Wren Cottage Live!

Which Has The Higher R-Value? Dead Mice or Cat Food? Discuss.

2012-01-10T10:27:00.003-05:00

In designing the super-efficient country house of the future, architects must keep in mind the R-value of two substances that pack the walls of every domicile in the Endless Mountains and, I can confidently assert, all mountains everywhere apart from the moon: cat food placed there by mice, and dead mice who have gone to their heavenly reward in a heaven of their own making. Leaving aside the deceased little greedikins who blocked the opening of the birdfeeder with his portly form last winter, the dead mice in my walls have come to a place that could not be more perfect to spend eternity: dark, winding, free from predators and packed with an excellent brand of dye-free, additive-free, naturally preserved cat food. If only the mice themselves were naturally preserved. Summertime dead-mice-in-walls for 24 hours smell like a garbage container truck that was en route from the slaughterhouse to the landfill on an August afternoon but lamentably broke down and therefore was held up at a roadside rest area for two or three days while parts where shipped in from the Midwest, but then their smell is gone. It burns itself out in a horrific maelstrom of stench, localized to a part of the wall where hopefully you do not have to go that day. By contrast, wintertime dead-mice-in-walls are more the Peruvian Ice Maiden of unreachable rodents. They start out cute little thieves intent on tanking up on the burned oil residue under the stove burners before making the big climb up to the cat bowl on the counter to ferry its contents away into the superstructure. Then they take their time over the cold, dry months turning into tiny mouse mummies who may not be wrapped in nice textiles (or who may, actually, if you consider the state of the fabric storage drawers upstairs) but who are lavishly supplied with food for the afterlife, which, since they are mummified, is going to last as long as this house stands. Which is why it is important to include their R-value in your home designs.

You may think that the heat produced by the composting process might give the dead mice an edge over the room temperature cat food, but in fact the heat is short-lived and the only way the decay process advances the mouse’s cause is by compacting him, which improves his R-value because it allows the walls to be filled with a far greater number of his deceased relatives over time. The fact that our house is almost 100 years old and still filling up with mice shows the efficacy of this process. Meanwhile, the cat food has a distinct advantage because it is smaller to begin with and therefore packs more closely. Whereas dead mice are the open-cell spray poly of organic insulations, cat food is the closed-cell: inherently more of a barrier. However, in the final analysis, we recommend that you design to make the best of the diverse heat retention qualities of dead mice and cat food used in combination. In particular because, if you live on Earth, you don’t have any choice.

P.S. The illustration shows an oxalis demonstrating heliotropism and indoor air quality management in a south-facing window during the heating season in the North. Because inside of a wall, it’s too dark to illustrate.

Whooperere Salutorum

2011-12-17T10:23:00.003-05:00

So here we are on the penultimate Saturday before Christmas, a scant handful of days before the solstice, and just now as I was walking the dogs amid the snowflurries and brisk breeze, I saw 3 Vs of geese probably totaling 500 individuals heading south at a hot pace. A day late and a feather short, in my opinion, but this mild autumn and early winter encouraged all sorts of lassitude. And now, my friends, those of us not heading south at a hot pace are, I think, about to get our butts whooped in a seasonal kind of way. Because what else could induce the migrating classes to rise up from their downy waterbeds and git while the gittin’s good? Winter, that’s who. Real winter, not this globally weird travesty of a mockery of a sham we’ve had so far.

Thanks to Kevin Shea of the Commonwealth of Virginia via the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for the beautiful picture.

The Realms of Glory

2011-11-28T07:31:00.003-05:00

Today is the first day of deer-by-rifle season, and the sunrise was glorious. Like my late lamented terrier, I was not bothered by gunfire most of my life, but these last few years it has started to unsettle me, as though I had developed a sensitivity. I do not mind the fact that people eat deer; indeed, somebody has to do it. A few weeks ago when our resident bucklet killed the main trunk of my new tulip magnolia by flossing his antlers with it, I was ready to snap off those handsome decorations and use his four points to stab him through the heart.

It’s the noise that bothers me, and the suddenness of it all, the fact that sometimes you are standing around minding your own business, and then there is a loud noise or a soft noise or no noise at all and a second later you are dead. Surprise! You’re dead! Or the deer standing right next to you is dead. Or you hear the noise over the hill and know that somebody you probably knew, a cousin maybe, is dead. This is what bothers me.

However, a sunrise like this does seem to say, as the Navajo do, “This is a good day to die.” If I were going to be shot at the breakfast table, I would like it to be on a mild morning like this one, looking at a sunrise like that.

Does This Straitjacket Make Me Look Fat?

2011-10-18T17:56:00.002-04:00

In my last post, I mentioned that one of the casualties in the barnyard this summer was Bull, my favorite sheep. It has taken me two months to mention this because the event cast me down to an extent which you probably wouldn’t believe, and which I really do not understand. He was a nice sheep and all, but he was a sheep. Losing him should not send a person into the kind of tailspin that, in fact, ensued.

In the third week of August, Bull started hanging around the barn instead of going out with the other sheep to graze. He may or may not have been acting a little strange weeks before; I remember seeing him standing alone for a long time inside the branches of a reclining apple tree, which is not a real sheep-like behavior. He had stopped coming to scarf up the cup of chicken feed I throw out the door of the Hen Room every morning for the entertainment of the grazing classes, but I assumed that that was because Joshua, the sheep with the stand-up horns, had taken to using those horns to, as the capitalists say, maximize marketshare. Still, Bull was acting fairly normal until one particular week when John went to Colorado to travel and work, and my parents came up and stayed with me and the children for a few days so we could visit and do fixer-upper projects together. That Thursday Bull started not leaving the barn much, and I saw him drinking water from the barrel, which is unusual—they seem to get most of their water from the grass they eat. But he wasn’t really eating. I stayed overnight with my college roommate and came home and Bull was still odd but no odder. Mom and Dad left on Saturday, and Bull ate a little strip of leftover grilled zucchini I gave him because it was slicked with olive oil, which I thought might help if he was plugged up inside. Sunday morning he was wider than the other sheep. He was always wider than the others, possibly because he was the greediest damn sheep in the world, but Sunday he was wider than usual. I went on the Internet and found advice involving the gargling of mineral oil by sheep with bloat. Juliette de Bairacli Levy, the great barnyard herbalist, counseled dill seed. I started thinking about the ice pick scene in Far From the Madding Crowd. But none of these remedies seemed possible without John there to restrain the sheep. And it was Sunday, when it seemed criminal to call Dr. Mike away from the family dinner table because my sheep had gas.

I guess I should have called. On Monday morning just before full daylight, I went to the barn to open the hen door and check on Bull before I darted off to serve breakfast at the B&B. He was lying in his usual spot along the wall, his head curled down alongside his flank. He was still warm. His eyes were closed. He looked for all the world like a sheep sound asleep.

After I laid out the coffee and juice and cereal and pastry at the Inn, I called my friends on the next hill. Bill understands tractors, and was willing to come dig a hole for me. The kids helped me drag Bull out of the barn and into the tractor scoop. We buried him down near Dermott and Sterling and Dolly Madison, the turkey. Phyllida put some goldenrod in the grave. Everybody got poison ivy.

All the rest of that day, I couldn’t stop crying. Pretty soon little whispery voices in my head started making accusations about care that could have been given, actions that could have been taken, choices that could have been made that would have saved that sheep. The rational assertions of my friends—that Bull had lived about six times longer than sheep normally get to live, that he had had a really nice life, that he was a sheep, for God’s sake—had no effect. By Thursday, the little voice had turned from angry to vicious. Sheep killer, it whispered. Sheep killer. It wasn’t this bad when I had to send Rocco, the fourth lamb, to the slaughterhouse because he had become violent. This time, the little voice was carrying a torch and a pitchfork, and you could tell that after dark there was going to be trouble.

This worried me enough to call in the Cavalry. I told my friend Paula in Vermont what the little voice was doing. Paula ordered me to tell the little voice that if it said another word on the subject of sheep, now or ever, she would come down here, and it would be sorry. She meant it. Don’t push her.

That was it. Like all bullies confronted by a person of courage, the little voice shut up. I started feeling a little better and sleeping at night. On the weekend I told more people what had happened. My friend John, who has spent a good deal of time in Ireland, said, “He might have had that thing sheep get where their stomach flips over and there’s nothing you can do to save them.” It had never occurred to me that maybe there was nothing I could have done.

Seven or eight weeks went by. I wondered why I was not writing about Bull. Then at the feed store I ran into my friend Margaret, who sold me the lambs three years ago and maintains her own large flock. She is so sensible she actually eats some of her sheep, and sells them to other people to eat. Margaret is wise and good, and as I confessed to her what had happened, how I had taken one of her lambs and heedlessly thrown it away, I watched her reaction. She stood with her hands in her jeans pockets, tapping her Muck shoe, which was held together with duct tape. When I finished speaking, she gently shrugged thin shoulders under her ever-present flannel shirt. “You do what you can for them,” she said. “But the time comes when only they can decide whether or not they are going to live.” She added, “He probably ate something bad.”

I am not ready to exonerate myself of this sheep’s death. But it does occur to me that Bull was the greediest sheep alive, and if he did in fact eat himself to death, there is a metaphorical elegance in that which I think reflects the deep structure of the universe. I believe in that structure, and I believe you can read the fitness of an event—how necessary it was—by how fully it conforms to the deep elegance. So while I am not yet ready to get down off the cover of the Autumn 2011 Triple Harvest Issue of Bad Farmer magazine, it is possible that I was a bystander at the wreck of this hay train, and not the one who blew up the tracks.

Dead or Broody?

2011-10-11T12:35:00.003-04:00

Back in the day when I was in college and MTV was the coolest thing anyone had ever seen, we used to wile away the time between study groups playing Dead or Canadian? This week at Wren Cottage, we are updating that game for the 21st century farm with the action packed puzzler Dead or Broody?

I guess the photo gives away this week’s answer.

One of the black hens, the youngest, spryest, egg-producingest part of our flock, went broody early last week. This is not the most convenient time of year to have tiny defenseless infants, but what the hell. It’s her life.

I have been leaving for work before daylight lately, so the chickens get fed in darkness, and the few eggs that are still being laid are collected in darkness, by feel. A day or two after the hen went broody, I was feeling around for eggs and accidentally jammed my hand into the broody girl’s back. I apologized. But the next day I had the chance to visit the barn in broad daylight, so I thought I would do some visual recon on the mother-to-be. And guess what? I guessed wrong. Not broody. Dead.

At least her eyes were shut. I hate when creatures die with their eyes open and then they get dirt in them. Who wants dirt in their dead eyes? When my favorite sheep, Bull, died this summer, he died in his sleep, his head curled gracefully down to the hay bedding and his eyes closed as though in repose. Ditto the black hen. I am a tiny little bit tired of my animals dropping dead this year. But I am glad that none of them have been smashed open, and their eyes were all shut.

White People Get Stranger & Stranger

2011-08-10T10:53:00.003-04:00

I have always loved that line from The Brother From Another Planet, and today I am it.

These are four fleeces from my Jacob sheep, drying on the roof of our house. I went to skirt them yesterday to send to the carding mill, and lo! They were soaking wet! Because in what was admittedly not my finest hour as a logician, I laid the fleeces on a tarp in the garage after shearing…right over top of the floor drain. In which location they got soaked by the very many, many torrential rains we have received this summer. A-doi.

The roof was so hot it was burning my feet, so I hope I am today redeeming my reputation for solutions crafted using just what’s available in the Magic Cellar. With better attention to detail than I displayed in June, we will hopefully toast the fleeces just enough to be perfectly dry and not so much that they get all brittle and unspinnable.

And P.S. Happy Birthday, Eileen Flanagan!

Rosefugee Camp

2011-07-17T15:16:00.002-04:00

My friend and gardening role model, Rodrica Tilley, she of the amazing paintings, many of which have depicted the citizens of her garden in Montrose, PA, is moving away to Vermont, where her gardens will be smaller and less sunny. She has generously given me lots of cool plants over the years, and now a set of potted roses (including the tea rose ‘Inkspot’ pictured here) which never made it into the ground, and which are not making the move to New England. Even though I JUST finished swearing that I was done expanding my perennial beds because I want to have time some day to hike and kayak and so forth in the summer, I am choosing spots for these new roses, and since the existing beds are crammed beyond full, some of these pioneers are venturing forth into new parts of the property, like the orchards. I see no reason why a rose should not be happy as part of the brush island around the base of an old apple tree.

In addition to the bougthen roses in my rosefugee camp, there is also a piece of the rugged old thing that grew over Rosebush Cottage, the decommissioned chicken coop Roddy used as her girlhood playhouse. This rambler is renowned for its insouciance, fragrant pink blossoms and complete indifference to neglect. I am so touched to have a piece of this lovely and historic rose; Rodrica just explained to me that when old rose people come upon a plant they cannot readily identify, they give it a working title until its true identity comes out; hence my new plant is named Rosebush Cottage, and probably always will be, even if we find out what genetics it has, because whatever its original name, it cannot be as charming. I am going to plant Rosebush Cottage next to the self-sown sweetbriar in the North Orchard beside which I intend to build my little writing room some day, and in whose dooryard I intend to have my ashes planted at some even later date. The fact that the garden is preceding the building may be the cart before the horse, but in this case it means that from the very first day it is inhabited, Orchard House will have an excellent rose garden.

Dept. of If That Don’t Beat All

2011-05-21T19:29:00.002-04:00

At 6:04 ET this evening it came to my attention that the RaptureMobile had failed to pick me up on its way out of town. However, ten minutes later, when I went to fill a pan with a little water for this strange old Dominique hen who’s been hanging around the birdfeeder/front door all by herself lately, it became apparent why even a hanging strap on the mass transit to the afterlife would be thrown away on me.

I had been gardening for three hours or so, and was totally covered with mud, so instead of tracking through the house I used the garden hose, set to a fairly pitiful trickling spray, to put an inch of water in an enamel pan that was standing around near the odd hen. And while I was at it, I thought I would just water the potted plants on the porch stairs, since it hadn’t rained in at least six hours, and they have gotten used to drenching storms every twenty minutes. So while I am watering the red chard plant that overwintered in the cold frame and now graces the front steps, a male ruby throated hummingbird came twittering over, hung like a sign from God on the very edge of the spray from my hose, and then alighted on a chard leaf to sip the water that was running down the stem. Having given this astonishing performance, he moved off to a rose cane nearby to swipe his bill clean.

When my amazed eyes lifted from this sight, there were woodpeckers of two different species hugging the pole of the birdfeeder across the drive, and three other kinds of perching birds in the hedgerow behind. At this point I decided that I, like the old lady who lived here before me, would prefer to stay at Woodbourne for some unspecified period of time than spend eternity in a country where there are no dogs or songbirds.

Sterling Marlin, RIP

2011-05-10T19:00:00.003-04:00

Late this afternoon I heard a strange repeated cat cry, which led me to the East Orchard, where Sterling, my very white cat, was lying on the very green grass, his pupils slitted with pain, his tongue and gums not so red as they should have been. It was obvious that whatever it was was really bad, so I scooped him in a towel and rushed him to the vet five minutes away. He died on the way in.

Sterling was coming up on his fourth birthday. We don’t know the exact date because we got him when he was about six months old. He had moved out of the barn where he was born and was living under a pull-behind camper in a machine shed a mile or two from here. A nice older gentleman was living in the camper, feeding Sterling venison burgers and cans of tuna, but he was going in for hip surgery soon, and Sterling would not be able to go with him. The gentleman saw my poster for a lost cat and called me from the pay phone at the gas station. He said, “I don’t have your cat, but I have another little one you might like.”

I did like him. He had a funny double-strike meow, and he got to be great friends with the other junior cat in our extensive pride. That fellow, John-Paul, looked on in great concern as Sterling lay crying in the field, and had to be shooed out of the way as we rushed off to the vet. Of us all, I feel the worst for him.

As The Hen Turns, Episode 804,566

2011-04-09T14:23:00.003-04:00

We have two chickens left from our first batch seven years ago, a New Hampshire Red named Prudence and a white and gold Auracana called Marisol. Marisol is the only one who has been on our farm that whole time, because Prudence was part of the fifteen reds I raised for my friend Maggie, who wanted new chickens that year but her daughter was getting married that spring, so having a roomful of dusty peeps in the house was out of the question. So I raised the reds the first few weeks and handed them off to Maggie after the wedding, and a few days later, my own flock of 10 or 12 assorted birds was attacked first by an opposum and a few days later by a roving dog. There were only 2 survivors, Marisol and one of the reds I had kept, whose leg the dog had broken. I knew I should wring her neck and be done with it, but I couldn’t bear to, and miraculously by the following week she was walking again. Maggie gave me back two red chicks to console me, so we had Prudence, Constance, Capability the miracle bird and Marisol. Over the years Capability died and Constance was carried off by the wildlife but Prudence and Marisol have endured. Marisol is very friendly and curious and likes to come into the kitchen and hang out with the human flock, so she became everyone’s favorite chicken. She even has fans in other states.

All the chickens except Marisol had started going out of the barn again now that it is kinda sorta grudgingly spring. Yesterday was pretty nice out, so I went and caught Marisol where she was hanging out in a nest box in the Hen Room, no doubt eating eggs, and I put her out with the other birds. She went straight back indoors. I went and got her and carried her halfway down the barnyard. She pecked around a bit on the ground; as soon as I started for the house, she sprinted for the barn door. I rolled my eyes and decided to leave her to it. As I went through the barnyard gate, she disappeared around the corner of the barn.

But at bedtime when I was locking up, glancing over the roosting hens as always, there was no Marisol. I looked again, harder. No hen. Marisol was gone. Somehow in the three feet between the corner of the barn and the barn door, something had swooped down and nabbed her, and I didn’t even hear it happening. This is what you get, I told myself, for meddling with Nature. You don’t know how things are, you don’t know what’s going on, you think you understand everything and know best but you don’t, and now, because of your arrogance, everyone’s favorite chicken, the venerable Marisol, is dead. In spite of this cheerful assessment, that little part inside me that refuses to ever see reason was crossing its fingers that she might come back, because there was no corpse and no explosion of feathers on the ground.

This morning when I went into the Hen Room, Marisol emerged laboriously from inside the wall where she had hidden all night. Why was she in the wall? I have no idea. She is not broody. She went out into the barnyard today with the rest of the chickens, as though winter had never happened and this is just what we do every day all year, and we never think of a quick run back to the barn to hide in the darkness and eat eggs. Maybe she has chicken senility. In any event, I am glad that her blood is not on my hands.

Always Winter & Never Christmas

2011-04-06T18:59:00.003-04:00

I’m just saying.

REWARD: Information leading to the safe return of our lion will be met with boundless gratitude and large recompense from a populace on the verge of mass immolation.

Nature Slobbery In Tooth and Claw

2011-04-03T09:22:00.003-04:00

Friday morning I was leaving to take my son to school when we saw the neighbor’s year-old Lab sprinting around the yard in suspicious glee. I yelled at him to get home, and he dropped his parcel and ran. The parcel had a strange tail, so I went to check it out, thinking it might be a rat, which we never see around here. In fact, it was a slobbery but perfectly furred, warm, breathing gray squirrel so young its eyes were not even open yet. Since we had to leave for school, I took the squirrel to the neighbors’, where their visiting daughter accepted him. By the time I got back from the drive to school, she had found another baby lying in the snow, and had deposited both, securely swaddled in a floppy hat and a towel, at the foot of the ash tree where she had most recently seen some adult squirrels. We supposed that the parents had been moving the nest, had been surprised by the overenthused Labrador, and had dropped the kits and run. The parents were nowhere to be seen, having evidently gone down for their morning nap with whatever was left of their family. We have all had a lot of experience with lost baby wildlife, and therefore we were full of gloom.

At lunchtime my daughter and I went up to town to meet my husband. Phyllida was full of concern about the squirrels, who were still, in spite of being obsessively checked on every fifteen minutes all morning, in the hat under the tree. She wanted to collect them after lunch, buy some dog-milk-replacer, and nurse them to adulthood. I saw a number of problems with this plan, starting with the fact that Phyllida was going to her father’s house for four days—leaving me holding the bag of squirrel infants—and ending with the foreseen presence in my office of two adolescent squirrels with no sense of how to be a squirrel out in the world. Despair reigned.

When we got back from lunch we had a few minutes to stoke the fire and let the dogs out before we had to leave to collect my son from school, so I thought I would pop up the driveway and check the hat once again. Midway there, however, I saw a white rag hanging in the bush above the hat and towel. I saw a squirrel hanging upside down on the tree trunk, watching me. I went back inside.

When we left, we drove slowly past the tree. The rag was still there. The towel was flopped on the ground as before. The squirrel came down the trunk again, looked into the towel, hopped around the base of the tree a bit, evidently checking for more lost babies, then went up the trunk and disappeared into a knothole twenty feet up. We were too consumed with anxiety to leave without knowing: I snuck over, surreptitiously watching the knothole all the while, flicked back the towel's edge and beheld the floppy hat, perfectly empty. Joy erupted, and we departed singing.

Many thanks to audreyjm529 at Flickr for the loan of her image.

First Frog of Spring

2011-03-18T12:35:00.001-04:00

This has been rather a long winter, but these last few days were mild, and today we have both the first snowdrops and also a few frogs awake in the pond. I think the de-icer may have something to do with this, because the water is a bit warmer than just the sunshine would make it, but at this stage of the game, I am willing to cheat a little. There was a pair of Carolina wrens examining the basswood tree in our back yard this morning. I hope they will stay.

Bastard Rabbit Swine!

2011-03-01T14:46:00.002-05:00

Ah, spring! When a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of blowing that bastard bunny rabbit into a million tiny scraps of fur for totally debarking the quince bush and the long-suffering plum tree! Furry little parcel of death! Miserable dark lightning of fruit tree fatality, flashing across the snow banks when I go out for firewood just before dawn! Small, soft angel of how I threw away $50 on those trees! I despise you! I will never again stop the cats from eating your children! I will encourage the cats to eat your children! And may fleas infest the pink satin linings of your ears! And may fruit tree bark upset your tiny stomach! Bastard rabbit swine!

Cold Feet

2011-02-08T18:14:00.003-05:00

I love icicles. Watching them grow is a great way to pass the winter. (You can file that under John’s perennial question, “You sure you’re not a stoner?” Yes, I’m sure. Because why would I spend money to get like I already am?) We had one enormous ice-o-lith that spent weeks slowly reaching and reaching down from the corner of the porch roof to the surface of the snow. One melty day last week it finally connected into a great column of ice; by nightfall the jointure was as big around as my wrist. I was particularly glad it had connected a day later when we had to knock it down because the ice jam was backing up the melt water into the porch roof and raining it down on the front door.

After the ice column my next favorite icicles of this winter have been the chickenfeet. The actual chickens have been locked in the Hen Room for weeks to keep the starlings from cleaning out the feed (you would not believe how much feed a hundred starlings can eat in a day). I miss the hens. I want spring to come. But meanwhile we have these clear glossy chicken feet hanging from every eave like some kind of fairy tale freak show to remind us of warmer times. And no, I don’t drop acid either. Because why would I bother?

Wireheart

2011-01-11T13:41:00.002-05:00

I was loading the woodstove for bedtime last night when I found this piece of firewood with a length of barbed wire growing right out the middle. It looks like the tree might have been 10 or 12 inches in diameter when it was cut. At some point in the second half of the twentieth century it apparently stood along the edge of a pasture. The wood is kind of folded over on itself where the wire protrudes, but on the outside of the former log, even though the bark is gone, there is no sign of the metal within. It’s funny how life wraps around noxious add-ons and just keeps going.

Frost Upon Frost

2010-12-30T09:33:00.002-05:00

We have a few inches of snow on the ground from a lake effect storm that brushed us after we totally missed the Great East Coast Blizzard of ’10. Then this morning, somehow, we also have a coating of hoarfrost everywhere. This prodigious lily-gilding adds to the wonderful light at this season, and the watercolor sunrises and sunsets. It’s a beautiful week to start a new year.

Most Carefully Upon Their Hour

2010-12-23T10:07:00.003-05:00

Tree sparrows are a pert little bird that lives in Canada most of the year, but they winter here in the Endless Mountains. Often we don’t see them until January, or at least the week after Christmas, but this year they arrived most punctually at the feeder when it got light out on December 21, First Day of Winter. It’s like they were hiding in the bushes, waiting for their cue. Thank you, as usual, to Cornell University’s bird program for this picture. And now it's back to the cookies-and-eggnog feeder for me. Remember, it's important to keep a supply of unfrozen eggnog in your yard so that migrating writers can refresh themselves there!

Winter Solstice Eve Eve

2010-12-19T12:36:00.002-05:00

Like most gardeners, I have a short list of favorite plants. The winterberry is near the top. We used to have a big old centenarian in Lilac Lane, the flowering shrub border planted by the original inhabitants of Wren Cottage. When that winterberry died the year before last, I was very sorry. But this year the North Orchard has given me a new one for Christmas: the volunteer pictured here turned up beside the trunk of an apple in a state of grave disrepair. I am so glad to see it, and I hope the birds will sow more all over the place.

This year on the solstice, we are having a full lunar eclipse, something that has not happened since 1554 or 1638 or some other unspecified time just before or just after Shakespeare. And who knows if it was even clear that night? So obviously this is a moment of some import. And with the revival of the winterberry clan on our hill, it seems to me that this new era will be a good one.

Happy solstice, everybody.

Lo, How E’re The Rutabaga Is Blooming

2010-12-07T18:29:00.003-05:00

Here you see dinner in an early stage of preparation. I have never grown rutabagas before, nor ever dug something out of the snowy earth and hossed it directly to the kitchen to be consumed. But it turns out that you can plant rutabaga seed in July and by early December, with no further attention, you have rutabagas so large they are hard to cut up with the biggest kitchen knife.

I made a gratin of these rutabagas and a couple carrots, plus a frozen leek I prised from the ground, topped it off with Bechamel and some sourdough breadcrumbs, and damn. With the snow outside and the fires inside, it’s a lot like Switzerland. So in addition to my own admiration for rutabaga gratin, I felt the satisfaction of many generations of relatives who were glad to see this dish again.

Why Can’t I Go Out Today? Huh? Huh?

2010-11-29T08:18:00.000-05:00

A Guest Post By Murphy The Labrador

Mama is not walking me. Why? Why? Where else can I eat frozen rotten apples? Where else cat poo? Where else can life have meaning until dinnertime? Nowhere, that’s who.

She says we are not walking because I am the size and shape and color of a deer. Eat your carrot! Chew your treat! Go! Lie! Down! This is stupid. I am always this color and shape. And we always walk.

I am full of resentment. I will nap.

Owl Together Now, Happy Thanksgiving!

2010-11-27T15:19:00.003-05:00

Thanksgiving night I was flopped in front of the fireplace with a book, overstuffed and much relieved to be home and out of the slushy weather. Some while later John returned from visiting still more kin, and he reported that there was a little owl in the hemlock at the foot of the drive. We got the flashlight and trekked down there, and sure enough, a screech owl was perched on a low branch, not troubling to hide its irritation at our presence. Owls really do not care about your emotional state and how excited you are to see them. They wish only to eat mice and be left alone. Our little fellow had dramatic great ears for someone who was only eight or nine inches tall. The guidebook shows him also having magnificent two-prong feet, which I wish I had noticed in situ. Our little man was from the red clan, but he looked a lot like this gray individual. Thank you to Cornell Lab of Ornithology for the loan of their screecher, and for all their excellent work in the field.

SDRAM, LED, CAT

2010-11-15T11:35:00.004-05:00

Fall has sped by in a blaze of cider and art openings, and the house now has more wooden storm windows on it than it has had in probably 80 years. We are hoping this will make us toasty warm on less oil this winter. Now I am getting ready to settle in for a long, snug winter at my desk, getting lots of writing done in between cooking meals, walking dogs and cats, and feeding barnyard folk.

In the photo above, you will see all the modern conveniences required by a writer, ie a big monitor, a laptop and a cat basket to keep the cat off the laptop and out from in front of the monitor. Yes, the basket has cut down considerably on my work surface, but since the cat was overheating the computer and using his sharp little elbows (even through the closed lid) to delete important emails and highlight long passages of the New York Times while I was reading, thereby rendering it impossible to scroll down to read the rest of the article, the cat basket is an acceptable compromise.

The other black cat, btw, sleeps on the printer on the opposite side of the desk, for symmetry. This is not super convenient, because if you forget and start a print job, the printer ingests the nearest part of the cat, but it does promote thrift in the use of paper and toner.

You are probably wondering why I don’t just close the office door and lock the cats out. And the answer is Ha! Because cats (also dogs, sheep, hens, children, husbands, etc) are the great annoyances that, like Keats’ flowered chains, bind us to the Earth.

Dolly Madison R.I.P.

2010-09-07T07:44:00.002-04:00

Poor old Dolly Madison: that elegant creature gobbles no more among us. Although she lived only 17 months, that was still about 500% of the life most broad breasted white turkeys get, and she brought us—well, me anyway—a lot of satisfaction. At the beginning of the summer she lost her ability to locomote, so she spent her last weeks sitting in the grass in the barnyard, taking in the action of chickens and sheep and wild birds and chipmunks and house cats. She was fond of her kibble to the end, as I hope to be myself. The barnyard is notably green now, with no big white orb in it.

I am going to bury her down by Dermott in the orchard. I don’t think she would have had a lot of use for that terrier gentleman, but he would have found her a source of endless fascination.

Sheep Out to Eat

2010-08-30T19:43:00.001-04:00

Sometimes circumstances cram you into a really nice spot you never would have gone to otherwise.

It’s practically impossible to move the sheep fence after the middle of June without a brush hog. But the New Holland and the brush hog had gone to John’s mother’s farm to cultivate John’s cornfield, and they never came home. So when the sheep pasture got overgrazed, I couldn’t move the three lengths of fence. Then Joshua, my four-horned problem child, got tangled in one length. Like so tangled he had 50 loops around each of his four horns. We had to cut him out of the now completely useless section of fence, arrivederci sixty dollars, and the overgrazed pasture was even smaller than before. The hay for the winter had not yet arrived, so in a moment of sheep starvation panic, I turned the fence off, opened the end of it and walked out into the orchard with the three sheep following curiously along behind. For an hour they stuffed themselves as fast as they could on multiflora rose leaves, ash sapling leaves, orchard grass, poison ivy and windfall apples. Then I walked back inside the fence, they followed me, and I locked it all up for the night. This worked so well, I have continued doing it even though there is plenty of hay in the barn now. In fact, it has become one of my favorite things to do. I take a book and a step stool and I go sit there for an hour in the goldenrod while my friends chow down. When everyone is visibly larger in diameter and burping up clouds of cider breath, we go back in. We’ve done it so often now that the sheep are the ones who decide when they’re full and it’s time to go home.

I have no idea how long it takes to re-chew that much plant material, but it has to be awhile. It seems to take about 24 hours for me to need my refill of orchard time.

Hay, You!

2010-08-20T10:06:00.003-04:00

Lot of water over the dam since the last time I wrote. We’ve frozen some pesto and some Granny Puzo Sauce, put up some jam and froze not enough blackberries, started taking the sheep out to eat early each evening (outside the electric fence, that would be), and my submission to the Fair won the third place ribbon in the class called Flower Arrangement Under Five Inches, In A Thimble. I have heat rash AND hay rash, so you can tell it’s still summer.

The hay arrived this morning, fifty bales of first cutting, which ought to see us through the winter. The neighbor brothers who raise it and deliver it have at least one gas well between them, which makes me wonder why they still bother to sell hay. I guess they like it. I am reminded of the old Midwestern joke about the farmer who wins the million dollar lottery and is asked what he’s going to do with all that money. “Well,” he says, “I guess I’ll just keep farming til it’s all gone.” If I had a million dollars, that’s what I’d do.

So the hay room is full, the jam shelf is populated and the heating oil has been paid for. That means all we have to do is lay in a few cords of firewood and we’ll be ready for winter.

Benji Met the Bear

2010-07-21T08:39:00.003-04:00

The dogs and I were just out for our morning walk around the North Orchard trail, and naturally the corgis had run on ahead while Murphy, the Labrador, and I came lumping along behind. There was some rustling and crashing in the thick undergrowth where we never brush hog any more because we’re letting the forest come back up there between us and the road, and I started to worry the corgis were messing with another groundhog, so when I reached the hairpin bend in the trail, I yelled, “Corgis! Corgis!” And both dogs come back around the next bend, and about 20 feet from them in the deep brush behind the raspberries, up comes a big old black head and shoulders. The dogs were mighty surprised, and Medwards offered to advance, so I started hissing powerfully and the dogs came back to me, and then me and all three of them lit out for the other side of the hill as fast as we could get through the brush.

I have no illusion that that bear meant us harm—the subsequent crashing indicated that he was running for the road while we were running away from him, and I hope he did not run out in traffic without looking, but years of Scottish terriers makes me think it advisable to put the largest possible space between your dogs and your wildlife.

So. I think we can dispense with the second cup of coffee today.

Thanks to yosemitehikes.com for the image. Now just picture that fellow chest deep in berry bushes.

Surprise Visitor

2010-06-18T12:41:00.001-04:00

John came home one day this week with a Great Horned Owl that had gotten hit by a car and was nursing a bum wing and leg. He was on his way to a client meeting when he spotted the poor little guy on the shoulder of the road, so the owl rode to the meeting in John’s lap, and then transferred to a cardboard box donated by the client. (Side note: you have to love a building designer who shows up to your kitchen renovation carrying a piece of saved wildlife.)

We called the Game Commission and they said an officer would call us, but time went by and none did, so I left a message at the raptor rehab about 25 minutes from here. Then the phone rang, and the Very Cranky Game Officer, who was sitting at the intersection about a mile south of here, demanded to know where the owl was, and then whether I had made clear to the dispatcher that the owl was in my possession, and then the gender of the dispatcher who had supplied him with the false impression that there was a Great Horned Owl lying in a state of distress along Route 29 in Dimock. Although the VCGO would not confirm, it appears that he drove an hour to get here from the regional office, and maybe that’s why he was pissed.

He was not a great deal nicer in person, but he did take the owl off to a rescue center, saving me the trouble.

It was a real treat to see such a beautiful animal up close, and in our subsequent research we found out that where a big, mean game officer has 60 pounds per square inch crushing power in his hands, a Great Horned Owl has 500 pounds per square inch, enabling them to catch and eat animals two-thirds their size. I just wish we had called the nice lady from the raptor rehab first (she called back right after the owl left). Because as it is, I feel like we narced out the little guy to the cops.

And, for the record, if I thought I could get Officer Sunshine out of the building for two hours by neglecting to mention that the owl was resting comfortably in a box on somebody’s porch, I would do it too.

Psalm 23

2010-06-13T18:31:00.003-04:00

The shearer came yesterday to relieve the overburdened sheep of their four inches of very warm wool. It’s been pretty hot for weeks, so they should have been glad to be shorn, but since it involves being torn one by one from their safe place in the barn and wrestled out the door to God knows what, they were not. Roger was gone by 8 a.m., but the sheep bawled for the next hour until I left the property for a wedding, and when I returned at 5, they were still bawling. I went back out and came back home, and at 7:30 p.m., they were still out in the barnyard, yelling their heads off. Finally it occurred to me that they sounded hungry, so I went out and walked down the barnyard with them and stood still at the bottom and let them bunch up around me. After a few minutes of butting and jostling, they settled down and began to eat ravenously. It would appear that all day long, they had been too frightened and unsettled to risk lowering their heads to graze.

It got dark as I stood there, letting the sheep eat and singing that Sweet Honey in the Rock song about King David playing his harp for his sheep, and the fireflies and the lighting started to come up in and above the orchard. And I developed a new appreciation then for the twenty-third psalm:

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters;
He restoreth my soul.

I’m afraid a lot of the Bible is thrown away on folks nowadays, not because we’re all corrupt and going to hell, but because we mostly don’t have sheep. Until you have made it possible for someone to go to bed with a full stomach merely because your presence makes them feel safe enough to eat, it is hard to appreciate how nice it would be to feel that way about somebody else looking after you. But lately I’ve been thinking that getting all bent out of shape about life doesn’t seem to be making a lot of difference, just losing me sleep, so maybe my new attitude should be, “Screw it. The Lord is my shepherd.”

Frodo Has Left the Building

2010-05-12T11:37:00.003-04:00

You can see just by looking that this White Polish Crested Rooster believes himself to be a rockstar. Even when it’s been raining on him all day, he doesn’t look like a bedraggled bird. He looks like a guy shooting a music video in the Islands.

Frodo (so called by the grandchildren of his original owners because of his aFRO hairDO) came to us as a very nice adolescent a few months back. Unfortunately, once he hit the ugly testosterone stage, he took over the flock and in addition to fighting with the older Auracana roosters and the little English cockerels, he somehow induced the Auracanas to fight among themselves. Now my oldest and most revered rooster, Paco Negro, He Of The Crippled Toes, he who survived illness as a chick and overcame, he who ruled in benevolence and equanimity all these years, is standing down in the corner of the pasture, totally bedraggled and terrified to come back up the barnyard where the rest of the flock is. Now the harmony of the flock has been shattered. Now the carefully laid out hierarchy of bird status, AKA the pecking order, which all chickens can remember in exact detail up to a flock of 30 birds, is all disarranged.

Now I am pissed.

So I got on the phone to the Extension and fifteen minutes and three phone calls later, Frodo has a date to be picked up in the parking lot of the hospital tomorrow morning to be carried off to the eastern part of the county to become part of a nice high school girl’s Polish Crested 4-H project. That kind of efficacy, my friends, is the hand of God.

So while Mr. Wonderful goes off to stand stud to a bunch of sparkling white babes, the younger Auracana has 10 days to return to good behavior. If he doesn’t, we’re taking a ride to the Poultry Auction at the fairgrounds on the 22nd. Now Playing: Bye-Bye, Birdie.

A Sad State of Affairs

2010-05-04T09:12:00.003-04:00

I am sorry to tell you that Dolly Madison is a murderer. I am also sorry to tell you that, as predicted, Dolly hurt herself leaping from the barn one day and for two weeks could only stand up with assistance. That’s right, I went out every morning and hoisted the turkey to standing position, and then I went out in the afternoon and lifted her again. I understand what this says about me. I understand what my life has become.

The sheep would not let Dolly rest in their side of the barn, even though they don’t use it that often at this time of year because they would rather be outdoors, lying under the hemlocks. So I put Dolly in a pen closer to the house, with a tarp over it to keep the rain off. For company—and since it’s time to incarcerate the English hens and practice birth control for them so we don’t end up with even more English chickens—I put a handful of English in the pen too. They may well be the same ones that lived in the bunny crate with her last spring when they were all infants. I also added another hen—Hickety Pickety, a black yearling who liked to lay her eggs in the hay feeder in the sheep room, and whom I found one day hanging headfirst down out of the feeder with a paralyzed leg. At first I thought it was broken, but it failed to become useable again. It simply continued to stick straight out in front of her. But Hickety Pickety got around remarkably well on her wings and good leg, and it was obvious she wanted to live, so I let her.

After two weeks of physical therapy in the Paraplegic Poultry Ward, Dolly was able to stand on her own. The timing was good because I had to go away for two nights on business, and John was spared the task of standing the turkey up each day. The second morning I was away, he called to say that Dolly had gotten up on her own and had used her regained powers of health and locomotion to walk over and stand on Hickety Pickety, who had come down out of the coop for breakfast. Then she stepped off, took the hen by the neck and shook her hard. John return the poor hen to the coop, where she died overnight of her injuries.

Today it is almost a week later. John and I brought down a calf hutch his mother kindly let us borrow from her farm, and I cut out the doorsill so Dolly can walk in. She did not, of course. But last night I made her walk in, so she gets the idea of sleeping in there out of the rain. Unfortunately, as of yesterday, she needs help once again to stand up. I am no longer convinced that her problems are injury-based. I think she may just be engineered to have been eaten last November, not to be still walking around. Her suspension is not adequate to the tasks required of it at one year of age. So now this irritating bird, who killed another animal with a disability almost identical to her own, is suffering the legacy of her own genetics. And eventually I may have to decide what to do about it.

Chez Dolly, Or The Problem of Turkey Housing

2010-04-07T09:23:00.003-04:00

We are having serious issues of turkey mechanics. Dolly Madison cannot get in or out of the hen room of the barn by herself because the door jamb is about three feet off the ground, she weighs maybe 45 pounds, and her wings are about 6 inches long and molting anyway. The barn foundation is concrete, with nowhere to mount a ramp. Dolly has grown accustomed to being put in and taken out each day, which involves me bracing myself, lifting with my legs and giving her a boost onto the jamb, where she poises herself and then jumps to the other side. Going into the barn, this is fine because the drop is only 18 inches. Going out, she invariably lands on her feet in the barnyard and then flips ars over tea kettle from the sheer momentum of her giant bulk striking the earth. It’s only a matter of time before she gets hurt.

I was hoping Dolly could sleep in the sheep room (next door to the hen room) because it is at ground level. But the sheep harass her and will not let her stay in there. I tried the old dog house, which is just the right size for a turkey shed, but she’s a little too wide for the doorway. Next I am going to call my mother in law and ask whether they have any calf hutches that are so banged up they can’t keep calves in them any more. If we can keep the sheep out, that might work—sheep are pushier than you might think. Otherwise I am going to have to build a mini-shed-roof off the side of the barn above the spot where Dolly sleeps on the ground when I don’t put her in the barn manually, just codifying what is already the de facto turkey bed.

Farming is just an endless series of making things up and trying to string together a solution out of a pile of assorted doohickeys lying around the yard. If I didn’t have the family’s native engineering impulse, I would hate it.

Dead But Not Endangered

2010-03-28T13:40:00.002-04:00

I am a close watcher of roadkills as I make my appointed rounds, and I have often considered creating a roadkill calendar, from the first dead skunks of February through the deceased rabbits of early March and the August gray squirrels driven out of their minds, I suppose, by thirst. This year I noticed a lot of dead minks in the second half of March, and one day, not too far from here, I saw a really big one that was lighter in color than usual. Could it be, I wondered, a dead pine marten instead? I had heard that someone had seen one last fall during deer season. It was worth turning around and going back to find out.

My stiff little friend was in great condition, so I put him in the car and went home. The mammal guidebook said minks had a white patch on their chin, but pine martens had one on the chin and another on the chest. The deceased did indeed have a chest patch, so I measured him and photographed him and left a message for the neighborhood naturalist.

[Game wardens and other DCNR types will please note that I never even considered adding this critter to my earthly possessions. I was just looking him up.]

It turns out that pine martens were extirpated in Pennsylvania more than a century ago, so for this to be a pine marten would have been rare indeed, and I would have gotten my name in the Fish & Game News. But it was not a pine marten. The naturalist and our other neighbor, a retired wildlife biologist from a part of Canada where they still have living pine martens, both said it was a mink, and that the chest patch was just a kind of extended chin patch, not nearly yellow enough or glorious enough to be a real chest patch.

So our pretty fellow is just a dead mink like all the others. In a way, I feel better about that because if it were the only pine marten in Pennsylvania for a hundred years and it were dead in my freezer, that would be pretty sad.

Lilac for a Day

2010-03-19T13:20:00.002-04:00

My husband has a thing for certain breeds of livestock, including Highland cattle and Boer goats. So when he phoned from band practice last week and asked if it was OK to bring home this little practically orphaned Boer goat kid that we were only keeping for six weeks and not a day more, so help him God, I figured it was time to let him work through the goat thing. (We worked through the cattle thing a couple years ago by way of the late lamented Herkie.) So Thursday after school, John and St. John went to get Lilac.

Lilac’s problem is not that her mother is dead. It’s that her mother prefers Lilac’s twin brother, and won’t stand for Lilac to nurse. In fact, she was seen yanking Lilac’s tail when she tried to make the effort. My longsuffering friend Pete, of Clodhopper Farm, solves this problem by holding the mama goat’s lip in a twitch while Lilac nurses. Lilac was three weeks old when we got her, so obviously the plan was working, though she was smaller than the other kids.

I went online and poked around for advice on what to feed goat babies. John stopped at his mother’s barn for some raw cow milk and calf panels, and at the feed store for a lamb bottle. Then he and St. John went out and came home with the cutest little goat you ever saw. She was springy and adorable and curious about everything. And if you went out of her sight, she went off like all the car alarms in New Jersey. Also, no amount of effort would persuade her to drink milk out of the bottle. Then John announced that he was going out to band practice. Because they had a gig tomorrow night. When he would not be available to care for the car alarm again. All I can say is “Good thing my blood pressure is not naturally high.” Because this would have been an excellent way to precipitate a major coronary event.

I watched Lilac for a few hours and tried a hundred more times to get her to eat. There is not much more frustrating to the cooking mother than an infant animal that will not eat. I sat down finally on the floor beside the wood stove, and Lilac came over and after tentatively sniffing and even licking at the stove a bit, folded up her knobbly knees and laid down beside it, apparently finding its warmth very like goat maternity. And at least the wood stove was not yanking her tail. I didn’t want to sleep on the kitchen floor, so I removed Lilac to a dog crate in my bedroom, where she slept quietly all night, with just one reassurance that we were still there in the dark with her.

But the next morning I sent her back to the farm. Because a little milk from an unwilling mother is better than no milk from the willingest foster family. St. John was sad; he and Lilac shared a common interest in jumping off stuff. I don’t know if 14 hours was enough to resolve the Boer thing for my husband, but I think I helped him complete the emotional arc when I offered to murder him with a skillet the next time he brought home a live animal. So now we are back to just dogs, cats, sheep, chickens and Dolly Madison, of whom more next time.

P.S. The maple run was practically non-existent this year, and coincided with rising creeks and a bunch of work gigs. So no syrup for us. We will buy some from the neighbors for whom the maple run is the work gig.

Ready to Run

2010-02-19T10:34:00.002-05:00

Just as I was steeling myself for the New Ice Age and the permanent descent of winter upon us (and never Christmas), I have started to see some early signs of impending spring. We’re not talking anything as out there as crocuses or anything, but the house has sprouted some very impressive icicles, some of which are almost as long as me (not a big wow by human standards, but pretty big for an icicle), and although just a few days ago I poo-pooed my husband’s tentative plan to tap the sugar maples this weekend, now I can practically feel the sap starting to rise in the trees around me. That’s what 2 degrees Fahrenheit can do for you.

Furthermore, the big male skunks are out getting hit on the road at night (not something that would normally gladden anybody’s heart, but an indisputable sign of spring, because they’re out looking for mates after hibernating since Thanksgiving); my family in southern Pennsylvania and my friend in southeastern Vermont have both seen large traveling flocks of robins (my uncle says they left D.C. early this year to avoid the blizzard); I saw what appeared to be 2 hawks riding a thermal today (a thermal!); and I also saw three wayward Canada geese noodling around near some open water a couple dozen miles south of here, where it is a good deal warmer.

Obviously none of these things is going to cause a stampede of Easter rabbits and daffodils. But the evidence is accumulating, and apparently the sap is also rising in me, because I feel a sudden urgency to order seeds and march up to the sugarhouse to make sure they are no bears under it in advance of next weekend’s tapping session. I am taking charge of sugaring this year, because John is too busy, so you can expect to hear more of that shortly.

Adventure Thrust Upon Us

2010-02-06T11:23:00.002-05:00

I have always had an interest in wood-fire cooking, and have always intended to learn about it some day. The previous occupant of our dear cottage, a woman of considerable oomph, had spent several years in the late '30s doing everything the hard way in the wilderness of British Columbia, and she left us some interesting cooking tools. I have even fantasized more than once about dragging the original wood cookstove back out of the barn and into the kitchen. But I have never been quite interested enough in wood-fire cooking to, like, do anything about it. Fortunately, yet another opportunity to learn and grow and fulfill my every ambition has been thrust upon me.

The gas range is dead. Well, it may not be dead, but it’s not feeling very well, and nobody is coming out to fix it until Monday, if it is fixable and the guy happens to have the right part in the van. So for a few days, it looked like microwave tea for me, and that is a level of culinary depravity I was not going to take lying down. It struck me that my mother on numerous occasions has said that the best tea she ever had came from the kettle that was permanently installed on her grandmother’s coal stove, because the water was still boiling when it hit the tea bag in your cup. So I tried putting our kettle on the wood stove, and by God, it made the water hot. So then I tried flipping some corn tortillas and frying my eggs in a little skillet on the stovetop, and by God, they cooked and were good. And then I remembered that there was a cast iron griddle in the cellar (shaped suspiciously like the work surface of the cookstove in the barn, come to think of it), so I brought it up and am going to try cooking naan on it this afternoon. And why not soup, right? So back to the cellar for some of the onions left over from the wedding, onions so immense that they can never be used at one time, and so have never been chosen for use. But what better onion to sweat down for French onion soup, am I right? So now I can smell the onions from the other end of the house and I am chainsmoking cups of the most wonderful green tea, and if the naan works out, a curry would be another good candidate for the cast iron pot.

Possibly the Complete Disaster of the gas leak and broken stove, which evoked yesterday’s anthem, tentatively entitled “Even As Men Wracked Upon A Sand,” has led to a culinary revolution at Wren Cottage. I recall a field trip my son’s class took to a canal, which involved traveling some distance on the canal boat at about 2 miles an hour. I remarked to one of the other moms that this seemed like a pretty good pace at which to live. She was aghast, but I think I just found the right way to cook dinner on the very slow-moving canal boat of my life.

Weather to Fly

2010-01-11T16:03:00.002-05:00

My godfather passed away overnight. He was 83 and had been ill for quite a while. I am the only one in my clan who lives upstate, so I haven’t seen him too much these past few years. I heard how things were going, so I went down over the holidays to visit him at the nursing home. I didn’t expect him to recognize me, but he did. I didn’t think he’d be able to hear me either (he wasn’t about to spend money on a hearing aid when he was old and was just going to die anyway—this went on for about 15 years), but he could. My dad was 18 years younger than Uncle Walter and they had been close all their lives, so Dad spent a lot of time taking care of him and doing for him toward the end. When Dad knelt down by the bed and told him I was there to see him, he replied, “Yeah, they told me she’d be here soon.”

I told him about my recent wedding and showed him pictures of my children. I told him about all the dogs and cats and sheep and chickens we have now, and the turkey, and this led to a conversation about the nursing home’s chicken management strategy, somewhere in the ether between how my grandparents did their annual flock planning and what turned up on the lunch cart at the nursing home. We rhapsodized a bit about roasted chicken on Sundays, and were just getting on to roasted rabbit when the nurses came in to help him dress and give him his medicines. This process must have been exhausting, because after that he went inside himself and was apparently too tired to come back out.

Today I have been thinking of another thing he said to me that day. I asked him whether they’d gotten snow a few days before and he said, “Yeah, when I seen them high cirrus clouds, I knew snow was coming.” I know there is snow coming to us tonight, so I went out to see whether I could tell that from the clouds. Sure enough, they were high, wispy bands. Then I realized that he'd learned to read the weather because he was a pilot, flying his own little Piper, whose engine he had rebuilt himself. Yes, his house and barn and the yard in between were crammed with boxes and piles of junk, but maybe that was because you never knew when you would have to build a flying machine from scratch, go taxiing down the driveway and sail off over the cornfield across the road.

This is a good time to resort to the Elbow song Weather to Fly.

Snow Falling On Sheepers

2010-01-07T11:26:00.003-05:00

The holidays blew by in a muddle of twinkle lights and eggnog, and already it is not black as pitch at 4:30 p.m. any more. That suits me fine. I am glad to lie down and shut my eyes in the darkness, but not before dinner. I am not quite to the point of lending any credence to the seed catalogues on the dining room table, but we’re getting there. I see at the end of the 10 Day Forecast, there’s a day when the high temperature will be in the upper 20s. I guess that will trigger the neuronal cascade that causes your hands to retrieve the credit card and open the websites of key seed companies. My son has already requested that we grow the snappy bi-color hippy tomato Burpee put on their cover this year, the Tye Dye. Why they felt the need to make the two syllables symmetrical, spellingwise, I do not know, but anything that a child wants to do in the garden gets my support.

Meanwhile, back in January, the waste hay that the sheep pull from their manger and then drop while chewing makes up their bed, and it is about a foot deep now. It’s nice and bouncy and full of sheep poo, which the USDA highly recommends, and when it comes time to mulch the kitchen garden in spring, it will be a rich top dressing. Again I am drawn back to the summer garden…. Maybe it’s closer to the surface than I thought. As the woodpile dwindles and the chickens and the turkey stay hunkered down around the de-iced waterer in their end of the barn, I guess we are all hoping so.

Happy Thanksgiving, Dolly Madison!

2009-11-27T10:16:00.002-05:00

In recent days, it has become apparent that Dolly Madison, the turkey, is actually male. She has some black feathers coming on her chest, and the weird red fleshy bits on her head and neck have multiplied. She even has a purple sweep over each eye, like a drag queen in bad early 80’s eyeshadow. The discovery of her true sex has not changed her name or the pronouns by which we all refer to her. We say ludicrous things like, “Look, Dolly’s strutting!” and “Listen, Dolly’s gobbling!” But no one feels obliged to switch to masculine verbiage, and Dolly does not care. Gender is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder.

One more interesting thing about Dolly’s new look: the dingle on her nose, which she seems to be able to operate—at least making it stand up a bit when she’s interested in something, such as my head appearing in the barn door—can also be extended, or drooped I should say, during The Big Show, which involves poofing herself out all over like a Mummer, dropping her wings and revolving majestically so you can get a good view of all sides. When fully drooped, this dingle, barely an inch long at rest, hangs down past the end of her beak. It’s the damndest thing you ever saw. Nature goes to incredible lengths to ensure future generations of turkeys. (Broad-Breasted Whites like Dolly can’t actually mate naturally any more, because they’ve been bred to grow quickly into tasty, easy to pluck T-day entrees, but we’re going to avert our gaze from that fact and dwell instead on where Nature was at in the Turkey Promulgation Project when we intervened.)

Yesterday, Thanksgiving morning, while John was out in the dog garden grilling the tofu for Thanksgiving dinner, I found out that, in addition to his other well-known gifts, such as the ability to cause a woodstove full of miserable, wet firewood to burst into flames simply by putting his hands near it, John is also a turkey conjurer. In the middle of a stream of conversation with Dolly, John interjected, “Give a little whistle!” and Dolly gobbled loudly. He can do this at will, for my entertainment and the children’s. It’s certainly going to be a good party trick when the weather turns warm again.

Invaded by Beauty

2009-11-12T15:58:00.003-05:00

Most the of invasive plant species around here were introduced to this country as ornamentals, then escaped and spread all over the place by means of their very successful reproductive strategies. We have purple loosestrife; Russian olive; that USDA darling of the 1930s, the multiflora rose; and my personal favorite, the bush honeysuckle, which is so shallow rooted that in a fit of pique you can tear one out of the ground with your bare hands, even if it’s 10 times your size. We also have a few pyracanthas, or firethorn, pictured here. They’re a nasty customer, and good luck getting rid of one without chemicals. Fortunately, their successful reproductive strategy involves these beautiful red berries, a real treat at this brown time of year.

Tastes Like Chicken

2009-11-03T14:11:00.004-05:00

Tonight for dinner, we are having our annual Fall Fungus Risotto, starring a new special guest myco-entity, the Sulphur Shelf, aka Laetiporus sulphureus. The Fall Fungus Risotto tradition began early in this century when I found myself one October in Scotland, where I chanced to eat one of the best meals of my life (at the restaurant of a Holiday Inn Express, no less), which included a locally-foraged Autumn Mushroom Risotto.

This experience was too wonderful not to be attempted again, so each year I make my fall risotto with whatever I have on hand, usually some boughten crimini, a dried porcini stock and one or two fresh shrooms extracted from the woods.

We are running late this year, thanks to the wedding; the usual September-October mushroom flush is long gone. In fact, the whole autumn apparently occurred while I was not looking. My friend Pat’s photographs of beautiful local scenery record the foliage that completely escaped my attention while it was hanging right outside my window. This makes me think that in addition to its other bad qualities, excessive stress makes you blind.

However, Nature in her mercy has vouchsafed me a cure for Autumn Deficit Disorder: in spite of the late date, Pat discovered a big clump of a beautiful mushroom that at first we took to be Hen of the Woods. But when I, the ever-dutiful mushroom hunter, went to look it up, I found that it lacked the Hen’s gray color and ground-dwelling location. This beauty was orange, shelf-like and growing on a downed log. It was, in point of fact, not the Hen but the Chicken—Chicken Mushroom being another of its aliases. According to Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America, by David Fischer and Alan Bessette, we may have years of Sulphur Shelves at the Fall Fungus Festival, because they tend to re-grow on the same log for several seasons.

So my autumn has been redeemed with a mushroom new to me, which in its raw state smells dee-vine. It will share the stage with the humble criminis and porcinis we depend upon, as well as some onions from the farmers market, our home-grown garlic and some Arborio rice all the way from Italy. We will eat this glorious feast by the fireplace, accompanied by a nice Shiraz and not much else. I don’t believe in crowding the plate when there is something so extraordinary to concentrate on.

I’ll let you know how it all cooks up.

Autumn Chores

2009-10-20T12:42:00.002-04:00

I got married a week and a half ago, and this past weekend John and I went out to Pennsylvania’s really rural north-central section, where we sought out the elk. We’ve both seen them in the Rockies, but seeing them here at home is better. For one thing, some of them are right by the road and easy to get a good look at, but the main pleasure is in knowing that these big old things live in the same state as you. It makes you feel more genuine somehow.

In the days between the wedding and now, the tent was taken down and the borrowed pans and lemonade dispenser and so forth are slowly being returned to their owners. I have been feeling positively nostalgic for the misty past when I used to occasionally think about dinner more than ten minutes before its scheduled serving time. Yesterday and today the weather has been delightful—warmish and sunny and playing off the yellow leaves that are still on the trees and vines, and I managed to take in the garden hoses and drain the spigots, move the water lily to the frog pond for the winter and put out the floating de-icer to keep the frogs’ ice open so they can respirate way down in the mud at the bottom. There’s one frog in there that is either already asleep or just dead. Can’t say for sure. But most of them are a little active in the warm part of the day and apparently senseless by dark, not unlike myself.

This morning I roasted a pan of squash and broccoli and rutabagas that had been standing around in the fridge for a couple days, and for supper tonight I will make them into a fall vegetable quiche. It makes me feel sane to know what is for dinner tonight when it’s barely past lunch yet, and to have my garden hoses in the garage, and my frogs safely plugged in for winter. I like celebrations, and I had a wildly wonderful time at the wedding, but normal life at its best is so sweet. Life is endlessly entertaining if you’re easily amused. And thank goodness I am.

Barnyard Lockdown

2009-10-14T12:32:00.002-04:00

The barnyard was attacked Monday sometime in the late morning by an unknown assailant. I came home and let the dogs out, then went out to break up the ensuing fight, and found the corgis with the neighbor dog pinned to the stone wall in the barnyard. There were no chicken corpses in sight, so I took him back to his pen and let his family know he was out again. Then I went back to see where all the hens had gotten to, and found a series of disturbing things—a trail of white turkey feathers in the barnyard, just a handful of chickens and no turkey in the hen room of the barn, two terrified sheep with bloodied throats pressed against the back wall of their part of the barn, making no sound. The third sheep, Joshua, was gone.

I ran back to the neighbors', because he’s a dairy farmer and she’s a nurse, and asked them to check and see whether Harry, the sheep with the badly torn throat, needed a vet. They thought he would be all right, and they and their daughter spent an hour combing the orchard, helping me look for the missing sheep. We found downed electric fence, the rest of the hens way up in the rafters of the barn, and even the turkey hiding in the brush pile, but no sheep, no corpse and no kill site. Joshua had four horns, including two that stuck straight up from his head like daggers, so clearly whatever had attacked was fairly large and serious.

I did not think the neighbor dog was implicated because he had no blood on him. He had probably come down and broken up whatever was going on. I felt certain that Joshua had been carried off by a bear, a bobcat or a mountain lion, all of which are known to be working in the area, probably when he came to defend his twin brother whose throat was so badly ripped up. Harry, the hurt sheep, never says anything and depends completely on his brother to decide how to spend his days. What Joshua decides to do, they do. Where he decides to graze, they graze. Part of the sorrow of the attack was how Harry would ever recover from the loss of his twin.

I took in the electric fence for the season, piled an overturned picnic table against the original pasture gate that has a little gap under it, wired the second gate across the opening we’d cut but not yet finished into the most recent electric pasture, then called for my new husband to bring home a bale of hay from the barn at his mother’s dairy farm, since we haven’t laid in our hay yet for the winter. The two remaining sheep would not leave the barn. That night for the first time since winter, I locked them into their room for the night.

John and I had just gotten married Saturday in a tent not far from the barnyard, and I was kind of struck by how fast normal life comes back. Cold rain, rental return people, predators in the orchard. The works.

Then Tuesday morning before I was completely awake, John jumped out of bed yelling, “I hear him! I hear him!” He threw open the window and I could hear Joshua’s familiar voice calling from the opening where the second gate was now blocking his return. In the barn, roaring at the top of his lungs, Harry was calling in reply.

Joshua was not badly hurt. He’s back to chewing his cud in moments of repose, and even venturing out into the barn dooryard to eat dead leaves. Harry follows. And the electrician is out today, wiring outlets into the barn walls, into one of which I am going to plug the permanent fence charger that will electrify the barnyard fence. I considered heavily armed guard towers at the corners of the barnyard as well, but that may be excessive.

You don’t have to lose many sheep to start understanding the people who hunted all the large predators to extinction in eastern North America. I’m not saying it was a good idea, but I think the farther people get from the farm and the woods, the more sentimental they become about animals, and the less they see the even-handedness with which animals murder one another the first chance they get, humans included. Meanwhile, I am 100% on the same page with the biblical author who wrote about the joy of getting your lost sheep back.

Descendant of a Friend

2009-09-18T12:33:00.002-04:00

This week I was mowing and startled a praying mantis that was hunting in the high grass around one of my infant raspberry bushes. He fell all over himself trying to get away, so I passed quickly by to keep the terror to a minimum. Here’s a picture of one I found on the highly amusing garden blog wisdom-of-the-trowel.

I wonder if this mantid is descended from the one who used to sit in the driveway on summer afternoons a few years ago. He and I became closely acquainted; he stars in this poem that appeared in the garden-themed tangle, a limited edition artist book I made with the photographer Michael Poster as part of our 2008 series Ready to Fold.

Mantis at Prayer

Reverently he says grace
before the meal to come,
yet takes the time
to cock his head
to the hundred copies of
my face that fill his eyes.

Is it love? Neither wants
to look away.

If You Fill It, They Will Come

2009-09-08T11:50:00.001-04:00

I have a little frog pond garden right off my office porch, featuring a 50-gallon Rubbermaid stock tank sunk into the earth and filled with some big rocks, a bunch of leaves, some rain water and 23 frogs. There used to be a miniature pink water lily in there, too, but it’s too shaded for the lily to be happy, so I moved that into a galvanized bucket on the front steps, where it gets full sun and actually made a tiny little pink lily flower this summer. Two frogs have moved into that bucket too.

I got the idea for the frog pond several years ago when the children abandoned their blow-up castle swimming pool after a few short weeks of playing The Siege Of Harfleur In Bathing Suits. I didn’t dismantle it in a timely way, and it turned green, and then when I was going to dismantle it because it was green and gross and an eyesore, it turned out to have numerous small frogs in it. At the end of the summer, we collected them all in mason jars and took them to the closest pond, half a mile away. But the next summer, when we dug the hole and inserted the stock tank, it filled right back up with frogs, and not all the same kind, either. The largest one is now more than 3 inches long, which I assume means he or she is an old-timer.

We continued to take them out every fall and carry them down to the pond to sink into the mud for the winter, but then we got a stock tank de-icer, which is a floating heater coil that I run on an extension cord out the basement window. It costs a few bucks a year to keep a little circle of open water in the center of the pond (which you have to have or your frogs will suffocate) but it beats sticking your arms into icy water all afternoon one day in late October, and then never being sure if you got everybody, or if someone is under a rock, resisting salvation. Plus other animals come and drink at the pond on winter nights, which you can tell by the footprints in the snow the next day.

I do wonder how the frogs find new water that is so far from the old water, and whether at night in the springtime, the world is secretly covered with frogs, walking everywhere in search of their new world.

Blackberries & Goldenrod: Must Be September

2009-09-02T10:21:00.001-04:00

Life here is as season-specific as the border of a Tasha Tudor drawing. These days we are awash in the wild blackberries known locally as black caps; the old pastures are full of goldenrod in full bloom; and asters are flowering everywhere, in every shade between white and dark purple. There is a white kind that grows in the shade of the hedgerow along the driveway, and the really stunning big purple ones that appear by the ones or twos in lucky ditches around the county. To my mind there is no garden in the world more beautiful than a disused Pennsylvania pasture in September.

The trees are unusually lush still, thanks to the endless rains of this summer, but the light has turned to the sheer gold of autumn. John mowed some access trails to the blackberry islands so we don’t have to wade through chest-deep goldenrod to get the berries; the children picked enough for a pie one day before school began. It’s getting to where I remember when things happened by what we were eating at the time: long after I am unable to retrieve my children’s birth dates from the archives, I will still remember eating peaches while I nursed my daughter the day after she was born, and the sight of my son, just before he learned to run, bear-walking on 3 limbs down the rows at a u-pick raspberry patch, the other hand busily stuffing his mouth with the squishy red fruits.

The Honey House is Abuzz

2009-08-19T20:04:00.002-04:00

This week is the 152nd annual Harford Fair in Harford, PA, and all the world is there. You can’t walk down the green alley between, say, the Sheep & Swine Barn and the Fine Arts Barn without seeing ten people you know.

Today I worked in the Honey House for the Susquehanna County Beekeepers Association, selling bottles of local honey and beeswax candles and the megapopular 25¢ honey straw. You bite the end off the little plastic tube with your teeth and suck the honey out of the straw. Numerous people confided to me that they looked forward all year to buying their honey straws and walking around the fairground all day, guzzling down the tiny amount of honey within. We also had honey tasting from plastic bear-shaped squeezie bottles—everything from the light, fine clover honey of spring through various shades of wildflower honey including the goldenrod that’s coming in right now to the very dark honey that comes from the white blossoms of the Japanese knotweed plant. Japanese knotweed was introduced into cultivation in the U.S. because it’s really striking and turns from nothing into a shrub-sized presence in just a few months. Unfortunately, it’s wildly invasive and almost impossible to kill without liberal applications of known carcinogens. But at least it makes good honey.

In the observation hive, we displayed a wild swarm that a Beekeepers Association member caught last week. All day we looked for the queen, but nobody ever found her. It could be that this colony doesn’t have a queen at the moment, in which case they will start immediately to raise a new one by feeding an infant worker bee royal jelly. This highly nutritious substance is the only thing standing between the QE2’s and the Melissa’s of the bee world. It is powerful stuff—a few extra days of noshing on royal jelly turns the resulting bee into an egg-laying wonder, the mother of the colony, she who must be fed, groomed, kept at a suitable temperature all year round no matter what the outside climate and also followed if she decides things are too crowded and it’s time to swarm and depart for more spacious environs. No wonder humans want to eat royal jelly! Who knows what amazing changes it might wreak in us! I personally would not want to never go outdoors again so I could lay thousands of eggs a week, but the perks are pretty good if you’re not really the outdoorsy type anyway. Or if bee eggs are your obsessive art form, the highest calling of your tiny, six-legged soul. Hmm. Maybe I’ll try some jelly after all. I could definitely use to log a little more studio time, as my artist friends say.

An Eight Foot Fence Full of Chaos

2009-08-06T13:15:00.003-04:00

I went out to pick whatever peas the chipmunk had overlooked, and I found the way largely impassable due to huge, sprawling catnip, lemonbalm, dill and borage plants covered with flowers. The garden is in a state of total chaos, and I am perfectly happy, because it has at least 2 garter snakes and many dozens of honeybees (not ours), hoverflies and other wild pollinators. Plus John’s garden at the studio is located on bottom land so fine and deep you would think you were in the Midwest, and it is very productive, so the wilderness inside the fence up here on Rocky Top is not causing us to starve.

For example, my new favorite way to consume large quantities of summer squash (which we must do in order to be able to navigate the kitchen) is to sautee them in olive oil with an onion and some garam masala, and then make a raita of it with whole milk yogurt. Ladle that over your rice and lentil kitchree, and you can ascend directly into summertime paradise.

This spring I sacrificed one garden bed to 2 fruit trees; next spring I am thinking of converting another to strawberries, which we love, and so do the deer, so planting them outside the fence is a fool’s errand. Slowly I seem to be converting the kitchen garden to a fruit-and-perennial vegetables garden, leaving the annuals to John and my talented farmer friends. This time next year when the herbs are feeding the pollinators, I will be one bed closer to admitting that this may be the real reason I have the garden to begin with.

The Invisible All Around Us

2009-07-29T19:00:00.004-04:00

For the last two years, ice storms have kept turnout low for bear hunting season around here. As a result, we have more than the usual number of black bears in the neighborhood. A mother bear with three cubs was seen crossing the state highway from the wildlife preserve into our North Orchard in broad daylight this Monday. She is accused of demolishing my neighbor’s beeyard about a mile south of here, although another bear was caught inside the fence, having squeezed herself under three strands of electric barbed wire to do in a few hundred thousand more pollinators. We got to see this second personage, a yearling female—or at least we saw her unrepentant snout—when she was captured in a live bear trap that looks like a cross between a culvert pipe and one of those pull-behind pork barbecue smokers. The photo above shows an example of such posted online by China Creek Internet Service in British Columbia.

I didn’t see the bear family as they crossed our hill (and I hope my dogs never do either), but I found some scat on the single-track trail I mow with the push mower through the every-day-taller goldenrod and grasses of the orchard. The aforementioned dogs were pretty definite about which way the bears went after relieving themselves (straight for the barnyard, but I am not worried, because bears are about the only thing around here besides me that doesn’t eat chickens).

If I hadn’t heard from the postmaster at the Dimock four corners that somebody saw the bears crossing the road, I would not have checked the trail for scat. And I never would have known those bears were out there, at lunchtime, while I worked in my office and the kids played in the woods. One thing you learn when you live here in the winter is that the snow is full of animals who live all around you and you never see them. They are in the business of your not seeing them. And if you can hide several hundred pounds of moving black bear on a sunny hillside, who knows what else there is in this world? Pretty much everything, I guess.

Postcard From Maine

2009-07-22T14:47:00.003-04:00

We are sitting on Jasper Beach, Maine, near the town of Bucksport. We are farther Down East than I’ve ever been, past Acadia National Park by a good long way, and an hour past the town of Milbridge, where we’re staying at Sea Cairn, a 1933 camp house in an enchanted fir and reindeer lichen forest on a point of land in Narraguagas Bay. The human history of the place has been as patiently acquired as the natural history, which contributes to the impression that one is vacationing on the heavily encrusted pages of a fairy story.

Jasper Beach is a fairly steep inclination of very smooth pebbles ranging in size from quail egg to dodo egg, made of every sort of rock you can think of, purple and green and white and gray, every one a door stop or mantel decoration in the making. Points of land run off to either side, creating a small fir-encrusted, mist-wreathed bay. Since we can’t take all the stones (and we have tried), we are burying the children one at a time in rocks. St. John looked like a sculpture; Isaac made a convincing Cairn Man rising from the surface of the beach; and now Phyllida appears to be getting the local spa treatment, which involves being packed from chin to sneakertip in sun-heated, organic, free range glacial moraine stones.

Canada is not that far away, with the great tidal shift of the Bay of Fundy, and even though the day is warm, you can feel that you are approaching the edge of where you will be allowed to go in this world. It is difficult to imagine what conditions would have to be like in your old homeland to inspire you to come here and try to hew a life from the wilderness. And yet much is circumstantial to your upbringing—the lobsterman who was pulling traps this morning in the mist just off the Bear’s Den shed where we slept was listening to the local classic rock station on the boat radio, deep in a work day as unfathomable to me as this stony, hissing, effervescent cove.

On the Nature of Power

2009-07-15T09:53:00.002-04:00

We have three cats. Originally we had one male (Mr. Darcy, a shiny black number with tuxedo highlights who bears more than a passing resemblance to Basement Cat in both appearance and spirit, and yes, he is above his company), and one female (a fat gray cat named Winter because as my then very small daughter observed, she was the color of that season). Life was peaceful. Then we lost Winter for a while last fall, and in her absence, somebody gave us a new kitten. After 2 months, Winter came home, and baby made three.

The kitten was male, as Mr. Darcy immediately apprehended. And like the little boy in A Child’s Christmas in Wales who sees another boy like himself, he hated him on sight. Now, I understand all about the need for alphas to perpetuate their own genes and not those of renegade bachelors hanging around the edges of the tribe. But in light of the fact that we’re all neutered and some of us are pacifists, for God’s sake, I thought maybe we could give the Constant World Domination a rest. But no. Sterling Underfoot, the white kitty, has grown into a fine young man while hiding in trees to avoid having his pearly butt kicked by Darth Kitty (heavy labored breathing and ponderous theme music).

A few days back, Darcy started limping on his passenger side rear paw. It comes and goes but today it is noticeably worse. If he doesn’t heal up soon, we may have to inflict healthcare on him. You would think that if even a lowly human noticed this, the other animals would have been hip to the scene days ago. But as another glorious July morning dawned, the rising sun found Sterling 30 feet up a tree, balanced with one foot on the merest twig stump, singing the epic song of I-am-trapped, trapped-I tell-you-and-like-Odysseus-I-long-to-be-home-but-I-am-not-doing-anything-about-actually-getting-myself-there, while below, Darcy limped around menacingly on three legs.

Naturally this led me to survey my landscape for things I am afraid of, to see if any of them have busted a shin. I wonder how much of our lives we spend avoiding unpleasantness whose butt we could kick with one paw tied behind our back if we had to.

Dolly Madison, A Bird Apart

2009-07-09T13:32:00.009-04:00

Wren Cottage Farm is 10 acres of verdant Pennsylvania hillside, perched atop Woodbourne Hill in Susquehanna County. That's in the Endless Mountains for those keeping score at home. The purpose of this blog is to entertain my city friends with tales from the series Liz calls “As The Hen Turns,” and to give other rural types a sense of comfort that they are not going through this ridiculous life alone.

Today’s story is about Dolly Madison, our little turkey. We’ve never had turkeys before because I am a vegetarian, and there are some animals you really only keep around to eat. But when I was first getting started with chickens, an old-timer told me that turkeys were immune to Marek’s disease, a virus which kills unvaccinated chicks to the tune of 33-50% of your hatch. And the turkeys pass on their immunity to the chickens they live with. So I thought it would be a good $5 experiment to import a day-old turkey from Clodhopper Farm, home of my generous friends Pete and Eliza. Since the very tiny baby bird was a broadbreasted white, I named her Dolly. I figured in a week she’d be bigger than the baby chickens who were 2 weeks her elder, and they would not peck her and annoy her. Unfortunately, Dolly turned out to be not big and brassy but quiet and refined, and given to sticking her head in dark holes when she could no longer bear the ugliness of life. So we added the surname, and when I found her hiding behind the waterer with a bloody nose, I removed her from the toddler room at the chicken juvvie home and built the Madison White House out of an old dog coop we had in the yard.

Dolly is now growing madly, perhaps because she is no longer afraid for her life (you may not realize how mean chickens can be, but the pecking order is serious, and unpleasant), and although it looked for awhile like she literally did not know to come in out of the rain, she is a killer fly-catcher, which keeps the bugs down nicely in the barnyard. In a few more months, Dolly and her attendant staff of bantam English game fowl will move into the barn with the rest of the flock, but for now, she is the primary attraction in the dog garden outside the kitchen door.

And in spite of their extreme ingratitude, not a single chick has been lost to Marek’s this year.