by Amy Stinnett
“Wh-whah?” I stuttered, and my head began to swim.
Mom raised both her eyebrows and doubled over in a huge belly laugh. She stood up and looked skyward. “Dan?! You are still a piece of work!”
January 18, 2013
I know Bill said a bunch of other stuff, but I didn't hear a bit of it. The most I thought Dad would leave me was a token item, maybe a children's book he used to read to me, or a hat or something. I just assumed he had an apprentice or someone else to give the farm to. I never once indicated any interest in farming, his or anyone else’s. I wouldn’t even have the first idea on where to start. Mom was keen to point out that Dad didn't start out life as a farmer, he had to figure it all out from books, advice, and trial and error – “lots of error,” she emphasized.
My parents met when Dad was in his late forties and Mom was in her mid-twenties, and they decided to drop out of the rat race and homestead out in Idaho. Dad loved the science of farming and took to it right away, having left his job because he’d been promoted from repairing office copiers, something he mostly enjoyed, into what turned out to be a sales job. He always had computer work of some sort, but they still needed some reliable income, so Mom returned to nursing as a floater at the hospital in Emmett. She eventually was hired by a pharmacy clinic in Boise, and by the time I was four, my parents barely saw each other. Mom and I moved in with her mom for a couple of years until she got a much better job as an OB-GYN nurse in Sacramento, where I went to school 2nd grade through 12th. With no mouths but his own to feed, my dad could make enough to get by, so he kept pushing on.
Clearly I’m going to sell the farm, but how? I begged Mom to stay and help me figure out what to do. After she stopped laughing and wiped away a few tears, she said she wouldn't touch this adventure with a ten-foot pole. So she wished me the best of luck and headed home. Note to self: Find a sketchy nursing home to threaten Mom with.
A couple of days ago, I went into Bill’s office and signed some papers, and he tried to explain some things about water rights and other farm services. I guess I’ll deal with those as they become important. He said he would have the deed to me in a number of days and assured me that there weren’t any liens, something I hadn’t even thought of. I have an appointment to go out to the farm with Bill and meet Dad’s hired hand, the other person listed in the will, and the reason the place was still in such great shape. Apparently, my dad worked out some arrangement with him, where he does work on the farm and splits money on meat sales, hay, and produce. He can keep working the farm as long as needed, so I have a little bit of breathing room. Thank god or whoever for that.
January 19, 2013
His name is Elliot, the hired hand. He is about six foot two with dull red, moppy hair. He's between 35 and 50, it's nearly impossible to tell because his face is covered in stubble and he mainly just says “yep” “nope” and something I cannot decipher just yet. He works like a dog, though. Bill says Elliot will stay on and can do everything on the farm except pay bills and shop. For the last three months (Dad has been in and out of care that long, a fact that hit me fairly hard when Bill told me), a neighbor has been picking up the items at a local co-op about once every two or three weeks, and Bill has set up to have an invoice sent to him directly. She agreed to keep doing that for another month, but she is going to see her granddaughter in Tempe in March. If I am here, I will have to take it over and talk to Bill about accessing the savings Dad left for running the farm. If not, I’ll have to find someone to cover it. I think I can handle that much, but I might have the place sold by then.
I asked Elliot if he wanted to buy the place, just in case there was an easy button on this situation. Elliot took off his hat and scratched his head. He grinned nervously and said something I interpreted as follows: “Yep, sure, no, but I got the place down the road and gotta take care o’, uh, my mother. I told Danny, too. Wish I coulda hepped ya out but nope, gotta keep Momma there, until I can’t. Happy to keep workin’, though. Alright then.” I let that ricochet around a bit and finally took it to mean he would have liked to have the place, but he had to stay where he was, taking care of his mother. I guess maybe my dad offered it to him first. I didn’t want to push him, not knowing the particulars of why he couldn’t have made a place for her here or managed both properties. But at least he agreed to stay on as long as possible.
He lives about a mile away and walks over every morning. Maybe he has DUI’s or something?
We walked around the main areas of the place, and I met the dogs, chickens, and goats. The inside of the house was much cleaner than I expected it to be, but it needs a lot of repairs. I guess Dad spent all his energy on the animals and ran out of interest, time, or money when it came to the house. Bill says I would need to have a crew come in and work on it before I put it up for sale, but the main thing is to maintain the farm. He seemed to think a lot of the set up. Bill has a lot of respect for my Dad. They have been friends for a long time, since before I was born. He has been open and easy to talk to, but he did arch his eyebrow at one point and say, “It would be a crime to let this place run down. I know you and your dad weren’t always on good terms, but he loved this place, and besides, it’s worth more to you in good shape than in bad. Don’t worry about the small details.” And then he advised me to let Elliot teach me some things and then make my own judgment calls. “You let me know if you need anything. I mean, anything,” he said. He gave me his card and looked me straight in the eyes until I agreed. I thanked him for all his help.
After he left, I looked around the place and saw Elliot giving hay to the goats. It was getting windy and cold, and I didn’t have the energy to interact with him again, so I went back in the house. Not ready to get into my Dad’s personal items, I started straightening and cleaning the living room and kitchen area. I thought I would have some flashbacks to my childhood or something, but I didn’t. It might as well have been a stranger’s house, for all the emotional connection I had to it.
Dad didn't have many cleaning supplies, so I mixed a vinegar and water solution, a life hack I have used since college. Soon the whole house smelled like a jar of sauerkraut. I went to open a window to air the room out and had to pry it open with a butter knife. There was a nice accumulation of bugs in the track, and finding no vacuum cleaner, I wiped them into a towel, then wet another towel down with the vinegar solution to wipe out the stray bug parts. The window screen had a hole in it, so I grabbed some tape from Dad’s desk and covered the hole, and since the tape wasn’t sticking well, I tried to pull the screen out to tape the other side. It wouldn’t budge, so I went around behind the house, climbed over a stack of tires, and taped the back side of the hole. When I climbed back over the tires, one of the dogs finally noticed me and let out a monstrous growl, so I lost my balance and fell. It was not that big of a deal, but when I got up, I yelled at the dog to hush and decided to kick the offending tire, thereby finding out the tire was filled with concrete. CONCRETE! Who fills a tire with concrete? My turn to growl.
I hobbled my way back around the house and finished up the kitchen, at least the counters and floors. I opened a cabinet door, fully expecting a possum to jump out. None did, but there were layers of dust and unidentifiable lumps there, so I decided deep cleaning could wait for another day and gingerly closed the door. I shoved the vinegar and spray bottle under the sink and stood the dustpan and broom back in the corner where it belonged.
I took a kitchen chair over to the front window, sat down, and stared out over the driveway. There was a fake water well, the kind you see in front of old people’s homes, crammed with fake flowers, sitting in the middle of the turnabout. It was a little out of place, since my dad was not very sentimental. My car, an alien green Kia (I named her Yoshi) looked out of place, too, offset by the gravel, the swaying elm trees, and the flock of goats in the field behind it. It seemed ready and eager to zip into the crowded parking lot of my apartment building back in Seattle and chirp my arrival home to Ton-Ton, my girlfriend. We
ll, I guess I mean my last apartment building and my ex-girlfriend.
“Sorry, girl,” I said to Yoshi, “that’s not going to happen.”
Sitting in my dad’s rustic farmhouse, I could still smell dim sum from Happy Tai’s in Seattle that I used to pick up every Saturday evening for our binge watching night. I’m not usually sentimental, myself, but I did tear up, thinking about the two of us, curled up on the couch, making out and watching zombies or criminals or something else trying to destroy the world. But the whole time, she was plotting to destroy our little world. Her impending visa deadline propelled her to marry a guy she barely knew just to stay in the US. Never mind that she could get an extension. Never mind that we could get married, even though we probably weren’t ready, and maybe that would make a difference in her being allowed to stay. Also, how could she think I would be okay with her going back and forth between the two of us? Didn’t she know me at all?
I hopped in the Kia and cranked up the radio, which was playing Vampire Weekend’s Oxford Comma, a song I used to sing ironically whenever I went to my freshman English class. I closed my eyes to shut out the pressure that was building up inside me.
When I opened my eyes, I saw a little grey chicken bobbing back and forth outside the coop gate in front of me. I scanned the farm, but Elliot was nowhere in sight. I know that sometimes chickens get attacked by dogs or wild animals, so I was pretty sure it needed to get back into the coop. Not having a clue how to catch it, I got out and started talking to it. “Here, chick, chick, chick.” It looked like it was about to have a heart attack before I even got ten feet from it. I bent over and started to grab it, but it flew straight up, exploded, and then reassembled into a chicken about five feet away. I repeated this a couple more times until it ran behind a shed and got trapped in the corner. I slid sideways in between the shed and a barbed wire fence, grabbed at the chicken and, finding only one leg to hold onto, tried to back out and not rip the chicken or my clothes or my body parts on the barbed wire. I succeeded to some degree, only ripping my shirt and getting a scratch on my lower back. When I got out into the open, the chicken, who looked woozy and had gone limp, worried me, so I tried to turn her over. She squawked like I was tearing her apart and jumped free. I almost cried but went back to the car to cradle my head in my hands for a while instead. The scratch on my back didn’t bleed, but it did burn a little.
It was starting to get too dark to see, when the bird reappeared at the gate, pacing back and forth like it was waiting for a doorman. I decided to oblige and try one more time. I waited until it was on the end of its pace, slipped up, and opened the gate. It eyed me suspiciously but quickly scooted into the coop. Voila! Bird in coop in only forty-five minutes.
To recoup (re-coop, get it?), I spent the better part of the afternoon cleaning a small kitchen and wrangling one bird, stubbing one toe, getting one scratch (still burning, by the way), and ripping a hole in my shirt. If farming is always this easy, just shoot me now.
January 20, 2013
I spent today (Sunday) with Liv and her boyfriend hiking at Camel’s Back Park, and then we had lunch at the Boise Co-Op. Since the co-op is only a few blocks from her house (as is the park), she practically lives there. Liv is so sweet. She bought me some single serve salads to take with me out to the farm, and she’s been treating me to an occasional movie. I am lucky to have such a cool friend. She walks and bikes a lot and hardly ever uses her car. Boise is really navigable if you live close in.
Her boyfriend, Nate, is an Assistant General Manager at a radio station. He moved in with her in November, and they don’t seem to mind me crashing on their couch until I get things settled with the farm. They are looking for a house off Warm Springs Road. Nate thinks the North End is just too trendy and he hates renting. He wants to buy a place and get married, but I haven’t really “sussed out” what Liv wants to do yet. She seems okay with it, though.
Liv and I met at the University of Washington (U-Dub), where we both worked as RA’s to supplement our school costs. She helped show me the ropes, and we practically lived in each other’s rooms our senior year. She went on to her master’s program in Communications at BSU, and I took a gap year working for a Seattle based non-profit that promotes environmentally sound community development (think anti-fracking). Basically, I do their web design and promote the hell out of the site.
Okay, going to bed early tonight. Tomorrow I am going back out to the farm to work with Elliot and see if I can get a handle on what needs to be done to maintain it and maybe get it ready to sell.
January 21, 2013
So, the long awaited big snow finally hit the mountains, and on this, my first full day spent out at the farm, snow was spitting and wind was blowing. It wasn’t quite Game of Thrones cold, but it wasn’t Sacramento, either. I thought I was prepared for working outside, in case Elliot needed me to do anything. I had two long-sleeve t-shirts, my uber fleece ski jacket, a balaclava, insulated ski gloves, wool socks, and waterproof hikers. The latter was a Christmas present from Mom, ostensibly to use when I go to Snoqualmie Pass this summer with Ton-Ton. I may still go, you never know.
The first thing I wasn’t prepared for was the drive to the house. Almost an hour-and-a-half to make it through the fog, with unpredictable drivers in front of me and tailgaters behind.
The second thing I wasn’t prepared for was what I saw when I pulled up to the farm. Elliot was trudging back down the driveway towards the house, his shoulders slumped forward and his breath trailing behind him in a white puff of a cloud. When I glanced back at the driveway entrance to make my turn, I saw two legs with hooves (hoofs?) sticking out of the top of the trash can. Yikes!
And then, finally, I was not prepared for virtually everything else that happened today.
I pulled up to the house and got out to talk to Elliot. He said he was sorry about the doe, that her buddy died in the fall and the others must have kept pushing her outside of the barn (who knew goats had cliques?), where the weather, her age, and her declining health combined in a deadly way. She was old, though, so not too sad. He pointed out her daughter over by the back fence, and said he was glad she was settled. She looked calm enough. I guess some of them are wilder than others. I’m still not reconciled to the whole animal to meat thing. I was practically vegetarian, living with Ton-Ton. Maybe it will be good to learn this, though.
Anyway, there are fifty-four goats on the farm, after the last casualty. Elliot had already fed them, so the next item on the agenda was to get their waters cleaned out. There were four water fountains lined up a few feet apart on the fence row next to the gate. They each had a thin layer of ice over the top, rotting leaves, and crud that I am pretty sure was goat crap. It smelled disgusting, sickly sweet and earthy, even in the cold. Not wanting to look like a wuss, I did just as Elliot showed me and reached in bare-handed, pulled out a plug, and swished debris out until the water ran clear. I put the plug back in and wiped my contaminated hand on my jeans, trying not to gag. Why don’t these things freeze over? They must have a heater in them.
One of the fountains wouldn’t stop running, so Elliot had to work on it. He pulled a side panel off to have a look, mumbled something, and went to get some tools. He made some adjustments and then had me hold the floating device in a certain spot (it looked like a smaller version of the one in toilets, of which I am very familiar), but when I let it go, the fountain overflowed again. Finally, after numerous trips to get tools and parts from the shed, he finally fixed it. Did I mention that the entire time, it was about ten degrees with an icicle-sharp breeze blowing? I was already cold on my legs, since I just had blue jeans on, but I soaked both my sleeves in the fountain, and my hands and wrists were tingling with cold. The boots were not insulated, so my feet were numb after about an hour. It was difficult to hold onto things, shivering as much as I was.
When I asked Elliot to come in with me to get warm, he said, “You go ahead, Missy. I gotta get the chickens fed.” I thought you just walked around and threw
feed to them in the morning, which didn’t seem like that big of a deal, but I guess that’s only if you have a few birds. Elliot says there are about 60-70 birds on the place, with four coops, or runs, I mean. The coop is just the house. There is a run for new birds, one large one for egg layers, and one for older birds and rehabs. Elliot said the big empty one was for meat birds, but I didn’t bother to ask anything more about that. So, the place has these large feeders that hold tens of pounds of feed, so you can fill them up once a week or so. I asked him the most intelligent question I could think of, if the feed was organic, to which he replied, “Kin’ of.” I didn’t follow up on that one, either.
So we threw two feed bags into a garden cart and rolled it to the different feeders and used a scoop to fill them. The chickens attacked the feed like they were starving, but I saw pellets scattered all over the ground. The snow had quit falling by then, so it was fairly easy to get around in the coops. I will say this, though, it’s damn near impossible to avoid the piles of chicken poop because they spring up everywhere you’re not looking.
After we put the leftover feed back in the shipping container shed, Elliot pointed to the house, and we started off. We wiped our boots on a boot brush, me tearing off layers of my wet jacket and top shirt. Elliot dropped his big coat on a hook by the back door. We both unlaced and stepped out of our boots and finally went into the house. From the moment I opened the front door, any thought of retrieving my meager salad from the car disappeared. Elliot had put food in dad’s crock pot for us that morning, and the house smelled amazing. “I hope it’s okay,” he said. “I figured you’d be hungry, and me and your dad used to have sumpin’ most days in winter.” He showed me where it was kept in the freezer in flattened bags marked “Goat Stew,” the top one with a date from last June. I let him know that it was more than okay, and to help himself any time.