast.

But the old chickens are really old and the new chickens will be old soon and this spring it was time to think of a contingency plan. I was thinking of ordering chicks with my friend, Kate, but we missed the ordering deadlines and then it was going to be the end of June before there were birds available. June seemed so far away, so I bought an incubator instead.

Jackson's preschool hatches a batch of chicks every year and they seem to have great success and the kids like to watch them hatch and it didn't look that hard. Well, it wasn't that hard, except that the incubator just has a turny knob with no settings and I didn't really read the directions about getting the incubator temperature stable before putting any eggs in and I sort of baked the would-be chickens at 120 degrees for an hour or so. I put some more eggs in after that, and we hoped for the best. We candled them (holding them in front of a hole cut in a beer box set over a trouble light) to see if anything was growing. Some of them were uniformly light--no chicken. Some of them had dark masses--maybe chicken. And some of them had dark masses and veiny-looking blood vessel things visible along the sides of the egg--definitely chicken. You'd think I'd be excited for those last ones, but instead, it freaked me out. Then the eggs started to move a little, and that freaked me out. Then there were holes in them and the chicks were hatching and that freaked me out too. I was, of course, holding it together for the sake of the children, but inwardly I was having a hard time being so close to life emerging from an egg.

Maybe it was because of the 120 degrees, but these chicks weren't looking so good. One had a messed up leg and couldn't stand up. Another managed to get out of the shell fully formed but completely dead. Another one seemed to still be attached to the yolk of the egg. They all died, except for the one that was already dead, and the count was four live chicks and three dead ones. There were two yellowish birds and two blackish birds and then the strongest one of the lot turned up dead in the waterer. The waterer is a little plastic circular tray that fits under an inverted mason jar and refills itself to keep about a 1/2 inch of water available. The trough is only about an inch wide at the top, tapering at the bottom. It's not something a chicken can fall into. It's not possible to get stuck in it. The only explanation is that the chick fell asleep while drinking, or suffered cardiac arrest, or just decided not to be alive anymore. Really, there's only so much even a non-freaked out chicken caretaker can do with creatures with so little life force.

The three remaining chicks are looking fine, but they're probably all roosters. I'm not sure what I'll do when it's time to whack them, or even how it will go when we introduce them to the big birds in the coop. I guess I won't do anything but be grateful to Earl and the boys for taking care of that end of the deal.

For now, there are three little chickens living in a cardboard box in my furnace room. The second set of eggs is in the incubator and I check on them constantly. Part of me wants them all to hatch and be hens and keep me supplied in lovely bright yellow-yolked eggs. The other part of me wants the experiment to be over. I suppose it's not up to me either way. For better or for worse, I've got little chickens. Until they decide to be dead.

Farm Boys

2008-05-29T06:54:00.004-04:00

Jackson's friend, Ben, came over to play on Monday morning while his dad, Michael, and Earl worked on a project to get some of Berry's old chicken fencing structures over to Michael's farm. The boys were playing in the yard when Cliffy, who was home from school for the holiday, came down the hill and said, "Jackson, Daddy needs us to lock the cows in pasture. Hey Ben. You come too!" Jackson ran for his boots, ran out the door and called to me over his shoulder in his all-business voice, "Mama, I'm going to lock the cows in with Cliffy and Ben!" And they were off like a shot. They lost Ben when they passed the shop where Earl and Michael were fixing up the old hay wagon for its new role as chicken fencing transporter, but Cliffy and Jackson ducked under the fence and rounded up the cows and headed them down the lane. They worked like a team of sheepdogs and had everyone going in the right direction in just a few minutes. Then the cows were in the lane and there was nothing to do but follow, watch out for poop, and laugh with your brother.

I watched from the garden and then ran to get my camera. I love this picture because they're working together and it's a lovely day, but mostly I love it because that's not even 100 pounds of kid moving 60,000 lbs. of cow.

New Rule

2008-05-24T07:26:00.005-04:00

We are in the thick of the grazing season now. There are 52 pastures, sized to feed the cows for 12 hours. We go get the cows before chores, pushing them out of the pasture and toward the barn, moving the water tub and setting up the electric fence gates so they'll have a fresh paddock when they come back from the barn.

This year we started the rotation in Field 16, way behind the barn and up on the hill. Then they went down by Berry's house on the hill, then across the road to the flats, then worked their way up Field 20 to the Old Sugarhouse Field and then to Field 8. Earl put numbers on the gate handles this year (using old cow ear tags) so he, Pam, Erik and I can all be sure we're talking about the same thing. So far it's working slick.

Yesterday the cows were in Pasture #48, but I'm pretty sure if I call it the Stupid Fucking Pain-in-the-Ass Driveway Pasture, everyone around here, including the UPS driver, will know just what I'm talking about. The pasture (using the term loosely) encompasses the grasses, plants and weeds that grow along the driveway for about 1/4 mile, starting just below the house. From a nutritional and resource-management perspective, it's actually a rather smart pasture; there is quite a bit of healthy feed growing on the shoulders and it's unharvestable by machine and it would take hours of misery to mow it by hand. From a vehicular-access perspective, however, it sucks.

Larry, our delivery driver, was the first one to drive through the fence on his way in at five in the morning. Earl hadn't been able to find much in the way to flag the wire, so he put a bright red funnel-thing in the road. Larry did wonder what the red thing was in the road, but he'd already driven through it. He saw the second gate, and opened it, drove through, and closed it again behind him and went to find Earl in the barn to tell him the fence was down. Earl finished the cows he had in the parlor, hung up the units, and went to fix the fence.

Earl was late coming back from the barn, but we were on track to get the boys to school on time when Nancy called from her cell phone, saying something garbly about cows being out. We were, and still are, mystified on how she could get cell reception, but when we looked out the window, sure enough, there were cows all over the place. The heifers must have been running when they came down the hill, because they ran straight through the fence into the alfalfa field. The fence was broken and down and there was a line of employee cars stopped in the road, no doubt thinking that they wouldn't have to deal with this kind of thing if they sold insurance. We still could have made it to school before the first bell except that Cinder was in the road, walking slowly, looking around, and not really inclined to let us pass her. There's not really anything to do but wait in that situation, lest I spook her and get her running where she could hurt herself or crash through the fence. So we waited and Cliffy missed his show-and-tell spot for the second week in a row.

Pam almost drove through the top gate on her way back from school, but she didn't, slamming on the brakes with the wire stretched tight across the hood. She backed up and the fence was fine, but Earl and Erik had seen the whole thing and laughed heartily.

Oliver had a doctor's appointment and then the kids needed to get picked up and, although I know I'm a little prone to dramatics, it really did seem like I spent the better part of the day climbing in and out of the car, hooking and unhooking fences. We were doing okay, though, until the UPS driver came up the driveway.

I saw the UPS truck going slowly and sent Cliffy to open the gate and I went out to get the package. But before Cliffy could get out the door, the truck sped up and went up the hill. Cliffy went over to the gate and the next thing I knew he was sitting in the road screaming about being zapped. The UPS guy stopped, got out of the truck and said, "Sorry, I tried to go through it slow. I hit the other one, too." And he handed me the package of watch batteries, which would have fit in the mailbox, and drove away. Now first off, this is the same driver who left packages in the middle of the road all winter because he was afraid he wouldn't make it up the perfectly plowed and sanded driveway. Secondly, he tried to go slow?! Apparently in UPS Driver World a large brown vehicle can pass through a wire fence, provided the vehicle is moving slowly enough for its large brown molecules to move out of the way to allow the polywire to pass through intact. In Farm World, however, the fucking fence breaks into two pieces and Cliffy can't figure out what to do with it and zaps himself. Fortunately, Cliffy wasn't hurt and the cows were as unimpressed by the exchange as I was and just lay there, chewing their cud, not escaping.

I loaded up the boys and went to the barn to unplug the fence, showing Cliffy how to do it for next time. Then we drove down the road and I tied the first fence together, and then the second, flagging them with a great many streamers of leftover-green-up-bag plastic. I stood back and evaluated my efforts, thinking that anyone, except maybe UPS Idiot, could fail to see and open the gates. Thirty minutes later it was time for chores and not even one vehicle had come up or down the road to test my work. Pam came to push the cows to the barn and set up pasture #47 and we don't have to think about it for 26 days.

Twenty six days from yesterday is a Wednesday, though, and we're thinking that maybe numerical order isn't the way to go when it comes to the Stupid Fucking Pain-in-the-Ass Driveway Pasture. We have a new rule--Pasture #48 gets grazed on Sunday afternoon.

Nine Years Ago Today

2008-05-23T11:21:00.005-04:00

This is our ninth anniversary. In the rush to get the kids out the door and to school, I hadn't really made a note of the date until I came home and Earl greeted me with an extra-long kiss. On other anniversaries, I have thought wistfully of all the people and the dancing and how crazily happy I was to be marrying such an amazing man. Today, thinking back, my overwhelming feeling is relief--relief that we don't ever have to do that again.

Some weddings are big productions because the couple, or their parents, wants a big show. Our wedding got to be a big production without anyone wanting it to be. We got married in the pasture in front of the house, on benches borrowed from the fire department. Some friends of Earl's roasted a pig, the caterers brought some salads and appetizery things and opened wine bottles and we had had music from a DJ in the shop part of the big shed and tables and chairs in the hay part. My mom baked the cake and altered my clearance-rack dress. My friend, Bernadette, baked the bread and sang a song. Earl's sister and Uncle Vaughn read Corinthians and a poem. My sister stood up for me. Earl's brothers stood up for him. Charlie Brown, a retired dairy farmer and justice of the peace, officiated. The ceremony took about fifteen minutes and then we ate and danced and Billy gave a really nice toast and then we went to the Norwich Inn for the night.

Simple enough, but there was the part where the people who were supposed to build the shed cancelled and then Earl, with lots of help from Billy and their friends, built the shed in the two weeks before the wedding, putting the ridge cap on just as the first guests came up the driveway.

It hadn't seemed very RockBottom-like to rent port-a-potties, so we built an outhouse, a sort of nice outhouse, with two stalls, a porch, a sink and running water. We had it mostly framed out by Thursday , but without my brother, Eric, and Earl's cousin, Nelson, I'm pretty sure everyone would have had to pee in the woods. Earl dragged the finished outhouse into place with the bulldozer that morning and the photo album shows my mom running up with a twelve-pack of toilet paper, just as everyone is getting settled for the ceremony.

Getting the pig dead and cooked was a bit of a project, involving a full cast of characters, lost and then found guns and ammunition, several bottles of Captain Morgan (one of them bought by my dad, along with a pack of unfiltered Camels, much to his straight-laced horror), and Josh's girlfriend, Lisa, who was the only one sober and drove all over creation trying to find the whereabouts of the pig cooker, only to finally find its owner twenty minutes after he'd passed out. There was another pig cooker, a better one, but it was mounted on a trailer that needed a 2 and 5/8 ball hitch and no one had one. The effort was stalled out here at three in the morning when I went up to the barn to start milking early. Oh, I told Denny and Josh when he explained the situation, I have a 2 and 5/8 hitch on my truck. But then I remembered that the registration had lapsed a few days before. They laughed, doubling over, at the idea that a little piece of legal paper would be at issue on the dirt roads of Orange County, Vermont at three o'clock in the morning. So cooker arrived and was fired and everyone said the pig was very tasty.

I don't exactly remember which construction project(s) my brother-in-law, Jess, worked on, but I still don't think he's forgiven me for saying no when he called before they left Wyoming to ask if he should bring his tools.

Jamie ran the electricity to the shed as soon as I got out of the shower and he could turn the power off. His brother, Rett, mowed aisles in the shin-high grass for guests to follow, preserving the rest of the pasture for the cows' feed the next morning.

Earl's sister, Sophie, ran the to-do list and pretty much everything else, taking care of all the helpful relatives and her three kids in stride. Earl's sister-in-law, Oona, did the flowers. My sister, KJ, filled balloons and wrapped potatoes and drove me around to three different town clerk's offices when someone remembered that we needed a marriage license, at 5 pm. on Friday afternoon. As it was, we wouldn't have really gotten married that day if Jody, Charlie Brown's daughter-in-law and assistant town clerk, hadn't come in after hours to do the license.

Gabe and Ben wore bow ties and did all the parking; I have relatives who still inquire after them, remembering them as the nicest young men they're ever met. I think they were also involved in getting whoever got stuck in the ditch unstuck, but I can't be sure. I think Biggie drove the tractor for that and I know he milked that afternoon with Gabe's brother, Brandon, finishing in time to clean up for the dinner and party.

Now that I think of it, it had the feel of a great many high-output RockBottom days. Lots of people doing all kinds of things and it all coming out pretty well despite looking pretty doubtful for most of prelude. Most of the time there are less than 350 people to disappoint if we screw up, however, and I hope it stays that way. There are a hundred reasons to stay married to Earl, most notably that I'm crazy about him and love him even more dearly than I did when I agreed to all this nine years ago. Another reason is that when a wedding is that big a production, it sort of seems like we should be having a marriage that lives up to all that fuss. So far, I think we're doing okay.

Helen

2008-05-14T06:41:00.005-04:00

A few summers ago, like maybe fifteen or sixteen, I was rock climbing with my sister on a little escarpment not far from our rented house in Jackson, Wyoming. If it wasn't her first time climbing, it was pretty close, and she was understandably a little nervous as she got pretty high off the ground and the foot- and hand-holds became fewer and farther between. She was dealing with her sense of unease by talking a mile a minute, mostly about how I didn't have very good ideas and it was about time she stopped subscribing to my version of fun. Then she suddenly relaxed and called down, "Hey, that's more like it! Major bucket hold." She reached up and repositioned herself well enough to smile, look down at me and ask, "Was Mom up here with a chisel?"

That's the kind of mom we have; if there was any way to make things more fun or successful for her kids, she'd find it, and then she'd do it and then slink out of the way so we'd discover later the warm corn muffins for the first day of seventh grade (when I insisted I was old enough to get myself ready), or the cookies on the table after school, or my favorite vegetarian submarine sandwich at the meat-laden after-graduation party. Helen never missed a little league or soccer game or a track or ski meet, unless we wanted her to. She'd have refreshments for the whole team and scream so loudly from the stands that I once stopped at second base on an easy triple, too mortified to get any closer to my otherwise very classy mom's adrenaline-activated gutter mouth.

Every time I adjusted the passenger side mirror for her, the resulting angle was The Best It's Ever Been. Even when I was thirty-five, just before she sold the last vehicle without automatic mirror controls.

I have a new perspective on all that mothering now that I'm a mom myself. It seems so easy, in 2008, to slip into a form of over-the-top self-congratulatory motherhood. The parenting magazines I read at the dentist's office are full of birthday party ideas and decorating tips for children's bedrooms and easy meals the family will love. The selling point of all these offerings is that they'll make me the coolest mom ever if I do them and I will be thanked and admired and envied. My kid might even be thanked and admired and envied, mostly for having a mom as cool as me. I get sucked into it myself; at lunch today I did my fancy spiral-ketchup trick for Cliffy's Hot-Dog-on-a-Stick and handed it to him saying, "Do you have a cool mom, or what?" He obliged me, but the mildly pathetic aspect of the exchange didn't escape me. If I was really that cool, I could wait until he comes home from college, or becomes a parent, or is writing a Mothers' Day blog entry when he's thirty-eight to get my kudos.

If my mom knew, or cared, how much my friends and my sibling's friends adored her, she shrugged it off. If she was bringing snacks, it was because she thought someone might be hungry. She didn't really care what our bedrooms looked like, provided there was adequate ventilation and no rotting food. She never would have thought to take her friends to see what she'd "done" with the kids' rooms. She did occasionally worry that we'd attract the attention of the child welfare agencies if we insisted on wearing our favorite worn-beyond-patching blue jeans or refused to wear a jacket on a chilly spring day, but short of that, the opinion and counsel of the outside world had little bearing on her plans. We hung out together and she helped us with our lives, short term and long.

Helen has also appeared with her metaphorical chisel in my life, and the creamery's life, more times than I can count. When I volunteered to paint the house I was renting in South Royalton, she came to my rescue with her ladders, paint brushes and trim saw when the project started to involve siding and got over my head. Since we've had the creamery, she has delivered ice cream in her van on the way back home after a visit, met me at events to watch the kids and sewed a felt banner so we'd have something with our name on it when we debuted the ice cream. She even put on a hairnet and ran the bottlewasher when we were short of help. She stayed for a few weeks after each of the kids was born, doing whatever she could to make the house, family and farm keep moving, whether it was cooking supper, reading to the older kids, tending the garden or raking field 19.

You get the idea. My mom wrote the book on Being There For Us. Every day of my life, I have known that my mom was cheering for me, eager to hear about whatever is going on. That's a pretty big thing to have in the back of your head, and it tends to make a person take on more challenges than one might otherwise. Like marrying a dairy farmer or having four kids in six years.

So thanks, Mom, for making all this possible. You set a pretty high standard that I try every day to live up to (minus the swearing from the sidelines). It's a tall order, but I don't really have a choice; a foundation of love like this is something you build on.

Beach Party

2008-05-09T04:56:00.003-04:00

This has been a trying week. The ground is finally dry enough to get the tractors out on the fields and Earl and Erik have been plowing and discing and planting and spreading manure. I see them and talk to them when they're in for lunch, but they're occupying their own planet these days--the Planet Fieldwork. Somehow, I forget, every year, what this is like. First cut of haying I remember, but the scurry to fix the equipment, get seeds in the ground and get the manure all spread before haying always surprises me. I think it's like the biological inability to remember childbirth accurately, mine anyway. I've been so happy to get through the experience well and successfully that I forget that parts of it inescapably suck. I guess fieldwork isn't really all that bad, but when Earl announces, after dinner, that he thinks he'll go back out to the field to finish plowing and he'll be back not long after nine, I'm solo on bedtime and missing my few innings of watching the ball game with my husband.

The reason Earl had to go back to plow is that I came and got him before he was finished. I had been hanging out at the house, cleaning the kitchen and talking to Pam, when I realized I hadn't seen Harley or his friend Jasper for a few minutes. Jasper had fallen asleep on the blue chair around the corner, but Harley was nowhere. It had been ten minutes since he'd asked if he could go get the potato chips that he and Jasper had been eating on the porch steps. I'd said yes, and that he could go get them and bring them inside. Cliffy was just walking up the driveway from school and I didn't think anything of Harley going outside on his own. He's three-and-a-half and the door was open and he's got his things he does in the yard--digging holes, playing pirate, sitting on the toy cars and airplane and going on adventures to faraway lands. Besides, although he's rascally and likes to interrupt his brother's play and sabotage cleaning projects, he's generally a good kid and his insatiable need for loving attention generally keeps him close by and on this side of the law.

But then I couldn't find him. I called for him and then I yelled for him and looked all around the house and yard. Then I got worried and I glanced at the stream and pond behind the house and checked under the porch. Pam and Cliffy and Pam's daughter, Jade, looked in the house and helped me call. Then I started to freak out, and really looked in the pond and stream and then the big pond up the road and then Pam went down the road on the Ranger and I went to get Earl, who was plowing with Jackson on some rented land a few miles away. I was hoping, stupidly, that maybe Earl took Harley with him and maybe I didn't hear him tell me or that maybe he had asked Jasper to relay the information. The absolute height of my fear was when Earl opened the tractor door and it was just him and Jackson and a look of curiosity on both of their faces and I thought to myself, "They've been having a really good time and I'm about to ruin that. Forever." Earl was profoundly calm in the crisis, cataloging the outlying places we might look and in what order and I can't remember what I did except drive the car and play worst-case-scenarios. And then we met Pam on the back road. And she was smiling.

Jade had found Harley on the old dumpy couch in the corner room downstairs. He had pushed one of the cushions forward, made a little nook, pulled a blanket over himself, and fallen asleep. I had been folding laundry earlier in the day and there were some unfolded clothes on the couch; Harley, under his crumply blanket was invisible. In the classic manner of a three-year-old in a house full of boy noise, he can sleep through anything. I had looked under the clothes, feeling stupid because there weren't enough of them to hide a child and I knew I was reaching past hope. I had yelled, full strength, in every room in the house, including that one. And he was just right there, laughing when he woke up to think that his mother had lost him when he was "just right there!"

So I am reevaluating my parenting, reassessing nap schedules, age-appropriate levels of supervision, and how much I can really trust my kids to look after their own self interest. I'm also thinking that losing a kid on the couch doesn't speak very well for my housekeeping skills.

Someday I will think about the experience without my heart pounding and, as my sister pointed out, it will actually be funny. That day isn't this week, though. I'm still picking that kid up every time I walk by him, checking on all of them in their sleep, and feeling ten years older and up against impossible odds.

In the midst of all the planting and spreading and trauma, there has also been T-ball, the art project I've been doing three days each week at school, kindergarten screening, and the usual business stuff. I had started this blog entry with the title, "Something Has to Give," yesterday afternoon. But then Jackson announced he was having a beach party.

He was out in the greenhouse that opens with a sliding door just behind where my computer is and had found the bottom piece to a big plastic pot, a water tray sort of thing. It looked to him like a party platter, so he was filling it up with the rocks from the greenhouse floor, carefully washing each one, and calling out his creations--barbecued oysters, fried shrimp, calamari, and a Fabulous Dipping Sauce. He brought some out to me, holding the tray in one arm against his body, taking a rock in the other hand, carefully dipping it, twice, in the Fabulous Dipping Sauce, and holding it out to me. As you can imagine, it was just what I needed, light and fun, and the sauce really was fabulous.

Then Jackson said everything was ready for Cliffy when he got home (which was going to be soon) and then he thought Cliffy might be really hungry, like for real food, so could we have some of that, too? I had just gone to the co-op the day before, so we had watermelon, oranges and apples to slice up and I found a metal platter that he could take to the porch. Harley suggested root beer and I let him go get one to share from the box in the pantry (Boylan's root beer, which is really good and devoid of high-fructose corn syrup). Cliffy and Pam's daughter, Taliesin, came up the road and Jackson invited them to the party. Taliesin went to ask her mom if she could come and the answer was yes and she was back in a minute. And it was great. Oliver loved his watermelon and Harley decided a party should have dancing, and Jackson was a generous host, walking around with his tray and refilling root beer cups. Cliffy was indeed famished and camped out by the snacks and told us about his day at school.

There's a line in a Pam Houston story that I think about a lot. It goes like this: Life give you what you need when you need it; receiving what it gives you is a whole other thing. So although there is not enough Earl to go around or time in the day to keep constant watch over my children, or to keep the house clean, life gave me Jackson, and Harley and Cliffy and Oliver. And yesterday, Jackson gave us all a beach party.

P-A-S-T-U-R-E

2008-05-06T06:24:00.005-04:00

The cows went out on pasture this weekend. This is a big deal. We're still feeding the last of the round bales out in the paddocks, but there are only four left and, with last week's rain and this week's sun, it should work out just about right. Pasture means chores start with a walk out to go get the cows, rearranging gates for the next paddock in the rotation. It's one of my favorite things in the whole world, walking out in the first light of a cool summer morning, calling to the cows so they'll be up and starting toward the barn before I get to them. Earl calls, "Cooooommmmme Booooosssss," once or twice and the cows get up right away. They love Earl and he means good times, grain, milking and a pleasant walk with their favorite non-bovine. It's a little harder for Non-Earl's to get the cows up and moving. I try to imitate Earl's voice, but that doesn't go over so well. Earl's voice is among his many gifts, low and mellow, able to hold a tune, and always sounding like it's smiling (or almost always). My voice, on the other hand, is small and mumbly and sort of high-pitched and can't carry a tune in bucket and would probably benefit from twenty years of heavy smoking. Even so, it's still better, timewise, to make some gently-rousing noise when approaching a pasture full of cows, so I sing to them.

Even if it's afternoon milking in the middle of summer and the farm is abuzz with activity, the pastures are on the hills and tucked into otherwise unmowable corners and bringing the cows in is a solitary venture. No people can hear me, and the noise seems to keep the cows moving even after I've circled around behind them to push them toward the barn. Cow time does not take into account all the other things I might have to do after milking, and the pace of all this rousing and walking is always slower than I want. There's nothing to be done about it, so I make up cow-themed songs to pass the time.

I have some old stand-bys: Good Morning, My Bovines, How are you?, P-A-S-T-U-R-E, Find Out What it Means to Me, Paradise by the Parlor Lights, Take Me Back to the Barnyard, and Sweet Lactation. The three-chord simplicity of Black Sabbath's Ironman also adapts nicely and every now and then I try my hand at a farm-friendly version of Bohemian Rhapsody. Nashville isn't sending any scouts, but I have a good time.

With pasture season upon us, it's time to shake the cobwebs off my vocal cords, which have only been singing hushed lullabies and Pop Goes the Weasel all winter. The grass is growing and the cows are out and I need to be prepared for the morning in the middle of first cut when my dead-tired husband will ask if there's any way I could bring the cows in for him. It'll be showtime, and I'll be ready.

The sheep, pig and chicken are dead, but chivalry isn't

2008-05-03T10:27:00.007-04:00

My friend Margaret called yesterday afternoon and asked if there was any way Earl or Erik could come shoot her ram for her. I said sure, and she asked, very politely, if there was any way they could come NOW. So I found Earl, and he went to the barn for his gun and headed right over. All of Margaret's sheep, I learned later, had gotten out, and the ram was being a total jerk, butting Margaret and knocking her over when she tried to lead the sheep back in the barn. He was threatening the kids and the garden, and his rock-hard, made-for-hitting-things-with skull was not responding to Margaret hitting it with a shovel. Now, in addition to being strong and athletic, Margaret is a never-say-die kind of girl and if it had been possible to kill that ram with a shovel, I have no doubt she would have done it. But he wasn't even blinking, and so she picked up the phone to call in artillery.

The first time I was involved in one of these damsel-in-distress-calls-for-prince-to-pull-the-trigger situations was the fall that Earl and I were first married. It was Friday afternoon, I had just gotten home from law school, and Earl and Biggie, Erik's predecessor as Ace Farm Hand, had been chopping corn all day. It was time for chores and someone had to unload the corn in the bunk silo and pack it down, someone had to milk, and someone had to go pick up the pig for the party we were having for Earl's birthday the next day. Biggie was the obvious choice for the tractor work and I was the obvious choice for milking, but I came to the farm with a deeply-entrenched habit of trying to raise men's eyebrows and I volunteered to go get the pig. I was in my sixteenth year of vegetarianism and going to collect an animal for slaughter wasn't on the list of things I did, but it didn't sound like there was all that much to it and I liked the way Earl and Biggie seemed impressed with my offer. Now, that was over nine years ago and I know a few things that I didn't know then. I know, for example, that they were not thinking, "Wow. What a rough-and-tumble girl this is." They were thinking, "Glad I don't have to go to the smelly pig farm and deal with getting the pig in the crate."

As it turned out, the pig barn, which was as nice and well-maintained and as clean as a pig barn can be, smelled horrible. Horrible. It turns out there is a hierarchy of smelliness in the livestock world and I have heard dairy farmers talk about chicken operations smelling bad as a reason not be involved with poultry on any kind of scale, and I have heard chicken farmers talk about pig operations as a reason not to be involved with pigs on any kind of scale. A pig barn, I'm pretty sure, is the end of the line there. I don't have the most sensitive nose and for the most part, as long as something doesn't smell like strawberry-scented candles, I can move on, but this was wretched.

Nevertheless, I steeled myself and went looking for the farmer. I found her at the house, or at least I thought I did. What I really found was the farmer's wife. The difference became apparent as I followed her into the barn and she said, "I thought it would be one of them big guys who was coming. Shit. Why'd they send you? I don't even know what pig is yours or how the hell we're going to get it in the crate."

At the time, I thought for sure that, after I'd been on the farm a few years, I would be able to do all the things Earl could and help anyone who came up the drive. As it turns out, I have yet to reach into a cow, or pull a calf on my own, or load up a trailer full of round bales and expect them to stay loaded. Someday, when the kids are grown, I might do those things, but right now I'm holding down the kid and house fort and if someone comes for some hay and she's not very big and not wearing gloves, I'm thinking, if not saying, "Shit. Why'd they send you?"

Pig Farmer's Wife and I discussed how many people we needed to feed at the party and selected an appropriate sized hog and then we tried to get it into a little transport crate. She had these panel things that were about the size of a truck mud flap that she used to sort them out and she told me where to stand and what to do and the desired pig went into the crate pretty easily. We were both surprised and pleased and were sliding in the gate slat behind the pig when he suddenly went completely nutso. You don't think of a pig in a crate that just fits it as a particularly mobile or flexible creature, but there were limbs flying everywhere, lots of head shaking, and a noise like you wouldn't believe. The pig managed to break through the hardwood slats with his head and then got stuck on the splintered wood. If the pig hadn't been thrashing around so violently, it probably would have been able to straighten up without much trouble, but nothing we could do would get his head unstuck and there we were, with a crazed pig wearing a transport crate and no pig farmer expected back any time soon. She didn't even bother to ask me if I was up for shooting the pig and she wasn't sure where the ammunition was and hadn't ever fired the gun before. We called Earl to see if he could come shoot the pig, but he was in the middle of milking, so the pig farmer's wife called her friend, Wally.

My own call for the big guns was a few years ago in my brother-in-law's chicken coop. We were covering for Berry while he was away at a Special Olympics event and the kids and I went to collect the eggs that the Coop 1 birds were laying on the floor. Coop 1's rooster didn't think I was allowed to touch the eggs and came charging at me, all beak and talon. I ushered the kids out of the coop and reached out the door for a broom. I swatted him, thinking any reasonable five-pound animal would squawk and run away. Instead, almost instantly, I found myself opposite the rooster in a circle the hens had cleared for us. The rooster was strutting about, acting all cocky, flashing his talons, and the hens seemed to be clucking in unison, "Fight. Fight. Fight." I looked at my broom, looked at the rooster and backed out of the coop. He was giving the rooster equivalent of high fives as I shut the door. Earl was down the hall in Coop 4 and I called to him and explained the situation. He returned, promptly dispatched the fucking bird and the last laugh was mine.

And you know, even though Margaret, the Pig Farmer's Wife, and I were not the ones pulling the trigger, I hope word gets out in the livestock community that we are not to be fucked with. We are good wives and friends and neighbors and we have big men with weapons watching our backs.

Milk Fever

2008-04-28T23:49:00.005-04:00

This is a picture of Nene* taken yesterday morning. The first thing you might notice about her is that she doesn't look dead. Friday night, she looked dead. Earl was with Cliffy and Jackson at baseball practice and the little boys and I were hanging out when Pam called from the barn. She had just gone to bring Nene into the parlor to be milked and Nene looked at her, lay down on her side, and didn't look very good. The words didn't sound all that bad to me, but Pam has very good intuition and if she's calling about a cow not acting right, I'm calling the vet. I hung up and called the vet's emergency answering service and pulled Dr. Pinello out a dinner party to come check on her. Dr. Pinello likes to know what to expect when she gets to the farm and I could only tell her what Pam had told me, so I put Harley into his barn boots and loaded Oliver on my back and went to call her from the barn. I rounded the corner to the holding pen and stopped in my tracks. I had expected Nene to look kind of bad, but I hadn't expected her to look that bad. I asked Pam if Nene was dead, and she said, "No," then looked closely and added, "not yet."

Nene was lying on her side, legs straight out, head back, ears back, eyes rolled back in her head, eyelids half open. I called Dr. Pinello and described the scene and told her I'd call her back if the cow died before she got here. She told me she'd hurry, and added, as an afterthought, that if Earl had any calcium around, I could try to get her to sit up on her brisket and give her some.

Pam and I scoured the medical supply shelves but all we found were a few bottles of antiseptic, about twenty bags of organic herbs (goldenseal root, black cohosh, echinacea, etc.) and some rolls of adhesive gauze. Pam went downstairs to see if she could find anything in the milkhouse and I decided to open up a new-looking cardboard box that was on the floor by the shelves. I was just pulling the flaps back when Pam came back empty handed and looked over my shoulder. "Hey," she said, "that says, 'Cow 911.' I think this situation might qualify." Inside were tubes of calcium concentrate that look almost exactly like tubes of caulking, like you use to seal the spaces around your bathtub. Pam's boyfriend, Dave, thought he remembered seeing a caulking gun around, but while he was looking I tried pressing the inside plunger-thing with my thumb and it squirted out easily, so I got a stick that the kids had left in the utility room and we were ready for the next step.

Up on her brisket is a big order with a 1,500 lb. cow and less than 500 lbs. of people, but Pam and I pulled and Dave pushed and then braced her and then I got the tube in her mouth and Pam held it steady and I pushed the plunger. And while we waited to see if it was going to do any good, Pam told the story of coming to get Nene and having her take one look at her and flop over and how it was hard not to take that personally. And then Nene, as if to make Pam feel better, started to bring her ears forward. Then she looked around. Then she seemed to take a deep breath and decide that she wasn't going to die just then after all. We pulled a little and repositioned her and Dave was able to stop bracing her. And when Dr. Pinello arrived a few minutes later, and Earl a few minutes after that, they found a not-dead cow hanging out with three people who were feeling pretty damned good about themselves.

Dr. Pinello gave Nene some IV calcium and checked out her health otherwise and Pam asked lots of questions about milk fever and I went back to the house to get the kids ready for bed. When Earl came back to the house, Nene was up and eating and drinking and much improved. Three days later, she's not in top form, but she's gaining strength and looking bright in the eyes.

Milk fever is a big deal in cows. It's not actually a fever at all, but it happens sometimes after a cow has had a calf and her body is gearing up to crank out the milk. The systems go into hyperdrive and the cow puts all her calcium into her milk and her own levels drop and she starts to feel all yucky and then lies down, which makes her feel yuckier, and then she needs some help or she can die. Before you could buy tubes of mineral concentrate from the Udder Necessities route truck, farmers used to pump air into a cow's udder with a bicycle pump to force the milk back into the cow's system. The science behind it wasn't well known, but it worked (sometimes, anyway).

I don't know a lot about milk fever, except that there are some herds and some breeds of cows that are more prone to it than others. Ours don't seem to be particularly susceptible. I can only think of a handful of times when it's come up, and Earl told me he mostly bought the Cow 911 for the calves, because it has a pretty well-balanced mineral mix that can really help a struggling calf have the energy to eat well and help her own cause. I think it happens more often in higher producing herds, especially with Jerseys.

What I do know, is that milk fever is pretty easy to treat with the big tubes of calcium/mineral stuff. I also know that the human administering the tubes of stuff gets to feel like a hero. I squirted some gray stuff down her throat, and now Nene isn't dead. The enormous efforts of my life rarely yield quantifiable results and so it's hugely satisfying to do a simple little thing like squirt a tube of mineral concentrate and just about bring a cow back from the dead.

*Pronounced Nay-Nay. She's Naan's calf and Neet's little sister and Nanco's granddaughter and sometimes you just name them the first thing that pops into your head. If you're Earl, anyway.

Spring: An Inventory

2008-04-24T22:00:00.003-04:00

We took a vacation this year and went to California for a week to see Earl's family north of San Francisco. Now that we're back and almost all the snow is gone, we're taking stock of where we are and getting ready to work really hard until October or so. Here's how it's looking:

Calves: Two were born while we were away, and one the afternoon we got back. All heifers, names too goofy to report except Amethyst, Ambrosia's calf, hopefully starting a long line of lovely gemstone cows (sometimes you deviate from the first-letter thing when you think you'll end up with forty-two cows with A names otherwise).

Chickens: One less Black Austrolorp, thanks to our dog who apparently is crying out for attention in all the wrong ways. New chicks are on order, including some meat birds, which we haven't raised since I've been on the farm.

Grass: Growing fast and possibly able to provide feed for the cows by this weekend, if supplemented by some hay in the pastures.

Mud: Going fast and, with recent road improvements, not much of a factor in our daily routines. This is a big departure from previous years when every successful trip up the driveway was an accomplishment.

Fence: Earl and Erik have walked about twenty miles this week, checking all the fences and waterlines. They have kits and spools and I see them only in passing, when they stop in for water and cookies.

Heifers: The smaller group of weaned heifers moved out onto pasture today. It was pretty neat to see the first animals of the year move out of the barn yards. They're in the double-fenced training pastures down at Earl's brother Billy's place where they'll move to a fresh paddock every few days.

Employees: We are so lucky, blessed even, to have such a great group of people working here. Nancy, Jay, Erik and Steve and Pam held down the fort beautifully in our absence. Larry is happy to be back driving the truck and we are fall-on-our-knees grateful to have him.

Garden: The strawberry plants were happy under the heavy snowpack and are green and healthy. I found about a half bushel of last year's carrots in the beds I was preparing to plant peas. They were in great shape and, along with our potatoes, beef and maple syrup, made a fabulous beef stew last night. The onion starts are ready to go out as soon as I can get space made for them. Jackson's giant pumpkin seeds have sprouted and are taking off. My tomato plants, despite being planted in the finest germination mix I could buy, are quite wee and reluctant. (Kate planted hers in plain old potting soil and they are big and beautiful. I don't know how Michael and Margaret get their seedlings started, but the tomato plant they gave me for my birthday looks ready to flower. I have seedling envy once again.) The oregano, sage and tarragon are greening up with the scallions in the herb garden.

Little league: Cliffy's first practice was rained out after fifteen minutes, but he got a chance to take some swings and to be out in the long summerish night with his friends. Jackson's first practice is this weekend.

The Big Leagues: The Sox apparently had no trouble winning ball games while we were gone, but have fallen prey to a nasty flu virus. If I wasn't so busy, I would make them some chicken soup, as my grandmother would have. I think she would have liked Dustin Pedroia every bit as much as she liked Marty Barrett, who was the subject of many Yiddish endearments.

Hay: It looks like we will have enough hay to get through. Earl has been counting and recounting and, I suspect, hoping and praying, and it seems like it's worked out right this year, for once.

Frogs: The peepers are out tonight with their chorus of desperate pleas for love. I was staring down thirty when I found my soulmate and I understand and feel for the little creatures, but I won't mind if they're desperate for a while yet. I love taking a deep breath of cold, damp spring air and falling asleep to frog song. As a matter of fact, I ought to do that right now.

Goodnight.

Dead Squirrel Birthday

2008-04-12T07:50:00.008-04:00

Yesterday was my birthday and Jackson, who is learning his letters, made my name out of colored sticks and the boys made supper all by themselves (roast chicken, noodles, salad and pumpkin pie) and it was great. The best news of the day, though, was the dead squirrel.

I remember, as a young child, thinking squirrels were cute. My dad took a management course at Penn State one summer and we drove down to visit him and marveled at the enormous grey squirrels that ran up and down the big elm trees around campus.

A summer or two later, we went hiking on Mt. Washington and stopped at the AMC Hermit Lake shelter for lunch. I had a Hershey bar in the pocket of my lovely new windbreaker that I was looking forward to for dessert. Well, when I was ready to eat my chocolate bar, I had nothing but a hole in my pocket. I was just old enough not to cry about it, so I gathered up some rocks and lay in wait. And so it began.

In the houses and cabins of my single life, squirrels filled my ski boots with acorns and dog food, made nests in my sweater drawer and ran month-long track and field events on my roof. I bought an ultra-sonic device that was supposed to repel rodents with a piercing noise, inaudible to humans. Apparently I have supersensory hearing, because I could hear that thing pulling into the driveway, windows rolled up, radio on. I set a tin of mixed nuts and rat poison out on the porch; every nut was carefully removed. I went to K-Mart and bought a CO2-fired pellet gun, put out more mixed nuts and set up a blind. I shot one squirrel and for a while the track and field activity stopped and I thought I had solved my problem, but they were just out on a recruiting mission to fill the dead squirrel's spot on the relay team.

I came home from waiting tables one day to see a mama squirrel with a baby squirrel on her back, scampering along the telephone wire toward a gap in the eaves of the house. I picked up a rock and pegged them from sixty feet , surprising no one more than me. The mama dropped the baby, who made terrible sad noises, and then ran away. I didn't know what to do. I probably should have put the little creature out of its misery and rid the world of one more repulsive varmint, but I couldn't bring myself to get any closer to that baby squirrel. I didn't even know if it was hurt or just too scared to run and I thought it might look at me or bite me or something if I got too close. So I got back in my truck and drove away. When I came back a few hours later, it was gone, collected by its mother or eaten by a larger varmint, I couldn't say.

When I married Earl and moved to the farm, I was delighted to learn that he hadn't seen a squirrel out of the woods since he was a kid. For a girl who had previously considered seeking work in Antarctica to get away from squirrels, this seemed like a dream come true. And it was, squirrel-wise, until this fall. Then a little red squirrel appeared from nowhere and started picking the apples from the old tree at the corner of the house and carrying them up the lilac bush and phone wire to the attic. He wasn't very shy about it, and Earl soon learned his habits and then went out and shot him and that was it, no more squirrel. Earl was my hero.

We didn't see or hear any more activity until winter started to stretch on and some squirrel who must have overheard the dead squirrel bragging about his great apple stash decided to go after it. The new squirrel also made his way through the boys' bedroom, the upstairs closets, and my sewing room. I put some nuts outside and Earl spent some time watching with his gun, but there was no regular pattern of activity and I was back in familiar territory, with the hair on the back of my neck standing up every time I went upstairs, seething.

So I went to the hardware store and bought rat traps, which are near the top of my list of Things That I'm Afraid Of, and Earl glued pistachio nuts to the bait bar and set them up. For two days, the traps were untouched, but last night I checked on them and the one on my sewing table was gone. I got a flashlight and found it under the table, and there was a fuzzy tail with a big apple-fed squirrel attached to it. Earl is my hero again. I breathed a deep sigh and crawled into bed. I could sleep easy. Happy birthday to me.

Earl has now put the dead squirrel in the branches of the apple tree, as a lesson to any others in the neighborhood. I know I should be a little grossed out by this, but I'm not. I hope it works and word gets out that we are not to be messed with. My hope is that the dead squirrel is the last squirrel. My fear is that we're only killing the stupid ones, creating a race of Uber Squirrels by selection. If that happens, I may have to resort to more drastic measures. My grandfather once ran an electric current through the pole that supported his bird feeder, watching out the window and flicking a switch. I'm not that protective of bird seed, but my house is a different story and electrocution is promising.

Beware, squirrel friends. Go back to the woods.

Scallions

2008-04-10T08:32:00.003-04:00

A few years ago, I bought a packet of High Mowing onion seeds. I meant to buy seeds for yellow onions, but these Ever-Hardy Bunching Onions only make themselves into scallions. But they're perennials, and every year they make more of themselves and I give some away. The best part, though, is that they come up all by themselves in the spring. Even through the snow.

So last night, less than a week after walking over my raised-bed circle garden, oblivious to its existence under three feet of snow, I picked some scallions for supper. They were just beginning to straighten themselves up and they weren't pretty, but they were green food, from the farm.

Now, we eat stuff from here all the time. I have a freezer full of Keeko, the bull, and corn and berries from the garden. There are potatoes in the basement jars of jam in the pantry. And then there's the milk, eggs and ice cream, of course. But we take that stuff for granted. In April, the scallions are special. They don't so much mark the beginning of the growing season as the promise of it. I've got big plans this year, for enough lettuce for the family reunion (a week-long camping trip for about thirty people), for onion braids to last the whole year, cucumbers for pickles and corn in succession plantings for a month of corn-on-the-cob. I have plans like this every year, and every year my garden gets overrun with weeds and things rot on the vines. This year, though, I think I might actually be able to get it all picked and frozen and canned. I mean, if I can grow scallions through the snow, anything is possible.

On dentistry and condescension

2008-04-08T16:47:00.003-04:00

I had my root canal this morning and it really wasn't that bad. I brought my iPod and listened to the Fenway playlist I made for Earl and Jess to listen to on their way to the first game of the ALCS last year. It has the National Anthem, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, Sweet Caroline, the intro songs for the starting line-up and Josh Beckett (who pitched a gem that night), some hilarious ballads --Manny Being Manny, Dice-K and Okajima, Advice to Grady Little, and Terry Francona--and the classics Tessie, Dirty Water and Merry Merry Merry Frickin' Christmas.

So I was doing fine, mulling over the Coco/Ellsbury problem (or is it a problem?), and who might replace Lugo at short, but Root Canal Guy kept talking to me. Apparently the age of iPodity has not altered his routine of offering friendly banter over the procedure, even when the little device is the only thing keeping his dentalphobic patient from running out of the office in drill-sound induced panic. Now, I might be a total nutcase about the dentist, but I do have manners, so I pressed the pause button and made small noises and gestures in response to his thoughts on development, island vacations, and the weather.

And then, in what must be his standard take-something-you-know-about-the-patient-and-say-something-cute-about-it part of the monologue, he said, "Hey. Dr. H [my regular dentist] lives in Strafford. You should invite him up to milk a cow. Take a picture without him noticing and send it to me. That would be really great." Chuckle. Chuckle.

Now, if he'd only said it once, and if it had been a normal conversation where a comment like this might be chalked up to ignorance and lost in the exchange of pleasantries, it might not have been a big deal. As it was, he was rather pleased with this suggestion and kept talking about it and I had some time on my hands to mull and seethe. Still, it was in my best interest to play nice, so I turned up the volume next chance I got when he was busy with drills and vacuums and some sort of glue-gun-looking thing that smelled like a red rubber ball and filled my sad and empty tooth roots with happy, non-infected plastic. It was over in the nick of time and I was getting out of the chair that I had come to think of as The Rack, when he said it again.

"Dr. H could use it on his Christmas card. Wouldn't that be a sight." And I laid into him, as much my numb and stupid head would let me. "That's jufft great," I said. "Maybe I could cub over in my barn cloves and you coub take a picture of me doing a woot canal. That woub be funny." He looked utterly confused, probably because he wasn't used to patients being snappy with him and also because I think he forgot I could talk. "It's the sabe fing," I told him. "I woubn't let a dentift milk my cows any more than youb let me play wif your drill."

Obviously, it wasn't my finest moment, and I needed to get some fresh air more than I needed to make my point clear. Really, though, what was he thinking? It's one thing to harbor an idea that dairy farming is cute and rustic in an abstract sort of way. It's another thing to share, and belabor, that point with someone whose family does it for a living.

I left there pretty pissed at the suggestion that our work is a cute sideshow. Now that I think on it, though, it seems to me that being a root canal specialist has got to be one of the worst fucking jobs in the world--it's cramped and tedious and no one wants to see you and then you have to talk to yourself, with someone listening, for hours on end. It might actually be funny if my dentist came up and tried to milk a cow. I could introduce him to Charlie. Now that would be a sight.

Bovine Therapy

2008-04-06T08:28:00.004-04:00

Earl and I had a milk date last night. The older boys are at my parents' house, so it was just us (and Oliver, but he just rode on my back and laughed at the cows.) It was a pretty uneventful milking. I milked the first twelve by myself while Earl shredded the round bales and spread out wood chips on the bedded pack and then we milked the rest of them together. For the most part, Earl washed and hooked up the cows and I fed them and filled the dip cups and took a unit off here or there when I noticed a cow was done. We talked about Urny's feet, Neet's postpartum udder swelling (going down nicely, don't you think?), and Popcorn's stupid, pathetic little tail. (A few summers ago, she got it caught in the notch of a tree and thought she was being eaten and ran away, leaving some of her tail behind.) The cows came in and nudged their feeders, telling me to get to work and scoop out the grain. Kristee opened the door to let herself into the parlor. Noodle stole grain out of the bin with a fancy tongue trick that had Oliver in stitches.

And it didn't matter that I was tired and Oliver was heavy or that I was getting dirty after finally finding time for a shower earlier in the day. I was hanging out with Earl, talking and laughing and discussing the great and small issues of the day. Earl moves around the barn with perfect ease and competence and the cows nuzzle him and talk to him in cow language, a silent little language Earl can understand and there's something about watching your husband do something really well, no matter what it is, that's just cool, and even sort of sexy.

The sun was shining when Oliver and I walked back from the barn. We followed some good cooking advice about how to begin meal planning from some cookbook I read once: "As you walk in the door, before even removing your coat, set a pot of water to boil." Dinner turned into Pasta Arabiata, a saute of spaghetti with fresh tomatoes, mushrooms, garlic and jalapeno peppers. As I was chopping the garlic, my friend Margaret, whose arrival in town a few years ago was a fucking gift from the gods if ever there was one, called with some jokes. I laughed and Earl and I set the table, considering and deciding against candles. We had light enough as it was.

Diversion

2008-04-05T12:47:00.006-04:00

Some things are just too depressing to write about here. If I were to try to chronicle this week, even with the most upbeat attitude I can muster, it would still sound like nothing but whining. Let's just say that my trip to the dentist and learning that I need a root canal didn't even come close to the low point. Oliver's first birthday was the high point, but we didn't get to eat his cupcakes until after eight when Earl got back from the barn after feeding, bedding and milking because Erik was on the road in the delivery truck, filling in for Larry, who slipped and hit his head on the ice by the outside freezer and has been out for two weeks with a bad concussion.

I think I'm going to need to wait for some bright spots before I do any more blog posts. I don't trust myself in this current state. Earl and I went out to dinner at Pauline's in Shelburne last night with my sister and brother-in-law and even at one of my most-favorite restaurants, with three of my favorite people on the planet, it was all I could do to keep from banging my head on the table and screaming when the talk turned to dentistry and the housing market.

What the world needs now, what my world needs anyway, is a good old-fashioned diversion. If the circus would only come to town, I would buy ringside seats for every show. I would buy the ginzu knife, and the handy-dandy orange juicer. I would sign up for the celebrity cruise that stops in a dozen fun-filled ports of adventure. I would go to Foxwood Casino.

Alas, I can't do any of these things, or buy a new car for the next three years because I'm having a root canal instead.

Anyone know a good joke?

The Most Important Thing That Doesn't Matter

2008-04-02T10:03:00.002-04:00

This Sunday, we stayed too long at a birthday party (there are a lot of kids in this town and they seem to have three or four birthdays each) and got home just before milking. We should've left earlier, but it was so nice to be like normal people, talking and laughing while the kids ran around in the afternoon sun. It didn't make the work any easier when we got home, but it was nice to forget about it for a little while.

We got home just at four and Earl still had a round bale to shred before he could start chores, so he set up the milkhouse and brought the cows in while I packed up Oliver and Harley and went up to start milking. Cliffy and Jackson were playing outside and I couldn't bring myself to make them come to the barn with me, even though it would have been nice to have their help.

I thought Harley could ride in the tractor with Earl, but the snow and ice is built up so high where it's fallen from the barn roof that the cab tractor doesn't fit in the barn anymore. The loader tractor doesn't have a seat for Harley, so he had to stay in the barn with me. He was a total trooper, drawing on the white board, singing his little songs to the calves, running up and down the feed aisle, saying to the cows, "Watch how fast I can run!" He fell and got his hands dirty, but he was so impressed when I washed him up like he was a cow's udder that he forgot to be sad about it. It's not really how I want to raise my kids, shooing them away from me while I'm working so they won't get kicked by a cow, but it's good to have a kid who can deal when we don't have a choice.

The towel holder had Stupid Towels again. I mixed up Popcorn and Bizkit and probably half of the other Jerseys who all look the same to me. And then I couldn't figure out why Neatha was kicking me and acting psychotic. Getting kicked with a baby on my back is on the list of things that strain my marriage, so I went and got Earl to hook her up. Turns out, the reason Neatha was acting weird is that she was actually Charlie, who is, in fact, psychotic. Charlie usually comes in at the end of milking, which explains why I hadn't milked her since I've only been starting milking lately. She's a quarter Angus, out of Charcoal, a Jersey/Angus cross that this lady we bought some cows from a few years ago sent along on the truck claiming she was a "Black Jersey." Black Jersey my ass. For years, when Charcoal came in the parlor, we wrote, "FBC" on the milking sheet. Yup. BC is for Beef Cow. Anyway, I don't like to be beat, but the counter-intuitive get-close-to-the-psycho-cow moves that milking Charlie required don't work with my precious baby on my back.

Earl went back to feeding and I slogged along through half the cows until Earl finished up and came to take over and Harley, Oliver and I went back to the house to start thinking of what we could possibly eat for supper that could be ready before ten o'clock at night. It wasn't exactly a recipe for a great afternoon, except for one thing--there was baseball on the barn radio.

The Red Sox were playing an exhibition game against the Dodgers. It wasn't going very well for the Sox. Coco made an error that should have been part of a tidy inning, but then Buckholtz started to fall apart, eventually walking in a run. He finally managed to piece three outs together to get out of it and the Sox, who can be so good at rallying behind their pitcher and getting those runs back, had nothing going at the plate. Zero. But it was baseball.

Here it is, the start of the season, and there are so many things to think about. Is Manny hitting third or fourth? How's Big Papi looking after the surgery? Ellsbury or Crisp in center field? If J.D. Drew has a great year, do I have to like him? What's Wakefield going to do without Mirabelli? Oh, the pitching. There's Beckett's back and Schilling's shoulder and whatever is going on with Stick Bug Buckholtz which hopefully will sort itself out before he starts against the Blue Jays in Toronto.

I don't have much use, or time, for basketball, football or hockey, let alone golf, tennis or soccer. I played rugby, but you'd have to tie me up to get me to watch it on television. But baseball is perfect. Three outs and nine innings and a full cast of characters to keep track of and fret over.

I was at the barn when Varitek stuffed his glove in A-Rod's pretty face and turned the 2004 season around. Earl hurt his back in the fall that year and I did all the milking for a week, seven months pregnant and it would have sucked, except that the Sox played a lot of afternoon games on their way to clinching the wild card and the morning radio world was full of news and speculation. As long as the barn radio is on WDEV, a milking's worth of radio will yield some interesting tidbit from spring training to September.

Baseball, someone told me, is the most important thing that doesn't matter. And in my life, with lots of big things that do matter to worry about, it's invaluable.

Shameless Commerce

2008-03-31T16:06:00.002-04:00

The steers were escaping too often and eating too much hay, and since it looks like we're just not going to have a spring or summer this year, we called the butcher and now we have organic beef for sale by the side and quarter. Inquire by e-mail.

Goes to Show You Never Can Tell

2008-03-29T20:34:00.007-04:00

Here's the Niicey update:

This calf got on Earl's last nerve and so he decided to bucket train her early. Usually we get them going on the bucket on the third day. (Bucket training helps calves lose their sucking instinct, which, if left unchecked, will cause them to try to nurse on each other. If they get nursed on, they can get bacteria in their little empty udders which turns into mastitis when they freshen and can compromise their milk production or even kill them.) On day two, he filled up her bucket and she seemed to be interested in it, so he left her to it and did some other stuff. When he came back, it was empty. No coaxing. No fingers in the milk to lure her head down. Nothing. She just drank.

So I guess I have to take it all back. She's like Einstein, failing his first algebra class. She wasn't dumb after all. She was just advanced. A bucket genius.

Go figure.

The Stupidest Calf Ever Born

2008-03-27T09:07:00.004-04:00

I've been pretty sick this week, so it was a big deal for Earl to call from the barn last night and ask me to come up and try to get the new calf to take a bottle. This, he said, is the Stupidest Calf Ever Born. She won't suck on anything, she doesn't want to have anything to do with people, or at least me, and she doesn't even seem to have an ounce of self-preservation. Yup. I've heard this before.

The first Stupidest Calf that I remember was Marley, and she was pretty stupid. She was born breech and she pretty much got everything backward. She drank from a bottle okay, but she was in the Remedial Bucket Drinking class for months, somehow convinced that the milk that was so tasty when it was in her mouth was toxic if it touched her chin or nose. When she and the other calves born that spring were weaned and learning about the electric fence, all the other little calves would touch it once and then stay away from the bad zappy string. Marley ran toward the fence, got zapped, and then sat down, still touching it. Every Single Time. She was unhappy and freaked out, but didn't seem to understand that she was the one driving her body.

Noodle, Ursula, and Sabrina were also notably dim. There were a few not-so-smart bull calves, but for the most part, they know where they stand and eat voraciously, without a fuss. They don't usually, like Bette did, try to nurse on the handle of the bucket, ignoring the milk inside.

As I was walking up to the barn, I was looking forward to sweeping in and saving the day with my patience and my calf tricks. Earl has plenty of calf tricks, but he's low on patience. He has lots of patience for the cows, but calves have none of the cows' stoic calm and when they won't even do the simplest things to keep themselves alive, it pisses him off. So he calls me and I come up and teach Bottle Drinking 101 and I get to feel like a hero and Earl lets me think I alone stood between the calf and doom (when really I stood between Earl and fifteen more minutes at the barn).

The calf was up and looking pretty alert when I got there. She's a full Guernsey and she's equal parts white and that orangey-brown color, distributed in nice spots and blotches. She's Neet's daughter and Naan's granddaughter and so Earl named her Niice. (I just don't know what to tell you about the cow naming around here except that I think Earl is trying to bait me to spend more time at the barn so we won't have a whole herd of dumb-named cows.) Niice was all fluffy and healthy looking and didn't look like all that tough a customer to me.

I climbed into her pen and let her take her time getting used to me. Then I put my fingers in her mouth and we had problem number one, no sucking response. I rubbed the roof of her mouth, I stroked under her chin. Nada. So I tried the bottle. Nothing. She flopped her tongue out of the side of her mouth. I tucked in back in. She flopped it back out. I tucked it back in. Many, many times. I took a break and got her fresh straw to bed on. I tried again. And again. And then I gave up and Earl raised his eyebrows and said, "Really? You give up?" So I climbed in and tried again. I leaned over her, so she'd feel like she was under a cow and I tucked my elbows in close to her eyes. (Sometimes animals, like small children, forget to be quite so psychotically unreasonable when it's dark.) And she started, very slowly, to suck. And she was very slow and not very strong about it, but she was actually sucking. She even swallowed. I held my breath, waiting for the colostrum to hit her bloodstream and start to give her the energy to really get going. And then Earl leaned over and asked, in what was probably just his normal voice but seemed the loudest yelling ever, "How's it going?" and she remembered herself and we were back in the World of Stupid. Nothing I could do after that would get her to suck at all. Nothing. And I'm not a girl who gives up easy.

And so I believe she is indeed the Stupidest Calf Ever Born. Earl ended up tubing her (squeezing the milk directly into her stomach with this special long-tubey thing designed for calves who are too weak to suck; apparently it works on stupid, too). Maybe the protein will make her a little bit smarter. I hope so, because I have to wrap this up and see if she'll take any better to the bucket.

Wish me luck.

Sugaring

2008-03-22T13:39:00.007-04:00

I first met Earl in mid-November 1998. We were engaged by Thanksgiving. Dairy farmers, it turns out, have no problem with commitment and aren't exactly having their doors broken down by hoards of young women wanting to wake up really early and never go on vacation. There were a lot of good reasons to get married in May, but I suspect the big one was to put a ring on my finger before hay season. Haying is hard on a spouse; there are the long hours, the trips to the John Deere dealer for tractor parts, the trips to the New Holland dealer for baler parts, the trips to get more baling twine, to run truck shuttles, to haul hay wagons, and to bring lunch or iced tea to the field. And then there's the milkings to cover so Earl can keep baling until the dew comes down. (Or in Earl-language, until the dude shows up and says it's time to go home.) And all that is before you even get on a tractor or throw a bale of hay. And then there's the emotional roller-coaster of hay being perfect, or rained on while the baler gets fixed, or being stemmy because we went to my friend's wedding on the only good day to mow last week. Earl can't help it; hay is really important. No hay, no food for cows, no milk, no money. Still, Earl's level of absorption makes Ahab's interest in Moby Dick look mild by comparison.

Sugaring, at least the way we do it, is another matter. It's lots of work, but all the stuff is old and paid for, so any money we make is just gravy. The sap either runs or it doesn't and the time to boil can be a little flexible. We're outside, working hard enough to maybe strip down to a t-shirt when the breeze starts to blow warm for the first time since September. We put the sugarhouse radio on the dorkiest country station and sing along at full volume. People stop by. We drink beer. It's good times.

The last time we sugared was when Jackson was a baby, so that would be five years ago. That year, the sap was slow to run and we hadn't made much syrup at first and then, in early April, we had a killer run, with overflowing buckets and a full storage tank and cool weather overnight so we could get a good night's sleep and boil in the morning. And then Toad hurt his back in the creamery and Earl had to go run the pasteurizer. While 300 gallons worth of sap spoiled in the tank. There was nothing for it; no one else knew how to operate the pasteurizer and I couldn't boil with a three-year-old and a three-month-old baby.

We were still heartachy the next year and decided not to tap. It turned out to be a good idea when late snows buried our neighbors taps and made sugaring season a wash even for folks who were into it. And then we were out of the habit and we had all these little kids who were too little to help and who couldn't be trusted to stay away from the arch when it was hot. We built a house for employee housing two summers ago and one of the hopes was that having another family on the farm would let us get back into sugaring. The families-working-together thing hasn't played out, though. So we've been thinking we'd tap again when the older boys could help collect sap and Oliver could hang out with me in the tractor and drive the storage tank around (our big tractor has a passenger seat that holds a carseat). Maybe next year, or the year after that.

And then Jackson and Harley's preschool had Sugaring Week. The director is a dairy farmer's wife and she runs a great program. They turn the classroom into a beach, a pirate ship, a pajama party, and this week, a sugar bush, complete with cardboard box sugarhouse. When I dropped them off on Friday, Jackson and Harley made a bee-line to the buckets on the wall and started collecting. They hauled imaginary sap to the box, called to each other about needing more taps, stoked the fire, and poured off gallons and gallons of Very Very Sweet Maple Syrup For Pancakes and Waffles. And then Earl picked them up and they told him all about it. By the time they got home, a plan had been hatched--fifty taps (we used to do 350), slab wood from the sawmill, and one or two good boils.

I was not so sure about this. I laid out my reasons, pointed out that it wasn't like we were short of worthy activities to occupy our time, and said maybe we could go visit some friends who sugar. And Earl said I was right, we didn't need to. It was too much. And then he didn't say anything. And I probably should have pretended I didn't hear anything but agreement, but I asked, "Are you okay with that?" And he wasn't. The boys had really wanted to sugar. And Cliffy said, "Pleeease?" and Jackson said, "I was a baby the last time we sugared and I didn't even get to help and the only way I know anything about sugaring IS FROM BOOKS!"

What do you say to that? Nothing. You get your boots on.

So they're out tapping right now. I'm not entirely sure how this is going to work, but we'll figure it out.

That's Jax in the bottom picture.. He was thirsty and took a drink of sap right from the tree.

First Day of Spring

2008-03-20T07:53:00.001-04:00

Yup. This about says it. Out like a lamb. Out like a lamb.

Stupid Towels

2008-03-19T10:16:00.001-04:00

Earl's conference thing ran late yesterday and he had forgotten to ask Erik to start milking and so when it got to be four o'clock, Oliver and I went up to milk. Some milkings go better than others and this was one of the others. It was just little things. When I was putting the cows in, Neatha wanted to keep eating and kept taking two steps toward the barn and then turning back into the feed bunk, so I gave her a slap on the flank (It's the noise, not any pain that is motivating. I'm like a three-year old to her even before you factor in her full suit of leather.) Well, Neatha is a brownish-black color and she was clean as a whistle, except for the exact spot my hand touched and I had a few things to do before I found my way near a sink and some soap and paper towels. Then I couldn't find the bucket to fill with hot water and iodine soap to wash the cows. And Kila Monster had thought it over and decided she might want to be milked eventually, but not right now and not by me and couldn't I just please leave her alone while she ate her grain, which incidentally, there wasn't quite enough of. And Oliver fell asleep and I had to lean a little forward to keep him snuggled against my back. And then the feed sheet was missing and I had nothing except the size of each cows' udder to tell me how much grain to feed her.

Really, though, it was the paper towels. About every third Monday Wayne Kerr comes by with his big truck full of Useful Things a Dairy Farmer Might Need. The truck's box has a door on the side with steps like a motor home. There are fifteen-gallon drums of soaps and sanitizers for washing the milkhouse equipment, shovels and shovel handles, calf bottles, nitrile gloves and leather work gloves, buckets of all sizes and materials, and paint sticks (which are big oil pastel crayons) for dairy farmers who might want to make it easier for their wives to identify and feed the cows by writing the first letter of each cow's name in a color that corresponds to the amount of grain she gets. And paper towels for washing and drying the cows' teats.

There are two kinds of paper towels, white towels and brown towels. The white towels are thinner and more flexible and are great for the summertime, when the cows are out on pasture and we just dip and dry them and hook them up. In the winter, we wash them with paper towels dipped into a bucket of hot water and iodine-based Udder Wash. Then we dip them, then we dry them. The white towels are not up to this task, so every winter for the last ten years Earl has bought the thicker brown towels. The white towels cost 21 dollars a box. The brown towels cost 34 towels a box. Last winter, for some reason unknown to us, when Earl asked for, "The Brown Towels," Wayne left two boxes of thin, barely-enough-to-blow-your-nose-on brown towels that he had just started carrying and which cost 13 dollars a box. As if it was the color that was important.

We call these The Stupid Towels, as in, "Cliffy, go get a Stupid Towel and blow your nose," or, "If you can't get the woodstove started with just kindling, you can use some of the Stupid Towels." When I got to the barn yesterday, the towel holder was filled with Stupid Towels. (The towel holder is a little cordura pouch that buckles around your waist to hold towels while you're milking. It looks a little dorky, but it's a great invention.) Now, I should have just marched right into the utility room and swapped out for the good towels, but I didn't want to take the time and I thought it would be good to use them up and I thought I might even save us some money, despite using about four times as many towels per cow. I doubled up the Stupid Towels, then I tripled them. And I kept thinking that I would go get the better towels as soon as I got one set of cows hooked up and I had a minute before the next set was ready to come off. But the gods of milking were laughing at me and the next cows were done, done, done by the time I had finished with the pair before them.

Eventually I used up The Stupid Towels and I left Sweet Pea dripping teat dip while I got the unstupid towels. It took about fifteen seconds. And then everyone seemed to milk out nicely and then Earl came back and took over and I went back to the house with my small victory--I had milked fifteen cows and eliminated one more bundle of Stupid Towels from the barn.

Visitors

2008-03-18T14:52:00.004-04:00

A white Volvo came up the driveway today, got to the top of the hill, and then backed down slowly. At first I thought it was someone who thought our road went somewhere, but a few minutes later, some people appeared at the door. They were wondering if anyone had a few minutes to show them around the farm.

Nancy was downstairs because we were having our weekly check-in, which we usually do while we're cracking eggs together, but Earl is on a panel at a forage conference today and I had to crack my share of the eggs when he was still here to watch the kids (45 dozen in 31 minutes--a new record for me). So Nancy and I were in the kitchen, working on how to make sure our employees are getting milk for their households while we're short of milk, discussing how to best get organic coconut now that our regular supplier has instituted minimums that far exceed our use, and all the little things that make up our work. I was also baking the cookies that Harley and his visiting friend, Charlotte, had mixed up and helping Laila, Charlotte's six-year-old sister, work on a quilt project we're doing together. Oliver was asleep on my back, the laundry pile could comfortably hide a family of stowaways, and the phone had rung three times in the last fifteen minutes. Nancy had piles of invoices, statements plus the rest of the 2007 wrap-up to do. Erik was busy bedding and feeding and watering and taking are of all the new calves. He was also fixing the grain bin that Noodle had managed to break apart and get her head stuck in. Travis was cutting firewood for the outdoor furnace that heats the house and office. Jay and Steve were running milk with Bill, who looks like St. Patrick's Day was a little hard on him. And so we had to tell these nice people, "No. We really don't have anyone who has even a few minutes."

Earl really likes to show people around. He's proud of what we've got going here and thinks that there's nice stuff, like inspiration and education and good will, that people can take from a tour. But it's also hard on him to get interrupted in the middle of his work, which happens often enough anyway, and it eats at him to have too many half-finished projects. Me, I like a little privacy. I don't like the way it feels to sweep aside all the things the boys were expecting--popcorn or homemade playdough, or a trip to the library or finding the Playmobil pirate with the peg leg and the shiny sword--every time someone stops by. Earl doesn't want people to think we have anything to hide. I understand his point, but I do have some things to hide, like our underpants on the clothesline, the endless clutter on the counters, and the trash that the dog got into that is now frozen into the snow.

So we're compromising. We're planning two open farm days this summer, between cuts of hay. Earl will make a round bale maze with the new hay and I'll scoop some ice cream cones and Earl and the boys can show people around. Kids can check out the tractors. Folks can walk the lane and visit the cows on pasture and see the new calves in the barn. We'll put some curtains in the kitchen window, rent a port-a-john, and keep all the action up by the barn and creamery, where it belongs, of course. We'll try to make it really nice. Hopefully it will be fun for everyone who comes, and for us. Maybe even for me.

Sweet Pea

2008-03-16T09:49:00.004-04:00

Earl and I milked together last night, just the two of us, for the first time in months. My teenage cousin, Zoe, was taking care of the boys at the house. I had hoped to get the cows in and set up the milkhouse while Earl was still shredding a round bale in the freestall feedbunk. (The cows can eat the round bales unshredded, either rolled out or just plunked there to pull the hay off, but they waste a huge amount and, with last summer's low-yield hay season, the bale shredder has made a big difference.) I'm famous for underestimating how long things will take me, though, and between Oliver getting hungry, making pizza for the kids and Zoe, and trying to figure out how to get the television working after our ten-hour power outage so the boys could watch a movie, it was twenty past four by the time I headed up the hill.

Earl put the cows in and I set up the milkhouse, which is a good distribution of labor--the cows sometimes treat me like the babysitter, saying, in their bovine way, "Earl always lets us drink as much as we want before we go in the barn. He never makes us wait to drink inside." I also like to set up the milkhouse because then I can bring all the units upstairs and have them connected before I turn the vacuum pump on. This makes all the pulsators, which make the rubber sleeves that go around each teat squeeze and release, squeeze and release, make their clicky noises in synchronicity. I don't like it when the clicky noises are all random.

The cows are used to a few minutes of standing around, waiting for the person who put them in to shut the gate behind them and come around to milk, and they weren't quite sure what to do when the door opened right away. Antonia was in the front, but she just calved last week and she's not a raise-her-hand-in-the-front-row kind of cow, so she turned tail and headed back into the stream of cows and I backpeddaled and decided to shut the door and refill the dip cups for a few minutes. Only Kila had made it in. Kila, aka Kila Monster, was born on New Years' Day 2000 and she's a rascally old cow and she's seen it all. She wasn't surprised to see me and I wasn't surprised when she tried out three different stalls for leftover grain, tried in vain to get into the new grain bin, and generally ignored my attempts to influence her behavior. When Earl came into the parlor, she stepped up into stall three and, if it wasn't an anatomical impossibility, I would swear she was whistling.

Before we had kids, I used to milk all the time, either with Earl or to give him a chance to sleep in or to work longer at something else, like sugaring or haying or fixing something. I milked the day before Cliffy was born because it was Thursday and that was Earl's morning to sleep late. And then we had all these kids who were having nothing of bottles or pacifiers and I haven't had a regular presence in the barn since. I pinch hit--milking 11 in a row when Earl hurt his back in '04 and when things go wrong somewhere else and Earl needs to fix them, during haying, or when we're running late and I'll get started while Earl feeds. And milking is a like riding a bike and I find myself in autopilot--one hand on the cow's flank, leaning in, reaching for the dip cup with the other. I use all my tests to determine when she's done milking (this is the most important part to keeping the cows healthy and milking well), looking to see if there is milk in the hose and if all four quarters are slack, feeling the udder, and what I know about each cow and her stage of lactation and how long she takes to milk out.

The problem is that I don't know the cows like I used to. I mean, I still know the cows I knew when I milked all the time, but that was almost eight years ago and a lot of those cows aren't with us anymore and some of their daughters look or act like them, but some of them don't. Scarlet looks like Bizkit and Coffee and Cream and Cocoa and Butter are all lumped together in the Dumb Food Name group in my head and I can't seem to remember who is who. Maisy looks like Tatiana, except that that the white spots on Tatiana's head look like the number 7 and Maisy's just look like spots. Lily looks like a lot of other cows but she is high strung and mean and I find myself thinking, "This must be Lily I've just milked," when I breathe a sigh of relief and let Honey or Dixie or Ambrosia out of the parlor. Taffy is mean, too, and Selma can be unpredictable. And all these cows get a scoop, or a half scoop, or a no grain at all when they come into the parlor and to look them up on the feed list, I have to know who they are. Sometimes, after I've milked, Earl will say to me, "I saw on the chart that you milked Popcorn three times," and I will shoot him a look and make some smart-ass comment about maybe getting some more distinctive cows if he cares so much about his milk chart, but the truth is, in my mind, that was Popcorn, all three times.

So last night when Sweet Pea came into the parlor, I was all smiles and relief, greeting an old friend. Sweet Pea was a wedding present from some dairy-farm neighbors. She's a Holstein-Guernsey cross and she's all black, except for a white heart on her forehead. She has a beautiful well-balanced udder and and is patient and sweet. She's very tall and her udder is usually very clean, minimizing the work I need to do with hot water, iodine teat dip, and paper towels. She takes a bit to milk out and usually needs her front quarters taken off for her rear ones to get fully empty. She makes a lot of milk and gets a full scoop of grain unless she's just about ready to dry off, and that's obvious from one look at her udder. Sweet Pea was my easy street. She came in with Urny, another old friend, and I sat down between them and knew just how to take care of them.

Pi Day

2008-03-14T10:51:00.014-04:00

Today is Pi Day, as in 3.14159 etc., or 3/14/08. It’s a big day at Cliffy’s school, with an assembly with skits and contests and songs. Cliffy memorized the Greek alphabet and managed to recite it perfectly, referring to the t-shirt I made him with a sparkly Pi on it, when he got stuck after Omicron. Some of the kids had memorized Pi to over fifty decimal places. Aibhilin, who won the Greek alphabet writing contest, sat down with her slate and asked if she should use upper or lower case, but then decided to do both. It was pretty impressive. Rebecca said the alphabet in 4.66 seconds and that was really fast, but I left before her older sister, Emma, had her chance to beat it. The first graders had a song and the kindergarteners lined up with their digit cards in the right order. There was a baking demonstration with whipped cream and even a Pi rap. Earl, Oliver, and I went to watch and it was a riot.

The NOFA newsletter is coming out and they asked us for a picture to put in the article about Jack Cook Award winners. Cliffy was memorizing the Greek alphabet, so Jackson took these pictures of us. I think maybe we'll take some more at the barn for NOFA, but I thought I'd put them in here because my mom's friend, Linda, was wondering why there aren't any pictures of me.

I know it's only a calm before the next storm, but it's nice to have a day that feels a little boring and routine. It's not really. The three-phase inverter for the little bottle filler, the bottle conveyor and the bottler pump died yesterday. (Most commercial motors run on three-phase power, which is cheaper and better for machines that run at variable speeds. Three-phase power doesn't come this far into the woods, so we take single-phase power and split it into threes with these things called inverters.) We could run all those things through the ice cream inverter, because we never run those machines all on the same day, but we need our electrician to do it and he was at the assembly, but we had to leave early and didn't get a chance to talk to him and apparently he hasn't checked his messages. So we're limping along with the big filler and the portable pump, with Bill sliding the bottles on the conveyor like a fancy bartender.

And Frank, who was supposed to be riding with Larry today so he can train as a substitute driver, which we desperately need because I really hate driving the delivery truck with my kids riding shotgun, didn't get here until seven, when I was pretty sure we had talked about him coming in at six. So Larry left without him, which is good, and then left a message with Nancy about how he hadn't picked up his rider. But Nancy thinks is about dropping off the truck for service at Ryder and so we're needing a little clarity around all that. And we have to call Frank and ask if he can cover Monday for Bill, who needs to take St. Patrick's Day off in order to celebrate properly, whatever that means. But all this is workable and are moving forward.

Tessa

2008-03-11T22:34:00.004-04:00

Earl will have to write about what really happened with Tessa, medically and all--but here's how it played out for me:

It's four thirty in the afternoon and the phone rings. I'm supervising homework, washing eggs, and thawing steaks for supper. It's Earl and the vet is coming and there's something up with Tessa. Can I come up to milk when Dr. Pinello gets here? Sure. Give me twenty minutes. I feed snacks, wrangle boys into outerwear, put Oliver on my back and head up to the barn. Dr. Pinello isn't there yet and the boys run around, checking on all their secret barn projects, while I feed grain and hang out with Earl. I go check on Tessa and she actually looks okay to me. She's up and eating and I can see the calf moving against her side. I say this to Earl and he says he knows, but something doesn't seem right to him. Christine (aka Dr. Pinello, the vet) arrives with her buckets, paper towels, halter and rope. She is saying something to Earl about how, when he calls her like this, it either turns out to be nothing at all or else it's really something. I am thinking this will be in the first category, but I am wrong.

Tessa, or maybe the calf, has somehow managed to twist her uterus around so her birth canal is twisted shut. The solution to this is to lay her down and roll her over with a board pressing against her belly. Earl calls Erik, our ace farm hand, who has gone home about an hour before, and our neighbor, Kris Brown and his daughter, Amanda, who have the dairy farm across from our road. Cliffy and Jackson are dispatched to throw down straw from the hayloft. Earl and Harley go to get a board. Oliver and I milk the rest of the cows. I hear Dr. Pinello saying she thinks the twist goes this way. I wonder what will happen if she's wrong. I finish milking and take the units down to the milkhouse and clean everything up. When I check in with Earl about the milk for the calves, Tessa is on her feet, untwisted, and Christine is checking her cervix. Apparently Amanda, who is a high school senior and as smart and tough as she is beautiful, managed some gymnastics to hold the board in place and the job came off without a hitch.

The next step is to get the calf out. Apparently this is complicated by the labor being so long and going nowhere and all the hormones have quit and gone home. Christine gets baling twine on the calf's feet and, with Earl and Erik pulling, the calf comes out, but he doesn't make it. Tessa, however, is up and eating and looking pretty good.

I don't know about this final outcome until later, because there's a meeting at the preschool to review a policy that I care deeply about. The original reason I went to the barn was so that Christine's visit wouldn't make Earl late and he'd still be able to watch the kids while I went to the meeting. But things are different now, so I take Oliver with me and go to the preschool, which I am hoping will only take twenty minutes, but which takes over an hour. I peel out as soon as I can, and come home to find the kids watching a movie and Earl still at the barn. I make a quick supper of sliced apples, canned soup and thick slabs of wheat bread I made earlier in the day. The boys tell me about the calf, which is sad, but that Tessa is okay, which is so good, and that Cliffy fell into the ice in the ditch beside the barn and had to run back to change his clothes. Earl comes in a few minutes later and we fry up some steaks. Earl is exhausted and that mixture of glad that he called the vet and that Tessa is okay and wondering if there was something he could have done sooner or better to save the calf. He almost falls asleep at the dinner table, which is not surprising, because it's almost nine o'clock. The boys are beyond hungry and gobble up everything I put in front of them and then get really sleepy when the food kicks in. They manage to get into pajamas and up the stairs with just enough energy for about two minutes worth of crankiness before Earl settles them and they stretch out and fall asleep. Meanwhile, I have gone out to the car to get Oliver, who fell asleep on the way home from the preschool and who I bundled up and put a baby monitor next to so I could concentrate on getting the other boys fed and in bed. Oliver wakes up and I change his diaper and put him in his jammies and nurse him until he falls back to sleep in his bed.

And then I wash the boys coats so they'll be clean for school in the morning and write all this, waiting for the washer to click so I can hang the coats by the heater to dry overnight. Which I just did.

We have days like this. Maybe not every month, but maybe three, maybe fifteen times each year, when we divide and conquer, call in friends, let the kids watch movies and drink root beer, eat canned soup or cereal for supper, and then collapse on our pillows, happy to put the day and its challenges to bed. Which is what I aim to do right now.

Goodnight.

Three Calf Day

2008-03-11T12:00:00.003-04:00

We had three calves yesterday. Antonia had calved when Earl went up to the barn, Kristee calved during morning milking, and Charlyze calved in the afternoon. All heifers. It was a good day.

When cows first freshen (that's what it's called when they have a calf, although I must say, having given birth a few times myself, that "fresh" was not one of the ways I would have described the postpartum time), they make colostrum, which is full of all kinds of good stuff for their babies. Colostrum has antibioties, immunoglobins, and tons of protein and fat. It's bright yellow-orange and sticky and pretty unappetizing for people, but just the perfect thing for calves. We milk fresh cows into a separate pail until they stop making colostrum, which is usually around the fourth or fifth milking.

Antonia, Kristee and Charlyze will go into the tank tomorrow, and milk production will start to come up. This is a really, really good thing. We were almost 1600 gallons short for today's orders. Antonia and Charlyze are heifers, so we don't really know how they'll milk, but we can expect about forty-five lbs. a day from each of them. Kristee is a very good cow, probably because she is so smart and rascally and always finding a way to sneak an extra bit of grain, and will likely top out at over sixty pound a day. Butter and Nala have just started going into the tank and we'll probably see over 70 lbs./day from each of them, as we will from Tessa, who looks ready to calve any day now.

So it's looking like we'll have more milk for a little bit here. We'll have a bit of a drop when we stop picking up Putnams milk at the beginning of April, but we hope it will be short lived. We have seven cows due in March and April and nine in May and early June.

I hope the folks who have been looking for our milk will start finding more of it. I hope all these cows calve easily and that their calves are healthy and strong. And I hope I'm the first one to spot one of the heifer calves. I have some good names in mind.

Jax

2008-03-08T21:32:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was a miserable day here. Rain and slush and mud and the boys and Earl spent the morning cleaning the house to keep me from making good on my threat to take Oliver and go on vacation until everyone learned to put their things away. Then Jackson went to a friend's house. Earl went to pick up milk at the Putnams. I took the other boys to baseball sign-ups and on a few errands. We picked up Jackson and on the way home, Cliffy pointed out that today, the best thing to wear was a house.

So then we got home and dubbed around and made supper and got on each other's nerves. Cliffy did chicken chores and looked defeated by the walk across the road, but we had talked about him taking on the job of bottle feeding the new calves and so I told him it was time to go help Daddy at the barn. I reminded him that Earl was paying a dollar per milking. Well, Cliffy made it pretty clear that he really, really didn't want to go, although he would if I absolutely said he had to, and I was thinking this over when Jackson volunteered. I was still thinking it over when Jackson appeared at my feet with all his warm things and an umbrella. So even though he just turned five and it was windy and awful, I sent him up. I tried to call Earl to let him know he was coming, but the barn phone isn't working. So I distracted myself and made the pasta fresh because it's Jackson's favorite. I was just looking for Earl's raincoat that fits over me and Oliver to go check on them when Earl and Jackson slogged in the door.

They were soaked, even with the umbrella, but Jackson beamed like molten sunshine when Earl gave him a dollar and thanked him for his help. He ate like a teenager, thanked me for making supper, and was all business at bedtime, happy to rest his hard-working little self.

Jackson takes himself very seriously, which can be supremely annoying. He isn't just playing, he's Doing Very Important Things and doesn't like to be interrupted to, say, eat, or sleep, or get ready for school. Farm work, on the other hand, is itself a Very Important Thing, especially if Daddy is involved, and Jax is out the door at the first mention of a barn. When I milk, he manages the grain, climbing up onto the tie rail to turn the auger off and on. I'm pretty sure if I asked him to fill the bin and then asked again later, I'd end up doing it myself, but if I ask him to make sure I don't run out, well, that's a different story.

Earl and I think sometimes about how it would be nice if one of these boys wanted to keep the farm going when we retire. Earl has some perspective on this, and doesn't want the boys to grow up thinking they don't have other options. So even though we think Jackson would make an excellent farmer, we'll keep that to ourselves. If he comes to that conclusion on his own, well, that's a different story.

Bull Calf

2008-03-08T21:12:00.006-05:00

Butter was due today and she calved this morning during chores. That almost never happens.

Butter is Butte's daughter and Boots' granddaughter. She's tall and strong and a good milker and a sweetie in the parlor. She had a bull calf, who we'll raise as a steer along with the heifers until he's about two years old, at which point he'll move to the freezer. We only keep one bull each season, from a spring-calving cow with lots of desirable attributes and an AI sire who is unrelated to the rest of the herd. (AI stands for Artificial Insemination and involves a technician, a shoulder glove, and straws of semen stored frozen in liquid nitrogen.) There are five cows due this spring whose offspring, if male, would meet this criteria. Usually we hope for heifer calves, but I'm hoping either Nala or Honey has a bull calf. Nala is Nora's daughter and has a little Ayshire in her. Ayshire's are known for their hardiness, especially in infancy, and that's certainly a benefit in any barn. Nala's also got good body depth and is calm and gentle. Honey is Ambrosia's twin and Nectar's daughter. Nectar came from Butterworks farm when we were desperately needing more milk and Jack and Ann had a few more cows than they had stalls in the barn. Honey is sweet and lovely and has nice strong, straight legs and a perfectly balanced udder. The twin thing isn't necessarily good, as a female born with a male twin will usually be sterile. Birthing twins can also be hard on the mother, although all the twins we've had here were born without assistance. Of course, these five may all have heifer calves. And that would be fine. Savannah, the butterfat/production queen and a true sweetie, is due in late May.

As for Butter's calf, he'll have a good two years. He'll be ready to graze right about when the grass starts to really grow. He'll spend his first summer with his buddies in the training pastures (double rows of polywire on the perimeter) and will winter on the bedded pack in the heifer barn across the road from the house. We'll give him a dumb name, like Butter Boy or Butter Bud (all the bull calves were called Bud when I first met Earl). He'll grow big and strong and likely he'll be a little on the dumb side, as the steers invariably are. And then we'll either sell him for freezer beef or eat him ourselves. If this last batch of animals we just butchered is any indication, he'll be delicious. Earl is really good at balancing the steers' diets, with just enough grain to get some marbling in the steaks and great flavor.

I was a vegetarian for fifteen years before I met Earl, and I lasted a full meat-free year before one thick, juicy steak won me over when I was pregnant with Cliffy. I was never a vegetarian for any good reason (I was just trying to impress a boy in high school), but over the years I had gotten kind of used to not having any animals die to feed me and I thought I would probably feel bad about it if they did. Turns out, I don't. We can't raise all the bull calves as pets; that's ridiculous. We could sell them when they're small, but they wouldn't fare as well and would probably end up as dog food. So we raise them, and the same way I look at Antonia and hope she'll milk as well as Ambrosia, I look at the steers and I picture the dotted lines marking off the various cuts of organic, grass-fed beef. These days, I like my beef pastured, happy, and medium rare.

Harley Barley

2008-03-03T10:18:00.000-05:00

Harley is three and he pretty much acts like it, except for the talking. He's one of those kids who talked early in complete sentences at the age when his brothers were still saying single words and pointing at things. Harley looks for opportunities to use the fancy word constructions he cooks up--"ACTUALLY, Mama, I PREFER the blue sippy cup." In his little sing-song voice. Mostly it's cute.

The way Harley plays out on the farm is this: the bale shredder is his implement. Cliffy has the Bobcat. Jackson has the finger-wheel rake. Earl has the tractor and the barn. I have the house. Pilot (our dog), has the porch. Oliver has his Twisty Billy toy. (Lots of emphatic nodding.) That's how it is. Cinder is his cow. Itty Bitty was Jackson's cow, but she didn't breed back and now he's not sure who his cow is. Maisy is Cliffy's cow. Oliver is too little to have a cow. He can have a chicken. He can have the black chicken. There are two black chickens. Oliver can have both of them and then if one gets run over by the car, he'll still have a black chicken.

Today the older boys were going to help Earl water the heifers. Harley wanted to go too, but by the time I got him dressed, the tanks were all full and they were headed up to the big barn. So the big boys ran ahead and Earl came and got Harley. He marched off as proudly as if he'd just accepted the post as President of All Fun and Important Things, pausing only to give me the Rose Parade wave. At the barn, he helped Earl move the dry cows, waving his arms and saying, "Git," a lot. He held the hose in the water tub for the cows in the maternity pen. He sang a little song to the cows. Then he played in the snow and climbed on the Ranger.

If you ask Harley if farming is fun, he'll say, "Yes!" But then he'll add, "But it's very important," and he'll nod for emphasis.

Winter Carnival

2008-03-03T08:31:00.000-05:00

Strafford has a winter carnival. It's really quite a thing, put together by a bunch of people who love winter and love kids but mostly just love living in a town that has a winter carnival. Eva and Leslie did movie night at the gym on Friday. Siobhan, Therese, Kent, Blake, Sherm, Paul, Michael, Jessica, Sperry and Tim put on the sledding and skiing races and ran the rope tow on Saturday. Earl and I did the lunch and snacks; Tom helped us carry everything up, Eva helped us carry it down. Rebecca took pictures.

Tom and Jere did the ice for the skating party on Saturday night with Tom's tractor-driven Zambini. I'm not sure who put up the lights, but some of them were Scott's and the generator was in Tom's truck. Jessica brought the whipped cream. We brought the cocoa. Everyone helped everyone else's kids put on skates. Margaret and Michael brought the hockey goals and extra sticks. Someone made a fire. Everyone fed it sticks.

Sunday was snowshoe and cross country ski races and a biathlon with skis or snowshoes and paintball guns and an obstacle course with climbing and falling and sleds and tunnels. There was more skating and marshmallow roasting and hot dogs. Jere made the trails with his little ATV groomer. Ann and Kent and Siobhan did the timing. Scott was on course to help with the Sled-on-a-Rope. Jere did the biathlon. Hilary found skis and snowshoes for anyone who wanted to try them. I think it was Scott's grill, but Tom and Eric were the ones I saw cooking.

Sunday night was the Spaghetti Supper and awards ceremony. Siobhan, Therese, Bridget, Tom, Jessica and Sperry got the food together. I made the meat sauce with Kiko, the bull who recently moved into the freezer. Andy took the money. Ann poured the punch. Rebecca's pictures were in the first slideshow; Tracy's were in the second. Janet and Ann did the dishes. Sperry read off the awards. Everyone cheered like it was the Olympic medal ceremonies. Bob took the extra meat sauce home to make lasagna for town meeting lunch on Tuesday. Jessica took the meatless sauce for the same thing. Everyone cleared off their spaces, picked up the crumpled napkins, and pushed in their chairs.

Well, you get the idea. It was great. Sometimes people talk about the heyday of Strafford and they mean the years when the copper mine was open--the 1880s and 1940s--and in full swing. And our one-store, two-post-office town of 1000 today is nothing like the one that had two hotels, five general stores, a sawmill, movie theater, a lumberyard, a grist mill, a tannery, a bedstead factory, two dance halls, three doctors and a creamery. But this weekend, Strafford had as much going on as a small city and, for 100 kids and their parents, it was THE place to be.

A cold day in February

2008-02-29T10:01:00.000-05:00

Usually Amy does these posts but I figured I'd send one out because today it was -12f and people sometimes wonder what the cows do when it's cold outside. Our milking cows live in a composting bedded-pack barn, which means the air temperature is the same as outside, but the pack is actually about 55 degrees or so on the surface due to the composting happening deep in the pile. That said, cows love cold weather and some of them will sleep outside in the snow, although not usually at -12.

I got up at 4:15 and headed to the barn like normal, the air was crisp and the snow was squeaky but there was no wind and the stars were brilliant. I thought to myself "I love this." It was quiet and calm in the barn. The dry cows were in their stalls in the barn and were all chewing their cud and keeping the barn warm with their body heat. The calves were all sleeping in their pens, snuggled into the straw. I checked the maternity pen, which has 8 cows waiting to calve, but none this morning. When I opened the door to the pack barn where the milkers sleep the lights were off which means that no cows had been moving for half an hour or so (there are motion sensing lights so they can see if they want to eat or drink). The door to the pack barn slides and the condensation had frozen the door almost completely shut. As soon as it opened the cows started getting up and clouds of water vapor rose from each bed as the heat trapped under them was released. The Pack looks kinda funny right after they get up with big oval patches surrounded by light frosted areas. The cows love to come in the barn and get milked and require almost nothing from me to get in, although when it's cold out it would be nice to get them in a little bit faster so the parlor doesn't get so cold. Milking at -12 is not so bad because I can cuddle right up to the cows and they're very warm. The cows go right back outside after milking and into the pack barn. When the sun came up at about 7:30 I looked out and all the cows were outside in the snow facing into the sun to catch some solar radiation. The looked quite happy, unfortunately by the time I got the camera they had shifted around and some had started eating. Oh well.

New Arrival

2008-02-28T22:25:00.000-05:00

Neatha had a calf yesterday. Neatha is Fartha's calf and Nera's granddaughter. Her cousins are Yonder and Nearly. You get the idea. Earl had a little fun with those names. But Erik saw the calf first, or her feet anyway, as she was being born, and he named her Nikki.

Nikki is the first of the spring calves and her birth means milk production will come up a little bit as Neatha rejoins the milking string. Calving is not really a seasonal thing, except that we plan our breeding to avoid having calves in the deepest, darkest part of the winter. Cows cycle year round, about every 21 days, and have a nine month gestation, just like people. Unlike people, they don't seem particularily bothered by being pregnant and are pretty chill about giving birth too.

Cliffy did his homework on the fly so he and Jackson could run up and take a picture of the new addition to the herd.

Germination Mix

2008-02-28T09:03:00.000-05:00

It's time to get the tomato and onion seeds into some dirt. I know this not only because town meeting is next week and because it's about 8-12 weeks before last frost, but also because I think I might begin to lose my mind if I don't.

There's a lot of snow up here, and I love snow and all the sports that go with it, but sports aren't my life anymore and this family of ours does a lot of eating and I like to grow our food. I'm not very good at it. Last year I didn't label my tomato seedlings and when only one variety really took off, I figured that would be okay, except that we ended up with about forty cherry tomato plants and three full-sized ones. The year before that I thought I'd plant asparagus and I asked our friend, Josh, who was here working on some drainage with his excavator, to dig me a trench. Four spears of asparagus surfaced before I gave up and filled it in. Every year, by August, the weeds and I have to carry my kids on my shoulders through the pigweed, orchard grass and jerusalem artichokes to look for the squashes.

Every year there's at least one garden success story. Last year it was the potatoes and the green beans, which only sort of climbed up my teepee, but were happy to produce a bumper crop in a heap near the ground. The year before it was the tomatoes, early and perfect and ten different varieties and well supported by their cages. The year before that it was the carrots. Before that it was the peas, and even once it was the corn. It's never the lettuce.

If I was a good gardener, I would grow all the lettuce for the family reunion camping trip that goes for a week in the middle of July. It shouldn't be that hard, really. Lettuce seed is cheap and I can plant it early. Somehow, though, I always get it wrong and end up with either a bag of baby lettuce good for a few salads or bolted, bitter lettuce that is barely fit for chickens. My mom is one of eight kids and they come from all over with their families to camp at Lake Dunmore and they eat a lot of salad. I bring the milk and the eggs and usually Earl will come over for supper with a tub of ice cream once or twice, but it would be really nice to do the lettuce, too.

This year I'm going to buy germination mix. It's a odd thing for me and it feels a bit like when I got my first automatic transmission truck. Outside of the kitchen, I'm not really a specialized equipment kind of girl. I use bottle caps as screwdrivers and am holding the oven door together with a lobster cracker. I plant things in dirt. But last year, my friend, Kate, used germination mix and I had plant envy. She had plants when I still had sprouts and though she was kind and modest about it, I could tell that she was pretty excited to hit the ground running. That's going to be my story this year.

Vitamin D

2008-02-25T15:19:00.000-05:00

We don't put Vitamin D in our milk. Unlike Vitamin A, it's not required by law. We looked into Vitamin D and learned that the human body needs about 30 minutes of sunlight each week to make enough Vitamin D to stay healthy. We were pretty sure our customers would be getting that.

I hadn't realized, until I had little kids, how easy it is to stay inside. All the snowsuits, mittens, boots and hats are a major undertaking and there is so much to do to keep the house and business end of the farm running, that sometimes Oliver and I don't get out at all.

Yesterday was bright sunny and when Oliver awoke from his morning nap, Jackson announced that we needed "sunshine for our vitamins." So we packed up and went for a walk and it was amazing. The sun was warm on our faces, the sky was that color Earl calls RockBottom blue, and the boys were full of wonder. They found sticks and mud and giant snowballs and Loud Mouth, the farm cat, sleeping on top of the back-up generator. We watched Erik shred a round bale for the milking cows, saw Shiloh, the calf, try to nurse on Loud Mouth's ear, and took this picture of the finger wheel rake's shadow on the snow. We came back to the house for some hot chocolate (our chocolate milk heated up) and I couldn't help but think that not putting Vitamin D in our milk might be a public service of sorts. Like a prescription to get outside.

Attention

2008-02-21T21:57:00.000-05:00

I guess we got mentioned in the New York Times recently. Our coffee and mint ice creams were on a list of the author's favorite artisan foods. That's really nice and very flattering; we go to a lot of trouble to make those flavors and it's nice that our efforts are appreciated. We brew the coffee right into the ice cream mix and we pick and destem all the mint by hand. We're crazy about fresh ingredients and we're usually grinding the coffee or picking the mint on Wednesday morning as Jay and Steve are setting up the ice cream freezers.

The appearance of that article explains why our phone and e-mail have been buzzing lately with requests from New York and Florida asking us to send our ice cream in the mail. It's very nice that people are so interested in our stuff and willing to pay whatever it takes to get it to them. The problem is, that sending ice cream in the mail is rather involved. The process goes something like this:

Pack up children in the car and drive up to the creamery (it's 100 yds. from the house) and get ice cream and pack it in the cooler. Hope that Oliver stays happy and that the older boys are not fighting. Put the cooler in the car and drive 20 miles to the big supermarket that sells the Styrofoam coolers, not the coop I usually shop at. On the drive, tell the kids one of our long, involved stories about the Construction Boys who solve all their family's crises with things they build out of scrap lumber or the Pixie Sprites, who steal children's shiny treasures, drink moonlight, are afraid of rocks, and are magic, but only a little bit. Unbuckle the boys from their carseats and go into the big supermarket. Put Oliver in the seat of the shopping cart, bribe Harley and Jackson with a treat to stay right at my side, and pick Cliffy up to retrieve a cooler from its perch on top of the beer cooler. It's imprinted with NASCAR all over it. Wicked cool. Pay for cooler, reload kids, and drive 5 miles to Dry Ice Place. Dry Ice Place is actually New England Medical Couriers and selling dry ice pellets by the scoopful is not their primary business. They seem happy to see the kids, who are fascinated by the steamy cold. I give the nice people the extra pint of ice cream I brought along, pay and take my wicked-cool and now wicked-heavy cooler back out to the car, hoping the handle doesn't break as I carry it with the arm that's not holding Oliver. I buckle all the kids and drive 3 miles to FedEx, where, if we're lucky, there is only one other car in the parking area. More cars mean a line and no car means the nice FedEx lady could be doing something important in the back and we'll have to ring the bell and wait for her to appear and help us. I hate to ring bells. I fill out the FedEx forms and dry ice disclosures while trying to keep the Construction Boy or Pixie Sprite story going so I won't feel so bad about schlepping these poor kids around all day. We pay the $50 to $100 it costs to send the ice cream and get back in the car to go home but Oliver will be hungry so we'll sit in the parking lot while I nurse him. When Oliver has fallen to sleep, I'll try to get him nestled in his carseat without waking him, but I'm only rarely successful and there are three traffic lights to stop at before we can get on the highway and the sound of the tires lulls him to sleep. We drive 25 miles home and I think of what I'm going to cook for dinner while I try to wrap up the Construction Boy or Pixie Sprite story with a tidy, cohesive ending.

So you see, this is something I will only do for love, and not money. My brother, who I love dearly and who loves our coffee ice cream, gets a shipment every couple of years. Once FedEx messed up and it all melted, even though it was winter and well below zero in Wyoming.

Thank you, kind writer at the New York Times and thank you people who think it would be worth the expense to get our ice cream in the mail. I'm sorry we can't help you, but we're going to stay at home and take care of the cows and each other so we'll want to keep doing this. You could always take some ice cream home with you next time you visit Vermont. The NASCAR coolers are at the big supermarket at Exit 20, on top of the beer cooler, when you first walk in.

Thinking ahead to dandelions

2008-02-20T13:50:00.000-05:00

I like winter, but sometimes I look out over all the snow and think wistfully of how it felt to walk barefoot on warm grass. I'm pretty sure the cows spend their time almost exclusively in the present tense, but they kick up their heels and throw their necks around when they get out on pasture for the first time in the spring.

This is Urny. She's Ursina's daughter and Ursula's mother and this image was supposed to be a poster explaining why our milk gets yellow in the summertime (Guernsey cows are really good at passing along the color and flavor of their feed in their milk, especially fresh grass and dandelions).

Urny is a sort of hard name to explain in a short little paragraph and I couldn't get around it and the poster never materialized. Maybe this summer we can take a nice picture of Fern, or Sylvia, or Savannah, or Tatiana, or Maisy, or Honey or Ambrosia or Sweet Pea or Popcorn or Nettle. But not Urny, or Ratley, or Butter or Cream or Natty or Neatha, or Sprocket or Ullie. Well, maybe Sprocket. You see, the person who finds the calf gets to name her, with a name beginning with the first letter of her mother's name. That person is usually Earl and most of the time he comes up with really nice names. Other times, something odd will pop into his head and he'll just go with it and move on. Over the years, I have sometimes tried to make suggestions, but Earl always says the same thing, "So-and-so is due to calve later this week. You can do all the milkings until then and you can name her calf." This summer, when the grass is warm, I hope I'll find a few calves. I've got some good names in mind.

Chickens

2008-02-19T07:03:00.000-05:00

We took the kids out to dinner last night and they were a little bit whiny and loud--disputes over the crayons and wanting to work on their artwork instead of eating the scallops they really, really wanted. A few threats to bring them out to the car for the duration of the meal were effective, but overall, we weren't impressed. As we were packing up, though, a nice older lady from a nearby table came over to tell us how she'd been admiring our sons' manners and wanted to let us know. The boys beamed with pride and put on their coats without a fuss. Sometimes, out of the blue, you get thrown a biscuit.

The chickens are another bright spot in our parenting world. Every time I ask him, Cliffy will set down whatever he's doing and get his things on to take care of the chickens. He feeds and waters them, checks for eggs, and lines their boxes with hay. When he's out of hay, he brings a sled around to the upper part of the barn (it's built into a hill), climbs up on the hay and rolls a bale off the stack, drags it onto the sled, and pulls it around to the chicken coop. A bale weighs about thirty pounds and it's bigger than he is, but he's figured out this system. When he thinks he needs help, he asks Jackson. The two of them can make chicken chores into a major adventure, dividing and conquering the tasks like they're taking over a subcontinent.

So when I'm asking them for the third time to wash their hands for dinner and no one is listening and I raise my voice without response and then I have to scream over the din and they look up at me as if they just can't fathom why I would be interrupting their play and making demands of them, I can think of the chickens.

NOFA Winter Weekend

2008-02-18T21:06:00.000-05:00

The NOFA (Northeast Organic Farmers' Association) Winter Conference was this weekend and we scooped ice cream for the Saturday Ice Cream Social. It's really a big deal--500 ice cream cones in about an hour, with six people scooping, most of them college student volunteers without much in the way of food service experience. Nice folks, though, and good sports to take on the mission. It's a pretty cool thing for us to make a product that makes a college gym hum with food happiness. We hold on to the nice things people say to us as they get their ice cream cones and remember them when we're in need of encouragement.

The conference was two days, for the first time, this year. There was an ice cream component to lunch on Sunday, too. I had hoped to get there for it, to help with the logistics and because it's nice to visit people and represent our stuff. Our five-year-old, Jackson, had a birthday party to go to, though, and I hadn't finished the quilt we were making for a present and I found myself in the familiar position of thinking, "Something's got to give." And so Earl went to the conference solo, arriving a few minutes after the recipient of the Jack Cook award was announced, and it was us! Earl was floored. I was floored when I heard. What a thing. I'm not quite sure what the criteria for selection is, but it makes me blush to think that the likes of Enid Wonnacot and the other folks at NOFA-VT, who are among the warmest, smartest, kindest people on the planet, think we did something good. Wow. Now I wish I'd stayed up late and finished the quilt the night before.

Earl called as he was leaving the conference--late for having to round up the ice cream paraphrenalia. I think he was calling to see if we could help start chores because he still had to feed and water the heifers and shred a round bale before he could start milking. We were already getting our things on to go to the barn, though. I put Oliver in the Ergo baby carrier (a new purchase for the fourth kid, but invaluable to Oliver's delight and getting things done), and put Earl's barn coat on over both of us. Cliffy and Jackson walked and I pulled Harley in the sled up to the milkhouse. It's pretty amazing how these kids, who still seem so little to me, can do so much. We set up the milkhouse faster as a team than I have ever done it alone, even before I had kids when I did it most every day. Jackson got the filter, Cliffy got the fittings from the COP (clean out of place) sink, and we all carried the units upstairs together. Then we went to get the cows and mostly Harley and I just held hands and walked around to the back of the herd as Jackson and Cliffy got them all in. Harley sang a little song to the cows. I used to be so worried to have the kids around the cows, afraid they'd do something to startle the cows and get kicked, or fall down into the manure and be miserable, 100 yards from the house and only a few minutes into chores. Now they're so comfortable in the barn and the cows seem to recognize and return that comfort. Whether they end up farming or not, I'd like to think that being able to move a 1,200 lb. animal around when they're five might set them up well for the challenges they'll meet later.

Milk shortage

2008-02-14T16:56:00.000-05:00

This blog was my sister's idea. She said we should do it as a public service to all the people who would feel better about their own going-poorly days if they knew the sort of thing we deal with here.

Today, though, was rather unusually uncomplicated. Earl milked this morning and was back at the house in time to wake up the boys for school. Harley's normal Thursday morning gig was canceled for Valentine's Day and he rode shotgun in the delivery truck to go pick up milk at Thistle Hill Farm. (The Thistle Hill folks, John and Janine Putnam, are dear friends who make cheese that doesn't work on winter milk, so we buy their milk from mid-November to April. They're organic, of course, and are milking about sixteen cows right now.) Oliver and I (Oliver is ten months old) dropped off Cliffy and Jackson at school in town and rushed back for a meeting with a guy who wanted us to get onboard some USDA grant he's working on. Grant guy didn't show up and Oliver and I returned a call to one of our retail outlets who is having a really hard time with our current milk shortage.

Milk shortages are really hard. This time last year, we were swimming in milk, with about 1,000 to 1,500 extra pounds of milk each week, which we skimmed, saving the cream for ice cream, and fed to the pigs. So when we did our breeding planning for the year, we looked at the milk that we were able to sell, looked at how much that demand had increased each year (about 1,300 lbs. each week) and tried to have enough cows milking now to match that projected demand. Well, the cows are making about 1,400 lbs. more each week over last year's sales and we would be feeling pretty smart, except that we were 4,000 lbs. of milk short this week. (A gallon of milk weighs 8.6 lbs. and for some reason the dairy world measures milk in pounds, even though it doesn't actually get weighed.) Ah, the best laid plans.

Our friends down at Killdeer Farm in Norwich are fond of saying that the two most important words in farming are, "Oh well."

We don't seem be able to do much about the shortages. We've tried working with Organic Valley or Horizon to balance our milk (which means we would be able to pick up milk from one the organic dairy farms in our area that are under contract to sell to them when we need milk or have their tanker truck pick up some of our milk when we're in surplus) but they aren't interested in working with us, because we're competitors and too small to be much help to them in return. We'd love to work with Butterworks, but the transportation issues are insurmountable.

We sometimes buy cows from other organic dairy farms, who might be selling for some immediate cash or because they have more cows than will fit in their tie stalls. This is a hard time of year to bring a cow into the herd, though. Cows have a social order and do a version of bovine hazing that can make new cows feel unwelcome at the feeder. It doesn't take much for a hungry cow to get cold and sick. We'd much rather build our herd with our own heifer calves and by keeping the older cows healthy and strong to have long, happy, productive lives. And we're doing that, but it's not a plan that's very responsive to the marketplace. Oh well.

So I guess if this blog finds any of our customers out there, let me say I'm really sorry if you're not finding the milk you're after. We so appreciate and need your support. There you are, needing milk for breakfast, looking for our milk, willing to pay for and deal with the bottle deposit, and the shelf is empty and you're staring down a jug of Hood. Stick with us, if you can; we're doing our best. Maybe next year will be the year we get it right.