Waiting

     One of the things I’ve learned on the farm is patience.  I am thinking this as I sit on the steps of the chicken house waiting for the last hen to decide it’s time for bed.  She is still outside, pecking around, hopeful that she’ll find one last beetle or seed before flapping up to the roost.  I know that if I go into the chicken yard and try to shoo her toward the building, she will run the other way.  That’s the way chickens are.  So I wait.

     The waiting is not so bad.  It’s the cusp of evening and a cool breeze tickles my face as I stare across the dimming pastures.  Birds are singing their evening songs and, across the road, the lambs are bleating for their mamas.  I can see them in the pewter light, running down the hill to catch up with the ewes who are waiting-like me. 

    To my left, the cows begin to mosey through the gate and I know that will lead to another kind of waiting because, after I capture this last chicken, I will fill the grain bucket and carry it out to pasture for the three calves I’m still tending.  The cows will stand around me in a circle, staring at that grain and hoping I’ll leave so they can butt the calves out of the way and steal their meal.  But, I am seasoned in patience.  I deliver the food and then upend the bucket.  I’ll sit there until the calves finish, jumping up and waving my arms or pitching pebbles whenever a cow ventures too close.

     Perched on my bucket, I glance over at my garden.  I’m waiting for the first cucumbers, tomatoes and beans.  Seeds planted in late May have finally begun to look like they will bear.  Every day there is a new unfurling, a new flower, a new leaf, a new pod, a new bug.  Gardening is all about the waiting and then the dealing with what comes along, knowing that whatever it is will be different from yesterday.

     So, I wait for things, but when I really study the farm, I realize that I don’t know anything about true waiting.  When this farm was first settled, I’m guessing the meadows and pastures were all covered in trees and rocks.  There’s a small graveyard in our front meadow and a gravestone that tells me that Samuel Wilson died here in 1862 after living only 47 years.  Did he get to see the fruits of all his labor after toiling each year to clear another few acres?  Did his wife wait anxiously for the garden to produce its first green bean or ear of corn because they hadn’t had any fresh fruits or vegetables for nine months? 

     With a round baler, a weather window of three dry days means we can harvest a significant amount of hay in a short time.  I like to think of Sam Wilson scanning the skies all summer long, hoping for fair weather clouds so he could proclaim to his bonneted wife, “This is it!  I think we can get some hay up this week.”  He would have hand-scythed, raked, shocked and then stacked enough hay to get him through the winter.  What we harvest in one day, Sam would have patiently accomplished over the length of a summer, watching his hay stacks grow slowly, anticipating fat cattle in the snow.

    Sometimes I fear that modern life has stolen our ability to go slowly.  I see this especially in the young who carry so much at their finger tips.  I watched a group of my son’s friends in conversation not long ago.  They were all holding cell phones and i-pads and, as the conversation flowed, they referenced things.   They argued about movie stars, history and their friends relationships, casually scrolling through the world with their fingers to exclaim, “Look, see, I was right.”        

     I wonder.  Would Sam Wilson, long dead in my pasture, have looked at how fast the world is moving and told us we were missing out on the joy of things gained slowly, or would he have said, “Hot diggity, where can I get a round-baler?” Generations move forward.  What’s lost is replaced with something new.  Is life better or worse as a result? I might know the answer before I die.  I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

Dressed for Success

 Yesterday, I wore my white tennis shoes for the first time since I bought them three months ago.  The purchase seemed like a good idea at the time, but that’s because I forgot to factor in where I live.  To get to my car, I have to walk out of my gate and stroll across five yards of a forty acre pasture.  When the cows and sheep met to discuss personal hygiene, I think they unanimously elected to use that five yards for all offensive bodily deposits.

     My white tennis shoes are now polka-dotted with brown.  I try to be careful, but my mother will tell you that I was born to be dirty.  On my first date with my husband I impressed him by stepping in a mud puddle, twice.  Living on a farm presents more hazards than puddles.  Now that I am retired, my fashion choices are dictated by those hazards.

     In the morning, I get up and pull on yesterday’s dirty jeans and tee, slide into my mud boots and stroll across the pasture to switch out the dogs.  The one who has been loose for the night bounds up to meet me.  He knows there’s some cat food waiting for him and, excited by the thought of fish-flavored nuggets, he jumps up planting both dirty paws on my thighs. 

      After I switch the dogs, I mosey over to the hen house to release the feathered inmates.  Spell bound by the dew-pearled cobwebs strung like party lights along the fence, I don’t notice the cow pies until I slip in one. Manure is slicker than grease and I can’t stop my downward slide. I rise up, my backside and hands stained greenish brown, and move on to the chicken house where I fill the chicken fountain, splashing enough water in the process to soak my left pants leg. 

     The three bottle calves, who have graduated from milk to grain, trot up.  The oldest one, Ralphie, has never given up the idea that I am his mother.  He bumps up against me, sucking my elbow and rubbing his dusty sides against my shirt as I lug his feed to the grain pans.  Chores done, I dust off my pants, and consider changing into clean clothes.  But, the garden needs to be weeded and the shed cleaned out.  If I change, I won’t be clean for long.   I’m not expecting company, so I elect to stay dirty.  I just have to remember not to sit down.

       After lunch, I discover that I need to go to town for several small purchases from the general store, and, again, I consider changing into clean clothes.  But, the morning chores have to be repeated in the evening, so I go as is and hope I don’t run into anyone who would care about how I look.  As I pull up to the store, I spot two female friends.  Like me they are in their oldest clothes and clonking around in muck boots.  We laugh about our appearance and compare notes about our chores, pointing to various stains and snags as proof of our endeavors.

     My friends and I love beautiful clothes, pristine shoes and matching pocketbooks.  But, those things are mostly reserved for Sunday mornings or special outings.  Whenever I visit my parents in the city, I spend several days in good clothes.  I don’t have to watch where I step and I’m not expected to do anything that would lead to un-removable stains.  I bought those white tennis shoes on one of those trips.  Now they’re not white anymore, but they are still too good to wear in the garden.  I set them on a shelf in my closet.  I’ll wear them to the fair this fall.  They’ll be perfect for looking good in the barn.  Unless it rains.  Then I’ll wear my muck boots and I, and all of my sisters-in-fashion, will splash happily through whatever nature dishes out.  After all, we know how to dress for success.

The Coyote Tree

     A friend of mine recently posted a picture on Facebook of a tree out in the middle of a pasture.  There were two coyotes hanging from its branches and a sign referring to it as the hanging tree.  I have seen this tree, but when I saw it there were about ten coyotes hanging there.

     The posted picture created a very small storm of disapproval.  People were appalled at such a vulgar, angry display.  I found myself, strangely, on the other side of the argument.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am not condoning the actions of the farmer involved (whom I know), but I am not condemning them either.  After living on the farm for twenty seven years and participating in the daily struggle to produce a good, marketable crop of lambs or calves I find that my old city attitudes have shifted.

     Like most of my city counterparts, I imagined that all farms consisted of sunny meadows full of frolicking sheep and happy cows.  I loved to eat a good steak or fry up some bacon, but somehow my mind didn’t connect happy farm animals to my plate full of juicy protein.  Happy farm animals lived so that people could enjoy their cuteness and occasionally feed them and pet them. People certainly were not going to eat them.

      It’s not that I didn’t know the source of my burger, it’s just that I chose not to consider it.  Living on a farm changed all of that.  On the farm, I began to face up to the fact that the cute little animals trotting along behind their mamas would one day be sold for food.  I lived on the farm for several years before I would let myself consider this truth too closely.

     Then my boys raised 4-H animals and I watched them grow attached to their four-legged  friends.  And, I watched them mourn when those same friends, after winning some money and ribbons, were loaded onto a stock trailer which pulled off into the sunset, heading towards a feed yard and eventually a butcher’s shop somewhere.

     It was during our third season of raising and selling fair animals that my attitudes began to shift.  In the first years, I cried, too.  But, then it occurred to me that humans have to eat, and we simply cannot do it without something else dying.  Even if we are vegetarians, eating only organically raised produce, a bug will die somewhere as the crop is harvested.  Why are we mourning only the cute furry things?

     In fact, everything must kill something else in order to keep on living.  It is a truth that has been lost as generations of eaters pluck their dinners from the sterile well-lit aisles of a grocery store.  Here on the farm, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring the source of our sustenance and the death that is an inevitable by-product of our eating.

     What does that have to do with coyotes hanging in a tree?  It turns out, everything.  Everything dies.  That’s the truth that we learn living on the farm.  Coyotes are top level predators.  They don’t die very often, unless the one predator above them, man, does the killing.  Coyotes kill indiscriminately and it’s not always because they are hungry.  Any farmer who’s seen a field full of neck-slashed lambs can tell you that coyotes are hit and run killers.  Thus, one farmer who has witnessed too much of this senseless killing and the effect it’s had on his income, chooses to hang the coyotes--symbolically saying, “enough is enough.”

     This farmer is not deranged.  He is angry, and rightfully so.  The coyote tree is simply an expression of that anger and frustration.  Since I’ve lived here, I’ve seen at least ten farmers give up raising sheep because of overwhelming coyote losses.  They’ve tried donkeys, guard dogs and llamas and if they were able to keep their sheep in a small acreage and had a small flock, then they could enjoy some level of protection.  But, most farmers in this county turn their sheep out to pasture in the summer.  Pasture on the sides of mountains, out of sight of the house.  Usually the flock splits up.  A guard animal would have to choose one group, leaving the other group vulnerable.

     If National Geographic came to our mountains and photographed the coyote tree, it would appear in the magazine with a caption that appropriately captured the frustrations of a group of people who are watching their way of life disappear one coyote-killed sheep at a time.  Lambs dying so that we all can eat are one kind of death that we accept on the farm.  Lambs dying in our fields because a coyote went on a killing spree are not.  Sometimes it seems that modern society has forgotten how to distinguish between the two.