Carried Home

If you always wanted to farm, but never did, you would not need to decide what to do with a baby chick that limped and dragged its wing but lived for weeks.

You would not weigh the possibility of contagion against the possibility of recovery.

You would not finger your lumpy purse of obligations, considering how much time you might lose.

You would not lift the golden bird from its hospital pen to watch it nestle down next to the earth and cock its head sideways to study you with suspicion.

You would not stand in a field of clover rustling in the sweet wind and shoulder the weight of the job before you.

You would not kneel in the clover when the job was done.

You would not feel yourself drift beyond your tumbling fence lines into a glittering ocean of corn, which would receive you completely and close over your head.

You would not discover that you could breathe under this sea, but that words all drown.

You would not allow your body to lift you like a competent mother and carry you to the garage where the shovels hang.

You would not live without words for a while, swaying to rhythms you knew before you were born.

You would not know if you were really home.

We have an unusually collegial batch of chickens. The other night, one of them stood by Ian and pecked at his boots. Ian stooped over and to stroke the chicken, and it just stood there calmly. They stayed that way for a long time. I have been troubled by the birds’ friendliness because I have taken to wearing some plastic flip-flops when I step into their yard to take care of them, and they all rush over to step on my feet with their sharp toenails.

The ducks are fully feathered out, and they look magnificent. When I let them out of their pen in the morning, they all run across the driveway, flapping their white wings. My yard is filled with the sound of air moving under many strong feathers. We have granted the ducks a week of reprieve before they go to the processors because we want them to be able to attend our potluck on Saturday. It is at 5 PM. Can you come?

the kids remember

As I cut up a watermelon for my children, I realized that they had visited the place where it grew.

“Was that the farm with the pigs in the silo?” my daughter asked.

“No,” I said.

“Was it the one where there were all those ducklings crossing the driveway?” my son asked.

“No,” I said, realizing that as I have been taking educational farm tours and trying to learn about farming methods, my children have been having dream-like adventures.

We finally identified the farm where the watermelon was grown. According to my kids, it was a farm that had a swing hanging from an impressive tree that had been struck by lightning. A whole bunch of people walked around following a big tractor, and that tractor sometimes changed direction unexpectedly. This was alarming for the children, who did not like the idea of being in front of the tractor, even if it was quite far away. That afternoon, children were scolded for climbing into the back of our pickup, and we all used an impressively smelly latrine.

The farm with all the ducklings also left a deep impression on the kids. They remember a huge and rather scary male turkey on the loose, along with many beautiful birds. The children were worried for a while because they lost track of us, but they found us again. My son admired a smashed up truck, and my daughter was licked by a calf. There was a potluck full of food my kids did not like. (I and everyone else thought the food was amazingly delicious. It was home grown, and organic. Our contribution was potato chips we bought at a gas station, and nobody else touched it. I have felt ashamed every time I thought of that potluck, and I am relieved to have a different way of remembering it.)

Another farm, which my family visited without me, apparently has an on-farm store. My daughter remembered vividly a large, empty room with two people standing behind a counter. A door led from that room into a “normal” bathroom. “I always remember the bathrooms,” my daughter said.

I’m not sure I want to know what visiting children remember from our farm.

hot birds

It is hot, and the chickens are hot. They open their beaks to pant like dogs and their little necks wiggle with each breath. They hold their wings slightly away from their sides to let the cool air next to their bodies, which makes them look large and proud, and would give them an air of grandeur if they did not also look uncomfortable. This afternoon, I watched one little chick purposefully scratch the ground, then the sink down onto it, and I imagined that the soil felt cool and damp on her hot little belly. I almost felt cooler just watching her. She kept panting, though, and I decided the chickens could use some help.

I walked back to the house and turned on the hose, knowing that many chicken farmers spray their chickens with a gentle mist of water to cool them on the very hot afternoons. My husband has done this several times, but it was my first time. I could not shake the idea that I was causing some kind of mischief, and I tried to make the water come out slowly, gently, and soothingly. The water burst out from the hose in a big, wide mist, and the chickens peeped with surprise and fled to the other side of their shelter. I sprayed them as though they were plants, and when they were all damp, I turned around made sure that those in the yard were not left out. As soon as the water stopped they settled down quickly. None of them were panting. Either they were cooler, or they were too surprised to pant.

Cats

As we thought about moving to the country and starting a farm, there were many things that worried me, but I never once worried about cats. That just goes to show how little I knew about living in the country. Cats show up here, and if I were a regular farmer, like those I knew growing up, I would probably put out some cat chow and let them live their lives without much interference. I cannot imagine doing that. Ever since I was a child, cats have filled me with delight. They feel like friends, and I want to love them up and keep them safe. That is a tall order here.

When we moved in last year, six cats lived in the garage – a mother and her five untamed kittens. Soon the mother got hit by a car right in front of our house, and I tearfully called my friends, trying to figure out what to do. First, I trapped the wild, six-week-old kittens in a rolled up piece of carpet and moved them into my bathroom thinking I could socialize them. Within hours, I changed my mind because the kittens wheezed, and I worried that they would make my old cats sick. The kittens were too wild to lift, so I made ramps from an old trellis and a piece of wood paneling that allowed them to escape through the open window.

My daughter and I spent hours sitting on an old loveseat in the garage that summer, taming them. It worked. We also shelled out hundreds of dollars, which we did not feel we could really afford, to have them neutered. When fall came, one of the outside kittens followed us around the house, pressing his face against the screens to peep in at us with a plaintive look on its face. We gave in, and let it and its sister become house cats.

One kitten disappeared without a trace, so we were left with two outside cats. The orange and white one captured my heart completely. Every evening, it put its front paws around my neck like a hug, nestled its soft head under my chin, and purred with delight. My heart lit up. This spring, when another batch of kittens was born in the shelter by our porch, that cat never showed impatience with them, but snuggled with them. He was a lovely soul. I spent my Christmas money from my mother-in-law to buy him a heated bed for the cold winter because I could feel him shivering.

We have not seen him for over a week, and the neighbor said that while working the fields on the border of our property, he scared up a coyote that had just killed a young pheasant. I am struggling against picturing what happened to my friend. Its brother was hit by a car earlier this summer, so of the six cats that originally lived here, the two survivors live inside.

Two cats other live outside our house now – a gray female that showed up in the wintertime and had kittens before she was tame enough to neuter, and one of her offspring. They, too, are lovely cats, which purr mightily. I cannot imagine a nicer sound then loud purring mixed with the trills of crickets.

I am giving these cats good advice every night: Stay close to home, and don’t go near the road. Beyond that, I feel there is little that I can do to keep them safe. It grieves me to be reminded of how little protection I can give to all the things I love.

Rip van Winkle

I came back from a short trip to Iowa yesterday and found that things had changed here. Ian had arrived ome a couple days early to take the big chickens to the processor, so they were gone, and in their place out in the field were the little chicks from the brooder. I feel like Rip van Winkle. An entire generation has passed while I was away for what I thought was a long weekend.

The new chicks seem quite merry in their new home. We are keeping them inside the floorless shelter for a few days so they are more likely to think of it as an inviting place to go when the rain comes. Today the chicks burst out of their shelter by pushing under some chicken wire when they saw it Ian coming towards them with a family who was visiting the farm. They suspected he was going to give them feed, and they did not want to waste a moment of time.

The ducks are so huge that they dwarf the sleds we have filled with water for them, although they use them faithfully for their morning cleaning, patiently taking turns. If they were chickens, the most prestigious birds would go first, and the downtrodden would be pecked and have to wait. Because the sleds seem inadequate, we have tried several ways of making ramps up to the lip of a small plastic swimming pool, but the ducks are still wary of going in it. Today, during the heat, several climbed up our makeshift stairway of sandbags and splashed jubilantly in the water.