The Hawk

That

Damn

Hawk

sits in bare branches

considering which

of my

hens to eat next

while I sit at

the window

considering how long it will be

before I get arrested,

if I shoot him.

Then

 the wind shifts

and the hawk

extends

elegant wings

to rise in silent circles

sunward

and I decide to let him live

just because

he is so

Beautiful.

Free Range Fricassee

    

 If someone had told me thirty years ago that I would one day kill a chicken and giggle while doing it, I would have scoffed.  Yesterday, Joe and I beheaded four of our roosters-who-should-have-been-hens.  I didn't think I could ever find any humor in death, but my husband looked so silly with specks of blood and feathers on his face that I did it.  I giggled.

     Joe was kind enough to do the beheading while I boiled water over on the other side of the fence, so I guess I can’t claim to be a total farm girl, yet.  My father says his grandmother used to chase the chickens down, grab them up by their necks, give each neck a quick twirl, and bring the old girls in for the stewing.  Our process was a bit more complicated.

     First, I read a book about how to butcher chickens.  Joe humored me in this, but thirty pages later I decided it might be easier to just listen to him.  He had, after all, done this before with his mother and had the chopping block and ax to prove it.  So, he gathered up four of our overdose of roosters and guided me through the process.

    After head removal, the roosters were tossed into a bucket to bleed out.  They shuddered and shook as rigor-mortise set in, but my book assured me that this was the dance of the dead.  Then we dipped the carcasses in 160 degree water.  The feathers came off pretty easily and in forty minutes, we had four headless, featherless birds ready for phase two.

     Phase two was to singe the long hairs off of the body.  Joe’s mom had always done this with a rolled up newspaper which she lit and passed over the bodies, but after almost setting the kitchen, the porch and the yard on fire, we decided to use a blow torch instead.    When the roosters were as slick-skinned as body-builders, they were dropped into the sink for phase three.

     Phase three made me appreciate my underdeveloped sense of smell.  We made a slit in the skin around the crop and removed it, cut off the feet and then worked to carefully remove the intestines without any spillage into the body cavity.  We were mostly successful at this, but since Joe’s mom had always done the innard removal, we had to experiment a little and consult the book (which frustratingly had no pictures).  By the fourth bird, we had mostly figured it out.

    The four boys, which at this point actually looked like store bought chickens only skinnier, were placed in water for a cold soak to remove the rest of the body heat.  Then they were placed in the fridge for storage and aging.

  The final step was the easiest.  We watched a video on You-tube of Joel Salatin butchering.  He had lots of fancy equipment and completed four hens in ten minutes.  He recommended using a knife as little as possible, tearing the skin open instead, to save meat.  He said every ounce of meat was worth fifteen cents, which made his chickens worth $2.40 a pound.

   Tonight we are having $4.80 worth of chicken fricassee.  But what we are really having is a farm-raised, free-range, antibiotic free, cleanly slaughtered supper.  That's worth more than any fat, overfed, cage-raised hen that money can buy.

    

    

Manna and Tomatoes

     Having a garden is a marvel.  I step out the door, walk twenty steps and palm a ripe red tomato or I wander the rows eating tender green beans like candy as I admire the beauty of all those growing things.  In July, the seeds I planted in May are showing a promise of abundance.  I run to the house, first tomato in hand to share with Joe, and we slice it reverently to eat with just a little salt and pepper.  Or we strip the silk from those early ears of corn and drop them into the pot that’s already boiling and stand over it drooling in anticipation.  

     But in September, my humble garden has morphed into an an overachiever.  It used to offer tomatoes shyly, nestled below green leaves.  Now it dangles them brazenly in the sun.  It hammers me with abundance.   “Come gather beans now!” it screams whenever I step into the yard.  And the flighty corn, so vibrant in its youth, is now pale and whining about the load of ears it carries.   

     We eat tomatoes for breakfast, tomatoes for lunch and tomatoes for supper.  I’m even tempted to hide them in dessert.  I have made and canned tomato juice, whole tomatoes, tomato ketchup, tomato soup, pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce and salsa.  I have gathered, de-silked , shucked and cut five buckets of corn.  I have pulled and dried a bushel of onions.  I have picked, snapped and canned twenty quarts of beans and still the garden throws vegetables at me in reckless abandon.

     I always feel overwhelmed at the end of the growing season.  Longing for the garden to cease and desist.  But then, I notice that there are no more green tomatoes on the vines.  There are no more bean blossoms.  There are no more baby cucumbers.  The corn rustles dryly in the wind. The garden is shutting down.  And, I after longing for such a moment am sad.

     When the Israelites wandered in the dessert, they cried out for food and God gave them manna.  They ate it three times a day for forty years.  I ate tomatoes three times a day for a month and whined about it.  Children in Africa would eat them gladly for as long as they could get them.  I have much to learn about gratitude and abundance.

Spring Cleaning

     With fall fast approaching I find that I am feeling rushed to complete my spring cleaning.  “What?” you ask.  “You haven’t finished your spring cleaning?  Spring is long past.”  You’re right spring is long past and I haven’t even started my spring cleaning.  There, I’ve said it out loud.  I am a spring cleaning drop out. 

     Over the years, I’ve tried to get excited about moving all the furniture out of a room, cleaning it side to side and top to bottom, and then putting it all back.  After all, Livvie Walton and the girls certainly seem to have a lot of fun when they do it on TV Land.  My problem is that when I start something, it usually brings to mind something else that I need to do. 

     For example:   To start my spring cleaning, I  prepare to move the  blanket chest in the living room out to the porch, but realize it’s really heavy,  so I open it to see if there’s anything I should remove.  As I am sorting through the contents, I find a blanket that would look really nice on my couch, so I pull it out and drape it over the back.  But now a quilt, that’s folded in a basket, doesn’t match so I carry it upstairs to put on the shelf with the other quilts, which are stacked beneath a coat that needs some buttons.  Hmm… It won’t take me but a minute to sew those on.

     So, I get the coat and the buttons, but the blue thread is not in my sewing box.  I walk downstairs to look next to my chair and notice a great magazine article about spring cleaning, so I sit down to read that.  Maybe I can get some tips that will make me more efficient.  When I finish the article, I find the thread and head back upstairs.  Once the buttons are attached, I take the coat in to my child’s room, which is really dusty.  I can’t leave it like that.

     Back down the steps I head to get a dust rag and some dusting spray.  Might as well dust the whole downstairs while I’m at it.  Downstairs dusted, I climb back up and dust the upstairs.  Then I notice that the screen to Scott’s window has fallen out onto the porch roof, so I squeeze through the window to retrieve it and, while I’m there, I see that the chickens are in my garden.

     I run down the steps, out the door and through the yard, waving my arms and hollering at the renegade hens until they fly over the fence and hot foot it back to the hen house.  On my trip back to the house, I notice that the lawn really needs to be mowed, so I get the lawnmower, gas it up and trim up the yard. 

     When I finish that chore, I’m thirsty so I head to the kitchen for a glass of water.  The clean glasses are all in the dishwasher which I unload.  As I’m unloading, I notice how messy the cabinet where I keep my plastic-ware has become.  I sit on the floor and sort through all the different size bowls, trying to match them up with lids and discovering that I have 40 lids that no longer have mates.  I toss those, which fills the trash can, so I take it out and dump it.

     I stand for a moment admiring the beautiful spring flowers and that’s when I remember.  I am supposed to be spring cleaning my house.  But, now it’s supper time.  I’ll finish tomorrow. 

     After supper, I sit down in my chair.  Why am I so tired?   I didn’t get a bit of spring cleaning done.  The trunk in the living room is still standing open and, as I reach over to close it, I notice a stack of pictures that need to be sorted and placed in albums.  I’ll do that as soon as I finish my spring cleaning.  Which I might finish this fall…if I don’t open that trunk again.

Waiting

     One of the things I’ve learned on the farm is patience.  I am thinking this as I sit on the steps of the chicken house waiting for the last hen to decide it’s time for bed.  She is still outside, pecking around, hopeful that she’ll find one last beetle or seed before flapping up to the roost.  I know that if I go into the chicken yard and try to shoo her toward the building, she will run the other way.  That’s the way chickens are.  So I wait.

     The waiting is not so bad.  It’s the cusp of evening and a cool breeze tickles my face as I stare across the dimming pastures.  Birds are singing their evening songs and, across the road, the lambs are bleating for their mamas.  I can see them in the pewter light, running down the hill to catch up with the ewes who are waiting-like me. 

    To my left, the cows begin to mosey through the gate and I know that will lead to another kind of waiting because, after I capture this last chicken, I will fill the grain bucket and carry it out to pasture for the three calves I’m still tending.  The cows will stand around me in a circle, staring at that grain and hoping I’ll leave so they can butt the calves out of the way and steal their meal.  But, I am seasoned in patience.  I deliver the food and then upend the bucket.  I’ll sit there until the calves finish, jumping up and waving my arms or pitching pebbles whenever a cow ventures too close.

     Perched on my bucket, I glance over at my garden.  I’m waiting for the first cucumbers, tomatoes and beans.  Seeds planted in late May have finally begun to look like they will bear.  Every day there is a new unfurling, a new flower, a new leaf, a new pod, a new bug.  Gardening is all about the waiting and then the dealing with what comes along, knowing that whatever it is will be different from yesterday.

     So, I wait for things, but when I really study the farm, I realize that I don’t know anything about true waiting.  When this farm was first settled, I’m guessing the meadows and pastures were all covered in trees and rocks.  There’s a small graveyard in our front meadow and a gravestone that tells me that Samuel Wilson died here in 1862 after living only 47 years.  Did he get to see the fruits of all his labor after toiling each year to clear another few acres?  Did his wife wait anxiously for the garden to produce its first green bean or ear of corn because they hadn’t had any fresh fruits or vegetables for nine months? 

     With a round baler, a weather window of three dry days means we can harvest a significant amount of hay in a short time.  I like to think of Sam Wilson scanning the skies all summer long, hoping for fair weather clouds so he could proclaim to his bonneted wife, “This is it!  I think we can get some hay up this week.”  He would have hand-scythed, raked, shocked and then stacked enough hay to get him through the winter.  What we harvest in one day, Sam would have patiently accomplished over the length of a summer, watching his hay stacks grow slowly, anticipating fat cattle in the snow.

    Sometimes I fear that modern life has stolen our ability to go slowly.  I see this especially in the young who carry so much at their finger tips.  I watched a group of my son’s friends in conversation not long ago.  They were all holding cell phones and i-pads and, as the conversation flowed, they referenced things.   They argued about movie stars, history and their friends relationships, casually scrolling through the world with their fingers to exclaim, “Look, see, I was right.”        

     I wonder.  Would Sam Wilson, long dead in my pasture, have looked at how fast the world is moving and told us we were missing out on the joy of things gained slowly, or would he have said, “Hot diggity, where can I get a round-baler?” Generations move forward.  What’s lost is replaced with something new.  Is life better or worse as a result? I might know the answer before I die.  I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

Dressed for Success

 Yesterday, I wore my white tennis shoes for the first time since I bought them three months ago.  The purchase seemed like a good idea at the time, but that’s because I forgot to factor in where I live.  To get to my car, I have to walk out of my gate and stroll across five yards of a forty acre pasture.  When the cows and sheep met to discuss personal hygiene, I think they unanimously elected to use that five yards for all offensive bodily deposits.

     My white tennis shoes are now polka-dotted with brown.  I try to be careful, but my mother will tell you that I was born to be dirty.  On my first date with my husband I impressed him by stepping in a mud puddle, twice.  Living on a farm presents more hazards than puddles.  Now that I am retired, my fashion choices are dictated by those hazards.

     In the morning, I get up and pull on yesterday’s dirty jeans and tee, slide into my mud boots and stroll across the pasture to switch out the dogs.  The one who has been loose for the night bounds up to meet me.  He knows there’s some cat food waiting for him and, excited by the thought of fish-flavored nuggets, he jumps up planting both dirty paws on my thighs. 

      After I switch the dogs, I mosey over to the hen house to release the feathered inmates.  Spell bound by the dew-pearled cobwebs strung like party lights along the fence, I don’t notice the cow pies until I slip in one. Manure is slicker than grease and I can’t stop my downward slide. I rise up, my backside and hands stained greenish brown, and move on to the chicken house where I fill the chicken fountain, splashing enough water in the process to soak my left pants leg. 

     The three bottle calves, who have graduated from milk to grain, trot up.  The oldest one, Ralphie, has never given up the idea that I am his mother.  He bumps up against me, sucking my elbow and rubbing his dusty sides against my shirt as I lug his feed to the grain pans.  Chores done, I dust off my pants, and consider changing into clean clothes.  But, the garden needs to be weeded and the shed cleaned out.  If I change, I won’t be clean for long.   I’m not expecting company, so I elect to stay dirty.  I just have to remember not to sit down.

       After lunch, I discover that I need to go to town for several small purchases from the general store, and, again, I consider changing into clean clothes.  But, the morning chores have to be repeated in the evening, so I go as is and hope I don’t run into anyone who would care about how I look.  As I pull up to the store, I spot two female friends.  Like me they are in their oldest clothes and clonking around in muck boots.  We laugh about our appearance and compare notes about our chores, pointing to various stains and snags as proof of our endeavors.

     My friends and I love beautiful clothes, pristine shoes and matching pocketbooks.  But, those things are mostly reserved for Sunday mornings or special outings.  Whenever I visit my parents in the city, I spend several days in good clothes.  I don’t have to watch where I step and I’m not expected to do anything that would lead to un-removable stains.  I bought those white tennis shoes on one of those trips.  Now they’re not white anymore, but they are still too good to wear in the garden.  I set them on a shelf in my closet.  I’ll wear them to the fair this fall.  They’ll be perfect for looking good in the barn.  Unless it rains.  Then I’ll wear my muck boots and I, and all of my sisters-in-fashion, will splash happily through whatever nature dishes out.  After all, we know how to dress for success.

The Coyote Tree

     A friend of mine recently posted a picture on Facebook of a tree out in the middle of a pasture.  There were two coyotes hanging from its branches and a sign referring to it as the hanging tree.  I have seen this tree, but when I saw it there were about ten coyotes hanging there.

     The posted picture created a very small storm of disapproval.  People were appalled at such a vulgar, angry display.  I found myself, strangely, on the other side of the argument.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am not condoning the actions of the farmer involved (whom I know), but I am not condemning them either.  After living on the farm for twenty seven years and participating in the daily struggle to produce a good, marketable crop of lambs or calves I find that my old city attitudes have shifted.

     Like most of my city counterparts, I imagined that all farms consisted of sunny meadows full of frolicking sheep and happy cows.  I loved to eat a good steak or fry up some bacon, but somehow my mind didn’t connect happy farm animals to my plate full of juicy protein.  Happy farm animals lived so that people could enjoy their cuteness and occasionally feed them and pet them. People certainly were not going to eat them.

      It’s not that I didn’t know the source of my burger, it’s just that I chose not to consider it.  Living on a farm changed all of that.  On the farm, I began to face up to the fact that the cute little animals trotting along behind their mamas would one day be sold for food.  I lived on the farm for several years before I would let myself consider this truth too closely.

     Then my boys raised 4-H animals and I watched them grow attached to their four-legged  friends.  And, I watched them mourn when those same friends, after winning some money and ribbons, were loaded onto a stock trailer which pulled off into the sunset, heading towards a feed yard and eventually a butcher’s shop somewhere.

     It was during our third season of raising and selling fair animals that my attitudes began to shift.  In the first years, I cried, too.  But, then it occurred to me that humans have to eat, and we simply cannot do it without something else dying.  Even if we are vegetarians, eating only organically raised produce, a bug will die somewhere as the crop is harvested.  Why are we mourning only the cute furry things?

     In fact, everything must kill something else in order to keep on living.  It is a truth that has been lost as generations of eaters pluck their dinners from the sterile well-lit aisles of a grocery store.  Here on the farm, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring the source of our sustenance and the death that is an inevitable by-product of our eating.

     What does that have to do with coyotes hanging in a tree?  It turns out, everything.  Everything dies.  That’s the truth that we learn living on the farm.  Coyotes are top level predators.  They don’t die very often, unless the one predator above them, man, does the killing.  Coyotes kill indiscriminately and it’s not always because they are hungry.  Any farmer who’s seen a field full of neck-slashed lambs can tell you that coyotes are hit and run killers.  Thus, one farmer who has witnessed too much of this senseless killing and the effect it’s had on his income, chooses to hang the coyotes--symbolically saying, “enough is enough.”

     This farmer is not deranged.  He is angry, and rightfully so.  The coyote tree is simply an expression of that anger and frustration.  Since I’ve lived here, I’ve seen at least ten farmers give up raising sheep because of overwhelming coyote losses.  They’ve tried donkeys, guard dogs and llamas and if they were able to keep their sheep in a small acreage and had a small flock, then they could enjoy some level of protection.  But, most farmers in this county turn their sheep out to pasture in the summer.  Pasture on the sides of mountains, out of sight of the house.  Usually the flock splits up.  A guard animal would have to choose one group, leaving the other group vulnerable.

     If National Geographic came to our mountains and photographed the coyote tree, it would appear in the magazine with a caption that appropriately captured the frustrations of a group of people who are watching their way of life disappear one coyote-killed sheep at a time.  Lambs dying so that we all can eat are one kind of death that we accept on the farm.  Lambs dying in our fields because a coyote went on a killing spree are not.  Sometimes it seems that modern society has forgotten how to distinguish between the two.