The Meadow View

Fire in the Hole

2012-02-12T20:26:00.000-05:00

When we returned from our Sunday evening egg delivery, the house had cooled down, so I opened the damper on the back of the stove. As the flames caught up, I heard a whoosh and then an intense crackling. Joe stood for a moment listening and then announced, “I think the chimney’s on fire.”

Twenty three years ago, the first time this happened, I grabbed the phone and began dialing the fire department. Joe took the phone from my hands, closed up the back of the stove and sat down to have a beer while I ran around the house gathering up all my prized possessions in case we had to evacuate. Apparently, chimney fires were a fairly common woodstove occurrence. Before calling the volunteer firemen away from their mashed potatoes and gravy, country courtesy required that you try to put out the fire yourself. So, when the stove had cooled a bit we searched for something that Joe could use to knock down the smoldering creosote. Lacking a long board, we settled on my horse lunge line and an old spade I’d inherited from my grandmother. We tied the spade to the end of the rope and Joe climbed the ladder to dangle it down the chimney. The blade swung around knocking creosote loose. This worked pretty well until we melted the handle of the spade.

After twenty years of dealing with stopped up smoke holes I was surprised two years ago when Joe actually handed me the phone. Flames and sparks were rising from the chimney and after singeing his eyebrows, he decided that it was too hot for us to deal with. All of the firemen are neighbors, so we chatted while they scrambled up and down their ladders. Dressed in their heavy coats and smoke shields, they hauled up a heavy chain hooked to a steel punch and dropped it down into the fiery pit. When they were finished, I served my local heroes coffee and cookies before they headed back to their farms.

Although we clean our chimney every summer, about mid-winter, it usually stops up again. Joe has stood on our slick roof in fifty mile per hour winds, thunderstorms and blizzards. He said tonight was a piece of cake. After years of practice, my husband has perfected his technique. He scrambled up the ladder and I handed him a fifteen- foot long stick and a chimney sweep’s brush. After punching the stick into the smoking tunnel, Joe swooshed the brush up and down a few times while I shoveled out the hot creosote that clattered down to the clean out hole. We actually meant to have Scott do this for us when he was home, but forgot to ask him.

No matter. The chimney is clean, the smoke is rising, and Joe finished in time to watch Virginia Tech beat Boston College.

A Lot of Lambs and a Hardworking Man

2012-02-08T18:30:00.002-05:00

The moon is full and so are the barns. That extra bit of moon-inspired gravity is hastening the lambing. Fourteen ewes have dropped thirty-two lambs to the straw in the last week. The barnyard is full of leggy lambs and Joe’s days are full of work. He starts each morning with a trip to the lambing barn. That’s where the pregnant ewes spend their nights. If there are new lambs, then Joe cleans out a stall, adds fresh hay for bedding, carries the lambs in, chases the mama in and then feeds some hay and grain. Sometimes there’s only one ewe nosing a lamb or two around in the straw, but other mornings there might be three ewes and six lambs all jumbled together. They must be sorted out, but Joe has some tricks up his sleeve. He pulls the similar looking lambs into separate areas of the barn. The moms can identify their lambs by smell and sound, so they run around, sniffing and bleating until they’ve claimed their babies. When all of the new families have been moved into stalls, the rest of the ewes are shooed out to the meadow where they are fed three gallons of grain and two bales of hay.

After his stint in the maternity ward, Joe visits the nursery. Each stall in the bottom of our barn is divided in half to accommodate two sets of ewes and lambs. He visits each stall, checking on the lambs and gathering up the black rubber water buckets. After several trips to the water hydrant, all the mamas have fresh water. Then Joe scoops up five gallons of grain and gives each ewe her breakfast. If the lambs are new, he dips their umbilical cords in iodine to prevent bacterial infections. If they are at least a day old and looking healthy, he bands their tails and testicles. If they’ve been banded for at least a day, then each lamb is painted with a number to match mama’s ear tag. This makes it easier to sort them out later.

From the barn, Joe carries two five gallon buckets of grain out to the orchard lot. That’s where the older lambs and ewes stay until they are turned out to pasture. He dumps his buckets into the five sided feeders. Then he fills a trough with water. After that, Joe climbs into the hay mow and throws down six bales of hay. When the ewes finish the last of the grain, they get two of the fifty pound bales. If Joe is lucky, then that’s it for the sheep until suppertime, but more often than not, there’s a ewe in a stall who won’t nurse a lamb, so she must be tied and the lamb held in place to nurse. Or there is a triplet whose mama didn’t have enough milk. So Joe goes up to the house, mixes a bottle of milk replacer and then carries it back down to the barn for the hungry baby.

All of these things happen before Joe goes off to the shop for the day. They are repeated in the evening, after work, along with feeding all of the cows. No wonder my husband spends most of his evening after supper napping in his chair.

Dark Skies

2012-01-29T12:05:00.000-05:00

     I woke up at three o’clock the other morning and leaned out of my open window far enough to rotate my body and stare straight up. There was no moon and the sky was freckled with stars. The Milky Way, which is just an edge-on view of our home galaxy, was a river of light, with Orion hoisting his sword on one side and the twins Castor and Pollux striding across the other. When I was growing up in Richmond, I could see the moon and, on a really good night, I could see the Big Dipper and North Star. I had no idea that there were so many other stars in the sky until I moved to the mountains. The skies here are so perfect for star gazing that when my brother comes to visit, he says he likes to look for UFO’s. Apparently the bright lights of the city would hide an alien invasion. So far he hasn’t seen any but I think that’s just his macho way of disguising his pure delight in studying such a jewel-encrusted firmament. Realtors even refer to it in ads designed to sell property around here. “Come enjoy the dark skies!” they enthuse. ( dark sky map )
     My father has installed lights on the woodshed so that we can feed the dogs at night, but sometimes, I prefer a starlight stroll. I walk through starshine and starshadow across the dim back forty, straining my neck as I try to find constellations that I can identify. When I was a camper in middle school, my camp director, John Ensign, used to have us lie face up in a field. Using the beam of a powerful flashlight, he would point out the obvious Big and Small Dippers, and then show us the other stars that make up the Big Bear. He would trace the line from the end of the Small Dipper to the North Star and we would lie in the field with dew dotting our cheeks until we saw all the other stars in the sky rotate around its fixed point.
     When I began to teach science I learned that light from our nearest star, the sun, takes eight light-minutes to reach us, while light from the North Star, Polaris, takes 430 light years to travel to my eyes. My students always gasp when I tell them that if the sun were to die, we wouldn’t know it on earth for at least eight minutes. That’s when the last photons would finish their trip through space to reach us. Even more amazing is the fact that if the North Star were to go dark, its light would still be visible for over four hundred years here on earth. Perhaps the star I was studying in that dewy field was already a fading memory and that twinkle just a part of the light stream still beaming its way across the cosmos. I love stars for their beauty but also for the size of the ideas they bring to my imagination. That and they are a really good diversion from a menopausal hot flash on a cold winter night.

Dimple Dirt

2012-01-21T16:13:00.000-05:00

I found myself on my hands and knees this afternoon, scrubbing my kitchen floor with a toothbrush. There was no drill sergeant standing above me shouting orders. I had simply had enough of dimple dirt. I think anyone who has ever made the mistake of putting in a linoleum floor decorated with dimples will know what I am talking about. Those little dimples make the floor look almost like real stone, but they are dirt magnets. I bought my floor because it was about the color of barn mud. I thought. But it isn’t. It’s lighter. Considerably lighter. The dimple dirt has made that abundantly clear.

I had been sort of living with the dimple dirt, fooling myself into believing that it didn’t really show too much, when our new puppy began to baptize the floor with little yellow puddles. Did you know that puppy pee dissolves dimple dirt? Ammonia would probably do the same thing since chemically it’s pretty darn close, but it also smells rather like what I’m trying to prevent, so I decided to try some Oxyclean. Ta DAH! Oxyclean plus a toothbrush destroy dimple dirt. I even got out my Sonic Care (I was pretty desperate) and gave it a whirl. (using my spare toothbrush head of course) It worked pretty well. So now, I’m designing a machine made up of tiny toothbrush heads all spinning in different directions. I can’t be the only one battling dimple dirt. When I get it all figured out I’ll sell it and make millions. Keep watching this blog for your chance to buy it for only $19.99 plus shipping and handling. But, Wait! There’s more. For an additional handling charge, I’ll throw in a puppy!

The Prodigal Chicken Returns

2012-01-16T20:15:00.000-05:00

The prodigal chicken has been returned to the roost. Those of you who read my blog regularly will remember that in September I wrote about our wayward hen.The Prodigal Chicken Shortly afterwards, Joe captured her and locked her up in the chicken house for three days. Since hens have brains the size of a walnut, he figured that was long enough for her to forget all about her previous adventures in town. But, as soon as Joe let her back out, Hen Rietta waddled back out to the road and resumed roosting under the trailer. Why didn’t the chicken cross the road? Because she didn’t have to. The men working on the bridge welcomed her back with cheese doodles and potato chips. Then another chicken joined her and the two old biddies were spotted regularly about town. They became somewhat of a tourist attraction, visiting the store, the post office and even the church. Last week, two friends and I were taking our daily walk when we spotted my rebellious hens strolling along the sidewalk across the road. Caroline and Lori offered to help me chase them down, but I vetoed the idea. As a veteran of the first chicken war, I knew the only result of our efforts would be some mighty fine entertainment for passing motorists.

Then, last night, the local storekeeper called the house to report that she had one very mad hen boxed and ready for pick up. Apparently Hen Rietta stuck her head just a little too far into the Stonewall Grocery and Joannie dropped a box over her head. The other hen must have run home. We retrieved our boxed biddy and brought her up to our farm, six miles north of town. If she gets a yen for cheese doodles, I think we can count on Tip, the Chicken Chasing cat to bring her home.

A Nest Full of Joy

2012-01-08T19:55:00.000-05:00

     Today was a beautiful , warm sunny January day. The whole winter has been warmer than usual, but I still count every sunny day as a gift. After walking several miles with friends, I met Joe at the woodpile and we loaded up the truck and drove it home to unload in our shed. Then we split up to do chores. He fed the steers while I gathered eggs.
     The hens were still running around outside, enjoying the opportunity to scratch unfrozen ground, when I climbed the steps to the house. The hens are all Red Sex-Links. We bought them because they are prolific layers and their eggs are all a warm brown, but today I found an egg that was almost white. As I held that pale egg in the palm of my hand I was transported back to the first year we had chickens.
     It was Scott’s idea to get them. He asked for a flock shortly after his grandma died. She had always had chickens and he enjoyed helping her grind corn for them and gather eggs. So we built a chicken house and he purchased his first flock of biddies. He loved taking care of his feathered friends and gathering what Joe calls “henfruit.” One day, Scott came running to the house. He had found a whitish egg in the nest, along with the brown ones and wanted to know what had caused it. I couldn’t answer him, but I am ashamed to admit that I immediately saw an opportunity for a great practical joke. The next day, before he came home from the farm where he often spent afternoons with his dad, I snuck a pure white store-bought egg into the nest.
    As soon as Scott gathered eggs, he ran to the house to show me the white shelled wonder. Again, he asked me how it was possible for one of his hens to lay such a pale egg. “And this one is even whiter than yesterday, Mom,” he said. “Hmm,” I pondered. “Maybe there is something in the feed.”
     The next day, I snuck two white eggs in the nests and the following day, I put in three. Each day we discussed possible reasons for the faded out eggs. I offered the explanation that maybe the growing day-length might have something to do with it, or maybe the hens knew Easter was next Sunday and were laying eggs that were easier for us to dye.
     The following day, I shook some Rit dye into three cups of vinegar, and then when they were dry, placed the red, green and blue eggs in the nests. When I tell the story of his excitement, Scott claims that he knew all along what was going on and that he was just playing along with me, but I still cling to the idea that I fooled him.

     There are so many wonderful memories connected to the henhouse: of the boys helping Burley build it, of Scott selling his first dozen eggs, of countless conversations held in the kitchen as we washed eggs together. In the last one hundred years, Americans have become more mobile. We travel to far away places for vacations, we move to pursue careers, we move to larger houses and better neighborhoods. When I married my husband, I knew that I would be bucking that trend. I was marrying a man, but I was also marrying a farm. I was worried about planting my feet so firmly in one place, but I have discovered something about myself. Like the hens, I am a nester. I can no longer imagine a roving life. I like living in a place where every hill, every field, every building connects my past to my present. Where the simple act of gathering eggs becomes so much more than a simple chore.

Dreaming of Dragons

2012-01-02T12:25:00.001-05:00

    Justin gave Joe a new beagle pup for Christmas, so what better way to ring out the old than to take the new baby plus the two granny beagles for a run on the last sunny day of the year. We loaded Cindy and Sandy into the beagle box on the back of the truck and tucked the little one in with his wise and wiley teachers. He was off for his first lesson in tracking rabbits.
     The ground was wet after a soaking rain from the night before, but the weak winter sun was drawing scent up from it. A perfect day to roust out some rabbits. We took the dogs to one of our fields where thorns and Devil’s Shoestring and Barberry bushes have overrun some of the rocky ridges. It’s perfect rabbit territory. The older beagles were anxious to be away and jumped from the truck with alacrity. The pup hung back, unsure of what to do. As soon as they landed the two old girls dropped their noses to the ground and whuffled and snuffled searching for an invisible trail left by any rabbit. The pup was placed on the ground and he followed along behind, pretending to understand what all the sniffing was about. It wasn’t long before one of the human members of our party inadvertently rustled up a rabbit. Shane brushed up against a small thicket and out pelted the fluff-tailed fellow. The dogs were quick to spot the rabbit and took off in hot pursuit. But Bugsy ran straight down the fencerow, outdistancing the dogs in an instant. No matter. They laid their noses to the ground and with their long ears scooping up scent, they followed the rabbit’s invisible trail. Musical howls floated down the valley as the dogs zigzagged across the rocky field. It always amazes me when I see how accurately they can follow a trail made of dead skin cells, hair follicles and rabbit breath. The dogs tracked the rabbit to his den and then we pulled them off to look for another one.
     For an hour, the beagles circled through the thick brush, tails beating time to the their inhalations. The pup had tired at this point and was tucked in my coat, napping. We had almost given up hope, when the dogs began to yip. They had picked up another trail. Diving into a thorny thicket, they succeeded in dislodging another hare. The rabbit headed west and the dogs, with full throated bays, scrabbled after him. Rabbits always circle back to where they started, so we climbed to a high spot to watch the action. The rabbit would hop far enough ahead to rest in the brush and hide while the dogs worked out his trail. When they closed in, he would leap out ahead again. Thus he led them full circle. On his second pass into the cedars, the rabbit must have made a huge side leap. The dogs lost him there. They worked circles for a while, but were unable to find where he had landed, so we gathered them up and stuffed them back into the dog box. The dogs weren’t tired, but at five o’clock, the sun was already behind the mountains. It was time to go home and celebrate an appropriate end to the Year of the Rabbit. The Year of the Dragon starts January 23rd. I wonder what the dogs will chase then?

Dreaming of Dragons.

I Wonder as I Wander

2011-12-25T09:30:00.000-05:00

When we left the barn service last night the sky was spangled with strands of stars, draped against the black night, linking Orion to the Big Dipper to the North Star. My breath smoked against the sky and I started singing under my breath, “I wonder as I wander out under the sky, how Jesus our Saviour did come for to die, for poor ornery people like you and like I. I wonder as I wander out under the sky.” It’s a haunting melody that I just learned this year and I think I love it so much because it is an Appalachian tune. According to the autobiography of John Jacob Niles, the fellow who first heard it in the deeply poor mountain town of Murphy, North Carolina, “A girl had stepped out to the edge of the little platform attached to [an] automobile. She began to sing. Her clothes were unbelievable dirty and ragged, and she, too, was unwashed. Her ash-blond hair hung down in long skeins.... But, … she was beautiful, and in her untutored way, she could sing.”
That little girl was with me in the barn that night. She was standing right there in front of Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus listening to the soft breathing of the cows, turning to watch the shepherds stride up to the manger, tipping her head to hear the choir in the loft above her. She was there with the other blessed, the meek at heart, the poor, the mourning, the ones who came to see a miracle wrapped in swaddling clothes. She’s the reason Jesus was born in a dirty barn, laid in a manger full of hay and wrapped in second hand rags. She was me and I was her, and together we watched our king reach his tiny hand out from the lamp-lit manger and welcome us in.

There's a Song in the Air

2011-12-21T20:04:00.000-05:00

And the star rains its fire while the beautiful sing

For the manger of Bethlehem cradles a king….

    Who are the beautiful that sing around the manger in Bethlehem? I have heard some of them this Advent season. This morning, we attended services at the church on the farthest edge of our charge. In fact it is across the state line about three miles. The children of that little white church in the wildwood recited poetry, rang bells and re-enacted the Christmas story from Luke. They were cute and silly and charming and brought tears of laughter and joy to more than one person in the congregation. My favorite child was three year old Sydney. She wore white tights, black patent leather shoes and a green velvet dress and she was in charge of a little orange bell, but she never rang it on cue. She became so engrossed in the music of her fellow bell-ringers that she leaned over, placed her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her upturned bell. “Hark the Herald Angels” rollicked merrily along until it was time for the littlest bell. There was a four count silence while Sydney looked out at the congregation and grinned. Finally, her brother elbowed her, she straightened up, removed her chin from the bell and waved it vigorously over her head. The congregation’s response was so encouraging, that she repeated this performance throughout the remainder of the song.
     After the children’s service, the charge choir presented a cantata. The music was challenging and I never thought we would master it, but on Sunday morning we filed into the narrow pews up front and began our assault on the difficult piece. Somehow that assault turned into grace. Our choir director who had suffered and worried through our disastrous practices grinned through the whole piece. We could see in her joyous smile that somehow we had managed to pull it off.
     As we sat down, I was suddenly aware of all the humans across the nation worshipping the same way. On the edge of the Pacific, childish shepherds and kings were walking solemnly up the aisles as the story from Luke was read. In the midwest, bell-ringers were throwing joyous notes up to the heavens. On the east coast choirs were sending alleluias out to the nation. This Advent we were the beautiful singing while the star rained its fire. We were the choir of a king.

Indisposable Christmas

2011-12-10T10:17:00.000-05:00

I have begun the process of decorating my house for Christmas. I don’t do it because I love decorating, but because I love the memories associated with each thing I put out. Therein, lies the problem. I cannot throw away anything given to me in love. Instead, it is wrapped in tissue and placed in a box so I can dither about whether or not to put it out again. In fact, I would prefer to have a rather Spartan house for Christmas. With a wood stove, every ornament and decoration requires weekly dusting. But those full boxes glare at me from the top of my closet and the dark edges of the attic. “We are up here!” the ornaments and angels howl. “It is Christmas and we need to come out and celebrate.” So far, I have resisted their clattering cries.
I have put up one small tree, which I admit I bought new this year at the Dollar General for twelve dollars. I have not hung a single decoration on it, except for the string of lights it came with, but they are menopausal. Hot one moment, cold the next: the whole string blinks on and off randomly. In spite of its shortcomings, I am positive that this tree will also find a home in my attic to join the clattering crowds next year. I’ve also draped one garland around an interior door. It is covered with Santas given to me by various family members or found on memorable trips.

The only other decorations currently in sight are my advent wreath (presented to me by my godmother when I was five) and a nativity scene I made years ago. Although it stays out year-round, I’ve moved it to a shelf right above my kitchen sink, so I can contemplate the true meaning of Christmas as I wash dishes.

There are five more boxes of decorations that could be brought out to the light. The Christmas village given to me piece by piece by my youngest son. No matter where I place it the cats seem to find it and break another house or barn or church. Catzilla meets Christmas. Three hundred angels given to me by students and friends. In a small town, if you tell one person something, soon the whole village knows. I’m sure parents who were trying to find the perfect teacher gift were ecstatic to discover I had a collection of angels at home. Every year, I unwrap at least five more. When I put the whole collection on display, it reminds me of humanity. After almost fifty years of collecting, there are inevitably some cracked angels, dirty angels, angels with missing body parts and angels that can no longer stand up straight. Still they remain a part of my collection. Isn’t it sacrilegious to throw an angel away? I try to rotate them so they all get a vacation in a warmer climate. Here we are only two weeks from Christmas and they are all still shivering in the Antarctic Attic. What to do? What to do? If I put any out, they will grow a little grayer with stove dust and Catzilla will mangle a few more.

This Christmas quandary reminds me of the true gift given at Christmas. Christ came down to a world full of mess and made joy. He left no one in the Antarctic Attic. He continually straightens those among us who wobble. He chases away Catzilla and glues the world back together. Sigh….I guess it’s time for me to unpack the angels.

Christmas Lights

2011-12-02T23:02:00.003-05:00

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1:5
     December is the month when darkness descends on the mountains. At 4:30, the shadows they cast are already halfway across the valley. By 5:30, the first star rises up from the southeast. Not actually a star, Venus looks like the headlight of an approaching truck as it crests the shoulder of a distant ridge. But, the bright planet is not the only light sparkling across the shadows. Christmas lights, like lovely swags of fallen stars are draped on fences and eaves. I am a December baby and my favorite birthday present is a trip through the lonely countryside in search of the delicate strings of Christmas lights that brighten the total darkness of a mountain winter.
     This afternoon, I visited a local landmark: the old Elementary School, now a community center. Light from Christmas trees and garlands spilled out the wide double doors into the twilight as I climbed the steps. It is Wintertide in Highland and local artists and crafters were set up inside the wood floored gym peddling their hand-made gifts. The thing about living in a small town is that you can’t go anywhere without stopping for a chat. As I shopped, every person I met was a friend. Three of them shared their stories with me. A grandmother, raising two grandchildren, worried about their school progress. A mother, struggling with the rigors and fears of cancer treatments spoke about an upcoming bone marrow transplant. A past student who is running a very successful catering business talked about the challenges of raising a daughter and tending to business. The stories I was told will be told again. Over cups of coffee, in local stores, from telephone to telephone the message will travel like those lights strung from post to porch. And the telling will not be gossip, but will instead bring light to dark places. Folks will offer help and encouragement.
     As the nights grow longer, the Christmas lights beckoning from the edges of meadows and mountains make me thankful that my country neighbors know all about how to shine in the darkness.

Turkey and Blessings

2011-11-27T20:30:00.002-05:00

     This week the whole family gathered at my house to celebrate the first truly American holiday: Thanksgiving. My house overflowed with siblings, nieces, nephews, and my mom and dad. We measured the three oldest male cousins against their annual ladder of growth marks on the wall. Once again, they have grown taller and more mature. I’m sure it was just yesterday that these three were hitting each other over the head with croquet mallets and chasing each other with fire-sticks from the yearly campfires. Now they tower over all but their dads, entertain themselves with less violent pursuits and even ask what they can do to help.
      I fretted for a week before everyone came. How would I get everything done? There was shopping to finish, beds to strip, floors to polish, furniture to dust, kitchen cabinets to clean, a stove to scrub. The list felt endless, but then I remembered: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Each day I concentrated only on what needed to be done before dark. That, plus help from the young man who occasionally comes to clean for me, calmed my anxieties. Although I’ve always been sure that the hostess gene skipped me, I was able to figure out menus for each day, satisfactory sleeping arrangements for fourteen people, entertainment for the younger ones, and how to get the turkey cooked perfectly.
     The week was full of laughter and some happy tears. There was singing and games and stories retold. There were walks and rocks for splashing and a hammock for swinging wildly under the tree. We gathered evergreens on Friday and the children made wreaths then, on Saturday, my sister and I decorated my front gate for Christmas. There were Christmas presents passed from car to car and some left behind to be opened in a month. There was even a birthday cake.
     Joe says the whole family came, ate everything in sight and left. But, he was laughing as he said it. The yearly pilgrimage to the farm is a treasured tradition for us. I went in early one morning and curled up in bed with my mom. She asked me if getting ready had been too overwhelming. If she had asked me two weeks before everyone arrived, I might have said, “yes.” But, as soon as my nephew started strumming his guitar for me, as soon as my two nieces begged for homemade grape-juice, “the kind with the grapes still floating in it,” as soon as all of us joined hands around the table, it was more than worth it. The family bonds that we rebuild each year are precious. Oh, and how did I cook that perfect turkey? I didn't. My brother-in-law cooked it for me.

And There Was Pie

2011-11-17T23:25:00.001-05:00

Last week, on Veteran’s Day, the entire school system turned out to celebrate service men and women in our rural community. Every student in the county, plus all the teachers, principals and aides paraded down Main Street to honor those who have protected our freedoms. The senior class spent several days after school constructing a replica of Iwo Jima on a haywagon. The sixth graders spent their own money on flags to hand out to the watching crowd. The band marched, the kindergarteners dressed in historical costumes, the fourth grade rode a red white and blue float waving flags and hand painted signs in honor of the soldiers. The other students paraded behind homemade banners and highly decorated three- quarter ton pick up trucks. It was a day that no one will forget.

On Wednesday evenings, several local churches coordinate an after-school program for children in grades K to 12. This program concludes with a meal cooked by three women who volunteer in the kitchen after working all day at other jobs. Each Wednesday, they whip up supper for forty to fifty eager eaters and then stay late to clean up. They eat their own meal standing up . Suppers are always home-made. For many children, this may be the only sit down family style meal of the week so these kitchen angels take their job very seriously. Home-made pizza, fried chicken, meatloaf. The meal last week was an early celebration of Thanksgiving. It involved two roasted turkeys, twenty pounds of potatoes mashed and smothered in gravy, huge bowls of stuffing bursting with celery and onions and sausage, home-made whole wheat rolls and pie. Pie with hand made crusts. Pie that was flaky and piled high with hand cut apple slices or filled to the brim with creamy pumpkin custard. No frozen crusts or canned apples in sight. Pie that said, “I love you.”

Tonight, one of our community leaders with a passion for mission work, spent her fourth evening in the back room of the local church collecting shoe boxes full of goodies for children for Operation Christmas Child. http://www.samaritanspurse.org/index.php She and her sister-in-law are aiming to collect five hundred boxes from our community of 2500 people. That’s one box for every five people. They’ve canvassed the elementary school WRE program, the county 4H program, the high school National Honor Society and every member of every church in every valley. So far over two hundred fifty boxes have been packed into bigger boxes for a trip to Charlotte, NC. The two women will follow these shoe boxes south and spend three long days helping pack hundreds of thousands of boxes for transport overseas. They won’t get paid for this and in fact will spend their own money to travel and stay in the area so they can work.

Pie. It’s all pie. Pie piled high with hand cut apple slices. Pie with home-made crusts. Pie that says, “I love you.”

The Meaty Season

2011-11-08T21:29:00.001-05:00

     I have eaten my fill of meat this week. We have put our garden to rest. My cellar shelves are loaded with jars of pickles, beans, tomatoes, grape juice, jelly, relishes, applesauce and peaches. There are baskets of potatoes and boxes of apples stacked on the floor. Normally I would also have strings of onions dangling from the ceiling, but this was not a good onion year. Although the fresh fruits and vegetables have petered out, the season of meat has begun. We had squirrel gravy a couple of weeks ago and now we are eating venison. I recently read a book by author/historian Warren Blackhurst who chronicled the lives of settlers in this area. In one chapter of his book, A Mixed Harvest, the main character, Andy, notes that the weather is finally cool enough for the family to hunt some venison and hang it in the meat house. The season of meat was dependent on weather cool enough for the keeping.
     Although we have a refrigerator and a freezer we, like those settlers of old, still focus a portion of our menus around what’s available. And what’s available right now is deer meat. We have cut up the hams for the freezer, fried the tenderloin for supper and breakfast, and processed the shoulders into jerky. Even the dogs share in the feast. Joe drags the remains over to their houses and they disappear so deep into the carcass that only their wagging tails are visible. They won’t eat dried kibble again until they have stripped the last of the scraps from the bones. I’m hoping for at least two more deer before the season ends because canned venison is my go-to for a quick supper. Then after hunting season, we will have a hog butchered and, after that, a beef.
     Joe still remembers his family doing all of their butchering on the farm. In fact when I met him, the pole and barrel for scalding hogs was still out in the barnyard. Joe doesn’t miss the killing and hard work of getting the meat wrapped and salted and ground, but he does miss dipping cracklings out of the rendering kettle and the resulting cans of pure white fat that were perfect for popcorn. No matter. Some of our neighbors still butcher on their farms so we can visit them and lend a hand for some lard if we’ve a mind to. For these families, meat season is a season of in-gathering. The kids and grandchildren are drawn back to the farm each November to hunt deer and then again in January to butcher the hogs. In this way, traditions and skills are passed to the next generation.
     I had a friend who moved to the county from the city and immediately acquired a flock of fat breasted chickens and a mob of meaty rabbits. I still remember her amazement as she described how the butchering was for her five-year old. Elizabeth was afraid that her very girly girl would be offended or frightened by the process. Instead, her blond headed cherub squatted over the offal and dug through it, asking questions and watching with interest as the chickens ran around like chickens with their heads cut off do. I know some people are offended by the idea that meat once ran around, but for this little girl, it was just a part of the circle of life. Hakuna Matata and all that. Our ancestors were not vegetarians. They couldn’t afford to be. There was a season for fresh fruits and vegetables and a season for meat. It’s the same on my farm.

A Scary Halloween

2011-11-03T22:31:00.000-04:00

Pumpkins glare at me from every stoop and step as I drive home. They are twinkly reminders that a small amount of light can illuminate a whole lot of darkness, even if it is coming from a scowling face. In church on Sunday, my minister talked about Halloween. While he’s against it in principal, he said there are times when it can bring communities together. His words took me back to Tylerton on Smith Island. When I was still hale and hearty enough to take my sixth grade students on a three day trip to this island, out in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, twice we managed to land there close to Halloween. Because the life of a waterman is harsh and dangerous, many of the families had moved off-island for easier work. Tylerton was a community with only four children left and it was a mighty quiet place. So, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation educators had my students create wacky costumes from found objects and then go trick-or-treating in the 25 house community. The islanders welcomed the sound of unruly children roaming the streets and celebrated Halloween for a week with each successive group of students.
Our village also used to echo with the laughter of cowboys and princesses and nerds and outlaws, but this Halloween the streets were subdued. There are less than three hundred children left in our county. Like the Smith Islanders, many of our Appalachian farm families have had to move to the lowlands for work. So, houses compete for the trick-or-treaters because the giggly Martians and sober hobos bring us hope that our community isn’t done, yet. I managed to bribe two miniature cowboys down my long driveway with a promise of home-made cookies. Even teen-agers well into high school are welcomed with Snickers bars and popcorn balls. Children make noise and remind us that we are still alive. A Halloween without children is one of the scariest nights I can imagine.

Squirrel Gravy

2011-10-28T21:03:00.002-04:00

     One of the advantages of being a teacher is all of the nifty presents I get from my students. At Christmas there are the usual coffee mugs and stationary and Russian Tea and homemade jams and boxes of cookies, but my favorite gifts come at other times of the year.
     One of the first gifts I was given as a new teacher was a handful of teaberries. I didn’t know what they were and I was a bit suspicious of the grubby hand holding the squished berries. “Go ahead, teacher, they’re good,” Robert said, and so after watching him eat one, I tentatively placed a berry in my mouth. They were good, tasting faintly minty and remarkably like teaberry gum. He grinned and a month later gave me my next teacher gift, a dime-store diamond ring which he had won at our annual Halloween Carnival. Robert waited until the class was quiet and then strolled up to the blackboard where I was writing up the day’s assignments. Dropping to one knee, the gangly 6th grader took my hand and asked me to marry him. I was tongue-tied. Fielding marriage proposals from love-struck boys hadn’t come up in my college classes and I think my blushing “No” probably hurt his feelings. As soon as possible, I sought the sage counsel of my principal who had a little talk with my sixth grade suitor and explained to him why the state wouldn’t allow him to marry one of his teachers.
     My first year of teaching, I also received a batch of morel mushrooms and a bag full of ramps. Both gifts were harvested by my students and carried to me in brown paper sacks. I learned a lot about mountain hospitality that year, and even after twenty-eight years of teaching, I can still be surprised by my students’ generosity. Last Saturday, I was in the kitchen finishing up a batch of applesauce, when I heard a knock on the door. When I opened it, I was greeted by one of my eighth grade boys. His father was out in the truck behind him and waved to me as his son handed me a Ziploc bag full of skinned and dressed squirrels. I had mentioned in a class the week before that I had never successfully made squirrel gravy, so his mom brought me some gravy and biscuits the next day and shared her recipe. I never expected to then receive a bag full of fresh-killed ingredients for my own efforts.
     I made the gravy and we had fried squirrel with biscuits and gravy for supper. Our visiting minister mentioned at a cover-dish lunch that next afternoon, that, although he had travelled all around the world and eaten some strange and wonderful dishes, he wished he could taste some true mountain food. Imagine my surprise when he said that what he’d really always wanted to taste was squirrel gravy. I believe it was ordained by God that I still had some left in the fridge. I carried him a container full that evening. My friend, Robin, says it is bad luck to thank someone for a gift. Instead you should pass the blessing on. Forevermore, squirrel gravy will remind me of the blessings of gifts given and received in my remote mountain home.
P.S. For the recipe, check out my other blog Singing in the Kitchen

A Cloud Free Day

2011-10-05T21:52:00.003-04:00

As the sun sank down into the clear sky tonight, I rested against the farm truck and whistled a reply to the screech owl calling from somewhere on the mountain to my right. I think he was announcing the stars. It’s been a dark fall. Day after day and night after night of cloudy weather has made all the critters, including me, a bit depressed. Our hens, who were averaging 12-14 eggs a day, have lost their motivation, producing nary a yolk for almost a month. My beagle quit eating. The vet could find nothing wrong with her and she withered down to a walking skeleton, with hip bones like anvils, and ribs like a washboard. But, this week, the sun came out and the clouds rolled back and the hens laid three eggs and the beagle ate a bowl of cat food and the owls are hooting for joy.

Monarchs and Mantids

2011-10-01T16:17:00.000-04:00

The monarch butterflies are headed south. I sat on the edge of my garden last week and, in only thirty minutes, I counted 300 fluttering above the zinnias. The generation that is wafting south is not the generation that flew north. In fact there are three generations in between. Somehow the fourth generation knows at the end of August to turn around and start the trip south to the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico. This generation is the only one to make the entire trip and will fly up to 3,000 miles home. My classroom full of sixth graders sat outside yesterday to watch and count. The students were unusually subdued, pointing quietly as bits of orange and black fluttered by. I saw wonder in their faces. Our official count was 61 monarchs in ten minutes which we posted on http://www.journeynorth.org/ .

Other insects on the move have found a temporary home in our classroom. We adopted a few fat praying mantis females and brought them in so we could observe the production of their oothecas

(oh uh thee’ kas). The students provided a balanced diet of crickets and grasshoppers which mantids hold and eat just like an ear of corn. Every morning a crowd of kids converged on my classroom for the morning feeding and their favorite part of the show was watching the alien-faced bugs preen like cats at the end of their meals. Finally, a female rewarded us with an egg case and we rewarded her by releasing her outside. The next day she was at our window, tapping with her folded claws until we let her in and fed her. The following day, she came again, but that was the last we saw of her. She will die soon, but we will tie her ootheca to the dogwood tree outside our window and hopefully, one day in the spring, we will be greeted by 1,000 baby mantids tapping at the window in search of lunch.

Prodigal Chicken

2011-09-28T21:35:00.001-04:00

     Imagine my surprise when I pulled up to the little country store in McDowell and discovered one of our red hens preparing to make a purchase. She was perched on the edge of the concrete step, perhaps considering what type of butter to buy for her bread, but when she saw me hop out of the car, she skedaddled. Zigging and zagging, that sassy clucker dodged under a truck and when I went left, she went right. We continued this game of tag for ten minutes while the two old farmers loafing on the edge of the porch watched and laughed. Finally, they sauntered over and all of us flapped our arms and feinted left and right until we had her headed in the general direction of the farm.
     The farmers turned the chicken herding job back over to me and I followed the little red hen back down the road to the driveway that leads to our barnyard. But instead of turning left and joining her flock mates, that little feathered fiend continued straight across the pedestrian bridge and into the construction zone on the main road. I chased her until she ducked under a trailer and then gave up.
     A hard-hatted worker strolled up and asked why I was chasing their pet chicken around. It turns out they’ve been feeding her breakfast, lunch and supper. Biscuits, sandwich crusts and small treats three times daily are far better fare than she gets in the henhouse. My chicken on the lam is living high on the hog. The worst part is that, apparently, she brought a friend to dinner yesterday. At this rate, In three more weeks, my barnyard will be bereft of cluckers and the men on the construction crew will be tripping over chickens. It would serve them right for harboring fugitives.

Selling Chickens

2011-09-18T16:23:00.001-04:00

     Yesterday morning, Joe and I went to the chicken house early and separated out twenty hens to take to market. It’s a task neither of us relished but culling a herd or flock is part of living on a farm. These twenty girls had simply aged out of our egg production program. Young hens lay an average of an egg every 26 hours, but at two or three years of age, their ovaries slow down. Our customers expect eggs every week, so we bought some younger chickens. Feeding the non-productive hens was too expensive, so with heavy hearts we gathered up the old girls and placed them in crates. We lined the van with a tarp and then placed the crates in the back.
     Joe had heard about a once-a-month chicken sale held in a parking lot on the edge of the city five mountains away. On this gravelly acre, chicken farmers gather with crates of birds to sell to any takers. In our area, those takers are usually Mexican or Russian families who buy the birds to butcher, or back yard farmers who buy the birds to take home. When we pulled up, the lot was full of vans and trucks. Their hatches were open and cages of birds were stacked up behind them. We parked beside a Ford Explorer. The owners, like us, had elected to transport their birds in their family vehicle, but unlike us, they had no tarp under their cages. The back was covered in chicken crap.
     We pulled out our old-fashioned wooden crates and waited for customers. We soon discovered that most of the buyers had come and gone. Apparently, immigrant families rise at the crack of dawn to shop. The day was chilly and we blew on our fingers and stomped and then wandered around to inspect the other birds. On our left, a man was selling roosters. One was a big old New Hampshire doodler who surely could have taken on an eagle and won. The other was a banty, no bigger than a dove. They commenced to crowing when they saw our hens, and what the banty lacked in volume he made up for in shrillness and enthusiasm. I almost bought him just for his cocky attitude and good looks, but then remembered my chicken chasing cat. A bird that small wouldn’t have a chance.
     Finally, a doting father bought one of our hens for his daughter. Then, another man, a backyard farmer, bought nine to take home and release in the woods behind his house. Just when we were ready to pack up the remaining ten girls and take them home, a young boy with his mother and aunt showed up. None of them spoke fluent English and the women wore head scarves. They might have been Indian, but we weren’t sure. We bargained for a while and they agreed to buy the remaining hens. One of the women asked in broken English if she could butcher them on the spot. I nodded squeamishly and watched as the boy opened the trunk of their small passenger car and pulled out a sharp knife and a large plastic pan. Then, unsure that on-the-spot butchering was allowed, they changed their minds. Instead, we found some string and tied the legs of the hens together before tucking them into the trunk of the car. I suspect that the family, who said they lived over thirty minutes away, stopped at the nearest picnic table and completed the job.
     When the last customers drove off, we packed the crates back into our van. Because we had sold all of our birds, we decided to drive on to an orchard where we picked up a bushel of apples. My van now has a distinct bouquet characterized by the earthy odor of chickens overlaid by the acidic notes of ripe apples. Perhaps we can bottle and sell it to those who long to return to a simpler way of life.

Bug Busters

2011-09-11T15:45:00.003-04:00

    No bug is safe within a hundred yard radius of my home. There are 50 red hens patrolling the grounds and not even the rooster can get their attention. I sat on the rock by the creek today and watched my bug busters ridding the world of red ants, unlucky flies and anything else that was shiny and moved. The hens walked with their eyes on the ground, stopped to stare cross-eyed for a moment then, SNAP, they clicked their beaks down and swallowed. I believe the lack of bugs in my garden this year was partly due to their appetite.
     There are other critters helping out, as well. Yesterday, I caught a praying mantis climbing up the wall of the outbuilding. I usually see at least one or two each fall. This one was a female. The girls are much bigger than the males, which makes romance truly dangerous for the guy. Generally, he is eaten by his wife as soon as the marriage is consumated. Then, still hungry, she starts stalking crickets, spiders, grasshoppers and the occasional moth or butterfly. I have kept mantids as pets in my classroom and it is fun to watch them chow down on grasshoppers. They eat the hoppers the same way that we eat an ear of corn, but they eat their husbands by pulling them over their backs and eating them from stem to stern.
     At night, just when the sky is pale pewter, the bats start to flap and flutter above my yard. If I throw a small gravel up in the air, they will dive at it. I guess for a moment their bat sonar is fooled into thinking each pebble is a big bug feast. Bats catch bugs by scooping them up with their wings and popping them into their mouths. I’ve never seen a bat do this to a rock. The bats always swerve away at the last minute to continue their pursuit of mosquitos and mayflies. I didn’t see as many bats this summer and worry that White Nose Disease has been at work. A single brown nose bat can catch and eat over 600 mosquitos an hour. I hate to think how itchy our world would be without them.
     Three years ago, I walked out into my yard and was surprised to find a network of tunnels zigzagging around from pine tree to porch. Moles or voles, I'm not sure which, had taken up residence. They lived in the yard for two years and then this summer they were gone. So were all the Japanese beetles. I know Japanese beetles pupate underground, because one amazing moonlit night, Scott and I witnessed a whole fleet of them popping out of the ground and taking to the air. I’m fairly certain that when the voles had eaten every last grub, they left for better pickings.
     Several years ago, I read that a big clear plastic Ziploc bag full of water would repel flies. The theory was that the bags of water looked like wasps’ nests to the flies and since wasps eat flies, the buzzy black pests stay away. I went one better. I have a string of round lanterns that really do look like wasps’ nests. I hung them on my front porch and it does seem that the flies have moved away. At least for the last two summers we haven’t spent each evening on the porch waving like beauty queens on parade.
     In spite of all these miraculous, organic bug control methods, my house is still the target of one bug pilgrimage. Ladybugs, the imported nuisance kind, love to winter in every corner of every room of my house and studio. I tried sticky traps on the tops of my windows, but there were so many little ladies crowding the strips that they ended up falling to the sills covered in sticky goop, making it that much harder to remove them. I was going through two traps per window, per day and still ladybugs were doing low level flybys from my reading lamp to my hair and back. I tried vacuuming them up with a hand vac, but the smell of a thousand lady bugs wafting out the back end of the machine was nauseating. In spite of their name, ladybugs, stink. So, the bug guy is coming to spray next week. Since he started dousing my house with poison, the ladybugs have resorted to dying by the bushel on the front porch. The first big wind of winter sweeps them away. I believe in taking care of the earth and I have been known to carefully juggle a wasp or spider on paper until I could toss it outside. But, sometimes that's not enough. Sometimes the hens, the bats, the preying mantises , the decoys and relocations don't work. Sometimes, you have to defend your home against invaders.

Mending Fences

2011-08-09T12:16:00.000-04:00

After enjoying a leisurely lunch with a couple of old friends, I came home and visited my backyard gym, which is what I call the mountain behind the house.

view from the backyard gym

I took the long path home, pausing at the top of my driveway to watch for Joe who had gone for a load of water. The garden threatens to blow away in the dry weather so he’s been trucking three hundred gallons a night to it. I heard the old truck before I saw it, so I scrambled down the hill to meet him. When I climbed in the truck, Joe told me the cows were in the meadow tearing apart the freshly rolled bales. When the grass is short the cows bully their way through weak spots in the fence and Joe was headed over to put them back in the pasture. I agreed to go along and help. Being Joe’s extra hands is one of my favorite things to do.
     The sun had just slipped behind the mountains when he pulled the four-wheeler out of the barn. I hopped on behind, hugging him tightly, and we rumbled across the pasture to the offending cows. They watched us ride up and open the gate and then, when Joe dropped me off and zoomed around them, galloped through the opening, kicking their heels up as they went by. It didn’t take us long to discover the cows’ entrance. A section of fence had popped loose and was sagging enough for the cows to jump it. It would have to be re-stapled. Joe said the only way to keep the cows out of the hay meadow while we worked was to feed them a bale of hay, so he fired up the John Deere while I drove the 4-wheeler back up to the house for fence staples and a hammer.
     When the bale was unfurled and all the cows were lined up for supper, we went back to the fence to stretch and staple the wire back to the posts. After 24 years on the farm, you’d think I would remember to dress for the job, but I was in shorts and clogs so naturally I snagged my leg on some barbed wire in the process. I don’t think I’ve ever gone through a summer without some farm-related scar to mar my legs or arms. I even got married in August in a long sleeve dress because I’d been in the hay field and my forearms were covered with hay pricks.
     When the fence was stretched tight and the electric wire reattached, we called it a job well done. Joe sat on the four-wheeler first and I swung my legs over and around him. The sky was dimming and the air was cool as I leaned against him for the ride. The fireflies blinking in the meadow lit our way home.

Turtle in the Hole

2011-08-05T18:56:00.001-04:00

You can't see him, but he's in there!

     I haven’t been swimming in the hole under the bridge since a plate-sized snapping turtle took up residence in the snag. He sits on top of it surveying his kingdom with his beady black eyes. I have enjoyed swimming in the hole with goggles and snorkle, but I believe in giving snapping turtles their space. My grandfather used to make soup from them. He would catch them, I’m not sure how, and then hold them in a barrel feeding them grain until all the fishy taste was cleansed. Then he stewed them with corn and tomatoes and lima beans. I remember liking the soup as a child, even though I had to spit out the occasional clavicle or toe bone.
     I will let this turtle continue his reign over the swimming hole. He’s been joined by two golden trout. Perhaps he will scare away the blue herons who might snack on them. If he grabs their toes or beak, I’ve heard it said that he won’t let go until it thunders. As dry as this summer has been that could be a long time. And I will swim instead at the pool. There’s not near as much excitement there, but the water is clear and I can see the bottom. Nothing scary lurks there.

A very dim view of the gold trout. He won't let me close enough for a better picture.

A Stitch in Time

2011-07-23T10:40:00.001-04:00

     When I was thirteen my mom offered me the chance to take a sewing class. I made a lopsided sun-dress, and I was so proud of it that I even wore it when we had a family portrait made. My father, not to be outdone, declared that anyone could sew a dress if they had a pattern, so mom gave him a pattern for a simple A-line dress, some material and access to her Singer. Dad did sew a beautiful tent. We still laugh about it at family dinners.
     Learning to sew has been a most valuable skill. It’s not my favorite activity, but I always love the fact that I can create something I need, and I’m comforted to think that when the next depression rolls around, I have enough skills and scraps to avoid complete nakedness. I’m still way too impatient to attempt anything very complicated like sleeves, but I have made my share of skirts, curtains, tablecloths and slipcovers. Yes, you read that right. I can’t construct sleeves but I can create slipcovers from scratch. Women in third world countries provide all the inexpensive tops I might ever need, but every time I price a new couch I end up buying some bargain fabric and stitching together another slipcover. Like my first sundress they’re a little crooked, but they cover all the necessary places.
     My first slipcover came about as a result of nesting instinct and an extremely hot July. I was eight months pregnant and craving a comfortable loveseat. I found one at a junk shop. It was cheap but ugly, so I borrowed my mother-in-law’s sewing book and found some vague directions for constructing slipcovers. I spent the next month of sleepless, hot nights measuring, cutting, cursing, tearing out stitches, re-measuring, re-sewing and finally successfully re-covering the second-hand loveseat I’d found at a junk shop. That loveseat has been through two additional slipcovers in the nineteen years since Scott was born and recently I’ve begun pricing sofas again. Sigh…. I think I see another slipcover in my future.
     My grandmother was a whiz with a sewing machine. Many of my favorite dresses were handmade by Nana. When I attended cotillion and needed a special velvet dress for the Christmas ball, Nana and I picked out the pattern and the material and two weeks later I was a princess. She was old, but she was hip. One time, when I was drooling over a black watch plaid, knife-pleated wool skirt in an upscale department store (I believe we had gone there to buy bras), Nana whipped it off the hangar. I thought she was going to ask me to try it on and then offer to buy it for me. Instead, she flipped it upside down and held the hem up to her nose with one hand. She straightened her other arm, sliding the material through her fingers and counting. I watched the hemline moving from Nana’s nose to her outstretched hand like an inchworm. “Three yards,” she said. “Remember that.” Then we drove to the fabric store. She led me to the fine wool section. “See anything you like?” she asked. When I had picked out a plaid, Nana bought it, some buttons and thread and two weeks later the skirt I coveted was hanging from my waist. Nana even made a matching vest.

Easter dresses a la Nana

I will never have Nana’s prowess with a needle, but recently I’ve stitched some gifts for three dearly beloved graduates. Each of them gave me a stack of at least twenty tee shirts that were won, bought or earned throughout their high school careers. These were cut into forty squares with the logos intact. I stitched them together, plus a square cut from a tee shirt of the graduate’s future college. The resulting quilt top was then sewed to a backing and hand tied so it wouldn’t disintegrate in the wash. Both my son and my nephew take their quilts everywhere they go, and my most recent creation will soon be headed to Virginia Tech with my lovely “first daughter” Hayley.

Sometimes I worry that kids raised in the Walmart age won’t have the advantages I had growing up. I’m thankful to have had a Nana who taught me that a sense of accomplishment can often be found with a needle, thread and a little inspiration.

Do Bears Sit in the Woods?

2011-07-10T23:21:00.002-04:00

     Caroline and Lori and I are hiking our way across Highland. Our first hike was last week and started at the summit of Shenandoah Mountain in the George Washington National Forest. The morning was cool and foggy and we had two choices for hiking. There was a faint trail running north, marked by the occasional yellow diamond and there was a forest service road heading south. Since it was foggy, we decided to hike the road.
     The first half mile was a gentle incline. Within three minutes I was sweating enough to fog my glasses. I peered helplessly through the condensation wishing for windshield wipers as Lori and Caroline pointed out deer sign and salamanders. The trail followed the ridge top, climbing and descending several times, but the fog was too thick to see the views. Before our walk, we had had a serious discussion about what to do if we met up with a bear, so we were a bit jumpy. The heavy fog made it worse. It closed around us like a heavy, wet blanket and we couldn’t see very far into the woods. About two miles up the trail, we almost stepped in a large pile of very fresh poop. We circled it suspiciously. What does bear poop look like anyway? The gray woods began to look even more ominous. We continued downhill, jumping at every drip and crackle. Surely a hungry bear was lurking behind that tree or that rock waiting to pounce. We made it another quarter mile before we gave into our fears and turned around.
     We were moving at a fair trot when we passed the poop and crested the ridge. No bear in sight. The sun popped out and we realized how foolish we’d been, but we decided to call it a day and head back to the car. On our way out, we planted a letterbox in a small camping area.

This week, we hiked trail number two in the Wildlife Management Area just south of McDowell . This trail is also a gravel road maintained by the Game Commission. It is gated in several places but open to hikers year round. We planted our letterbox near a campsite about a mile in and then climbed steadily for two miles. We turned around when we reached the ridge top. In contrast to our first hike, the morning was sunny and bright. Streamers of light dappled the forest floor and birds sang from the trees. The trail followed a pristine stream which we forded twice by hopping across rocks. Deer lifted their tails and scudded across the path in several places and we must have seen thirty orange salamanders on the road. We didn’t even worry about bear. Next week we’ll take hike number three. Hopefully it will be sunny and bright. Fog makes us fearful. I think there’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere.

Evening Chores

2011-06-23T14:48:00.002-04:00

     Every evening begins with a trip to the back forty. That’s where the dogs, chickens and lambs live and they all need attention before sundown. But, I don’t mind. It’s a peaceful routine that signifies day’s end.
     I start by grabbing up the old round-bottomed pot that we use for egg gathering. It hangs on a hook right beside the mud porch door and I think it’s the same bucket Joe’s mom used for years to gather her eggs in. Sandy, our little beagle, jumps up when I leave the house. She’s been sprawled out in my flower bed, crushing peonies and lilies but I don’t really mind. Her good nature makes up for her bad manners in the garden. She follows me down the dirt driveway that leads to the shed. .
     When we round the fence the lambs, who are living around the house so they can grow to maturity beyond the threat of coyotes, begin bawling. They are up on the hill and bound and bounce their way down to me, cluttering up my path and generally making a nuisance of themselves. There are currently thirty of these noisome, wooly adolescents pooping up my front forty and sticking their heads through my wooden fence for forbidden floral snacks. Joe has promised that at least twenty will go to market next week. The lambs are hungry and I can’t get to any of the other chores until I have downloaded four gallons of grain into the three troughs over by the pen. If I don’t feed them first, then they will follow me everywhere, overwhelming the dogs and stealing their food and clattering up the chicken house steps to poke their heads in and alarm the old rooster who will crow until they scatter.
     We keep the sheep chow in an old oil barrel just inside the shed door. Three chickens scratch at the base, pecking up spillage and I shoo them out of my way. There’s chicken poo everywhere. I’ll have to get Scott to fence them out of the shed tomorrow. I lean deep into the barrel until I am bottom-up and scoop grain out with a number ten can. Then I exit, carrying the five gallon bucket full of grain clutched to my chest like a fullback running for a touchdown. If I let it hang down, the lambs will shove their heads into it as I walk, and pull it from my hands. I am surrounded by a baa-ing, bleating crowd and a high carry is the only way to thwart them as I make my way to the troughs. The lambs push and shove my knees, knocking me sideways as I pour grain out for them, but at least they grow quiet with the eating.
     My next chore is to feed the dogs. Back to the shed I go. This time I reach into a battered trashcan and scoop the dry food into a metal pail. The bail fell off of this bucket several years ago, so it, too, must be clutched to my chest as I cross the creek to the dog houses. Cindy is tied there until the weekend. Then it will be her turn to exercise her passion for rabbits out in the front field. She pokes her head out of her house and then pops out to meet me. Her tail wags her shoulders into a twist and she starts eating before I finish pouring. A dip of creek water with the rubber bucket completes her menu.
     The final chore is egg gathering. Sandy has abandoned me to eat her supper, but Tipper Cat loves the chickens so he stalks along beside me, tail high and straight. As we approach the hen house, he crouches down. There’s a lone hen wobbling her way towards us and, unknown to her, the Feline Chicken Chaser is about to strike. Tipper twitches his tail once and then he leaps. The chicken cackles and dashes towards the hen house with Tipper in hot pursuit. When he can’t catch her, he subsides into the weeds and licks his legs furiously until he feels dignified again.
     I slide the latch on the blue door of the henhouse and step over the threshold. It is cool and dim inside and most of the chickens have found their perches. One determined hen remains on a nest and when I slide my hand under her warm breast feathers I discover three eggs. She’s been broody for a month and, although Scott let her try to hatch a clutch, they fizzled. Apparently our ancient Rooster is shooting blanks. The hen cackles disapprovingly as I steal her eggs, but she doesn’t peck my hand.
     The sun drops behind the mountain when I step back out. The barnyard is quiet once again and Tipper follows me back to the house where the warm light from the kitchen window calls us inside for the night.

Daddy Do All

2011-06-19T11:47:00.000-04:00

The two best Dads I know.

     I was fortunate enough to be raised by one of the best fathers in the world. I cannot remember a time when his gentle advice and manner did not weigh, consciously or subconsciously, in my decision making. His earliest advice to me was, “Gasoline will not burn you.” I did not believe him at the time. I was five and had decorated my arms in oil-based paint. It dried before I was discovered, so Daddy called for Mama to bring him some gas. When he explained that he would be using it to wash the paint off of my arms, I bolted. Gasoline was used to run cars, and I was fairly certain from overheard bits and pieces of adult conversation that burning was somehow involved. Therefore gasoline would catch my arms on fire. The paint would be gone but so would my arms. I ran down the street with Daddy in hot pursuit. He yelled promises of ice-cream and Chatty Cathy dolls if the gas burned me, but I didn’t believe him. Finally, a neighbor snagged me and hauled me kicking and screaming to my father who gently applied the gasoline and removed the paint. If I had been smarter I would have hollered bloody murder and scored a doll and dessert, but he was right. Gasoline did not burn. Daddy didn’t lie
     My mama was every bit as smart and wise as my daddy, but I was a sullen teen and didn’t fully realize her amazing gifts until I had my first child. Mainly I was jealous of her because she was too cool and way too young looking and all of my friends liked her too much. It was Daddy I turned to in my teen years. He took me shopping for dresses and told me truthfully what looked good and what didn’t. He climbed the stairs to my bedroom when he heard me upstairs sobbing because I was overwhelmed with all my activities and talked me through prioritizing and trimming my schedule. When I grew old enough to date, Daddy told me some of the lies boys might use to convince me to climb in the back seat of a car and then gave me a dime to call him if I needed a ride home.
     But Daddy didn’t just give good advice. He was a prankster. When I had friends over to spend the night and we traipsed down to our dark basement for séances and Oujia Boards, Dad would sneak out to the small window with a flashlight and at just the right moment shine it upwards on his face and laugh maniacally. It scared the bejeezus out of us every time. On Halloween, he would conspire with all of us on our annual family haunted house. He devised countless ways of startling the neighborhood children: hanging himself, covered in ketchup, from the ceiling in the living room or rising up from a box shaped like a coffin, dark circles painted under his eyes, and cackling in an ungodly falsetto.
     He told us Paul Pig stories, which he made up on the spot while we waited out in the parking lot for mama to grocery shop and then, to our everlasting delight, often hid the car right before she came out. We would giggle and point as she pushed her full cart through the lot in search of the old blue Chevy. To her credit, Mama was always game and laughed along with us when she finally located her silly brood.
     When I grew up and moved away, Daddy’s other gifts revealed themselves. In addition to the coveted title of “Daddy Do All” he earned the name, “Electric Man” with the catchy motto, “Daddy’s hands make lights work.” He helped wire the house Joe and I restored and re-wired the farm house down the road. His gifts applied to our outbuildings make me feel safer at night when I go out to feed the dogs. One flick of a switch dispels the darkness.
     Daddy is still dispensing good advice, wiring the world and building furniture to order for all of us. He and Mama make it a priority to let each of us children know we are special and loved. They model God’s unconditional love daily.

So, here’s a shout out to my Dad (and mom). Happy Father’s Day to the Bestest Daddy Ever I Saw.

The Swimming Hole

2011-06-09T22:41:00.000-04:00

     Being a bit plump has some advantages. I went down to the river last week, goggles and bathing suit at the ready, and took a little dip. Actually, I took a little float. I float so much better than I used to. It’s a density thing. Fat is less dense than muscle. The last big rain had washed a deep hole under the bridge and I wanted to see what was swimming around in it. Last year, my students and I released thirty two brook trout in that very spot and I was hopeful that I might glimpse at least one.
     I parked the car just east of the bridge and opened the rusty metal gate next to the barn. The hay was up to my waist after this rainy spring and I pushed it aside before each step and examined the ground for snakes as I walked over to the river bank. The willows that used to line the side of it had been pushed out onto a small island of rock in the middle.
     I draped my towel on a big rock and shucked down to my suit. I left my shoes on because mountain river swimming is not a barefoot endeavor. Then I waded in. The hole was in the shade under the bridge and I was thankful to be out of sight. One, because my neighbors would probably think it was nuts for a 50 year old woman to be floating face first in the river wearing old tennis shoes and goggles and two, because, well, I’m not quite as cute in a bathing suit as I was thirty years ago.
     I was a bit intimidated to start with. I couldn’t see the bottom and it’s a little disconcerting to wade down into a river hole. Snapping turtles have been known to lurk there. But, once I got over my fear, I pulled the goggles over my eyes and floated face down. At first, the fish avoided the blobby body bobbing around above them, but soon their curiosity got the best of them. The minnows came first, nibbling at my fingers which floated slightly below my face. Then the larger suckers and red eyes swam over to sample my legs. We floated together in the shadow of the bridge for about ten minutes. Every time I lifted my head for a breath, the fish darted away. I found myself longing for a snorkel.
     There was a large snag of branches and roots on the sunny side of the pool and the fish swam in and out of the roots. I was sure there must be some more interesting life back in the tangled mess, but I couldn’t bring myself to pull some apart. Some of that interesting life might bite me. The current kept pushing me into the snag so I put my feet down and discovered the pool was about four and a half feet deep. Although I saw many fish, I didn’t see any brook trout. A neighbor six miles downstream told me he caught and released a small brookie a couple of weeks ago. I’d like to think it was one of ours.
     After floating for a while, I waded upstream. The amount of damage done to the channel by the storm was significant. In some places, the river bank had eroded down five feet or more. A hundred yards upstream in what used to be a flat river bed, there was a four foot waterfall, and an island of rock that cut the flow of the river in half. I’m afraid in the heat of the summer my pool under the bridge will lose its source. I don’t know where the fish will go then.
     When I finally clambered back up to the road I discovered I had brought a little of my childhood with me. My grandmother, Nana, used to take us swimming in the farm pond. Papa would row us out to a spot near the far shore and Nana would jump in with us. The same delicious fear of snapping turtles and unseen things brought it all back to me. I think I’ll jump back in again soon. Maybe I’ll even touch the snag and see what swims out.

The Church of the Front Porch

2011-05-29T17:29:00.000-04:00

     I attended the Church of the Front Porch today. We have had two consecutive days of sunshine and I didn’t want to miss any of it. I hope God didn’t mind that I spent the morning with a devotional book on my lap turning pages and thinking about what it means to be a child of God all the while glancing up occasionally to find the mockingbird who was singing saucily from the walnut tree, or to look for the redwing blackbird I could hear warbling in the wetland. As an artist, nothing gives me greater pleasure than to have someone enjoy, really enjoy my work. I hope God feels the same way because that’s what my worship was about this morning.
     Yesterday was the last day of shearing. What a relief to have gathered all the lambs and ewes in to count, worm and shear and find, so far, none missing. Coyotes are having pups this time of year and fresh lamb makes an easy breakfast for mama coyote. Some coyotes kill for food, but there are others who kill just for the sport of it. My friend Cindy, the one who has a llama on patrol, found six dead lambs the other day. The trapper told her that the coyotes must have come in a pack so the llama couldn’t defend against all of them. The lambs weren’t eaten, just slaughtered and left scattered about the field. I love God’s creation, but it’s hard to love coyotes who kill for pleasure. I suppose God loves them, though. They are as much a part of His creation as those blackbirds I enjoyed.
     Two nights ago, Joe drove me through a horrible storm to the emergency room. I had been fighting some back pain for 24 hours and it finally got the best of me. Joe said he’s never seen such weather, but I didn’t notice much of it from my fetal position in the front seat. After ten hours in the emergency room and a CAT scan, the doctor still couldn’t tell me why I had felt such hot knives stabbing me in my right side. There was no evidence of kidney stones or appendicitis to give truth to my overwhelming pain. By morning it had subsided, leaving me relieved and appreciative of every good day in my life.
     This morning on the porch, I thought about God’s presence in my pain. It’s a place I hate to go to, but I have discovered sometimes I find God most clearly in the hurting places. Pain, whether physical or emotional, is like those coyotes: uncontrollable. And because I cannot control it, I must wait it out. In the waiting, I am emptied totally of myself. I see God most clearly when I am empty. There’s nothing else to stand in the way of His love.

At the Church of the Front Porch this morning, I was reminded of these words by Sir Thomas Brown:

If thou could`st empty all thyself of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might He find thee on the ocean shelf,
And say, `This is not dead`,
And fill thee with Himself instead.

But thou art all replete with very thou
And hast such shrewd activity,
That when He comes, He says, `This is enow
Unto itself - `twere better let it be,
It is so small and full, there is no room for me.`

I am a little emptier and yet, much fuller this morning.

Old Bones

2011-05-06T22:28:00.000-04:00

     I love rocks. They are the bones of this old earth, slowly wearing down to mineral and soil and they speak to some place deep in my own bones. I can name them when I see them, although only with their familiar names, not their lineage names. Metamorphic, igneous, sedimentary…that is the extent of my scientific knowledge. I love limestone because it forms the backbone of my county; visible on some ridge tops like the knobs of vertebrae in a malnourished child. Over time, the vertebra weather off in chunks and tumble down the mountain to the fertile valleys below bringing the curiosity of fossils imprinted in their rugged sides. Seashells, snails, sponges and corals live forever in reverse depressions where they died and decayed. Our mountains were once under a shallow sea.
     The creek behind my house is not the kind of creek that graces the covers of gardening magazines. It comes down from the mountain through our open pasture at a pretty steep pitch. When we first moved here twenty four years ago, the water ran in a shallow channel close to the top of the ground, but over time it has carved itself down into a deep trench, lined with the rocky rubble of spring floods which have washed away the loose soil leaving a creek bed that is over eight feet deep in places. I planted willows in the eroding banks to stabilize them, but even they washed to lower ground and rooted at the bottom of the channel with their roots tucked in the rocky rubble. Then last week, after four inches of rain in less than three hours, the creek brought boulders from the top of the mountain down into our deep channel and filled it back up again. I went out this evening to inspect the treasures carried down from the mountain top. There were sandstone boulders bigger than a border collie and deep beds of gravel and sand. If you look carefully at the edges of the creek you can find evidence of the bed shifting back and forth over time, a pattern that repeatedly reveals and re-covers the bones of the earth.
     As I picked my way across the mounds of rocky rubble I found three perfect flat rocks. I threw them to the bank and later I will carry them to the house and complete the path through my secret garden. There were some small fossils: crinoids, porifera, and scallops, but after sorting through them I didn’t find anything that I didn’t already have, so I tossed them back into their gravelly beds.

I located several large squarish rocks which hopefully Dan, who is getting ready to rebuild the retaining wall beside our root cellar, will find useful. I found a heart shaped rock, which I tucked into a pocket to carry back to the house. I’ve been collecting them for years now and when I die, I imagine a geologist hundreds of years in the future pondering the preponderance of heart shaped rocks in the area. I found a piece of gray shale, small and warm and breathed on it just for the smell of earth that rises off of shale when it is warm and moist, and I found a chunk of slate with white lines of quartz criss-crossing its face. A wishing rock. I’ll save it for when I really need a wish.

When Joe and I were first married, he used to show up at the house with unusual rocks. He understood and supported my obsession. These were gifts that I treasured from him even more than the diamond I wear on my left hand. They meant that as he wandered the farm and fields, I was on his mind. His gifts are the stepping stones in my garden, and the edging of my garden beds.
As I came back in the house, my pockets full of rocks, I happened to glance at the edge of the sidewalk where years ago, I traced an outline of each of our hands as a pattern for a friend who cut them out of stained glass. We celebrated the completion of the house by pressing them carefully into the wet cement of our new sidewalk. After fifteen years in the weather, they like the bones of the mountain, are chipping up and breaking apart. It’s comforting to consider that they will never really disappear. Instead, they will become part of the bones of this old earth, and maybe one day, a new woman digging carefully in her flower beds will find a very small chunk of green glass. She will wonder about its origins and then tuck it into her pocket next to the heart shaped rock she found buried beside it.

Egg Sunday

2011-04-25T18:19:00.000-04:00

     It is Easter Sunday and, like the Easter Bunny, we are delivering eggs. Ours are dyed various natural shades of brown, and they are so large it is often hard to close the top on the carton. The chickens who donated them range all over our property eating bugs and grass, so the yolks are bright yellow and dense with a rich flavor that can’t be found on a store shelf.      Scott started this egg business soon after his grandma died. She loved chickens and he loved her, so it was a natural way for him to remember her. He has over 50 chickens which means we collect over 20 dozen eggs a week which are delivered to customers on Sunday afternoons. When Scott is home he drives up and down the valley making the deliveries, and his 30 minute route often takes him over two hours because everyone wants to visit with him. Sometimes he even comes home with plastic bags full of cookies or slices of cake pressed on him by his baking customers. When he’s away, Joe and I keep the business going for him. Joe does the bulk of the work, but I help out when I can and lately I’ve been riding along with him on the egg run. Today is a beautiful sunny day, with the green promises of spring in every field.
     We drive north. Our first stop is a home where the husband and wife, who have finished raising their own two children, are fostering three teenage boys. What a difference they’ve made in those boys’ lives. Three boys eat a lot of eggs so we leave them with two dozen. Then we turn south and bump down the half mile driveway to a farm house tucked off the road. There are goats and pigs stretched out in the sun next to the barn and cows grazing on dandelion-speckled fields. We rumble over one cattle guard and the farmer’s youngest son, who is fifteen, runs out to open the other gate for us. He takes the eggs to his mom who is cooking dinner and returns with change. I smell fried chicken when he opens the door.
     Five miles further south, we stop at a house where there are four children under the age of twelve. The two littlest girls run out to hug me and take the eggs before leading me to the kitchen where their mom waits with a check. Then they lead me back out to the truck and demand more hugs before we pull out. At the next white farmhouse, a half a mile further on, we leave eggs on the kitchen table. No one is home, but the door is unlocked and the table has empty cartons for us to recycle, plus money for the eggs we’re leaving. We are collecting quite a stack of used cartons on the front seat of the truck. At every house we pick up last week’s empties which we’ll refill next week.
     Finally we reach the village where we stop several more times. At one house there’s a man recovering from surgery. He is happy to have company so we chat for a while. At another, The Three Beauties have bicycled down to visit their grandmother. They laugh about burning off a big Easter lunch and then wave and hop on their bikes for the uphill ride back home.

Our egg run is done, and we load hay and bottle feed a lamb. Then we have a genuine Easter egg hunt, climbing around the barn to gather eggs out of the hay mow where the hens have hidden them. After washing and sorting them, we head home. More eggs wait for us there.

Market Day

2011-04-08T22:47:00.001-04:00

     When Justin called at 5:30 this morning, the moon had set and the brightest object in the sky was Pluto sliding across the southern horizon. The cows bedded down in the back lot were not expecting such an early breakfast, but Joe creaked to a standing position, got dressed, pulled on his Muck boots and with flashlight in hand went to help them rise and shine. I grabbed a cattle stick and stepped out the back door just in time to see the light bobbing across the dark lot as Joe made his way out to the shed. I settled down on the back steps to watch and wait until he needed some help. The sound of the shed door sliding open woke the steers and heifers who, like Pavlov’s dogs connect that sound to food. They began to low softly and I could hear them stirring and shuffling as they unfolded their legs and rose to stroll in the general direction of the shed. I still couldn’t see them because it was dark and the majority of the cows were black.
     Joe filled his bucket and then slipped across the lot. “Whooo, sook calf, sook calf.” He called softly in the morning air and the cows answered with their own morning song. Walking back and forth across the lot, Joe called again and shook his bucket so the grain rattled. I still couldn’t see them, but I could sense the movement of calves as they lined up and followed him into the pen. Joe poured the grain in the trough and the flashlight beam played across the backs of the steers. Then, he called out to me. “Turn on the back light,” so I slipped inside and flipped the switch. There were two steers on the wrong side of the pen and in another minute, the rest of the cattle streamed out to join them. So much for fooling them into the pen with grain.
     I clicked open the gate and stepped out to help. It was hard to walk on the rough ground in the dark and I stumbled a couple of times as I crossed the wet ditch. The mud sucked at my boots and the steers, who were now backlit by the porch light watched me curiously as I squelched around behind them to try and force them into the pen. I could tell that they were anxious as they pondered this predator sneaking up on them in the dark. Several tried to break away and I waved my white stick. The uneasy calves changed their minds and backed up to huddle in the corner. In a moment we heard the rattle of an aluminum trailer bouncing down our driveway. Help had arrived.
     Justin and his friend Michael parked and jumped out to help. In another two minutes the steers were all streaming into the open gate. With a few deft touches of their cattle sticks, the guys sent the heifers back out and the steers were loaded onto the trailer. Then Justin and Michael pulled out the driveway and headed to Staunton. Joe and I headed to the house for showers and breakfast. It was time to go to work.

The Cow Poop Trail and Other Educational Wonders

2011-03-27T18:22:00.000-04:00

     I followed a brown cow splat trail for about three miles up the asphalt road in front of my house yesterday. A sure sign that the neighbors have been on their annual spring cattle drive, moving cows and calves from winter pastures. Highland’s valleys are too narrow for there to be much open range for cattle moving, so most people load them onto a truck and drive them to greener pastures. But, Mike and George-Ann prefer an old fashioned cattle drive, so they saddle up and bring the herd down the road. It’s a raucous trip with mama cows and their calves bawling as they lose sight of each other and humans hollering directions back and forth as they work to keep the bovines away from open gates and front lawns.
     But, I don’t think those cows and calves were nearly as noisy as the ten girls from the city who came to visit grandparents this weekend. John and Jean entertained their granddaughters and eight of their friends as a special birthday gift for the just turned ten year old girl. Their back mountain adjoins us and as I was upstairs finishing some writing, I heard what I thought was a pack of coyotes carousing on the mountain. Turns out it was just a pack of excited ten year old girls walking down the backside to visit us. John and Jean’s grandchildren often come to see us when they’re up because we have a menagerie of dogs, chickens, horses and lambs to pet and feed and kiss and hug. The birthday crowd had hiked over to see what animals might be available for the city girls to visit. We have a bottle fed calf in the barn who was terrified by the shrieking, giggling, galloping crew, and the chickens got quite a workout running from long-legged girls in pink boots , but it was good fun to see the joy on the girls’ faces as they bottle fed the calf and gathered eggs.
     Visits to the farm are important to city kids. There are so many things they don’t know about the food they eat. One of the little girls asked me if we had to give the hens shots to get them to lay eggs. Another asked if the steers out in the field were milk cows. When I first moved out here, I was every bit as ignorant. I once admired a ram in the field noting that “she had one of the biggest udders I’d ever seen on a ewe.” Turns out the thing hanging down between his legs had nothing to do with milk. And Joe used to take advantage of my ignorance. For the longest time he had me convinced that he grew a special breed of mountain cow whose legs were shorter on one side than the other to accommodate standing upright on steep hills.
     I’ve come a long way. I can tell by the poop on the road which breed of animals has recently been herded by. I can tell the difference between orchard grass and alfalfa in a field from a moving car. I can tell the boy animals from the girl animals with one glance and just this morning I squeezed out a half a bottle full of milk from an engorged mama ewe so her lamb could nurse.
     I’m blessed to have received my country education and glad to share it with others. The happy sound of children squealing as they tried to catch chickens or bent down to kiss the calf was the highlight of my day. I hope it meant as much to them.

Mud

2011-03-13T12:41:00.000-04:00

This is the messiest time of year. Even though the days are warm we are still feeding the stove, but it’s dampered down which creates more ashes and they sift out every time we open it, leaving a pale powder on every table and dresser in the house which daily dusting can’t defeat. And, the cats are shedding. When Tip jumps up to perch on the arm of my chair, a flotilla of cat hairs drifts in behind him. Yesterday, he crawled into my lap and when he left I was furrier than my cat. Then, there are the tired houseplants. They’ve grown leggy in their search for sunlight and their dying leaves lie curled in fetal positions all around the pots.

Did I mention the mud? We’ve had steers around the house all winter and the thawing ground outside the white board fence is a quagmire. The chickens must be tended to twice a day and they live on the other side of this mess, which means we are constantly tracking dirt into the house. We also have a bottle calf in the shed so there’s a dirty bottle and mixing bowl to wash up twice a day and a bag of calf milk replacer on the mud porch ringed by a fine flour of powdered milk.

And yet, all of this mess is part of a promise. I heard the first whisper of it last night when Scott ran inside to tell me the peepers are singing. I stepped out into the starry night and stood on the sidewalk to listen to their spring choir. They sounded faint and far off, but the promise of warmer weather was there.

When God created the world he dug deep into the oceans and made piles of mud that He patted into mountains. And because there was no one there to say, “Don’t track that mess into the house!” He kept right on. His muddy mess was the beginning of a beautiful world. The muddy mess inside and outside my house is also a beginning. It’s a symptom of the birth of spring.

March

March is mud
mucking,
slop,
sucking,
streams
flowing
grass
growing
calves
running
colts
sunning
Peepers
singing,
“Winter’s gone
and
spring is
springing!”

It's Maple Time

2011-03-05T12:37:00.000-05:00

     It’s the first week of March and the morning air tastes sweet. There’s white steam curling out of sugar shacks all across the county and in McDowell the rising column from Sugar Tree Country Store is pink in the early morning light. It’s been perfect sugar weather. Nights below freezing and days above. These are the temperatures that really put the trees to work sucking up the starches they’ve stored in their roots over the winter and sending them skyward as sugars to jump start spring growth.
     My son Justin has been in the syrup business since he was about sixteen. That’s the year he and a friend collected enough sugar water to set up their own ramshackle sugar shack and boil until they had produced about 13 gallons of syrup which they then sold to visitors at our annual Maple Festival. It took about 500 gallons of water and 48 hours of work drilling, hanging, collecting, boiling and bottling to produce that small amount of syrup, but the boys were proud of their operation and were even featured in an article in the Washington Post about the county’s youngest syrup producers.
     For the last two years, Justin has opted to just gather his water and sell it to other producers who will boil it, condensing it until it is light amber, sticky and sweet. This year, he hung 80 buckets in the sugarbush down on our farm in McDowell. Joe had to set up an electric fence to keep the cows away from it because they love sugar water and will walk from tree to tree nosing buckets and dumping as they drink. Justin gathers his water by hand , tipping the buckets into a 425 gallon transport tank which rests on the back of an old farm truck. It takes him about an hour each time he collects and lately the buckets have been brimful twice a day. The season is only a few weeks long, and farmers who work their sugarbush are boiling without a break so they can finish off as much syrup as possible before the trees bud out and the rising water gets sappy and off-flavored.
     The smell of sweet steam is usually one of the earliest signs of spring here in Highland. So raise a jug of maple syrup and make a toast to warmer and sunnier days to come.

It’s maple time
It’s sugar time
It’s tapping trees for syrup time
It’s dripping, dropping
Sweet drops plopping
Buckets hanging
Tin lids banging
White steam roiling
Water boiling
Pancakes sizzling
Syrup drizzling

It’s maple time
It’s sugar time
It’s tapping trees for syrup time.

.

Sister Trips

2011-02-27T22:05:00.000-05:00

When my big sis was five and I was three, she was so shy that I had to walk her to kindergarten for her first day of school. I don’t remember doing this, but it’s a story my mom has told often. As we grew, we remained best friends when we weren’t bickering over clothes or boyfriends and my shy sister blossomed into a leader and my hero. I remember days when Mom sent us to our separate rooms for fighting and we managed to rig a telegraph line between our upstairs windows by leaning out and swinging a string until we were connected and could clothesline messages back and forth. Then we grew up and moved away from each other, but the conversation never stopped.
One of my favorite traditions with Meg is our sister trips. Originally they started with her travelling to the mountains to see me, or me travelling to Atlanta to see her, but in 2007 I was selected as Virginia’s Educator of Excellence and receiving the award required me to attend a gala in Washington, DC. In need of a dress and some advice about taxis and tipping, I flew to Atlanta to conspire with my more sophisticated sister. As we visited the dress shops, I shared my fears and Meg offered to attend the gala with me. She’s a world traveler who is unfazed by airports and bellhops so I eagerly accepted her offer. Suddenly the idea of navigating the city sounded fun. It was. Meg steered me through the unfamiliar formalities of a glamorous evening and I was able to enjoy my brief moment in the spotlight. After DC we decided that we’d had so much fun that we should continue the tradition. So far we’ve been on sister trips to Charleston, SC, Dahlonega, GA and most recently Amelia Island, FL. This last trip was a 50th birthday present from Meg to me and as usual, she took care of everything.

We met at the Atlanta airport and because my plane was running a little late, I was in danger of missing the connecting flight to Jacksonville. No worries. As I huffed and puffed my way down the long corridor there was Meg waving a ticket at me. “Here, take mine and get in line,” she directed as she handed me her ticket and took mine. Because she’s a frequent flyer, Meg has privileges that allow her to board each flight early. The plane was crowded and getting on first allowed me to find a place to stow my bag before the bins all filled up. It was fifteen more minutes before Meg boarded and sat beside me. The whole trip was full of small courtesies like that. When we debarked in Jacksonville, there was a rental car waiting and Meg drove us out to Amelia Island where she had booked a hotel for three nights. We spent the sunny days in between roaming the beaches where we gathered starfish by the dozens as they washed ashore, rode bicycles on secluded paths, toured the island shops and galleries, and finally galloped through the surf on horseback. At night, we sampled some of Amelia’s finest restaurants and wine. Like all of my adventures with Meg we moved at full speed until falling into bed at night. I could barely walk when we landed back in Atlanta. But, it was worth every minute.

We talked about our fears, our dreams, our families and our frustrations. When we finally separated at the Atlanta airport, me headed to Richmond, Meg headed home, I cried. While the sister trips are fun to plan and even more fun to enjoy, the best part of all is just spending time with my big sister. A sister who is your best friend is a treasure beyond counting. I have riches beyond measure.

Best Friends

When mom
banished us
to our rooms
for fighting
we
dangled a string between
our separate windows
and sent secret messages
clotheslining
across the warm brick
then,
growing up
split us apart
leaving the line
between our rooms
to sag
in the wind

now that you live
five hundred miles south
I miss you
and long to
instant message you
with that
tender string
again.

Date Night

2011-02-09T23:50:00.000-05:00

The barn was quiet tonight when we pulled up to check on the sheep. The first group of forty ewes is just about finished lambing, but Joe wanted to make sure there would be no lamb surprises in the morning. This has been an interesting lambing season. One ewe dropped her lambs out in the pasture bottom in the snow and they died before we discovered them. She wasn’t supposed to lamb for another month, but apparently the buck jumped the fence. Two other ewes have lambed out there, but Joe found them in time to bring them back to the barn where they enjoyed a snug stall until the lambs were ready to be turned out.

Another ewe gave birth to quadruplets. Four strapping lambs that made us wonder how in the world they all fit inside. She dropped the lambs out in the small meadow where the imminently expectant ewes spend their days. The quadruplets are several days old now and so far we haven’t had to supplement their mama’s milk with a bottle. As big as a child’s-size basketball, her udder is well…udderly fantastic. The lambs take turns ducking under and butting at it before they latch on and suck. It seems she never gets a moment without at least one lamb bumping her and grabbing on, but she bleats contentedly in her stall, and the lambs are full of pep. I’m certainly glad my boys didn’t have to butt at me that way. Sometimes, after the lambs are about a month old, you can see them out in the meadow hitting mama’s udder so hard that they lift her back end off the ground several inches. Ouch!

Joe has spent almost every afternoon in the old barn, numbering and docking lambs. The mothers wear numbered plastic tags in their left ears and their babies get the same number painted on their rear ends. Tonight I am along to help. Joe catches the lambs and hands them to me where they dangle from my arms with their bellies facing him. If the lamb is a boy he gets a band on his testicles and one on his tail. If it’s a girl, just her tail is docked. After the banding, I flip the lambs around and Joe dips the metal branding irons into the red paint and presses them onto the lamb’s left hip. Then they are placed gently back into the pen with mama who has been nickering softly in concern. The banding hurts the babies for a little while, so they usually lie down in the hay until the pain subsides, but in an hour or two, they will be up and butting at mama for more milk. Banding prevents poop from accumulating in their tails. I’ve seen undocked sheep in the summer, their long tails covered with brown feces. This creates a breeding ground for maggots, so it’s healthier for the sheep to be tail-less. And of course the little boys can’t have all their parts because they can begin to breed at a fairly young age. This would lead to continuous in-breeding and weaker stock.

When we finish, I stand for a minute in the feedway, just admiring all the history in the hand-planed, wood pegged beams that hold up the massive walls. This barn is almost a hundred years old, and looks ready for another hundred years. Then we turn off the lights and climb back into the warm car. It’s been another wonderful date night on the farm.

Midnight in the Barn

steam rises
animals exhale
a quiet breathing
sheep bleat
cows moan and
hay shuffles
as kine and swine
turn
shift
stretch
and recline
in
summer’s leftover
pleasures

A Proper Hunger

2011-02-02T19:56:00.000-05:00

      For just a moment last Sunday, I glimpsed grace which floated into the small wooden sanctuary of my church and settled on the windowsills with a sigh and glimmer like dust motes in the morning sun. It lasted less than a minute, but its impact still resonates. Holy moments, when they occur, are worth thinking on. There was nothing special about the service other than it was the fifth Sunday of the month, so my friends from all the churches in the area were gathered in the same sanctuary. It’s a tradition I cherish. I had just finished leading worship and a visitor was explaining plans that are percolating for a youth center in town. As I listened to her, that’s when I felt it. Grace. I’m not sure if anyone else was aware of the sudden clarity that made the air in the sanctuary feel like a baptism in a clear mountain stream, but I was and it stayed with me the rest of the day.
     My heart may have been ready to feel that grace because I had spent the day before with a dear friend on a road trip to Bristol. Mary Lou and I went there to see the play “Bridge to Terabithia” and hear its author, Katherine Patterson talk. Mrs. Patterson said that we’ve “lost what is beautiful and joyful, and the best books for children help them look at the world with a sense of wonder that puts them in awe of ordinary things.” She said “a taste of wonder may well give the soul a proper hunger for the Bread of Life.”
     I taste wonder every day when I look out my windows at blue mountains against bluer sky, or drive to work down a valley road lined with white barns that glow pink in the early morning light, or lift my eyes from my desk to see a dogwood tree full of black birds and red berries. But, I taste it best when I am with friends and family who love God. I also glimpse God’s grace best in their company. On Sunday morning my plain clapboard church was full of plain folk worshipping, and worship is the language of wonder and grace.
     I looked up the word "worship" in my thesaurus and it gave me adoration, love, reverence, respect, devotion and prayer. On Sunday all of those things danced together so beautifully that the sanctuary glowed with it. My friends smiled and lifted their faces in joy and I knew. Light has come into the world and the darkness cannot overcome it.

Shopping

2011-01-23T19:16:00.000-05:00

     Joe just came inside and a bit of the bitter cold air followed him through the door. But when he reached into his coat pockets he pulled out summer and fall: an orange, a grapefruit and an apple. Fresh fruit in the midst of a bitter cold snap. He hadn’t made a trip to the grocery store for it, but rather a quick trip to our root cellar. We always buy a bushel of oranges from the FFA kids and two bushels of apples from a local orchard. They provide our winter fruit. He asked me which piece of fruit I would rather have and I chose the orange. It was cold and firm. I peeled it slowly, savoring the sweet smell of sunshine and citrus. I ate it deliberately thinking about the boxes of fruit and other good things stored in our cellar.
     Joe and I drove to Staunton yesterday for a load of chicken feed and of course made a trip to the grocery store. It took us six hours to complete this odious chore and when we got home, I was more tired than if I had spent the day shoveling snow. I craved a nap. I appreciate my root cellar most on days like yesterday because it keeps me from having to drive for groceries more than two or three times a month. Putting up jars of beets and tomatoes and beans and pickles and peaches and relishes is time consuming, but pleasant, fulfilling work in a light filled kitchen. Walking up and down the aisles of a grocery store, overwhelmed by aisles of choices is drudgery to me. Why in the world would anyone need an entire aisle dedicated to cereal and another just for toilet paper? I hate shopping most particularly because of the overload of information I must sort through to find what I need. And just when I’ve memorized where things are in a store, the chain decides to rearrange things so I’ll be tempted to buy more as I search. I much prefer my tiny root cellar with its tidy rows of jars. Shall I have beans or beets? Whatever I choose, there’s only one variety to tempt me, so I can save my time for more valuable pursuits than reading labels.
     I often wonder if I would feel the same revulsion towards shopping if I lived where I could do it on a whim. If I could jump in my car and be at the mall within ten minutes would I spend more time there? Would I, like my mom, shop each day for what I planned to eat at night, thus spending no more than fifteen minutes on the whole operation? I don’t know. I only know that when a trip to town always includes a mandatory trip to the grocery store, the drug store, the feed store and any other store we should add to the list so we don’t have to come back soon, it wears me out just to think about it. I hate shopping but, maybe in a world gone mad over materialism, that’s a good thing.

It's a Dog's Life

2011-01-17T23:08:00.000-05:00

Four weeks ago Joe ran over one of the rabbit beagles. We had just come home from finishing chores in McDowell and it was already dark. He dropped me at the front gate and then pulled around the side of the house to park the truck out of the way. I had just opened the gate to go inside when I heard a shrill yelp. I ran around to the side of the house and found Cindy Dog lying at an awkward angle in the snow. Joe’s windows were up and so he didn’t even know he had hit her until he walked back up the snowy driveway. The best we could figure is that she slipped on the ice and slid under his back wheel as he drove past.

I scooped the dog up and carried her gently to the house. She tried to bite me several times, so I knew that she was in a lot of pain. Our neighbor is a retired vet so I called him and he agreed to meet us at his house. Without an x-ray, he couldn’t be sure, but it appeared that she had cracked her pelvis. He said the best thing we could do for her was to keep her in a very small area for six weeks while the pelvis knitted back together.

When we got home, I prepared a thick pad of papers and old towels for Cindy and set her up in the kitchen. She had to be carried outside several times a day to take care of her doggie business, but other than that she sprawled on the linoleum looking miserable. Then a friend offered a small cage, so we set her up in the shed outside, surrounded by blankets. That worked pretty well, because she could do her business on the dirt floor, so there was less stress to her hip from being toted outside, but I felt bad for the dog. It’s cold outside. I was sure she must be freezing. Within a week I had hauled her back in the kitchen, where she spent her days looking sad and miserable. I assumed it was because of her hip.

     Then, a funny thing happened. Joe set her outside so she could go to the bathroom and when he went back out, fifteen minutes later, Cindy Dog was gone. In spite of the fact that she couldn’t even walk five steps to her water bowl, the dog with the broken hip had smelled a rabbit and with her hunting pal, Sandy Dog, was off on a three-legged adventure.
     I searched frantically all day for my dog, sure that she had fallen and couldn’t get up. I even went out into the dark with my flashlight and scanned all the fields around the house figuring the light would reflect off her eyes. I was right. It did. I found her curled up in her doghouse. I carried my naughty beagle back to the kitchen and placed her on her snug bed. She stared at me with sad eyes asI held the bowl to her tired little lips and worried about the damage a jaunt in the woods must have done to her unhealed hip.
     The next day, when we set her out to go to the bathroom, Cindy disappeared again. And again, I found her at dark, curled in her dog house. The same thing happened each day for the next three days. The pitiful little dog in the kitchen, who spent her days curled in the corner making sorry suffering puppy eyes at us, would disappear as soon as she was set outside.

Three days ago, we gave up and tied her outside. It turns out that’s what she wanted all along. When I go out to feed her, the dog who could barely wag her tail or stand up to drink from her bowl comes bounding out of her little house balancing on three legs and wagging her tail so hard it throws her sideways. She’s happy to be home. I’ve always felt bad about having to chain my dogs, but I’m seeing it in a new light. Given the choice of a warm bed inside with a view of four walls, or a chain and doghouse outside, this dog chooses the chain and the wide outdoors. I’m sure there’s a lesson in all this. If anybody figures it out, let me know.

A Holey Tradition

2011-01-05T13:37:00.000-05:00

     When I was a little girl, my grandfather used to take his shotgun outside the old farmhouse and shoot a hole in the sky to help the arrival of the new year. Here in the mountains, I’ve discovered a new way to poke a hole so the year can come through. My friend Caroline is hosting her annual doughnut party and the holes we will make are sweet. Doughnuts at midnight are a longstanding tradition for her family and it’s one I’m delighted to share with her.
     Friends and family start to gather at Caroline’s hilltop house at about 8:00. Everyone arrives with at least two plates of finger food, but there’s not much time to stand around and eat. It’s doughnut cutting time. Caroline and her mother spent the day housecleaning and then mixing and kneading two dishpans full of doughnut dough. The square pans are over by the gas wall heater and the dough inside has already risen above the edges. Caroline lugs the first pan to the kitchen and her son-in-law grabs a softball sized hunk and with firm hands rolls the wooden pin over it until it’s less than a quarter inch thick. Then several women grab doughnut cutters and with deft twists of their wrists create the rings and holes. My mom and Dad have driven up from Richmond to celebrate with us, so she and I take charge of moving the floppy dough rings onto trays to rise. Then we carry the trays of doughnuts out to the other room and set them on every available surface . The other guests, who are laughing and gabbing, jump up to help place them. There are trays on top of the piano, trays on chairs, trays on the steps and even a tray on top of the TV which is on so we can watch the ball drop later. I estimate we’ve cut out over a hundred doughnuts.
     By the time we finish cutting out all of the doughnuts, the first ones are ready to fry. Caroline fills a large pot with about six inches of oil and when it’s hot enough, she begins dropping them into the sizzling pot, six doughnuts at a time. They bobble and twirl for three minutes on one side and then Caroline deftly flips them with a slotted spatula. Three more minutes and then, like pleasantly plump ladies emerging from a tanning bed, the winter white doughnuts are tantalizingly brown. The first four dozen are cooled and then shaken in a mixture of plain and powdered sugar. The next forty-eight take a bath in a maple syrup glaze and the last ones get a dusting of cinnamon and sugar. For the next hour, stainless steel bowls as big as washing tubs full of warm doughnuts make the rounds of the teen-aged card players and their aunts, uncles, mothers and fathers who are gathered in the living room. My son, who has a date later, has elected to come to this party with us first and he stays until he’s played enough Rook and eaten his fill of doughnuts. When he leaves, he wraps four more in a napkin and stuffs them in his coat pocket to give to his girlfriend later.

By midnight every guest is stuffed. “Just one more,” we say as the bowl makes another round. After all, this is the last sweet hurrah of two weeks of overeating. Tomorrow, we’ll diet.

Oh Tannenbaum

2010-12-23T08:12:00.000-05:00

     My large yellow and white cat, Tip, has taken up residence at the foot of the Christmas tree. He’s tucked between the shepherds who are keeping watch over their flocks and the stable where the baby Jesus lies. Tip loved the tree as soon as we pulled it upright, and now that I’ve added the manger scene, he sleeps beside the baby Jesus.
     I didn’t want a Christmas tree this year. My plan had been to go the easy route and buy a four foot tall, pre-lit fake. Then, Joe asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I surprised myself by asking for a trip to the mountain with the family to pick out a tree followed by a decorating party. I’m so glad I did. The spicy smell of the tree greets me every time I walk in the room and it’s loaded with ornaments that bring special memories to mind. Scott’s girlfriend laughed as we topped the tree with a fragile paper doily angel he crafted in Sunday School when he was six. It has a photograph of his face where the angel’s head should be and he is not smiling. His sullen expression contrasts so beautifully with the laciness of his angel attire, and his frown leaves no doubts. Boys don’t like wearing dresses. Then there’s the six inch cardboard circle carefully constructed by Justin when he was about ten. He cut a picture of a large white-tail buck out of a magazine and I can still see his serious expression as he glued it onto his ornament. He had picked the most beautiful thing he could find for decking the tree. Justin’s girlfriend, Rachel, hung it tenderly in a place of honor. The lights were wrapped around the top two thirds of the tree because all of my men are over six feet tall and, as they passed the lights from hand to hand around the tree, it never occurred to them to bend over. So, the tree has a haphazard look.
     But, I don’t envy my neighbor’s carefully constructed Christmas trees: lights placed just so, fragile glass ornaments which emerge from layers of fluffy tissue paper, color schemes that match the furniture. My tree is lopsided, but Justin picked it out. We took a truck up through the snowy field to the base of the mountain. Joe, Lori my neighbor, and I rode in the front, while Justin and Scott bounced in the back. When the slick snow stranded us, we jumped out and walked the rest of the way up the mountain. Scott was distracted by coyote tracks, but Justin strode up the steep face of the mountain with the chainsaw perched on his shoulder and within minutes I heard the welcome growl of the saw coming to life. It wasn’t long before he slid back down the hill with the tree in tow.
     Our Christmas tree is a cedar. It was prickly to decorate and it was shaped by deer and wind, so it has a large hole on one side, but the smell and memories of the harvest make up for that. It’s not at all like our first tree. For the very first Christmas tree of our married life, I convinced Joe to go to a tree farm. I had definite ideas about what the tree should look like but Joe, having never bought a tree before, was appalled by the prices. We argued from tree to tree and when we finally brought one home it was pretty, but there was no joy in its branches. The next year we went to the mountain. I couldn’t find a perfect tree, but we weren’t paying money for it, so it didn’t matter. We laughed as we trekked around the mountain surveying our lopsided choices, and the tree that decorated our living room that year carried that laughter with it.
     Ever since then, our trees have come off the mountain. I think Tip likes lying under this one because it was picked out with such joy. I hope the baby Jesus feels it, too.

Christmas Love

2010-12-04T09:54:00.000-05:00

     Orion is sprawled across the southeastern rim of the sky with his trusty dog Sirius at his heel. All of the winter stars twinkle with a cold blue light. The first sifts of what I call a sugar snow drifted from the clouds today, but they are clearing and leaving behind a sparkly sky that reflects the whirls of snow that fly up like feathers when we step out. Joe and I are headed to town to decorate the shop for Christmas. We have in mind a tool-themed Christmas tree for the big plate glass window and the van is piled with lights and the scratchy limbs of the artificial tree I used twenty years ago to display the ornaments I sold. It was up in the attic with all of the other memories gathering dust beneath the eaves. The walnut cradle I made that rocked both my boys to sleep. The wooden crib they slept in after that. An old high chair. Boxes of toys and books set aside for the grandchildren we hope to have one day. The odds and ends we took out of the house when we were remodeling. So much love tucked up there.
     Love is the bravest thing most of us do in our lives. To love something means to be willing to take the inevitable pain of loss that will surely follow. This has been on my mind since Gus disappeared. But it’s not just Gus. Perhaps part of aging is that we begin to recognize that loss will surely happen in our lives. Joe and I are at such a sweet spot in our relationship. We are best friends and the hours fly when we are together. We have raised two fine boys and launched them out into the world, and although we miss them, we now have time to turn again to each other.
     When we park the van in the town full of Christmas magic, we step out into a quiet night lit by swags of lights and the glitter of softly falling snow. We hold hands and my heart fills to bursting. This is love and in this season of God’s love I want to drink my fill. After the tree is decorated, we drive home listening to Christmas carols on the radio station. The snow has stopped but the roads are icy and halfway down the mountain we are flagged to a stop by a state trooper. His blue lights intermittently light the crumpled side of a pick-up truck that has just been hauled over the steep edge of the mountain. There is a big hole in the windshield and for just a moment before I can see it clearly, I panic at the thought that it might be Justin’s truck. I have been to the site of accidents that both of my boys have been involved in and the dread lurch and pound of my heart will never quite go away. And, although it’s not Justin’s truck, I know some mother’s child has just been pulled from the brink.
     When we get home, Justin calls his dad to tell him about his day. When they hang up, I call Scott, who is on a college road trip with friends. I remind him to buckle up and tell him I love him. Then I step out onto the porch into the frosty night and look up. Above my house, Orion still sails across the winter sky. The Christmas stars remind me. God sent His son, so I am not afraid. Love has no end.

The Day After Thanksgiving

2010-11-27T15:58:00.000-05:00

For those who want to know, Gus is still missing. I am sad about it, but looking forward, not backwards. What a gift to have enjoyed such a happy, free-spirited, loving little beagle. If he is still alive somewhere, I am praying that he has found a good home where his keen sense of loyalty and fun will be fully appreciated.

Joe and I travelled to Staunton today to pick up chicken feed. Around every turn in the road we saw deflated Christmas decorations sprawled in soggy brown yards. They looked like the aftermath of a drive-by shooting. I know, I know. You have to wait until night for the magic to begin. That's when these scraps of cloth and thread rise to glow on lawns like blimpy aliens from a nylon planet. They are kind of neat, then, but really does the baby Jesus have to be right next to Sponge Bob on the lawn? And it's a little creepy to have a ten foot snowman towering over the manger. This time of year, right after Thanksgiving makes me a little cranky. America is so conflicted about this "holiday season." We're not even allowed to say the word Christmas in school anymore and I love Christmas carols, but I don't want to hear them as the background music to advertisements for chocolate and sodas and cars and ipods. That's why I wrote this song. It reminds me to keep my eyes on the main thing. Hope it helps you, too.

The day after Thanksgiving, Christmas shopping begins
We can’t forget Aunt Myrtle or her husband Uncle Ben
We must find the perfect present for each person on our list
It’s critically important and no one must be missed

We wear ourselves to shadows of our former jolly selves
We shop like Martha Stewart and we work like Santa’s elves
We decorate and bake and clean and decorate some more
We’ve got to match the beauty of our neighbor’s house next door

Children whine and whimper and they drag their folks around
From computer store to toy store they shop all around the town
They long for something special that will really thrill their heart
They think that they will find it at the local Walmart

Christmas presents stacked beneath a lovely Christmas tree
Christmas presents PILED UP HIGH, are all of those for me?
Christmas presents wrapped in paper, tied up with a bow
Gimme, what’d ya get me? I just really have to know

A tiny babe wrapped up in a handmade cloth of love
The shepherds wonder at the angels singing up above
The wise men cross the desert as they travel from afar
To find the baby savior sleeping underneath the star

A Christmas present in a manger underneath a tree
A present sent from heaven, is it really just for me?
A Christmas present wrapped in love and placed into a stall
God sent His love at Christmas—a gift for one and all.

So when I hear commercials and see Santas all around
Or hear the registers ringing as the shoppers rush through town
I just turn my head and listen to the angel’s distant song
Joy to the world….
And then I sing along….

A Christmas present in a manger underneath a tree
A present sent from heaven, is it really just for me?
A Christmas present wrapped in love and placed into a stall
God sent His love at Christmas—a gift for one and all

As we begin the Advent season, I hope you hear angels around every corner singing "Joy to the World."

Gus

2010-11-20T11:26:00.000-05:00

     My beautiful little rabbit beagle Gus is missing. He was born on the farm and raised by my side. When I pulled into my driveway every evening, Gus would stop whatever he might be doing and pound across the yard with a happy grin, ears flapping, tail whapping, to meet me. He would sit patiently at my car door until I gathered everything up and then place his front paws on my legs for an ear scratching before following me to the house. He could fetch a ball, sit on command, catch food in mid-air, circle, and walk on two legs but his favorite activity was jumping straight up in the air like he had pogo sticks where his pads should have been. As I walked back to feed the other dogs at night, he would bound along beside me, jumping up so his nose was almost as high as mine every few steps and laughing as he landed. Then, he danced his joy and ran it in ever widening speed circles around me.
     The yard is empty and so is my heart. It’s my fault he’s gone. I didn’t tie him up when hunting season started. Last year, I remembered to chain him until the season passed, but I forgot this year. He was last seen chasing a fox across our neighbor’s mountain on Saturday morning a week ago. Various school children have reported sighting him on Monday morning sniffing his way across a field several miles north of here but I have canvassed all my neighbors to the north and no one has seen him since then.
     Most people think that dogs can run free in the country, but that’s not generally the case. Two dogs working together can wreak havoc on a sheep flock and generally one or both end up shot. Maybe Gus found another canine friend and provoked the ire of a farmer. If so, then I can’t be mad. I’ve seen the damage dogs do to sheep. It’s not pretty. But, I don’t think that’s what happened. There’s only one flock of sheep near us and Glen would have let us know if our dog was around.
     Maybe Gus crawled through a fence and was snagged by a coyote snare. Coyotes are ravaging the last flocks in the county and snares are one of the few ways farmers have found to create a line of safety in wire fences. But, dogs get caught in them, too. When Gus was a pup, he disappeared for a day. I discovered him just a quarter mile from the house caught in a neck snare. He had been chained before, so rather than struggling against the snare he lay down patiently to wait. It saved his life. When I found him he howled pitifully but he didn’t move. I remember trying to free him and after several unsuccessful attempts to trip the latch, running screaming to the house for Joe. Gus never moved until Joe got back and cut him loose. So, if he’s in a snare, he’s been lying there a long time waiting. But, we’ve let our neighbors who set snares know he is gone and no one has found him, so I don’t think that’s where he is either.
     He could have been shot by a hunter, angry at a happy little dog who chased deer for sport, never catching them, but running until his tongue scraped the ground. Hunters have been known to do things like that. They've also been known to steal dogs.
     Gus was a handsome dog. He might have been snagged by a hunter who thought he scored a prize. Good rabbit beagles are worth some money and Gus would hunt rabbits tirelessly when he could roust them out. I hope that’s what happened, but what I cling to is the hope that he’s just still hunting and has found a kind soul to feed him who doesn’t yet know my pal is gone. Every morning I wake up and run to the window, hoping to see him prancing across the lawn. Every evening I stand on the hill and call, hoping he’ll hear me and decide to come home.
     I should have kept him tied. His mother and aunt are tied and only leave the chains to hunt or trade off for a day of freedom. Our chains are long and light. The dogs can touch noses and have plenty of water and shade, chickens to watch and a good ear-scratching each night as they are fed. But, still, I hate a dog on a chain. Gus was free because he was my buddy, and now he’s gone and I miss him very much.

The Staff of Life

2010-11-10T20:20:00.000-05:00

     The bread I had for supper was over forty years old and still moist and delicious. The sourdough starter that I used to make it was given to me by my dear friend Lucy, who brought it to Virginia with her in 1978. She doesn’t know how old her starter was because it was given to her by a friend who may have gotten it from another friend and so on. I like to imagine that perhaps there are some pioneer bacteria quietly exhaling CO2 into the jar where they rest in my fridge.
     I had never tried to make bread with sourdough starter before Lucy graced me with a jar and at first I was a little nervous. I didn’t want to be the person who let the legacy expire. But it turns out that sourdough critters are very forgiving. They languish in my fridge for up to a week at a time requiring nothing from me at all. On Friday nights, I take them out, feed them a little flour and water, and let them warm to room temperature until they are waltzing with the wild yeasts that live among them and pumping up their respiration a bit. In return for the favor, they raise my sponge ( a technical bread term for the bowl of warm fermenting batter). The beauty of sourdough is that I can let the sponge rise all night. In the morning I add more flour, some oil, salt, sugar and water and knead it to a spankable softness, that slowly burps and gurgles in my big bowl all day until it is double in size. If I’m not ready to bake bread on Saturday night, I just punch it down and let it rise again until Sunday morning when I make fresh rolls for breakfast.
     When I first moved to the mountains I really didn’t know much about cooking at all. Determined to impress Joe, I made bread one Saturday afternoon right after we met. While the flour floating around in the air was light and fluffy, my bread was not. I worked for years trying out different recipes and never coming close to the moist, light bread that my mother in law turned out consistently week after week. She didn’t have a recipe because she’d been mixing bread in the same blue enamelware bowl since she was five years old. She just knew when it looked right.
     Yeasts are not patient. They rise fast and can overdevelop the gluten in the finished bread product if they aren’t monitored. When I discovered sourdough, I found my missing ingredient. It is slow and patient and very, very forgiving.

Jesus is often referred to as the “bread of life.” I’m sure He must be sourdough.

Risky Business

2010-10-27T21:11:00.000-04:00

     I participated in risky behavior this past weekend. Because I live cupped in a valley between lots of mountains, I see more sheep than people in a day. But, I want to publish a children’s book and I’ve discovered that one of the realities in the publishing world is the necessity for networking. So this past weekend, I pulled on my big girl panties and travelled to the Society of Children’s Book Writers Mid-Atlantic conference in Arlington, VA. I saw more people on Friday than I have seen in the past six years and that was just the ones I passed on the interstate during rush hour.
     Then on Saturday, I spent the day with 300 other aspiring and some “yeehaw I’ve made it!” authors. They were all lovely people. I heard Lisa Yee (a highly published and popular author) speak and listened to agents and editors talk about how to make it in this business. I had my first ever face to face meeting with a delightful agent, who although she wasn’t interested in my book, still made me feel hopeful. I had lunch with a new found friend who gave me the name of her editor at a magazine I’ve been trying to crack. I collected artist’s cards and studied portfolios so I could spiff mine up. I ate homemade pizza on an urban front porch with good friends and watched what appeared to be UFO’s fizzling across the sky. It was truly a great weekend. And, I moved outside of my comfort zone for a while.
     As I grow older, I want to be sure to break out of my rut, even though it’s a beautiful one, every once in a while. My grandmother, Nana, was always forward looking and eager for a new adventure. She lived to be 102 and even though she went to heaven to give God some pointers a while ago, I still feel her lively curiosity. Nana quoted Shakespeare to me every chance she got, which guaranteed that I was sometimes a little big for my britches. I’m embarrassed to admit that at ten years of age, I could be heard saying things like, “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” Nana was also dogged and passionate when she wanted to make something happen and I am trying to channel that confidence. So, Nana, even though my trip wasn’t as successful as I had hoped, I’m not giving up. The world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

Readers, what have you done lately that caused your heart to beat a little faster?

The Daily LLama

2010-10-08T22:12:00.000-04:00

     The predators move ever closer. I have seen more bears this year than all my years living here put together. Coyotes howl on the ridge tops and we shepherds anxiously count our sheep each morning. We’ve lost 16 this year, another neighbor has lost 15, and yet another 13. There are bones scattered in every meadow and pasture. The local trapper announced at a recent meeting that these wily canines and hungry ursines are here to stay and we will just have to find a way to coexist. Some farmers are penning their sheep every night, others are using llamas and Great Pyrenees dogs as sentries in their flocks and others are just giving up.
     Coyotes are cruel hunters. They kill by biting the ewe or lamb in the neck and then hanging on until the animal suffocates. I don’t think I would mind it so much, if they would just eat what they kill, but often they eat a chunk or two and then move on. At least bears drag the lambs off and bury them for future meals.
     My neighbor, Cindy, has been penning her lambs each night in a small lot with snares set in the areas where a coyote might creep through the fence, but the coyotes are avoiding those holes and digging new ones to get to the sheep. She was in tears the other day as she told me about the loss of her five year old daughter’s pet lamb. Cindy hasn’t broken the news to her, yet. Instead, she went and bought a guard llama. The llama comes with a guarantee. If a coyote succeeds in getting past its hooves and head then the vet who sold it to Cindy will replace it with another or refund her money. This is a serious business. But Cindy’s daughter is interested in her new and strange looking pet because it is cute. The llama stands a whole sheep taller than the ewes it guards. His neck rises above them like a periscope and he is constantly turning his head and flicking his ears as he scans for danger. His name is Charlie and although he lost a lamb the first night, he has since bonded with the flock and fought off all predators. Cindy told me that the first time Charlie saw a black Angus cow, he charged it. Her guess is that the cow looked too much like a bear for Charlie’s taste. The sheep follow along behind Charlie in a single file line. When he moves to greener pastures, they parade behind as he leads them safely through the valley of the shadow of death.
     The sheep have come to trust the llama and it seems their trust is well placed. So, another of my neighbors may stay in business after all. In a community that seems constantly under threat from a spiraling economy and an ever-encroaching predator population, that is good news indeed.

The View from the Bus

2010-09-26T17:32:00.000-04:00

     Last night I peed in the woods and slept in a bus and I wasn’t even at Woodstock. Joe and I spent the day repairing the board fence that keeps the cows out of my garden and yard. There were posts to replace, boards to prime and paint to scrape. At 4:00 when our arms were sore and our tempers short, we called it quits and packed up for a campout in the bus at the top of the mountain.
     Two years ago, Joe bought an old school bus at a surplus sale. It had been his dream for some time to convert one into a hunting camp. After a week spent painting the exterior forest green, Joe and the boys built four bunk beds, a small eating area, and a kitchen counter. This bout of interior decorating was capped by the installation of a tiny wood burning stove. Joe drove the bus up the incredibly steep path to the top of the mountain on the eastern edge of our property. He parked it so it commands a majestic view of the lower part of the Bullpasture Valley.
     The boys had spent two hunting seasons up there, but I had never had the opportunity to spend the night. The weather was beautiful. High blue skies contrasted with the trembling orange and yellow fall leaves. A Red Tailed hawk screamed overhead as it drifted on the thermals. We drove the logging road to the top of the ridge and unloaded our few supplies into the bus. Then we hiked up the holler to the watering hole and followed some old logging roads to the top of the mountain. We visited Brent’s pond, which is almost completely dry and then trekked southwest into the setting sun until we reached the high meadow. Perched on rocks at the edge of the field, we admired the one hundred eighty degree view of the surrounding mountains which undulate endlessly to the west. Views like that always remind me of how big my God is.
     As the sun slid below the last mountain we turned downhill and headed back to the bus. Our legs were trembling with exhaustion and it was completely dark by the time we reached it, but Joe ran these mountains as a young boy chasing coons in the moonlight, so I knew I could just follow him home. After a supper of warm pork tenderloin sandwiches, chips and beer, we talked into the dark until finally we were yawning more than conversing. Then, we crawled into the tiny bunks and fell asleep to the distant sound of dogs barking in the village below. At midnight, when Joe returned from a brief trip to the woods, he stood at the bus window and I rose to join him. The moon rising in the east behind us was casting a brilliant light on the ridges below. We crawled back into our cozy beds, refreshed and bone tired and slept until the sun woke us. After another brief hike down to Dark Holler, we packed up and bumped our way home.
     This was my second hike of the weekend. On Friday, I stopped in Ramsey's Draft at the foot of the Shenandoah Mountain and hiked a small portion of the trail there. I am planning a field trip to the area for my students and wanted a chance to check it out. The path there follows the stream bed,which was almost completely dry from the continued drought. I did find several small pools of crystal water and although I didn't drink any, I have read that it is so pure, that I could have. Justin has hunted all through the Ramsey's Draft area and before I left, he jokingly offered me one of his dog's tracking collars, so if I got lost the signal could be used to find me.  He cautioned me not to leave the main trail because the wilderness there is deep and tricky with lots of false hollers. More than one hiker has spent several cold and lonely nights there waiting for rescue. I only walked thirty minutes in and thirty minutes back out so I wasn't in danger, but I also didn't reach the virgin timber tucked deep into the heart of the valley. I would like to go back soon and try to find it.

It is a privilege to live in a place where the best vacations can be found right out my back door.

Words and Bread

2010-09-10T22:01:00.000-04:00

     When I first moved to Highland County, my principal suggested that I learn where all of my students lived. He wanted me to understand some of the remote and rugged places that they called home. So, I hopped in my car and started looking for their houses, but I couldn’t find them. One set of directions said to go three miles up Straight Creek until I reached the Forks of the Water. Then I should turn left on the Blue Grass Road and follow it until I reached the road to Laurel Fork. Seemed simple enough, but although all of the roads in the county had names, none of them sported a road sign. The locals and old timers knew which road was Possum Trot and which one was Seldom Seen, but county maps only listed roads by route numbers. When I finally mastered most of the place names and the people attached to them, I felt like I was officially a member of the community. Then, the government required us to post street signs on all the roads so the rescue squads and firemen could come to our rescue, even though they already knew where we lived. Even my quarter mile driveway was marked by a brown sign. And of course there were arguments as folks tried to determine if the street signs should read “hollow”-(definition--empty space), or “holler” (definition--friendly yell.) Hollow won out over the more poetic local vernacular. Many of the place names were changed or replaced.
     Last weekend I attended a happy reunion on the tree lined shores of Camp Hanover. Several of us climbed into a tree house high over the tannic brown lake and recalled the language of the magical summers we spent there. We talked of Mystery Lake, the P-fer Teepee, Vesper Dell, the monkey bridge, the Trading Post, the sawdust pile, the snake pit and Fairy Land. We remembered drinking bug juice, initiating the innocents into the Honey Bee Society, listening to John tell stories about “Our Elephant,” and “Old Roanie,” going on dry runs across the lake and kneeling reverently to light a fire. The words were enough to carry us, if only for a moment, back to the firefly nights of sleeping in hogans, making s’mores, and gathering on rainy nights in the Kirkwoods.
     But, like the road names in Highland, some of our words have been lost or replaced by a new vernacular which will resonate in the same way in thirty or so years for another bunch of old friends who, like us, will come back to hike the lake and speak the words that evoke such rich memories. And like me, they will be fed.
Evening has come. The board is spread. Thanks be to God who gives us bread. Praise God for bread.

Dog Days and Snake Skins

2010-08-30T22:13:00.000-04:00

     At 2:30 this morning, I stomped out to the back forty dressed in nothing but my little blue nightgown and Muck boots. The fog was backlit by a full moon and I walked through liquid silver as I crossed the culvert to the dog houses where I stood for a moment and listened to the distant bugling of my beagle, Sandy. I had let her off her chain at sundown so she could get a little exercise while the chickens were cooped up for the night. Sandy is too fond of white meat for me to let her loose when they are free ranging in the field. Gus, who was still tied, had been howling since 12:00 as he listened to her merry chase and I despaired of getting any sleep unless I moved him to the house to spend the night on the mud porch. I hoped that he would be quiet there.
     When I hopped out of bed to retrieve my loud hound, I wasn’t too happy about a midnight stroll. But, standing in that magical mist, I was glad I’d been forced out. As I listened to my beagle’s howl floating through the fog I could tell that she was running towards me. Rabbits run in a wide arc and Sandy’s singing got louder as she came full circle.
     Closer by, crickets chirped in the grass. My twenty-eighth year of teaching started last week and as always it was heralded by choruses of crickets in the fading meadow and yard. This is a bittersweet time of year. The garden is pumping out produce at a rate faster than I can keep up with and my freezer and cellar are fat with tomatoes, peaches, beans, corn, beets and pickles. But school has started and cold weather is just around the corner. The warm freedom of summer days has come to an end.
     Houdini, the snake who escaped from my room last week, was recovered under a trash can across the hall. As soon as I put him back in the terrarium, he shed his skin. Vernon, our school janitor said it was another sign of the approaching fall. He said snakes shed when the dog days have ended. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but because he had been without food for almost two weeks, I brought the snake home and turned him loose where I had found him. In a blink of an eye, he disappeared into his home hole.
     This is also the time of year when parents all around the county are prodding their children to finish 4-H projects. While Joe and I miss helping our kids with their animal projects, we don’t miss the tension of pushing them to complete their barn displays before midnight. Still, when a neighbor child calls, looking to borrow a lead rope, or a hog waterer, or a halter, Joe is always happy to help.

     So, here we are, empty nesters. Like the singing dog and the shedding snake, we’ve come full circle. I wonder what the next round will bring.

SSSSSNAKE

2010-08-23T22:50:00.000-04:00

     Somewhere in my classroom a snake is learning to read. Two weeks ago, when we were cleaning up the yard, Joe lifted the vinyl grill cover off the ground and discovered a small ring neck snake curled in the dirt below.
     Hearing Joe’s exclamation, I hurried over and when I saw the snake, I scooped it up and dropped it into a large plastic jar that I keep for such marvelous surprises. I layered some soil, moss and rocks in the jar and the snake slithered into hiding. I planned to take the snake to school and keep it in my classroom for a couple of weeks. Then after all learning opportunities had been exhausted, I would return the snake to the spot where it first saw the light.
     I Googled “Ring Neck Snake” and the information that I found was encouraging. These snakes are shy but they make good pets. They need a place to hide, a shallow dish of water and an occasional snack of small invertebrates. Their favorite meal is salamanders. I strolled around my yard lifting rocks and logs until I uncovered some worms, crickets and a small black and yellow spotted newt. Perfect. I had a snake smorgasbord. The critters were dropped into the jar but the snake didn’t seem interested in the menu.
     Five days later, the only thing the snake had eaten was the tip of the salamander’s tail. Worried, I returned to Google and discovered that my snake’s milky eyes meant it was getting ready to shed. Snakes lose their appetites as their skin gets too tight.
     On Wednesday, I took the snake to school and it was a big hit that night at the sixth grade orientation. On Thursday, the biology teacher offered me a bigger home for it and I transferred the snake into a ten gallon terrarium. At this point, the Ring Neck’s eyes were almost completely opaque. I anticipated finding a freshly shed skin on Friday morning.
     What I didn’t anticipate was finding an empty terrarium. I wiggled my fingers through the rich loam. Perhaps the snake was burrowed deeply in the dirt. I turned over leaves, moss and rocks and uncovered the salamander, crickets and worms. But, there was no sign of the snake. The small opening between the glass sides and glass top of the aquarium must have been large enough for the slithery Houdini to escape. But where did it go? The last thing I needed on the first day of school was gaggles of girls leaping up on their desks when the snake reappeared. I crawled around on my hands and knees and looked everywhere, but the snake was gone.
     The students came for the first day of school today. They asked about the snake. I told them that I took it home. Yes, on the first day of school, I told a big, fat lie, but it’s better than the alternative. There are some students who wouldn’t come into my room if they thought a snake might drop out of the ceiling for a visit.

Somewhere in my English class a snake is learning to read. I hope it learns to spell EXIT.

photo courtesy Julie Williams

A Peach of A Day

2010-08-12T23:03:00.000-04:00

I spent a day last week putting up the bushel of peaches Joe and I picked up on our anniversary trip. This is just a little pictorial of all the fun.

First thing with peaches is to wash them. Don't you love my old-fashioned porcelain sink? The drainboard is slightly slanted so every drop of water slips back to the drain. Plus just a little bleach keeps it sparkling white.

Anyway, after I washed the peaches, I dipped them in a big pot of boiling water for about thirty seconds, then I dumped them into a sink full of cold water. The skins slipped right off. I chose to slice my peaches this year, but sometimes I just skin, pit and halve them.

Once the peaches were washed and sliced, I made a weak syrup of one part sugar to two parts water and heated it to boiling. Then the peaches were packed into the jars, the syrup poured over them, the hot lids put on and screwed down, and the jars processed in a steam canner for just a few minutes.

This is my big, scary canner. It was one of the best wedding gifts I got. The first time I used it, I hid in the next room so if it exploded I wouldn't be hit with flying beans.

Some of the peaches were also packed into freezer boxes with the leftover syrup. As you can see, these boxes have been used for years. I can't even find this kind in stores anymore.

And then of course, there's our favorite way to eat peaches.

One bushel of peaches yielded 32 pints in the freezer or cellar, two bags of fresh peaches for friends, a week's worth of peaches to eat fresh out of hand and of course, one peach pie.

In addition to peaches this week, I put up the following:

A great week of harvest! Only tomatoes and beets to go.

Happy Summer!

Dirt

2010-08-05T19:48:00.000-04:00

     Those who know the secrets of the dirt are leaving us. The hardworking sweaty browed farmers who could pick up a fistful of soil and tell when it was ready for seed, or point to a furrowed patch and say, “That is the best spot for onions in the garden,” are dying and their children are selling the land because farming is just too hard and doesn’t pay particularly well. The former vegetable gardens and apple orchards and timothy grass pastures are being buried beneath housing developments that have sprouted up on former meadows like mushrooms on cow pies. What’s been built can’t be unbuilt.
    Joe and I just returned from a four day anniversary trip through the central and western sections of Virginia. We were appalled by sprawl. We found battlefield land preserved in narrow strips that were bounded on either side by shopping malls, housing developments and storage units. We climbed Lee’s Hill in Fredericksburg and stood with our backsides practically in someone’s storage shed as we gazed out on what used to be pasture but is now a commercial district. We drove scenic routes that showcased run down farms and encroaching malls. And, we were sad. Living in our little forgotten gem of a county, where there is only one blinking stoplight and whether or not to build a Dollar General was a much debated topic, has spoiled us. We gaze daily on cows and sheep and rolling, vibrant pastures so it is understandable that we found most of the scenic routes a bit of a letdown. But we were shocked by how fast it is all disappearing.
     We drove on roads that used to be lined with daisies and chickweed and are now lined with malls and we wondered why we need so many of them. What is everyone buying? And the even bigger question is: What will everyone eat when all the farms are gone?

A Shepherd's Devotion

2010-07-30T22:19:00.000-04:00

Question: What goes stomp, stomp splat? Answer: Me, running after sheep this morning and doing a nosedive into a pile of poo. It’s never easy when it’s time to move animals and this morning was no exception. In fact, this morning was day 2 of a round-up that started yesterday.

Day 1
Joe and I wake our teenage son as soon as the fog rises off the mountains. Son jumps on four-wheeler and zips up the driveway and out to road while his parents poke along behind in the truck. When everyone is successfully assembled at the gate-we-hope-to-bring-sheep-through, son and father enter the field of battle while I wait on the road. The tried and true strategy is that Scott will travel up and down hills, rounding up sheep and funneling them down the holler to his father who is waiting below rattling a grain bucket. I am stationed on the south end of the road to prevent the sheep from travelling to town. This is the way it usually works, but today, the sheep have apparently been sucked into a giant space ship by mutton-busting aliens. They are nowhere to be found. Not on our land, not on our neighbor’s land, not on our neighbor’s-neighbor’s land. Joe and Scott search for an hour while I sit on the grain bucket out on the road. Then we go home to eat breakfast. Sometime's it’s best to just wait things out.
Day 2-
Same wake up scenario but, this time, the sheep are clearly visible across the road. We must make haste before the sheep abducting aliens return. Son zips out driveway followed closely by parents in pick up. There’s no time to lose. Son speeds through the gate-we-hope-to-bring-sheep-through and successfully corners the flock, turns them and sends them out the gate. It is a brilliant, hair-raising ride on steep hills. The sheep barrel out into the road, but unfortunately it’s only one half of the flock. The other half is a whole hill behind. Before they can all reunite, the first group changes its mind and EWE-turns in the middle of the road and barrels through the newly arrived flock. They all scatter up a very steep, very wooded hill. Joe throws the grain bucket after them. It doesn’t help.
Day 2- continued

Joe runs straight up the hill while Scott guns the four-wheeler and careens up the holler to head the sheep off at the pass. I run up the other hill and do my face plant in the poo. The sheep watch us warily from the woods and slowly, slowly, oh how slowly, we coax them down. Like wooly pendulums they vacillate up and down between the hills until finally they make the turn and stream through the gate-we-want-to-move-them-through. Joe runs back down the hill, grabs his bucket and walks down the road, shaking the ten corn kernels left in it. Convinced that he has a banquet in that bucket, the sheep follow. Once they are on the road they lose interest and weave back and forth plunging down the steep shoulder on the right and climbing the steeper shoulder on the left. I follow them and the audience of drivers waiting in their cars behind us is treated to the sight of a 49 year old woman belly sliding backwards down the shaley slope. The sheep watch from above and when I land at the bottom, leap over me to tip tap docilely down the road. They wend their way to the turn-off stopping to taste every wildflower before they hop through the meadow gate. Scott follows them on his four-wheeler while we race up the driveway to open the gate at the other end where we finally bring the sheep home.

The Bible often refers to humans as sheep and Christ as our shepherd. Every time I work with sheep I am reminded of this. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Run to the Light

2010-07-23T13:56:00.000-04:00

The sun has just peeked up over the mountains, so I slip on my garden clogs and head out to weed. The plants are cool and wet with dew and that old bob white is up bright and early letting me know he is around. I whistle back and forth with him for a minute or two while I rest on the handle of my hoe.
     The early morning sun is suspended in a soft fog that burns off as I work. The garden is going great guns. The corn is tasseling, the broccoli is crowning, the squash are burgeoning and the beans are blooming. Looks like my cellar will be full this winter. But, right now I am full of a gardener’s kind of contentment. I am already filthy and I haven’t even had breakfast, yet. Damp dirt clings to my fingers as I practice the art of weed and shake meditation. Pull a weed, shake the dirt from its roots, toss it on a pile to wilt in the sun. Pull a weed, shake the dirt…well, you get the rhythmic picture.
     The sun defeats the last of the fog and I feel the heat on my back as sweat drips off my nose. I don’t mind. I love the summer because of the sun. I am like the plants in my garden always happiest in its radiant light.
     Yesterday, I spent some time, out of the light, in a wild cave in West Virginia. Caroline and I took a ride with some of her relatives to the Sinks of Gandy (don’t you just love that name?) It’s a remote, ruggedly beautiful area of Randolph County. We travelled a private road that stretched across ten miles and five gates to her aunt’s property tucked in a sea of towering, grassy meadows. The feeling was the same one I get when I stand at the edge of the ocean and watch breakers rolling in from the distant sky.
     Then after a packed picnic lunch that included fresh cucumbers, potato salad, watermelon slices, homemade peach jam, and (heavenly days) homemade coconut cream pie, we gathered some interesting rocks, resisted the urge to nap, and drove another ten miles across vast wilderness to a place where the Gandy River ran into a hill and disappeared, only to reappear almost a mile to the north.
     Caroline had been through this cave twice and wanted to explore it again. I was happy to finally get a chance to go through a cave I’d heard so much about. We left her family at the misty entrance and turning our beams to the darkness, followed the water inside. The happy sound of our splashy footsteps bounced from one wall to the other as we sloshed upstream and our flashlight beams soared up to an arched dome of a ceiling. It wasn’t long before the giggling stream dodged under some boulders and we were forced to climb up and over the tumbled remains of floods and ceiling drops. We turned off our flashlights and spent a moment in the dark. The only sound was our breathing and the gurgle of the creek on the other side of the rocks.
     The plan was to follow the water all the way out to the other side, but the water never reappeared. We clambered around a stagnant pool of foam and sticks, and we waded through a dark, cold spring-fed pond, but the stream eluded us and soon we couldn’t even hear its happy song. Caroline was all for pressing forward, even though her memories of the cave didn’t match the reality. My rising sense of panic overruled her. My head was screaming in my ears about death and being buried alive. We turned around and realized that we weren’t sure exactly how to go back. There were several paths to choose from.
     With our flashlights bouncing off of the now menacing rock formations, we began searching for a way out. The route back didn’t match our memories of the route forward so we took turns scouting ahead until we stumbled upon some familiar looking features. The stick that looked like a snake, the arrow painted on the wall that clearly showed we had gone the wrong way (Oh, that’s what that arrow meant!) and finally the glimmer of sun dancing off water up ahead. Like a horse headed to the barn I picked up my feet and cantered to the light.
     After ten minutes of thanking a watchful God and enjoying the sun, we hiked up to the car and changed into dry clothes. Then we decided to walk over to where the river reappeared and exam the cave from that side.
     This entrance was a bit trickier. In our clean clothes and shoes we slid down a narrow crevice through wet orange clay to a small chamber. Intrigued by light dancing on the ceiling we discovered a large lake with an opening to the outside on the opposite shore. Then we turned around to go back the way we’d come, only again (can you spell I-D-I-O-T) we could not locate the correct path. There was no exit sign to guide us out and our flashlights were beginning to cast rather faint orange ovals on the pitted floor.
     I looked at Caroline and said, “If we don’t find our way out of here in ten minutes, I am swimming that (expletive deleted) lake and I will climb down a thirty foot drop if that’s what it takes to get out of here!” She told me to stay where I was and disappeared. I turned off my light to conserve my batteries. In a minute I heard her calling. She had found the way out.
     Now Mom, I know you are reading this and you are ready to pick up the phone and give me a call, but the reality of the situation is people knew where we were, and the cave is rated family friendly. The only real danger I was in was the danger of spraining my ankle as I galloped to the light. In fact, I would really like to go back and try to get all the way through sometime. Well, maybe not for a while.

Light and dirt. Two of my favorite things. But, dirt without light doesn’t hold the same magic. I have read Tom Sawyer with my students too many times. I know Tom and Becky get out of the cave and he discovers treasure in the end. But, I’ve discovered I wouldn’t make a very good troglodyte. My treasure is the warm smile of the sun on my face and a garden full of green things that have captured the light and stored it so I can enjoy it later.

At the Auction

2010-07-18T11:03:00.000-04:00

When the chores are done and the weather’s fine, then it’s time to go to the auction. Today, two friends and I spend the morning at an estate sale in West Virginia. Cars and trucks line the road for a half a mile in either direction, so we squeeze onto the grassy shoulder perilously close to a ditch. Caroline jumps out and directs my parking.
Once the van is secure, we scuttle up the road, dodging oncoming cars and then climb the porch steps of the old farmhouse to register and get our numbers. I am number 206, which means there are 205 bargain hunters ahead of me. It might not be a good day for deals.

     The auctioneer starts with a hay wagon load of boxes. Each box has a variety of household treasures tucked inside its cardboard walls. Nut crackers, boxes of matches, Tupperware, ashtrays, tin boxes, pots with no lids and lids with no pots, paint by number pictures framed and ready to hang, beads, buttons, curtains, sheets, and dish towels. And hidden amidst all of these things might be a piece of depression glass, a tin toy, a rare book, a butter mold. The first hour at any auction is spent poring through the boxes to see what might be tucked under the junk. But, we are late. No time for that. We’ll just have to use our women’s intuition. We push our way through the crowd to plop in the grass on the hill.
     I’ve never been to an auction with this auctioneer so it takes me a while to catch on to his patter. Every auctioneer is different. Dressed in blue plaid and blue jeans, with a farm cap tilted back off his eyes, he leans on his cane and commences to tantalizing.
     “Heey! Lookee here. A genuine tin flower pot shaped like a bedpan. Isn’t that clever? Who’ll give me five dollars and where? How about four? You aren’t looking. You’ll never find a prettier potty. Start me off. I got a dollar, now two, now three. Anyone else? Are you all through and all done? Sold to number 135!
     The lady who buys it raises her card so he can get her number and then hurries forward to claim her prize. The first time I went to a country auction, I was afraid to wave to friends, scratch my nose or nod to acquaintances. I was uncertain about the bidding process and thought any stray movement on my part might be interpreted as a bid. I’ve since learned that sometimes you have to wave pretty hard to get the auctioneer’s attention, but then once you have it, just a slight wrinkle of your forehead is enough to send the bids up. It’s fun to look around and see if you can figure out who’s bidding against you.
     Sue and I jump right in. She buys some galvanized troughs for her lambs and a garden push plow. I buy a box of old pots for three dollars. There’s one white enamelware pot that I’m interested in for decorative purposes, but when I retrieve my pile I discover I’ve also gotten two beautiful enamel bowls, one blue and one sage green. Plus, a tin dishpan and various other pots with holes in them. There are tape labels on the sides proclaiming “All Big Boy,” and “small cherry.” These pots have been used as seedling starters, but now they will get a new life as dog bowls and decorations. Not bad for three dollars.
     A storm blows up and people scatter as the auctioneer and crew rush to pull blue tarps over dressers and sofas. I take a break and Caroline and I haul fifty pounds worth of goods to the van and then pull it closer. Lots of people have left in the deluge. We may get a bargain, yet. Sue stays behind and snags a box of toys and I offer to buy a cute little tin duck from her. We seal the deal and move on to the farm goods across the creek.
     Before I can cross the little bridge, I hear the auctioneer start the bidding on some chicken coops I spied earlier. I splash through the creek, soaking my pants , because these coops are one of the reasons I’m at the sale. I get there just in time to get a real deal on two coops. Sue offers to buy one off of me for a coffee table, but I tell her we’ll have to wait and see if Scott needs both of them. We consider buying some wooden barrels, but decide we can’t stuff them in the van. I offer to buy a chicken waterer from a lady who buys ten of them, and she takes me up on it. Then we make another trip to the van with our loot.

It’s lunch time and Caroline springs for hot dogs and a slice of cake. Then we decide we’ve had enough and wedge ourselves into the van in between all our bargains. The van lumbers home and when I unpack it, I discover my chicken waterer won’t hold water. Oh well. Auctions are really about risks and treasures and catching up with old friends. It’s been a successful day.

One Summer Day

2010-07-07T21:58:00.000-04:00

I thought I would document one summer day and see what I did:

7:00 am--rise and shine—breakfast for Joe and Scott—creamed chipped beef on toast

8:00 am--clean up from breakfast gather things to work on finishing the mud room

8:30-9:00—Morning devotions

9:00-11:30--sand and finish all woodwork on mud room, finish moving furniture back on to it, sand and refinish five window sills in house

11:30 --go with Joe down to McDowell so he can drive the tractor and bailer up the road and I can drive the hay wagon. I hate driving wagons up the road. I’m always afraid the wagon will take out a mailbox, but I manage to make it the six miles with no incidents and even pull it through the gate without hanging up on a gate post. Scott flags us down. He’s lost hydraulic pressure on the disc mower so Joe pulls into the meadow and problem solves for him.

12:30--to the house for lunch. It’s just leftover hotdogs, beanie weenies and sliced apples with cold iced tea. It’s been hot and dry so we’re going through a lot of iced tea.

1:30 --Joe and Scott return to the hayfield. I finish bringing all of the furniture onto the mud porch and putting my tools and paint and rags and varnish away.

2:30—catch up on some writing assignments for the Recorder, then outside to water the back flower garden.

3:00—clean house—sweep and dust, wash some windows

4:00—drive back down to McDowell to meet Chance and talk about the CD he wants to record. Play and sing songs and choose four of the ten for him to use.

5:30—Justin comes home and heads to his garden, so I go out and help him weed for about 45 minutes.

6:15—back home. Go with Scott to chase cows out of the meadow. Then feed and water dogs and fill the trough with water for the sheep and horses.

7:00—start supper. Tonight we’re having cold sliced leftover chicken with Oriental cabbage salad, cubed cantaloupe and sliced tomatoes. Make another pitcher of iced tea with plenty of sugar for Scott.

8:00—Joe calls. He’s in McDowell filling the three hundred gallon water tank from the well on our other farm. He asks me to roll out hose up the hill so we can gravity feed it into our garden. He shows up at 8:30 just as I finish and we hook things up and make sure water is flowing all the way through the soaker hose.

9:00—sit down to eat supper out on the screen porch. It’s still 80 degrees, so we turn on the fan full blast.

9:30—clean kitchen and sit down to write this post. Whew! I’m tired

Celebrating the Fourth

2010-07-04T23:01:00.001-04:00

On Saturday, in honor of our country’s Independence, Joe and I drove thirty five minutes to cheer on the marchers in our favorite parade. We were five minutes late and would have missed them completely if they hadn’t done a U-turn and retraced their route past the white-porches and general store of Blue Grass (formerly Crab Bottom), Virginia. It’s the same every year. Children on bicycles with red and blue streamers tangled in their spokes rush ahead of the red faced parents tugging their toddlers in red Radio Flyer wagons down the hill. They are followed by a phalanx of four-wheelers with flag waving teen-agers. They are in charge of the CD player for the line of cloggers tapping up the asphalt behind them. Next, a few civic minded citizens stroll past, decked out in crazy red, white and blue hats. Our local Maple queen and her court, in flip flops and halter tops, toss candy to the crowds lining the route as they stop to chat with friends. I score a Mary Jane, and three pieces of bubble gum. Finally, shirtless Stew, who sports a Mohawk and moccasins trots past on his noble black nag followed by cute little Carly on her Shetland Pony. It’s all over but the pooper scooping as the marchers disperse and line up for home-made ice-cream churned on the spot by the Friends of the Book Bank.
Tonight, we continue our celebration with Doc who is on a brief leave from the Naval Academy. He has finished his plebe year and has come to visit Scott. They stay at the house long enough to share supper with us before packing up to spend the night up on the mountain. When they leave, Joe and I clear the table and then sit on the front porch under a star spangled sky and watch all the fireworks going off up and down our valley. Sue and Bobby, our neighbors across the street and over the hill, are really putting on a show and we watch their green and gold and red and silver chrysanthemums bloom against the black shoulders of Jack Mountain for at least 45 minutes. When the last explosion echoes off the hill behind us, Joe heads back inside but I hang out a bit longer to watch the earth-bound fireworks as fireflies rise up from the dark lawn. One last look at the night sky reveals Venus low on the horizon and tucked next to Regulus in the Sickle of Leo. I watch until she sinks from sight. A lone shooting star crosses right through the ladle of the Big Dipper and the sky show officially ends. It’s been a perfect celebration. Happy Fourth of July.

Gathering Up the Fragments

2010-06-19T20:52:00.000-04:00

     We have a new barn out in our hayfield. It seems as if it grew up overnight with the hay. Joe has dreamed of building this particular barn for the last twenty years, but as ever, my Scotch-Irish husband waited until he had the financial means to do it before starting. But now, when I look out my window towards the north end of the field, there it is. We chose to build a red barn because, really, is there any other color suitable?
     When Glen Jr. had put the last nail in place, we drove out to inspect. There were piles of leftover tin and boards everywhere and like good country folk, we began to gather up the scraps and plan for their use. Although we made a pile for the dump, we also made piles for kindling, piles for patching and piles for doghouse building. Living as far as we do from a Home Depot or Lowes means we carefully consider what we throw away and what we save. Thank goodness we have outbuildings to keep our recycled treasures in. I’ve discovered that “if you build it, it will fill.” I’m sure that new barn will be full of things we can’t live without in a couple of years.
     I like to recycle the old pieces of metal that I find lying around by making them into wind-chimes and have even snipped some old tin roofing into stars for our Christmas tree. Used baler twine is good for emergency gate latches, staking tomatoes, and can even be woven into a sturdy fence patch. When Joe takes down a section of old woven wire fence, he rolls it up. Much of it is still serviceable for tomato cages. And if it’s too old for that then it can be mashed up and used for erosion control.
     Things don’t go to waste in the house, either. Ratty tee shirts are cut up for rags or torn into cotton strips for rugs. Mayonnaise jars, before the companies started using plastic, made great canning jars. Food scraps go to the chickens. Old cardboard boxes are torn into strips and saved for emergency kindling. Worn out socks become dusting mitts, and newspapers can be used as mulch in the garden.
     Joe’s mom, Geneva, was the master of repurposing. Growing up during the depression gave her a strong need to hold on to things in case they could be used for something else. The first day I opened her fridge a pile of butter wrappers fluttered to the floor. She was saving them to grease cookie pans. She also had a cookie tin full of buttons she’d cut off of old shirts and several attractive stools in her house she’d made from fruit juice cans and scraps of fabric. Windshield glass from broken down cars became colored mosaic candle holders and lamp shades. Joe never wore the legs out of a pair of jeans, because every time he tore a hole in them, she would cut up an old pair and make a sturdy patch. She also taught me how to turn shirt collars so the frayed edge was underneath.
     When Geneva was alive, I always knew that if I needed something, I could go prowl through one of the twelve rooms in her house and I would probably find exactly what I was looking for, or something that could be used in its place. Her most unusual repurpose was the time she cut up hundreds of bread bags into strips which she crocheted into pocket books and placemats.
     Many of our older neighbors also have the recycle, repurpose, reuse bug. Glen Jr. ( the same one who built the barn) went out last winter when there was twenty inches of snow on the ground and removed each of the huge icicles that hung from his eaves. He cut them into chunks, some as big as three loaves of bread, and carried them to his freezer where he stored them until we dug them out last week. We chipped them up, threw them in the churn with a bunch of salt and cranked out some truly old-fashioned home-made ice-cream. It could be my imagination, but I believe it tasted sweeter because it was made with the last icy breath of a really hard winter.

Communing with Cows

2010-06-15T19:16:00.000-04:00

     I climbed the hill across from the house, yesterday and sat in the pasture with the cows. I didn’t plan on spending so much time with them. I started out with watercolors and sketch book in hand to do some studies of sheep and the view of my house from the hill. After climbing to the top, I sat on my little three legged stool and began to pencil in a small drawing of the view. That’s when the curious cows moved in. I wasn’t aware of how close they were until one snorted. When I looked back, ten cows, each the size of a small pickup truck, were lined up shoulder to shoulder glaring down their noses and chewing their cuds.
     They grunted softly, snorted loudly and their rumens rumbled constantly. One calf, who probably weighed about 500 pounds, kept sidling closer and closer. Finally he worked up the courage to rub his shiny wet nose across my shoulder. Then he began licking my arm. Imagine the roughness of a cat’s tongue multiplied by ten. The grown-up cows watched him with interest and finally decided I might be a friendly beast. They moved in and soon I was surrounded by an imposing row of cows looking down at me through incredibly long eye-lashes.
    As we sat there, one species pondering the other, the cows stepped closer until the circle of curious bovines was only an arms-length away. I was afraid to breathe. Even the smallest shifting of my weight from one side of the stool to the other made them jump, and I didn’t want ten tons of cows to spook and stampede me.
     I was surprised when a flock of cowbirds circled and landed beside us. One or two of the small birds hopped up through the grass, dodging massive legs and hooves, until they were right at my feet. They tilted their heads like they were listening and then began pecking at something hidden the grass. I wondered about the symbiotic relationship between birds and cows. The birds hopped without care around and between the mass of shifting, shuffling beef, but when I moved, the birds startled and took flight.
     After a day full of noisy students and clanging bells, the gentle cropping and burping of cows was like a lullaby. The sun was low enough in the sky to outline the cows in gold light and I was content in the shadow of their ruminations. Finally, I had to scratch my nose. When I lifted my hand the cows bolted and the birds fluttered to another part of the field. I folded up my stool and walked down the hill. It was way past time to start supper. The cows followed me to the gate and then as I clanged it shut, turned and threaded their way up the narrow valley back to the high meadow. But, the little calf who had tasted my sweat, paused for a moment to stare at me. Then with a flick of his ear, he ran to catch up with his mama. I wonder what stories he told her under the stars.

Critter List

2010-06-06T13:59:00.000-04:00

Critter List

Today, just for fun, I kept a list of all the critters I saw as I went about my daily business. Here it is
1. Golden Eagle riding a thermal
2. Bald Eagle soaring along the river
3. Geese honking their way north in a perfect V formation
4. Goldfinch perched in a peach tree
5. Bluebird catching a bug in mid-air
6. Robin pulling a worm out of my lawn
7. Brown Thrush skirting the wooded edge of the driveway
8. Black Bear and three cubs crossing the road
9. Whitetail deer and fawn in meadow
10. Chipmunk scurrying across the driveway
11. Frog (didn’t see him, but heard him)
12. dead groundhog in road
13. dead raccoon in road
14. Vultures eating dead groundhog and dead raccoon in the road
15. Sheep and lambs lounging in the shade
16. Cows and calves licking up salt
17. Chickens scratching in the dirt
18. Dogs hanging out in their houses
19. Cats napping on the porch
20. Horses grazing in the front lot
21. Earthworm curled under a rock
22. Cricket hopping across shed floor
23. Yellow Snail climbing a grass stalk
24. Slug eating holes in my Hostas
25. Crows congregating in the woods
26. Redtail Hawk being chased by crows
27. Red Fox being chased by crows
28. Honeybee sipping clover
29. Fly annoying me
30. Gnat annoying me
31. Deer Fly annoying me
32. Newt hiding under a log
33. Crayfish scuttling backwards in a riffle
34. Minnows swimming forwards in a riffle
35. Water Strider swimming on top of a riffle
36. Bats looping and curling after bugs
37. Swallows dipping and soaring after bugs
38. Squirrel scolding me from tree
39. Dragonfly hovering over rushes in marsh
40. Fireflies twinkling in the pasture and woods
41. Bobwhite (didn’t see him, but heard him)
42. Grouse crossing road
43. Butterfly sipping water from a fresh cow pie
44. Little spider making a sheet web
45. Moles (well, not the moles, but evidence of their tunneling)
46. Redwing Blackbirds singing from tall grasses in marsh

Woolgathering

2010-05-28T23:48:00.000-04:00

When I walk down to the barn, the air is filled with the plaintive bleating of ewes who are penned in the barn. It’s been raining every evening and they need to be dry for their shearing. Justin oils up his clippers. He is standing on a six by six foot piece of indoor outdoor carpeting that is stained with lanolin and sheep manure from years of use.

He and his brother Scott have been helping shear sheep on the family farm since they were eight years old. Like all farm kids, they started in the wool bag which hangs from a seven foot high frame. This splintery structure holds the wool sack vertical so the fleeces can be dropped in. When the wool froths out of the top, someone must climb up and drop down into the bag to tromp on the fleeces until they fill every corner of the bag and make a tight tube. When we were first married, that was my job. It’s stinky and hot, so when the boys were old enough I gladly turned it over to them. A well packed bag will hold around twenty fleeces and weigh around one hundred thirty pounds. After wool packing, the boys graduated to fleece gathering and then to sheep catching. Justin sheared his first sheep when he was twelve years old.

Everything is ready, so Scott jumps in the stall and catches the first ewe by her head. A drench gun attached to a plastic bladder bag hangs from a rusty nail on the barn wall, and he slips the metal tip of it into her mouth. She pulls back, but he holds on until the two-pump dose of wormer has been delivered. Then Scott wrestles the ewe out the door to his brother. Justin twists the ewe until she is propped up on her rump. He makes his first pass with the clippers across her belly. They chatter and click as Justin pulls the ewe back into his thighs. He shears her left hip and then steps between her back legs with his right foot. The wool falls away from the ewe like a fluffy blanket as he glides the clippers up her neck to her head. She kicks and struggles, so Justin shifts his hold and admonishes her, “You aren’t accomplishing nothing. You’re just gonna get yourself in trouble.”

The clippers buzz as Justin swivels them around to her left shoulder, and Scott darts forward with an oil can. He drips a fine stream across the comb and cutters until they are singing their chicka-chacka song again. Then with a deft twist Justin lays the languid ewe on her right side. She seems to be enjoying the tickle of the buzzing clippers. He pins her to the ground with a knee and makes several more passes with the comb until her left side is clean. The curved teeth leave raised stripes in the wooly stubble across her ribs. Then Justin steps across her body with his right foot. He grabs her ear and pulls the ewe’s head up, shearing around her right side as he rolls her into a sitting position. A few more passes and the ewe is released. She jumps to her feet, ears flapping and trots off leaving her wool behind on the mat. The whole operation has taken less than three minutes.

A good shearer makes the job look easy. I tried it once. I lost my ewe three times and each time Joe had to chase her down, drag her back, and set her up in the correct position. He was exhausted by the time I made the last pass across the ewe’s hip. It took me thirty minutes and the poor sheep had random tags of wool hanging everywhere. She looked like she had been sheared in a blender.

Twenty six years ago, wool sold for around eighty cents a pound. So, the average ewe yielded $4.80 worth of wool. Shearers got two dollars a head to shear, and selling wool was a profitable venture. Now, wool is bringing around fifty cents a pound and the cost of shearing has risen to three dollars an animal. A farmer is lucky to break even. But, the sheep must be sheared. Justin told me he hates shearing. It’s back breaking work, but when I asked him why he did it, he said, “How’d you like to have to wear a wool coat all summer long?” I hope the sheep appreciate their shepherd’s loving care

No Place Like Home

2010-05-24T15:51:00.000-04:00

After spending three days in Atlanta, I am glad to return to my serene mountain home. Atlanta is beautiful in the spring, but it is a pampered, manicured, cultured beauty and my tastes, after living in the mountains for more than twenty-five years, run more towards the wild, sprawling, untamed kind. The neighborhood streets where my sister lives are tree and flower lined and I admire the majestic oaks that guard the sidewalks and doorways. Unlike the crowds of trees that march up and down my hills, these don’t have to compete for space, so their crowns are huge clouds of leaves and limbs, like the hoopskirts of a southern belle. I wanted to hug one of the largest trees on my sister’s block but it was in a stranger’s front yard, so I refrained. Yes, Atlanta’s trees are definitely one of her treasures.

But, I missed the gentle swells of my mountains. I missed long grass bowing before a spring blow. I missed daisies that sparkle beside the narrow roads and long views of nothing but cows, mountains, trees and grass. I missed beauty that is not dependent on man’s hand. And I also missed the beauty of the gentle decay of barns and sheds as they sag to the ground from the weight of all those years of work. Most of all I missed the music. Atlanta is all bass drums and trumpets while my mountains are flutes and woodwinds. Bird songs, wind songs, river songs, rain songs, leaf songs, frog songs, bee songs, barnyard songs. All of the smaller sounds survive here.

In Atlanta, I also realized that I am a small pond kind of girl. As talk swirled of vacations taken, days at the pool, accomplishments and awards, I had nothing to add to the conversation. My world is narrower and defined by the edges of the mountains around me. So was my children’s. They participated in sports and activities, but the distances meant there were limits to what they could choose. I came home feeling a little melancholy about all the missed opportunities, but as my home-from-college son and I drove the hour it takes to get to the dentist, he put it all in perspective for me. We were talking about his cousin’s upcoming scuba trip when he looked at me and said. “It sounds like a lot of work for some fun. I would much rather grab my gun and walk out into the field for an hour or two of groundhog hunting, or grab a pole and go trout fishing, or camp on our river.” Then he paused for a moment before continuing. “You know mom, all my friends from college were talking about what they were going to do or where they were going for the summer, but all I wanted to do was come home.” I guess Dorothy had it right. After the excitement of Oz, there really is “no place like home.”

Working Cows

2010-05-03T22:19:00.000-04:00

This weekend was sunny, and warm: perfect cattle working weather. So, after closing up their small engine repair shop for the afternoon, Justin and Joe hopped on their four wheelers and zoomed out into the long pasture next to our farm. The cows were scattered over several fields so the guys wove back and forth on their ATV’s moving mamas and babies into small groups which eventually merged into one large herd. It looked like a twenty acre square dance. Finally the cows and calves were all gathered at the gate.
     I was drying dishes when I looked out the window and saw the first of the 25 cows and calves funneling through. I threw down my towel, pulled on an old pair of boots and ran outside, grabbing a big stick on my way to the cattle pen. Our set-up requires the cows to cross a small creek and then follow a fence to the end of the pen where they turn and enter. Saturday was like every other round up. Most of the cows trekked obediently to the opening, but there was one rogue cow (I won’t tell you what Joe called her) who refused to go along with the crowd. Every time we had most of the cows turned into the pen, she threw up her head, whirled around and charged past one of us (usually me) back out to the open field. Every time, Justin hopped on his four wheeler and gunned it, racing to get in front of her. Joe attempted to hold the other cows in place while I ran huffing and puffing to take up a strategic cow-turning position. Every time the cow galloped towards me, I waved my big stick and hollered hoping to turn her. But, the old cow figured out pretty quickly that I belonged in the hen house behind me with the other big chickens so she just slobbered derisively on me as she cantered past.
     Finally, she got tired of running circles and joined her bovine friends. Joe swung the gate shut and then the sort out began. He stepped into the pen with the crowded, restless herd. They signified their displeasure by stomping and bawling and kicking at him. Joe waded around in the black gumbo of feces and urine, ignoring their distress and gently sent them two or three at a time into a smaller pen. From there he moved them into a long, narrow passageway with a head chute at the end. It’s designed to fool the cows into thinking they’ve found an escape route. Each time a cow stretched her head through the narrow opening, Justin pulled a lever, pinching the gate shut around her neck. While she kicked and struggled, he climbed the fence, leaned above the 1250 pound animal, jabbed a needle into her neck and pulled it back out before she could trap his hand against the side of the pen. I was, as always, amazed at how quickly and calmly my son worked. Once the vaccine was administered, Justin poured on some wormer and then released the cow back out into the pasture where she circled around bawling until she located her calf.
     Of course I had the most important job of all. Early in the afternoon, one of the cows kicked a hole through a board in the pen. Whenever a cow sees a hole, she forces her head through it and then bulldozes her way to freedom. My job was to intimidate the cows and keep them from escaping. I am much braver when I have a fence to hide behind. The only hazard I faced was streams of liquid green poop that squirted out of the cows as they moved away. In spite of their size and stink, the cows were interesting to watch. They love their babies and a lot of their movement in the pen was directed at keeping them in sight. They were also very curious about me, sometimes smelling my scary stick and then licking their noses. A cow is not afraid to stick her tongue all the way into her nostrils.
     We finished up in about an hour and a half. Several cows were loaded into a trailer to be moved. Then, the rest were released to mosey back to the pasture, while we moseyed back to the house. As the sun sank behind the mountains, we sank into our porch chairs and listened as the last of the mamas and babies mooed their way home.

2010-04-26T21:39:00.000-04:00

Sometimes pictures can speak louder than words. After work, I drove 35 miles to the grocery store which is across the state line from my house. That might seem a burdensome drive after a 9 hour workday, but the road was mostly unlined, narrow, barely two-lane and decorated with living breathing juvenile bald eagles, a groundhog, a rabbit, red-wing blackbirds, bluejays, a meadowlark, and whitetail deer. In addition to the wildlife, spring is decked out in frilly pink redbuds. Vacation is a state of mind.

Homecomings

2010-04-20T21:22:00.000-04:00

     Two weeks ago, the chiller in my trout tank died. My baby trout, better known as fingerlings at this stage, can’t live unless the water temperature is between 50 and 55 degrees, so the death of the chiller created a crisis. Within an hour the water temperature had risen to 57 degrees. We started an ice brigade, but the ice, sealed in Ziploc bags was melting almost as fast as we could get it into the tank. The temperature dropped a degree, but then rose again. Next, the cafeteria donated frozen two liter bottles of water which they use to keep coolers, well……cool. The frozen bottles helped and the temperature dropped to 55 again. Panicky calls to my Trout in the Classroom coordinators did not yield a replacement chiller, so I ordered a new one from California . Then I started trying to figure out how I was going to keep my fishy babies alive until the new cooling unit arrived. Plans that ranged from taking the trout home in a small bucket and icing them every four hours to bringing in a drink cooler and rigging some hosing to run through it were discussed and abandoned. Finally it occurred to me that we had a bona-fide trout hatchery right in town. DUH! I called them and they were quick to agree to fish-sit for us until the classroom tank was cold again.
     The babies, whose tank temperature was now perilously past their survival temperature, were gently spooned into a cooler with some ice bags and then loaded into the van for a sloshy ride to the hatchery. As I backed in to the basement door, I was met by Junior who was ready to perform trout CPR if necessary. Thirty three fingerlings found a pristine temporary home in the cool waters that rush through the basement of the hatchery. I could tell this was a far better thing that had happened to them than had ever happened before. A week later, the new chiller arrived and the trout, who were much fatter and happier than when I left them, came home. The students were overjoyed, the teacher was overjoyed and the fish were disappointed to be back in a smaller, glass walled home. They had forgotten what it felt like to have children staring at them. No longer our friendly swim-to-the-top-of-the-tank-to-say-hello-fish, they spent most of their first day hiding in the rocks. Finally, we tempted them back out with food, but they are warier than they were. Which, if you think about it, is probably a good thing considering they will be in danger of becoming lunch for a larger predator when we release them. So we’ll call this one a happy ending.
     Second homecoming. Tip the Cat had become too romantically inclined. He was travelling out to the main road in search of a furry girl friend. The last time I caught him prancing back up the driveway, I knew his time of manhood and dangerous assignations needed to end. I scheduled an appointment with my vet friend who teaches at a community college. Tip would get his little operation for free, but it involved a lengthy stay. I made Joe take him so my darling boy wouldn’t associate me with his lengthy abandonment. There would be no one to rub his head and I was sure he would forget how much he loved it (and me.) Three days later, Tip was home, seated on my lap begging for a head rub. Happy ending number two. (Tip might feel a little differently)
     Third homecoming. Scott was home for the prom. We didn’t see him much because it was a quick trip, and now that he’s back at Tech, the ghost of his happy soul is rattling around the house. It always feels that way when he leaves to go back to school, but in less than four weeks, he’ll be home for the summer. Then we’ll have happy ending number three.
     Homecomings are better than sunny days!

Saving Seeds

2010-04-10T10:27:00.000-04:00

I’m working magic and miracles this week. That’s how I always feel when seed planting time comes. Last week I started some flats of tomato, cabbage and pepper seeds (yes, you readers of my earlier columns, I succumbed and bought some Peter Pepper seeds.) The first sprouts are uncurling themselves from their seedy homes and stretching out to the sun. Every day is like Christmas. I run to the window to see what new plants are presenting themselves for their first inspection. This morning there were enough green shoots that I could take off the protective dome and allow them to bask in the full strength of the sun.

     In addition to the seeds that I bought, I have also started some heirloom seeds. In the fall when we eat tomatoes and beans and squash, I always scoop out some seeds to dry on paper towels. Then they are labeled and sealed in envelopes to wait for spring. I also do this with marigolds (which my five year old Scott used to call “miracle-golds”) and zinnias. My grandmother always hung bouquets of flowers upside down in brown paper bags at the end of the season. By spring, they had dropped their seeds to the bottoms of the bags. I follow her example and always think of her when my zinnias bloom.
     There is a real joy and satisfaction in saving seeds. When I married Joe, one of the things that came with him was the “Dr. Stover Bean.” The first Stover Bean was given to my mother-in-law by her family physician, whose name was…..you guessed it….Dr. Stover. The beans produced by this seed are flat-podded and grow on a bush. They stay tender all the way through the big bean stage which is the way my family likes them and they don’t have any strings. I’ve never found anything in a seed catalogue that matches. Every year, I plant an extra few feet of beans just so we will have seed for next year. Joe’s brother does the same and if by chance the harvest is slim in my garden, then I can call him for seed next year. Justin is dating a girl whose family grows a very similar bean which they call the Refa Bell Bean. Like us, they carefully hoard the seed each season to ensure next year’s crop.
     We also love a sweet tomato that’s marbled with red and yellow. Geneva had seeds for that as well, but after she died I couldn’t find them and I don’t know what it was called. I’ve tried Old German and Mr. Stripey and this year I’m trying one called The Hillbilly tomato which originated not too far from here. When I finally grow one as sweet as Geneva’s original, I will save the seed for my children and grandchildren. Their inheritance will be found in little glass jars full of seeds, carefully labeled and stored on the cool shelves of my root cellar. I like to think that, like me, they will feel connected to their past, as the first sturdy sprouts of Dr. Stover beans poke their heads out of damp soil beds.

Where the Wild Things Grow

2010-04-02T12:45:00.000-04:00

     Mother Nature is hosting her annual free food party. The first course is dandelion greens, gathered fresh and tender and served with a warm dressing of vinegar and eggs. My mother-in-law called dandelion greens her spring tonic and the first time she put them on the table I was pretty skeptical. In the city I was taught that anything that grew in your yard was toxic. I guess maybe with all the chemicals used on a lawn that’s true, but apparently in the country almost anything green is fair game. Next there’s poke, which like dandelions must be gathered in its infancy. Poke has to be boiled a couple of times to remove the bitterness but then it’s pretty tasty. Sort of like turnip greens. I like mine topped with homemade cucumber relish.
     Ramps appear next. They are a cross between a wild onion and wild garlic and grow in green patches on mountain slopes. They are considered a real treat, but because onions don’t agree with me, I’ve never tried them. When I first started teaching, students used to eat ramps so they would be kicked out of school. If you eat them raw, your body exhausts the pungent odor through your skin cells. Kids knew that most teachers couldn’t stand the smell, so they would eat them and laugh as they were sent home to stay until they smelled better.
     After ramps come fresh asparagus. Spring isn’t really here until the peepers sing and the asparagus appear. I have discovered a secret wild asparagus patch where the spears are as big around as my thumb. It’s in one of our meadows where the sheep feast on it until the end of March. When they are moved out to pasture, it’s mine. Planted by the birds and tended by God, those asparagus are far better than the ones I grow in my yard.
     At the same time that we pick asparagus, we also start hunting for morels. The first time I ate one of these wild mushrooms, I lay awake all night because I was sure I would be dead in the morning. I grew up on mushrooms wrapped in cellophane, and I wasn’t sure a wild one could be trusted. But, I lived to tell the tale and now I’m an avid eater. Morels are pretty safe to hunt as there aren’t any other mushrooms that resemble these brainy looking fungi. They grow in abandoned apple orchards and old growth ash groves.
     Last spring, my friend Lori and I grabbed some walking sticks and paper bags and headed up the steep side of her family’s mountain where a grove of ash trees clings. We only managed to find one morel because a scoundrel neighbor had beat us to the patch. He was trespassing and when he saw us he skedaddled. He was carrying a pretty bulgy bag, so we gave up. We were angry, but really who could blame him? I am a terrible mushroom finder. I don’t have mushroom eyes like Lori and my oldest son, Justin. Morels disguise themselves by looking just like the patches of withered leaves where they grow, but still I love the thrill of the hunt. We like them dipped in batter and deep fried, or sautéed and scrambled with eggs.
     When the morels are finished, it’s time for the rhubarb from the old patch in Geneva’s abandoned garden. It’s also time for the wild strawberries that grow on the brow of my hill. These two spring foods sing in gustatory harmony when baked in a pie. Once the wild strawberries are done, then the party is over. It’s time to look to my own tame garden for lettuce and peas. While I love to eat things I’ve grown, my heart will always be with food that comes from God’s hands to my mouth. I love to eat where the wild things grow.

Change and the Lack Thereof

2010-03-27T11:14:00.000-04:00

     The sun is shining and we are talking about planting our garden. No, we aren’t actually ready to put seeds in the ground. The fickle Highland weather won’t allow us to do that for at least another month, but we can dream about potatoes and tomatoes. My very unadventurous husband wants to plant something exotic just for the fun of it. He suggested rutabagas. What the heck is a rutabaga and what do you do with one after you grow it? I’ll have to look it up. Joe, the man I married because I wanted a rock, a man who takes weeks to make any kind of major decision, recently changed his beer brand after 20 years of faithful sipping and now rutabagas! What will he think of next? Change is in the air.
     After a wickedly cold snowy winter, everyone is rejoicing in sunshine. This year’s Maple Festival was a case in point! The first weekend was moderately attended because it was a bit rainy, but the second weekend was slam jam packed with wall to wall vehicles. The sun was shining, and the sapsuckers (as we affectionately call them) arrived in full force. I’ve never understood why anyone would want to drive over five beautiful mountains just to end up in an hour long traffic jam, but I talked to more than one visitor who said this festival is the highlight of their spring. And, really, thank goodness! Our little slice of heaven depends on these visitors to help pay for scholarships, field trips, fire departments, fuel assistance, and mission trips, to name just a few. For my middle school students, it meant slapping together barbecue and hotdogs and baked potatoes and serving them with a smile. Another year of field trips paid for by the work of the students who will be on them.
     The Maple Festival always reminds me of how truly wonderful my neighbors are. The Ruritans flip pancakes and fry sausage and make thousands of doughnuts just so they can offer scholarships to students, aid to the homeless, a Little League Field to the sluggers , and firewood to the elderly. The ladies of the elementary school spend days baking bread and then selling it to visitors to fund Cancer research. The churches sell ham buns and funnel cakes so they can go on mission trips. The Lion’s Club deep fries truck loads of pork rinds so that they can help support the local pool and provide eye-glasses to kids who can’t afford them. This is only a small example of the bustle brought on by Maple visitors. I don’t think any other community in America can rival the service hours offered by mine. Tonight, I am going to help with a spaghetti dinner totally organized and executed by two teen age girls who want to help a young family recently burned out of their house. I am humbled by their generous offer of time for their friends, but I am not surprised by it. Children here grow up flipping burgers and waiting tables all in the name of fund-raising. It stands to reason that selfless service would weave itself into their natures.
     So change may come in the form of rutabagas and sunshine and visitors to our community, but the things that really matter in a small town don’t. The kids here still grow up knowing who their neighbors are. They know that we are all family.

Purple Love

2010-03-15T21:01:00.000-04:00

     When I got home from school today, Joe and I went out to feed. I rode on the back of the truck dropping hay flakes into the frost-bitten meadow for the cows as the wind picked up the chaff and whirled it around my head. Although it was from the north, the breeze was gentle, and there’s a promise of spring in the green blush creeping up the sides of the hills. I haven’t heard the peepers yet, and it’s not officially spring until the peepers sing. I have, however, heard the robins as they wheel in from the south. Like all critters, they have more than one thing to say. So far, I’ve heard the peek and tut of an agitated robin, another one singing a morning song (which sounds like “wake up birdy, wake up, wake up birdy, birdy”), and a lusty male claiming territory as he announces shrilly that spring is finally here. I wish he were telling the truth, but the fickle weather is calling for snow flurries.
     I went out last Monday to trim my grape vine. It’s a chore I usually do a little earlier in the season, but the snowy weather sort of put me out of the mood. When the maple trees finally woke up and started pumping out sugar water, I realized I had better get the job done before it was too late.
     I learned to trim grapes from my good neighbor Rudolf. His home place is a mile deep into a hollow across from our house. In early September when the spicy smell of grapes hung like a purple haze in the autumn air, he used to call and invite us to share in his mother’s bountiful harvest. I always made Joe drive us over because the little wooden bridge to Cliffie’s house was only three inches wider than our car and the boards jumped and rattled alarmingly as we crossed. There were four gates on the driveway, and each one had to be opened and shut to keep the cows from roving. Three were off their hinges and had to be dragged across the hard ground. Finally, we would pull up to Cliffie’s tiny white frame house tucked into the chin of a friendly hill. The grapevines were full of purple, red and white grapes. Purple for juice, red and white for jelly.
     While we picked, Cliffie, who was by that time legally blind, would sit on her porch in the afternoon sun and entertain my boys by barking like a dog. Even though she could only see shadows, she always insisted on coming down the steps to help with the picking. The grape juice from her vines always seemed sweeter because of her happy laugh.
     Cliffie died about eight years ago, but Rudolf still tends her vines and several years ago, when mine finally got large enough to bear, he taught me how to trim them. Before the sap rises, you must go out and trim the long leaders back so they each host no more than two plump pink buds. These will send out sturdy shoots to hold the heavy clusters. If you don’t trim the vines, the harvest will be slim. I got mine done just in time.

Sing A New Song

2010-03-06T21:09:00.000-05:00

     I stood out in the sun today and listened to the Earth making little contented pops and crackles and crinkly sounds. It was slurping up snow. As I searched for the source, I noticed bubbles in the melt. All around me the spongy ground was bubbling and burping. It got me to thinking about elephants. They make sounds that are so low pitched that we humans can’t hear them. But, of course, other elephants can. Researchers once taped some of the sounds and played them back to the elephants across several miles of savannah. The sounds were obviously a message that the elephants understood. As a group, they turned and began walking towards the hidden speakers.
     We humans often self-centeredly assume that all creatures experience the world the same way we do. Hearing the same frequencies of sound, seeing the same wavelengths of light. But, recent science has shown that our limited senses can only receive a small spectrum of the information floating past us on a daily basis.
     My dog, Ruff, could always hear Joe’s truck coming down the road long before I saw it cresting the last hill in the valley below my house. He would perk up his ears, bounce up and down and start to bark. When he did this, sure enough in about three minutes, the blue truck would slide into view a mile south. Even at the end of his life, when he was totally deaf to anything I might say to him, he could still hear that truck.
     My rabbit beagle’s nose picks up an amazing array of olfactory signals that completely elude me. When I take him out on a brisk winter day, all I smell is clean air, but his nose vacuums up groundhog, human and rabbit smells, sorts them out and then zones in on the one he is most interested in chasing. He loves me with a devotion that I don’t deserve. The minute I step out of the house, he sniffs me out and comes running for a pat on the head. I can’t even sneak out for a walk without his amazing nose sniffing me out.
     So many things on this earth make a music that we can’t hear. What else don’t we know about? Do spiders sing in high pitched arachnid arias that draw bugs to their webs? Do angels shimmer in a wavelength our eyes can’t discern? The Psalmist wrote: “Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy." Today, I heard the Earth singing praises to the Creator as it gratefully drank the first water of spring.

A Dusty Day

2010-02-23T22:09:00.000-05:00

Tonight, when I come home from work, there is a lamb in my living room. She is splayed out on an old rug bleating and kicking her legs. When Joe was feeding the livestock, he found her lying in the field near death. Her mother had successfully delivered her twin brother, but this lamb weighed probably eight to ten pounds and must have spent too much time being born. She was worn out by the time she dropped onto the snow, and she just didn’t have the energy to rise and suck. Joe brought her home to attempt a revival. As I stare at the matted, wet lamb, I mentally review what we need to do.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR BRINGING A LAMB BACK TO LIFE:
First dunk the chilled lamb in a warm bath to bring her body temperature up. If this doesn’t work at least she’ll be clean when she dies. Then, after wrapping her in some old towels, give the lamb a shot of antibiotic and leave her to steam dry in front of the wood stove. Next, you must feed her. Newborns need colostrum which is not available in a store near you. Grab a partner, and go back outside. Corner the uncooperative mother ewe. While your partner holds her head, get down on your hands and knees. Pray. Then, press your head into the ewe’s side and fish around underneath her until you locate a teat. If you can’t find one, then bend until your head is on the ground and you’ve established eye contact with your target. Grab the teat with your right hand and use your left hand to clean the poop out of your hair as you straighten back up. Next, squeeze the teat. If you are rewarded with a squirt of milk, line a soda bottle up with the stream and capture it. When the ewe breaks free, chase her around. Try not to cuss. Repeat until you collapse or you’ve collected some colostrum.
When you get the colostrum back to the house, you must make a decision. Will you drown the weak lamb trying to get it to suck a bottle or will you kill it by tube feeding it? If you’re smart and rich, you’ll choose “none of the above,” and call the vet. Of course if you were smart and rich you would have called the vet in the first place. He has pre-mixed colostrum and he knows how to get that tricky little tube down the lamb’s throat into its stomach instead of down its windpipe into its lungs.

I am roused from my musings by a last weak bleat and kick from the lamb. She chooses to die without our help. As I look at the little lamb laid out on the floor, I can’t help but be relieved. When things go well, I always feel like we’ve pulled off the ultimate miracle. A Lazarus. But, more often than not, all of our efforts yield nothing but a last death gurgle and kick. The old timers around here say that lambs are born just looking for a place to die. Still, we try. In spite of the difficulties and frustrations, we want to see those little lambs bounce back to life and go tappity-tapping across our kitchen floor.

Joe bundles up the lamb and takes her outside. He will dispose of her body in the morning. I clean up the mess she’s left behind. A friend of mine wrote in his blog the other day that God loves dust. From dust we are born and to dust we return. It’s been a dusty sort of day.

A Stack of Gold

2010-02-15T21:14:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite books when I was growing up was Christy by Katherine Marshall. It is the true story of a young woman who travels to a remote corner of the Appalachians to teach. In spite of the hardships she faces, Christy comes to love the people who have learned to scrape a living from the rocky hillsides. From the moment I read that book, I wanted to be a teacher and live in the faraway blue mountains. In 1983, after graduating from college with an education degree, I hopped in my little red Zephyr and headed for an interview in a small town tucked in a high valley on the far edge of Virginia. The road snaked over the first mountain and I sang along with the Beach Boys as I drove through a light dappled forest that parted only occasionally to reveal sweet green meadows dotted with sheep and cows.

On the second mountain, I lost my radio signal and by the third mountain the only signs of life were large satellite dishes (this was the 80’s, when the satellite dish was jokingly known as the “West Virginia state flower”) and the gargantuan piles of firewood everywhere. The further into the mountains I drove, the higher and deeper the piles grew. Every yard was decorated with a stack of winter fuel as long as five or six pickup trucks.

But, it was a beautiful June day and I assumed that people had overestimated the amount of wood they’d need and that these stacks were left over from the previous winter. The countryside grew more picturesque and more remote the further I drove, but I was relieved to find a town full of wide-porched houses at the bottom of the last mountain. After convincing the superintendent and principal that I was their girl, I drove home confident that I would soon be living out my dream.

Fall in my beautiful mountain county was idyllic, but the temperature dropped as fast as the leaves. Luckily my roommate and I had electric heat and by wearing three sweaters apiece and keeping the thermostat set in the low fifties, we were able to afford to stay warm. By the following winter I was living in a small log cabin. When it snowed, I often woke to find white drifts sifting across my living room floor. Paying for electric heat was out of the question. I would be broke by the end of the winter. Luckily, by that time, I had met my future husband and he helped me build up a supply of winter wood, so I could burn the little fireplace insert that came with the cabin. Having been raised in a house with a woodstove, he found the idea of wearing three sweaters laughable. That winter, I supplemented my heat for the first time with wood. It was the beginning of my journey into self-sufficiency.

Now, I have a wood pile as long as five pick-up trucks, or longer if I am lucky. I grow my own produce in a large garden and store it carefully in my root cellar. My water comes from a spring less than a hundred yards from my house, and I even have two horses should gasoline become so overpriced that I can no longer afford to drive. What I don’t have is a lot of money in the bank. But, it doesn’t really matter. I feel more secure than many of my city friends who must depend on others for food, heat or water. Bring on the storms, let the electricity fail, I will stay warm. Snow in drifts five feet tall? I have a cellar full of food to last me through the longest winter. There’s a certain satisfaction in being so directly connected with my own survival. Those huge stacks of wood I wondered about as I crossed the five mountains to my eventual destiny? They were my guideposts to a richer life.

In Mason Jars

Inside my cellar, glass jars glow
between the rock walls, row on row.
They mark the time of rain and sun
that like the larks I know is done
and scarce can bear to know.

They hold tomato’s ruby sheen
that glowed a moment midst the green
admired by all, but captive now
in Mason jars.

I take these jars in winter’s night
and think of past days long and bright
when fruit was gathered to be canned
and lay like bright jewels in my hand
I’ve caught a bit of summer’s light
in Mason jars.

Winter

2010-02-10T10:53:00.000-05:00

A month ago, I wrote the words, “snow is magical.” That was my “new love” phase. My relationship with the white stuff was still exciting and full of promise. I am now in the “been married a while” phase. This means that I must choose sometimes to love the snow, even when it does annoying things, like filling up the path I just shoveled, or pulling my car into a snow bank because it feels I need more exercise shoveling. But, the Bible reminds us to “give thanks to the Lord in all things,” so here is what I am thankful for.

The snow has saved me money on my gym fees. I can’t get to the workout room this month, so I haven’t had to pay any dues, and I’ve been shoveling at least 20 minutes a day. Snow shoveling burns 440 calories an hour. So, as I was digging my car out of the drift that I accidently backed into, I thanked God for this opportunity for snow aerobics. One hundred fifty calories later, I had the car out, and I was so warm from my exertions that I had broken a sweat. Of course, I celebrated by eating a fresh baked cookie, but I still had calories to spare.

The snow has given me more time for Bible study. I decided to study “joy” this winter. I wanted to see what God had to say about it, because sometimes I feel guilty that I am so happy. Mainly because of things like Haiti, and my friend’s daughter who is dying of cancer. I mean, who am I to enjoy my life when others are suffering? Should I be worrying about misfortunes that might come today or tomorrow or next week? I am reassured by the passages I’ve read so far. Psalm 16:9 says I can “confidently rest in safety.” That’s not a promise that I will never be in danger, just an admonition to enjoy where I am now. So, I am. I sit in my warm house with a cat stretched out beside me and give thanks for my blessings.

The snow has reminded me of why I love my husband so much. On one of the few days that we did have school this week, my van was parked way out at the end of my slick, snowy driveway. Because the schools were on a two hour delay, Joe needed to leave for work before me. The wind was blowing and wind chills hovered around zero. My husband would not let me walk out to my car. He waited until I was ready, drove me out, drove me back in because I forgot my keys, laughed at my forgetfulness, drove me back out and made me sit in the warm truck while he started my vehicle and scraped the windows. Then he insisted on staying with me for the twenty minutes it took for the inside of my van windows to finally melt off so I could see.

If my “been married” phase of my relationship with snow is anything like the one I celebrate with my husband, I have much to look forward to.

Hot Peppers

2010-02-02T22:04:00.000-05:00

WARNING! this post is just a little bit naughty

The mailman brought me a present today. My first seed catalogue arrived. It’s from Shumways and there are over thirty pages of beautiful black and white engravings. I’m considering papering a room with it when I’m done.

The descriptions are mouthwatering and the names are fun. “Jumbo Elephant, Dwarf Blue Curled, Fat ‘N Sassy, Dragon Tongue, Big Bertha, Howling Mob, Topsy Turvy and Burpee’s Big Boy. But, my favorite is called the Red Peter Pepper. It's described as being "shaped like a mini peter" and being so realistic that it might “shock the prudish.”

The most frequently touted virtues are tender, sweet, vigorous and delicious. My fingers twitch with the urge to press seeds into soil, and grow these virtuous vegetables. Unfortunately my garden is sleeping under a fluffy white blanket and all I can do is dream of spring. The almanac says, "Snow is poor man’s fertilizer." After the abundance of this winter, I expect my soil to be especially prolific. So, I’ll order some seeds and come summer, don’t be surprised if you find a glistening basket full of produce on your doorstep. Dig deep. I'll wrap a few x-rated peppers in brown paper and hide them under the tomatoes. Don't serve them to your granny. They’re hotties in every sense of the word.

HEAT

2010-01-30T13:43:00.000-05:00

Calamatous cooties,
my housewifely duties,
make wiping up dust a bothersome chore.
Abracadabra, I wave my rag wand
and the dust disappears
but tomorrow there's more.

It’s that time of year. The woodstove is humping as we beat back the bitter cold of this endless winter. But, in the process of heating my house, it deposits a fine layer of dust daily on every surface. My philosophy in the winter is to dust only on the weekends or when we’re expecting company, whichever occurs the least often. This philosophy keeps me from running stark naked through the snow screaming in frustration.

Heating a house with a woodstove is definitely the toastiest way to go. My dad loves to come see me in the winter and cozy up to the stove. He backs up to it, heats his pants, pulls them against his legs and sighs with a happy grin on his face. I like to do that with my flannel nightgown and then run and jump into bed before it cools. This is a technique I learned when I was about nine and my family spent “40 days and nights in the wilderness” as my mom likes to refer to it.

In actuality we were living at Rosebower Farm in Dinwiddie, Virginia. The house was breezy (a great attribute in those southern latitudes, but not so nice in January) and the furnace, when it wheezed on, didn’t do much more than occasionally cough some tepid air through the vents. So, at night, mom and dad would build a cozy fire in the fireplace of the only interior room. The den would get about ten degrees warmer than the forty degree house, and we would gather to shiver, do homework, and read. When our homework was finished, Meg and I scurried up the winding staircase to the little nursery tucked in the eaves, threw our clothes off and jumped into our nightgowns . Our breath left cold little ghosts floating in the air. When we’d pulled on our matching flannel gowns, we’d pound down the steps and jostle for a position close to the fire, heating our backsides until we were in danger of igniting. Then, we’d warm our front-sides by hugging our parents and dash madly up the steps so we could jump under our icy covers before we cooled.

Mom says her memories of that time are of having to put breakfast plates in the oven so they could warm up before she placed our hot eggs on them, or the eggs would be cold before they reached the table. It’s no wonder I don’t like cold weather. My bones were frozen at a very impressionable age and never fully thawed out again. So, in spite of the dust and the wood bark decorating my front room, I am grateful for my woodstove. As my husband likes to say, “A woodstove heats you twice. Once when you cut the wood and once when you burn it.”

Sleeping Beauties

2010-01-18T21:27:00.000-05:00

Just when I’ve had enough of winter weather and snow and ice, the sun pops out and turns it all into a big bowl of sticky chocolate pudding which I wade through on my way to and from the house. For the first time in over a month, I can see more brown than white. The glots of dirt that drip off my boots onto the floor are proof that the sun still shines.

Since I’m feeling hopeful, and the thermometer is above freezing, I decide to bring some sleeping beauties into my house. All I need is a pair of garden shears and an overgrown yard. Dogwoods, forsythia, flowering quince, redbud, witch hazel, hawthorn, honeysuckle, saucer magnolia, star magnolia, crabapple, flowering almond, pussy willow, spirea, lilac and viburnum –any of these will work. After cutting off several branches, I lay them on the sidewalk and pound the cut ends with a hammer. Then I bring them inside and put them in vases all around the house. In a week or two I will have swelling buds and then riotous flowers. I will create a new bouquet each week until the middle of March.

Spring may be several months away, but I can hang on as long as I have the promise of warmer weather blooming in a Mason jar on my kitchen window sill.

Four Wacky Wonders

2010-01-09T21:50:00.000-05:00

Visitors rave about the gentle beauty of the place I’m privileged to call home, and I have to agree with them. But it’s been cold and snowy lately and hard to travel. Thus, I’ve been forced to create my own fun. I hope you’ll enjoy my list of Highland’s four wacky wonders.

Wonder #1 Fly Art: Highland County would be perfect if it weren’t for the pesky cluster flies. They congregate by the hundreds on the sides of houses and many manage to sneak inside where they spend the winter spinning aimlessly on their backs until they die of exhaustion. About two miles north of McDowell there’s an abandoned store building. The store has a huge plate glass window in front and the window is double-paned for insulation. Sometime in the last ten years, the pane on the inside broke, leaving a gaping hole. The outside pane is intact. This window is the perfect cluster fly trap. When you drive by you might be fooled into thinking it’s a large piece of sand art, but the five foot black and white parabola is actually ten year’s worth of preserved flies. Their little bodies create a layered effect. Fly art at its finest. And of course the best part is that they are dead.

Wonder #2 The Coyote Tree: The meadows in Highland are dotted with ewes and lambs and not too long ago there were more sheep in the county than people. Not so anymore. Coyotes have forced many farmers to give up their flocks. However, one farmer is doing something about that. Travel down a dirt road tucked between two steep hills and you will see his warning to all toothy lamb-eating outlaws: an ancient sugar maple decorated with the mummified remains of sixteen coyotes. They hang from the limbs like furry Christmas ornaments and in the right light and a soft breeze they possess a bizarre beauty, but maybe I think that because I’ve seen a lamb with his belly ripped open and his tongue eaten out. The last time I saw the tree, I was on a horseback ride with neighbors. We stopped to admire it and give a silent salute to this vigilante farmer. He makes us and our flocks feel a whole lot safer.

Wonder #3: The Ice Tower: Travel four miles west of McDowell and look south about 100 yards beyond the road. If it’s cold, you’ll catch a glimpse of the ice tower. Created for the first time about ten years ago, it appears each year when winter weather pushes the mercury consistently below twenty degrees. The fellow who creates it told me that the overflow to his spring kept icing up and he needed a way to prevent the blockage. He draped a hose in a tree and let the water flow down. The top of the tower is about twenty feet above the ground and it grows all winter long. At Christmas it is draped with colored lights--a fun testament to the cold weather around here.

Wonder #4: The Rubber Tree: Rumors persist about this tree, and twenty odd years ago when I moved to Highland, it was legendary. I have never actually visited it, but residents chuckle as they recall their own escapades beneath its branches. Like the Coyote Tree it is decorated, but not with something I can mention in polite company. Prophylactics dangling from every twig are evidence of hundreds of close encounters. In my opinion, no lover’s lane or make out spot in the world can match the romance of this highly decorated tree at the end of a steep dirt road.

So there you have it. Next time you have a yen to see something a little bit out of the ordinary, forget the plane tickets. Just hop in your car and traverse four friendly mountains. I promise it’s worth the drive.

To Everything There Is A Season

2009-12-29T20:49:00.000-05:00

Yesterday,
some boots
booby-trapped
the halls,
as
the shirts and jackets
smothered the sofa
and
the dirty dishes and crumbs
conquered the
counters

only
the garbage
managed to
escape

evading
the trash can
by hiding in plain sight.

When I was little, I was required to clean my room at least once a week. When I had hidden the last sock under my bed, I would call mama up to see. I was always disappointed when she used her x-ray vision, and declared, “Clean this mess up, and make it Mama Clean.” By college my housekeeping was more honest. Instead of hiding clothes under my bed, I piled them on every available surface. My room looked like a collision between a garbage truck and a department store. Then I got a job and a house of my own. My standards improved. I hid my dilapidated sofa under a pretty bedspread and artfully covered the stains on my Salvation Army rugs with hassocks. I rearranged furniture weekly and picked flowers to distract the eye from the stains on the table cloth.

By the time Justin and Scott entered my life, I was able to hire the prestigious decorators Tonka and Little Tike. They specialized in bright plastic toys. As the boys got older I used Nike and Converse for most of my floor treatments and Cabelas and Aeropostale did the slipcovers on my chairs. I even had specialists in large knick-knacks: Remington and Winchester.

Now that Justin has moved into his own house to fight his own dust wars, and Scott is away at college most of the year where everyone is having too much fun to worry about dust, I have discovered my inner neat freak. I find myself washing dishes before I go to bed and straightening the sofa pillows when I leave the room. For the first time in eighteen years, my Christmas decorating did not require bringing out the shovel and broom before I could bring out the tree and presents.

It’s now, four days after Christmas, and most of my friends have already put away their Christmas decorations. I’m not ready for that, yet. My house is full of clutter and it is evident that a child lives here again. I’ll make it Mama Clean next year. And then clean it each night before bed as I wait expectantly for the day that a child’s coat draped over a chair signifies that once again my house is full of all that really matters to a mother’s heart.

Snow

2009-12-24T15:20:00.000-05:00

I am a Pioneer Woman. The snow has made my driveway impassable and the only way out is on foot. (My son Scott says I can only be a Pioneer Woman if it’s uphill both ways.) Over twenty inches of snow on the ground makes it work to walk anywhere. It is fun to imagine what it might have been like to live long ago, and realize how lucky I am to live in an age of motors and snow plows. We were snowbound, but only for a day.

This snow was much anticipated. Friends on Facebook were all atwitter and hopeful for huge amounts. Then when the final totals were in, they were dismayed and uncomfortable (well, not the ones with a good stock of liquor, or a good sense of fun.) Farmers like snow if there is six inches or less. They call it poor man’s fertilizer. But, over six inches means every gate needs to be shoveled out, and sometimes it’s hard to get feed to all the animals. We had sheep up on a fairly steep hill and couldn’t get through the three foot drifts to feed them until a neighbor plowed us a path.

Snow is magical. It erases the brown doldrums of winter and replaces them with hope. The kind of hope I learned about on my thirteenth birthday.

As my birthday approached, I decided I wanted snow. I wanted school to be canceled. I wanted to spend the day napping and reading in bed. I wanted to go sleigh riding with my four closest friends, and then come back to my house, for cake and ice-cream.

So, three months before the big day, I started adding these words to my bedtime prayers: “…please God, if it’s not too much trouble, could You bring me some snow for my birthday?” I prayed faithfully and I was sure that God would answer.

As my birthday approached, I scanned the newspapers and listened to the radio each night for some indication that God had heard me. Forecasters babbled about blue skies for the remaining shopping days before Christmas, so I continued to pray.

On the morning of my birthday, I woke and pulled back the curtains to reveal a bright blue sky. I felt betrayed. I slumped downstairs and even my mom’s reminder about my birthday party couldn’t lift the cloud. Although the list of guests included Stuart and Fred, two boys I had deep crushes on, I still wanted snow. God had let me down.

There were no windows in my school except for the ones on the outside doors, so eventually I stopped pouting and began to daydream. Then, at about nine that morning I picked up some vibrations from classmates who had managed visits to the restroom. It was beginning to look really wintry outside. By ten o’clock, the snow was dumping and the principal announced over the loudspeaker that school would be letting out in an hour.

“YESSSS!” God had come through.

I rode the bus home on a spiritual high. God was a loving God and a God of good things. My birthday dreams were about to become a reality.

The snow fell at an alarming rate, obliterating trees and bushes faster than you could say “Jack Frost.” After jumping down from the bus steps into the inviting powder, I trudged home in wet tennis shoes and began to think about my friends who all needed their parents to DRIVE them to my house for my party. In my prayers I had forgotten to mention a specific amount of snow. At this rate, the snow would be a foot deep by supper time, traffic would come to a complete standstill, and my party would be cancelled.

I climbed the stairs to my bedroom and plopped on my bed to watch the snow cascade from the sky. At precisely three o’clock the last flake spiraled to the ground and the storm ended. By seven the roads were clear enough for all of my friends (including Stuart and Fred) to ride to my house for a caroling party in the snow.

When I watch it snow, I am reminded of how gently and graciously God answered the prayers of one awkward teenager, who wanted nothing more than a little magic on her birthday and an assurance that her Sunday School teacher was right.

“God’s eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.”

Spider Eyes and Other Unexpected Gifts

2009-12-07T21:20:00.000-05:00

There’s something magical about the first snow of the season. I pull on a pair of Muck boots and stride into a world that’s slowly becoming a fairy land. Duke pup runs after me and the snow is just deep enough to make him look like a fish surfing the waves. We walk over to the edge of the woods, and while he’s snuffling and snorting his way through every drift, I inspect the tracks that squirrels and a lone fox have left. Foxes walk by placing their back feet exactly where their front feet have trod. This creates a single line of tracks that runs across the snow like a neat row of stitches. Finding these tracks is an unexpected gift. Nature is constantly dishing up some wonderful surprises.

For example:
One foggy night I saw spider eyes reflected in the headlights of my car. At first I didn’t know what I was seeing. My headlights kept picking up small green sparks on the damp road. When curiosity got the better of me, I pulled over and the beam of my flashlight illuminated hundreds of hairy wolf spiders scuttling back and forth. Later I read that, although a wolf spider has eight eyes, only the two largest reflect light. I never did figure out why so many spiders were out dancing a hoe-down on the wet pavement.

Another time, on a damp spring morning, I spotted a large group of earthworms mating on the berm. Somehow, over two hundred earthworms had signaled to each other that it was time to stretch out of their holes. They were lying cheek to cheek (or more scientifically, clitellum to clitellum) in the dew spangled grass. When I looked it up, I discovered that earthworms are attracted to the vibrations of other worms nearby. All I can say is that there must have been an amazing worm party going on.

Since I moved to the mountains I have witnessed an eagle plummeting from the sky to catch a fish, a praying mantis eating her mate (head-first!) and a monarch butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. I have discovered turtle eggs buried in a warm rock nest, a dead otter washed up in a flood, and an owl pellet at the base of a hollow tree. I have collections of heart-shaped rocks, turtle-shaped rocks, screw-shaped fossils(crinoids) and cone-shaped fossils (porifera). I own a coyote skull and a complete cow skull. And, I am jealous of my husband who once saw a golden eagle snatch a rabbit right out from under the noses of his beagles.

These are my treasures. But, I still have a long list of things I hope to see. I want to watch an eagle catch a rabbit. I want to discover a hummingbird’s nest. I’d like to find a fossilized leaf imprint, and collect the complete skeleton of some small animal. It is wonderful to have so many things to look forward to. This is indeed a rich world in which I live.

A Winding Path

2009-11-28T20:29:00.001-05:00

On Thanksgiving after the turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, butternut squash, green beans, succotash, seven layer salad, curried fruit, deviled eggs, three types of pies and rolls, the family was in desperate need of a walk. So we wrapped ourselves in layers of coats and gloves and hats and headed down to the river. I haven’t walked with children in several years and I had forgotten how they wander. From cow pile (“Hey this one looks like a hurricane seen from outer space”) to rock pile (“Daddy, can you show me how to skip this one?” asked by child with twenty pound rock in hand) to leaf pile (“This leaf is a fairy hat, and I am the fairy queen.”)

I am ashamed to admit that when my children were young and we were headed down the driveway to fetch the mail, I did not have patience with meandering. Why was I in such a hurry? Those years flew by fast enough without my help. But, meandering with nieces and nephews was marvelous. We admired every rock and every color. We played with the dog. We splashed rocks in the river until Pop Pop outdid us all with a thirty pound boulder bomb! KERSPLOOSH! We took note of red winterberry against silver tree limbs, and gold ribbons of sun streaming from cloud to mountain.

A meander is a small creek that winds around touching one bank and then the other. If you let it, a meandering walk with a child will wind around your heart touching one side, and then the other with joy.

Girls Gone Wild

2009-11-21T17:12:00.000-05:00

Darkness drops from the sky like a stone now, and as the shadows creep up the sides of the mountains, hunters in bright orange caps congregate on the steps of the Stonewall Grocery. They are there to check in deer or grab a can of Vienna sausages before they head back to camp. Some of the hunters are strangers to the county, but many of them are family members, who’ve come home for one of our richest traditions—hunting season.

The Ruritan clubs in the county put on great feasts to tempt the hunters to leave some cash behind for college scholarships and their other community service programs. So, in the spirit of fund-raising, Joe and I sup on oysters and turkey in the gymnasium of the old elementary school where we see former students and friends in the newly refurbished hall. Lori and Steve eat with us. When we drive them home, their neighbors, Dale and Sandy, are inspecting the bed of an old truck pulled up in the light of the back porch. Anyone who’s lived here very long knows that means there are deer on the back, so we walk over to say hi and check it out. Two freshly killed deer are sprawled in the truck bed and Abby, Dale’s feisty red-haired grand-daughter, is tugging on the head of the largest one.

“Look what I got!” she screeches.

Her daddy laughs as Abby jumps up. “She’s been dancing ever since she shot it,” he says. “She and Paw Paw were hunting back on the old home place when these two slipped into the field. Abby got her doe with one shot.”

I congratulate her and ask if she gutted the deer herself, or if her Paw Paw did it for her. Abby proudly thrusts her bloody hands, into my face. “I did it myself,” she squeals. She has officially joined the club of the providers.

Before I moved to Highland County, I had never seen meat that wasn’t wrapped in cellophane. My grandfather was an avid bird hunter and I knew he occasionally ate doves, but I don’t remember ever being at the table when they were served. I certainly had never heard of girls hunting. In fact when Joe offered to take me hunting with him, early in our dating career, I went, but scared the deer away so he couldn’t shoot them. He never offered again.

But, in Highland, hunting is a rich family tradition. I have female friends who hunt and many of the girls in my middle school classes come to school during hunting season full of stories about button bucks and big does. I am happy to see young girls participating in the act of putting meat on the family table. Abby’s dad tells me that they are almost out of venison, so the whole family is looking forward to putting this one in the freezer. Deer is their favorite meat.

Not too long ago, I was driving my sons and some of their friends to Marlinton to a soccer match. One of the passengers, a curly haired cutie named Lily, was staring out the window while we traveled through the rolling hills. All at once her five year old voice rang out, “Look, a deah, a deah.” I was just turning around to comment on how pretty the field of does was, when she lifted her hands and aiming an imaginary gun screamed, “Bang! Bang! Bang!”

Unlike my five year old friend, I haven’t even pretended to shoot a deer, but I do love the meat. It is low-fat and free range. My freezer is stocked with deer roasts and my cellar boasts several rows of canned venison. Fast food in Highland is defined as dumping a jar of venison into a pot with barbecue sauce. Add some coleslaw and green beans and supper’s ready in less than fifteen minutes.

I am not such a city girl anymore. Now, when I see a field full of deer, I anticipate a healthy, low fat meal. One day, I hope to become a full-fledged country woman. When I shoot my first deer, I will remember Abby dancing in the bed of the old truck with her red hands thrust to the sky. And I, too, will dance a small jig (appropriate for a woman of my age) as I celebrate joining the oldest club in the world. The club of the protein providers.

The Lights of Home

2009-11-14T21:06:00.000-05:00

A filigree of sky and tree
has caught an evening star
and if the wind doesn’t blow
and if the branches don’t let go
it might be there tomorrow.

Although winter is still officially a month off, the end of daylight savings time has brought an early onslaught of dark skies. The stars are vivid, but my favorite lights are closer to home. As Joe and I head down the six mile stretch of country lane that connects our house to the small village of McDowell, the blackness is occasionally broken by lights shining in the distance. Each one belongs to someone we know. There’s the farmhouse tucked against the mountains with just a single light showing from a downstairs window. The woman who lives there is very frugal and never burns more than one bulb at a time.

The next farm is closer to the road and every window upstairs and down is a glowing jewel. There are four children in the house and it seems to laugh at the darkness. As we drive by, I can see one small face peering back at me.

We travel at least a half a mile before we see another house. The eerie blue light of a television dances against the curtains in the front room and there is a string of laughing orange jack o lanterns draped across the front porch. In two weeks, they will be replaced with the beautiful red, orange, gold and green of Christmas decorations. I look forward to these each year, especially the ones wrapped around the twenty foot tall spruce tree in the side yard.

Across the road, a big old barn glows in the light of a mercury vapor bulb. If I roll down the windows I can hear it humming in the crisp night air. Most of lights we’ve seen come from tungsten bulbs. They cast a welcoming gold light. But, the barn is garishly blue and gray beneath the industrial fixture. The hay wagons are parked in deep black shadows cast by its one large bulb.

The next house is up on a hill. There is a beautiful bay window, and I can see the five family members seated around the dining room table. That means the twins are home from college. Beyond their house, a recently built log cabin dominates the sky line. It has a modern set of floor to ceiling windows and they are festive against the velvet black night. I wonder how Christy keeps them so spotless.

Two more curves and we will be in our little village. The houses are closer together now, but they still don’t light the night sky in the same way as the city of Staunton which is four mountains to the east. On a clear night, the sky in that direction is orange. I am so glad to live in an area where the sky is dark and each light belongs to someone I know.

Finally, we pull into the yard of the homeplace. Joe's mom died six years ago and the house has been empty. Now Justin lives there. The porch lights are on and the house looks happy again.

Sanctuary

2009-11-10T21:12:00.000-05:00

There’s something peaceful about chickens. Joe’s out of town for a couple of days so I have inherited egg duty. After slipping on some old clothes, I grab the battered pail that serves as our egg bucket and walk across the back forty to the hen high rise. The end of daylight savings time means that the sky is silver and pink by the time I get around to this chore. Most of the hens are inside on the roost because they are smarter than humans. They don’t stay up past their bedtimes watching TV.

The door to our chicken coop has an old fashioned peg latch on it. I slide the latch to the left with a soft snick and push the wooden door open. The hens chuckle and snuggle against each other, huddling against the intruder (me). A stray feather drifts to the floor. In the subdued light, the hens look like fluffy brown pillows tossed onto the thin sticks that make up the two corner roosts.

I turn to the nesting boxes and feel around in each one for the five or six eggs the hens have taken turns depositing there. The eggs are smooth like river rocks and the last few to be laid are still warm to the touch. I check to be sure the chickens have some food and water and then walk over to rub my hands through the feathers of the closest hen. She squeaks a little, but lets me ruffle her head. Chicken feathers are silky, and the hen and I mesmerize each other as I run my fingers down her back. Her bottom eyelids rise up to meet her top ones and she relaxes.

I thank the hens for all their hard work, and admonish the rooster to take care of his girls. On my way back to the house I say a little prayer of thanksgiving for the simple places and rituals on a farm that provide sanctuary from busy days.

Finding Your Inner Dog

2009-11-05T22:22:00.000-05:00

Last Saturday, the skies were blue and the sun was friendly. I sat on the lawn with my rabbit beagles-- Gus, Lady and Duke. The three dogs took turns crawling onto my lap for a good ear rub. In between they chased each other, tumbling and growling until they collapsed in an exhausted heap next to my knees. They were totally relaxed and living in the moment. That’s when it hit me. My dogs know some things that I need to learn.

Here's what they taught me:

Take time to do nothing. Instead of mowing the grass, lie on it and enjoy that bright blue sky overhead.

Kiss people even if your breath smells like garlic, peanut butter or dead ground-hogs.

If you find something you like, allow yourself to completely enjoy it. Roll in it if that makes you happy.

Wag your entire body when you see someone you love.

Sing to the moon or the sun whenever the mood strikes you.

Eat when you’re hungry even if people are watching you.

Don’t be afraid to let people see your round belly. Maybe they’ll be charmed by it.

If someone rubs your back or ears, grin with appreciation and move around until they’ve gotten all your itchy spots.

Make everyone you meet feel special.

From now on, I’m going to pay a little more attention to my inner dog and a little less attention to my inner critic. Woof!

Dancing With Cows

2009-10-28T21:56:00.000-04:00

Working cattle is not for the faint of heart. Most of our cows weigh between 1200 and 1600 pounds. Joe, like most farmers around here has been kicked, trampled, gored and flattened by ornery cows. Occasionally, the air turns blue with cuss words when the cows are not cooperating but, more often, my husband makes working cattle look like a beautiful dance.

Yesterday, when I came home from school, he and Justin were moving some cattle. Justin was in the meadow on his four-wheeler. Gunning his engine he bounced across ditches and bumps as he rounded up stray cows. I held my breath every time he skidded onto three wheels. As he zoomed back and forth, Justin pushed the cattle into a tight group and funneled the herd, like a shape shifting amoeba, through the gate.

Then, working together, the three of us forced them into a fence corner. Another group of cows and calves watched curiously from the other side. Joe opened the gate between them creating a twelve foot gap. Then, my intrepid husband stepped between the two herds and commenced to sort them out. Both groups of cows pushed and shoved trying to move through the gate.

Swaying from left to right, Joe directed the cows. If a wily cow tried to sneak through, he side-stepped and turned her away. If one hung back, he lifted his stick, tapped her on the rump and steered her into the other field. With grace and precision, he selected cows from one herd and propelled them into the other. Within five minutes all the cows and calves were sorted into the right fields. It was like watching a rural Baryshnikov in a bovine ballet.

My youngest son, Scott is majoring in animal science at Virginia Tech. He called the other night to say his Intro to Ag class was learning how to move herds of cows. He laughed as he described the antics of his classmates chasing cattle around the pen. Scott, like his brother and father, has been dancing with cows since he was old enough to hold a stick. I guess something like that can be taught, but it takes a lifetime of exposure to develop it into a fine art. We may not have a lot of culture out here on the farm, but watching my husband and sons perform their bovine ballet more than makes up for it. The best seats in the house are free.

Evening Vespers

2009-10-21T19:59:00.000-04:00

The light fades so fast. This afternoon, when I got home, I jumped in the truck with Joe to help him give the ewes some barley. When we left the house, the sky was gold; when we reached the field, it was silver; by the time he had poured the last of the barley into the pan, it was gray. All in less than fifteen minutes.

I love to watch Joe feed the sheep. Cap pushed back, flannel shirt flapping, he walks into the field with a sort of lopsided gait, weighed down on his right by the barley in the bucket. Then he lifts his hands to his mouth and calls. “Shirrrpy, Shiiiirrrpy!” The musical invitation rolls up over the hills and before the last echo threads its way back, a train of wooly ewes bounds over the brow of the hill. They leap and kick their heels as they barrel down to their evening meal. The last rays of sun limn the lambs with light.

The sheep circle Joe, butting, bleating, baahing as they push into the pans full of grain. They are hungry because fall temperatures have nipped the grass. As the grain swishes into the pans, the sheep subside to gentle bleats. Tilt your head and listen. Can you hear it? All across the county, in every valley and holler, farmers and sheep are greeting the evening in Highland County.

Invasion of the Crumb Snatchers

2009-10-16T20:43:00.000-04:00

In the fall, UFO’s send large numbers of their species to invade my house. With their large black eyes and pointy faces, they might be scary if they weren’t so darn cute. They only come out at night and I wouldn’t even know they had visited if it weren’t for the abundance of small gifts they leave behind. I am positively schizophrenic about these Unidentified Furry Objects (Peromyscus maniculatus)or deer mice.

For years I have gleefully trapped mice and tossed their carcasses to the chickens. But, last year, I accidentally dislodged a momma mouse from her nest of babies. She ran off, leaving her little pink eraser-shaped children to fend for themselves. Instantly my maternal instincts took over. I gathered all nine babies into the palm of my hand and went in search of a small box. Joe says I should have been searching for the cats.

Anyway, after locating an appropriate receptacle, I scoured the internet looking for a mouse milk recipe. I couldn’t find one. Go figure. So I concocted my own version from canned milk, water and egg with just a touch of sugar for sweetness. Then I spent an hour or two convincing the babies to suck a drop from a syringe. After three days of this madness, thank goodness they all died. But ever the conflicted one, I dug a grave for them under the pear tree. By the end of the week, I was once again trapping the little boogers and tossing them to the cats. See what I mean about schizophrenia?

Farm living continues to teach me new things about myself.

Country Decorating

2009-10-07T22:34:00.000-04:00

A country themed magazine came in the mail yesterday. When I sat down to read it, the pages fell open to a beautiful spread featuring what the editors called an authentic country kitchen. There were flowers and decorative bowls of fresh produce on the counters. There was a deep, country sink and a six burner, stainless steel Viking stove. There were rough hewn timbers and recycled barn wood throughout. The windows were spotless and the curtains were crisp. It was beautiful, but it was not an authentic country kitchen.

There were no people in overalls or muddy shoes. There weren’t any wilted piles of day old vegetables waiting to be processed. A farmwife stood at the counter, dressed in white slacks and silver sandals. She was smiling as she snipped the ends off a fresh artichoke. It was obvious that she and the artichoke had just stepped off the plane from California where she must have gone for a perm and manicure.

I wore white slacks in my kitchen once, but I’ve never worn any silver sandals there. I don’t have any rough hewn timbers because they’re the dickens to clean and all my recycled barn wood is out in my barn. My windows are spotless twice a year and my curtains are crisp only after I put out the flames from the Christmas candle I set in the windowsill.

Eight years ago, a pipe burst in my kitchen and the resulting flood soaked its way into the subfloor. After tearing out the ruined linoleum, I went shopping. I bet I searched through over two hundred samples in my quest for a pattern that matched my idea of the perfect floor. I finally found it. It’s a mix of browns that coordinate with lamb, puppy and calf poop. And the yellow and orange highlights match any stray splots of applesauce or tomatoes that splatter on the floor during harvest season.

Real country decorating is beautiful because it is durable, economical, practical and unpretentious. Just like the people who live here.

Autumn Easy Bake

2009-09-30T22:14:00.000-04:00

Yesterday,
I sat in a field
and let my left ear bake in the sun
until it was done
and then,
I turned and toasted my other side.

I have a love hate relationship with fall. I love the colors. I hate the shortened days. I love the crisp wind. I hate going back to work. I love the harvest. I hate canning the harvest.

When I was in kindergarten, my family moved to the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Fall came early and I remember curling up with my white kitten in the bright patches of sun that warmed our back patio. I would lie on my side, watching the red and gold leaves swirl down from the tree in the backyard. Then, when I was sufficiently warm, I would turn to face the brick wall and take a mid-afternoon cat nap.

It’s a good thing my house is almost a half a mile off the road, because I still like to do this. I suspect that if I lived in the suburbs, my neighbors would find the sight of a middle aged woman curled up on the concrete with her cat a strange and troublesome sight.

Oops! Now you know. If you come to my house on a day that smells like apples, and I don’t open the door to your knock, just mosey on around to the back. You’ll find me sprawled on the warm rocks of my patio. I hope you'll pull up a cat and join me.

Winging Our Way Home

2009-09-23T19:47:00.001-04:00

I went outside this evening to feed the rabbit beagles. We have three adults and two puppies, so dividing the food around so that everyone gets their fair share can take a few minutes. After I had rattled the dry chow into their bowls, I sat down to keep guard. My two horses roam freely about the lot outside my yard, and the sound of chow pinging on the bottom of the bowls is a siren song to them.
They came trotting over, anxious to bully their way to a snack and I shooed them off, then sat on a log to wait for the dogs to finish.

As I looked up, I noticed the monarch butterflies. The sky swirled gray and silver in the waning light, and silhouetted against it were several Monarchs, beating their way home. They crossed against the mountains to the west as they headed south, and while I sat there, I counted ten. Then I got interested in counting how often they flap because they seem to be working awful hard. I didn’t get an exact count of wingbeats per minute, but I can tell you that they were beating at least three times faster than my heart. It’s hard to imagine a critter who, born here, knows somehow when it’s time to flap south and head to Mexico, which is where almost all monarchs end up. How do they know where to go?

I have captured and raised more than one for my science classroom. Born from tiny eggs laid exclusively on milkweed leaves, the tiny larvae eat themselves from the size of a comma to the size of a pencil nub in less than three weeks. If you look at the bottom of the plant where they live, you will find a sizable pile of caterpillar poop—little green pellets that they excrete almost as fast as they eat. Then the green and black striped worms diddle themselves a little pad of silk and hook their back legs in so they can hang head down and transform into a beautiful green and gold chrysalis.
Within two weeks, depending on temperature, the chrysalis becomes translucent and the folded up shape of the future butterfly becomes visible. It only takes the monarch minutes to break free. Then it hangs head down so gravity can move fluid into its flaccid wings. In an hour the butterfly is ready. It pumps its wings and lifts off.

We released a few from my classroom this week and I was amazed to see them immediately orient themselves and then start to flap south. How do they know which way to go? Anyway those were my thoughts as I watched the Halloween striped beauties wing their way home this evening. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could orient ourselves so we could head home with as much boldness as these tiny flapping wonders?

2009-09-08T21:49:00.000-04:00

ON HUNTING AND GATHERING

I live with a bunch of hunter-gatherers. I was born and raised in the city, but moved to the mountains when I graduated from college. My prior experience with hunting and gathering involved bargains at department stores. Then, I married a farmer. I knew that my life had really changed on the day that my brand new husband came home, dropped a deer carcass (skinned and gutted) on my countertop and declared, “I brought you a little something to work up.”
That’s how I learned to cut up and process a deer. Now, I work up between two and five deer a year. I don’t think I realized how much I have changed, until I visited my sister, who lives on the edge of Atlanta. To celebrate my arrival, she hosted a small get-together so I could meet some of her friends. Meg introduced me as her “country sister.” I think everyone pictured me sitting on a wide veranda sipping mint juleps and taking an occasional stroll out to pet my horses or pluck roses. They moved in closer as I talked about life on the farm. At some point the conversation turned to cooking, and I mentioned what a convenience food canned venison is.
“Oh really? Where can you find that?” A perky woman to my right seemed to think that I picked it up at some special wild game abattoir, so I told her about the twenty quarts of canned deer meat in my root cellar. Her eyes grew wide as I explained the yearly hunting rituals in my small mountain community. I don’t hunt, but many of my female friends do. One of them even has a chandelier hanging over her pool table that’s made of antlers from all the deer she’s killed. As I described my life, I began to sense that stories of “Meg’s odd sister” would be the topic of discussions in the living rooms of Atlanta for some time to come. I shared how to process a deer and then someone asked what my husband and I raise on our farm. I answered that we raise cattle and sheep and the occasional pig.
“Do you ever eat any of the animals you raise?”
It occurred to me then, that what had become a natural occurrence for me was considered strange to an American society that has moved away from its rural roots. Most of my friends raise their own meat, or buy it from someone they know. It is not unusual for me to trade a couple of T-bones for a freshly killed chicken or two. You might be shocked to hear my children ask, “Is this hamburger from Radar (a blind steer we raised to steak size) or Butterbags?” I love knowing exactly what my steak or ham slice or chicken breast ate before it became my meal. When my city friends express dismay at my ability to eat an animal I’ve seen, I tell them that the animals on our farm live a good life, with all the food, water, shade and space to roam that they need. And when they die, it’s quick and for a purpose. I think most humans would feel blessed to have as much.
As the party ended, one of the husbands slipped over to talk to me. He looked wistful.
“Do you ever let people come up to visit?”
“Sure,” I said.
“So, could I come up there and camp sometime, and maybe fish or help out on the farm a little?”
I said “yes,” but I knew he’d never make it. He just needed a dream. I think most men are hunter-gatherers at heart.
Based on what I read in magazines and hear on the news, there seems to be a growing interest in America for what you might call a “simpler life.” People fantasize about living on farms and getting “back to nature.” I have an idea that might start them in the right direction. They could adopt an animal, or maybe only a share of an animal, from our farm. Make no mistake; this would not be a rescue adoption. The eventual fate of the chosen porcine, ovine, or bovine creature would be the family supper table. The adoption fee would include the cost of feeding and raising the animal, the fee for killing and processing it, and the privilege of visiting our farm. Adoptive families could drive out to the country to picnic and watch their cow or hog or lamb enjoy another fine day. The children could help scatter hay and the adults could help bring the animals in for vaccinations or routine care. Those who wished to sweat and really experience life on the farm could ride a hay-wagon under a blazing August sun, or muck out a shed full of manure, or peel and drive fence posts, or well….. you get the picture.
Then one day, in the winter, a big box of frozen meat would arrive on the family’s doorstep. And, as they sat around the table that night, enjoying a beautiful sirloin steak, the family would say, “This is Henry, and isn’t he fine?” because they would know where that steak came from and remember the small part they played in bringing it to their table. They would have earned the right to call themselves hunter-gatherers.