Girls Gone Hillbilly, report

I think the best part was having Alecto at my house. As soon as she pulled onto our road, one of my most powerful omens took wing. It is funny how that omen has changed through the years, yet remained the same. I always think of it as an omen and a different thing as a totem and I'm sure it doesn't matter and I'm not telling you what they are anyway.

It is a funny thing, this friendship with Alecto. If you started naming things we don't have in common, you could make a list that might never have an end. And yet, we have a sympathetic vibration.

And Cielo, you know, we've known each other since we were nine. Also vast differences and yet we can sit around for four days and be comfortable in silence yet never run out of things to say either.

Last year Alecto spearheaded food. This year I seemed to have done that. There wasn't a lot of planning, or a lot of sticking to any plan that was made, but we ate well, mostly thanks to the garden.

And Cielo's coffee. I love coffee. And Alecto's eggs.

My family killed and dressed a rooster for me one day when I was at the barn, so we had one properly aged dead chicken to take. Because I had worked every day up to the going, I hadn't packed until after Alecto arrived. The next morning, after grits, we went to the garden and the bounty of the late summer garden is mostly what we ate. Squash, potatoes, chard, onions, tomatoes.

I got to take Alecto to Shangri-la too, where we got apples which we had with most every meal, and with which we made promptly devoured fried apple pies.

It took us until our second morning to come to our morning routine -- get up, drink coffee, do yoga (the 26 Bikram postures minus the hot room), sit in the hot tub, cook and eat breakfast.

It took Alecto two days to forgive the non-primitive condition of the so-called cabin. I don't think Cielo and I had a problem with it.

Alecto brought a rooster but he turned out to be only the most well traveled rooster on the east coast instead of dinner.Perhaps our most hilarious adventure out was to find him some food before the feed stores closed down at noon on Saturday. (later noted: I will never forget the boy at the feed store asking what she fed her rooster. "Laying pellets," she said. He whole body became still and he looked directly at her. "He's not going to lay eggs you know, no matter how much laying pellets he eats." His delivery was deadpan and still make me chuckle. I think they may be talking about Alecto for awhile there at the feed store.)

rooster packed up to head back home, alive!

We also got ourselves some cheese at a local cheese shop on that jaunt, and mmm, do I love cheese. I could live on cheese and bread but the bread was a different story. Alecto made her trip on Wonder Bread and Twinkies. Yuck (but Mallomars and HoHo's are ok). I brought the dry mix for a no knead loaf (and the iron to cook it in) with us. After I soaked it and went to knead it, it looked like the yeast had given up the ghost. So Cielo bought some more yeast . . . and the results still did not look promising. So Alecto said, fine, let's make crackers, but *then* it decided to rise and we ended up with well fermented whole grain brownie bread. It was delicious.

Cielo and I gathered materials for Alecto to spit roast the dead rooster. During the gathering I found some really cool quartz and some buckeyes which I thought were chestnuts. I know that in some places chestnuts do survive to nut bearing age and I'd never in my life seen a buckeye. Well, now I have.

We ate the rooster in the dark which was probably best. And we only ate two buckeyes. (they are poisonous)

Alecto spitting the scrawny rooster

buckeyes are NOT chestnuts!

I loved the yoga. I learned from the juxtaposition of doing yoga with my friends that in yoga as in life I find the point of stillness and relaxation within the exertion rather than always pushing and maintaining the tension. It is why I can be still on a horse. It is something I like about my way of being.

I got very antsy being outside of my life. I learned from vacating with my friends that I don't vacate very well; that I run toward home, not away.

I learned from the hot tub that I am really easily over stimulated. Turn off those jets. It also may be related to that point of stillness thing; a cow chewing her cud.

Ladies, this is my love letter to you.

And to my family.

And to life on the farm.

the heart of life

We're back in milk and it feels good. She's a very different cow. She has a LOT of milk but lets down very slowly.

There is nothing bad, but everything is different. It has reminded me of the times I've run across people who know already exactly how everything is going to be. The funniest ones were going to raise chicory for their goats to browse on, and when goats proved too difficult for their pansy rears, they got a cow and failed at that too.

Not that there is anything wrong with failure. If you aren't failing at something, you aren't trying at very much. But success just isn't all that difficult either, so if you aren't succeeding at something, you aren't trying at very much either. By any measure, we've failed at most things we've tried in one way or the other. But we've always kept at it, and that is a good measure of success.

The other day a tree blew down across our road, about half-way between the house and the road. Luckily one vehicle was out already because moving it took several days -- although if no vehicle had been on the other side of it, I'm sure we would have worked a bit earlier and more diligently to get it moved. My point, at any rate, is that to most people a downed tree would be nothing but a liability, especially across their road. But to us, it was only a very mild inconvenience and in the end an asset as it becomes the beginning of next winter's firewood. That is because when you shift your perspective, everything looks different. Scratch that, everything IS different.The down tree was a heavy sugar maple. Cutting it into pieces with a bow saw proved an exercise in how many ways one can get a saw bound, and a lesson in levers. There is still one big piece down there that wasn't in the road so we didn't haul it yet, and a bunch of smaller pieces to be worked into lengths there and brought up on the cart. It was fun to hook and work the horse. Then we went on down to the garden and harrowed a bit.

The kids and I came back up to milk because right now it takes the whole crew (at least three people, preferably four). She's getting the routine but we've still got the calf running around loose, and, well, it can get complicated. Luckily our children know what chores are.

Chores, for those of you who might not know, are work that really does have to be done, no excuses, no make work, nothing decorative, no complaining, period, even if you are on your deathbed. Some chores, like doing the dishes or hoeing, can be put off for a day or two but you'll pay for it. Others, like tending to day old chicks, must be done on time or the chicks will die. Milking you get to slide and hour or two but otherwise, it simply has to be done. I think a lot of adults don't understand the nature of chores as they've never dealt with them -- they think it is an imposition instead of a centering, a grounding, a basis for all of life and living. Busywork is the basis of schooling -- it would be my posit that meaningful work is the basis of unschooling.

For the time being we've converted the old shoeing stock into a milking stanchion, and two of us milk her from opposite sides at the same time. She isn't fixed in the stand yet by a head stock so she can leave when she wants too and yet we're still getting lots of milk only milking once a day and not yet having taken the calf off at all. We have tentative plans for an eventual milking area but until this cow, I never would have made plans to be able to have a milker on each side. I may never have another cow that requires it, but one never knows these things.(see that rope-like thing on the bottom of her belly going to her udder? That's a vein! I think that is the coolest. Her teats are really small, her udder huge, those are a daughter's hands, and a cat catching milk from the quarter that had a little mastitis and so it being milked to the cats and not in a bucket.)

(pps I actually have not forgotten the dish rags folks, this is just my normal slowness)

tectonics

December and being snowed in by the snow storm for so long highlighted a couple of things.

One is that we had a gosh darn lot of fun jousting with the being snowed in. I mean, it was four days after it snowed before the sun shone and the temperature went above freezing and we began in earnest to get the vehicle out of the place. It took quite a bit of effort over two days, shoveling deep and heavy snow off the steep parts of our road and cutting snow covered bent sapling trees loose (“plop plop” on our heads went the icy snow) and wresting their heavy snow embedded selves out of the road. Not to mention the white knuckle driving to actually get it out.

But when the vehicle and all of us were on the bridge there arose a mighty victory whoop! We had worked very hard, together, and it had been a lot of fun.

If we had not had off the farm Christmas preparations to make, I do not know how long we would just allow ourselves to be snowed in. Perhaps, probably, until it melted.

And I have my off the farm part-time employment. Which I love. And that taught me something too. My off the farm employment is pretty much firmly in the mainstream paradigm, not the homesteading paradigm. Said employment could and probably will morph as times change, and almost certainly the skills and contacts will be helpful no matter what, but it is the modern world that trots endless circles, not the homesteading world. And on the day I was actually certain that I would not be able to get out of this farm to feed horses on that farm, I also did not have a phone. The stress of being unable to let my boss know that I couldn’t get there was very traumatic.

Now, juxtapose those two things -- the stress was only, I repeat only, in the place where the homesteading paradigm meets the modern paradigm. It felt like tectonic plates grinding over each other creating earthquakes and volcanoes and deep ocean trenches. Being inside the homesteading paradigm, with all the things that might be hard or unpleasant about it, is not hard or unpleasant in itself. It is only in the overlap.

The sheer joy in the snow was personified by a giantess snow woman with baling twine hair, a cranberry necklace and pine cone belt who looked in my kitchen window for a few days, arms akimbo. And the many fastfastfast sledding trips down the various hills. She didn’t get a photo taken of her because the camera batteries had not been recharged and even at 7’ tall, she melted before the power came back on (although there is still a lump of her snow out there!).

Happy Halloween!

flesh to flesh

Isn't it funny how at spring equinox, I can milk in the light both times, but at fall equinox, more often both milkings are in the dark? It is more like, when I milk early in the morning, it is still dark; and when I milk regular time in the evening, it is dark already.

Ah, but the moon was up tonight. And lately the glow worms have been magnificent, like stars fallen to earth.

I remember when we first moved up here. I'm not sure I'd ever seen glow worms before. But we had rabbits down at the garden. I was pregnant with the eldest child. I still worked full time. And every evening, husband and I would walk together through the dark with the stars filling the sky and the glow worms filling the earth, hand in hand, down then back up the hill.

The little building where the rabbits were then, it is still there, now just a garden storage shed and home for wasps. It was the first thing we built on this land. We built it for chickens, and it was good but we didn't live here yet and, well, the end wasn't pretty for the chickens. Or the dogs that killed the chickens.

But before that, when there were maybe a dozen chickens in there, I would come sometimes after work to feed them before going home. One day I came and one was dead of natural causes. I didn't know then what to do exactly. I knew I needed to get her out but I thought I needed to bury her. So I tried. Something dug her up, of course. But what I didn't know then was that it was perfectly acceptable to just throw her over the side of the hill and life would take care of the rest of it, and fast. We had a goat die once in sight of my kitchen window and I watched and it was amazing. And in three days, it was gone except for some skin and the bones.

What she said.

(actually posting this from Cielo's house! -- link in title)

(P.S. Cielo's husband told her to be careful and me to have fun!)