Thriving By Walking Around

We maintain trails through the property - through the prairie grasses, through the woods, around the lawn.  More than mere "access", they are an invitational feature of our particular landscape.  They beckon, as surely as a curled finger motioned in our direction.  "Come," they whisper; "explore."  And though not nearly often enough, we do - on foot, on snowshoes, on the bench of the utility cart.  We answer the summons to pay closer attention.

Every season has its reward - in summer the joints of the bluestem, the monarch on the wildflower, the lushness of the foliage; in fall the crispness of the air and the color in the leaves; in winter the muffling carpet of snow, the crystalline accents in the elbows of the trees; in spring the myriad awakenings, the buds, the awkward fawn.  There are textures.  There are scents.  There is more than meets the eye and ear.  We walk amongst it, not to get anywhere in particular, but to see, to feel, to listen attentively and receive the gift of what life along the trails has to say.

Not, as I earlier confessed, often enough.  We make excuses.  "It's too hot."  "It's too cold."  "It's raining."  "I'm tired."  All the while, the grasses whisper, the leaves shimmer in the breeze, the hedge apples swell and fall and roll like bowling balls, the deer tamp down trails of their own, the colors evolve.

I'm determined to counter my neglect.  Recently an old word reentered my orbit that has tugged with a gravitational pull.  "Peripatetic" is a transliteration of a Greek word that means, at its simplest, "to walk around."  It is an "onomatopoeia" kind of word to me - it sounds...ambulatory; active.  Peripatetic.  Aristotle's educational endeavor (4th C. BCE) was known as the "Peripatetic School" because, not being a citizen of Athens and therefore unable to own property, he lectured to his trailing students while walking along the pathways of the city's common spaces.

In his own version of "The Peripatetic School," business leadership guru Tom Peters centuries later encouraged an effectiveness strategy he coined, "MBWA" - management by walking around.  A leader can learn a great deal, he argued, by pushing away from the desk, exiting the office, and wandering around the workplace, observing, listening, chatting, building rapport.  It is to suggest that as much or more can be learned viscerally - through our pores - than via the data of reports.

At the very least it is more interesting.  And nourishing.

I'm determined to more regularly feed our "Peripatetic School" of homesteading - which is to say, "of living."

Walking around.

Paying attention.

Listening.

Learning.

Not merely maintaining the trails, but using them; and allowing them to use me.

TBWA:  "Thriving By Walking Around."

It might not be an efficient strategy for getting places, but it may well be the only means of living in them.

A Big Silence to Fill

We didn’t want him in the first place.  We tend chickens for the eggs, and roosters aren’t qualifited.  We only buy hens.  But accidents happen - “sexing” is an imperfect art - and so it was that of the two Mottled Java hens we purchased from a nearby hatchery, Samantha turned out to be Sam.  As I have noted elsewhere, by the time all of this became clear, we were invested.  Time.  Money.  Feed.  Affection.  

And so it was that Sam found a home in our flock.  It hasn’t been trouble-free.  There was that winter when, amidst an excrutiatingly cold spell, Sam’s comb was frostbitten.  He took on a tragic posture, shuffling out of the coop each morning, only to stand hunched over most of the day just outside the door.  No crowing, no chasing the girls.  We were sure he was dying.  And then he didn’t.

There was the time his foot was injured.  We were never sure how it happened, but one of his “toes” was one day abbreviated and bloody.  His movements were impaired.  He limped.  He did the best he could.  We treated the injury as best we could, but our medicinal expertise is limited and our expectations were low.  But once again Sam recovered.

And then there was the fox invasion.  I’ll spare you the details but it was ugly.  Usually something of a guard rooster, Sam abandoned his post amidst the carnage, adopting the “fight another day” strategy of retreat, and we found him in the front yard, traumatized.  With the help of our neighbor, we restored him to the coops and eventually nerves settled and normal life resumed.

Until yet another unintended rooster revealed himself in a batch of chicks.  Gallo was young and fiesty and colorful, but small.  Compared to Sam, he was junior varsity.  But Gallo became the aggressor, chasing Sam, abusing him, pecking and humiliating him.  Cowling him down and standing on him.  One day I watched Gallo chase Sam across the chicken yard and over the fence, after which Sam went missing for the day.  When he finally returned that evening looking like a bedraggled shell of a man, I subdivided the yard, putting a fence between the two roosters for safe keeping.  There Sam has lived ever since - Sam and the several hens who rotated in and out to keep him company.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was at least detente.  Everybody was safe - physically, socially, and psychologically.  And the two developed a kind of ritual.  They would crow antiphonally.  Back and forth, call and response.  For hours at a time.

Until yesterday.  This summer we have a new family of raccoons living in the neighborhood.  We have seen them running along the tree line.  I have seen evidence of their digging around the coops.  Most disconcerting is their desire for breakfast.  I am accustomed to them moving and hunting at night.  We work hard to secure the chickens in their coops at dusk to have them out of harm’s way after dark.  But this little family is active in the morning.  I shooed one out of yard one morning earlier in the week, and trapped still another.  Unfortunately, yesterday, after releasing the flock at daybreak, I went back to bed.  It is the intense time of garden season and we have been working hard.  That paralyzing fatigue coupled with an atypical late night drew me back between the sheets for a few extra minutes of rest.  Somehow I didn’t hear the commotion.

At least two of the chickens were victims - Sam among them.  I can picture him defending.  He was, as I said, big, and he could ruffle himself into an imposing presence.  He would stand his ground.  He was always the last one to head inside at night, sanding sentry outside until all the girls in his charge were safe.  I can picture him trying to defend them.  

Futily, as it turned out.  

And strangely - or not, perhaps - we are heartbroken.  We didn’t want him in the first place.  But in the end, we loved him.  And despite the remaining hens, the coops seem somehow empty.  

And quiet.  Gallo crows, but there is no answer.  There is call, but no response.  He even laments the loss of his old nemesis.  And his job has suddenly gotten bigger.

It is, as we continually remind ourselves, the way of nature.  The raccoons aren’t evil, just hungry.  But that little bit of rationality doesn’t help much just now.  It’s deafeningly quiet out there.  Out there, and in here as well.  

Gallo has big shoes and silence to fill.  As, I suppose, do we all. 

Spending the Currency of Perspiration

I am not a heat-loving guy.  In truth, there isn't really all that much of it in Iowa - a couple of months on average, unlike the oppressive expanse of it across the calendar in the Texas of my rearing - but heat is heat, regardless; which accounts for my frequent consternation.  Despite the opulence of the season outside, my waking hours are increasingly spent indoors.  Early mornings are tolerable, and I use them to keep as many of the garden weeds at bay as I can.  Lori is more intrepid.  I arrive early, she remains late.  Between us, we are keeping up, if only barely.  The vegetable beds are thriving and growing; salad greens and turnips frequent our table, and the braising greens are coming into their own.  The green bean bushes have blossomed, along with the squashes and cucumbers, and adolescent tomatoes are burdening their branches.  Berries, both cultivated and wild, we manage to glean as we pass their snagging reaches.  The peppers and cabbages won't be far behind.  We'll wince at the water bill when it eventually arrives, but the flavors that bill has enabled will be some balm for the financial pain.

But while the vegetable garden's invitation is primarily gastronomic, the flower beds proffer other inducements.  The butterfly bush is awash in blossoms and, as advertised, butterflies.  The day lilies - justifying their biblical splendor that shames even Solomon - open like a ballet in slow motion.  The iris, the poppies, the daisies and echinacea, the towering sunflowers and spindly zinnias - the beds are awash in them.

But the blooms are ephemeral.  They arrive as if by magic, and just as suddenly disappear.  These are their glory days.

These days that we spend largely inside.  Avoiding the warming sun that has beckoned the color.

I'll get acclimated.  Eventually.  As much as I dislike the assault of them on my skin and the drain of them on my constitution, these, too, are days "that the Lord has made."  Comfort and ease are no substitute for the beauty that swabs and dots them.  It is a common passage.  What practicing scales is to a pianist, what calisthenics are to athletes, what knife scars are to a chef and iambic pentameter is to a poet, intemperate days are to a human aching to master the art of being fully alive.  Living through the onerous and strenuous disciplines is the only door opening into the beauty they evoke and beckon us to celebrate.  And savor.

It is summer - not my favorite temperature, but my favorite benefactor.  And so I'll get up in the morning and embrace it.  There is work to do, but also beauty to attend.  The blooms won't be around for long.  And perspiration is a small enough price to pay for the glory of embracing them.