To Russia (And Elsewhere) With Love

One of the most fascinating things that I have found about writing a blog is tracking its audience.  Don't get me wrong, this system is in no way exact - I have no idea of who actually is reading, but only a very general idea of where they are from.  I have noticed that for some time now I have had readers (or reader) located in Russia, some in Germany, some in England, and a few here and there scattered over the globe.  It would be wonderful to have some comments posted from readers from other countries and if you are concerned that your English isn't very good....no worries, because I guarantee that my Russian, German, Portuguese and Thai are much worse than your English ever could be.  We are one global nation thanks to this lovely Internet, and I, for one, like to know my neighbors.

In The Company Of Solitude

“Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.”

~Paul Tillich

I grew up as a farm girl.  Not so much in the sense that we raised a lot of animals and it really wasn't a "working" farm by any stretch of the imagination, but it was definitely in the country without the sound of a busy street nearby or street lights to light up the night.  I remember several times growing up when I would have friends over for the night and they would find themselves  freaked out by the lack of noise in the middle of a dark Minnesota night. 

Then I moved to the city to go to school and lived their for five years before being able to escape once again to a very tiny country farmhouse in the absolute middle of no where.  Unfortunately, I was entirely too busy finishing school to really enjoy that stay.  After school was finished, it was back to living in town as we started to raise our kids and pay off school loans.  A total of nine years of living in the thick of things - street lights, 24 hour stores a few blocks away, sirens going off, neighbors coming home late, dogs barking at all hours.....you sort of take it all in and block it all out at the same time. 

Finally, the move here.  Almost a mile to our nearest neighbor, no streetlights, no cars going by, no sirens, only quiet.  At night, only stars for as far as the imagination cares to fly out into the universe.  I very distinctly remember a moment a few days after moving out here when I stood on the front stoop holding our baby daughter in my arms and watching my two older children, then ages 5 and 3 run down the hill at breakneck pace, their short stubby legs going as fast as they could. I looked down at the baby in my arms for only a second and suddenly my two older children had disappeared from sight.  I felt my heart stop in that moment of sheer, pure panic that can only come to a mother whose children are suddenly no where to be found. All the typical thoughts of kidnapping, attacks by wild dogs, and falling in old wells raced through my brain.  It, thankfully, was only a moment before I realized that the only reason I couldn't find them was because the short apple tree had called to them to climb her leafy, apple heavy branches and they were just up in the first crook of the tree, happily hidden beneath all her leaves.  It was at that moment that I realized I had become "city-fied" and had become like one of my freaked out friends that felt both terribly exposed and totally alone all at the same time.  

Living on a farm takes a little getting used to, but thankfully, nature is a very patient teacher.

Instead of the street lights to light your way, nature shows you a magnificent sky on a clear winter night that takes your breath away.  You realize that, if you had to you could also navigate by the stars as so many other people have had to do for thousands of years because Polaris is always where it should be.  Suddenly the constellations and the stories behind them become worth knowing as they provide a sort of comfort while outside at night.  The moon's large smiling face becomes a dear friend's that you enjoy seeing every 28 days and time measures out from full moon to full moon when your very blood seems to rise more with the tide of it.  In the summer the fireflies light up the early evening and make the world appear as a shimmering diamond, and generally are used as a sign to the kids that it is time to head in for the night....right after they have caught (and released) a few of them.

Instead of the convenience stores and sirens you have your garden and your farm dog.  At first these seem woefully inadequate to the task at hand, but then after working in the garden all day you are really too tired to notice the dog keeping the masked bandit raccoons away.

Instead of sirens and noisy neighbors,  there is the chirping of industrious birds whose whole conversation lets you know the moment spring arrives because of the cacophony outside the window.  The frogs chime in at night with their low "bur -up, burr-up"  which roughly translates to "this mud is fine!"  The crickets keep track of time and the temperature as the summer heats up.  All these sounds are infinitely more agreeable than those of crowded humanity....unless, of course, one of the aforementioned crickets finds his way into your bedroom in the middle of the night.

Instead of many houses, there is only the one - yours.  This house is old, it has its secrets and protects its past well, but that doesn't mean that it isn't open to the warmth and life of a new family.  There are, after all, always more secrets to protect- like the time capsule that we put together with our story and our current information and tucked it away in a wall that we built. I have always had a thing for old houses.  They seem so wise somehow, they have seen so much and stood storms that have driven lesser houses into the ground, but they are alive and take some getting used to.  The floor boards that creek and squeak as you walk across them and always seem so much louder in the middle of the night , the door hinges that haven't seen any grease in decades and let you know just who is coming and going whether it is an angry teenager or a seven pound cat.  There is often a shifting of the entire frame of the house when the wind is strong enough, or when the pressure drops suddenly just before a big storm.  The basement breathes with its rock wall lungs.....cool, moist air breathed in during the summer and warm, dry air exhaled during the winter, and in between her many rock spaces she houses any number of very small neighbors that I have come to not only respect, but admire in many ways as they are extremely efficient in keeping many other creepy crawlies away.

The longer I have been here, the more I revel in the quiet and the solitude.  I would rather spend a day communing with the bees in my garden then most people I know.  I have come to count the animals and insects around me as my nearest neighbors and suddenly my world is very full indeed of beings to talk with when the need arises, and the best part is that they don't immediately consider me an idiot for expressing my views, whatever they may be.

I believe that, for many people, it is more of a comfort to live in town and have a network of humanity close at hand, but it often masks how much we really do rely on nature and the world around us to survive.  There really isn't any less nature in town - there are still all the same microbes in the soil, the same insects in the air, and many of the same animals that scurry around the neighborhoods at night, but it is easier to put that out of the mind in a town or city.  My daughter has often admitted to being afraid of the dark - more precisely - afraid of going outside after dark - which, for most kids is understandable.  The dark, for me, has become such a part of what I know that even the shadowy shapes that I see moving along beside me now are nothing much to be feared....especially when they answer to the name of Vincent, Tink and Frank - a few of the farm's cats.  And as to the occasional raccoon and possum that happen to stumble onto the same path- as I have explained to my daughter- they are as much afraid of us as we are of them.


Nature speaks quietly but if we allow ourselves to hear it, to work with it, and to understand that we are also a part of it....suddenly we are no longer alone in our solitude, but surrounded by friends that are all entwined in the wonder and travail of the earth.

Mr Pig Goes A Courtin'

Spring is starting to roll slowly around.  The sun is peaking up over the horizon a little earlier and staying up a little later every night.  There are many times when the weather has been warm enough lately to even smell the warmth of the earth, but the biggest signs that lets us know that Spring is on its way is that love is in the air.  Valentine's day isn't just for the humans of the world....our pig gets to have her love affair as well.  Granted, her pool of eligible bachelors was somewhat smaller than she might like, but then a kept pig can't be choosy.

For the last four years, we have purchased baby piglets to raise and then eat, but in the last two we have thought about saving the gilt (that's the female) and have her bred so we could farrow and raise our own piglets.  Last year's gilt was fine except for one small thing....she liked the taste of chicken a little too much and whittled away our chicken flock significantly with her ravenous habits. 

Mr Pig

But this year's gilt?  She was taught at a young age by the local rooster, Dominique (which is both his name and his breed....we aren't very creative with names for the animals that we might one day have to stew in a pot..."Bob-noodle soup" turned us off to that practice).  Anyway, Dominique taught her not to mess with the two footed and feathered crowd.  She happily allows chickens (and cats) to partake of her bounty of cracked corn and kitchen scraps without so much as a proprietary grunt.  In short, she is a really nice pig.  And so, she was nominated to stay and hopefully pass on not only her beautiful chops, but also her winning attitude to a herd of small screaling piglets. 

The question, however, was where to find the boy?  Technically, we would most like a Large Black - this is a particular breed that is easier to raise on pasture since they don't rut it up quite as much, but we weren't  into spending the prices being asked for a purebred boar, not to mention that you have to be able to house them and feed them - no small task to be undertaken when they can reach approximately 700 pounds. We found a rather nice one that was due to go to market unless they could find him a home, but he was already full grown, exceptionally large and more than we were up to paying once again.  Craigslist has any number of fun and interesting items for sale....including pigs, and we contemplated these options, but none of them stuck out as suitable matches for our pig. Our breakthrough came with finally taking the time to meet some of the neighbors. 



First encounter



My husband had been told about a farmer just north of us that had cows and pigs and sheep - doing basically what we are doing, but on a much larger scale.  It had been suggested that we stop up and see him some time and finally, one chilly December day, we made the trip of six miles and found a resource for bottle/bucket calves, milking advice and .....you guessed it, a boar.  All too often we forget to look around and tap into local resources.  We get caught up with the idea that we are the "lunatic farmers" of the neighborhood amidst an ocean of "conventional farmers" and we forget that there are, in fact, more and more of the us lunatics out there all the time - small family farms that are starting to make a small but significant difference in how food is raised.  But we need to work together and depend on each other - just like farmers did in the past.  All too often now, conventional farmers are out there on their own - big fields, big equipment, big risk.  The competition to produce more and more soy and corn has led to isolation and a general lack of public interest in farming in general.  Ask any non-farming person if they would want to farm and most of the time the answer is "No - I don't have the first idea how to do that!"  Conventional farming is daunting - even for the farmers that do it, and unless you are born into a family that farms, it isn't likely to be something that you would want to jump into.   But small farms, such as ours, are do-able.  With a little time and sweat equity we have been slowly turning this old homestead back into a productive farm.  One adage that I have stuck to when it comes to trying new things is, "Learn by doing" - you can read all the books on a subject you want, but until you are up to your elbows in it, it doesn't sink in.  So we were up to our elbows with a gilt that needed a boyfriend and, in this case, all it took was making a neighborhood connection to provide us with the answer.  The Rent-a-Boar.

A purebred Berkshire boar with proven quality...essentially meaning that he has been with a pen of sows and proceeded to get them all 'with pig' as the case might be.  Originally, the plan was to take Miss Pig for a visit up to the other farm and let her hang with the rest of the pigs, but Bill (the farmer) was a little worried that his sows might beat her up, so it was decided that Mr. Pig should come hang out in Shangri-La at our house.

Any time that you mix two 350 pound animals together there is a certain amount of blind faith that goes along with it because you realize that if they really don't like each other, there isn't anything that you will be able to do to stop the ensuing battle until the smoke clears.  We didn't need to worry with Miss Pig, she was smitten almost immediately and we are fairly convinced that he was taken with her as well. 

If you ever hear a person say that an animal doesn't have feelings, do me a favor -first, kick them in the shins and then direct them to this post.  Our Miss Pig had been without her pig friends since about late September when we took them to market.  The first few days had been difficult and she had mopped around without her buddies, but her gregarious nature and love of food brought her around fairly quickly.  On Sunday, however...when Mr Pig showed up....suffice it to say that it was love at first sight.  If you have never seen a happy pig with her new friend smile....you really should.