Blackbirds in the Fog

Blackbirds are flying in the fog. It is fog that I see now out of the eastern windows, as I wake, reluctantly, to my 4:59 am alarm. It’s set at that time so that I can boast of waking before 5 am. Really, there’s a routine involved, of shedding layers of warm covers, of undraping myself from my husband’s warm grasp, of dodging the cat’s paws on my wiggling toes, wiggling to take flight from this resting place, as the blackbirds have done.

There is no greater thrill for me than to wake to the sound of bird song in March. From now until the 19th of July, the birds will sing, announcing their willingness to take on familial duties. Many of us don’t feel the absence of bird song in July since fecundity is at the cusp of excess when it comes to gardens or carefully tended livestock, but the subtle changes of late summer and senescence have truly begun by then, at least here in Central Vermont.

Outside, the blackbirds are puffing up their red wing bar feathers, practicing for the return of the females, who make the journey fully three weeks later, counting on their prospective mates to set up household and procure territories that are bountiful with provisions for the summer of family rearing. When they finally do return, there is a bit of a free for all, as the birds are not monogamous, and the most flamboyant, most impressive males with the best territories are chosen first by the females.

In our hoophouses that were erected two years ago, everything is in order. Shannon has weeded the east house twice, carefully covering the crops that Kyle planted last fall with Remay. It’s a magic cover that warms the soil as much as 10 degrees more, and inside the hoophouse that can translate to 35 degrees, even when it’s 23 degrees Fahrenheit outside. There is spinach, arugula, radishes, Chinese cabbage, spring onions, and carrots all started and growing. We have been eating greens since the middle of February, and we made it through the winter buying just 6 heads of lettuce.



In the bottom picture, you can see the established greens from September in the middle. The lettuce that Shannon planted is on either side. These plants were started from seed in our heated greenhouse.




In the picture to the right, you can see the radishes planted between the rows of lettuce transplants. The carrots are planted underneath the radishes. The radishes will be harvested at about three weeks, just as the carrots begin to germinate and begin to compete for space. The lettuce will be harvested as heads become ready at about the same time as the radishes. A cherry tomato plant will be planted in some of these newly vacant spaces, about two feet apart from each other. Basil plants will flank the tomatoes, and the planting cycle will be complete. At the end of the season, the house will rest over the winter, and early the next spring, it will be used to grow just greens. We rotate the tomatoes from one house to another in an effort to cut down on pests that prey on tomatoes. Some people winter their chickens in the unheated houses to scratch up and remove the larvae that lay just under the surface of the soil. As long as there is plenty of fresh water, the chickens do well in these unheated houses. The added light from all sides will allow more productive egg laying; a chicken’s pituitary gland reacts to diminished light by decreasing their egg production.

Today it was gloriously warm- in the 60s! I put a blanket and a pillow in Bradford’s plastic sled and lay outside in the sun, listening to birdsong. Soon, the sheep will be on pasture, and wild leeks and stinging nettles will add to our table’s bounty. Tonight, we dine on mixed greens- arugula, red mustard, leaf lettuce, cress and kale shoots. The main fair is what I’m really excited about- real Boston Baked Beans from our own Bird’s Egg Beans that we harvested in the fall and Shannon and Whit have been shucking since January. Only 50 or 60 pounds left to go…




In the top picture, you can see that the aisle ways have been mulched with hay. Between the rows of lettuce heads, spring bunching onions have been planted.




Boston Baked Beans

1 small smoked ham hock, about 1 ½ pounds
2 cups dry beans, such as Navy or Pinto (or Bird’s Egg, Cranberry or Goose beans)
1 tablespoon dry mustard
1 cup dark real maple syrup, grade B or C
½ cup dark molasses
Salt and pepper to taste
4 garlic cloves, slivered


Cook the beans until tender, but not mushy. Drain and reserve the bean cooking liquid.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mix all other ingredients except the ham hock together with the beans. Add enough of the reserved bean liquid to make the beans soupy. Put the ham hock in a cast iron Dutch oven or bean pot and pour the beans around it.

Bake the beans for four hours; checking occasionally to see that the liquid has not all evaporated (add more if needed). The beans will be done when the meat flakes off of the bone. Shred it into the beans, remove the bone, fat and cartilage and serve with fresh greens and pickled vegetables like beets or dilly beans.

I will find the bones of buried pigs
And hang them on your clothesline.

listen to the sound of them drying.

I will become a cattle egret who perches on the
memory of cattle
and picks insects from the dark skins.
I will bury myself deep enough

goats’ milk fills in
around my shoulders. Around my neck

I will wear a string of gourds and old farm
machinery,

and in the ceremony
of your work

I will put coal on my ring finger
And tell myself, wait.
I will eat your apples

Because apples are proof
and they have fallen from the trees.


- Molly Bashaw- Letters to a Farm






I love March. Red-winged blackbirds return, the males at first, their fire-engine red wing bars blaring, their cheerful song bursting life into the silent, ice world of winter. Then come the black-green grackles singing tunes that sound like bad ring-tone choices on cell phones. Killdeer and woodcocks follow soon after, and then it is upon us, spring and its swell and hopeful greetings of change. No more bitter cold winds and nights where long-sleeved shirts and four blankets are required to keep warm.

The mud is the worst it’s been in ten years. School was cancelled once already, because the scant three inches of snow on the muddy roads made it impossible for the plows to pass. The $1800 we poured into the driveway is really getting its mettle tested as nights plummet to the teens, and days caress the warm winds of the 40s and 50s. I love mud season. And I love that today marks the first day of spring, which means we have 12 hours of daylight to luxuriate in.

Shannon Duffield started her apprenticeship this week. She applied for a position at Country Animal Hospital, where I am a veterinary technician, and I immediately became intrigued by her. Her resume was spot on, and she had a boatload of charisma. Her only weakness was that she couldn’t offer any length of time past August at the animal hospital without certainty. So when I saw her name on the list of potential NOFA apprentices, I jumped at the chance to have her come meet the farm.

And she is great. She’s already cleaned out the sheep pens that we refer to as the moldy pens, and today, I came home to find the chicken coop spotless. This is good, because VPR is coming on Friday to do a book interview, complete with chicken noises.

She has no farm experience, and I hoped to let her in on the stark realities of this business slowly, but Compaya, my 21 year-old llama died the day after she started her apprenticeship. Then there were two difficult births by yearling ewes (all the lambs and moms are fine), followed by a stillbirth four days later by a young ewe not experienced in the art of licking her newborn dry.

Today takes the horrible reality award though. Petal, the beautiful, sweet, perfect calf hung herself and died today. She was not even two months old. Her poor mother, Ginger, has the rope burn scars, where the halter her calf wore razed a jagged line across her back. I can only guess that a startled Ginger rose, while Petal was lying on the other side of her, and she strangled her own baby.

Shannon bravely handed me water and tools as Kyle and I scrambled to replace the horror of this tragic accident with practicality. Here was a 300 pound milk fed calf that would be composted if we didn’t act quickly. Had we been just minutes earlier, she would have been saved, but now, we had just minutes to save her meat for consumption.

Shannon stayed back as I slit Petal’s throat to bleed her out, then skinned her feet. Kyle got the tractor, and we hung her to skin and gut. We washed her and hung her to cure, and truly, the meat is beautiful. It is perfect veal, like that you would find in any specialty store. The problem that I have in allowing it just to be perfect meat is the tragedy of her death. I wrestle in my brain with why it’s easier for me to accept the local butcher coming with his gun to shoot the grass-fed steer than to accept Petal’s absence. And then, I think that it’s just that. I had dreamed of Petal romping about pastures, raising her own beautiful calves, not dying a horrible freak death.
I am truly thankful that we were able to pull our grief together so quickly and save the meat: although I feel as though it is important to feed the soil, it would somehow have felt like a waste to me.

For Shannon, it was easier to see the carcass without the beautiful hide, the head with its brown eyes, the feet, the tail—those things that make it a real animal. I know how she feels. It may be why I worked so hard to turn the animal that I know and kissed and pet and dried when it was born, back to a carcass. I don’t know. And the starkness of this reality always confronts me as though it’s the first time that I‘ve had to think it through.

So this is my letter to the farm, although not nearly as beautiful as Molly’s. We are at the cusp of fertility, of rebirth, but always reminded of our fragility.

As you read this, Whitney is on a boat to Tern Island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where I spent almost four of the happiest years of my life. Reality abounded there, but so did magic. I hope that she finds the same. If you want to follow her adventures, she has a blog called It’s the Sun. I miss her terribly, and I know that she would grieve Petal as we do.

Ge Ready for Your Chicks!

Time to Get Ready for Chicks!

March 1st—get set, GO! It’s still 10 degrees Fahrenheit at night here, and I’m still wearing double layers of clothes, but it’s time to plan! This is the year you’re going to do it. You’re ready raise chicks, and you should order them now in time for delivery in the spring (I try to time it so that the chicks can go outside in three weeks, and the pen they are in still has a heat source that keeps the air warm in at least one area to about 80 degrees Fahrenheit- this translates to late April in our Vermont clime). Start out with the egg layers first, if you’re feeling squeamish about raising meatbirds. Believe me, I’ve been there.

When I was younger and braver, I worked at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science. We lived in a common house with a bunch of other 20 year-olds. We were all full of life and energy; so much that we knew we had the power to change the world, if only someone would listen.

I worked in the rehabilitation center for raptors, where we took on injured hawks and owls and occasionally rare songbirds. One of our duties was to feed the captive birds. It didn’t bother me when I had to thaw out the frozen rats- I’ve never really had a huge affinity for them, although I had a great pet rat once. We also fed the birds the chicks from local hatcheries. They were excess hatches, chicks that had not been sold and were killed by gassing them with carbon monoxide. They were an amazing source of food for hawks and owls, but it was hard for me to pick up the black plastic garbage bags full of yellow fuzzy forms and hoist them into the back of the Honda.

On the drive back to the raptor center, I usually had the radio cranked as high as it would go. Never country music, mostly stuff like Journey or REO Speedwagon; sometimes CSNY or Cowboy Junkies. On one trip back to the center, I heard a cheep from the back of the car. I pulled the Honda over, and untied the black bag. There, inside, were three live chicks that had somehow avoided being gassed to death.

I raised those birds at the raptor center until they were so fat that they could hardly follow after me. They were so tame they knew their names. The day came when they started interfering with guests at the center, vying for attention right alongside the Snowy Owl display. I was told that they had to go.

My friend graciously offered to do the slaughtering, and I acquiesced. I remember crying for hours after their demise, wondering how I would ever be able to eat them. They sat in the freezer for about three weeks before I got up the nerve to eat them. When I finally did, I realized that I hadn’t tasted chicken that good and well cared for in a very long time.

But you can start with the egglayers…

Get sexed chicks (the ones that are 98% certain to be hens) from one of the reputable hatcheries mentioned in the Resource section of The Joy of Keeping Chickens, and raise them for egg production. By the time you’ve had the birds for two years, you may be brave enough to tackle the next step… using the chicken meat. Until then, here’s a checklist to get ready for your new chicks:

Housing should be draft-free, corner free (so birds aren’t able to pile up on each other- use cardboard to round out the edges of your pen), and warm (suspending a heat lamp about 17” above the bottom of the pen should create a temperature of about 95 degrees Fahrenheit. The pen can be as fancy as a finished, insulated area in your chicken coop, or as rudimentary as a cardboard appliance container with the sides cut away and lined with newspaper for their first few days and dry wood pine shavings thereafter. Make sure domestic house cats and dogs don’t have access to the chicks. Keep young children supervised around the new chicks, as this stress can also be overwhelming to the babies.

2. Waterers should be sufficient enough so that birds don’t have to crowd around frantically to drink. For very small chicks, place marbles or pebbles in the base of the waterer so that the chicks don’t get in it and drown. A one-gallon plastic waterer per 15 to 25 chicks should be good.

Make sure that you have chick starter on hand. This feed is much higher in protein than the ration used to grow older birds. I scatter it on the ground for the first couple of days before filling feeding trays for the chicks.

Change the chick’s bedding daily if needed. Feces can be ingested by the chicks, and infestations of protozoans called Coccidia can be detrimental.

Listen to the chicks. They should be emitting cooing type sounds that sound like bee bee beep, bee bee beep. Not CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP. Baby chicks are like any other baby. They need food, water and warmth. Adjust your conditions until you hear happy chick sounds!

More later on what to do to transition your chicks to more independence.

Winter Break

Bradford made a shopping list for me this morning. I had decided to make the trip to the big town 25 miles to our north, because there was a storm calling for eight inches of snow, and I figured that it would be safe to venture out into the metropolis without hitting the crowds that usually frequent on a Sunday. He wanted me to pick up things to make heart-shaped pepperoni pizzas (he was going to make them- he’s an amazing cook at age nine). My hardest task was to find a heart-shaped cookie cutter in the end of February. “They’re seasonally available,” the Wal-Mart associate informed me; “They might be in the reduced items isle.” Instead, I found a plastic, candy-filled heart that could double as a cutter after Kyle had devoured the chocolate inside.

Yes, I shop at Wal-Mart sometimes. Guess what- three bottles of chardonnay, some toiletries and a heart-shaped box of candies for $15 doesn’t break the bank. It was dead in there, and the employees looked nervous at the lack of shoppers on a Sunday in the winter. I mostly do shop at local stores, but the neighbor down the road had just served this $2.99 bottle of merlot the night before which was decent. He said he had purchased it at Wal-Mart. I wanted to see what the chardonnay tasted like. Good- not like Grigich Hills or anything, but good. Certainly as good as the $9.99 bottle at the co-op.

Back home: the sheep are crazy. We’ve had four sets of triplets. My plan of attack this year is just to try and supplement every ewe’s triplets with a bottle of formula, and so far, it has worked-they’ve all survived. The downside is that we’re supplementing seven babies and feeding two without mothers. They drink three, 8 oz soda bottles filled with formula four times a day. To date, there have been 50 lambs born and only 27 ewes have given birth. We have 21 left to lamb!

Some of the lambs have curly hair; some are black and white splotched; there are two that are muddy brown. I’ve only had one mom reject a lamb, ironically, a black ewe that twinned and had one black and one white lamb. She rejected the white lamb. I tied her up so that she couldn’t turn her head around to see who was nursing (called jugging), and she will reluctantly let him nurse, provided that his sister is also nursing. The other exciting thing is that I’ve had to pull lambs (meaning that the birth was not a natural one and had some complication or other) only three times (of course, we’re only about half-way done…). All of the lambs were saved, and the mothers ended up nursing their babies except for one mother, who is destined for sausage, I fear. We’ve named this lamb Bucket, because he’ll invariably have his leg stuck in the water bucket every time we go down there to feed him. Lambs are cute, but they’re sometimes not the brightest bulbs in the circuit.

The little bantam hen that is a mutt, and could be a cochin or an araucana cross, hatched out her eggs two days ago. They are a mix of maple sugar-brown and creamy buff, some with stripes across their eyes, some with puffy cheeks. I was almost certain that Cassie the Silkie was the father, but now it’s looking more like Poopie Poo is the proud daddy. They’ll be travelling to Randolph with me for the book signing at Cover to Cover on March 14th. I think I may take Henry, the enormous Plymouth Rock rooster, too.

My dear friend Ray Williams helped us load the pigs up for slaughter last Tuesday. When he walked into the barn, he looked around and said, “Whoa!”

Billy, the Peacock was in full display. There were 50 sheep and 50 lambs cavorting in their pens. Petal, the heifer calf was bounding up and down the isles. The cows were busily munching their hay, and Poopie, Henry, Danny and Cassie were all crowing at the top of their lungs in celebration of winter’s retreat from cold and darkness.

Ray was the one who helped me get the two llama girls who are now hanging out with the sheep and overseeing all of the new births. He was a little nervous when I told him that the transfer from the former owner’s trailer to his was going to take place in the Seven Barrels Brewery parking lot in downtown West Lebanon. I think he had visions of llamas galloping down Interstate 89 toward Concord.

“The llamas look like they’ve made themselves at home,” he added, watching their snake-like heads weave in and out of the ewes. Ray’s farm is in Chelsea, bordering a beautiful, treeless ridge, and reminiscent of a western valley scene. He and his wife, Liz have beautiful cattle for beef and tomatoes the size of softballs.

So it’s here, this space between winter and spring, when we’re not really busy, but keeping busy. When I still take naps in the new sunshine that streams through the south windows in the early afternoon. I think this may be the last head of lettuce that I have to buy- having only bought six this year, I am quite happy. The arugula, spinach and mustard that Kyle planted in the hoop houses in the fall is thriving, and the greens that Whit and I planted just two weeks ago are looking enticing. Our break is over- the growing season has begun, and I am only too happy to have it wash over me and carry me into what is to come.

“Every moment before this one depends on this one.”-Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

I turned down a CAUSE request today.
“You’re so strong.”
I didn’t even respond to a WHAT KIND OF MOTHER ARE YOU request,”
“Ohhhhhhhhh!”

I’ve entered the world of Facebook, thanks to my friend Geoff. He has been the driving publicity force behind the chicken book that we’ve just published. He called me one night and told me that we needed a Facebook page for it, and I gave him a long, exasperated sigh. Now, four weeks later, here I sit, maneuvering my way through posts and pokes and offers to join various causes. He’s right; the way to reach a mass number is to follow the mass media trends, and this is it. Daily, my question to Whit has been, “guess who just friended me??”

Just three days after I activated my account, I had a classmate from high school contact me, after 23 years of no communication.

Seriously, the premise behind Facebook is a good one. Keep in contact with one another. On the other hand, it’s a little voyeuristic; anyone and everyone has the ability to see what you’re doing and when you’re doing it. I suppose if you’re using it to stalk an old acquaintance, it’s not that great a use of time.

Interestingly enough, it’s been around for years, and only now are people who aren’t necessarily college aged taking advantage of it. The fastest growing demagogue using Facebook are the aged 35 and olders.

“Eliza ate too many cookies today.”
“Lupe is going skiing with a torn MCL”
“Jim is wondering whether he should sit on the couch and kill zombies or go home and clean”

“It’s ridiculous,” Whitney snorts at me. She’s shelling black turtle beans and listening to the Fruit Bats.
“It’s creepy,” she asserts.

Maybe she’s right- I mean if you’re a shooting star, and sailing into the swell of living, who needs that baggage trailing after you? All those painful memories of sitting on the gym benches during the slow dances at school, or being picked out as the one with hand-me-down clothes. Sitting at a computer to write 25 random things about oneself in the hope that it really matters to someone else might be a waste of time...still it’s fun.

“I’m a firm believer that some people should just remain forgotten,” she says.

“Ohh- I have 18 fans for the book now!” Whitney harrumphs and gets up to put wood in the woodstove. “I’m going to check the sheep,” she says in mock disgust, and out the door she goes.

“You still have time left to go back, you know,” she calls after me.

On the more practical side of things, Kyle has ripped up the hall and Brad’s room, and we’re doing renovations that we’ve put off for 10 years. He re-wired the barn, and the driveway has new gravel in it. Pretty soon, there’ll be no time for house repairs and yard work when the growing season begins.

Today we celebrated the sun’s light that still remained at 4:00 pm while we readied the greenhouse we rent from the neighbors for planting. The air inside should have smelled like spring- warm soil and little seedlings unfurling their green heads from their pots. Instead, it smelled strongly of ammonia and rodents. They kept ducks inside of it all winter, and the snow covering the plastic had shut out the light: a perfect petri dish for mold and bacteria. The place is a mess, and Whit and I have spent almost a week trying to get it back to something that resembles a place to grow plants. On top of the ducks, the floor of the greenhouse looks like a watering hole in the Serengeti- there are hundreds of rodent tracks searching for missed pieces of duck grain. You can actually see little rat footprints everywhere. We have to get rid of them before planting anything, because they’ll eat the seedlings faster than the seeds can germinate.

Whitney spent over four hours shoveling the heavy snow and ice off of the greenhouse’s roof, and now we’ve started bringing in the soil to warm and clear off the planting benches.

This weekend marks one year exactly that we’ve known the Red. In case you missed the picture of her, her hair is a burnt auburn, a flashy contrast to her smile and brown eyes. She showed up last year for the infamous interview that we have for our potential apprentices, which isn’t really an interview, but just a chance for us to meet whomever has decided that they want to spend the summer working hard on a farm with little pay and a not-so-private place to stay. In just one week, she’ll leave for an eventual voyage to Hawaii, headed for the chain of uninhabited islands called the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. It’s the same place I spent almost four years as a biologist and refuge manager. Paradise, really- seabirds and seals and sea turtles and shockingly blue water and white coral beaches. Her biggest regret is that they now have email capacity there. At least there’s no cell phone service yet.

I don’t look forward to when they leave, these people who put so much of their time and effort into Fat Rooster Farm. The hope they harbor in this world of doubt, fear and despair is such a tonic to me. Gets me through the dreary winter months.

The first lambs are being born now, and the first calf of this year is thriving. The greenhouse is teaming with onion life. Every new moment I live again is what has come before. And every moment points to now.

Soon will be spring- the blackbirds, the woodcock’s crazy aerial dance, the Barred owls calling out their territorial song. I better get busy and write my Facebook 25 things pretty quick…

“It’s a fine line between falling and flying”

-Cloud Cult, Hurricanes and Fire Survival Guide


Whit and I went to Boston this weekend. It almost didn’t happen. For one thing, Ginger the cow is eminently due with her first calf, and I, being the control freak that I am, almost couldn’t leave the farm in the capable hands of my husband, Kyle. For another, the sheep are so close to lambing that they need to be monitored at least four times a day. In this arena, I am truly needed, because if they are in trouble, my hands are smaller and can get the lambs out if they’re in the wrong position inside of their mothers. And lastly, Greg, who spent the summer with us and was planning to visit, hit a deer and totaled his Jeep. It screwed up his plans to visit the farm, and he had no way to get from Burlington to Jersey, on his way to a semester abroad in Tasmania.

It worked out, though, and we ended up staying with her friend in a cute little apartment in Newton Center, right outside of Boston. We had exactly 25 hours in the city, exactly 25 hours enough for me, before returning to this rural haven.

I love to people watch, and the T subway system in Boston is perfect for this. In a six foot area, you can hear three different languages and see nine different types of fashion, from Goth to Punk to Prada to Patagonia. There are entire conversations being carried out, like no one else is there, riding along with you, on cell phones and in face-to-face conversation. Ninety percent of the passengers are hooked into music, off in their own world, on their way to wherever.

We took the Orange Line to my favorite part of the city, Chinatown. I love it here-the raw ethnicity of it, the privilege to have access to ingredients that I can’t find anywhere else, even in Burlington, to cook my favorite food and being immersed in an element completely unfamiliar to me. Whit has never seen me in an Asian supermarket before. She’s only seen the frugal me, the coupon budget oriented-justify every penny me. When we hit that market, I was a little insane. We had just fifteen minutes before they were going to shut the door on us. We found another couple of gringos, raiding the aisles rich with sauces and noodles and chicken feet and preserved eggs, and we called questions to each other- “have you found any ginger?” “no- have you found the fish sauce” “it’s near the Sriracha.” “What are these? Fermented lettuce? I’m getting it.”

Whit followed with the cart, and green bean vermicelli, candied ginkgo, ground bean paste, palm vinegar and galangal root found its place in the cart. At the end of fifteen minutes, we (meaning I) had filled the shopping cart full, and we headed to the check-out as the lights snapped off, plunging the store into darkness. I took a breath, grateful that we hadn’t missed the store’s open hours; Whit was grateful that there were only fifteen minutes of misery to have endured.

We searched quickly for a place to eat-mainly because we both had to pee pretty badly. Luckily, we stumbled onto a Vietnamese restaurant that had been listed in the Zaget’s guide. The food turned out to be just plain awesome. We ordered enough food for four people and paid $30. Admittedly, the noodle soup had beef in it that we both didn’t care for (are we just spoiled with the taste of grass-fed beef?), but everything else was spot on. From pickled lotus rootlets to spring rolls in peanut sauce, we ate and ate and drank mango shakes and fresh limeade.

After eating for about an hour and a half, we hopped on the Green line to Whit’s friend’s apartment. I was pretty much ready to pack it in for the night, and I thought maybe that it would be a great idea for me to just go to bed and read so Allie and Whit could talk but Allie wouldn’t have it. Nope, I could’ve done that if I had stayed at home, she said. I was going out with them. Allie, Adam, Whit and I went to a small little bar on Beacon Street called Union City and sat and talked about the perils of having new jobs just out of college and what to do in this economy. Everywhere around us were boutique stores and beautiful clothes, with no one to buy them, all with 75% off signs attached to them. I tried hard not to worry about these people sitting here with me, with their new jobs, knowing how much hope and energy that they were full of.

On the way back out of the city toward home the next day, we sat on the commuter train; Whitney was obsessed with finding a song with the lines “I’m sick of being sick and tired.” She put her iPod on and started searching through the songs. “Is this it?” and then she gives me the one of her ear buds, and I start sharing the music. We’re listening, while outside, Boston is flying by the train’s windows, late winter light streaming in, and the tick of tracks becomes the song’s bass. I feel like I’m in a movie. Like I’m close to flying.

At home, Brad and Kyle are making dinner. I tell them of our adventures, and they listen. Brad asks about the subway doors and the gates to get into the subway and the colors that delineate the different trains. Then, Greg arrives, having been rescued by Whit who has spent yet three more hours in the car to get him from Burlington. All of a sudden, we’re all here, in this one place, laughing, and talking, and wondering where the next adventure will take us. We fall back into a comfortable routine of board games and banter, animals snuggling close, shutting out the cold January winds and chill that surround the house. Silently, I begin planning an Asian feast for the next evening’s meal.

Behind the Scenes

It’s amazing how much time I spend looking at the posterior ends of things. At the hospital where I work, people are constantly asking me to check to see whether Jill the cat is really Jack, or Thomas the guinea pig is really Thomasina.

On the farm, every morning when I do chores, I scrape the manure from the cow stalls into the gutter. While preparing to shovel it all outside, I’ll glance at the back end of the cows, to look for signs of heat- to see whether it’s time for them to be bred artificially. This usually entails remembering to call the number pasted onto the fridge for the “Vermont calf makers,” where my call is automatically recorded. Magically, a technician will appear, with frozen straws of semen from bulls that live as far away as California, ready to be implanted into the willing cows.

Sometimes, I’ll whisk a hen from the floor of the coop and inspect to see if she’s laying eggs. You can tell, ya know, whether she’s taking a break and just eating grain, or contributing to the daily haul of eggs, just by looking at her cloaca (Latin, for sewer), where an egg comes out the same place that she defecates.

These days, I’m pretty careful to look at the flock of sheep’s behinds, as they’re starting to bag up and get pink back there- at least if they’re ewes. I want to know who’s close to birthing (lambing), so that I don’t inadvertently turn them out into the cold after their night sleeping in the barn, and the newborns have that to face as their first full day of experience on earth. Technically, I’m looking at udders and vulvas, but still…

In the winter months, I also find myself looking a lot back toward the east, back toward the light, and admiring the sunrise, out the back door near Michael the horse’s stall. The cold and grey of winter is tempered by the pink streaks of clouds hanging low along the valley, warning of storms and their chilly winds. It’s beautiful and makes me smile.

Looking back on this year, I can say that we had a good year. I was not burned out going into the season, and I was not burned out in the end. I enjoyed the people who were here helping us farm, and overall, things went well.

We had some downfalls. The hay was not good during the beginning of the season; due to too much rain and too much time in the field before it was cut (the cows are actually staging a hunger strike right now). The second cut is good, though, so I think it will do the pregnant ewes a great deal of good in the nutrition department.

A coyote killed many of our sheep (perhaps as many as 15), and at least four sheep got tangled in old wire and died. The coyote was eventually killed, and the wire removed.

The sweet corn delayed ripening, so that it cross- pollinated with the Indian corn and was starchy and inedible. The cows were happy…

My beloved House Hen died, after at least 12 years of age. For those of you who do not know House Hen, she was attacked by an owl and left debilitated about 10 years ago. After recuperating in the house in a box for about two months, she was put outside. That night, she was on the back step, waiting to come in for the night. Every night after, when she was unceremoniously dumped outside to brave the morning hours, she appeared on that step, waiting to be scooped up and put in her cockatiel cage in the dining room for bed. It’s hard to believe that it’s possible to become so attached to something like a chicken, but it happens and on a farm it’s typically not a great thing to get in the habit of doing.

Everything is always beginning and ending here, at a rapid rate. There isn’t a day that goes by when something doesn’t begin its life or meet its end, from the cherry tomatoes harvested for the market to the newly hatched white goslings, tucked away in the hay barn by their watchful parents.