Another wild Friday night at the farm

For weeks, Ian and his friend Chuck have been fixing up an old field cultivator that we were given, and last night he finally pulled it behind the tractor to prepare our garden for planting. The machinery still wasn’t working properly, so Ian asked me to come out and help. My job was to walk behind the tractor and encourage a mechanism on the field cultivator to turn as Ian went around the corner. We started out very slowly with visions of me falling down and being sliced up by the tines that were digging up the earth, but we never gave that an opportunity to happen. The first time I helped the mechanism turn, another piece of metal turned faster and came up and squashed my middle finger.

I shouted and went tearing across the field. When I got to the yard, I did not want to stop running, so I just ran in circles. I could feel something flopping off the injured hand, and I asked Ian to look at it because I was too afraid. He took one look and said, “We are going to the doctor.” This confirmed my worst fear, and it wasn’t until we were getting in the car that I found out it was not part of my finger that had been torn off, but just the nail. It was the entire nail, including the portion that usually sits under your skin.

As we drove to urgent care, I belted out hymns and folk songs and wiggled in my seat and stomped my feet because I thought that if I sat still I might throw up. The folks at the urgent care tried to stick my nail back inside my finger to give a new nail a chance to grow, but they could not do it. They said I have a week get someone to do that, and if no one can do it, then I might never have a fingernail on that finger. I am remembering this is a distinct possibility, but Ian said it sounded to him like I would probably eventually have a fingernail of some sort on that finger. It will likely be a weird looking nail –bumpy or discolored, but it will be a nail. What a shame that it is not my style to flip people the bird because I will have a unique instrument for that purpose.

The bone in my finger is also broken, and the skin is pretty sliced up. We spent so much time at the urgent care that my son had time to watch the whole Toy Story movie in the waiting room.

Back at home, I tried unsuccessfully to find a substitute for my Pilates class the next morning and then went to deal with the chicken that had been in the oven when I got hurt. The chicken was standing upright, balanced on a Coke can, just as I had left it, but in the intervening two hours it seemed to me like it had acquired more personality. I tried in vain to pull the Coke can out of its cavity, but my finger hurt too much, so I had to put it in the refrigerator as it was. It is still standing there bare naked like a cranky gnome.

I have no idea how we are going to keep up with things while my finger gets better. It hurts so much.

More possum repercussions

Last week was a heavy week.

After the possum bit me on a Friday night, we were supposed to kill it, refrigerate it and then give it to the University of Minnesota so it could be tested for rabies. We did that, and on the following Monday the University called us to say they could not test the possum because its brain had turned to mush. They recommended that I get rabies shots.

I did not get the shots. The Minnesota Department of Health says that only one possum in the state has ever tested positive for rabies, and so I had a pretty low risk of exposure. Also, my wound was small and shallow, which lowers my chances of getting the disease, according to my doctor. (She strongly encouraged me to get the shots anyway.)

If that possum has given me rabies, I will die a terrible death and there will be nothing anyone can do about it. I went online to learn more and ended up looking at pictures of people and animals that were dying of the disease. It was like catching a glimpse of a demon. I think it is possible that diseases have awareness and a spiritual character much like plants do. If I were around it, I might be able to “hear” the disease, the way I “hear” the awareness of plants, but I do not want to be around it. It is an embodiment of horror. Thankfully, the chances that I will experience that horror are very low.

I was afraid of getting the shots because my osteopath said the shots might cause me more chronic sickness and pain. I believe this guy even though his advice runs contrary to other information because he has healed me when other people could not. When my repetitive stress injuries prevented me from picking up toys from the floor or washing dishes, the regular doctors gave me braces that messed up my elbows and started talking about surgery even though they said I was not a good candidate for it. The osteopath started working with my collarbone, and my arms got much better. When I experienced a low-level stomach flu for a few years, the regular doctors gave me pills that did not work. The osteopath put me on a strict diet that helped me feel like a regular person again. It seems to me like he goes to the root of the problem instead of fixing the symptom and leaving the main problem alone. (He also said that in spite of his concerns, he could not advise me to forgo the shots.)

As I considered getting the shots, it seemed like I had to choose between a very low chance of death and a fair chance of pain and disability. I have had enough pain and disability. I don’t want any more. There are so many things that I want to do with this life. Every day, I find myself panting after breathtaking beauty. I want so much to be free to dance and run after it, and to lift heavy things as I pursue it.

Hefty handfuls

The chickens have a new pasture now. We are letting them out the door on the east side of the coop (instead of the north side), and this is especially exciting to them because this yard includes both tall and short clover. When we mowed, we left a strip of pasture untouched, and now these plants are knee-high. The chickens love to nestle into the tall clover and munch on it or settle down next to it. We can see white faces peeking up from a green tangle of plants. Even though they enjoy the tall clover, we mow their pasture because we understand that they are able to eat more greens when the greens are shorter. When the plants are taller, the chickens tend to trample them more.

This group of birds has two more weeks to live. We will try to make sure that they are good weeks. When the birds stay out late, and I have to pick some up and put them inside their coop at night to protect them from predators, I can no longer pick up two at a time. Each chicken takes two hands, and some of the larger ones already feel like very hefty handfuls. Last evening, a little rooster was so determined to sleep outside. I must’ve put him back in the coop 5 times because he kept wandering back out as I went to fetch another wayfaring chicken from the yard. He felt huge in my hands.

Help us find homes!

We are looking for homes for four kittens. They will be ready for new homes by the end of the month. They are friendly and they have been using the litter box on the front porch. They are very cute!

We are also looking for a home for their mother, because she hunted down a chicken. (Maybe it was not her fault -- maybe the possum killed it and she ate the leftovers.) She catches mice too. The mother has lived as a barn cat but is very affectionate and strolled in through our ripped screen door. Yesterday she walked in and jumped on my lap

You know anyone who wants a kitty? Call us! 507-645-4662

More relaxed chickens

The chickens are finally in their clover pasture because weather has turned warmer, and they have finally feathered out. On Friday, I herded all the chickens in from their temporary yard by our garage, and Ian chained the little coop to the back of our tractor. The coop slid behind him on skids as he drove out to the pasture. Then we set up a fence for them and let them out into their new world. The chickens seem to be making up for lost time by eating lots of greens. Their yard has become a honeycomb of little paths through the clover, and near their coop, they have eaten all the leaves off the plants, leaving stiff stalks bare and pointing up at the sky. We will need to rotate their pasture much sooner than I expected.

The flock seems much more relaxed in the warmer weather. I feel relieved for them. On the first warm night this week, when their coop was still near our garage, a bunch of them bedded down in the grass, and something felt just right about that. Even so, I had to move them inside to protect them from predators, so I ended up picking up half the flock, one or two at a time, and setting them inside their coop. It was a little bit shocking. They are completely feathered out on top, but when I reached my hands around their undersides to lift them, my fingers sank very slightly into warm, soft skin. Apparently their bellies have not feathered out yet. It was not at all what I expected, and I felt surprised every time I picked up another chicken. The chickens felt surprised too. They squawked piteously, but then calmed down quickly when I set them down again. I admire how quickly chickens seem to recover from emotional upsets.

bad to worse

This evening, I went to pet the six-week old kittens that live in our garage, and I reached into their nest in the straw bales, and something bit me hard. After standing there in shock for a moment, I rearranged the straw bales to look inside the nest, and there was a possum. I had been bitten by a possum, and it broke the skin.

I went to tell my husband, who was playing soccer with the children. He told me to start washing my hands and call the nurse line, and he closed the garage so the possum could not escape. Actually there was one place where the possum might be able to escape underneath a garage door, so he posted the children there to watch. This ended up being a terrifying assignment, at least for my daughter, because the door raised up a bit while something scratched and thumped behind it. Ian thought it was probably the cats, but it seemed to my daughter that it must be the terrible possum that had bitten her mother, trying to escape under her watch.

While the children were watching the possum’s escape route, I was on the phone with the doctors, and then the Veterinary Center at the University of Minnesota. It was decided that because animal control probably does not come this far out into the country, we needed to kill the possum without damaging its head so that the University could test its brain for rabies. Then we needed to refrigerate it until we could bring it to the university for testing.

We relieved the children of their guard duty, and went to the garage armed with a flashlight, shovels and a rifle. I shone the flashlight into a hole between the hay bales, and we could see a furry body in there. I thought I could identify a black ear, and I also thought I could see a tiny pink foot sticking out from its abdomen. My husband shot a couple of times into the straw bales, and then the possum tried to get out between the straw bales and the wall of the garage. We wanted this to go as fast as it could, so he shot it a few more times, and it died there against the garage wall with its bright eyes wide open. It looked dead, but we thought we would give it a few moments before picking it up, just in case.

Flashlight in hand, I checked around for the kittens and found them curled up and sleeping near a wood burning stove someone had given us. Inside that wood burning stove, framed by its square door as if she were on a television screen, sat the grey mother cat eating something rather large. I shown my flashlight on her and saw clearly that she was chewing on the rib cage of one of our white chickens.

Again, I went to the house and picked up the phone, trying to figure out what to do. I adore cats, and I have become a good friend of this particular cat, but how can we keep an animal that eats our chickens? As I called a couple of shelters, my daughter realized that we were planning to give away the cat and her kittens, and she burst out sobbing and ran upstairs. My husband went out on the deck to discuss a plan of action, but we could not come up with anything that sounded good. The Humane Society was closed for the night anyway, so we decided to try to be useful in our indecision and go pick up the possum and put it in the refrigerator.

I grabbed a trash bag and followed my husband to the garage. The possum was still just as it was when we left. I was curious though as I remembered the pink foot sticking out from its abdomen, and I grabbed it back foot and moved it so that I could see its stomach. Possums are marsupials, and this one had seven bare pink little creatures sticking out from a wide open pouch in her belly. They were all faced in, towards her stomach, as if they were nursing.

My husband finished the job of bagging up the body while I went to the refrigerator and moved aside old leftovers, pickle relish and lemon juice to make room for the possum. When he appeared in the kitchen with a trash bag in hand, my husband surveyed my work and said he had pictured putting the possum on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, not the middle shelf, where I had made room for it. We put it on the middle shelf though, next to the eggs. After dinner, I considered where to put the leftovers, and I found room for them on the top shelf, even though it was a little crowded up there.

After dinner, we worked on moving the chickens out to the pasture, just as if nothing unusual had happened.

Staying here

While I was training to become Lamaze childbirth educator, I got the idea that spring was one of the most dangerous times to live on a farm. I read that babies who were born during certain times of the year in farm country are more likely to have birth defects because they were in a critical time of their prenatal development during the spring when the fields were being heavily sprayed. We moved to our farm in June of last year, and all year I’ve been remembering that study about the birth defects and wondering if I would be able to make it through my first spring living here.

I have a hard time with chemicals, even those that don’t bother most people. For example, half an hour after using sunblock, I feel so sick to my stomach that I have to lie down. I have given up on the stuff and am using long sleeves and hats instead. The chemicals they spray on crops are even worse. Last July, when I was in Iowa for a Quaker gathering, they were using planes to do some cropdusting nearby, and I was moderately sick for a week. For a couple of those days, I had to cancel most of my other plans and sleep. This problem embarrasses me somehow, and I want to explain that I was not always this way, and that I am not trying to be difficult or overdramatic. On a rational level, I know this explanation should not be necessary.

Given my problem, moving to a farm nestled in corn and soybean fields seemed like a bad idea. Before we moved, we did some research, and I read about studies that suggest agricultural chemicals may cause various kinds of cancer. I also read that these chemicals tend to become more concentrated inside homes, because they cannot break down the way they would outside. I vowed that I would clean our new house regularly and well, but of course I have not.

In the end, we decided to move to the farm because we could not imagine doing otherwise. On some level though, I have been worried that we would not be able to stay here. I thought that might become clear this spring.

So far, I’ve been aware only of one bout of spraying this spring. My stomach went queezy as I was caring for the chicks outside one morning, and I stepped away from the coop to look around. Down the road I saw a small group of trucks parked in the neighbor’s field. One had a tank on its back. I finished up my work and headed inside instead of tackling some of the other outside projects I had planned for the morning. I had not been inside long when a vehicle drove through the field to my tree line with its long red spray mechanisms outstretched behind it like low, enormous wings. It retreated and returned several times, its loud engine vibrating. Sometimes, throughout that day, I felt a little spacey and nauseated, but it was not a big deal.

The next day, my neighbor planted corn, and now I can see it coming up in beautiful light green rows. I’m happy to see it, but I’m also afraid because I do not know what kind of spraying will happen in that field during the next month or so. Still, it is already the middle of May, and I am doing fine, so I’m starting to believe that we will be able to keep living here.

Now a new fear is forming. I will worry that because we are staying, my children might get cancer when they are adults. I so much wish that growing food did not mean risking my health and fearing for the health of my children. It should not be that way.

Sneezes

Have you ever heard a chicken sneeze? It is a delicate outburst, appropriate for a bird. Once in a great while, a very vigorous sneeze is accompanied by a gentle little tooting sound. During the last week, as we prepared our chickens for their life in the pasture by weaning them from their heat lamp and making them spend more time outside, they responded by starting to sneeze. Standing among them for a while, you might be able to hear several sneezes popping up from different parts of their brooder. Their eyes are bright, they are active and growing, but they are sneezing.

We decided we need to baby them a bit more, and we have returned to leaving the heat lamp on during these very cool nights. To plug in the heat lamp though, we have to keep their coop near the garage, which is delaying their move to the clover pasture. The clover is gorgeous, and so vibrant, but we will wait a few more days until they can enjoy it.

In the meantime, they have been going outside in a temporary yard near our garage, and tomorrow I will move the fencing so that they can eat down a new patch of greens. Our major accomplishment for the week is helping them learn to love the outdoors. During their first few outings, we had to herd them out and then stand in the door so they could not return to their familiar coop. Now when we open the door they all come rushing outside with a mild frenzy.

When they are feeling cool, which has been often, they like to cuddle together. When I check on them, I often find what looks like flotillas of chickens in the brooder. All these little heads pop up out of the flotilla to look at me curiously.

Love, like mist

Yesterday morning, when I was sitting in worship, I had the feeling that love was spread across the fields like a low mist. In the field south of our house, which is planted in clover, turquoise sparks leapt up into the mist, and clear lights blinked and moved The field beyond our property line, to the south, is empty of plants. Perhaps it has already been planted in corn, although I was not around at the time to see the tractor go by. I was not aware of light dancing over those empty fields, but the love that lay over them was strong.

I believe that I'm supposed to tell people about the love I saw hanging wide and whole, over the land.

Now I have told you.

Growing bigger

I feel both disappointed and relieved to report that the chicks have passed their cutest phase. They are no longer irresistible yellow fluff balls that I want to scoop up and rub against my cheek. Instead, they are feathering out rather awkwardly. Their tails grow a little bit every day, and the fluff on the chest and back looks clumpy as it is replaced by the narrow beginnings of what will soon be white feathers. The little birds have a new sense of themselves as well. For the first time this week, I saw two chicks go chest to chest, arching their little necks and hopping to see which one could be taller and more intimidating to the other.

They went outside for the first time this morning! Their new feathers help them stay warm, so we let them out in the morning sunshine. “Let them out” does not quite describe what we did. My husband tried to coax them out using their food as a lure, and then used a piece of cardboard to very gently herd them all out. They seemed happy enough to be outside, but getting them there took some work. We will always feed them outdoors now, and within a few days, I hope to move their coop out into the field.

While the chicks are still in the brooder, I have been spending the most time with them at about 9 AM and 9 PM – after my children have left for school, and after they have gone to bed. It has been a joy to go outside after dark every night. Earlier in the week, I saw the moon through the clumps of brand-new leaves on my maple trees. Later in the week, for two nights in a row, the moon had an enormous pale halo. This scents in the air have been growing stronger all week, and now we walk in violet clouds because the lilacs are in full bloom.

PS -- Do you know anyone who would like a kitten? A cat who adopted us last winter had five kittens in April. They are cute.