Surviving Winter

It is December. Technically, Winter hasn't even started yet and already I am ready for spring to come. But then I stop and force myself to remember how much work is actually involved with spring. Winter is the time to hibernate, the time to drink lots of tea, the time to take long hot baths, read really good books, sleep and write.....and knit. I have never been a tremendous knitter. Can't do a cable stitch if my life depended upon it, but I can turn the heal of a sock with the best of them. I have yet to tackle a sweater, but recently set about with my new set of bamboo knitting needles and I think I may have hit upon the makings of a sweater without really trying. I learned how to knit from my mother years ago and then promptly forgot again until the thought of having a sheep around the farm sparked my interest. As though by simply having a sheep would lead to reams and reams of yarn as if by magic...... I like to dream. I bought my daughter a book on basic stitches and then proceeded to nab it from her time and again to refresh my memory on how to do simple stitches, how to cast on and bind off, knit, pearl, etc. Then, I found my favorite of all knitting books. Knitting Rules by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. It combined no nonsense patterns with a witty delivery that led me to read most of the book just for the fun of it. I used her instructions to finally figure out how to knit a sock using 4 knitting needles. My first sock was a bit of disaster, looking more like a sock for an elephant than a sock for a person, but I got the basics down and now, I can honestly say that every one I have knit gets slightly better than the last. Can I just say, knitting socks is way too much fun, but the hardest part is that you have to do two of them! My patience is usually good for about 1 and 1/2 socks and then I get side tracked on some other project like cleaning out closets for a while until the kid that I was intending the pair of socks for has grown and will no longer fit them. It is a good thing that I have five kids - one of them can always use a pair of socks.

The biggest problem is that I get going on several projects at once and have to try to remember the patterns or counts on each one. One of these days I am going to turn a heel on a hat without thinking.

This is the current state of about four projects in my house:

One resides in my cubbie in the entryway....a half finished sock from last year....I desperately hope it still fits someone

Two new skeins of yarn with needles that my son and daughter have been toying around with. They haven't been completely bitten by the knitting bug yet, but they pick it up when I am busy in the middle of my knitting and ask me to help them get going again. Perhaps someday, when they are in their 30s and trapped in a house with a bunch of wild kids they will call me up and thank me for teaching them how to knit.

My new bamboo needles and the work in progress (even though I have no idea what it may actually become) I used to be a strictly metal needle person - the yarn seemed to slide better, but these needles are awesome! I can knit along to any movie and not have someone turn to me and say, "Man, are those things loud!" as the "tick, tick, tick" noise of the needles slowly drove them insane. These bamboo needles are silent. I am now stealth knitter.

This year....it's hats. And whatever large thing I end up making with the orange yarn on my big needles. Hats are fast and I can use up all the left over yarn from knitting socks last year. I turned this little cap out in two days while standing around in the kitchen waiting for food to cook and watching Christmas programs with the kids. Generally, it looks better when it is actually on a person and my kids are all competing for who gets to have it....it is Christmas time and I have Ella's name....hmm....I had her try it on just to be sure it fits.

And so, winter will continue to go by in a knit one, pearl two kind of fashion until I can sink my hands into the soil again and get back to the gardens.

Raising Tea

I love herbal tea. It is the English in me. Tea, in the day, was all there was for medicine and really, many of today's medicines are simply distillates from plants. Digoxin, a potent heart medication is a derivative of Foxglove, a lovely flower that grows in my yard. Aspirin is a derivative of the Aspen tree bark. Penicillin is derived from a mold that blows about on the very wind. Ask any herbalist or homeopath and they will be able to expound the virtues or terrors of thousands of plants, flowers and herbs. It is very enlightening to talk with people that know and use medicinal plants regularly because you come to realize how much nature provides for us. For almost every ill there is a cure. The hardest part is just figuring out which one will work best for you and where you can find them. I remember the exact moment that I fell in love with flower gardening. I was kneeling on a small triangular plot of soil at my old house in Winona. I had just dug out the soil and had it piled up next to me and I was planting hyacinth bulbs and daffodil bulbs that would come up the next spring. Maybe it was the day - it was a beautiful fall day with the light shining on my back, the soil still warm under my hands and the air so crisp and clean. All was right with the world in that one moment - the light, the air, the humus, ... I fell in love with gardening. Now, I had grown a vegetable garden when I was going to school in Iowa, but I hadn't fallen in love with that type of gardening. That seemed like a lot of work at the time....still does to some extent, but suddenly flowers were my thing. The house in Winona was also the first place that I started to grow some herbs, but then life intervened and we moved to LaCrosse and it was crazy busy with two full time jobs and three kids and before I knew what happened we were here on the farm in Iowa. There wasn't much to the yard in terms of flowers when I first moved in. There was an old rose bush and a few bulbs that popped up in the spring, but other than that, not much to work with ....But, now I had room and time - two things that are very helpful when planning a big flower garden. My husband would probably say that I have gone completely over board. Approximately 85 percent of the front yard has been taken over by my flower gardens and I have my eye on the other 15 percent still requiring a lawn mower. I love taking the "morning constitutional" through the flower gardens. They are more my sanity gardens than anything. My gardens are where I hide from my children, but am still close enough to the house to hear any of them if they truly need me. Flowers are strictly beautiful, something pretty to look at that soothes the soul, but herbs are flowers with a mission. They are kind of a cross over. They aren't flowery and showy, but many of them will, at some point in their lives, produce flowers that the butterflies and hummingbirds absolutely love. My herb garden started out small. A little oregano, a little basil and a few chamomile plants. My downfall (or so my husband would likely term it) is the garden center next to the grocery store. How convenient! For a while I think I would buy $30 worth of groceries and $75 worth of plants! And when I wasn't buying plants, I was buying books to better understand the plants and where they would grow best. Suffice it to say, I now have a fair number of herb and plant books that help to select which ones will grow the best in my area and what they can be used for. I also have acquired a fair number of books explaining how to make useful things out of herbs, not the least of which....is tea!

So What's The Difference?

The tea that you buy in the store is usually good, it comes in little bags and there are sometimes wonderful sayings on the box or on the tags of each individual bag, but it has been around a while. It has probably been factory farmed, dried, processed, mixed, bagged, boxed and then shipped. Fresh is always best....and by fresh I mean picked off the plant and put into tea. This is hard to do in Iowa in the winter. So, I play the part of a squirrel and during the summer I collect plants and flowers and squirrel them away for later use in the dark, cold days of winter. The wonderful thing about most of the herbs and flowers that make the best tea - they grow like weeds and often are weeds. My bee balm happily reseeds itself every year.....all over the garden. Every spring I have to patiently either remove it from its new favorite spot and put it back where it belongs (in my mind at least), or I let it run wild and form beautiful drifts of color in mid summer. As you can see from the picture, I prefer the later of the two options. Who am I to say where a flower will grow best. No flower I have ever known has read the text books....they like what they like. Actually, one of the most obnoxious weeds, stingy nettle, makes a very nice tea. While I was out hunting mushrooms this last spring, I was completely skunked in finding any morels on many days, but I did go through many lovely nettle patches. Nettle, although very painful to work with (especially when you find yourself without a pair of gloves),it does make a great tea that is very good for people with respiratory problems. On the days that I didn't bring home mushrooms, I brought home bags full of stingy nettle instead. Herbs are wonderful things to grow. A little sun, a little rain and they are good to go. It takes almost nothing to make herbs completely happy. So happy, in fact, that they will spread themselves all over the garden to the point of becoming a nuisance. My Lemon Balm has taken on this trait. Every time I turn my head, it has gone wild and spread itself everywhere. Thankfully, it is one of my favorite teas, so I am never without in the winter months. And weeding it out a garden full of unwanted Lemon Balm leads to the most wonderful citrus smell filling the air. Calendula, is another of my favorite all purpose, flower, herb and medicinal plants that loves to spread itself all over the garden....but really, who would be unhappy to see this gorgeous flower growing in their yard? So, the growing of herbs for teas is definitely NOT a problem! The control of them might be.

When to Harvest

For most plants that will be used as tea, the best time to harvest is before they flower. This works well for the flower garden as well because if you remove to tops of some of the herbs they form their flowers later in the season and prolong the flowering time overall. The one exception to the rule of picking before they flower is Chamomile....those you actually pick the flowers - which seems almost cruel to do to those cute daisy-like flowers, but I enjoy them ten times more in the middle of winter. Chamomile flowers I simply toss in a freezer bag in the freezer right away, without drying, to maintain all their freshness.

The best time of day to harvest is usually in the early mornings when the essential oils and nutrients are highest in most of the herbs....but there are the occasional plants that are better to pick at night - this is where the books sometimes come in handy. I tend to not pay much attention to what time of day I am picking as long as I get them hung up to dry right away.

Drying is a piece of cake. A sharp scissors, a piece of string or rubber band and someplace to hang them where they can dry. I tend to not put them in direct sunlight as that seems to bleach the leaves out while they are drying and I can only imagine that it causes them to loose during that process. Typically, an upside down tomato cage works very well, but really any place in my kitchen has been known to have herbs drying on them. I tie small bundles together and then hang them upside down to dry for a few weeks. If the weather is exceedingly humid like it was this last summer, I dry them a few minutes in a 250 degree oven and then strip off their leaves, put them in plastic Ziploc bags and put them in the freezer, or I put them in air tight containers for the winter. I have one entire freezer and one shelf of my cupboard packed with these herbs.

A list of the herbs that I have grown and saved for this winter include:

• Bee Balm

• Chamomile
• Stingy Nettle
• Peppermint
• Lemon Balm
• Rosemary
• Thyme
• Sage I could add Catmint to this list, but that never seems to make it past my cats.

Every one of those herbs listed is a perennial, except for the Rosemary. That means that every year, without fail, those herbs come back (typically with a vengeance) and all I have to do is pick them and dry them to be fully stocked with tea all winter long. When it was just me, this didn't take much, but my kids have now latched on to the tea and how wonderful it is, so my stock pile has grown.

A Spot of Tea

To make a great cup of tea, as only the English (and the Japanese) can do, you need only three things: Loose tea leaves, a pot and boiling water. It helps, however, to have an actual tea pot. This one came to me by way of a friend, who, when hearing that I had an interest in loose leaf tea, managed to come across this little gem at a thrift shop. I have yet to find another like it, but I am always on the lookout. The basket holds the tea leaves and keeps most of them from finding their way into your tea.....but lets just enough through for a reading of the tea leaves later.

If you don't have an official "tea pot" then a regular coffee pot will work and then just strain the tea through a coffee filter as you pour it into your cut to filter out the loose tea leaves. And, as a complete aside, the chickens absolutely love the left over soaked tea leaves in their daily ration.

Use whatever tea leaves you have stored. In my case I usually like a mix of Lemon Balm, Peppermint and Chamomile, but I vary it sometimes to include Sage, Rosemary, Thyme, Cinnamon, Bee Balm, Nettle, Cayenne Pepper (very good for the digestion), or Ginger....whatever combination you feel like dreaming up or (better yet) what you feel your body needs. I am always amazed at the intuitive sense of our own bodies. There are many times when I will be making a pot of tea with some nagging problem lurking, - a head ache, an upset stomach, a sore throat, etc. So, I toss in the pot what I feel will make a good tea for that night and then while it steeps I look up in one of my many herb books what the herbs that I am using are supposed to be good for. Nine times out of ten, I have put together a tea that is good for what ails me. This last Friday, my daughter came to me with a horrible sore throat and a fever. Great! Going into the weekend, no doctor's office open and what looked like the makings for Strep throat. Gave her some ibuprofen and made some tea that was heavy on Thyme and Cayenne pepper. Hot tea with honey can cure just about anyone of anything. As she finished her tea, she came over to me and said, "hey Mom, my throat doesn't hurt anymore!" By Monday, she was doing great...no more sore throat. Chances are good that it was just a passing virus, but even then....3 days is a pretty good recovery time if you ask me.

The most important step to making a great cup of tea is to let it steep. Minimum of 5 minutes and really the longer it steeps the better. My husband will often find that I have left tea in the tea pot overnight when he goes to clean it. He poured one such cup of tea in a cup for me to reheat and I thought it was a cup of coffee because it was so dark in color - it was wonderful! I am also a big proponent of the "tea cozy". Keeping your tea pot warm with the steeping tea inside helps to bring out more flavor. A little honey added for sweetening and you will have the perfect cup of tea.

Ham and Eggs

What goes really great with eggs? Yeah, you guessed it. We figured that since we had officially launched into having animals on the farm that we would try for a well rounded farm and bring on a few pigs.

I love pigs. Grew up with them for the most part (and, no, that is not a veiled reference to living with my brother). We always had a few on the farm for 4-H purposes for my brother and eventually for me when I got old enough. We even had a sow named Gus, that had a litter of piglets one year. The runt, Porkie, lived in our basement for about 3 weeks drinking milk from a baby bottle attached to the end of a hockey stick......hmmm, maybe that is where the idea of Lambie in the basement came from.....

There are very few farm stories from when I was a kid that didn't somehow involve a pig in one way or another. Leaping Leland, Gus, Dr. Jekyll, Brutus....all pigs of legend on our farm. Our pigs always had a great time of it. They were never confined. We had a wonderful English type piggery at our farm in Minnesota - they could come inside the hog house at any time, or be outside in the cement walled enclosure if they wanted. And, if they were very good pigs, we would set up a low electric fence and run them out onto dirt and then I would overflow the horse tank and let the water trickle down to the hog wallow where they would happily lounge for the entire day like crocodiles in a swamp with only their eyes and noses above the mud.

People that don't know pigs always assume that they are very dirty animals when actually, the exact opposite is true. Pigs are, by nature, very clean animals and highly intelligent. Of the farm animals, the pig ranks the highest in GPA. If they are given half a chance, and a little room, they keep their enclosures clean.

The very worst thing that modern farming practices have done is to confine these wonderful animals. If this entire blog does nothing more than convince just one person to consider where their meat comes from and consider that their "meat" at one point had a life that should have been worth living, then it will have been entirely worth all the writing.

As a veterinarian, we are required to learn about some production animal medicine. We have to have the basics down for approximately nine species - cats, dogs, pigs, chickens, cows, horses, goats, sheep, turkeys....and, as you can see, most of those species are production animals. So we learn about the antibiotics that get put into feed to help them grow quicker or protect them from disease since they are raised in such large quantities in such close quarters. What people don't understand....not even veterinarians in many cases, is that this is not the way these animals developed. They didn't develop to live in tiny confinement units with hundreds, if not thousands of others. If you take them out of that horrible artificial environment and put them in a more natural setting, guess what?..... they don't need any of the food additives or antibiotics to survive. The salmonella and pathogenic E. coli strains disappear.

I have seen confinements, been in them as well and I can tell you with all honesty that I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy much less an animal that lives and breathes to rut in the dirt. It is sad to see a pig in a confinement. They are stressed from the first day there and they are denied every essence of what being a pig really means.

CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) this is what they are typically called in the business. In the business of agriculture, an animal is reduced simply to an end product from the moment of its birth. It is only seen as a "unit of production" as in "how many units of production can we fit into that new building". We have become so focused on producing as many units as possible in the smallest space possible, that we have completely forgotten that these so called units are beings with a similar physiology to our own.

What is sadder still.....most non-farming people have no understanding of the conditions that these poor animals suffer in before they are butchered and served up to us in a grocery store under so much plastic wrap. Movies like Food Inc have definitely helped to open peoples' eyes and journalists like Michael Pollan have also helped with books such as An Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, but what helps the most?....drive around and look at where these animals are living! If you live anywhere in the Midwest I can almost guarantee that you can find some close by. It is depressing, disheartening and simply wrong on so many levels and the apathy that we have for these animals.....even more wrong.

It depresses me, as a veterinarian, to see animals treated this way. I stand very much opposed to the American Veterinary Medical Association's stance on antibiotic use in animals not to mention the entire idea of a CAFO in and of itself. For a group of people whose lives and careers are devoted to the care and well being of animals, we are a sad lot when it comes to production animals. I typically get the response, "well, they are just food animals" to which I say, any animal that will be forced to give up its life for me deserves to be treated better than they are.

I can sense my production animal vet friends sharpening their knives to come after me. Questions such as, "Well, how would you suggest we raise enough animals for this country then?"

Easy! Small family farms. The way that it was done a generation ago, before Americans became fat and slow and idiotic. Joel Salatin, owner and operator of Polyface Farms in Virginia has been farming with a conscience and sustainably for years. We all bemoan the loss of the "family farm" and hate to see corporate farms take over. Why do they take over? Because we buy their cheap, confinement raised, unsustainable meat, that's why. If we were to STOP buying it, the confinements would disappear.

If I can say nothing else about this issue, it is this......PAY ATTENTION! Notice where your food comes from, how it was raised. If you cannot account for its well being, then you shouldn't be eating it. We are what we eat and likewise, we are what our food eats as well. If our food is raised up to its elbows in shit....it is very likely that we will soon be up to our own elbows in shit (metaphorically, if not literally).

Alright, enough soap boxing for a while.....back to the pigs. One of my clients happened to have pigs that she raised. Farmers that actually farrow pigs are starting to become fewer and farther between (another type of corporate takeover, I'm sorry to say) but I lucked out with her because she had just had a litter of piglets one day when she came in for some other animal related service. We struck a bargain.....2 piglets at weaning for a bag of cat food.

I received 28 pounds of piglet and she went home with 17 pounds of cat food. Who said bargaining wasn't alive and well.

Two tiny little pigs in our new "piggery" section of the shed. They looked so small and lost the first few days. There were times when it appeared that they had disappeared entirely because they would be buried under the straw beneath the heat lamp, but pigs are very food motivated animals and within a few days they recognized us as the prime "food givers".

The reason that pigs are one of the main "meat" animals is that they are about 99% muscle. This was quickly realized as they grew incredibly fast and could move 60 pounds of cement block around with just their snout. We had to catch and treat the smaller of the two pigs once with a shot of antibiotics, but catching him and holding him up long enough to give the shot was a full workout of its own.

We had toyed with the idea of naming them or not. I was one to suggest that maybe we shouldn't name them, as then it becomes exponentially harder to eventually eat them, as discovered by the "Bob noodle soup" incident. So, we decided to name them based solely on marks....we had "Patch" and "Bongo" .....how exactly we came to Bongo is a bit of a mystery, but it involved a thesaurus and an alternate meaning for the word "stripe" I believe.

Pigs love to play. They chase each other, they have running "dashes" and will often make a "woffing" noise that sounds a little like a dog bark when they are having a good time. They are mischievous and humorous and very friendly. I made friends quickly with Patch and Bongo because I almost always had old produce from the garden that I would cart over for them to have. That, and I would share my beer with them.

Pigs will eat just about everything. They are omnivores just like us, but they are much less particular about what they eat. Left overs were a main staple of their diet at our farm. We would save all the scrap produce that we peeled off carrots or potatoes, left over onions, squash seeds, old beans, etc and take them out to the pigs at the end of the day. They would come running for any treats that we would bring. Old windfall apples, peach pits, corn cobs, watermelon rinds, rotting squash and cucumbers, pulled up grass weeds.....any vegetarian produce that we could come up with they loved. We had a strict rule though....no meat, although there was one instance of them catching a chicken on their own and making quite a feast of it. Eggs and milk however were allowed.....so they weren't vegan pigs. They also had an incredible sweet tooth and loved the chocolate chips and marshmallows that sometimes found their way out to them.

Our Patch and Bongo went from 14 pounds each at the start to well over 260 pounds within 6 months. And then it was time to go to market. The week before they left however, they received a special treat every day and split a beer between the two of them the night before.

Thankfully, we live in a small town where there is a small butcher. These, too, are becoming harder to find as the USDA grows in strength and tries to further limit what people can and cannot eat.....apparently it is fine to eat unwholesome, CAFO meat, but healthy happy meat....not so much. But I digress.

Was it difficult to watch Patch and Bongo go off to market? Yes! The shed was a sad and quiet place suddenly, but they had been reaching an age and size that they were clearly uncomfortable and the place had to be vacated so that we could clean it out and get it ready for winter and then, in turn, next year's piglets. The meat from those two pigs filled a chest freezer for us and fed our family of 7 as well as two other families throughout the winter. I cannot express to you how wonderful is bacon that has been raised on marshmallows, beer and fresh air. So, as sad as it was, we gave those two pigs the happiest life we could, we loved them well and cherished their bodies that helped to feed us. They were well treated and well thought of their entire lives and even after.....I would be happy if as much could be said for me when I die.

The Advent of the Lamb

I had nothing to do with this one. In fact, my exact words were, "No! They are nothing but problems....No." But, I guess I shouldn't really have been surprised when my words were not heeded.....she was really kind of cute.

It is a problem when the bus driver, who sees your kids every day and talks with them, also happens to raise sheep. It was early spring, lambing season, and he happened to talk with the kids about taking on a bottle baby lamb. The kids, of course, then passed this on to Keith.

We had just put a new roof on the "chicken shed" but had agreed that there was plenty of room in it to add a few other animals. Little did I know how quickly that would happen....a bit like Field of Dreams "if you build it, they will come".

Somehow, and here is where is all gets a little questionable as to who actually called whom initially, but Gene and Keith somehow got to talking. I have my suspicions that it was Keith that called Gene. Regardless, I came home from work to find a small, weak, seven day old lamb in my kitchen. She was all legs and really not much else - nothing to her. She was one of a set of triplets, and while sheep do alright with two lambs, three is a bit of a stretch to feed. This one apparently, was the odd man out at almost all the feedings. According to the bus driver, she had been drinking from a bottle, but that first night (and for many following nights) we struggled to get any milk down her at all.

We took her out to the shed because I just didn't feel that it was good to get her used to living in the kitchen....that didn't work - it was just too dark and cold to leave that tiny little beast out there all alone! We tried to introduce our outdoor dog, in the hopes that her Great Pyrenees breed would come out and take to her....no go, but she did almost have lamb chops for dinner. We thought that maybe even something like a cat would befriend her and help her out....nope, they were too freaked out by her, but they did want her milk.

Back in the house we went and we set up a place in the basement for her to live. The containment was essentially the same as the original brooder that we had used for the chicks when they first came. This confinement lasted all of about 20 minutes. But, she did find a spot in the corner to call her own, so we went with it and moved the straw and blankets to that corner of the basement which was close to the wood burning stove....smart lamb.

Approximately one week into this little lamb adventure and she still wasn't gaining any weight. That is not a good thing in a young lamb's life. Babies of all species need to be taking in enough nutrients and calories to grow - she hadn't grown a bit. We despaired that maybe she wasn't going to make it. Then I stopped and remembered that I am, in fact, a veterinarian and should know how to handle this conundrum.

The next day at work I gathered together a few items that I thought might be of help, namely a 60 cc syringe and a red rubber feeding tube. She had to have nutrients one way or another and if she didn't take it in herself, then she was going to get it via feeding tube. In general, this isn't too difficult of a thing to do for most animals. Sliding a tube to the back of the throat naturally elicits a gag reflex and they swallow and if you pass the tube with the swallow....it goes down the right tube. I showed my husband how to check to be sure that it is in the stomach - there should be negative pressure on the syringe when you pull back. If the syringe fills with air, you have inadvertently passed the tube into the trachea, or windpipe, and that can cause huge problems if you were to then pass the formula down that tube right into the lungs.

So, after refreshing myself with how to do this, and then teaching Keith how to do this, "Lambie" was thereafter subjected to three times daily feedings whether she liked it or not. That, and a shot of penicillin and she was well on her way to gaining weight.

We tube fed her for about three weeks and then, finally, the grass started to green up a bit and suddenly she realized that she was a herbivore. She never looked back after that point, but she had developed quite a bad habit of coming into the house. For the three weeks that she was being tube fed, she occupied a spot either behind our front door amongst the shoes, or downstairs in the basement by the wood stove. She bonded to my husband because he was, after all, her main care giver. She followed him all over the farm and would bound around him like a crazy gazelle, pronking, leaping and inadvertently running headlong into him and anything else that was in her way.

I think the original plan was to raise her up and then take her to the local butcher shop. That is very hard to do with animals that you have tube fed, worried over, and then watched grab hold of life for all they are worth and enjoy it with as much vivacity as a baby lamb. I suspect now that Lambie is a permanent, life long resident of the farm.

A Fence Emerges

As much fun as it was to have a lamb come traipsing into the house, it was also kind of messy as they are not exactly careful about where they leave their deposits. We had to have another place for her to stay. The north corner of the chicken house was fixed up into a very nice stall for her to stay in during the nights and during the day, she wandered around with Keith. We needed a fence however, and this became readily obvious when she wandered up to the house and happily started nibbling on my tulips. She is actually lucky to have survived that event at all.

A fence was planned out and materials purchased. I attempted to set a few posts, but as is typical, they were not just the way Keith had pictured in his mind, so I let him take over and slowly, the fence emerged. "Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight, and bull-strong. " Keith got all of those with the fence that he put in. You would often see him out there tamping in a post with Lambie attempting to climb on his back.

There is a reason that I originally said, "No" to this whole lamb idea. I grew up with a bottle lamb, actually two of them....Burt and Ernie. Ernie wasn't bad, but Burt would head butt you really hard any chance he got. I was happy the day that Burt left the homestead. We had another sheep at some point too named "Doc" and he would get out and promptly steel something from the shed and drop it somewhere out in the yard. This became a real problem when my dad was fixing a car and the sheep kept running off with parts. Lambie was working at becoming as much of a nuisance as Burt and Doc had been, but the fence did seem to help rein her in a little. Add to that pasture a Shetland pony that we had received a few years earlier and they were pretty good buddies. The thing that we didn't realize in putting in the fence was that the chickens now were within a pasture as well. We thought that they would leap over it - they are fully capable of leaping at least as high as the fence, but they seemed oddly content to stay within its confines as well. We now had quite a farm yard - chickens ranging around, a pony and a willy-nilly sheep that seemed to get a profound kick out of herding the feisty rooster "Brownie" around. She was the only one that he didn't spur every chance he got, he would instead flee from her. I think it was mainly that she was just so unpredictable - like a bipolar person off their meds, you just never knew what she might do.

Food is a huge thing for Lambie - almost ironic in some ways given that we couldn't get her to eat for the first three weeks of her life. She and Casper vie for any chicken feed that they can possibly lick out from under the dog of the chicken coop, and if anyone happens to leave a door unlocked you can bet that Lambie will be in there and she doesn't hesitate to let in anyone else to help with feasting on any food that she can uncover. More than once we have come into the chicken shed to find it in complete disarray with Lambie happily munching down on cat food and a flock of chickens at her feet helping as well.

How To Shear a Sheep (or Not)

If we weren't going to use her for lunch meat, we had to come up with some purpose for her existence on the farm.....not that the horses really have much use, but they clean up any hay that we have lying around. Sheep are a wonderful dual purpose farm animal - meat and fiber are both possibilities, so we opted for the fiber. We weren't about to splurge on an electric clippers for one sheep, so we thought that we would try the old fashioned way of shearing a sheep - hand shears. If you have never seen one of these, they look like really big, sharp, metal scissors that are sprung so that the only motion you have to do is to close the scissors to snip the wool. Biggest drawback is that it requires a strong wrist to use these babies and you are working on a living animal that is not always lying still, so you are almost bound to snip the skin periodically as well as the wool.

Lambie had no idea what was coming for her the morning that we decided to give it a try. The entire family meandered out to the pasture to watch the event. The book makes this look like a fairly simple thing. Usually, when you get a sheep set up on their butt, they kind of relax and stop wrestling.....or so the book says. Lambie clearly did not read this part of the book. The book also shows just one person doing the shearing and holding the sheep all at the same time. Clearly, this was a person who had had more practice than we did.

She came to Keith, as she always does, and he attempted to get her set up the way the book describes, on one hip. The hard part was that she weighs almost as much as Keith does. What followed was similar to watching a wrestling match, and unfortunately Keith wasn't coming out the victor without a serious fight. It was amazing to see how many legs a four legged creature seemed to have when she was struggling to stand up right. Eventually, she was brought down for the count, but it was more or less on her side and it took both of Keith's hands to keep her that way so there was no way that he was going to be able to use the shears at the same time.

I launched in with the sheep shears and managed to get going on quite a roll. Once you find the plane in the wool that is actually clean, it goes along quite nicely, but then you have to flip the sheep over at some point. This allowed Lambie the upper hand for the moment and she used it to her best advantage. She jumped up and was off like a shot having now decided that these people were clearly out of their minds. The book also mentions trying to keep the fleece clean. This is very hard to do when half of it is still attached to the sheep as they are running through all kinds of farmyard muck.

Another few minutes to catch her, another wrestling match and she was down on the other side and the sheering could continue. The only time she would really flail was when the shears would inadvertently pinch some skin, but unfortunately that usually led to a hoof to the head or a lip or some other sensitive body part.

Eventually, the wool was off. It wasn't necessarily pretty, but it was off. Lambie looked a little like a piece of foam that had had chunks cut out of it, but she didn't seem to mind all the kids giggling at her new do. Now, what to do with the fleece, which was nowhere near "fleecy white" It was full of dirt, manure and straw. Washing was the first order of business.

Dawn dish soap, Woolite and a lot of patience are necessary to get wool clean. I washed it twice and got all the gross disgusting things out of it. I wasn't perfectly clean, but good enough to start carding. I found some carding combs on ebay and had them in hand within a few weeks.

Now, I would love to be able to say that I have taken the time to card and spin the wool, but unfortunately, I have not. It sits where it has been for several months and taunts me with tracking down my grandmother's spinning wheel which currently resides at my parent's house. Maybe with next spring's wool, which I picture as a perfect, clean fleece obtained from a calm, relaxed sheep, I will feel inspired to card and spin it all. But then again, it is Lambie I am dealing with.

Which Came First.......

Somehow I had a feather brained idea to get chickens. This was four years ago now. Looked up Murray McMurray website and ordered some chickens to be delivered in the spring. Didn't have a place for them to live, had no idea what to do with a chicken really at all, but how hard can it be? Right? When I get set on an idea, I am somewhat hard to dissuade.....I think 'bull headed' is generally how I am described by most of my close friends and relatives. It does get the ball rolling though, and sometimes that is really all that needs to happen to make it go. 6 am on a Saturday in April, phone rings and I can barely hear what the person on the other end is saying over the "peep! peep! peep!" in the back ground, "Your chicks are here in the post office for you to pick up." Normally, we like to sleep in, but Keith scrambled out of bed and headed into town to bring back the 24 chicks (plus 1 free rare one) that were now the newest residents of the farm. He came back about 30 minutes later carrying a rather small 1 foot x 1 foot square box with a rather noisy bunch of one day old chicks in it. I had scrambled around the house to improvise a confinement system that would hold them in until a more permanent dwelling location could be devised. Had to keep them out of the house because the house cats might eat them, had to keep them warm because that was what all the books said. I had managed to pick up a small waterer and feeder ahead of time. A quick knife to a few cardboard boxes and voila instant chick brooder. We set them up on our "stinky porch" - so named by our children due to the fact that the garbage resides out there and it does, in fact, sometimes stink......but that is another post altogether. There is maybe no other baby creature as cute and fluffy as a one day old baby chick. Watching them scramble around their enclosure was absolutely mesmerizing. The kids would sit out there for hours captivated by the random, chicken brained ramblings of the little ones. The "free rare chick" was quickly dubbed Brownie as he was the only one that looked a little different and could therefore be picked out of the crowd. McMurray had actually sent us 26 chickens because there were a few in the box whose health was rather questionable right from the start. I inspected them and tried to tube feed them as any good vet would, but they just didn't have it in them. Try explaining that to five kids who are suddenly and completely in love with the sickest of the lot. There were tears all around when the two sickest chicks passed away and a small funeral ceremony held in their honor....and then life went on and the kids walked away from the episode understanding a little better the fragility of life. One thing about chickens....they grow fast! It took no time at all before they were jumping up onto the sides of the brooder and inspecting the great beyond, just outside of their known world. Thankfully, Keith had been hard at work on a permanent chicken residence. Not only that, but the idea of the chickens now residing in one of our previously unused sheds prompted the fixing of the roof of the entire building. Suddenly, what had been a dilapidated building was now a snug little shed in which to house the chickens, and potentially any other farm animals that came our way. Turning them over to the wilds of the world, however, proved heart wrenching.....not that they weren't fine, but as Keith said one night when he finally came in from the chicken house. "Geez, it is like sending your kids off to college - I feel like I should put up a cot out here!" You get attached to the little things. I have heard that raising chickens becomes an addiction. I know that whoever said those words knew what they were talking about. Our plan was to have them be "free range" chickens, which is all well and good, but it takes a certain leap of faith to allow these young feather brains out the door and only hope that they somehow come back. There were several tentative trials of letting them out for a few minutes only to shepherd them back inside almost immediately. One of the biggest worries were the many farm cats that we keep. They are kept so that the rodent population doesn't get too out of hand. That, and the fact that, as a veterinarian, you tend to acquire many of life's "castoffs" that don't have anywhere else to be. One such cat was Sparky. He came to the farm because his claws got him into trouble and the people that had him needed to get rid of him.....hence, my house. He had grown into quite a nice cat and a very good hunter.....especially of chickens. One morning, I had just finished the chores and was about to head off to work when suddenly I heard a "PEEP!" coming from very near the closest shed to the house. I knew that there was no way that the chickens, housed in the building furthest from the house, could be that well heard from where I stood on the porch. I looked out toward the shed and low and behold, here comes Sparky with a half grown chick in his jaws peeping away. Torn between panic and knowing that if I rushed the cat, he would likely run out of range entirely with his catch. I called to him in my most cajoling voice, "here kitty, kitty" and he stopped and raised his tail in recognition as though to say, "Hey! Look what I caught for you!" Somehow, I managed to sneak a hand in and get him around the scruff of the neck at which point he dropped the bird. The chick took off running and stopped in a shaded area the swing set, but now I noticed another cat headed toward the unsuspecting chick. I grabbed this cat by the scruff and now had both hands full of mighty hunters. I knew I had to contain the cats because even if I just took them away and set them down, they would beat me back to the chick's hiding spot - cats are brilliant like that. So, I settled on trapping them in my husband's shop for a few minutes - although hard to turn the handle on a door when both hands are full of squirming, hungry cat. Tucked one of the cats under my elbow in a snug football hold, turned the door handle and tossed them in and shut the door as fast as possible. The chick was still in the same place, thank God and I was able to corner it and pick it up without too much trouble. Still too shocky from being in the jaws of a carnivore. I looked it over and found that all that had happened was that there was a puncture hole that went through the neck and into the crop where food was spilling out. I took the stressed out little tyke into the house and rinsed off the skin to fully analyze the damage. What to do? Too little to kill and eat, potentially healthy enough to be fixed, but usually the stress of medical care will sometimes alone kill them. I reached for the junk drawer. When in doubt, the answer may just lie in the junk drawer. Super glue has so many wonderful uses, but one of the greatest is fixing cuts. It is very similar to "tissue glue" which is the surgeon's answer to what to use. With glue and chick in hand I walked up stairs. Keith was still soundly sleeping and again, with things in each hand I didn't have a good way of getting his attention without being too loud. "Keith! Keith! Get up! I have to glue a chicken!" I said as I kicked the edge of the bed. He sat up blinking and said, "What?" I quickly explained the situation as we went downstairs where the light was better and over the sink I glued the chicken's neck closed. With a few simple prayers thrown toward whatever God might watch over mauled chicks, I took him back outside to be with his buddies. Within minutes of being back out with the other chickens, I could no longer figure out which chicken it was. To this day, I don't know if it was one of the roosters that we eventually butchered, or if it is still one of the hens that lives out in the shed. It healed up without incident thanks to Super Glue.

Straight Run

When I ordered the chickens, I ordered a straight run, which means that you will get both males and females in the mix. We were excited about all the wonderful eggs that the hens would give us, but we opted not to dwell on what would happen with the males. Eventually, on October 20th the first little egg appeared as though by magic one morning. Small, but perfect, this little egg has become immortalized on our shelf for all time (or at least until some kid knocks it down) - I blew out the inside and shellacked it to remind us how good we have it to get free, home grown eggs.....and to remember how long we have been eating those eggs.

The boys were getting ever bigger, although it was still a little hard to tell just which one the "boys" were because they hadn't started crowing yet. Within a few weeks of the first egg hatching, however, there suddenly was some very unusual noises coming from the chicken house. It sounded like a choir of pubescent boys - voices cracking all over the place as they made multiple attempts at what might one day be called a "crow" Many would start fine, but then get choked off mid crow in what sounded like a deep throat clearing. With the crowing came the testosterone and the realization that we now had almost a dozen chickens to "do" something with.

The local butcher doesn't do fowl because of the feather mess - this is completely understandable having now seen the feathered mess for myself. As an undergraduate Animal Science major, I did take a "meats" course in which we saw how many meat animals were processed and then cooked. I highly recommend this course to anyone if you have any questions at all where your meat comes from. Better yet, try this....try going to a meat packing plant and asking for a tour. Just so you know.....it will never happen. You know why? Because they worry not that you will be grossed out by the animals being butchered, but you WILL be grossed out by the conditions and how the meat is handled. It may very well lead you to never eat meat again and then were would their company be?

I have been to the packing plants as they are in process. I went as a student doing research. We had to go and get tissue samples for what we were working on. It wasn't pretty - any of it. It was loud, and disgusting, and even I could see the gross cross contamination happening. Best yet was when an entire side of beef fell off the conveyor belt. It is supposed to be then "condemned". They hung it to the side for a while and then, when they thought we were too engrossed in our work to notice, they slid it back onto the line. The USDA inspectors that are there, I am ashamed to say, are veterinarians. It saddens me to think of how low their lives have sunk to be a USDA inspector....most, to me, appear to be former shells of a veterinarian. No longer actually caring about the animals they were sworn to protect, now a mere pawn of the government and getting paid high dollars to do it too.

Anyway, back to the boys. The time had come. Reviewed how to humanely kill a chicken and "process" it, which entails removing the feathers and internal organs all without contaminating the meat in the process. Our chosen method of humane euthanasia was La Guillotine also known as "the axe". We devised a cone that held the chicken securely and quietly and then if you hang them upside down for a few seconds they become almost hypnotized. We made it as quick and painless as possible. The statement "ran around like a chicken with its head cut off" has some basis in actual events, but "flopped" is probably more like it.

After decapitation, the body is immersed in almost boiling water to loosen the feathers and then the feather picking begins. This is a skill that is developed with practice. The first chickens we did took most of the day to get processed, now with our two years of practice behind us, I can tell you that just two of us can process ten chickens in just under 2 hours. But the feathers are the messiest part. They come off the chicken and stick like glue to you - to every part of you, hands, face, chest, hair. And they aren't just feathers, they are wet feathers,....hot, wet feathers, so the smell is one that you will always remember.

I typically get the post of evisceration, being that I am schooled in what needs to stay in and what needs to come out. The feet come off first and then the rest of the neck. A sharp knife is your best friend in this department, that and a pair of latex gloves (or several pair) After that, the scent gland and the anal opening are dissected out and tied shut to avoid any contamination. A small slit is made up the belly of the chicken and then, with small hands a benefit, you squeeze one inside and get a grip on everything from the crop and gizzard on backwards and you gently start pulling. Typically, it all comes out with a "shlop" kind of sound and then you have to assess weather you managed to get all that you needed. Typically, the lungs have to be removed separately because they are part of the upper chest wall and attached rather firmly to the ribs. They come out easily however compared to the kidneys. The kidneys are actually within the bone of the pelvis and behind several tough nerves and connective tissue, so this requires some digging in many cases to get them completely out. The testicles of a chicken are internal and quite large - they startle many at first (including myself) in trying to figure out the anatomy. It had been a while since I had had an avian anatomy course, but after a few minutes of private review I gave a short course to the herd of kids that came around.

I have had numerous people ask me why I would let my kids see it. Why not? I think it only right that they should have some idea of where their food comes from. They understand that it was a living, breathing animal with many of the same parts as we have. They understand that we killed it in the most humane way possible after it had been allowed to have a reasonably happy chicken life of roaming around free on the farm. They understand and are grateful to the chickens for providing us with food to live on. I had seven kids running around me that day while I processed the first chickens and not a one of them was all that grossed out and were really quite fascinated by the anatomy lesson.

After the insides are out, the chicken is scrubbed (inside and out) with fresh water from the hydrant and then bagged in a 2 gallon Ziplock bag and tossed in the freezer. Does it bother us to eat these chickens that we have raised from tiny one day old chicks? In a way. But I am, as I said before happy that they lived a good life - they weren't in cages, they weren't kept shut up inside, they were protected from predators and fed organic food. I think about it, I think about them and I am grateful to them....yes, grateful to a chicken because they provide some of the very best soup and dinners of the entire year.

4-H

The chickens have brought a new aspect as well, other than just food. The kids show them.

Simon's first year in 4-H was fairly uneventful because he just took projects that were judged and then sat around for the rest of the fair, but the second year....we took Brownie.

It is important with a flock of chickens to have a rooster.....ONE roster. We discovered early that two just wouldn't work because they started competing for the girls and the girls were paying the price, if you know what I mean. Bob, our other rooster had to go. We had a special butchering session a few weeks after the first and had "Bob noodle soup" that week for dinner. My daughter Ella, did have a little issue with a dinner with a name and will often times now remark, "Who are we eating this time?"

But Brownie was the chosen one. He had been our "free rare chick" that we had received and after much research, I figured out that he was an Ameraucana chicken. Ameraucana are one of the breeds of chickens that lay different colored eggs - greens, blues, and sometimes lavenders. I was excited for Simon because there was so much he could talk to a chicken judge about this breed. He did his 4-H work book and learned some of the feather patterns and different types of fowl. He practiced giving Brownie a bath before the fair. We carted Brownie into town in a cat carrier for the pre-fair blood testing that had to be done, and then the big week came.

We got Brownie all set up at the fair and waited around for most of the day for the judging to happen. Five minutes with the judge and done. Kind of anticlimactic in the end, but then we were only in one class. Brownie stayed the week at the fair and you could here him crowing from anywhere you were....our purple ribbon bird.

Genetics have to come into play however at some point. And where you have one rooster and some hens, eventually, one of the hens takes it into her brain to set on eggs. I had it all planned out, according to the almanac, when would be the best time to get one of the hens to set on eggs. But hens don't read the almanac and they were having nothing doing with the bucket of eggs that I had left for them to set on. It did , however, get their little chicken brains working. Within three weeks of leaving a bunch of eggs for them to ponder over daily, two hens finally took it upon themselves to try to hatch them out.

When a hen becomes "broody" you can tell because all the do is "sit" all day. You can move them around and where every you set them, they sit and stay. They will get up once daily to walk around, eat, drink, and poop, but then it is right back to setting on eggs. These are dedicated mamas! Needless to say, the eggs that I had left for them were goners, so we slowly traded them out for new eggs daily until they each had about 10 eggs to set on. It takes 21 days to grow a chicken from an egg and it is quite possibly one of the coolest things to witness. As the time grew short to when the eggs were to hatch, we put the hens in a separate area away from the other chickens - a little "A" frame brooder house where they would be safe from all the other aunts and uncles pecking on them. I got the call at work on the day that I was a "chicken grandma" and I hope that when I truly am a grandma, that I am half as proud as I was that day. All together we, or rather the hens, hatched out a total of ten baby chicks and raised them quite nicely in the little brooder. When the hens got tired of all their offspring, we moved them back into the regular flock again and then waited a while to move the babies over to the regular pen. There was a lot of chicken moving for a while. Eventually, with much monitoring and stress, the young ones integrated into the flock and took off on their own. Roughly seven months later there was another round of first eggs and butchering - one entire generation born and raised on the farm.

There is a definite learning curve involved in raising chickens, and ours has been (so far) about three years. We have had a few more hens hatch out a few more chicks with some limited success and some failure - mainly due to our intervention. We humans think we know it all when it comes to raising young - even when they aren't our own. But this fall, just as it was starting to turn cold, our best hen....Big Brown Hen as she is affectionately known, decided that she wanted to set on another round of eggs. I didn't think this was the best timing in the world, but chickens don't really care all that much about human opinions, so I decided to make her a "test case" and leave all the eggs laid in one day under her and NOT move her to a brooder. I figured it was too cold for many of the chicks to survive anyway, their chances of hatching were slim to none in my mind because it was 30 degrees at times and if she got off the nest....well, they just weren't made to survive that sort of temperature change.

We left her alone with 10 eggs to mind, paid little heed to what day it was and three weeks later, were stunned to find 6 baby chicks under her! 60% hatch rate....better than we had done so far when we had interveined, but they will never survive once they jump out of the nest because the other chickens will kill them. Survival of the fittest, we decided.

Mama hen was a force to behold. No chicken came within two feet of those babies without her beating them senseless. She chased off anything (including our small grey cat) that even so much as thought about bothering her chicks. She kept a wary eye out for any marauding animals and would call the chicks to her any time there was an exceptionally good spot of bugs or seeds that she had found. At night, when the temperatures dipped down into the twenties, you could find her and her chicks all safely nestled together -all of them protected under her wings staying warm. As they got older, I would go out there at night and find her sitting on the floor with 6 little heads poking out of her wings and feathers....she looked like a 7 headed chicken.

All of our best efforts to provide and protect and Brown hen did better than we ever could with all our fancy heaters and brooding boxes. Mother Nature knows best. Which came first?.....the mama hen.

Brownie's Reign of Terror

Brownie was our main man in the chicken house for the first two years. Purple ribbon winner at the fair and lord of the chicken house. There were offspring that bore his coloring and laid green eggs, but he had a certain way of ruling the roost that was a little frightening. He would eye you up as you came into the yard and sidle up to you, looking like the regal rooster that he was and then.......whoa! The attack was fast and furious and it consisted of him spiking you with his spurs in rabid suscession. He left many a person with wicked bruises - not only from the attack, but from the attempts to get away from him. I started always carrying a broom with me everywhere I went in the chicken yard. He would stalk you and follow you, waiting for the best time to attack.....when you were furthest from an escape. It was at the height of his reign that we ordered another round of chicks - new blood and more interesting breeds for the kids to take to the fair. In this order was another "free rare chick" only this one started out black and after more research, determined that this was a Dominique chicken. He became the choice chicken for my daughter to take to the fair for her first year. From there, he became the Champion Non-Standard Commercial Individual chicken. He not only came home with a purple ribbon, he came home with a trophy! He was also much meeker than Brownie, so the decision was quickly made to usurp Brownie. It was a difficult decision, but it was made much easier right after he attacked me one last time. We butchered at total of 15 chickens this last summer and Brownie was in there somewhere. I am sure that he will make some excellent Brownie Noodle Soup

This Old House

I have undertaken a project. I don't do this too often in this house because I am definitely no expert.....Keith is. He handles the house projects and I handle any of the medical emergencies that arise with the pets. Seems like a fair trade. I have a tendency to be a little impatient with getting things done so I don't take the proper time or care, not to mention the fact that I rarely use the correct tool for actually doing something. I have found that flat screwdrivers can be used for just about everything from opening a paint can top to fishing out toast from a toaster (provided it is unplugged and the toast is no longer on fire)

That said, I took on this job. It started by painting the room while Keith was away. I did it as a surprise for him while he was gone working at my brother's house for a week. I did it while he was away (and called it a surprise) because he would have hovered and fretted over whether or not I cleaned the brushes out well enough after I was finished with them. This sort of "hovering and fretting" drives me absolutely nuts and is part of what prevents me from taking on other jobs. So, I did it while he was out of town.

Problem was, the paint job looked too good when I was done.....it made the floor look terrible. I mean, before when the wall was bad at least the floor looked the part, but now there was such a difference that it just would have killed me to move the stuff in there with the floor looking that bad. So, after Keith came home and had a chance to inspect the room and declare the paint job "good" and also verify that his brushes were in fact clean enough, he agreed that the floor needed something.

I have always favored the idea of refinishing the floors. This is an old house - 101 years to be exact, but the floors upstairs are pine.....wide plank, pine floors and Keith was generally in favor of just painting them again and calling it good. I volunteered to do the work - "I'll sand and stain them" I offered - that was only fair right? And so it began and Keith was nice enough to get me a new sander and set me up with the proper tools which is a very good thing or I would still be at it with a single piece of 20 grit and a flat screwdriver.

At first it was just a job, one of countless projects to be done on this house before it is technically habitable. I figure we will get it completed about the time that the kids all grow up and move away, much like my own parents did. Slowly, the layers of paint came off and the wood emerged and slowly it dawned on me how old this house really is. The smell of old wood is not something that can be easily explained. I realized what it was when I walked into the room to work one day and was suddenly transported back to my grandparent's attic in their South Dakota farm house which was also made of old wood. One hundred and one years ago.....1909 - before my grandparents were born, this house was finished by Meyer's construction, as evidenced by the name of the builders and the date that was found on one of the beams in the attic....that is a long time to imagine. No motorized vehicles, no television, no e-mail, no electricity....old.

I wonder who the people were that built the house. They were probably in their twenties or thirties. Did they have families? Where are those families now? As I was cleaning out cracks in the floor that have now dried and split enough to allow entrance to necklace beads and crayons and other small child paraphernalia, I would come across the head of a nail that had been hammered in generations ago.

Where will I be in 100 years? Will I have left anything of any lasting importance behind when I go, like these men did? Will there someday be someone who is refinishing this same floor and wondering who the last person was to sand and stain it? It is a humbling thought to think that I may not leave anything of any real importance in this world. But then again, I am leaving my children to it and, with any luck, my grandchildren.

As with any tedious job, this one moves slowly, but I feel as though I know each board individually. Which led me to another realization. I was moving some of the trim boards around one day and I managed to get a wicked splinter in the outside edge of my foot.

Have you ever attempted to take a splinter out of the outside edge of your foot? It requires some amount of Cirque du Soleli maneuvers. But as I was fishing the splinter out, it dawned on me that this wood was probably two hundred years old! The wood that would have made up that room had to have grown for quite a while prior to being harvested, dried and cut for flooring. Two hundred years! 1809! Shortly after we gained independence from England, before the war of 1812. The forests that made this floor was likely standing during the time of my great, great grandparents and before all the Native Americans had even left the area.

Now, I realize it isn't Pompei. It hasn't been around for thousands of years, but even something as old as this floor, in the Midwest is encouraging - maybe things we build really can stand the test of time, weather the storms, and still be useful. I know there are many that like "new", but unfortunately, in today's age that also tends to equate with "fast" and I have yet to see a new fast house stand up to any serious time. I am also a big fan of natural materials....wood and stone. The "new" vinyl siding that the previous owner slapped up fast sometime in the 80s is now completely ruined, but the wood that we uncovered under part of it was just fine.....needed some paint, but otherwise fine. It had been there for almost 80 years with the same rain and sun that the vinyl had been exposed to and failed to stand up to.

I understand the new and improved mentality, but have yet to actually find anything "improved" upon in most cases. I see most people living in subdivisions where all the houses essentially look the same - all have the big garage out front and some variation of "greige" color, ....where is the originality? Where is the individualism? Where is the craftsmanship? I understand that most of the houses built in the early 1900s were also very similar, but they took their time, used excellent materials, and, I will let you in on a little secret that I have learned while living with an architect that has also done construction work, the older houses are cheaper AND better built! Yep, most people don't want to live in the "old" section of town, but would rather have the "new" house in the new subdivision. It is entirely possible that in 60 years, chances are very good that the "new" house will have been razed to the ground and rebuilt due to some design or construction flaw at least once, while the old house will still be standing.

So, I applaud the men that built this house (and the man that continues to build this house), their time, their skill, and their patience. I think of them often and can only hope that the next few owners of the house walk into this particular room and marvel, if only briefly, at the floor and all the work that it must have taken to make it look so nice.