Machines

                I’ve recently realized how easy it is to be cynical.  Cynicism has its own coolness; an elite feeling of superiority by remaining uncommitted to the ideas projected by others.  The elitist feeling of not buying in is one that has given me comfort over the years.  Perhaps the opposite of cynicism is gullibility.  The ability for some to believe whatever one tells them might be comforting.  By laying faith in the words of others maybe we abdicate our responsibility.  By not believing in anything anyone says maybe we can more easily blame others.  Taking responsibility is difficult. 

                When we are young it is difficult to take responsibility.  We shift blame.  We point to our parents or siblings.  Our culture has even coined the phrase, “my dog ate my homework” as a silly excuse for a child to not finish their work.   As I grow older I find that I have been cynical for most of my life.  I feel disdain for the gullible and solace in the sarcasm of the skeptic; but maybe it is time to get over some of that.

                I take stubborn pride in the fact that I don’t use machines.  What a lie.  I use machines every day.  Cars, phones, computers, are all machines that simplify my life.  Even though I know I could never do the work I do each day without them I feel slave to them.  I make car payments.  I need to make certain my computer is charged.  My phone is constantly begging for my attention.  I obey their wishes and they reciprocate with more production.  Our garden was going to be different.  Thoreau writes about contemplating his philosophy while raking his bean fields.  To me, if I turned over my garden with a fork and shovel I would have the same time for transcendental contemplation.  So, for the last three years, I have turned the garden each year with a fork and a spade.  Hundreds of square feet of grass have been transformed into garden with nothing but my hands.  A trailer full of rock has been pulled out of the ground by me, each one a fight against geology.

                When my grandfather called me and asked if I would rototill his garden I agreed.  Partly because I like to help anyone garden; partly because he offered to pay.  With smug pleasure I told him that I wouldn’t need to borrow his rototiller for my own garden.  His response was one that projected, “suit your self,” and he carried on to show me how to operate the machine with the familiarity of someone who has had more gardens than I have had lifetimes.  As I struggled to get the machine started he gave me a final pointer and with a pull the machine belched a cloud of disgusting smoke and I was ready to go.  My grandfather’s garden is big.  Much bigger than the farm, and all in one place, unlike ours that is broken off into beds and sections.  I started pushing the machine.  Moments later my grandfather came out and told me to not push, to let the machine do the work for me.  I did.  As I steered the rototiller up and down the garden I brewed up feelings of indignant cynicism.  How can we appreciate our work if it isn’t work?  In my mind I came up with this blog, a sermon about the evil of machines,  how they make us lazy, how we have no time to appreciate things, how we have no time to think.  Then I realized that as I was rototilling, I was thinking.  In the same way I could contemplate with my fork and spade, I was contemplating in spite of the roar of the small engine pushing the rototiller.  I looked over to the grass and saw Ethan, sitting on a lawn chair, watching.  What a weirdo.  I finished the garden in less than an hour.  My grandfather overpaid me and I went upstairs with Ethan to visit with my grandmother and the girls.  What took me weeks to do at home was accomplished before the sun hit the middle of the sky.  We left, and although I was happy to help, jadedness was in full force.

                I’m a hypocrite.  I don’t use machines, right?  The lawn, however, grows to the length of my hair.  The thought of cutting it with anything other than a gas mower is absurd to me.  This week I was finally embarrassed enough of it’s shaggy length, so I cut it.  In his usual ceremony, Ethan followed me out to the yard.  He watched me put gas in the tank, prime the engine, and start the mower with one hard pull.  Ethan has come to love mowing the lawn.  He knows I can’t hear over the roar of the engine and the thoughts inside my head.  In the beginning he follows behind me.  Whenever he thinks I might catch a glance of him from my periphery he darts across the lawn like a young foal.  Gangly and exuberant, he runs away to “hide” behind a bush, the side of the house, or my car.  The game is cute to him.  As I use this machine I see that he is engaged in me.  He is learning that machines are what are used to work.  I cynically hate being the power behind this mower, not being able to hear him or play with him.  Secretly I know that even if I don’t think that I am playing with him, he is playing with me.  Every time I catch his eye he squeals with adrenaline and dashes somewhere else.  Eventually he rolls into the uncut grass and waves his arms like he is making a snow angel.  Dandelion wishes clutter the area above him.  He volunteers to mow but doesn’t have the strength or control to push the mower.  It’s as if he knows that one day he will push a mower.  One day he will be a slave to a machine, but today he is free.  He is more gullible than cynical, but really he is neither.  He is just a kid.  How lucky.

                I love my fork and shovel.  I love my garden companions.  Most often it is Ethan, then Carly, and occasionally the girls.  Sometimes I get help, sometimes I don’t.  The therapy of extracting weeds and rocks while listening to my family is therapy.  We don’t need to make eye contact, we don’t need to be philosophical; we need to be together.  For me machines are impositions, cars drive me away from my house, farm implements are loud and impossible to speak over, and every monitor and screen (including this one) pulls our attention away from each other.  But if I didn’t have the machines I couldn’t tell you all this.  If not for the machines I wouldn’t go to my grandparent’s house and Ethan wouldn’t play his own version of hide and seek.  Maybe it is time to be a little less cynical.  Perhaps if I took the time to appreciate that which is before me rather than criticizing that which could be better I would be happier.  I would find more gratitude.  When I was a kid I wanted nothing more to be cool.  To be above anything was to show that you were cool. Cynicism and sarcasm were the stepping stones to cool.  Machines aren’t cool.  Maybe being happy is better than being cool.  I don’t like my machines, but I’ll use them.  I’ll get over myself.  I won’t blame my machines on my inability to think or connect.  I will think and connect in spite of the machines.  I will master them.  I won’t be their slave.  I’ll be happy.

Farm Pandamonium!

I dislike not documenting life.  Some people take photographs, others scrapbook, saving ticket stubs and memorabilia.  I write.  I write to keep the feelings in brain from spilling over, like releasing a pressure valve to keep from exploding.  I’m a terrible photographer and I throw stuff away.  Writing is remembering.  Writing is history written in the present.

All of the things I will write about truly deserve their own blog with their own further explanations. I’ve read catch up blogs that carry on and on so I won’t do that.  Here is what I will do.  In the last month since I posted about rabbits we have:

#1 Carly created artwork from the bones we salvaged from our rabbit harvest.  The art is called Bonart by Rosefield farm.  Her creative energy in this endeavor has been inspiring and she comes up with new ideas all the time.  But the art should speak for itself: http://www.facebook.com/BonartByRosefieldFarm?fref=ts

A selection of Carly's creativity

Rings from rabbit vertebra

 

#2 Last year we added ducks to our flock.  At one time we had ten – far too many.  We downsized our duck flock at the end of last summer.  As we got our flock down to a more manageable number we realized how much we really enjoy chickens and their eggs.  We adopted three new ones.  A feathery footed Brahma – Princess Ozma, a Russian Orloff – Catherine the Great, and a Black Wyandotte – Sister Naname.  We love our birds.

Dagny tolerating the new baby chicks

#3 Meet Harvey! Carly and I both felt the itch to bring a new dog into the home.  We went to visit one that wasn’t the right fit. After some casual looking, Carly found Harvey.  The thing about Harvey was that he was in Bend.  So after a week-long vetting process we were finally allowed to meet him.  His German Shepherd/Gordon Setter coloring was gorgeous and so was his personality.  Some people go to Bend for a weekend of skiing.  We went to adopt a dog.  Harvey has been in the home for about a month.  He is much different than Grimsby and is curious.  He has found his way into the pantry where he has eaten a few loaves of bread and four bags of flour.  Let’s hope he doesn’t have a gluten allergy!  Harvey is a yard dog and follows me around the farm.  He’s taken a trip to 1000 acres too.  That is where he learned to swim.

Love at first sight!

 Extreme close up!

Sleepy boy

#4 Kits! Kits! Kits! We have seventeen cute, cuddly, and eventually delicious baby bunnies.  Seventeen is a big number.  These rabbits came from three separate mothers and each litter is unique.  Big Gray is our new momma who all has big fat babies.  Mama had her typical mixed litter with Papa of one gray, one brown, and a bunch of spotted ones.  Baby Mama and her husband Emannymilo made some cute little gray ones.  Those ones needed a bath after getting way too dirty in their cage that was somehow exposed to the rain for a day.

 Mel has a fistful of bunnies!

 Mama & Papa's litter

 Big Gray's bunnies

 Ears & Tails

 Stupidly cute

I took a bath!

Father-baby meeting with Emannymilo

#5 Suck it Chickens!  After three years of chickens in the backyard we have finally built a fence to discourage the chickens from the back garden.  When I designed this fence the intent was to keep out the chickens without creating shade in our already sun starved yard.  Because we are always looking to maximize our space I put planters in the rail that are currently sprouting lettuce, radicchio, basil, and baby bok choy.  With the new protection there has also been a planting of lettuce, turnips, radishes, and spinach that will be on our table before the summer heat gets too intense.

Gotta Start somewhere

That looks like a fence!

We grow salads in our fence!

Bobby gets one last romp in the garden

Carly likes the new fence.  Harvey doesn't

I know that blogs like this can be laborious to go through.  I like to take the time to enjoy the small things in life instead of blasting out a bunch of news all at once.  This is the only way we can sufficiently update it all.  The spring season is busy, and there are plenty of other things developing on the farm.  Keep checking back and come visit us soon! 

Rabbit: The Friend of the Farmer

Rabbits are beautiful.  Whether it is the sensibility they bring to the suburban farm, the companionship of being a pet, or the lore and mystery that surround them, they are truly a blessing to Nature.  I fell in love with rabbits when I read Watership Down.  When Carly bought me two rabbits for my birthday in 2011 our thought was that they would be pets.  When we were surprised with a litter from what we thought were two bucks we didn't know what to do.  Eventually it came to us that we had a supplement to the farm.  Rabbits.  Rabbits for meat and for compost.  We let them breed again.  Eventually we had five rabbits that were ready to harvest.

Today we harvested two.  In the above picture Carly is making her first cuts to begin the skinning process.  Until today I had never killed anything.  Never hunted, never even killed a squirrel.  I am so grateful to have the help and support of our friend Paul, an experienced hunter that had never killed farmed rabbits before.  I explained the research I had done for humane killing and he told me that it made sense so we went with that plan.  Paul helped me keep my nerve and prevent the rabbit from suffering.  Adrenaline and shock coursed through me as we followed through on the promise Carly and I had made ourselves, that we would love and care for rabbits and they, in turn, would give their lives for our benefit.

We almost chickened out.  The mixture of running into the unknown and following through on an ideal clashed.  I'd talked to Paul about helping us before.  When I mentioned to him a few weeks ago that the rabbits were ready he was excited to help immediately.  The problem was that we neither had the nerve nor the space.  I set a date for the future and then I started cleaning the garage.

Part of making a kill area included making a start area.  With a florescent light and a heat pad we hope to see these plants growing in the garden this spring, fertilized by the super fuel of rabbit manure.  Rabbit manure is arguably the best fertilizer that could be found.  Nature is beautiful.  In order for rabbits to maintain their diets of plants it is necessary for them to be able to perpetuate more plants.  A pesky rabbit will destroy a garden, but a well kept rabbit will make a garden thrive.  It will be rewarded with carrot tops, broccoli stems, and an abundance of greens from the yard.

It doesn't take much space to harvest, skin, and gut a rabbit.  A card table in the garage was more than sufficient.

After Paul helped me with the kill and helped Carly with the basics of skinning the first rabbit was prepared.  Carly and Paul worked on both sides of the rabbit skinning carefully.  Once the rabbit was dead it was easy for Carly to see it as a piece of meat to work with, similar to preparing a chicken that was purchased at a grocery store.  The actual skinning was more difficult than she thought it would be, but time and practice will help her develop this never-used skill.

Rabbit is one of the leanest meats that can be consumed.  It has less cholesterol than beef, pork, and chicken, and requires less feed and land.  Not only is it good for the garden, it is good for the body and has less negative environmental impact in comparison to other meat protein.

This one rabbit will add a generous amount of nutrition and flavor to a numerous amount of dishes.  Rabbit stew is common, but rabbit meat can be shredded into meat for tacos and cooked as a pastor, hindquarters can be grilled, or it can be used in a stir fry.  Furthermore we kept the heart, liver, kidney, and lungs.  Eventually we will combine several of these to make a pate or terrine that is excellent with dijon mustard, a few nice cheeses, and crackers.

The usefulness of the rabbit doesn't stop at the meat.  Right now the skins being preserved in salt.  Eventually they will be tanned and meet a number of uses.  Tanned skins, bones, ears, and feet will all be incorporated into jewelry, hair accessories, decorations, and other undiscovered uses to get the most out of our rabbits.

Even the heads have been used to cook into stock that we will use for chili later on this week.  We love our rabbits dearly.  I had no pleasure in harvesting the rabbits.  Killing didn't feel good and I don't want to lose the respect for life we have gained from this experience.  I respect the rabbit.  I want it to be healthy.  I want it to be well fed so it can help me grow my garden.  I want it to be protected from predators so it can grow large.  I want to take care of it.  I'm so glad that when it comes time for harvest it too will take care of me.

Remembering Grimsby

Cheers to Grimsby!  He was our first nonhuman family member.  He was here before we were married when Rosefield was just the house.  Grimsby came into our life because Carly just had to have a dog.  I wasn’t keen on the idea of adding a dog to our family.  The truth is, I am a softy and I hoped that a trip to the humane society would be proof of how unreasonable adding a dog to our family would be.  Well, maybe I was hoping to convince her that a dog would be irrational and maybe I kind of was willing to convince myself that a dog would be okay.  We walked through the humane society dog run and I became immediately detached.  Carly fell in love with half a dozen dogs.  I wasn’t buying it.  By the time we were near the end I saw what to me was a big beagle looking dog named Adam.

Adam was never really Adam.  He also wasn’t a beagle.  He was a vizsla which is a Hungarian breed of hound dog.  Nervous from the beginning, he didn’t respond to his name.  We played with him but he was obviously afraid.  We really liked him and decided to sleep on the decision to adopt.  With a guess of eight years old the humane society admitted that they didn’t know much about the dog that was saved from a reservation in Jefferson County.  They thought that it would be too difficult to home him in rural Oregon.  We were glad they moved him to Portland.  The next day we took him home.

Adam was renamed Grimsby.  Grimsby is the wise old advisor of Prince Eric in Disney’s Little Mermaid.  Grim resembled the character’s stature and nervous demeanor and he quickly learned his name.  On the cusp of Thanksgiving he met his kids, first Josie and then Melody and Ethan.  They couldn’t believe it.  Even though he was brand new we took him across town on his first night to his second home at grandpa Carl’s.  He was a prince to the new family.  After a large Thanksgiving dinner he and I slept together wrapped in an embrace.  He was our dog.

Grimsby was an emotional creature.  He didn’t speak much when we got him but we coaxed him into speaking.  His trademark bark was a “roo roo roo.”  He was given his own speaking voice and we would speak for him often.  In his hoarse voice we would be his confessional, admitting on his behalf that “I like to eat poop.”  One time he was hopping around.  He was excited because people were arriving for Carly and my birthday.  I said something like, “it’s not your birthday.”  In a Grimsby voice Carly said, “It could be my birthday, you don’t know.”  That was true.  We didn’t know when his birthday was, but to us it will always be Thanksgiving.

Always wanting to cuddle Grimsby often ended up in bed with Josie when the kids were home.  He lived to be on the couch with us.  He became obsessive about cuddling me and would nudge and push into my lap.  If Grimsby decided that he would “help” me do my homework I would eventually have a dog muzzle in my keyboard and no schoolwork done.  Grim would raise his paws to reciprocate cuddles and lower his head for a scratch.  For the guests that would occasionally sleep on our couch Grim became a dog blanket.  Michael Romero spent plenty nights with Grim.  Grimsby made himself comfortable sleeping right on top of him.

In spite of his age, Grimsby liked taking walks with us.  A trip to the park would sometimes climax with a leash free run around Rockwood Park.  It was like glimpsing into the life of a dog we never got to meet.  Grim was a puppy running with his slender red body cutting through the air.  His ears would flap against his head and his legs bounded out in front of him to the point that sometimes we were in disbelief that he didn’t fall end over end.  Eventually he would come back to us.  He would have snot on his muzzle and his ear would be flopped up on top of his head.  He looked stupid but God was he happy.

Grimsby tolerated this farm experiment better than any dog could be expected to.  He never attacked the chickens.  When the rabbits lived in the house his ears perk up and he would watch them with a nervous whine.  I never worried about losing a farm animal to Grim losing control, and he proved that he was trustworthy. I’d get so mad when he would trample the garden.  I guess that is how people react in the moment.  He was just a goofy dog that didn’t know that I had baby beets under his feet.

After dark, a late night smoke on the porch was Grim’s opportunity to hunt for cat poop.  He’d immediately go to the horseshoe pit and clean each one.  After that we would watch him roam the neighborhood as we’d finish.  Occasionally he would wander further than we wanted but he always came back.  Rosefield was his home and we are his family.

In July of 2012 we noticed that Grim had developed a limp.  Without any signs of improvement we took him to the vet.  The report was that Grim either had early stages of bone cancer, arthritis, or a bacterial infection.  The earliest diagnosis was that if anything was to be done the treatment would be painful or Grim would lose his leg altogether.  We took him home with some pain medication.  For the rest of the summer Grimsby limped.  He was slower at the park, he was more careful when playing ball, but he was the lively dog we always knew.  When we came home on the afternoon of January 9^th and he whined at us we knew that the pain he had worked so hard to mask was just too much.  We took him to the vet and the same doctor was astounded that it had taken him so long to degenerate.  Our dear Grimsby was hesitantly yielding to the reality of mortality.  When we adopted him we wanted to give a great dog a great end of life.  We found out that end was coming sooner than we wanted, but we couldn’t possibly punish our dear Grim for our own desire to keep him.  So we let him go.

The last few days of Grimsby’s life were filled with delicious food made by Carly who prepared him a dinner of his usual rice mixture, cat food, hot dogs, a bone, and a quail egg.

He slept in bed with Carly and me finding different ways to invade the bed.  We sang him songs and cried over him, we talked to him and he was calm.  It was strange to see him so calm.  On his last night he walked through the January frost during a smoke.  He walked over to the horseshoe pit for one last treat.  I walked over to watch him and he followed me around the perimeter of the yard.  The grass was crispy under our feet and crunched as we walked around for one last night.  A hundred nights at least with him, some in shorts, some in coats, this was the last.  I was so happy to spend it with him.

Grimsby started his last day sleeping next to me while I wrote some of this.  We picked up the kids and went to get him some treats.  He had a lunch of canned dog food and dog treats.  He took a couple more trips outside with his kids that he was always so excited to see.  One more day of cuddles and songs was comforting to all of us.  In spite of his big lunch Melody kept giving him cheese and Ethan decided to fry him an egg.  Food is love.  Everyone in the family believes that.

Surrounded by the ones he loved Grimsby died a little after 2:00 on January 13, 2013.  He was covered in Carly’s baby blanket and cuddled Fabio, her stuffed bunny. 

 He was touched by us all.  He fell asleep and gave a twitch.  Chasing the squirrels he so often dashed after in the yard, I guess.  We wrapped him in a sheet and took him to where he first met his family, Grandpa Carl’s.  We offered him one last goodbye.  He was tucked in his sheet, warm and peaceful.  In a spot already prepared for him he was lowered into the ground by two of his favorite guys, me and Carl.  Carly and Josie watched.  We will always love Grim and know that we can visit his body there, but his spirit lives on in our family for all our lives.