Sylvia's Farm

by Sylvia Jorrin

  I have been working relentlessly on the vegetable garden and have high hopes for it. Some of it is planted, but much is waiting for me first to move the chickens to an enclosure that will prevent them from nibbling on the seeds. The ground where I planted some bean seeds had been well fluffed up by my rooster collection the day after the planting. I have only a few more days to see if it needs be replanted. Should anything have sprouted, all will be declared well.

  One morning I was in the garden far before dawn. Worries of a practical nature had plagued me all night and it made no sense to stay indoors any longer. Light had come from the east before the sun. A neighbor down the valley was playing music. It floated on the morning mist. It was very beautiful. I dug in the garden all morning and for most of the day with renewed joy and strength. I have since added to the stone paths and am now an hour or two away from completing the redigging of the original garden. All that shall be left by this time tomorrow is the section that shall hold its expansion. And that, too, is partially done.

  It feels as if I am smashing down relentlessly all of the obstacles that are preventing this farm from succeeding, one at a time. The lessons learned from the fence have made a deep impression on me. But there are other lessons as well, some of which I’ve had inklings of for my whole life but had never become part of me. Some of the debris from the barn is the result of tasks that I have only partially completed. There is an old semidemolished feeder in which I have gathered plastics, both of which I have been intending to throw away. And there they have sat for a very long time. I now think it is best to do all of something and to seem to accomplish less, than to do part of many things. Nothing here has ever been totally neglected, because I have been evenhanded in performing my allotted tasks. But nothing is totally completed, either. I have decided to complete each task one day at a time in its entirety before going on to the next. It is summer, today, so nothing will seriously suffer if I try this experiment. I remember the desperate day one winter I started to shovel the cow manure from the stall out of the barn window. I resolved then to immediately spread it onto the fields. It sits there still, much shrunk, but in its original pile, soon to be moved by machine onto the field. The cow manure shall never again be piled anywhere except, at worst, into a wheelbarrow outside of the window unless it is to be immediately spread.

  In its own way, the manure now being dumped onto the fields is an extraordinary gift. The parched earth is desperate. The nutrients and the abundance of good things being bestowed upon it must be received with equal gratitude. The sheep will not graze next to spread manure no matter how decomposed it is, and so the newly flushed grass shall be spared. With any luck, it shall be spared until fall.

  The blessings that have been bestowed upon us this year have been received with a heart full of gratitude. However, there is an element of distrust that, with an insidious consistency, tries to use up the presence of joy in the human heart. It whispers, “Do not speak of the good that has befallen you because it shall then be taken from you. Do not say a child is beautiful for the wicked fairy will then take it away.” But there are no jealous gods waiting to snatch good from our lives. Only jealous people. And even they may be simply impoverished souls who fear to allow love to enter their hearts. Nonetheless, we still fear sometimes to tell each other our blessings, hearing ancient warnings in the back of our thoughts, warnings that they shall be taken from us. But then how do we sing out thanks? And celebrate gratitude?

  There has been a grand assortment of blessings here of late. Some have been in the form of a box of white shirts, enough to wear a different one every day for more than two weeks. And yellow tomatoes at half price. And a dear friend to run around town with sometimes and bring me Epsom salts. And a kind and generous person who is shoveling the barn for us, for the sheep and me, that is. And a gracious friend who has told her waiters that I am a guest of the house when I snatch a rare moment to have lunch at her restaurant. And the friend who brought me enough crystal green first-cut hay to feed my most prolific sheep next winter, besides going out of his way to bring me store cheese whenever he comes to work for me.

  My front apartment tenants are a joy to share the house with. And even the elderly lady who is staying with me for a while is a blessing, because the only good she can still remember in life is love. The sheep have grown fat for some amazing and no understood reason on the parched earth. And dear friends are taking some of them for the summer to relieve the stresses on the pasture.

  There are even more blessings to be counted. And I shall.

  SUMMER ON THE FARM

  THERE IS a chicken that I have forgotten. A brown hen with spurs on her feet. It is not distinguished by anything exceptional, markings or color, or personality, for that matter. A chicken most easy to forget.

  I found her today in the cow manger surrounded by a dozen little chickens. Tiny little chickens. Six black or steel gray, reminders of Zorro the fighter rooster who lived here for a little too long, and six yellow with a brown or, rather, sienna stripe. Very pretty little chickens.

  I don’t quite know what to do. The outdoor nesting box has the fiercest fighting chicken on the farm in it, the famous layer of blue eggs. She has spurs bigger than her beak, attacks at no provocation whatsoever, and clucks furiously when any of her surviving six baby chicks are out of sight. She is content, if that word could ever be used to describe this chicken, only if all of her chicks are either under or over her wing. (They are too big to all fit under her tiny wings any longer and some now simply sit on her back.) Those are the only times I’ve ever seen her sitting still. She occupies the baby chick–mother hen cage of choice by my back porch steps. There is only one. What to do? I don’t want to let her go free. She is the kind of chicken who inevitably finds her way into the garden. If only one chicken feels like pecking someone else’s chicks, she is the one.

  What to do with the russet hen and her chicks? Furthermore, where are my little henna hen and the partridge-feathered one who raised a little flock this spring? I think I’m short two more chickens. Could they be brooding? And shall I be feeding a massive number of chickens all winter, waiting to see which sprout tail feathers indicating that they are roosters and subsequently needing someone to butcher them for me?

  One of the clutch of four born a couple of months ago may be a black rooster. He is smaller and has longer tail feathers than the three with whom he was hatched out. I have no way to tell what any of the six of the blue-egg hen might be. Nor the twelve in the manger. Nor the three racing after the orange hen in the barnyard. Of course I prefer hens to roosters. I have too many roosters.

  I count, recount, and recount again, each time devising a new system with which to categorize the chickens. Each time I come up with a new number. At the moment I think I have three pullets, five chickens, four big chicks, six little ones, three other little ones, twelve newly hatched chicks, twenty-five Barred Plymouth Rocks, and eleven, more or less, roosters. I think that’s it. But I’m not quite sure.

  The blueberries are magnificent this year. There are bushes so heavily laden as to seem more black than green. I’ve gone up the hill to pick them several times this past week. Gradually they jumped the wide band of woods that surrounds the upper flat where they were first found and established themselves on the slope of the hill. The slope is now covered with tiny bushes low to the ground as well as a tall one, five feet tall or so, literally covered with ripe berries. Naturally, there is a human tradition in gathering berries. That tradition is one for the mouth, one for the berry basket. What was learned that was most revealing from this practice was that each bush had different-tasting berries. Some were sweet. Some were tart. Some barely had a taste, and only one or two tasted classically, perfectly of blueberry. A friend came with me up the hill today. She had never picked blueberries before. She made the same observation. What she couldn’t have known, having nothing with which to make a comparison, was how thickly the bushes were laden. Thoughts of bears began to slip in between
thought of the blueberries. I have hesitated to go alone berrying on the top of my hill for quite some time. I still go, despite some minor apprehension. But I am more cautious than I have been and go only on the spur of the moment, on impulse; never can I walk that steep hill with intent to go into the blueberry fields.

  Chokecherries are not as plentiful this year as they have been. They make the most beautiful syrup I have ever seen, a cross between magenta and red. I’ve started saving bottles in which to store it. The blackberries are growing thickly as well. I’ve been looking at recipes in French cookbooks to learn to make wine from them as well as jam. I left a stand of bushes beside the new wooden fence, in part because the flowers were so lovely. Now I rejoice at the sight of them, thick and heavily laden, and think of evenings walking outside with a bowl of cream in one hand and a spoon in the other, picking thick sweet berries to have for dinner under a tree.

  This is the sweet time of the year. Summer lambs are being born, as well as baby chicks. There are two and their dam in the lambing room today. A ram and a ewe. Their mother freshened in January as well. She was a carefully considered decision. Eight years old, a beautiful confirmation, a Dorset-Finn cross, and a perfect mother, who could not nurse her lamb. I kept her, never dreaming she’d drop twins six months later. In all actuality, she is turning a greater profit, even if I have to buy milk replacer, than a ewe who had only a single. I only hope she freshens in the spring rather than the winter next time. I can’t handle winter bottle lambs.

  This is the sweet time on the farm as well. Walking up the hill for berries or to look at the progress of the fence. Finding baby chicks and their mother hen. Watching the Barred Rocks grow up. Seeing patches of green around the newly spread barnyard manure. And holding baby lambs, training them to come to me. The paths made when the fields were brush hogged have added a gracefulness to the sweep of meadow that was never perceived before. Summer on the farm.

  TO PATRICIA, FROM EAST LYME

  IT WOULD appear that men and women have different approaches to the way one must run a farm. I have no data to which I might compare this observation, only eleven and a half years of experience running my farm. Alone. And so I admit immediately before saying another word that there is a strong possibility that I could be wrong, and I readily admit that my observations are purely subjective. Nonetheless, I’ve been the recipient of a number of suggestions recently that have led me to think I might be correct.

  Take the placement of my new corn feeder as an example. I had dragged the twelve-foot-long platform from the front of the house, across the backyard, through the gate, and down the slope, laying it to rest temporarily on a discarded beam somewhat near the barn. I wanted legs to be put on it to raise it off of the ground. My preference was to have it placed on two legs with a carriage bolt on each end so it could be turned over and cleaned if needed. Each leg would have a long foot on the end to make it tipproof. It seemed to me, however, that the feeder was too long to be stable if built that way unless I were to have two legs on swivels on the sides that could hold the manger rigid when it was not being turned. Nonetheless, after I had the legs installed, I wanted the manger moved relatively close to the little low door that I had to pass through every day carrying the grain. I didn’t want to walk down an icy slope in the winter with fifty pounds of grain divided between two buckets in my hands. Their combined weight would lower my center of gravity and, as I moved both forward and down, would encourage a fall. The man building the feeder saw things otherwise. I had simply told him where I wanted the feeder positioned when he was finished and went on my way. A big mistake. Upon my return I found the legs neatly installed and the feeder firmly ensconced about thirty feet away from the place most convenient for my use. “Oh, it will get rain on it from the roof were I to put it where you wanted it,” I was told. “I didn’t want it to get ruined,” said he. I said nothing.

  My mother was raised by a Victorian mother and therefore was firmly convinced of an inherent weakness in all men (that is, all men, not all of mankind). Men are fragile creatures whose feelings get hurt easily and must be spared as much as possible from “things.” “Things” meant all manner of situations, problems, or affronts to the ego. “They are not as strong as women,” my mother would say. “They can’t take what we can. They fall apart easily. You have to be careful about how you say things to them.” And so these words and a variation thereof have been engraved on my soul. Therefore, I was reluctant to say to my hired man what I thought, which was, in no uncertain terms, that it is scientifically impossible for any more rain to fall into this feeder in the spot where it is most useful to me than in the spot from which he did not wish to move it.

  I let my annoyance with the arrangement build up for a couple of days in order for it to give me the strength to dislodge the feeder, now well frozen into the ground. It took several wallops with the head of an axe accompanied by a fury that had for its inspiration my repeatedly tripping over the indentations of frozen mud to move it to a position convenient to me. I shall say nothing to its builder when I have already paid for the privilege of the experience.

  Then there was the suggestion from someone who claims to have had experience on a sheep farm on how best to feed out my hay. I shall not go into the arduousness of the logistics I go through each day to accomplish that. Just saying that it is almost the most inefficient method conceivable should be enough. Last year’s system was the most inefficient conceivable. This year’s goes beyond that. I’m making progress on my quest to learn patience and the value of the advice “all things in God’s time, not my time.” It was suggested in all seriousness that I move the sheep outside, drop hay on the dirty floor, and fork it into mangers that are situated between fifteen and thirty-two feet away from the hay chute.

  I am paying a king’s ransom for hay this winter. A mouthful soiled is a mouthful wasted. The winter door in the barn is only two and a half feet wide. The sheep are pregnant. The north barn door, the only one I have, has solid ice in the ditches in front of it made by the skid steerer that was used to clean out the barn. Its operator was to return to level things off before the ice became solid; however, he didn’t. It is the exact texture and thickness to break when stepped on, cut a sheep’s ankle, and trap it in ice water. It is not difficult to see why the sheep are reluctant to leave the building upon facing the ice through that door or why they often turn around to reenter the barn while their friends and relatives are still trying to get out. How long would this little exercise take, one might ask oneself, two or three times a day at that. An hour each time?

  Sheep have been maligned for a very long time, considered to be not the brightest of God’s creatures. Poor dear things. Because they are docile when they know they are loved by a good shepherd, they have been profoundly misunderstood by mankind.

  My sheep know certain things. It is a limited number of things, but know them they do. They know when I am in a bad mood and they need behave. They know when I am going to fix a wound or pull a lamb that has become tangled within them and let me do it. They know to stand in a group when I am fussing over them in the evening in the barn, when chores are finished and we can simply be together, and they butt in only if I’ve spent too much time with the one ahead of them. They know if I am trying to trick them and let me get away with it only once, to humor me. Were I to put the sheep, all hundred plus whatever lambs there might be, outside and proceed to fill the mangers inside with food, would they ever let me repeat the exercise again? No … well, maybe some of them, those who wanted a drink at the brook or a romp more than they wanted hay. The rest would simply stay inside and stomp on the hay as I dropped it down the chute. And I’d have to fight them off with a pitchfork in my hand. Now would anyone capable of logical thought think this is a sane activity for sheep or shepherd? When I looked incredulous at the suggestion, the person making it said, “Well, maybe you just can’t understand what I am saying.”

  Then there was the contractor who couldn’t understand why I
wouldn’t line my barn with aluminum-faced fiberboard insulation and told me just to open the door to the barn if the ammonia buildup from a hundred sheep became too much for me to breathe. Not to mention the hay dealer who swore to me that a dusty white powder always flies out of late-cut hay. “The sheep will eat it if that’s all they’ve got.” Similar in fact to deer that are found dead from starvation with bellies full of pine needles, or people, in times of war, who have eaten paper out of sheer desperation.

  The issue, if there were one, would seem to be about values. Is the object a feeder, a bale of hay, a sale, the thing to be most valued, or is the living thing, the stock, the laborer more important? My mother would tell me, were she alive, to tear up this story. God bless her.

  THE COLOR WHITE

  THE STUFF that dreams are made of comes in all manner of shapes, forms, textures, and colors. For me, sometimes it is the noncolor white that inspires and encourages, and today it is the white of sheets of paper, foolscap with a magenta double line down its side and pale blue stripes on which to write. It is the white of pages in new paperback books and the newly starched white of my kitchen curtains and tablecloth as well as the white of this typewritten page.

  I applied today for a grant to obtain money to learn how to train my donkey, Giuseppe Nunzio Patrick MacGuire, to work on this farm with me. When he was first here, I was assured that he knew how to draw a cart, and when put through his paces by an expert in donkeydom, I was assured again that, indeed, Nunzio knew how to work. It is I who doesn’t. I’ve never been an animal person in that way, the way that is based on a natural ease, an inborn affinity and understanding. On the other hand, once an animal becomes mine, suddenly something happens. It is beyond me what that something is, but something does, and then all is in accord much of the time.