Rhythm and release
There’s something deeply satsifying about lifting the recycled window lids on the cold frames in the morning to shower icy, slighty sulfurous water onto the tiny sprouts, soaking their vibrant green ovals and spears. The spinach is coming on like gangbusters after a couple of sunny, but cold days, and the only thing I’m not seeing any of yet is the cilantro, which I forgot to soak first. I’m thinking another four weeks and we’ll be enjoying a rich array of sweet and spicy greens. I’m looking forward to the particular energy that comes from eating something that grew right outside the kitchen door.
The cold frames are the last thing I attend to in my new late-morning routine of hauling a bucket of feed and some scratch, along with whatever kitchen scraps I’ve put aside, out to the chicken tractor. The girls are starting to circle around when they hear me coming, instead of flapping in distress and trampling one another in their slightly retarded race for the corners. It’s a wonder they didn’t all suffocate those first weeks.
They’ve nearly done away with the grass in in the pen, so I picked up a few bales of straw today. In another day or two I’ll need to start layering it so they don’t make the run into a poopy, muddy mess.
They’re visible from the road, and while we still have the heat lamps turned on for them at night, we’ve noticed a lot of cars slowing down as they pass the house. It’s a mini-disco.
After Lila and I fill the hanging feeder, throw down the scraps, some cracked corn and a little bit of cherrystone grit, I pull the waterers out and hose the poo off the outside, then give them a good spray and a refill. I’m still somewhat amazed at just how gross chickens can be with the pooping in their own food and then eating it. My friend Debra says she doesn’t have to scoop the dog poop in her yard anymore, that the chickens she has free-ranging handle clean-up. Strangely enough, the eggs are delicious.
We’ve been pulling up dandelions to toss into the tractor, and Lila also gathers handfuls of the crazy yellow blooms to shove through the wire mesh into poor Charles the female rabbit’s face. Charles loves the treats, but despises children. In another couple of weeks I’ll be posting a photo of the 3.6 acre dandelion carpet that is our lawn. Today when we walked out to see how the peas survived the nighttime dips into the twenties (not so well) we gathered dozens for Charles, and I remembered the photo Chris sent to me when he first looked at the house. I lived in New York, and got the email while sitting at my desk at the behemoth weekly news magazine, hugely pregnant and desperate to know that I wouldn’t have to move myself, my son, and our new baby into his hodgepodge lodge of a handyman’s nightmare with the mold spores and the raccoon family. The only thing that house really needed was a bulldozer.
The dandelions sold me in spite of the ugly blue bathroom and the Bicentennial Bedroom with the Vegas Red Rug. He looked at the house on a sunny May afternoon, and the entire yard was covered with fat, yellow flower heads, Dr. Dent de Lion. I wanted to lay down in that photo and watch the clouds drift overhead for the rest of my life. Of course, I couldn’t lay on my back at all at the time, and a few weeks later would find out that I needed to stay home and lay on my left side for the rest of my pregnancy. But anyway. The dandelions gave me a feeling of hope when I needed it most, when I felt like I was living in a most hopeless situation, pregnant and living alone. Trying to help Tyler deal with his feelings about moving to Ohio, away from his father. Then sick and unable to even pack to make the move, finally living in a hospital waiting for a safe time to bring Lila into the world. (Thank you Mom! Thank you Kate! Thank you Sabine! You all saved my ass. Again.)
So this year I’m going to unwrap the gift of the dandelion as many times a day as it takes for me to fully embrace and appreciate the huge gift I have received in being allowed to live here and steward this land with my family.
But I reserve the right to bitch and moan about the Vegas Red Rug on occasion.
"In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy."
~Henry David Thoreau
April 10th, 2006 at 9:56 am
The chick-a-biddies do clean up the dog poop (except for the piles we step in), but leave raccoon scat. Then they leave their own piles of squishy chicken poop everywhere (including the front porch), which the dogs adore–nothing quite like fresh chicken nuggets. And so it goes.
April 11th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
I was just thinking of this the other day . . . I wonder if part of the joy I felt in the midst of all of that was some sort of knowing that it would be the last spate of such nearness I’d have with you for . . . who knows how long? And now you are bringing your homestead more together and I owe you a visit - perhaps woth my new man - and Life sure is different isn’t it?
K
April 12th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
Chickens are possibly the most disgusting animals in the history of ever. I used to have a flock of over 20, and they would amaze me with their grossness. I would wonder if my eggs would be flavored by cat shit… I think I may just get ducks next time, and forage for their eggs. Ducks do not repulse me with their grody behaviors.