Farm Life – Page 13 – The Hillhouse

Increasing the Fold

November 13, 2012 Posted in An Ongoing Journal..., Farm Life2 Comments

Big day here at the Hillhouse Coop. We acquired sixteen new laying hens from Elihu Farm. Bob and Mary Pratt run this lovely hillside farm which produces eggs, meat birds and lamb. Named for its homesteader/builder and Revolutionary War patriot (so fitting for this Veteran’s Day!) Elihu Gifford – who lies a few paces down the road in a family plot – we first found the place several years ago through a quick Google search for anything “Elihu” in our new neighborhood, and we soon came to learn that this farm is well-known in the culture of the area farmer’s markets. We’ve visited Mary at both her farm and her farm stand over the past few years, and she’s given us some very helpful information about the raising of hens. She’s been very kind to us as we fumble our way into the next level of chicken farming.

Today we learned how to tell the difference between a hen who’s currently laying eggs, and a hen who’s taking a short hiatus from the job. In the fall, with the loss of daylight, a hen’s system often switches gears; her system slows down a bit and among other changes, she often shuts down in the egg department. There are physical indications; her comb is dry-ish looking and more pink than red, her legs may be less colorful, she molts all over, and finally – and most importantly – her ‘vent’ – that is to say, the hole where everything (yes, everything) exits her body, is much more constricted during this phase. Mary showed us how to informally ‘measure’ the vent to see whether it was in shape for passing eggs or not. She flipped a gal on her back, and kinda held her fast between her knees, bird head up and back, vent end up and forward. Mary showed us how two of her fingers easily fit between the pelvic bones and how the vent itself was much larger on the gal who was currently laying. Another hen also so checked, showed a much smaller vent – quite easy to see at a glance – and the fit was much tighter between the pelvic bones. For now, this hen was considered a bit of a ‘free-loader’ as she was eating but not producing. (She’d most likely be a stewing chicken fairly soon.) I’d thought it would be some messy, wet-ish, esoteric, veterinarian kinda challenge to see the difference between the birds, but it was easy. Invert bird, inspect vent. Done. Give the gal a couple weeks to get back in the egg laying game, and if she can’t get it together, she’s retired. Retired gals will be thanked for having contributed their wonderful gift of eggs thus far, spoken to ever so gently as we box em up and drive them to the Amish farmer who’ll have em dispatched and bagged up half-frozen all in less than a half hour. (I must remember this time to have them quartered. And to save those giblets. !)

Elihu hasn’t been this thrilled, happy, nor deeply contented in a good, long while. The very essence of joy was all about my son this evening as he stood in the middle of his flock, stopping to handle each and every one of his birds, new and old, to look them over, talk to them in a low, reassuring tone before returning them to their roost. We have 48 birds. Four are grandfathered in; two roosters, one male guinea fowl, and one white gander (Ya only need one rooster. Our neighbor’s offered to lend out his Roo as a stud service in the spring, thereby making our old boys redundant and quite unnecessary. Elihu won’t have it. He’ll send the old gals off to the butcher, but he can’t see these boys gettin done in. Oh well.)

The sounds of a full house – a full coop, I should say – are gentle and pleasing sounds. I think they’d soften even the hardest of personalities. As you stand in the coop, rows upon rows of birds before you, sitting on their roosts, getting comfortable for a good night’s rest, they make all sorts of quiet little purring and cooing noises. It’s a peaceful place to be. Elihu can simply stand in the presence of his roosted flock for literally hours. Literally. There’s a spiritual quality to this quiet time; there’s a true communing with the birds that seems to take place. The coop is an oasis, separate and apart from the buzzing, high-energy output of human life.

Today’s acquisition was not an impulse; we took a look at some numbers before we made our move to increase the flock. Our prices are far too low, our egg output lately has been the worst ever, and it’s been a while since we’ve donated to Heifer International (one of the founding principals of Eggs of Hope), so we had planned this addition for a while. We’d added a few hens here and there over the past few months, but hadn’t found a true solution until Mary told us she was selling hers. So, calculator in hand, we ran by some different scenarios til we arrived at what we think will be a profitable number of birds. We will have to step things up a bit; get some new customers, announce our new price for a dozen ($3.50 – still a steal!) and work our way up to our new price for Spring of $4 a dozen. At that point we’ll be solidly in the black, and perhaps able to save. Whew.

(Now if only folks wanted piano lessons like they do fresh eggs!)

Upkeep

October 1, 2012October 2, 2012 Posted in An Ongoing Journal..., Farm LifeLeave a comment

It’s not without some guilt that I watch my beloved cable show “What Not To Wear”, because I’m often watching the show while wearing my high-rise mommy jeans and an ancient, cap sleeve t shirt with the slogan “Women who behave rarely make history” on it (ironically showcasing a slutty wild west sorta gal striking a less-than-liberated come-hither pose). I top the t with a unisex sweatshirt that I bought at a Walgreens in Evanston over a decade ago. I wear these two tops to bed just about every night. After I get out of bed, I’ll swap my nighttime sweatpants for the mommy jeans, but leave the tops on as I go outside to tend to the chickens. Then, what the heck, I’ll probably end up staying in the same outfit for the duration of the morning while I wash the dishes, tidy up and get the laundry done. I’m most likely still in this jeans/pajamas combo by lunchtime, which is when I pause to watch the show. Feeling guilty, I eat my sandwich and wonder if they’d at least let me keep my beloved barn jacket. I mean, I am a chicken farmer after all. This I need. But the high-waisted 80s jeans I am just plain ashamed of. They’d go in the can for sure, and I’d be glad of it. The only reason I even still have em is cuz nobody’s come around with $5,000 and a card ‘with my name on it’ for me to go and replace em with something nicer. And besides, they fit. Honestly, they’re all I have left from my old ‘fat’ clothes. (Feeling the euphoria of having lost 55 post-baby pounds, I stupidly tossed all my ‘good’ fat clothes. It kills me to think of the items I’d tossed which I could so use today.) The way I see it, every day I spend wearing these embarrassing togs brings me one day closer to the day when I’ll absolutely need to replace them with something better. Til then, I’ll pull my pants way up, my coat way down, and I’ll slink around town emitting my best possible ‘I’m invisible’ vibe… (btw – I do have a couple other pairs of jeans. Only problem is – over the last two years I’ve grown too big for em. Still can’t face it. I guess you could say I’m at a self-inflicted stalemate of sorts.)

Aside from the calamity of my high-waisted mommy jeans, there are some other elements of grooming and style which are becoming more of a challenge than ever before. New styles I can study; attractive clothing I can possess to some mildly satisfying degree. But the matters of skin and hair are a much more nebulous territory and the ‘solutions’ aren’t obvious. Nor am I even convinced that there are any solutions to be had at all. Dr. Sebogh can kiss my Midwestern ass. His rare melon extract is not responsible for Dekalb sister Cindy Crawford’s amazing skin. I’m pretty sure good skin is in her genes. And you can stop trying to convince me too, Miss Bertinelli… I don’t doubt that a topical treatment here and there might help, but the process presses on, no matter the speed. I’m up early enough today to have caught the beginnings of an infomercial designed especially for me. I’d like to think I’m too cynical for this crap, but apparently not. They have me in their sights, and I’m greatly disappointed in myself for leaving the program on as I go through my morning routine of coffee-making and egg-packing…

My skin has begun to change only in the tiniest ways, yet it’s enough to have me thinking. Until very recently I hadn’t given too much thought to my skin betraying my age; as I’ve said before, I feel like I’m doing ok in that department. As a result, I have strongly and egocentrically believed that my skin would always remain lovely, that my hair would continue to be as it has been for the past three decades. I have never, ever – til just about now – truly believed that things would change too terribly much. (Other people turn into ‘old’ people… other people...) Things – that is to say, my skin, my hair, my body, have been fine for the past thirty years. No huge changes. Well, at least no quick changes. Skin care commercials always seemed to be about so much over-priced bullshit to me. I could never even see a need. But now, I begin to wonder. Did I miss some sort of essential prevention routine? Was I too hasty? Might there be something to all this anti-aging hoopla? Might I slow it down just a skitch? The voice inside me tells me no, there’s nothing to be done but drink more water and keep a good, grateful attitude towards life. I believe that’s the real answer, but still, I can’t help but wonder if I might be missing a simple serum that could help me recapture the glow that I think I’m missing all of a sudden…

For now I let it all go – because I certainly haven’t the money to dabble, and anyway I don’t have a real need to get super-pretty in my current life. Pretty enough is just fine, and for now my skin is what it is. I’m more concerned today about the hair situation – the hair on top of my head, that is, but then again there’s also the hair below the top of my head to consider as well. But not to worry – I’m on it. I keep a vigilant, daily lookout in the rear view window of my car each morning. I keep my eyebrows nice and tidy, and I do a daily sweep of the face for errant stragglers. How humbling it is the first time one discovers an unprovoked hair appearing in the middle of a cheek or chin. No warning. Just one day, woah! – there’s a hair sprouting from your face where none has ever grown before. I used to have a really impressive hair which would pop up a couple times a year. It would stick out sideways from my face a good two inches. And it was beyond my comprehension that the thing would literally grow overnight. My husband jokingly called it my ‘curb finder’. Cute. Haven’t seen it in a long time now – but if it makes another appearance, you can bet I’ll pluck that baby out before I even turn the car on. Hair patrol is dicey when you do it alone though. It’s nice to have someone around who can catch you before you leave the house with one lone chin hair blowing your cover… It’s nice when someone has your back like that. And that’s one thing I do miss about Chicago; my regular visits to the Pakistani ladies on Devon who could henna your hands and remove every unwanted hair in one stop. They would snap their heads, make that ‘tssk tssk’ sound and tell me not to worry. “We make you beautiful” they’d say as they sat me down in a chair. Between my favorite eyebrow threading (movie star eyes every time) to lip wax and whole face thread I would leave glowing. Yeah, partly because of the sheer pain involved, but partly because I was restored. Beautiful once more. What fun it would be to experience that feeling again. To open the door of that tiny shop and step out on to the street with a light heart and hopes renewed. Can you imagine all that good feeling, generated merely from the removal of some unwanted facial hair? Mm. Crazy.

Facial hair well in hand, I turn my energies to the crowning issue of the day: what to do with my hair color? For under ten bucks, I mean. Last spring I popped for a real color job at ‘my gal’s’ place – and while it was lovely, it didn’t last. Roots came soon after. The lovely color she’d created was never again matched just right, and before long I was back down the road of $3 box color from (my shame doubles) Walmart. (But seriously, $3? How can you say no? How?) I waved the white flag and bought a coupla boxes. I’ll try mixing em maybe. Want that nice, warm brown. Won’t be brassy if I just put a little more finesse into it. Hm. Ok, roots are lighter. That’s wrong. Google it. Ok. That’s known as ‘root burn’. I can fix it. Next week we’ll try again. Hair keeps coming out lighter and lighter. And while I notice that aging female celebrities seem to choose lighter and lighter hair colors, I myself have been doing so unintentionally. My ‘real’ color – not seen in perhaps a good seven years – was always quite dark. Almost black. Originally my son’s hair was lighter, mine darker. Now, we’re the opposite. So finally, I will right this wrong. I will change things back to the way they should be.

Changed it. Oops. My hair sure is darker. (Secretly, I really like it. I feel like I’m about to go on tour…) My kid tells me it makes me look masculine. Like a rocker. (Secretly love this even more.) My gray is for once completely covered. That alone feels like success. But the color is flat. Definitely a box color. A color without any class. No depth. At least it doesn’t shine plum-ish or blue-ish when backlit. Maybe I should count my blessings. But it’s gonna be kinda hard to focus on the good when I have to face the world this week with hair that’s radically darker than any I’ve sported the past six months. If I’m going to get attention, I don’t want it coming to me in double-takes and long looks as people inwardly assess the subtle change about me today… I can remember getting haircuts and people thinking I’d lost weight instead – or even losing weight and people thinking I’d cut my hair. Funny how folks notice changes – even if they can’t quite figure out just what it is about you that’s changed….

I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs lately. I’ve always been fascinated with the many different ways in which people live and think. I surprised myself by checking out a book by Kathie Lee Gifford. She seemed to come from such a different planet as me, and the opportunity to learn just how different a planet was too much for my curiosity to pass up. In reading, I learned that she is not stupid, she lives a life with much love, humor and gratitude, and I also learned that staying young-looking is very, very important to her. I guess it’s her job, right? It’s also a fundamentally different way of approaching life. When I heard what was involved with the surgical skin treatments she’s undergone in order to keep her face looking smooth and young, I was taken aback. Maybe even shocked. She lightened the stories with charm and humor, as if to forgive herself for doing something so hard-core – and vain. Wow. I couldn’t fathom doing anything like that myself. Could I? And if I couldn’t, was it simply a case of money? Was my growing interest in the appearance of my skin just an infant stage of her full-grown concern? If I were a few years older, and a few dollars richer, would I do something like this too? Would I? I’d like to think not – I’d really like to think it’s not that big a deal to me. But still, this whole new chapter of aging has me just the teensiest bit concerned as to how I’ll navigate through it all. And I will admit to one and all right here and now: the ‘Lifestyle Lift’ appeals to me. A lot. I’m sorry, but there is nothing like a good jawline. Never had one to begin with – so it might be nice to go out with one. !

My entire professional, pre-baby life was all about the look. Now I’m just content to own a pair of good mud boots and a sturdy farm jacket. Last few years I haven’t had much occasion to get out. To represent, as it were. But now with Elihu’s new school, looks like I can’t hide the way I would have liked. So I’m trying to shift gears these days. Still don’t have a game plan, but I have a goal. I gotta get it together. Gotta find some pants that fit, gotta make sure my face is tended to, gotta make sure that I drink enough water and stretch in the mornings.

Gotta keep up with the upkeep.

Pullets’ Surprise

September 25, 2012April 5, 2018 Posted in An Ongoing Journal..., Farm Life, Mommy Mind6 Comments

As most backyard chicken hobbyists do, we began our adventure with little more than a vague dream, a soft outline of a goal… We imagined that having our own hens and fresh eggs daily would be charming, picturesque, that it would bring us closer to nature and to simple living. We might have done a little research online beforehand, but not too much. Just enough to sort of get the idea. After all, we really want to do this thing, and if we knew too much, we might just decide it wasn’t really worth it…

So, one naive stroll through your neighborhood farm supply box store around Easter time and you’re hooked before you realize it. You hear the tiny, incessant peeps long before you spot the red heat lamp bulbs or even see the irresistible, fuzzy, day-old little chicks crowding the temporary cages. My God, you had no idea they were this cute! Crazy, over-the-top cute with love-me eyes and tiny, drunken walks. Klutzy little chicken feet hobbling over each other, standing, now falling, cheeping all the while. It’s just too much for you to bear. You must take some home. You must have one all to yourself to smooch endlessly. How hard can it be? You’ve had pets. You know. Yes, it’s a responsibility, but that doesn’t worry you. You’ve done this before! You had to walk the family dog all through junior high school! But see, you don’t even have to walk a chick! Seriously, how hard can this be? Man. Just give me that little cardboard take-out box and I’ll choose me six of the cutest little chicks ever seen. Really. No big deal.

Ok. So the cutest little chicks in the whole wide world have been living in a plastic storage bin in your son’s closet for two weeks now, and the whole house smells like, well, chicken shit. It’s a sour sort of funk, a weird new poop smell, mixed with the tang of urea. Hm. Oh well, you knew they pooped. Just change the wood shavings, or if you went poor-house on ’em, change the soggy shredded newspaper. That’s a little better. But not much. Man, who knew they’d smell up the whole house? And look how much bigger they are all of a sudden! Wow. They sure are growing, aren’t they? Oh-oh. Seriously. What now?

In the back of your mind you thought you could put em in the cellar for a while longer, cuz it’s still kinda cold and snowy out. Easter in the north is still on the edge of winter, and even though they’re growing, they’re still not up to the 20 degree nights outside. Ok. So you’ve killed another two weeks, but they’re still growing. They’re eating and drinking like crazy, the upkeep never stops! Plus they keep escaping their temporary home and exploring all corners of the basement! What now? The funky smell is everywhere and so are the poops, and you’re not sure you’re good with another month like this. Ok. Think. Heat lamp. Got some place in the garage that’s secure? That’s fenced in? If you don’t, you’ll spend next Saturday afternoon with a chop saw and some scraps of wood cobbling together a mildly sketchy pen of sorts for your teenagers to move into. On a mild, early spring day you’ll get brave enough to commit them to this new apartment. You’ll hang a red heat lamp bulb above them – the kind that costs $10 a pop – like you saw at the farmer supply place. Check the windows and doors otherwise the raccoons’ll get em the very first night they’re out. (Then it will take another full calendar year to get to this stage again. Been there. I know.) The morning after their first night in the new digs, you run out to check on them. They’re all still there!! Now you know what this kind of relief feels like. It’s your first rite of passage. This is how you’ll feel hundreds of times, over and over again for the duration of your career as a chicken farmer. You’re over the first hump, so congratulations! Here we go….

So it’s mid summer. The chicks are long-legged and gangly looking, their plumage is spotty; fuzzy down pokes out from the emerging patterns of adult feathers. The combs on their heads are mere bumpy ridges, waddles are yet far-off, and it’s still not clear who’s who. But after another month – usually around the end of July or beginning of August – it becomes more apparent who will be laying and who will be strutting about and making trouble. The young roosters become apparent by three defining features. No, not their spurs – that comes later. Not even their crowing – for that too comes later. What first appears are three different sets of feathers: the hackles, the saddles and the tail. The hackles and saddles look much the same; drapey, elegant long, thin feathers that serve as an embellishment to the neck and lower back areas. And the tail feathers themselves are grand, arching things that rise above the height of the bird and cascade out behind him. No hen has such a tail. No hen has such long, thin decorative feathers about her neck or hind quarters. Hens may be surprisingly beautiful, but they are not as flashy as the men. Nor as obnoxious. Gradually it will become obvious to the armchair chicken farmer that something must be done about the excess of testosterone in the coop. But what? Hmm. You hadn’t quite thought this far ahead. You just sorta thought they’d all stay on as one happy family. But you’ve stalled so long now that the boys are challenging each other and things are no longer so peaceful on the farm. In fact, the poor girls are now being mounted by these randy teenagers to the point where some may be missing the feathers on their backs. Oh dear, something is not right. No, it is not. The ratio, half males to half females, it just doesn’t work in the world of chickens. Not at all. But you didn’t really think it through, did you? You hadn’t worried about having too many roosters. Heck, chickens are chickens, right? Not really. So. What’s next? I’ll tell you…

Chicken soup. Like the kind that’s simmering right now on my stove. Man this house smells good. Smells like a home. Puts my son in a fantastic mood, makes me feel like a real good mom. Plus it gets rid of all that extra testosterone on the farm. They say the ratio of hens to a rooster should be like 25 to 1. Seems about right. (It’s a living lesson for my son about the power of chemistry over good judgment. Read into that what you will, ahem.) It’s funny, but I really never gave any thought to the difference between hens and roosters before I became a chicken farmer. In fact, I’m pretty sure I used the terms interchangeably for a while. Wasn’t quite sure that hens were girls – the ones that laid the eggs – and roosters were the fancy ones. The ones you only ever saw one of on farm. Never gave much thought to that until I was in the thick of it. And a pullet? What the heck is that?

Well, I’ll tell you. It’s a young hen. A gal who’s just started to lay. In the very beginning of your chickening career you start to lose hope that your own hens will ever lay. Months seems to stretch on with no proof that you really do have hens. It seems that hens that actually lay eggs might really be something out of a dream – some sort of crazy magic that happens somewhere else, not in your own backyard. But just as soon as they’ve crossed the line of puberty, if the young hens aren’t overly stressed and are given some nearly private sort of space in which to work things out, you will indeed have eggs before long. And oh, that first egg is truly a miracle. It is a landmark day in your life, it is a personal triumph! Hens really do lay eggs! It’s taken months – but they’re actually doing it now! How crazy is that? I mean, eggs come from factories, right? This is what you believe on a cellular level, so it will seem almost supernatural to your modern self for a time. And I know that there are even some of you who will be even a little put off by actually eating these au-natural eggs… Yes, it might just gross you out a little bit in the beginning. Yeah, I know. I’ve heard it many times. I too felt a little weird in the beginning. But the longer you live with your fresh eggs, the longer they become a staple of your homestead – plus the more guests you have who marvel over the intense flavor of your eggs – the more you will become not only a believer, but a liver-of-the-lifestyle.

You may choose to bring the extra eggs into work, give them out freely and be a hero, or you may decide that the cost of feed and upkeep deserves some payback, and so you may sell them just a tad less than those at the farmer’s markets. You’ll definitely have enough to make your son fresh, home-made, healthy French Toast for breakfast every morning, and enough to pack a hard boiled egg into his lunch each day. So these hens are a happy story with a happy ending, but what of the other story – that of the rooster? Why that is a very different story, to be sure.

Roosters don’t stay long. Almost as soon as we can tell em from the rest, we make a call to Mr. Shaw, the Amish farmer who prepares em for us. Elihu is excused from the first half of his school day (mainly cuz I need him to physically round them all up and get em in the toter) and we dedicate one chilly morning in September to butchering our modest flock of roos. First off, you’ll notice the term I choose is “butcher”. You may use other words – kill, do in, dispatch – but the term ‘butcher’ says what it means, plus it seems to infer some civility, skill and tradition in the trade too. So that’s why I use it. And butcherin’s messy. It’s a process best left to someone who’s got the setup. If you’re kinda on the fence about it – I recommend you still go ahead and have your roosters butchered, but just don’t watch. My kid and I choose to watch – I might not have if it weren’t for his strong desire to know the whole cycle – to take real responsibility for his food, and to be a part of their death too. I supported my then 7 year old son so much there was no way I was not going to share the experience with him. And it was shocking. Truly. I was stunned by the amount of blood, the bright, bright red of it. That iron-y smell of the blood. The kicking and kicking of the dead birds’ legs, long after they’d been bled out. Witnessing the actually killing part does require one be in a certain emotional place. You must just steel yourself. Distance yourself. I like to try to maintain some gratitude, some reverence for the sacrifice that’s being made of one living being for my own sustenance. But with all your adrenaline flowing and all that blood-letting going on, keeping one’s heart somewhat reverential and calm is a small challenge – and the combination of it all makes for a surreal event.

When we first went, three years ago, Elihu would whisper his thanks to each bird before handing them over to be dunked upside down into a cone and having its neck slit. He felt closure in his offering of thanks and gratitude. I was amazed to watch Elihu go through his own process with such certitude, with a real sense of gravity projecting throughout his whole demeanor. To see how deeply he felt it, how critical it was for his experience of raising and making his own food. On the way home however, finally he began to cry. I wondered if there wasn’t going to be some fallout afterward, in fact I rather expected it…. I told him that I understood that it was a hard thing to watch, that the whole thing was sad and difficult. But he protested that that was not what was bothering him so. He wasn’t so much sad as he was mad – at Ben Shaw, the Amish farmer. Apparently Ben had told Elihu not to say prayers of thanks to the animals because God had given us the animals to do with what we would. That they belonged to us, and that they had no souls of their own. Ben told Elihu instead to make prayers of thanks to God alone, for these were his gifts to us. Elihu was livid, through tears he protested to me that Ben was wrong! “How can he look into his dog’s or his horse’s eyes and think that they have no souls! It makes me want to turn the car around and go tell him that he’s wrong!” Oh my poor, dear son. This is what troubled him. I could only tell him how much I agreed, and share his great disappointment with Mr. Shaw’s beliefs.

Since then, we haven’t looked back. We let Mr. Shaw believe what he will, and we continue to know that even the beasts we butcher and eat each have their own unique imprint of life, animated by soul, just as we are. They are just another speck of God that’s taken another form. And we thank them, we do em in as quickly as possible. And man, do we LOVE the soup that we get from em. We started out this year by roasting and souping up our handsome black/green rooster, named ‘Sylvan’; we ate “Sylvan soup” all week and loved it no less the last time than the first. I tell ya, these home raised chickens make the tastiest broth I have ever had. I like to over-salt things – but I find I just don’t need as much when I make soup from these boys. Yup. Our Rooster Soup is a highlight of fall. Nothing like the smell of crisp, autumn leaves outside and simmering soup inside.

But there’s still one more surprise this year on our little chicken farm. The pullets – the young gals whose brothers are now resting in plastic bags in the downstairs chest freezer – they have just started laying. And on account of us having a rather rag-tag, higgeldy-piggledy sorta flock – inbred now these four years – we have ourselves some interesting looking gals, and now, we’re learning, some interesting looking eggs. We learned about pale green eggs from our petite little lady Shirley Nelson, who is an Aracauna. We learned that mixed-breeds are a toss up. Some lay enormous pale pink eggs, some medium light brown ones. Some lay close to white. But today we learned of an altogether new experience here in the Hillhouse Coop – we found two small, roundish (this tells us they’re from first-timer pullets) dark purplish eggs! When we set them in water they turned a deep brown, but when they air dry, the reddish, purplish cast returns. ! Just when we thought we knew it all. Ha! Far, far from it.

So nice to know that we can still be surprised by our hens in happy little ways, like today’s discovery of purple eggs. Between the pullet’s new contributions to our hen house and the fresh pot of rooster soup on the stove, we have the makings of a very content little homestead. If you would have told me four years ago that this would be my life in the near future, I don’t think I would have believed you. Sometimes I still can’t believe that this really is my life – and that I really do love it. Yup, this whole beautiful, serendipitous, heartbreaking, soul-restoring, chicken-raising, child-rearing ride here in Greenfield has been the most unexpected – and welcome – surprise ever.

Free Friday

September 22, 2012September 22, 2012 Posted in An Ongoing Journal..., Farm Life, Mommy Mind, Waldorf Life3 Comments

Elihu has had bad asthma the past couple of weeks. That, plus the seasonal allergies – and last night a quick bout of 24 hour flu – have caused him to miss five out of his first twelve days at school. Might not seem like such a bad thing to those of us aren’t overly concerned about attendance (I myself remember once winning tickets to a Cubs game for having had perfect attendance at school one year), but Elihu has found himself now a bit more behind than he’d like in his schoolwork. Friday morning he awakes, still so very congested and weak from a night of heaving, so I take pity on him and let him rest. With one condition: that we do all of his schoolwork after breakfast. I have errands I must do later, but I assure him that I won’t do a one of them if he hasn’t finished his work. He agrees. So home he stays. One more day added to the list.

Elihu is more than a little concerned about how far behind he’s getting. I assure him that we just need to make a plan, a schedule, and stick to it. I tell him that I can only help him if he lets me. If he starts crying and complaining and stomps off – then there’s not a thing I can do to help. I need his cooperation. Is he with me? I’m committed to this – is he? I like to joke around a lot, but it is clear that I am not joking. He knows it, and he takes my hands, looks into my eyes and agrees to let me help and to cooperate. He’s concerned about his spelling assignment. Not that he can’t spell – quite the opposite – but it’s because he hates writing. The physical act of writing itself, as in pen to paper. He finds it tedious. I get it, I do. I reassure him that one day he’ll know the relief it is to type nearly as fast as he can think, but for now he must do it old-school. It helps when I remind him that hero John Audubon wrote all his notes – and manuscripts – by hand. “He didn’t have an old-fashioned typewriter?” he asks. I assure him that it was years and years before the thing was invented. I grab a Max quill from the kitchen window sill. “He did it all like this” I say, miming a quick dip into an ink well then scribbling on the table. Elihu’s eyes open with new interest. “If John did it, you can too” I smile, and thankfully, Elihu smiles back. We begin.

Elihu’s Waldorf class is studying Norse mythology as part of their daily main lesson, and we at home have been reading at bedtime from a book I was given when I was his age, “Great Swedish Fairy Tales”. A fantastic collection. He recognizes characters in our stories from his lessons at school. As his teacher has asked me to please find some more challenging spelling words for him, Elihu and I together pull out the book and begin to look… We agree on five, then he sits down at the kitchen table to write them out and use them in sentences. He strays after a few, I allow a small break, then he’s back to the task. In about forty minutes he’s done.

The greatest cause of his stress is his book report. Thing is, he and I read the book over a year ago. It’s old news. In fact, Elihu loved the book so well he re-read parts on his own throughout the year. This should be a friggin piece of cake. Yet he is as stuck as can be. I watch him, frustrated. I see him watching everyone else in the class pass him up. Even more behind than he was, he despairs of never being able to catch up, and stops altogether. The class is on chapter seven, and he’s still on one. ? He sobs to me his agony about never catching up. I promise him that he just needs to follow a plan. Ok? He sniffs and nods. We make up our minds to knock out the first two chapters, but then realize the silly book is at school. My heart sinks. We call the library. Their only copy is out. I ask for one to be couriered from another library. It’ll take a couple days. Well, I don’t feel great about it, but for now, this part of his homework is on hold. I agree that he’s done what he can, so after he does his morning nebulizer treatment, we can go on our errands.

As we wind down the lovely country road behind our house on our way to town, we see that the tiny railroad crossing lights are on – a very unusual sight. But we know that the tiny Delaware and Hudson line has been recently restored for a northerly tourist run (in fact a good friend is now conductor on that line) and so we do see a small train pass by every now and again. How lucky we are that one is coming now! We pull over and get out. There aren’t any warning bells and no train is yet audible, but Elihu freaks out anyway when I walk up to the tracks to investigate. “Please come back, Mommy!” he shouts. “I don’t want to lose my only Mommy!! Please come back!” So I do. We wait a minute more, and then we begin to hear a distant rumbling. I have an idea. I run to the car, find my purse and rummage around on the bottom. I find one single penny. Perfect. I run to the track as fast as I can, find a good spot, then lay the penny down. It’s all happening so fast – the sound of the approaching train, my running back and forth – that Elihu doesn’t say a thing, he just watches, his intrigue winning over his concern. I manage to run back to him just as the blue and yellow D & H engine comes around the bend. We wave to the engineer then to the few passengers in the dome car. It’s a small train, and it’s rumbling down the track in a cloud of diesel smoke within seconds. As it clatters away and the tiny crossing gates wobble up again, I run to the spot where I’d placed the penny. Nothing. If it hadn’t been for my experience in Dekalb, Illinois where dozens upon dozens of trains pass thru the tiny town daily, and all of the coins I’d practiced smashing there, I’d have been dismayed. But I wasn’t. Looking closer, I saw an imprint of a circle on the track, and a few inches away, an imprint of an oval. Elihu joins the hunt, and we widen our search. Finally, there it is. I coach Elihu to find it himself. He laughs when he first spots the oval sliver of copper in the gravel. We take it back to the imprint and lay it down; it matches the outline perfectly. Earlier that morning Elihu had been lamenting the fact that he remembered so very little of his younger years before we’d moved here, and that he felt he’d forgotten so many of the things he’d done. He was worried he had so few precise memories – his past all seemed to wash together. He wanted clear and distinct memories, specific stories to pass on to his own kids one day. This is the first time he can recall squashing a coin on railroad tracks. “Now, think you’ll remember this always?” I ask, hoping he’ll easily agree. He laughs. “And keep this coin. You can show this to your kids one day. Plus you can show them exactly where it happened. You’ll always have this memory. Always.” He is happy. He continues to marvel over the whisp of a penny as we get back into the car and head on our way.

Our day is lovely, the weather is sunny, mild and breezy, and walking hand-in-hand, we move through our day at a easy, gentle pace. Register my folk’s van at the DMV, find a ladybug (who may well be a male, Elihu reminds me), get a few groceries, pickup a gift card for a birthday party and get a new timer for the coop door. Our final stop is in the mall parking lot where we are going to feed the seagulls. This is always a nice little extra in a day. We pull into a far away corner of the mall parking lot and begin to throw tiny bits of bread outside the window of the car. We open the windows and turn the car off so it’s quiet. One flies overhead and then swoops down. Then another, and soon there are a half dozen seagulls swooping down just feet from Elihu’s window. He sees them close up, hovering, swooping, even snatching pieces in mid-air. (Sometimes we’ll put bread on our sunroof and watch them from below!) I miss Lake Michigan for many reasons, seagulls are one. I used to feed them on the beach where I lived, and have images in my memory of dozens hovering only feet above me, just hanging in the wind… It saddens me that people now think of them as pests. Hey, it saddens me that people think of pigeons as pests too. I like to think they are incredibly resourceful. Good for them to figure out how to make a living from our waste. (If it helps you to like pigeons better – just call em doves. Pigeons and doves are the same thing, it’s only context and culture that makes us think of them different creatures. If you aren’t convinced, just look it up for yourself.) The birds eat their fill, so we head out. The sun is now much lower in the sky, and we realize we’ve been out doing errands for almost five hours.

I’d thought the consensus was that we were both fairly pooped after our long day out, but as soon as we pull in the driveway – before the car has even come to a stop – Elihu is out and running after his beloved chickens. As I unload the car and begin to think about making dinner, Elihu is at the small pond searching for frogs. (His current goal is remove all the frogs from our tiny, plastic-lined pond and move them to the larger, mud-banked pond where they can properly hibernate for the winter.) In a while I have supper ready, and although it takes three rounds of bell ringing to get him in, he’s content to eat a cold supper. Once again his head is full of flying ideas – how wings work, how amazing they are to watch, how he wishes he could know what his birds are thinking… I am almost fed up with all the bird talk, but hey, I suppose I’m lucky to have a kid who’d rather spend his free time with an actual bird than an electronic game about birds – let alone angry ones. !

We’ll catch up on that book report – I promise us both. Granted, we hadn’t accomplished what we’d hoped for school-work wise, but it wasn’t a day wasted. Elihu may yet one day need to use spell check to make sure he’s spelled ‘exquisite’ correctly, but no doubt he’ll always remember the day we flattened a penny on the railroad tracks, and maybe that alone was worth taking a free day.

Second Act

September 17, 2012September 22, 2012 Posted in An Ongoing Journal..., Divorce Diary, Farm Life3 Comments

“Bankruptcy is not a dirty word” is followed by an image of a Staples-esque ‘easy’ button… “Considering Divorce?” is followed by a graphic of two browning, crispy roses shedding their petals… Been looking online for a local attorney to help me create a will – not that there’s anything except a few killer gowns and a handful of vintage keyboards to pass on – as I was reminded once again by my primary doc recently at my annual one-stop-shop-git-it-all-done visit that I really should, as a 49 year-old single mother, have a will in place. Yeah, made sense. After all I’d come to my doc’s to demystify my physical world, to break it down, to learn the things I must watch over more closely as I neared the half-century mark. To create the most personally important to-do list ever and to put it into action. And if she had a sidebar tip about end-of-life planning, why not. Hey, it was a small personal success that I finally knew my cholesterol numbers, so I was ripe for more forward strides. When she said the bit about the will, I immediately whipped out my date planner and wrote it down in the never-ending list. At least it was finally written down. A physical manifestation of my intention. A good start. It still must make its way into action, and that is why I find myself tonite, after having watched Oliver! with Elihu and finally putting him to bed, searching for attorneys to help me craft said last will and testament. Maybe not the best way to shop. But hey. It’s a start. And besides, I feel the need for an internet nightcap.

My shopping for an attorney reaches its conclusion, so I set sail for a little fun… I begin to torment myself, searching for “then and now” images of actors and musicians (as initially inspired this evening by me and my son wanting to learn more about the kids in the production we’d just seen.) Interesting indeed, heartbreaking too. I hardly remembered the chap’s name, but I can tell you that as an eight year old girl I felt the first, faintest tingles of sexual excitement watching Jack Wild on his crazy, high-70s adventures of HRPufnstuf. It was good that I finally saw him as Artful Dodger – else the poor man would had died with me only knowing the fluff that followed. I see he played football – but let’s just call it soccer – with Phil Collins, whose mom was a talent scout. Ok. I’m stuck at the idea of little Phil and even littler Jack playing soccer…I begin to imagine it… the future pop icon’s soccer mom says “Philip, sweetie, can you bring Jackie over here for a minute? His Mum and I need to speak with him about something…” Oh yeah, and that Jack Wild is even dead – that was sure news to me. You too? Just wait til ya Google him and see him looking like, to quote my son,” a ninety year old lady”. He had oral cancer, and it must have helped to shape his face in the final years. As I study the changes – the ones I hope so dearly people will overlook in me – I note how even the subtlest shifts result in a remarkably changed countenance. Tiny increments can result in a big transformation. Yikes.

I admit it; every so often I check up on folks to see how they’re aging. Lately – as in the past six months or so – I find myself thinking about aging a lot. I don’t mean this with any false modesty; I know that I don’t look bad for my age. I feel relief that I don’t – cuz in my younger years I fairly begged age to make an early home with me, indulging in hours on end of baby-oil sunbaths while sucking down Marlboros and hydrating myself with alcohol… Although that was several decades back, and it hardly seems like it should still count, I’ve heard the damage lasts. I dismiss that thought however with visions of regularly scheduled yoga classes, daily aerobic activity, disciplined portion control, and a robust daily intake of water. In this future life I also see daily meditation, an orderly, systematic approach to household chores, more delegation of such to my able-bodied son too. Oh, what a bright life this will be. This life that I will start just as soon as my house is clean and tiday. What’s that? Oh yes, my house is clean and tidy. Well then, just as soon as we get Elihu’s new violin and get him started on lessons. Then I’ll set out to get going on it all… Oh, but then there might be a day job… And I can’t possibly start drinking all that water if I have to sit at a piano all day, can I? And yoga – I can’t go because it’s too late and Elihu would need a sitter!

All joking aside, whether the hitches are mild or severe, there truly are some blips in the road that seem to make my ‘new lifestyle’ a little less than practical. I was able to do the yoga thing for a while a couple of years ago, but it just got too expensive. So I’m hoping with the little extra cash from playing piano for Waldorf, I can afford them again. But when? If not working, then it’s mom duty. No subs for mom. Grandma has to tend to Grandpa. No budget for babysitter. See? Taking action can be tricky. Still, there must be a way to live well. More research will be needed on this one.

And this aging thing – I just can’t lie down and let it take me without a fight. But that’s essentially what I’m doing. I think I’ve got a pretty healthy mental/spiritual/emotional thing goin on, and I do believe that helps to mitigate the signs of aging (cosmetic or otherwise)… but the physical part of the equation has me a little worried. Just tonite, after sitting for an hour to watch Oliver! and then getting up and trying to walk down the hill to the compost pile – OY! did I feel like a little old lady. Sheesh! Hand on my lower back, unable to stand up straight… A real mess, and just because I sat ‘wrong’ for too long. Yeeps. Now that feels old. My core muscles were hardly able to help. I slipped from right to left, each side taking the shortest turn possible in keeping me erect. I can honestly say it was kinda scary. Cuz I can tell you, just one short year ago my body never felt like that. I haven’t been using it much, and well, we all know what happens ‘when you don’t use it…’

I once found and contacted Jaye P. Morgan’s most recent producer and was this close to getting an interview with her for my radio show. This was a good ten years ago now, and back then the woman must have been in her late 70s. I’d been fascinated by how she, as a career diva, had dealt with aging. She’d even written a comic song about west coast plastic surgeons and the everyday trials of her glamorous, aging peers, so I knew she was at least able to treat the subject with some humor. But I wasn’t persistent about making the interview happen, and deep down I think she didn’t really want to get into it. And maybe I myself felt that it was too intimate a territory for me to breach. So I let it go. Besides, at a mid-thirty something, what the hell did I know about aging yet? Nothing! These days, however, I bring some experience to the table. Just this afternoon I even removed a pure white hair from my eyebrow. A first. Sigh. Miss Morgan, if you’ll indulge me, I think I’m ready for that interview now.

Years ago, I asked Fareed if he was at all worried about getting old – and ugly. He said no, because he’d always been unattractive, so getting more so wouldn’t be much of a shock. People wouldn’t treat him much different either way, he supposed. Me, however, having started out as a pretty young thing, and enjoying all the power that went with it, he proposed that aging might well hit me a lot harder. He postulated that I’d likely see changes in how people responded to me as my looks changed. Once, shortly after I’d had Elihu and was quite large, I went to the grocery store. I was exhausted, unkempt and fat. And I can tell you this too: I was invisible. I knew well what it was to be an attractive, well-dressed young woman who drew people in. And to experience the absolute opposite just these few months later – it truly blew my mind. I learned instantly and unequivocally that in youth and beauty there is power. Never did and ugly old man inspire the same feelings of warmth as a pretty young woman. Never. And yet within the outer shell of that man lives a person as complex, as human, as needing of love – if not in more need of love – than the pretty girl. How unfair is life. The moment I realized people were not even noticing me was stunning. I got it. I realized how lucky I’d been. How much love I’d been given by strangers just because of the way I looked. My heart bled for all of those who never knew that kind of immediate acceptance. Truly this is a cruel, cruel world.

I’m not doing this aging thing with a lot of class. Really, I’m not. I’m uptight about it, I’m continually surprised by it, I’m offended that age should drag me along with it… As light-heartedly as I may live my life, deep down I’m wondering how this is supposed to work. Oh, I can be happy here on my back forty with my son and my chickens, but I can’t hide back here forever. Maybe til my kid graduates from high school – but what then? I need to find this new life, this new person I’m to be. It used to be about the tiny-waisted cocktail gowns or the platform boots, but those things are never coming back. So what’s next? I find myself with thirty pounds on my frame that I can’t simply ditch the way I used to. My upper arms move in two different directions. I have no jaw line anymore, and what were once slight, temporary laugh lines are now permanent contours. Although it might sound it – this is not about knowing that I’m truly, legally divorced that’s bringing this on – I’ve been keenly aware the last few years that I’ve been walking through a transition time of sorts. The past four years here in New York my son has grown a foot, and my hair has become undeniably gray. And I just can’t seem to understand it.

I’ve identified this window of age in which everyone shifts from their ‘first act’ selves to their ‘second act’ selves… (The third act seems to occur in a wider range of years, and has within it some subtle differences, as in there’s ‘old”, then there’s ‘slack-jawed-in-the-nursing-home-wearing-a-diaper’ old. Those would be the last couple of pages – and I’m not thinking about those for now, although let us open our eyes to this very personal possibility. That may be us one day – although I pray we all die sweetly in our sleep before our kids ever have to choose that fate for us.) This transition phase seems to occur sometime in the mid forties. Don’t know quite when the threshold is crossed for sure – but I can tell you from my own experience that I felt ‘ok’ and ‘youngish’ still in the first few years of my forties, but this last year I no longer can claim those feelings. I don’t necessarily feel old, but I no longer feel young. I can much more easily see over the rise ahead. Or perhaps I might say that I’ve reached the rise in the elevation and can now see the grand plateau before me…

Personally, I was never one to look forward. Never once dreamed of ‘my’ wedding, a house, a career. Knew I’d be a musician and that was pretty much it. Knew I wanted to travel, have a beautiful home and be a mother one day. But ‘one day’ never existed in real, calendar form. It existed in a far-off, fuzzy dimension I never took a moment to envision. For all my lack of energetic homework, I feel lucky to have landed in such an idyllic situation. There are times when I lament my lack of planning, wondering where instead I might have ended up had I indeed bothered to plan it all out a bit better, but in the end I know that regret does nothing. Sadly, it doesn’t even burn calories. ! I’m in a good place from which to go forward. I’m still without a social life, and my friends seem to be mostly back in the midwest, but I’m a bit more hopeful than I’ve been the past few years about our life here continuing to improve. The past four years have been my transformation time, and the process is now gently lifting to reveal a wide-open future.

There’s much to come, I’m fairly sure of it. Intermission was refreshing, but now I’m eager to see what awaits in this next act…

Happy at Home

September 8, 2012June 20, 2013 Posted in An Ongoing Journal..., Farm Life, Waldorf Life3 Comments

Elihu has had a fever on and off for the past few days. Reminiscent of his very first day at Waldorf last spring; on his first day of the new school year I was called by the school nurse to come and administer his nebulizer treatment (as I’d not yet gotten this year’s doctor’s slip) and I ended up taking him home instead. He stayed home today too, and good thing. His sleep was deep and long, his fever only breaking just this morning. This needed to be a day of rest. He’d been going non-stop with his father for weeks and had come home with little time to adjust to the new school year. My intention was to give him a day with nothing to do but feel better.

Well, kind of. I did have a secret agenda for the day which seemed like it might work well with my kid confined to the home. I had a pile of clothes to go through which a friend (with boys just ahead of Elihu) had dropped off recently. A boon to be sure, but there was still some labor involved in assimilating and using it all. Not everything would work; the piles had to be gone through. Not all would be the right size; some were too big and would need to be put in bins for next year (and clearly marked so as not to overlook them until they were then too small!), some weren’t quite his style (shirts that advertise ‘Nike’, ‘The Gap’ and that feature the ‘life is good’ stick figure playing baseball aren’t really a match) and some he can wear right away. It just takes some time to assess what’s what. And in a little house like ours there’s only so much room; one can only keep what one will really and truly use.

We did this for about twenty minutes, until Elihu hit a wall. I don’t blame him, I kinda knew I was pushing it. In his incredibly convincing adolescent girl routine, he flung himself onto his bed and wept, and then in his incredibly self-aware young adult persona he paused from his drama to explain to me that he needed to simply cry and be angry right now, he apologized for doing so, and then promptly resumed his performance. I in turn apologized, thanked him for helping as much as he did, then left the room to give him some space.

After a while I came back to check on him. He wanted a hug. I gave it freely. He seemed pooped. Still not himself. I offered to read him a story. He told me he’d like that. After the story was finished, we lay there on his bed for a moment, shifting gears, and then got up and had lunch.

As I cleaned up the lunch dishes, Elihu put on his glasses and headed outside. After I’d finished in the kitchen, I followed him out to the coop to see about some fixes I’d been meaning to get around to for a while now. The weather couldn’t have been more perfect. The air just right, on the warmish end but not too bad – that is to say no mosquitoes hanging around – and a nice breeze blowing through. As I began my work in the coop, Elihu began his work of chasing chickens. It was kinda cute to see him zipping past – first right, then left, whizzing by in pursuit of a fast-moving bird. We’d check in with each other every now and then, sometimes stopping what we were doing, each seeking out the other and simply meeting in a hug. Wordless, or perhaps with a simple “I love you” we’d part and go back to our respective projects. It was a productive day for me as I’d finally gotten around to the outdoor to-do list I’d put off for too long now; I zip-tied holes in the fences, screwed planks along the perimeter of the coop bottom to deter under-the-coop-laid-eggs (as well as hunkered down raccoons and such), fixed the timer that opens and closes the coop door, installed a couple new nesting boxes and did a half dozen other little things – all of which added up to a couple hours work.

All this time Elihu was in his own heaven. Birds everywhere, birds tame enough to hold, wild enough to chase, varied enough to be beautiful and fascinating each in its own unique way… And with each of us so close by to the other, yet each of us each so engrossed in our own work, it made for the most perfect afternoon. An afternoon of love, security, joy – and even progress. We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. We’d take a moment out, pick up a bird, sit together side by side on an overturned milk crate and spend a full ten minutes marveling over all of its wonderful qualities. The variation from bird to bird is really impressive, and neither one of us is ever bored of bearing witness to it. We admired nearly every bird in the flock; at the end of the day we’ve handled, smooched, praised and thanked nearly thirty birds. Especially the young roosters who will go to the Amish butcher this week. (This is about as long as we can know them and still hand them over…) We know we have one mature rooster too many, but as we’ve had him for over a year now (his name his Judson) we cannot bring ourselves to butcher him too. The young ones go easier…And it’s these quiet, one-on-one moments we share with each doomed fellow that make it easier for us to let them go. They live a good life, and they die a quick death, and they receive our deepest gratitude. As farm animals go, it’s a sweet life.

The hours pass by and it is perfect. Every now and then I try to look up and around at my world; I see the spread of the beech tree branches, the canopy of the white pines, the view of the pale blue mountains beyond. The air is perfect. We are in no hurry. This is a day where not a thing is expected of us. And on account of once having lived a life where there really was a whole lot expected of me, it makes me treasure this moment even more. It’s a good thing to know the companionship of animals, to know the outside air, and to be blessed with unscheduled time – and to experience all of it with my young son makes it even better.

We even got around to burying out old pets today. They’ve been in the freezer for a while now. Some months, and well, yes, some even years. We have our three-legged leopard gecko Sweets – who’d come with us four years ago from Chicago and who’d had her leg amputated by a very kind and generous vet who did it gratis – as our situation was then fresh and dire – and she’d meant a lot to us. When she finally died, the ground was frozen, so we simply put her aside to bury later. Her sister, Stripes is there too. Died on Christmas day of a bored, tank-confined heart. (She got the best gift ever, in my opinion.) Then oh! Here’s King George!! Our beloved button quail. He lived free-of-cage in our house for over a year, every night making his surprisingly loud mating calls sadly to no avail… he pooped very courteously in one corner only, and he was a good companion to a six year old boy. (There are a couple of pics of them together in an album on Facebook which you can see for yourself.) And of course, there is Molly. The white hen who started this whole business. The cute little yellow chick that we found absolutely irresistible as we passed through Tractor Supply ‘just looking’ one Easter season.

I’d dug the deepest hole I could – and it wasn’t big, cuz digging in this particular corner of Greenfield is a job rife with rocks – and we planned on nestling all our little guys in there together. “With white cloth or on dirt?” I asked Elihu. “White cloth”, he answered. He put Molly down first, after we’d admired her peacock necklace and thanked her especially, then the others went in around her. “You know the white cloth is just for us. This whole thing is just for the living – you know that, right?” I said. He nodded. I said a general thanks to all of them for coming into our lives, and I apologized for the things we may have done to cause them distress. Then I told Elihu we should each take a fistful of dirt and put it in to begin the burial. He told me to wait – he needed to say something. Then, in the earnestness that can really only yet be found in a child, he kneeled down and pressed his hands together. He spoke for a while, basically saying what I had, but adding a whole bunch more. (He kinda reminded me of his paternal grandmother – always offering these ten minute long blessings at the start of a keenly-anticipated meal. !) Then, feeling ready, he let me shovel in the dirt. We marked the spot with some large rocks, then placed a couple of daisies on top. We hardly even paused; it was over, and we’d concluded the chapter the best and most fitting way we could. On to more life now.

We meandered down to check on our garden, which by now was reduced to a handful of plants; some tomatoes, peppers and beans. Elihu had pilfered some dried beans from his handwork class at Waldorf and brought them home in hopes they’d germinate. Germinate they did, and so we planted them here. Tonight they yielded just about enough for supper. We harvested an enormous, bright red cayenne pepper too, but learned that someone had beat us to the tomatoes, trimming off all the upper branches, leaving us just a few green ones close to the bottom. Maybe we really do need an electric fence next year. After all, we mean to do this right, and so far this garden has hardly been anything but a rather unsuccessful experiment. Gleaning a handful of a crop ‘every week or so’ wasn’t what we had in mind. Guess a true farmer can’t just get up and go to the Cape for a week, can they now? We’d missed a key week of watering and weeding and were seeing the results. Plus, going fence-free didn’t help. With our dinner in our hands – or rather, in one of my hands – we headed back up the hill.

I find some leftovers and heat em up, and I cook the beans. I’ve got a glass of wine left too; we have the makings of a nice, simple dinner. Tonite it’s kind of a white-trash kinda night; we’ll watch some show on cable about fellas scuba diving for gold in the frozen Bering Straight while we eat. We don’t watch a whole lot of tv – and when we do it’s usually while we eat. I know that’s not a great habit – but even that’s not so much a habit as it is a treat. Just as we finish eating, a truck pulls in… it’s a student of mine and her dad here to return a metronome and to say they’d like to start lessons again when they figure out their new fall schedules. It’s nice to see them again and to hear about their summer. Elihu whisks Katie away to look for frogs as her dad and I chat, but soon it’s time to go. It’s been a long day and we still have to close our birds in for the night. Goodbyes and good nights follow as they pull away and we go out to evening coop duty.

The automatic coop door opener is working again. Maybe all it needed was to be re-set. Who knows. But the door is closed, and all the birds have roosted. Even Max got back into the swing of an automated coop and got himself in before the little door closed. Now we have to close and lock the big door. But not before we count them all, and certainly not before we play ‘musical chickens’. When you simply touch the back of a resting chicken, he or she will emit a little sound – a little ‘whirring’ noise of surprise. Each a bit different; some coo low, some chirp high, and when you get going it’s kinda like a little bird orchestra. Elihu has fun with it. Then he stops, and the place gets quiet again. Head count. Twenty-eight chickens, six of whom are roosters (and going next Friday), one helmeted guinea fowl named Austin whom we love very much and who adds loads of comic charm to the place, and finally, the largest of our flock, Maximus, the Lavender Ice Goose. Thirty birds in all. For now. Elihu and I just stand there, looking, unable to walk away. Soft cooing and gurgling sounds surround us. It’s a peaceful place to be, here in our chicken coop. I know Elihu is feeling very proud right now. I am too. Honestly, it’s not as if we have some special talent here, but what we do have is a group of animals whom we care for responsibly, and whom we love, and of that we have pride.

Our night isn’t quite over. We want to enjoy our screen porch, and Elihu wants to enjoy some time in the darkness when he is free of having to wear dark glasses just to exist. I light all the candles until the porch glows. I sit and watch as he plays. He locates a long piece of PVC which once served as a drainpipe, and he begins to play it like a didgeridoo. Sounds pretty good. He looks around for crickets or mice (he wants a mouse to replace the one he found outside today and then let go by accident inside the house! Sorry, that lil guy’s showing up again tomorrow morning – in a trap…) He runs around back inside and flicks a light on and off, faking it’s a ghost, then asks me if I’d seen it too… Things get silly, then they wind down as I’ve drawn a bath and we need to get down to business. Candles out, pipe down, clothes off.

Elihu enjoys a much longer bath than I’d intended, as I sit down to write a much longer post than I’d intended. He’s certainly old enough to get himself out and dried off, and mostly that’s what he does these days, but in that we’ve had such a day of togetherness, when he calls to me to come and help, I do. Soon he’s in bed. Too pooped for stories tonight. Instead, the room is dark right away. I lie next to him, and lying on his side, he puts his hand on my face. “This was a great day” he says. I agree. We kiss, then lay back down. Oh so soon he is deeply asleep. So am I. It’s not til halfway through the night that I awake to finish the post. But now it’s back to bed for me too.

What a day we had. Such a very happy day at home.

Close To Perfect

September 1, 2012September 1, 2012 Posted in An Ongoing Journal..., Farm Life, Mommy MindLeave a comment

In a veritable firestorm of no-nonsense, gitterdone action I set out to use this fine and temperate day to bring all manner of domestic projects to a close. My son has now been gone for five weeks, making this the longest period of time we have ever been apart from each other in his nine years on the planet. He comes home tomorrow, so if it aint done by tomorrow, it aint gonna get done for a while yet. So the closing bell’s coming real soon. Hustle, hustle…

For several years there have been a certain two light fixtures just laying about, in need of being properly installed on the house. I know it’s not a terribly hard job, but I couldn’t seem to summon the focus to get em up. Til today. Up went the outside back door light. Just took a few minutes, really. Not a big deal. And wouldn’t ya know? It looks simply charming. I stand back for a look and I am about as proud of my simple improvement as if I’d laid a whole roof myself. Yup, I’m proud. Looks good. A hell of a lot better than the 1970s stock fixture which was twisted in its housing, hanging upside down by its own wires and swathed in spider webs. Yeeps. That was part of our trash house look. “Welcome! We don’t have enough motivation to change out this light, but you’ll ignore it, won’t you? We know you like us for who we are, and this skanky, cobweb-covered light fixture doesn’t change the way you feel about us, does it? We really do appreciate your just ignoring it… We know we need to get to that sometime soon, but there’s just sooo much to do around here. Who has time?”

So then I “install” the second fixture, a very modest, average sort of ceiling lamp which I’ve been meaning to get to for now, well, (could it really be??) four years. (????) Ok. Where’s the ladder. Let’s just knock this puppy out. But then wait minute, I can’t find a screw long enough. Man, looks like I’m gonna need two. And I can’t even find one. And geez, if I actually can manage to get one of these screws into the hole then into the frame to hold it in place – I have to do it all over again with another screw on the other side of the plate. Damn. I can’t find a second one long enough. So. Looks like the fixture will be held on by one very important screw. Oh, and I’m well aware it’s the wrong kind – it’s got a point on it (what is that like for wood??) but what the hell – the fixture is on the ceiling nice and tight. Yup. Wires are good, ground is good. It’s holding. New bulb in. Flip breaker, then switch. Hooray! I can do this silly sort of thing!

I’m so very happy that I go on to vacuum the whole house and then light every last candle in the screen porch for no good reason at all. Then I sit there, alone, the voices of HGTV keeping me company from the other room. My home looks good. For the first time since, well, since I was probably in third grade I actually know where ALL my stuff is. ALL of my school work, artwork, recordings, dresses, taxes, medical info, love letters, floor plans – ALL of it! And so THIS, this – it is a moment of perfection. For this moment, I know where everything is. And it’s all looking good. All of it’s in good working order. I have, for now reached a moment of completion. I have arrived.

I even find some time to sit at the piano and make music. My living room is aglow, my porch is aglow, I am playing my beloved piano and all is right with the world. Woo hoo. What a moment, thank you universe. Thank you everyone. Thank you life. Mm. Tonite it’s good.

Then I blow out the candles and leave my darkened porch so I can go and have another quick, satisfied peek at the back hall light before I turn in for the night.. I flick the switch and POOF. The bulb explodes. Well, ok. That’s ok. But then I try the wall switch, and notice that nothing’s coming on. Not even the lights at the bottom of the cellar stairs. That means something shorted out the circuit. Bless the breaker, it did its job and flipped over, shutting down my obviously sketchy installation job. Poopie is all I think. Elihu’s coming home tomorrow and I’d wanted everything perfect. I’d wanted things working as they should, looking top of the line clean and polished. Now this. Poopie. All I can say really. Kinda disappointing, but whatever. Aint nothin but a thing.

Earlier today I’d worked several hours at a friends house, the final stages of a cleaning process that’s dragged out for years, really. But today, this was it. The sky was wide and clear, bright blue with huge, sailing clouds… impressive, inspirational. It was on my mind as I bagged up dust and broken things, my eyes on the prize of a clean home. My spirit was filled with the feeling of the day and just working itself was a joy. I was able to be in my task, to enjoy my day, to enjoy being in the middle of a process not yet completed.

I remembered that feeling again. Which helped to remind me tonite when the wall switch went blooey, that it’s still ok. I’m still in the middle of the process of fixing it. And it’s not a big deal. Elihu won’t care. Even if we have to use flashlights to go downstairs for a while – that’s fine too. Whatever disappointment I might feel from this small hiccup in my day will only remain thus if I choose to let it be. So I turn my attention elsewhere. Today has been a wonderful, wind-swept, sunshiney, big-cloud-moving sort of day. A real beaut of an end-of-summer day. I so enjoyed living in it. I didn’t quite complete my list, but who cares. Instead, I was treated to a surprise visit by neighbor Zac and his teeny daughter Annabelle, I saw both of my parents, and my goose let me smooch him.

And of course, my son comes home tomorrow. Which makes everything just perfect.

Better Boy, Goofy Goose

August 9, 2012August 9, 2012 Posted in An Ongoing Journal..., Farm Life, Mommy MindLeave a comment

Happy to have spoken to my son today, if only briefly. I also received a surprisingly upbeat email from his father, detailing their recent visit to a family doc. Seems the doc had some insights about issues that Elihu is dealing with – including panic attacks, which have returned recently (some counseling a year ago or so seemed to quiet them for a while). Dr. Mark also does not recommend circumcision. Good. There’s an end to that.

I feel a bit bad that I was hitting an afternoon lull in my energy when Elihu and I were talking, and I left off with the promise I’d call him back soon. But I fell asleep, and by the time I called Elihu back he was no doubt at his dad’s gig (in Cleveland, as I had just learned in our conversation. Never a dull moment with Fareed) and he didn’t have access to a phone. So I missed him, but I’m content that he seemed to be in good spirits.

I myself have been busy, busy, busy as usual, all the while wondering how the hell it is that I still have not been able to get my house in order in the four years I’ve been here. I’m almost there – but I still have boxes of ancient papers and media in my office that I haven’t yet organized, and my garage – well that’s a mystery to me. It’s simply an unending job. It’s amazing how my garage just fills up with shit. Literally and figuratively. Housing our goose in the garage while we made our summer road trips certainly didn’t help. Did you know that geese behave rather like dogs? Well they do. They like to chew on things. I have doggie toys for him which he likes, but apparently the contents of the garage were much more interesting. Max got into things, moved them around, chewed on em, pooped on em. I had no idea what a goose was capable of. Kinda cute, yeah, but made for lots more work.

I have finally managed to collect and clean off every last unused item in our life and consolidate them in the garage. I listed them all on Freecycle and hope to have them all picked up by their new owners by Sunday. What doesn’t get taken will get packed into the car and driven the 20+ miles to the nearest Salvation Army. I wonder if they’ll take a goose…

Leg Two Begins

July 21, 2012August 3, 2012 Posted in An Ongoing Journal..., Farm Life, Mommy MindLeave a comment

It’s the night before our trip. Got Elihu to bed just after nine – and that is amazing. Especially in that he hasn’t been asleep any time before 1 am these past two weeks…

The sounds I hear comfort me. They are the sounds of being home, a place I love to be. The faint ticking of a clock, the purr of a small fan, the laundry gently tumbling around inside the drum, punctuated by the muffled thudding sounds of tennis balls I added to keep towels and blankets light and fluffy. But the anticipation I’m feeling gives the peaceful evening a certain sort of edge. Tomorrow we’re going away again.

Got the chicken sitter booked. The suitcase is laid out in my room on the floor, just about packed with our stuff. Preparations are much smoother this time around. Got it together much easier tonite than this time a couple weeks ago. I’d been a bit out of practice before, but I got it back. Yeah, I remember how to do this. Plus I’m working on keeping it simple. I remember the days when I had to pack for months overseas – and that I had to be able to carry it too. So I learned how to bring less. (For the most part I don’t end up wearing every outfit I’ve brought with me. Do you?) On long trips I hand wash favorites. On short trips I just wear em a bunch of times with simple air-outs in between (making sure to keep my body oft-refreshed to prevent a funk from developing.) I like traveling light, and this will be such a trip. It’s short, our belongings few. Not lots to wear. Not much reason to fret.

What does, however, end up making packing so challenging this time are the ‘extra curriculars’. In this case: phone, phone charger, camera, extra chargeable batteries, battery charger, laptop, charger for laptop, DS game, Diji too, rc helicopters and their various charging cables too. Djemebe and tip jar, just in case. Plastic bucket for pond or sea life. Oh, and books – the ones we’ll read at night and the ones that’ll be read to us as we drive. This isn’t over-the-top crazy, but it requires a skosh of organizational ability. At the very least the project requires a captian, a GC, a head chef; someone to bring all departments together in a shared game plan. And we know who that is, don’t we? I will do the best I can, facing the possible slight dissatisfaction of the lucky young man whose items I am packing. I’ll do it well, but he’ll usually show me how he thinks I could have done it better, sometimes working himself up into quite a lather about it. In a few minutes he’ll get over it, but halfway thru the trip he’ll panic that something’s been left behind. He go through all his things to discover it hasn’t. Good thing that, ultimately, I have a very appreciative young son. In the end – after a mini hissy fit here or there – he always thanks me for remembering his stuff and packing so thoughtfully. Whew.

So it’s now morning of, and I see the coop door has not opened as it’s supposed to. Strike one. I take my strong coffee with me to investigate. Never did fix the nesting boxes – I toss a couple milk crates, sideways onto the floor. That’ll work for now. I spend some time with the timer til it appears to be back on track. Then I spend a half hour going over everything, loading bins, filling water barrels. I take my coffee cup back to the kitchen for a refill, and no sooner have I come back out the door than there is a red hen, just feet away, looking up at me expectantly. “What?!” I holler. I’m packed, I’m showered, I’m ready. All to do is get the kid up and dressed and we’re outta here. Now this??

I stay calm, I don’t let myself get dramatic about it – cuz I so very easily could – after all, what fun is being human if you can’t let yourself get swept up in the melodrama of it all once in a while? Not this morning. Gotta fix it. So I sit down with my cup of coffee in a nearby lawn chair and wait. And watch. Soon I see that one of the young Auracanas is out too. And he’s poking around trying to get back in. Now here comes old floppy comb – she’s one of the first to jump ship. I see her eyein’ a spot of fence. Mm-hmm. Think we got our breach. Yup. Some wire’s been pushed out enough for a bird to squeeze out of – but not back in. The lone hen on the outside walks past me and I lean over and snatch her up. Can’t deny that I give her a quick kiss on her head and thank her for all the wonderful eggs she gives us before I heave her over the top of the fence where she flutters back down and joins her flock. I corner the young Auracana and fling him back too. I find a lawnchair and a piece of lumber and nestle them alongside the breach. Done.

Finish my coffee inside, looking out the window to see if my fix is holding. Yup. Looking good. Get the kid up, dressed, and while I pack the car, he says his goodbyes to the frogs in our two small ponds. He does so without incident, and finally, we’re off…

Highway construction, heavy rain and alternate routes made our drive a bit longer than it might have been otherwise, but another book on tape plus my colorful monologue on the whole experience – we might call it ‘sailor in a CRV’ – these helped get us to our destination without too much undo stress.

Where are we? Well, at 2 am I am typing at my trusty and ancient G4 in a generous-sized guest room of our hosts, a family we met last summer in Saratoga who now live in West Orange, New Jersey. There is a boy one year older than Elihu, and a girl one year younger than he. The three of them have a really nice thing and play together as children should. Not all kids have such a natural groove as these three. You might even say we’ve driven 200 miles for a play date. Because after our time at the pool today, we’ll visit the wide open ocean tomorrow – zoo and aviary the next day. This time it won’t just be mom and son as usual – this time Elihu can be a full-on kid. Makes my heart happy. His too.

There’s more family to this trip than we’d even originally intended: My father grew up in nearby Passaic. My maternal grandmother was born one town over, in East Orange. My grandmother, mom and uncle Paul summered in Ocean Grove, the very town we will visit tomorrow. Not much has changed in the ocean side town; we’ll be looking upon much the same downtown streets as they did some sixty years ago. And I’ve been told to try the Breyer’s Strawberry Ice Cream. Will do.

I’ve enjoyed our recent opportunities to travel. It’s fun waking up someplace new, pulling back the shades each morning to reveal a new scene… I’m off to a peaceful sleep now, the imagined sound of the ocean luring me to my dreams…

Homecoming

July 16, 2012 Posted in An Ongoing Journal..., Farm Life, Mommy Mind1 Comment

I awoke Saturday morning, in my own bed, to the internal soundtrack of a searing Steve Lukather guitar solo, floating atop a lush bed of strings and majestic french horns, the music rising, rising, rising, lifting my soul far above the clouds into the expanse of sky… My own personal and deeply subconscious interpretation – albeit embarrassingly corny – of the bliss I felt at being home, at the triumphant conclusion of an epic journey.

I laughed when I realized the music I’d chosen. I laughed because my bed felt so good. I laughed because it felt so good to be home. I laughed because I felt I had more than come home; I had made it. Whatever that meant. And all that it meant. I’d put eight hundred miles on the car, introduced my son to the ocean, met long-lost relatives, visited the first house I’d ever lived in, rediscovered New York City. And made it back home. Not one hen lost in our absence. All was truly well. We’d been successful – and in ways we’d never even dreamed of. I lay in bed, thinking about home. What it was, how it felt, how I now identified it, how important it was to me.

On our trip folks would naturally ask me where I was from – and I was never quick with an answer. Initially my inclination was to say ‘Chicago’, but as that wasn’t quite true, and that answering so would require a little back story, I would hesitatingly offer that I was from “upstate New York”, and feel a little disappointed in my more truthful answer. Being from Chicago seemed to define who I was – what the better part of my life experiences had been to this point – but as things stood right now, I was in fact not from Chicago anymore. I thought of Army brats and how they usually chose to answer that question. “Oh, I grew up all over”. That would be that. But I didn’t grow up all over, and furthermore I was now a country gal and should probably represent myself as such. Throughout my trip I was given many opportunities to get used to the idea that yes, I was indeed from “about three hours north, in the country, just outside of Saratoga Springs.” If my questioner would look at me for more information I might add: “It’s equidistant to Montreal and New York.” And if another beat followed, I might add “I have chickens.” Ok. I could feel a small amount of pride in that I suppose, but as I didn’t feel it completed the picture accurately, mostly I’d close the conversation by saying that “in my last life I was a musician in Chicago”. That seemed to bring it all up to date with the most amount of truth.

When I first opened the door to our house upon returning, I was hit with the scent of our home. This is something I think all travelers notice first after a long journey. The smell that is unique to their home. I can almost recall the particular ways in which my other homes smelled, the emotional memories that those scents retrieved for me, but had no idea what a fresh return would tell me about this particular house. What hit my nostrils first was a slight smell of, well, ‘funk’. The air told me that this was a summer camp in need of a good airing out. It smelled like a house used only seasonally; a slight hint of must, a shadow of damp linoleum… When I told this to my mom, she agreed that she too had noticed that my house had a particular smell. Not even bad really, just kind of different. She’d wondered if after all my improvements (removal of linoleum and shag carpet, new floors and paint) it might not change the scent. But it didn’t. It smells like a 70s house. Must be in the bones. Cuz I clean it, I maintain it, I open the windows and use fans to keep the inside air fresh. “So this is what my house smells like” I thought to myself upon returning. Crazy. Sometimes visitors have told me it reminds them of a cabin… guess this is at the root of it. Ah well, 70s, slightly funky cabin though it may be, it’s home. My own personal epicenter. Didn’t feel it a week ago, but I felt it for sure now.

We hit the ground running on our first day back as we had a wedding to attend – an early one too, the ceremony was at noon. Elihu kept saying that he was excited as it was his “very first wedding”. (Maybe not entirely true – I was sure he’d been to others, but as a very young one he had likely been playing with his Thomas trains while things had been going on.) But for this wedding – of two people who live just down the road from us and whom we’ve grown to love very much these past few years – he would truly be present. When I told him that it this wedding was significant in another way – that they, as women, were only allowed very recently by law to even marry each other at all – he responded that that sounded ‘hard to believe’ and then added that nobody should be allowed to tell you who you can’t marry. Amazing how things have changed. And how deeply pleased I was that in my son’s eyes it wasn’t even an issue in the first place. As the father of one of the women said that day, “We live in interesting times”. Inspiring times, too.

I mention this wedding because it too was a symbol for me of home. As I met guests from different parts of the country, even from different countries, I began to feel a growing certainty of my being from this place, this small country town. The wedding was at the couple’s home which they had decorated with brilliantly colored gerber daisies and hundreds of brightly colored oragami cranes. The place looked simply stunning. The joy, the love, the sense of family was deeply felt by everyone there. I couldn’t think of a better occasion on which to return home. For me the event helped me feel more deeply my own sense of center. My own family lives here, I now have friends here, I now have a new life here – and for my son it’s really the only home he’s ever known. In some way, both trip and wedding helped confirm for me that this place really is the center of our physical world; this is where we come from.

For the past four years I’ve had a flower on the antenna of my car. It is a subdued green, now weathered and frayed from thousands of miles on the move. I put it there before I left Chicago as a symbol of hope for the future and cheer for my aching, uncertain heart. (It also makes my run-of-the-mill gold Honda CRV much easier to locate in large parking lots.) I’ve many times thought of replacing it with something that might symbolize the future I’m moving into. I’d bought a bright, deep orange artificial gerber daisy months with the intention of affixing it to my antenna, but it never felt the right time. I realize my putting this much thought into such a thing – simply doing such a thing – may seem a bit immature (admitting it here in print makes me doubly self-conscious of that), but strangely, having that flower go before me in the world as I drive about has helped me to feel lighter. As if while all this heavy shit was going on I was still able to convey a certain lightheartedness in the world.

After leaving the party last night well past dark and then getting up this morning to go back over and help with the cleanup, it hit me. I spotted an orange oragami crane on my dashboard, a memento of the wedding. I remembered the colorful gerber daisies, the cheer they gave to the party. Then, in a flash of inspiration, I remembered the flower I’d bought months ago. I ran inside, found it, and with hardly more than one swipe with a knife brought the ratty, old flower down. In minutes the new one was up. I felt somehow refreshed. My whole spirit had been renewed; in the trip, in the wedding of friends, in the discovery of home.

The daisy goes before me in the world letting folks know (at least I hope) that I’m moving through my world with a certain good humor and lightness of heart. And at the very least, the daisy ensures that my home away from home is distinct from all others; I’m never unsure as to which car is mine. And at the end of my travels, the daisy leads me back down the long driveway to the little red chicken coop and the plain white house. I may not have believed it before, but I do now. That little white house in Greenfield Center is where we come from. Just look for the daisy…

The Hillhouse

The Journey of a Mother and Son

Category: Farm Life