Sylvia's Farm

by Sylvia Jorrin

  There are some combinations of animals that are a simple delight. It is hard to tell exactly why, and yet their enchantment is infectious. Giuseppe Nunzio Patrick MacGuire has spent a great deal of time in the carriage house this month past. Accompanying him is my band of roosters. They are an all-night playing band, indeed. One in particular favors Nunzio and loves to stand on the very edge of his stall, eye level, and crow his heart out to the donkey. He is my favorite rooster, cream, mustard, steel gray, and iridescent green. There was originally a pair of them. My heart broke when I found one dead, murdered, it would seem, by my cat at the time, the original Prentice. Now there is a father-son combination that makes an increasingly splendid pair.

  The three barn cats have decided that while field and brook are an endless source of interest, the carriage house is preferable to the barn. They have taken up in there somewhere, I’m not even certain of the exact spot. I had read in a fifteenth-century book that cats are best fed at eleven in the morning. They then take a brief afternoon nap and are relaxed for an evening’s hunting expedition. Since none of my bags of grain show any signs of mice or rats having taken their eleven o’clock lunch from them, I suspect my marmalade duo, Prentice and Prescott, along with the gray-and-white Pierce, are doing what they were hired to do.

  The carriage house chickens are looking winter weary while their out-of-doors counterparts have a sprightly eagerness to their demeanors that is a pleasure to behold. The roosters tend to cluster around the indoor chickens; however, I suspect it’s because there is a lot of grain scattered about the floor. Two of the less beautiful shall be finding their way into my stew pot this weekend. The rest shall stay as long as they live.

  The carriage house has become a farm on its own. Ally lives there, having made her own place in which to spend the night and take daytime naps in the hay. Three bottle lambs are doing better there than within the hustle of the barn and have created a nest beneath the stairs in hay that has fallen in between the cracks. Their nest is separated only by a paddock wall from the three kid goats and their mother. The bucks have learned to venture as far as the third step up on the staircase to the chicken coop. They are black and white, and black, and are more adorable than I would wish. They remind me of Colvin who, with his brother, was to have pulled a cart for me long before Nunzio was even a dream. The doe is the prettiest I have ever seen, all chocolate brown with a brilliant and soft coat.

  Together Ally MacBeal and Mary Queen of Spots, Anabella Boxer and Lavinia Honeywell, Giuseppe Nunzio Patrick MacGuire, the rooster Zorro and his band, Prentice, Prescott, and Pierce plus the assorted chickens and as yet unnamed goats all have created, in the carriage house, a tiny farm all of its own on my bigger farm. The atmosphere is enchanting. It draws me throughout the day and several times a night. It has its own magic that simply captures the heart. And for that I am grateful in particular to the redoubtable Ally MacBeal.

  TWO WOMEN IN THE KITCHEN

  THERE IS a houseguest here at Greenleaf. She has been here for nearly two weeks. She kept house for herself and her family for sixty years. Until she came here. We now, in a manner of speaking, keep house for each other. She is more tolerant of me than I am of her, which is rather an amazing thing to me. She is here for a while because I am supposed to be the understanding one of the two of us. And she needs a lot of understanding. She is renowned for her housekeeping abilities, something for which I am not. “This room is a mess,” she shouted at me, staring at my unmade bed the other afternoon. Since the floor and windows were newly washed and each thing in the room had been dusted and polished to within an inch of its life in anticipation of her arrival and fear of her critical eye, I was crushed at the injustice of it. “It’s my room,” was all I could reply as she kept saying, “Look at that bed, look at that bed. Oh, its your room, then it is okay, honey. We’ll just shut the door.”

  Were I only so absolutely tolerant when I find my dish towels all decoratively placed over the backs of my kitchen chairs, all but covering the newly washed and ironed pillowcases on all of the newly arranged little pillows. I was so proud of getting all of those pillows in order. And so I take the dish towels off and put them away, only to find them draped decoratively across the backs again. I concede. With reluctance, and certainly not with the tolerance that she has shown me in the incident of the unmade bed. I expected but did not receive a hard time about food. My cooking is European, but country and mostly French. My guest’s parents were from Italy. Tales of the days when ravioli was made and spread to dry all over the house reached my ears before I ever met her. She and her sisters and mother made them all day. In a time before pasta machines were in every department store.

  And so I knew I’d have to try really hard to get the food right. I started with coffee, Maxwell House French Roast. That was an immediate success. Dark, with only a little milk, one sugar. “Mmm, this tastes like chocolate,” she said. I breathed a sigh of relief. An omelet was next. Neat. Nothing in it but a pinch of salt and a lot of butter. Light. Very fluffy. Very even. Golden brown. Pale gold. French. Not like the Italian frittatas with a toasty crust. “Wow” came after the first taste. I got an “okay” on a hamburger, something I really don’t know how to make. But I haven’t struck out. Not yet, at least. Even a desperate version of New England corn chowder passed muster. My potatoes had frozen. I had put them in a box of hay as an insulator, in the dining room. They never made it to the root cellar. When I went into the dining room and uncovered them, they were frozen rocks. All I had to use was corn, rice, bacon, onions, milk, and a lump of butter. Luck has been with me. She loved the chowder.

  Making macaroni has been another story altogether. I knew I was on very dangerous waters with that one. She recognized the dough as I made it, beginner’s luck, for the first time. And proceeded to tell me why I shouldn’t make it. I continued anyway. I made very nice egg dough, oval in shape, put a cloth napkin over it, and set it to rest. All the while she lectured me on the simplicity, the thriftiness, the ease of simply buying a package of macaroni. “You can get enough in one box for three times,” she said. Again and again. “For thirty-nine cents.” She lifted the napkin and looked again at the dough. “Throw it in the garbage. It’s disgusting,” she said. I ran it through the pasta machine. “Look, it’s going all over the tablecloth. Throw it in the garbage. It’s too much work.” I sliced the dough and ran it through the machine six times. And then through the slicer again to the dismay of my houseguest.

  Later, I made her supper. And made the macaroni for myself. I put her meal in front of her. And silently ate the homemade pasta smothered in butter and Parmesan cheese. I’d glance at her as I ate, my head down, seeing her glance back. “Want some?”

  “No.”

  “Ever make macaroni with your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Want to invite your granddaughter over and we’ll make some?”

  “She won’t come.”

  I’ve been reading Italian cookbooks to try to find some things to please her. One described the great pride the women of Bari took in their macaroni-making skills. That was where her mother was from. There were a number of recipes for ravioli. Today I asked her if she ever made ravioli with spinach and ricotta. “Only ricotta,” she said. This woman who never had made macaroni of any kind in her life. She had said. She took some spoons from the silverware drawer. “This one, half full, like that, of ricotta only,” she said. She who had no knowledge of making macaroni. “Then you eat it with a little Parmesan on the top. On Sundays.”

  “Right. Shall we make some? I’ll buy some ricotta.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “We’ll invite your granddaughter.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where does this go?” She asks me. “I want to help. Where does this go?” How do I tell her, this woman in constant motion, pacing up and down my kitchen, that her eighty-year-old eyes are failing and the dishes aren’t quite clean enough. “Put them on the table, I’ll put them away, thank
you,” has worked so far, but I won’t get away with that much longer. She may know because she has started to polish them dry, rubbing them with a dishcloth.

  There are some things at which she is a wonder. Folding laundry is one of them. Slap, slap go the pillowcases in the air. An ancient sound. An absolutely female sound that women have been making when pulling clothes off of clotheslines or placed out to dry in the sun since the beginning of time. Slap. Slap. Then fold. And that one last motion, a pat, as each piece creates a pile.

  One of my many Waterloos is the laundry pile. I’m great at washing. Great at drying. Terrible at folding and putting away. Now here is my guest. Most formidable as an attacker, par excellence, on piles of warm and dry miscellaneous tangled clothes. I never knew I had so much stuff. She even has gotten me to put those beautifully folded, nearly organized things away. In their place. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Who would have believed I’d ever change?

  She walks around my kitchen speaking to inanimate objects as if they have a life. “You’re in your place,” she says with great firmness. “Stay there.” How many times I have thought to the very same objects, how did you get here or there or elsewhere? How? Now I have my new friend to say, “Stay in place. Stay in place.” God bless you.

  Every day she puts on eyebrow pencil and lipstick. Her hair is beautiful, with elegant waves. A startlingly brilliant white. She puts a little bit of Deb on it to keep it pretty. She puts out her clothes at night for the next day. I have a lot to learn. She looks in absolute amazement at my hair when I pull off my barn hat. “You don’t care what your hair looks like?” she asks. The funny thing is, I’m often tempted to ask her if I can try a little of her Deb. And when I lend her my lipstick to try the color, I’m tempted to put some on myself as well.

  She likes the sound of my name and says it often. “Sylvia, where are you?” When we are both in the same room but I am not in her line of vision.

  “Here I am. I’m right here.” Two women in the kitchen.

  THE UGLY CHICKEN

  THE HEN had been given to me as a throwaway. She and her companion were the ugliest I had ever seen. Not being one to say no to a free animal of any kind, I took them. What their prior owners had neglected to mention was that they didn’t lay eggs. One of the two died. Almost immediately. The other, a hideous creature, took off with one of my roosters and became the most free-range of free-range chickens ever to be seen on this farm. She’d manifest in the most unlikely of places, across the road, on a stone wall quite obscured by brush. Or near the white barn next door. Everywhere. Then she started to lay eggs. Blue ones. Immediately I began to admire her and even like her, but she didn’t like me. At all. Especially as I began to take the eggs away from her. A good friend is an artist and loves to paint pictures of those tiny blue eggs. And so I had a special use for them.

  This year the hen chose an especially nice spot in which to make a nest. It was outside of my chicken coop, of course, but nearby in some hay scraps that had gathered in a corner immediately on its outer edge. I was delighted. Yet there were no eggs to be found. Ever.

  A couple of days ago I was in the carriage house loft feeding the geese. There was the ugly little hen. She had nested between the floorboards and wall joists. The space was just the right size to accommodate her small size. I took her off of it for a moment and counted eleven eggs. Blue. I put her back, dumbfounded. Yesterday I saw her fuddling her way out of the carriage house door surrounded by eight baby chicks. I ran back upstairs to the loft. There were still eight eggs in the nest. And there in the now-vacant winter chicken coop was a chicken I hadn’t noticed before sitting in a nesting box. I saw the hole in the netting where she had gained entrance. But why? Who was she? From where had she come? There was no longer anything to eat up there. What could have drawn her? Were the additional eggs hers? And if not, whose?

  The chicks were only a few hours old and were quite easy to catch. Their counterparts, the three baby chicks born a couple of weeks ago, had not been, and I’ve left them to their mother’s devices and luck. With two barn cats around the third, Pierce, has taken to hanging around at the neighbor’s and assorted other treacheries that abound here, I’ve not enough trust that this one hen will manage all eight chicks. My fears may be misguided, however, as I watched her try to push one back up a stone stair using her head as a rather unsuccessful lever.

  With some help, I managed to get all of the chicks into my trash bin and then, wonder of wonders, the mother hen walked, quite by accident, into a cage nearby. She was immediately incorporated into the tiny flock in the trash bin.

  Ernest Westcott and Jim Wilson came down from the side hill having finished the messiest part of the fencing today. Ernest has farmed all of his life. He also has been blessed with the instincts of a farmer. He promptly fashioned the perfect cage for the mother hen and assured me that while the chicks could get in and out of it, she’d call to them and keep them in line. She has. I’ve put some cracked corn and water and chopped hay in there for them. Last night she had all eight under wing. Today two gray, two black, two brown, and two yellowish chicks are popping in and out of the cage.

  The mother hen is amazingly calm in confinement. This, my most outrageous chicken who has never allowed me within ten feet of her, is now sitting calmly as I approach. She acts only mildly perturbed when I drop some fresh food into her cage and is unflustered when the dogs approach. In all, she seems immeasurably altered by her experiences as a mother hen. She is watched intermittently by all manner of the wanderers, seems absolutely contented in her cage, all chicks within her sight or under her wing.

  The geese have managed to keep one of the two goslings that remain. One disappeared shortly after it was born. The other is beginning to change color. The geese have never moved from the security of the loft of the carriage house where they had made a nest on an old cushion (or rather I had made the nest on the old cushion, having moved their eggs from their nest on the floor). I bring them sod from the vegetable garden to have green grass; a great deal of water served out in dishes of varying sizes to accommodate goose, gander, and gosling, as well as some cracked corn. They guide their charge with their heads and push it to wherever they have decided it is the best advantage. I remain the enemy. Or rather, as I am expected to bring them their food, I am regarded as an enemy to be tolerated. A bucket serves to let them wash their faces and pat water on the gosling. They have abandoned the nest but not the loft and yet in other ways seem to have created a home for themselves. They lack the courage of the mother hens who take their chicks into the world with such immediacy and aplomb.

  Two chicks had been hatched by a much beleaguered little chicken the day before shearing. She had been sitting on her refuge behind a wooden pallet leaning against the wall on the upper level of the barn. She never realized that she could most clearly be seen at all times as her head was facing inward into the darkness caused by the shadow of the pallet. Her back bore the scars of many attacks by my outstanding flock of roosters. She is only a year old, born here, and quite inexperienced in the ways of being a hen.

  The chicks must have hatched in the morning because it wasn’t until afternoon that my son and I came upon them. They were both one flight down from where they were hatched, and could they run! We dove and dashed and ran and chased. Each time I’d think I had my fingers around one, it slipped through them. I’m always afraid I’ll hurt a young chick and never quite get my fingers tight enough around it.

  One slipped off of the floor’s edge down between two walls. I was certain I had driven it to its death. The second hid in all manner of awkward places, eluding capture in every instance. Their mother was beside herself, alternately looking for them and chasing us away. Miraculously, her back feathers had regrown and she suddenly lost her fragile appearance. She had become a hen. I was heartbroken thinking she’d never find them.

  The following morning there she was, clucking and pecking next to her sister, the first hen with chicks this year, and racing i
n front of her were her two, saved from the corners and cracks in the barn. Chickens count very well to two. And those two hens managed very nicely to keep track of their little ones while making dwelling places they abandon and relocate with great regularity.

  The geese have to count only to one to know where their gosling is. But to count to eight is another task altogether. My little ugly hen seems to know, however, when one or two or even three of her chicks are not under her wing and watches them with great intensity. Her get-over-here-now cluck is easily interpreted by them, and they are well-behaved little chicks, racing back into her cage when she demands their obedience. I check on them with great frequency. That means all day long. It is a delight. With any luck they will not be as skittish as their mother hen. With a bit more luck than that they might all make it.

  MIRACLES GREAT AND SMALL

  THE BARNYARD has been cleared of debris. The remnants from the collapse of the south wall of the barn two years ago are all gone. Or rather, the broken beams are neatly stacked, and forty huge piles of manure have been distributed in perfect order around the pastures. It is not, in fact, gone at all, none of it, but instead repositioned to more useful places. The grass near the piles has already turned a dark green. Dew trapped in the manure has quickened the slow release of its fertilizer and given small droplets of water to the drought-stricken pasture. I am grateful beyond imagination and haven’t a clue about how to express it.

  Yesterday I was given a hundred tomato plants for a mere ten dollars. And some fertilizer and advice thrown in. The advice was invaluable. One flat was of yellow tomatoes, which make the best jam in the world with all due respect to red tomatoes. The other flat, somewhat in distress, was of Roma tomatoes. If they make it, they will replace ones I bought from Georgia that are failing.