Meet My Peeps

So, I walked up to the counter at the Co-Op, and left with a boxful of LIVE ANIMALS AND THEY DIDN"T EVEN ASK TO SEE A PERMIT OR ANYTHING!!! It was such a peculiar feeling, just like when I left the hospital with Poppy - feed it, keep it clean, and beyond that just do whatever feels right, huh? I didn't have a clue, and it didn't seem right to be entrusted with a helpless human being.

I don't have a clue what to do with chicks either, but I'm beginning to have more faith all the time in the natural propensity of living things to continue living in spite of me. I mean, we've had a dog for six whole days now and she hasn't died. The cat's been hanging around for seven months, and not only lived herself but put out a bud that lived. Even my trees pulled through (though I'm having some niggling doubts about that Evans cherry...). Geez, my kids are 11 and 12! So I guess there's a pretty good chance that majority of the chicks will survive my attentions long enough to make it to dinner.

You know what? (I didn't know this before we got interested in ordering chickens, so I'm sharing my wonderment.) Baby chicks can easily go 24 hours without food or water, and they mail them all over the place. Mail them! Mail order chicks. Makes me think of mail-order brides. Though brides don't come in cardboard boxes, of course.

It's also extremely strange and new to me to care for animals that I intend to eat. Wow. Strange isn't the word. It feels... very spiritual, in a fear-and-trembling sort of way. I'm going to care for them as best I can, and when the time comes, they'll contribute to my well-being. And I'll look them in the eye everyday knowing that's how it will be, and when it comes time to butcher, it'll be my hand. I don't know why this strikes me into the soul, but it does. The spirituality of Real.

I'm so much tougher than I used to me, and so much more tender. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to spill over with compassion for this world and its foibles. Even my own, occasionally. And at the same time as I'm feeling that, I know there's little room for folly or illusion, or ya lose yer chickens.

Thus sayeth the High Priestess of the Brooderie.

Jesus For The Masses

Heard during the BBQ, spoken by one very religious man in his late sixties to another of the same:

"For the longest time I couldn't figure out how everyone in the whole world at the same time would be able to see Jesus coming back in the clouds. And then one day I was watching Oprah, and it suddenly came to me - it's going to be on T.V.!"

Word.

Nudged Over The Brink of the Sink

My spouse served as godfather at a baptism this morning, and afterward we were invited to the family's house for a BBQ.

I thought I'd help out with food prep, so the first thing I did on arrival was nip into the bathroom to wash my hands. This is a home with three small children, so the bathroom looks as bathrooms will under those circumstances - utilized.

Now, I'm not an entirely unfettered freak about cleanliness, but I do have this underlying urge to bleach things. Thankfully I'm far too exhausted almost all the time to disinfect doorknobs the way I might otherwise, and I'd like to think that I'm enough in possession of myself that even if I weren't too tired, I'd still be able to refrain.

However. Little kids are kind of... well, bacteria-laden. In a rather blatant way. I'm sure we're all completely loaded up with various bugs all the time, but the little people show theirs so much more visually than the taller varieties, so when I'm around them I have to work harder at not thinking about it.

But I tipped over the edge while I was washing my hands. Posted on the wall next to the sink was this little ditty, to be sung to the tune of "Put Your Fingers In The Air":

There are germs everywhere, EVERYWHERE!
There are germs everywhere, EVERYWHERE!
On your face and in your nose
On your hands and on your clothes
There are germs everywhere, EVERYWHERE!

And then... nothing. That was it. Probably this lyric offering was complements of the local preschool, but it still seemed unkindly brief, and I'd like a word with the librettist. There are germs EVERYWHERE, and - ??? What? What are we to do about it? Doesn't this seem too cheerfully fatalistic? I'm merely a perpetual perambulating host for the unseen hordes? Where's the plot, the heroic stand, the conquest and sterile denoument?

Ugh. And now here I am typing on my loathsome keyboard. Somebody pass the Lysol.

And Then There Were Three...

We have a dog.

The name she came with was Justice, but Mercy might have been a better virtue. Or Amity. Or Docility. Stern Justice just isn't so much in her nature. So now she's Jess, which I figure is close enough to the original that she won't be completely unaware that we're addressing her, but makes me a bit more comfortable calling her. Rather than calling for Justice, which would have a rather naive air about it, really. Justice. Ha.

She's an indeterminate cross between Bernese Mountain Dog and Husky. This makes her somewhat larger than I was strictly looking for, but she's not too enormous, and has the sort of coat that will allow her to live comfortably outside even out here on the prairies during winter.

We have a dog. Good Lord.

She's digging in the yard, but she doesn't bark, loves the kids, has a sweet temperment, and probably won't live more than 10 years total. She's 4 and a half now. I think I'll be able to handle it that long.

We now have a cat, a kitten, and a dog. I've got a hundred chicks arriving on Thursday.

We'll have gone from zero to 103 in six months. Population explosion.

And there's something wrong with my camera. When I first got it, the colours were fairly true. Now they all look sort of washed-out and overexposed, even on a sunny day in the shade. Drat. Oh well. Hardly a priority at this point.

On Being, Simultaneously

Today I planted beets. While I was on my knees measuring out the grid, pushing the soil gently over the seeds, watching the tiny, brilliantly red bugs I've never seen before, I was thinking about how strange it is. It's very strange that I kneel on the dirt in the sunshine with gnarled seeds in my hands, planting for the future, because at the same time, there are people screaming for their lost children, and homes being lost to fire, and bodies suffering torment. But I was just kneeling and planting in peace.

Friends of ours lost everything except their house in the recent fires. They'd lived there almost forty years, built it up from nothing, built their home, and a greenhouse business, planted gorgeous trees... while I was planting beets, they were trying to identify their possessions that were stored in the garage from twisted, melted remnants. Trying to recover pictures of their daughter killed in a car accident twenty years ago. Trying to do all this with bodies torn in the haste of trying to keep the flames from taking everything.

They thought they'd be planting beets. And if they'd been planting, there would have been other people, other places, that were struggling just to survive that self-same moment. Maybe me.

It's so strange that I can hardly think about it. Somehow it doesn't make sense, that while I sleep, others suffer, and when I suffer, others sleep. There are times when we all seem to be so devastatingly connected that it seems impossible that what I experience, you can remain unaware of. But that's really the way it is.

And tonight I can't comprehend it at all.

Thrives On Neglect

These past few days it's been snowing and slushing. (That's what Poppy calls it, when that heavy whitish stuff drops from the sky and goes splat and makes mud.) And cold. Today is supposed to be better, but it's been SO cold this week - overnight lows of less than freezing.

Thankfully most of our plants haven't put out any flowers yet. The only one that did was a haskap (not haksap, as I mistakenly thought it was before, many pardons). It's the Siberian blueberry-type thing that we put in last year and got mowed by the young man we hired to help out around here. Didn't think it would come back, but there you go. Awfully tough, apparently. I guess it would have to be to live in Siberia.

But about five days ago while I was wandering around inspecting the fruit trees and bushes, I noticed that this plant had several white flowers, so when the temperature was set to drop, I dropped a couple five-gallon pails over it and its sister to preserve the blossoms. The pails stayed on for two days, and came off yesterday afternoon to let the bushes have a boo at the sunshine. It rained last night, and doesn't appear to have frozen, so hopefully the little flowers are still sturdily attached to the stems and we'll see some fruit in a few months.

Maybe I shouldn't even have bothered with that, maybe it's overkill. These plants are reputed for their extreme hardiness - just leave them alone and forget about them and then come back and grab a handful of berries later on. Nice, huh? If only we were all that accomodating. They should splice haskap genes in with the human race, don't you think?

Gardeneers

Up and Coming

There's a lot of growth happening around this place.

The kitten, of course, growing at a small mammal's greatly accelerated pace. It's really quite astonishing how quickly the little animals mature, compared to us; how quickly they go from being an easy snack to being the snack-er.

We're certainly hoping that somebody makes a snack of the new pocket-gopher. Honestly! Just get rid of one, and before we've properly finished crowing over its remains, there's a new mound in the front yard! Roxanne has been rather preoccupied with her kitten's recent mobility and keeping him from falling to his death from the top bleacher in the auction mart (I'm going to assume that mother knows best, but I have to say that I wouldn't choose to keep a toddler up there....), so she hasn't been on ground patrol. And this is what happens to farm security. Huh.

All those dead trees I was lamenting? NOT DEAD AFTER ALL! Land-o-Livin'! There are buds coming out on all three, even the cherry that the deer stripped the bark off of. And the haksap that got mowed to nothing by the hired un-help last summer, even it's regenerated. So we've got a total of 2 haksaps, one cherry-bush, a long row of raspberries, a strawberry bed, one each Brookgold and Brookred plum trees, a September Ruby apple tree, and an Evans Cherry tree. Wow! This year I want to add a crabapple, not to mention a some fertilizer. I figure with all those different varieties, we're sure to always get some form of fruit coming up, even if every year isn't good for every sort.

I'm so pleased that everything didn't die over the winter. I guess sometimes even when things look dead, they're just dormant.

Mother's Day

Our fine, pocket-gopher-killin' kitty has a bit of dramatic flair about her.

She showed up all de-pregnified on Easter morning, then acted for weeks as if she had nothing to show for it. Yesterday afternoon, Mother's Day, she followed Poppy into the auction mart bleachers (where Miss Poppy practices singing), waited until the show was over, wandered over to a crack in the top row and called out a kitten!

Just one. Due to her rotundity on the penultimate day of her pregnancy, I'm going to hazard a guess that there were at least two others that didn't survive. Kind of a blacky, grey-y little body; I think it's a male. Hard to tell in the depths of an abandoned auction mart, and especially when any equipment is on the microscopic side. He seems to have a friendly outlook on life, and Roxanne is certainly proud of him.

Patch suggested we call him Asher (y'know, ashes and soot and all). He's got a friend named Asher as well. Then he revised it to "Ashfur", which somehow doesn't roll off the tongue in quite the same way.

Our farm's first baby!