July 2014 - The Cute & the Stinky

This morning I woke up with food poisoning. Zach left something on the counter that I thought was a packed lunch he forgot to take to the car. Turns out it was something that had brought in from his car after it sat steaming in the summer heat for 3 days. So between bouts of illness, I attended to the copious amount of puppy poo I face first thing every morning.  They have been cute and I will miss them and I know each one so well I can identify them by the way they move, but as the first two left this afternoon I sighed with relief. Two more head to their new homes tomorrow and then I will only have 2 baby wolves jumping on and biting my hands while I try to pick up their feces.

After spending my first hour of the day throwing up and scrubbing dog poo, I cleaned up and put on a brave face about playing a 4-hour concert at the farmers’ market.  The vendors kept offering chocolaty baked goods as tips, when all I really wanted was a box of saltines. Andrea kindly played all the songs I don’t like during my mysterious absences from the stage.  After I returned home, I tidied up once more for the new puppy owners, presenting them with a bucolic and perfectly sanitary setting – nothing to hint at what they are likely to encounter when they introduce their new puppy into their home: scratched floors, pee-infused carpets, favorite household items chewed into a thousand pieces across the floor…[If you are reading this, mom and dad, I hope you are happy I am keeping your puppy for you an extra four weeks. I am only doing it because I know how many times you had to clean up after me when I was too young to appreciate it. ]

After the new puppy owners came and left I was blissfully alone. Zach and the kids were down east sailing with their grandparents for the weekend. I picked the last of the sugar snap peas from our garden-turned-jungle and watched the daisies and black-eyed-susans waving in the wind of an oncoming storm. The milkweed flowers were as oversweet as high school poetry and crawling with honey bees. Shiny Japanese beetles were mating on weeds, chewing them into lace while they ignored the nearby kale and lettuce. Now is the top of summer, the time of fireflies, festivals, fireworks and thunderstorms. It’s when the march of flowers slows to a trickle of new blossoms and all the berries start to ripen. Farmers hold their breath for weather windows to dry their hay (and if you have animals that eat hay, you are holding your breath too, happy to see every truck passing with bales on the highway).   The biting flies emerge and everything living wants blood, nectar or water. 

 

I never have time to write about this time of year in Maine because it’s always in full tilt.  But tonight my family is gone sailing and I have shrugged off other possibilities for filling their space. I will sit petting the last of my puppies and try to understand something – as I approach my 39^th year – about the pace of life in this month and why it is so like this time in my life: racing, overworked and overflowing, through a tangle of adorable and disgusting moments that will end in some kind of harvest and then the chill of winding down. The garden will die, the lambs will go to the butcher and we will glimpse, as we sit wondering by the winter fire, how time consumes us too. The only difference between us and the bugs & lambs is that we have a chance to know it by seeing the cycle repeated so many times before ours ends. I imagine millions of ancestors before me contemplating their own fate. And as futile as it seems, wish I could shout a few generations forward to say: if all you manage to do is to pass on your love to your children, you will have succeeded.

May 2014 - The Legs

We have a bottle-baby (rejected lamb) this year. He prances around the house in a diaper and tries to eat my calendar. Last Friday night our family took a twilight “nature walk” around the property. Our lamb bounced along behind us, through the pasture, swamp and woods. He was eagerly following “the legs.” Those were the last pair of legs that had given him milk, and he wasn’t about to let them get away. He had sniffed those legs carefully after he nursed, imprinting himself on them. So when I decided to take a shower and “the legs” suddenly collapsed in a pile next to the laundry hamper, he stayed next to them. The pair that emerged from the shower didn’t smell quite right and weren’t worth following. I climbed into bed and placed a towel on the ground, thinking he would join me there for company. But he folded up his little body on top of the empty pants, still slightly warm, that had so recently fed him and led him safely home.  For a moment I glimpsed life from a sheep’s perspective, where survival depends wholly on staying as close as possible to the right-smelling pair of legs and the udder that hangs between them.

It’s probably the cutest month we’ve ever experienced. A box of velvet-soft puppies whimpering in the loft, a pasture springing with baby lambs, and kids giggling as they swing side-by-side over a dandelion-speckled lawn. To make it all happen is so much work and worry, especially around the new births. But we enjoy…

[Blog interrupted due to life. See July.]

Feburary 2014 - Dark Love

We escaped the cold for two weeks on a trip to California, visiting good friends up and down the coast. That was an expensive but otherwise really good idea. While we were waiting for the ferry to Tom Sawyer’s island at Disneyland, my cell phone rang with a call from the superintendent. “It’s a snow day, kids!” I proclaimed, and they grinned over their churros.

Earlier in the month, Zora announced that she wanted to write a letter to Darth Vader to see if he wanted a brother (hers). I thought she was just looking for an opportunity to get rid of her sibling, but on further questioning found out that she just felt Darth needed “some family on his team.” (The appearance of Luke in his life is, in fact, what did eventually inspire him to overthrow the Emperor). Having seen Episode 5 but not yet Episode 6, Zora also considered that Darth Vader was pretty much the most powerful person in the universe and that her brother would be safer off under his wing. I thought this was a passing obsession until she came home with a letter that a teacher had helped her write. It said, “Dear Darth Vader, do you want a brother?” A flurry of Facebook postings later, Carmen volunteered for the weighty responsibility of receiving and responding to this missive. I begged her to print her reply in “Star Wars” font because she is in our living will and might adopt the kids if we die young; I wouldn’t want them to recognize her handwriting and think they had been adopted by Darth.

At Disneyland’s “Jedi Training Academy” show, Darth Vader and his troopers rose up from a platform that appeared out of the ground and challenged each of the Padawans (kids selected from the audience) to a duel.  Zora was thrilled. After a day of rides, shows and ice cream, Zora reflected that the best part of her day was seeing Darth Vader. “I guess he’s on vacation at Disneyland, just like us. I want to meet him, mommy,” she confessed. “But I don’t want to fight him. I just want to give him a hug.” I tried to picture Zora dressed as a Padawan, dropping her sword on stage and hugging Darth’s leg. “Mommy,” she added more quietly, “I have dreams about Darth Vader. I want to climb on him.” Uh oh. It suddenly dawned on me why she had been so eager from the start to go on “Star Tours.” Here it was Valentine’s Day, and my sweet little five-year-old had a crush of empiric proportions on the dark lord.

Once we returned home, we found the letter that Zora had been waiting for. She carefully opened the elegant black envelope and I read it to her. As we composed her reply, it came up that Darth Vader dies in Episode 6. “I’m sorry, honey,” I explained, “people who do so much evil usually don’t have happy endings.” She grabbed Vader’s letter, ran to her room, and sobbed on the bed inconsolably. “Leave me alone!” she cried, as devastated as any heartbroken teenager. Finally, she was willing to let me comfort her and to explain that Vader is an “epic” character that lives on in the Star Wars movies and everyone’s hearts. Her mind spun as she tried to reconcile his movie death with the fact that she had just received his letter and seen him at Disneyland. “I guess I can’t go into the movie to be with him,” she concluded, and put her chin up.  Then she added, in confidence, “Mom, I don’t know why I like him so much. I just do.”

Two parent-teacher meetings later Zora seems to be doing just fine, though Mom may still need more counseling. 

January 2014 - Hibernation

I went out to the barn to collect the single egg that one of my twenty chickens had improbably laid in the below-zero weather.  The egg had frozen solid and cracked. In the heat of my pocket, a little of the white leaked onto my fingers. I drew out my hand with the egg in my palm, and during the walk back to the house the tiny amount of fluid froze the egg to my palm. “Just one today,” I waved to my family with an egg dangling unassisted from my open hand. 

Ayup. It’s wicked cold. The kind that reassures you global warming hasn’t messed up everything yet. As my boogers freeze on a single breath, I try to remember that this is what makes it possible for us to afford a farm. If it didn’t get this cold some portion of the year, everyone would want to live here.

We are keeping the cold at bay with a turkey in the oven, a 1200 degree fire in the soapstone woodstove, gin in our orange juice, and digital devices for the kids. My children are zombies. After reading Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Jonah got the idea we should try her “too much TV cure,” which involves watching TV for two days nonstop until you never want to see a screen again. We don’t have a TV but our apple devices are equivalent. No better time than now, I figure, when the holidays are over and we wait for school to resume.  It’s time to find out what nonstop screen time does to a body. The kids had been enjoying the sled hill, which we logged this summer, but not today: they are not allowed to do anything except eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, or sit in front of a digital device.  We even let them off their farm chores, which is why I was the one bringing in today’s dangling egg.

Yesterday I painted a “wheel of the year” for the kids, to help teach them about the cyclical nature of time and have fun anticipating the joys of each season.  But then it came time to paint something for January and February, my least favorite time of year. It was hard to think of something to paint. I finally settled on a giant snowflake, a skiing snowman, and a pair of mittens with a hat. This is the time of year we eat, drink, sleep, vegetate, dream and plan. I love that our life in Maine has built in down-time.  But this winter it’s pretty far down. Like in a hole, deep in the ground. Groundhog day will be here soon. We don’t have a groundhog but we do have a guinea pig. When he’s not willing to come out of his box, we shouldn’t have to either.