Practice Drill

Perhaps it was Black Friday weariness.

We have three coops for good reasons.  One - the Freshman Coop - is the "pre-school" shelter that serves as the transitional home for juvenile hens who have graduated from the brooder.  It is fenced off and over-netted.  In the main chicken yard are the Varsity and Junior Varsity Coops (the names an homage to my wife's career in public education), and they house the adults - the 30 or so hens and, at present, one rooster who make up our flock.  There are two here because neither is big enough to accommodate them all.  

Except on occasion.  Like Friday night.

Though I hadn't been aware of any unusually frenetic activity - shopping or otherwise - that Black Friday evening the entire flock bedded down in a single coop.  As I noted, it has happened before on rare occasions, coaxed by the onset of frigid temperatures with the prospect of keeping warm, or as aversion to some opossum exploring the other in search of eggs or a comfortable place of his own.  Friday the temperature was quite mild for this time of year - warmer even than the night before - so winter chill was not the incentive.  As best I could with my cell phone flashlight I explored the nooks and crannies of the empty lodging - beneath; within - but found nothing hiding or threatening.  It was simply and silently vacant.  A puzzlement.

As a child at school we routinely drilled in preparation for one calamity or another.  The bell would ring in a certain pattern for "fire" and we would line up, centipede-like, and head down the hall in one direction.  A ring in a different pattern signaled "tornado" and we would line up and head off in a different direction.  In my earliest memories, from a time clouded by the Cuban Missile Crisis, frosted by the Cold War and electrified by the "communist threat in Vietnam", we would periodically and on command retreat beneath our desks for a bomb drill.  I don't recall if the bell would ring for that, or if the teacher simply shouted, "Go!" and there we would crouch until receiving the "all clear." With countless others I have wondered in subsequent years, skeptically, exactly what protection our desks would have afforded against overflying, bomb-dropping communists, but we were prepared for them - or so we thought.  Who knows?  Maybe we should be huddling beneath our desks to protect us from COVID-19?

Regularly, then, we would practice making our way to the safety of the playground, or the cafeteria, or the shelter beneath our desks, hoping we would never need the skills we were rehearsing.

Maybe that's what was going on with the chickens.  Maybe nothing at all was amiss, and they were simply running practice drills in preparation.  Winter, after all, will surely arrive one of these days with a vengeance, and I have no reason to think we have seen the last of the opossums.  and who knows what other calamities might threaten.  A lingering communist, perchance.  

Perhaps, then, it wasn't fearfulness after all, but merely prudence.  Preparation.  Practice for what is coming.

Saturday morning at sunrise I made one final inspection of the empty coop and confirmed that I hadn't missed any intruder.  Lowering the ramp of its occupied neighbor and opening the hatches, I watched as everyone spilled outside and commenced the new day.  No one seemed worse for the night's cramped conditions.  Smiling at the resilience of the birds and what I presumed to be their prescient preparation, I walked back toward the house suddenly aware of their instructive nudge.  Advent would begin the following day - Advent, the season of watching and waiting, yes, but more importantly the season of preparing.  Getting ready.  Running "practice drills" for the greener life within as without.  And I wondered how I might prepare.  

I don't know that the rooster and hens are the religious types, but their example has been an inspiration.  I don't imagine that I'll be huddling under any desks, or bedding down in a crowded coop, but I do intend to make myself more ready...

...for renewing life. 

In whatever way it might drop down, blow through, flame up, or simply blossom
out.

Between Now and Then

 With muted gold and rose striating the indigo, the night sky moves toward dawn.  Predictions anticipate a warmer day ahead – 60’s instead of 40’s.  It is a pendulum I’ve come to expect in these swing days of nature’s indecision between autumn and winter.  Simultaneously reticent to let go and eager to move on, we hover along with the transitional ambivalence; dancing between “there” and “then”.  
 
We are no stranger to the tension.  As one, myself, who abhors goodbyes while simultaneously delighting in hellos, I am easily sympathetic.  How many treasured visits come to an end by moving out from the living room, only to stall in the driveway with one more story, and then another, and only finally one last hug?  How many warm and convivial Thanksgiving gatherings are truncated by Black Friday strategizings.  Staying or going?  Holding or reaching?  Tomorrow tints today which, of course, bears the lingering scent of yesterday.
 
High winds have been foreshadowing blusters on the way, but today the last remaining hose outside will still flow freely, and there is wrap-up work to accomplish with the hives.  We will take, perhaps, a final walk around to see about final winterizing details and then, with little choice, settle into the limbo of this betweenness; alternately freezing and thawing and pondering what other comings we need to prepare for with welcome, and what grips our fingers need to loosen around those of which we need to let go.  If that sounds ominous, it isn’t really. It is simply the nature of things.  We take up; we drop.  We receive; we release.  “When I was a child…,” the apostle Paul contrasted, “…but when I became a man…”. 
 
Yes, as the song observes, “We live our lives between then until now,” but it seems true to me that we likewise live our lives between now and then.  I know the Buddhists will counter that we only have the “now,” and while I agree that the present is the only real place to live, it exists among the broken pieces of the shell of the past from which it broke out, and for all its immanence, is always moving on without staying put. Life, then, as constant motion; undulation.  Going and coming.  Goodbye and hello.  Releasing and embracing.  Sunset, sunrise.
 There are gratitudes to speak aloud, coupled with farewells.  Greetings, as well, though we know not yet to whom to speak them.  Eventually, as is the way with things, it will become clear.
 
In the meantime, we wade into the tidal currents of this day and it’s incumbent ebbs and flows, its grippings and releases – its darkness and, just now, its dawns. There are seed potatoes to order for spring and coop bedding to refresh for winter, along with deck planters to store away.  And time to protect for each other.  Being alongside the doing.  
It will rise to 62-degrees in the hours at hand if the forecast is to be believed.  I’ll just note that the forecast for 7 days hence is for 11-degrees. Goodbye, and then of course, hello.
 
Now, with the fluttering of autumn’s few and last remaining leaves, and, inevitably, then.

 

 

The Handing Over Time

Overnight the temperature toyed with freezing, but never quite crossed the threshold.  If the forecast is to be believed, subsequent nights this week will laugh at that dividing line.  The chicken yard is carpeted with feathers from the molting as the girls prepare for winter.  And so must we.  Yesterday we stored the rain barrels and reconfigured the gutter downspouts.  We replaced the chicken waterers with their heated versions and stretched the extension cords to serve them.  Straw bales are on the way to insulate the coops, and before long I’ll twist the arms of my friends to help trade out the tractor’s mowing deck for the snowblower.  There are hoses to coil and collect.  Of course there is still work to be done in the garden, dismantling the tomato supports and extricating spent plants.  There are plenty of peppers yet to harvest along with greens and leeks and a cabbage and carrot or two.  Days grow shorter while the nights stretch deeper into morning.  It’s time to clean out, clean up and batten down.

 

Winter always catches me by surprise, though its coming can hardly be a mystery.  One minute I’m marveling at the colors and the falling of the leaves and the next I’m organizing snow shovels and ice melt in the garage and flannel shirts in the closet.  There is a wistfulness to the change – to what singer/songwriter Carrie Newcomer calls “the handing over time.”  I’m among the few who love winter, snow and all; but I dearly love autumn.  Fall is the only time I make room for the color orange, but on the pumpkins and trees I note its remarkable beauty.  There is a crispness to the season; a clarifying freshness that belies the seasonal decay.  I almost don’t mind the nudging reminder of the passage of time that is, undeniably and inexorably, passing.  My wallet bulging with newly minted Medicare cards, I hardly need additional reminders.  

 

But I love these days, shorter and chillier though they may be, and drawn from a bag that is only getting lighter.  I love the interiority of the hours, the glow of the hearth, the lethargy of the dogs and the softnness of the sweaters.  I love tromping through the thinner woods and scuffing my feet through the leaves.  I love exhaling and seeing my breath, picking up a pinecone, and admiring the blue/gray berries on the cedar; the anticipation of snuggling in while, outside, the elements flex their muscles.  I love the game of gathering an egg before it freezes, and finding tracks in new-fallen snow while doing my aesthetic best not to sully the scene with any of my own.  I love listening deeply into the silence – the hush that increasingly settles on the land.  I love these yet-colorful days with their morning bite and their evening silhouette and their daylight invitation to hurriedly get the last remaining chores completed.

 

And in the briskness, shivering with the joy of being alive.

Because We Need the Supervision

We’ve been adopted by a cat.  I’m sure she has an actual home somewhere in the vicinity where attentive residents actually feed her and provide water and toys and more proximate affection, but for whatever reason she has decided that we need watching over.  Almost constantly.  Day and night.  We are just as likely to find her nestled into the bare dirt in the chicken yard, as camouflaged in the tall grasses at the edge of the prairie, or curled around the flowerpot on the old oak stump beside the barn.  Early on in her supervisions I worried over the chickens, thinking that the cat had nutritional designs on the birds, and I would shoo her away.  But over the months of her visitations I’ve relaxed my concerns.  She may have her eyes open for the mice that routinely pirate the chicken feed - and I welcome that - but she has made no move on the hens.

 

I refer to her using the feminine gender not because I’m privy to any special discernment regarding her nature, but because I can’t bring myself to refer to the creature as “it” – a pronoun too static and inanimate to apply to a being so lithe and vibrant, so attentively aware and so clearly animated; and for some ineffable reason she simply strikes me as a “she.”  Incongruently, I’ve fallen into calling her “Casper,” even though I know that the “friendly ghost” of my childhood cartoons was a boy.  It doesn’t seem all that incongruous, however, given the androgenous nature of the ghost, and the white, almost apparitional nature of the cat.  

 

The dogs will see her through the window, in daylight or darkness, luminously traversing the driveway, from hither to non, presumably altering her angle of vision.  They will bark as she passes, but she seems untroubled by their perturbations as if knowing that they represent no threat behind the glass.  Usually, however, she simply appears – silently, elegantly, watchfully.  At various times throughout the day or evening I’ll go out to fill the feeders or gather the eggs or close the coop doors and there she will be.  Verbally and physically laconic, if such a thing is possible.  She watches me, keeping her distance.  If I violate it in the course of my ministrations she will saunter off to a more comfortable remove, recommencing her observations once I’ve absented myself. I’ve noticed, however, that she is gradually becoming more forgiving of my intrusions, less troubled it seems by my passages and more prone to hold her position.  

 

We aren’t cat persons, so I won’t speculate on her intentions.  As I hinted, she receives from us no food or affection, nor does she solicit such benefactions.  In fact, as the weeks have passed and I have grown more accustomed to her manifestations, I have come to see her presence more as an offering than a seeking.  She asks for nothing, so far as I can tell; she simply offers the gift – the soulful wisdom - of her supervision.  

 

And given the thinness of our comprehension of all that surrounds us here, never mind our age or tenure on this small piece of land, she seems to recognize that we need it.

Toward a More Delicious End

An Open Letter to the Garden’s Rotted Tomatoes

 

I apologize.  

 

Whatever else I might say, that acknowledgement of guilt must come first.  

 

I’m sorry.

 

You did your job.  You fulfilled the vocation assigned to you by the One who ordained that seeds and plants and their successive fruits would perpetuate each other in cyclical reciprocity – a dynamic trinity of essence, expression, and expectation.  You sprouted, first in the warmed greenhouse soil and air amidst the waning bitterness of winter, then rooting deeply into garden soil while reaching tall up trellising frames, finally to blossom and bulge into the red or purple or golden sunlighted acidic orbs that are your delight.  

 

And you accomplished it against all odds – high winds, pummeling hail, withering heat, drowning rain.  Despite injury and stress, you recovered and persisted and choked forth fruit.  Beautiful, taste-bursting fruit…

 

…while I got busy with other things.  They weren’t irrelevant distractions, I can assert in my own defense.  There were weeds to pull in other parts of the garden; there were obligations that took us temporarily away or absorbed our available time or otherwise claimed our attentions. There were travels, as well - too-long delayed - that took us even further away, which gave opportunity to still more weeds.  And then the harvest was upon us with its perpetual gathering and slicing and combining and cooking and canning; and the days simply did not offer ample enough hours.  Over the course of recent weeks we gathered as many as we could, but did not get so far as you, which I grieve.

 

I offer such an accounting not as an aggregate of so many excuses – nothing can finally “excuse” the resulting tomatocide – but more to rebut the understandable but mistaken impression that we simply didn’t care, or couldn’t be bothered.  We cared.  We bothered.  We just couldn’t get it all done.  And you were left to rot on the vine.

 

There is a sense, of course, in which you couldn’t care less.  As noted, you did your job:  you made fruit which contained new seeds which, even now, are falling to the ground where at least some number of them will nestle into the cracks of the soil, over-winter and, come spring, sprout and produce the next generation of vines.  Earlier in my farming I would not have predicted this, but the proliferation of volunteer plants over the years – including this one – attest to the contrary.  Seeds want to grow, and yours quite likely will even without my well-intentioned ministrations.  

 

But I suspect you harbored more esoteric ambitions – to occasion the burst of a bite, the ecstasy of flavor, the groans of satisfaction and the dribbles of delight.  You, too, must ache to lie together with crisped bacon and fresh lettuce; to melt into marinara, be spiced and surprised into salsa, or simply to drip your way off the edges of a burger.  

 

And I let you down.  I left you hanging.  And there you languished, softened, drooped and finally dripped into a rotting puddle at the base of the wire support.

 

I’m sorry.  You sprouted and matured for more than this, for better than I’ve given you.  You offered yourself in generously delicious glory, but my attentions were elsewhere.  I neglect and miss so many gifts this way.  And I am the poorer.  I give honor to the work you have done – the striving, the ripening, the offering.  You are an exemplar for these days.  

 

Chastened and inspired, I move toward autumn and the stillness of winter, before the stirrings of spring gives us fresh opportunity to honor and please one another.

One Big Happy -Larger - Family

 

We have become foster parents.  To a rooster. 

 

It was a charity case.  A mercy.  That much is clear.

 

Exactly on whom this merciful charity is being showered is less clear.  It’s certainly not the rooster, who had been raised since a chick by a loving – indeed adoring – family.  He enjoyed a good and pampered life right up to and well beyond the moment when he was revealed to be a “he.”  Purchased as a “she,” Dwayne (for that has always been his-née-her name) embodies the truism not uncommon with such well-intentioned sales, “accidents happen.”  Eventually the “cockadoodledoo” revealed the truth, punctuated by jaunty tail feathers and cocky strut.  The young flock had one fewer hen.

 

Dwayne’s curious nom de plum stems from the playful intersection of his breed – Barred Rock – and the favorite actor of the young boy who had selected him – Dwayne, “the Rock”, Johnson.  Hence, “Dwayne the Barred Rock Johnson”.  What had seemed odd for a hen now proves prescient.  “Dwayne” it is.

 

But therein began the problematic considerations.  Not everyone is infatuated with roosters.  Neighbor relations can fray.  Restrictive city ordinances can prohibit. That, and for those who get into chicken keeping for the eggs, roosters add little return on investment.  They consume but don’t produce – unless, of course, you hope to hatch your own, which intrudes its own level of complexity.  None of these were concerns for the family or their sole neighbor – they loved Dwayne.  He was a treasured member of the flock.  There was, however, that pesky ordinance.  Keeping Dwayne would be a rather voluble violation of the law.  

 

Enter Taproot Garden. 

 

We have chickens, the family well knew, and remotely situated as we are – well beyond the reach of the restrictive anti-rooster law – they knew as well that we had once included two such stately and similarly accidental residents among our flock before meeting an untimely and tragic end in last summer’s raccoon wars.  They had even heard us lament their absence.

 

“Would you possibly be interested in having Dwayne come to live with you?” they wondered.

 

I have to admit that we smiled at the offer.  It hadn’t been long before that we had cursed the gender reveal within our own flock.  We didn’t want roosters – one, let alone two.  We were not interested in enduring the crowing, refereeing the aggression, dealing with the fertilization, or disturbing the neighbors. Roosters would have no place in our flock…until they did.  We came to listen for their calls.  We chuckled at their demonstrated pride.  We almost saluted their soldierly protective vigilance.  Our hearts melted at the eventual chick that hatched from a craftily hidden egg.  And when the chicken yard fell silent with their absence, we…well…missed them.

 

And so what might charitably be called the “reciprocal mercy.”  A twin generosity:  our friends needed to give, and as it turns out, we needed to receive.  And at the center of it all, Dwayne moved from happy home to happy home; loving hands to welcoming ones.  All with visiting privileges anytime.  

 

A happy resolution.  Once or twice I have seen our older hens rolling their eyes as they hop up on the parallel bars, out of reach.  As if to say, “Here we go again.”  

 

But they don’t really seem to mind his spreading around the largesse of his love.  

 

His reliable crowing – morning, noon, afternoon and evening - like Benedictine prayer, remind us that life is larger than we settle into presuming, and is animated by a community of affection, receptivity, and mutuality.  

 

We genuinely are better together.  

 

Cockadoodledo.

 

More Than Meets the Eye

Hidden gems.

 

Ever since the hailstorm rained destruction on our garden in late June, we have repaired what we could, pulled up what we couldn’t, and valiantly hoped for the best.  For the most part, our hopes have fared better than our expectations.  Squash plants and chard – the broadleafed bullseyes of the storm – resiliently revived, as numerous recent mealtimes can attest.  Our coolers are jammed with beets and turnips unfazed by the battering, and early evidence portends a bumper potato crop in the making.  We’ve harvested enough garlic to keep all of Transylvania “vampire free”, and the broccoli, kohlrabi and peppers are well on their way with downpayments on future harvests already in hand.  

 

Tomatoes, however, incurred a more enduring setback.  Though most of the plants survived in various states of woundedness, the fruit that was already maturing on the vines was knocked to the ground or pocked into disfigurement.  Gratefully, more have come along to whet our anticipation, but the few we have brought in, reddened and ripened, wear their scars.  “The spirit is willing,” the old saying tells the truth of it, “but the flesh is weak.”  We have passed the subsequent weeks trimming off broken branches, clipping to trellises drooping ones, scavenging for beans and zucchinis and the occasional pepper, and weeding.  

 

Weeding, indeed.  The hail occasioned scant interruption for the purslane, miscellaneous grasses and intrusively choking “this and thats” which, if evidence is to be counted, found the onslaught stimulating, even vivifying.  Row by row we have worked our way from one end, across the center aisle into the next section, and then the next before arriving this morning at the final row, bordering the easterly fenceline.  It was, after all, the least urgent – occupied by the newer asparagus plants that have long since completed their springtime flourish.  It turns out, however, that the asparagus was not alone.

 

Lost amidst the overgrowth was a volunteer tomato plant, an echo of last year’s crop.  Deprived of a cage or a trellis, its vines were left to meander among the grasses…

hidden; 

held; 

sheltered; 

protected.  

And there, revealed by Lori’s yanking and clearing, were two perfect and perfectly ripened tomatoes.  

 

Gifts.  

Delivered lovingly into our disbelieving hands by these grassy Good Samaritans who had taken the errant vines as their own and kept them, protectively safe, until they could hand them, trustingly, into our care.  

 

As if to say, “we’ve done what we could.  The rest is up to you.  Enjoy.”

 

Of course, we will.                   

With amazement, delight, and slightly chastened gratitude.  

For the “good” that has been accomplished by that which we were convinced was “evil” - 

alien, 

invading, 

choking,

pernicious, and...

...rescuing.

As with so many things, it turns out that there is more to be seen than what is readily seen.