Samhain Season Altar

I’ve neglected my altar for many moons. Not for any particular reason - life just rushes in and gets in the way. Like everyone else’s, our family has been preoccupied by dealing with life in the Covid era. The new school year has been difficult so far. Distance learning is not going well, and it’s been exceedingly frustrating. We aren’t in lockdown, but there are still strict rules about how many people outside your own household you can see per week and how restaurants can operate and so on and so forth. It’s all exhausting. 

Last week I finally cleaned and purified the altar - and used way too much copal. The whole house filled up with resinous, fragrant smoke. I just used my turkey feather wafter to waft it all around, smudging the house basically, and then opened all the windows and doors wide and let the cool breeze finish the job. 

(Altar tools: the turkey feather fan is for wafting smoke, smudging an area. The pampas grass wand is for doing a limpia of a person - brushing their aura, for lack of a better term)

Except for lining up some squash, however, I left the altar empty. I just wasn’t inspired to decorate it. It wasn’t quite Samhain season, not quite time for the day of the dead altar, and too late to dress it for Mabon. So it stayed empty and clean for a week. 

Today my oldest daughter Rowan was visiting, and Hope asked if we could all dress the altar together. She found an altar cloth (a crocheted shawl I had just given her for her birthday) and we all chose seasonal items to place, either from the yard or from my collection of altar pieces I keep on a shelf in the kitchen. It only took about fifteen minutes and was a really nice group activity. 

The picture of the whole altar doesn’t show details, so here are a few of our seasonal items. Shed antlers, decorated with rose hips. Reminds me of a seasonal crown on Cernunnos, although he isn’t really a deity I have dealings with. 

Pomegranates, of course, are a beautiful and appropriate decoration for an autumn altar. Persephone is sinking into Hades right now, to meet her husband and take on her aspect as queen of the dead. The black corn I brought back from Oaxaca, and is there simply for its beauty. The skull shot glass has apple cider in it, for visitors. And that tattered crocheted animal is a representation of the Black Rabbit of Inlé (What? You haven’t read Watership Down? Go start it right now). 

This altar will probably stay up through the day of the dead, and we will add to it as the day approaches. We will out up photos of our dearly departed, and add flowers and fruits and sweet breads. On the day itself, we will make a big batch of hot cocoa, light a fire, and sit around the altar eating and drinking and telling stories of our ancestors and beloved dead. 

The house feels so much more homey with an altar laid. 

Gourd Or Gargoyle?

Every year, somewhere on the property, there will grow a volunteer squash plant. Usually the compost pile, of course. This year, one grew up through some cracks in the concrete pad behind the house that I believe was meant as a place to park an RV. Though the cracks were small, the plant was large, and entirely covered the concrete pad by mid-July. 

Volunteer squash are unpredictable. Their fruit might be anything from boring old round pumpkiny type things to enormous warty colorful gourds like the ones we got this year. The vine grew three of them, each about two feet tall. I gave one to a friend and placed the others as autumn sentinels on our beautiful new porch. 

Last year’s volunteer squash plant, in contrast, produced dozens and dozens of tiny hard shelled pumpkins. They made a cool October altar. 

What most volunteer squash will NOT be is palatable. Grocery store zucchini, crook necks, and other common varieties are all hybrids, and so plants that grow from their seeds will revert back to one of the (usually useless) parent types. However, they are often beautiful. 

And no matter what the fruit is like, all squash plants have delicious blossoms. This year’s volunteer vine provided us with plenty of squash blossoms for tucking into quesadillas or dropping into chicken soup. 

And now it is dying back. I wonder what next year’s volunteer squash plant will look like? 

It’s Pear Time!

We had a bit of a windstorm a couple days ago, and as usual, it knocked a bunch of pears off the trees. Went out and collected some today - just some - and here’s the result. 

On the left - pears that need to be dealt with NOW or never. Mostly Comice pears - my favorites. They are buttery and delicious and dependably ripen off the tree. There are approximately twenty perfectly ripe pears on that platter, which will be past-perfect tomorrow. 

On the left, a humongous bowl of unripe pears. These blew down off the other two peat trees - I can’t remember their varieties - and every year I am perplexed by their stubborn refusal to ripen. I’ve tried various things - closing them up in a box with some ripe pears or with a banana, and it doesn’t help. I’ve tried putting them in the refrigerator drawer because I have read that some pears won’t ripen without chilling. Nada. They just stay hard like greenish brown rocks until they eventually begin to rot. Someday I will unlock the secret if these pears, but this year I’m going to try cooking them and see what happens. 

But what to do with the ripe pears today? We can probably eat six of them out of hand. Or I could make a pie. Pear pie is delicious. There’s always the dehydrator. Or, of course, pear sauce. But my kids don't usually eat a lot applesauce or pear sauce, and it tends to just sit on the pantry shelf for years. Plus, there’s a severe shortage of canning jars at the moment. 

Maybe I’ll give them away. That’ll probably work! 

Preserving Log (Late Summer 2020)

I’ve been on an absolute tear in the kitchen the last two weeks. Late August/early September is the middle harvest season (Mabon is coming right up), the prime harvest season around here. Here’s a list of what I’ve done lately - as far as I can remember. 

Today the girls and I pressed about ten gallons of cider, from the apples you see above. My friend H. down the way has a dozen apple trees and was only too happy to let us pick some. Tomorrow I will bring her some cider. 

Cidering is hard work. Picking the apples, carrying the crates, washing the apples, hauling the press out and cleaning it, bending down and standing up approximately 7000 times, pressing the buckets, pulling the tight-packed plate back out of the buckets, carrying the apple mast to the compost. It’s messy too, with little bits of apples flying everywhere and juice on everything. By the end I was so sweaty and sticky and tired! Working outdoors in this horrible smoke isn’t a lot of fun, either. But this was the first time we’ve pressed cider in a couple years and overall it’s a great experience. 

The smaller of my two carboys, three gallons, will be made into hard cider, and we’re keeping the rest sweet. I threw two gallons into the freezer, which leaves us about six gallons to get through before it turns into tepache. Not that there’s anything wrong with tepache. 

Plums. This in an on-year for the Italian plum tree, and there are hundreds and hundreds of plums. I’ve dehydrated enough to fill a gallon ziploc bag - more plums than you probably think - and the dehydrator is full of plums right now too. 

I’m taking another swing at plum wine. My past efforts have been drinkable, not fantastic.  Probably I won’t get any better unless I buy a little more equipment - like a hydrometer - and start taking recipes more seriously. But hey - there are so many plums. How far wrong can you go? Right now there’s about two gallons in a primary fermenting chamber and I’ll pitch the yeast tomorrow. I have to go buy another carboy because all of mine are currently full of apple cider. 

One of Homero’s clients brought him an enormous side of  salmon as a tip. I cut it into five approximately 1 1/2 lb pieces, and we ate one fresh and then I smoked the others. One of the smoked pieces is in the fridge to snack on and the others are vacuum sealed and will keep in the fridge for a few months. Probably not until Christmas though, sadly. Smoked salmon is my favorite thing to send friends and family as a Christmas gift. I could throw them in the freezer but I’m not sure how well the texture would hold up. 

Let’s see, what else? Oh, I canned six quarts of salsa ranchera  this week with tomatoes from gleaners. But I’m not doing a lot of canning for the simple reason that I can’t find canning lids anywhere! Apparently canning lids are the toilet paper of this phase of the pandemic. I have one package of small mouth lids left. 

A couple days ago I hit my favorite local farm stands just to see what was available. I brought home some sweet corn (which we ate), some cherry tomatoes (ditto), five pounds of green beans, and three smallish kohlrabi. I started kimchee with the kohlrabi. Earlier this summer I made a batch of kohlrabi kimchee and it was the BOMB. It’s only about a quart, but we will enjoy it. 

I’ll have to decide if I want to use the last of my canning lids to make canned dilly beans with the green beans, or if I will lacto-ferment them like kosher dill pickles. Both ways are good. 

I haven’t even started in the pears. Good lord, the pears! WHY did I plant FOUR pear trees? 

. 

Memorial Painting

My memorial painting of Paloma with her sweet, deceased pet baby goat Stormy. I’m not a good painter by any means - in fact at some point during every attempt at painting I am convinced I am the worst painter in all of North America and I want to set my painting on fire and then set myself on fire as well. But my merit as a painter - or lack thereof - is distinctly secondary to any comfort I might be able to bring to my baby girl. 

I hope she likes this painting, and I hope she chooses to put it up in her room and I hope it brings her a little bit of relief from grief. But even if not, making it was good exercise for me. 

Hope Springs Eternal (More Babies)

 

Just a few days ago, we lost six baby chicks to drowning in the water trough. It was a tough reminder that babies need a special environment, even when the mama hen is raising them herself. They need a warm, dry place for mama to care for them, and they need a very shallow watering dish, no more than 1" deep. They also need grit, oyster shell, and high protein food. They need to have shelter that is devoid of crevasses where they can get lost (another way we have lost chicks - fallen down in between hay bales) and they need a roof to protect them from hawks and eagles. Mama hens do their best, but they are neither very smart, very fierce, nor very dextrous. I hate to imagine (but of course I have imagined) the distress of the mama hen unable to help her babies out of the water trough. 

For the last several weeks - not sure exactly how long - we have been aware that the Mama Guinea hen was sitting on a nest somewhere in the pasture. She disappeared, and for a week or so we were afraid she had been eaten by something, but she made several brief appearances over the following month. She would show up in the barnyard, snarf down some food, and quickly scuttle off back into the weeds. Homero wanted to try to find the nest, but I forbade him, because I read that Guinea hens will abandon a nest if you discover it. 

Yesterday morning when I went out to milk, I saw she was back with her husband. Then I heard some peeping, and sure enough, she was surrounded by a flock of tiny chicks. They were quick, and they stayed huddled together in a pretty solid mass, and Mama stayed on top of them for the most part, but I could tell there were a lot of them. I couldn't get close enough to count them, because Papa Guinea was very protective and he charged me, feathers a-fluff, when I approached. As best I can tell, there are about a dozen. 

I'm not going to try to do anything. If I discover another set of surprise baby chickens, I will scoop them and the mama hen up and put them in the rabbit hutch, but I'm going to assume that the mated pair of Guinea hens can raise their own young better than I can. It's delightful to see Papa Guinea so solicitous and proud. Roosters don't give a goddamn about their offspring, but Guinea Cocks apparently do.

What we are going to do with a score or so Guinea hens, though... that is another question. Google says they taste like pheasant. Guess we will find out. 

Death and Disaster (Bad Farmer, Good Grief?)

A few days ago, Paloma told me something seemed to be wrong with Stormy, her extra-special pet baby goat, the surprise baby that Flopsy popped out at the end of May. 

He’s always been small, and not growing as well as the others, but I attributed that to the fact that his mama was extremely elderly and thin while she was pregnant with him. I expected he would stay small, but had no reason to think he wouldn’t be healthy. But there was clearly something wrong right now. The day before, he has been keeping up with  the herd, but now he laid down on the ground, and was grinding his teeth, which is how goats express pain. 

We took him to the vet - even though it was Sunday. The vet took some blood and a stool sample, and when those came back, told us he had a very heavy load of stomach worms and was severely anemic. He was so anemic, in fact, that the vet said he had only a 50/50 chance of making it through the next 24 hours. 

We were shocked. I knew the goats had worms - the goats ALWAYS have worms. Worms are pretty much impossible to eradicate, especially if they are resistant to medications, as mine are. But we had no idea the situation was this serious. several of my mama goats are quite thin, and they have intermittent diarrhea, and I knew it was time to worm them again, but nobody seemed on the point of death or anything like that. 

We went home with subcutaneous fluids for him, to be administered every four hours, and with three different medications, each with their own schedule. The vet told us to coop him up tight with his mamma so he wouldn’t expend any excess energy. We did that, but when we went and checked on him at 10 pm, he seemed cold, so we brought him in the house and wrapped him up. Paloma slept with him on the couch. 

Despite everything we did, he died at about 6 am. Paloma was devastated, inconsolable. Ever since she was a tiny child, every goat she picked out to be her special pet has died. Stormy was the third. The first died of a urinary calculus, a not uncommon problem in wethers. The second ate rhododendron and died of poisoning. And now this. 

I don’t blame Paloma if she’s angry at me. Controlling parasites is difficult, as I’ve said, but I haven’t been as diligent as I should have been. I didn’t want to spend that kind of money - individual fecal flotations on every goat three or four times a year adds up quickly to several hundred dollars - and the best practices are incredibly hard or imposible to implement. Several months ago when I had a vet out we went over worm control measures, and I just didn’t see how they were feasible. We would need to invest thousands of dollars into fencing to create five or six pastures for rotation, and mow all the pastures every two weeks over the summer so that the eggs would be exposed to the ultraviolet light of the sun. The pastures are full of embedded rocks and pieces of concrete and such that it makes them impossible to mow with standard equipment. 

I asked “what if I took all the goats off the pasture entirely, kept them in a sacrifice area and fed them hay? How long would it take for the eggs to die off and to have a clean slate again?” 

Five years. 

FIVE YEARS. 

In other words, you can’t. 

The only thing I can do is do more fecals, and treat the symptomatic goats on a schedule. And make sure they have the highest quality feed and minerals so they have the nutrition they need to fight off worms.  So that’s where we are. That’s what I’m committed to doing. 

We buried Stormy under the plum tree. Now just about every significant tree on the property has a beloved animal buried under it. Ivory is under the pink dogwood. Dorian and Vladimir are under the pear tree. Now Stormy is under the plum. Paloma is still pining, a week later. 

Then today, I went out to feed the animals and found that all six of the surprise new baby chicks has drowned in the water trough. All fucking six of them. All of them. All of them. 

I can’t bring myself to tell Paloma. 

I feel like such a negligent failure. I KNOW baby chicks drown in water troughs. I should have scooped up the mama

with her babies as soon as we found them and transported her to the rabbit hutch to raise them in a safe place. But I didn’t and now they’re all dead. 

Sometimes I don’t know why I’m doing this. Sometimes farming just feels like one heartbreak after another.  Sometimes it’s very hard to imagine the upside. 

I have to believe that the joy of living close to the land, immersed in the specific nature of our homestead is a concrete good for the soul. I have to believe that forming loving bonds with individual animals, caring for them, and delighting in their grace and beauty is good for us. I even believe that grief is good for us. I do. 

Joseph Campbell, talking about Greek tragedy, wrote “the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.” which is undeniably true. Yet, he was not a pessimist or a melancholy man. On the contrary, he believed that we should strive to align our hearts and our perspectives with the eternal, divine animating principle that gives rise to the forms that we love. If we can do this, we will be peaceful, able to participate in the joy of infinite creation, which does not die with any one form but which goes on playfully creating more and more forever. 

This, however, is not an idea to be expressed to a grieving child at 6 am after a long, terrible, sleepless night. So I was incredibly grateful for my older daughter, Hope, who remembered this part of the FFA creed, which both she and Paloma memorized at school, and spoke it out loud as a kind of benediction: 

I believe that to live and work on a good farm, or to be engaged in other agricultural pursuits, is pleasant as well as challenging; for I know the joys and discomforts of agricultural life and hold an inborn fondness for those associations which, even in hours of discouragement, I cannot deny.

Miracle Milk (Goats are Great)

A neighbor of mine, S., recently had her first grandchild. Her daughter gave birth to a beautiful little boy. Although everything seemed fine at first, the baby wasn’t growing well. He had nearly constant colic, and wasn’t gaining weight the way the doctor wanted to see, even though he was nursing well. After trying several other things, the doctor suggested it might be something in mom’s diet, and suggested going off dairy entirely. 

Well, my neighbor owns a dairy. They are an old fashioned family-owned dairy, the likes of which have nearly disappeared. They own a hundred or so Holsteins, which are milked twice a day, and the dairy truck comes by daily to take away the milk. The family simply siphons off fresh unpasteurized milk from their refrigerated tank for their own use. “Going off dairy” was a serious proposition for someone raised on a dairy farm and used to fresh raw milk with every meal. Mom tried, but couldn’t give up milk for her coffee. The baby didn’t materially improve, and mom decided as a last ditch effort, she would seek out goat’s milk for her coffee and see if that made a difference. 

An aside - people who have trouble with milk and milk products might have any one of a number of different things going on. The most common is lactose intolerance. That is an inability to digest lactose (milk sugar) because of deficiency of the enzyme needed to break it apart. That enzyme is called lactase. All infant mammals produce it, but all non-human mammals, and many human mammals, cease to produce it after the age of weaning. If you don’t produce lactase, you will not be able to digest any milk, from whatever source. 

However, other people produce plenty of lactase but are intolerant to the protein in cow’s milk. They might be truly allergic to that protein, or they might just have an “intolerance,” meaning it causes them indigestion. If the milk PROTEIN is the problem, as opposed to the milk SUGAR, then one might very well be able to tolerate goat’s milk but not cow’s milk. The protein molecule of cow’s milk is about 100 times larger than that of human milk; the goat’s milk protein molecule much more closely resembles that of human milk. 

Back to the main story - my neighbor approached me and asked if I would be interested in trading goats milk for cows milk, just to see if it made a difference to her grandbaby. Of course I said yes. Two weeks later, my neighbor called me and said that the goat’s milk was a miracle, that she had been skeptical that anything in mom’s diet was the issue but she couldn’t argue with the results. Baby’s colic had nearly disappeared and he had gained significant weight. When I went to her house to trade more milk, she gave me a huge hug. 

In the course of my job (medical interpreter) I spend a lot of time just chatting with people while we sit in tiny exam rooms waiting for the doctor to arrive. One of the ways I pass the time is talking about my farm. Many of my clients grew up in very rural situations and this gives them a chance to reminisce and often we connect talking about caring for animals, kitchen wisdom and lore. 

No fewer than three people - all of them very elderly now - have told me that they were raised on goat’s milk from early infancy. One old gentleman told me how he was adopted when his mother died in childbirth and that he was fed goat milk from the first day of his life. When he told me the story he said “a nanny goat was my mother.” The other two were not quite so effusive, but they both told me that formula just wasn’t a thing that was available in the tiny ranchitos where they lived, and if there wasn’t a wet nurse available, then goat’s milk was considered the next best thing for newborns. 

In our area, there are a lot of immigrants from Russia and Ukraine. Some of them that are friends of ours have also expressed an almost magical belief in the power of raw goat’s milk to promote health and vigor. One Ukrainian friend of my mom’s drove up from Seattle - 100 miles - every week to get goat’s milk for his small daughter. 

Personally I have no strong feelings one way or the other about goat’s vs cow’s milk, not even about pasteurized vs raw milk (though I do think people ought to be allowed to buy and sell raw milk). I like goat’s milk. I LOVE goat cheese. If there is any magic in it, I tend to think it derives not from an inherent quality of the milk, but from the fact that it is a product of our own homestead. 

This place, this earth, grew the grass that nourished the goats. My hands cared for them and doctored them, birthed them and milked them. My eyes delighted in their grace and cavorting. My mind learned to use the milk to make cheese. My spirit birthed the longing to create this place and called all of it into being. Together my family made a home here that supports the goats, and they in turn support us. We have a beautiful circle going on here. 

The circle is the magic.

The Horns of the Dilemma (to Disbud or Not to Disbud)

Seven A.M. on a Saturday. We are all peacefully asleep, dreaming the dreams of the innocent. There is no alarm clock set; we will wake when we wake, naturally and without intervention.

OR SO WE THINK. The phone rings, jangling us out of slumber. “Your goat is stuck in the fence again,” says our neighbor, acerbically. “She’s yelling.” 

For perhaps the ninth time this week, Homero truckles  out to the back pasture, wire cutters in one hand, wiping the sleep out of his eyes with the other. He spends a difficult ten minutes wrestling with Lilac, the goat who insists on sticking her head through the fence several times a day, even though the grass is EXACTLY as green on this side as that. 

We used to disbud our baby goats. Most goat farmers disbud, or at least in our area they did when we got into goats. Goats with horns are not allowed at the county fair, which means any kids who have goats as a 4-H project would have to disbud. For those of you who don’t know, disbudding a baby goat involves applying a red-hot iron to their little adorable heads for at least twenty seconds, while they struggle and scream and behave exactly as you would, if someone were applying a red hot iron to your head. 

Personally? I am a feelingless monster (Aquarius) and their pain and suffering didn’t really enter into the equation. However, I am a trained medical professional and I did notice that a high percentage of baby goats suffered serious consequences in the form of neurological symptoms for several days afterwards. And more importantly, no fewer than three baby goats died over the years, following the procedure, even though I took them to the vet and had it done under anesthesia.

Feelings aside, that’s an unacceptable economic proposal: let me give you more money than this goat is actually worth, to perform a procedure that has, in my experience, a 5% chance of killing my animal. That just doesn’t make sense. For a couple of seasons, we tried to do the procedure ourselves, but I found that I am not hard hearted enough (or strong stomached enough?) to apply the iron for the time needed to kill the horn buds and avoid the growth of misshapen scurs. It seems that there is very little margin for error in the disbudding operation - the space between too little and too much thermal damage is slim indeed. 

So, three or four years ago, we decided we won’t disbud baby goats anymore. For the most part, this decision has had very few negative consequences. Goats do use their horns to challenge each other, butting heads and so forth, but they cannot really do any real damage to each other with them - with the exception of bucks who can and do butt pregnant does and cause them to miscarry. There is still a good argument for  disbudding bucklings. We don’t do it, but I understand and support people who do. 

This decision means we have several does with horns, and one of them - Lilac - is so dumb as to get her head stuck in the fence multiple times a day. Another quick piece of relevant information - it is not feasible to remove horns form an adult goat. Horns are lavishly supplied with blood vessels, and removing them is tantamount to an amputation. 

So we have been forced to try and rig up some sort of headdress that will prevent Lilac from putting her head through the fence, which has 4x4” openings. A little googling showed me solutions involving pool noodles. 

I went to the dollar store and bought a pool noodle, and we attempted to attach them to her head with zip ties:

These fell off within minutes. We tried again, this time incorporating a cross-bar: 

This also lasted less than 60 minutes. Our next attempt was to put the entire pool noodle crosswise:

Also attached with zip ties, this arrangement lasted all of 30 minutes. The problem is that her horns, like most, are basically cylindrical. The headdress tends to slip up to the tips. 

Finally, tired of fucking around and very extremely tired of being awakened at the crack of dawn by understandably irate neighbors, we bought a roll of wide, industrial strength duck tape and a short length of PVC piping. None too gently, I restrained the recalcitrant goat while Homero wound foot after foot of duck tape around her horns.

This iteration has lasted five days now. I hope

It will last until her horns grow wide enough to prevent the passage of her head through the holes in the fence. Wish us luck. We want to sleep. 

High Cheese Season 2020 (Making Do)

            A middle stage in the making of cheddar 

In last week’s post on preserving, I forgot to include cheese. Cheese is kind of the whole point of this farm - a desire to milk goats and learn how to make cheese was one of the driving forces in moving up here in the first place. After ten or so years, I have developed three or four cheese recipes that serve me well. As in many endeavors, it is pretty easy to achieve a basic level of competence, and then quite difficult to move on to a level of expertise that allows for consistent, high quality results every time. 

Being who I am, I have more or less decided that I’m happy with my level. I very seldom have an abject failure - all the cheese I make tastes good and is usable for one application or another. But I often have to decide what that application is AFTER I see how the cheese turns out. 

Today I am making chevre and cheddar. Chevre is easy - you just culture the fresh milk and wait 24 hours, then drain it through a clean pillowcase and salt it to taste. Once in a while, especially in very warm weather, the chevre will develop some off, goaty flavors that nobody is fond of. When that happens, I incorporate the cheese into a highly flavored recipe where the goaty flavors will be outcompeted,  like spicy eggplant Parmesan. 

Cheddar is more difficult. It requires several steps, and my recipes include instructions that are patently impossible to follow in a home kitchen, such as “hold the milk at exactly 99 degrees for four hours.” Much of the “cheddar” I’ve made is actually just “plain semi-hard cheese.” The most common defect is that it stays crumbly instead of melding into a single, smooth textured mass. But hey, goat cheese crumbles are a delicious addition to many dishes. Luckily, my Mexican husband is totally used to a dish of cheese crumbles on the table as a condiment, with a spoon, for sprinkling onto everything from refried beans to scrambled eggs to green salad. 

Making do with what you have is a philosophy, one that I’m fond of. I’m not going to waste any time lamenting over a “failure” to produce perfect cheddar when what I’ve actually produced is a pretty delicious piece of cheese. Instead, I’m going to incorporate that cheese into the larger, creative task of taking stock of what I have on hand and weaving disparate ingredients into something new and satisfying. 

This morning, I opened a vacuum sealed package of cheese from early this spring, expecting to find a nice, mild, melting cheddar. Instead it was a sharp flavored crumbly cheese. But it still worked well to make squash blossom goat cheese quesadillas for breakfast. I got no complaints. 

Preserving Log (Early Summer Edition)

I’ve fallen behind on my blogging, I’m afraid. Since the stay-at-home order was lifted early last month, I’ve been busier than a one-armed paper-hanger (as my mother used to say). 

Mostly, I’ve been working a lot. All the procedures and routine checkup and vaccination appointments and dentist appointments that were canceled during the lockdown have been rescheduled, and all the doctor’s and dentist’s offices are full. My agency is down by at least three interpreters. Two of them are elderly and not in great health and so are not taking appointments at the moment, and o e of them got stuck in Spain way back in March and hasn’t been able to come home yet. This means there is a ton of work for me, more than I want, really, but if I turn appointments down they often go unfilled.

In my free times, this is what I’ve been doing as far as preserving goes: 

 - several small batches (3-4 quarts at a time) salsa ranchera, as the gleaners pantry gives me the ingredients

- a gallon of kosher fills that is almost gone now. Yesterday I bought more pickling cucumbers and later on today I will gather grape leaves start a new batch

- a gallon ziploc of dried cherry tomatoes. Haven’t done this before and it’s really good. I season them with a little salt and garlic powder and then dry them till they are very leathery or even crisp. Nice for snacking and they add great flavor to a stew or soup.

- froze about a dozen quarts of strawberries. Went to the u-pick with friends when they were up visiting. 

And today I am breaking out the big stockpot to deal with this:

That’s about 25 pounds of mixed stone fruit from gleaner’s. After I separated the fruit that was too far gone and picked out the fruit that was still perfect for eating fresh, I was left with about ten to twelve pounds of slightly overripe fruit. The last hour or so has been devoted to bleaching, peeling, and chopping and my kitchen looked like a couple of murders had taken place (red plums!) but now I have this simmering on the stove:

Spicy stone fruit chutney. It has cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, red pepper flakes, a TINY hint of garlic, brown sugar and apple cider vinegar. It smells like heaven and it ought to be delicious with pork chops, chicken breasts, or maybe a hearty fish like halibut. It’s super pretty, too. 

But man there’s gonna be a lot of it. I think this may be my Christmas present to a few people this year. 

Still sitting out on the front porch: a crate of corn on the cob to be shucked, shaved, and frozen; and about ten pounds of jalapeños to be turned into rajas en escabeche. I might get the peppers done today, but he corn is gonna have to wait. 

Just Cute Goat Pictures

Paloma and Flopsy’s baby boy. I can’t decide who is cuter. 

My goat-totin’ man, totin’ Bitsy and Bootsy, Christmas’ two doelings. 

Hope being tickled by goat kisses from Sweet Pea, Polly’s doeling. 

Me and Bitsy. I think I’m gonna keep this one. 

DQ- OH WAIT ITS OVER!!

On Friday, the governor announced that Washington state was ending the stay-home order as of Monday morning. All that really means is that we are now officially allowed to leave home for “non-essential” reasons. There are still no gatherings allowed and stores and restaurants have not reopened. Those activities can begin whenever we make it to “phase two,” which depends on a number of variables including number of new cases weekly, hospital capacity, and I did remember what else. Daily life has not really changed, but it’s still a big psychic relief not to be in actual quarantine anymore. 

Today our last baby goat was born. Lilac was the last to pop. She’s our first freshener, the one baby I chose to keep from last year because she was the biggest, healthiest, and cutest. 

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a super easy birth. She had a single big buckling, and one of his legs was back. The kids and I had put her in the mama barn when we went out for afternoon chores and saw she was straining, and then we went inside to eat dinner and watch an episode of cutthroat kitchen, our new favorite show. 

When I went back outside to check on her an hour later, she had a head protruding from her rear, and, after a closer examination, a single foot. Luckily she was quite calm and in no distress, and the baby was alive. I called the vet and asked what to do, since I have never corrected this presentation before. 

“Can you push the baby back in?” he asked. 

“No way.” There was no way in hell I was going to try to push the entire head back into poor Lilac. It was completely out, up to the base of the neck. 

“Ok,” he said, “sometimes you can pull them out with one leg back, if there’s enough room.” 

“How can I tell if there’s enough room?”

“Feel around the baby on all sides and see if you can slip your fingers in between the baby and the bone.” 

I could (Lilac was being extremely cooperative, just standing there eating grain while I felt around in her vagina), so the vet said I could wait for a contraction and just apply some gentle traction - “but stop if she starts to really cry out or struggle, and I’ll come out.” 

It worked. The baby came out a little more and more, until right at the widest part of the shoulders Lilac gave one big bleat - but the baby was on the straw five seconds later. 

What a good mama goat! After her rough delivery, she still took an interest in him right away, and vigorously cleaned him up, talking to him the whole time. The poor little guy took quite some time to stand up. Maybe he was just tired, but for a few minutes I was worried that the poor presentation had caused some nerve damage because he couldn’t seem to support his weight. Eventually I decided to hold him up by the teat and see if he would nurse. He did, and after he got a little milk into him, and rested for a while longer, he was able to stand up on his own. 

I think I made a good choice keeping Lilac. She was bred a little young, but she did great, and having been a bottle baby she’s very friendly and used to being petted and touched. Assuming she becomes a good milker - no reason she shouldn’t - I’ll be very happy with her. 

So that’s all the babies this year. Three does and three bucks. One of the does and one of the bucks are already spoken for; I may keep both of the other does and just sell the buckling. We’ll see. Now begins my favorite time of the year, early summer with baby goats gamboling about outside and lots of milk and cheese making in the kitchen. 

Hopefully it isn’t too late, if Whatcom country progresses through stage two and onto stage three fairly quickly, for a few summer activities that were previously cancelled to be revived. Paloma told me that her theater teacher said that if we reach phase three by the early part of July, they can go ahead with the summer play. Who knows, there might even be Fair in August. 

DQ74 - Double Surprise

Yesterday Flopsy, our second oldest goat at thirteen, surprised the heck out of us by popping out a single baby buckling, quietly and with no fanfare. 

It’s been a couple of years since Flopsy had a baby. She’s elderly, arthritic, and not in the greatest of health, and I’ve tried to keep her separate from the buck so this wouldn’t happen. I don’t want to tax her system - she’s done yoeman service and doesn’t need to earn her keep any longer. 

Nonetheless, she got pregnant somehow and threw this adorable little buckling. Paloma discovered him yesterday morning when she was going out to bottle feed Polly’s babies. 

Oh yeah - Polly had a rough delivery and developed a fever and went downhill so quickly that I had to call the vet out. I was worried that I’d done her some harm by going in to help deliver the babies but the vet said no - more likely she’d been developing an infection since I noticed the premature string of goo four days before she delivered. Whenever membranes rupture prematurely you have a high risk of infection. Polly has been getting a twice daily regimen of antibiotics, vitamin B, and steroids for the past several days and is much better. However she lost most of her milk and her twins need supplemental feedings twice a day. The vet says she may never regain her milk this year. For a few days we were feeding the babies round the clock, but today whenever we tried to feed them they already had full tummies and were uninterested in the bottle, so it seems Polly has recuperes enough capacity to feed them herself. 

In other news, the governor has finally decided to lift the stay-at-home order as of this coming Monday morning. Yhe actual changes to daily life will be subtle - we are still prohibited to gather in groups larger than 5, and most businesses remain closed. Masks are also required in public indoor spaces, and outdoors where people cannot maintain 6 feet of distance. 

There has been a great deal of controversy on the subject of masks - violence has broken out in some places - but I haven’t seen open conflict here. In my small community, I’d say about half the people I see in public are wearing masks. I wear my mask assiduously, because I work in health care and am at high risk of contracting the virus. Wearing a mask protects me a little, but if I happen to be carrying the virus, it protects those around me a lot. Personally I have a hard time understanding the resistance to this innocuous act, but it seems to have become a political football. 

Now that there is a path forwards towards Opening back up, I have a little bit of hope that some events planned for later in the summer that were Called off - like the fair - might possibly be “called on” again. 

In the meantime, we just keep keeping on. 

DQ67 am- More Baby Goats

Polly finally gave birth today. I’ve been expecting her to do so for about a week, ever since I saw her kneeling with a long string of amber colored goo depending from her vulva. That’s usually a sign babies will be born the same day. But for whatever reason, she didn’t give birth, and a full week went by. 

Last night I could tell it would be very soon, because her udder had gotten very tight and shiny. That’s really the best indicator. So we locked her up in the mama barn. I fully expected to find babies when we did morning chores, but still nothing. I kept checking every hour or so, and finally at around noon there was a bubble. 

I sat and waited, but nothing appeared; just the bubble of amniotic sack. After another hour or so, I could see two hooves, but no head. More worryingly, I could see flecks of blood and fecal matter in the amniotic fluid inside the sack. I don’t like to interfere if I don’t have to, but it was clearly time to see what the heck was going on.  

Homero helped me get Polly onto the milking stand, and I washed my hands, lubed up, and took a gentle feel inside.  I was worried I would find the head curled back; that’s a common malpresentation and is often hard to correct. But no - I could feel the head easily correctly positioned above the front legs. But it was very high - too high to slip under the  dorsal pelvic bone. I stuck a finger into the baby’s mouth (and promptly got bitten, proving baby was alive), and exerted downward pressure to lower the head enough to let it slip under the dorsal pelvis. After that it was easy. 

The baby was huge. A big, pretty spotted buckling. Another baby appeared quite quickly - another enormous baby, this time a doe. I decided to quickly go in again and check to make sure there wasn’t a third baby - nope, all empty. 

The babies had had a rough time, as had mama. They were stained with meconium (meaning they had pooped inside - not a normal thing to do and indicative of prolonged labor) and took their time standing up. I scrubbed them with a towel, and waited to see they both stood up, but resisted the urge to further interfere. I went inside and left mama and the babies alone. 

Checking back after a couple hours, both babies are dry and fluffy, and I could feel they had a little bit of milk in their tummies. They look like they are all going to be just fine. 

Now we only have Lilac still to go. She’s a first freshener, and so we don’t know yet how it will go with her or what kind of mama she will be. There’s always a risk with first time mamas that they might reject thier babies. But luckily, she’s the last to give birth this year and so has had the benefit of seeing her mother and auntie birth and nurse their babies. My guess is she will do just fine. 

State of the Farm - DQ66

DQ59 - Baby Goats!

Paloma holding Bootsy, one of Christmas’s twin doelings 

Christmas cleans up Bitsy, her other twin doeling.

Christmas was the first to pop, day before yesterday. She did super well, only needed the tiniest bit of help in the form of a little bit of traction on the first baby. She gave birth to two big healthy beautiful spotted doelings, and then, hours later, to a tiny dead one. 

I don’t know what happened to number three, but it had clearly been dead for a long time, and was only about half the size of the others. My best guess is she was killed when our big mean buck butted Christmas in the side. He butts all the ladies, and it’s a problem. A problem for another day, though. 

It looks like Polly is going to give birth today. When I did morning chores I saw the telltale string of goo. So I put her in the mama barn - which meant evicting Christmas and her babies - and I will check on her in an hour or so. Polly is a wonderful mama, and I’m not worried about her. Well - I’m a little worried she might give birth to quads again like she did last year. But if she does, Paloma is ready and waiting with bottles. 

DQ51 - State of the Farm

The pink dogwood in bloom. 

It’s an absolutely unbelievably gorgeous day. It just could not be more perfect. I think it’s about 72 degrees, the sky is a clear, glass-of-water blue, and the grass is finally long enough to ripple and glint in the gentle breeze. The mountains are out, still snow capped, decorating the horizon to the North and East. 

The girls and I spent an hour cleaning out the mama barn in preparation for the goats’ kidding, which ought to happen within a week to ten days. This year, we have three pregnant goats: Polly, Christmas, and Lilac, who is a first freshener this year. Polly and Christmas have both thrown quadruplets in the past. I hope they don’t do so again, but if they do, Paloma is eager to take over bottle-baby duty. Hopefully Lilac will just have one. It’s always a bit of a gamble with a first freshener, whether she will take to being a mama well or not. The truth his it usually works out better if I stay hands-off and let the mamas figure it out for themselves, but it’s always a challenge to do that. Watching baby goats try to stand up and nurse is probably the single most frustrating thing on the planet, and the urge to interfere is strong. 

The garden is going well. The first salad greens and radishes are just about ready to harvest. It’s almost time to move the chile plants out of the greenhouse, which will make room for tomatoes. Maybe even melons? My cucumber starts have not done well, though, and I don’t know why. I may have to buy a few starts, and if I want to do that, I’d better hurry up because vegetable start season is almost over. 

We are expecting the farm store to call us any day and tell us  the turkey poults we ordered are in. I ordered half a dozen “mixed rare breed” turkeys. I’ve never found raising meat chickens to be worth the expense and mess, but turkeys are both profitable and delicious, if we can keep them safe from coyotes. 

Life feels almost normal - to me, anyway. This is the best time of year on the farm, and the best time of year in the Pacific Northwest. May days like today - sunny, serene, flower-scented - are the reason we suffer through the long, dreary months of November through  February. More than usual, I feel the need to pause, recognize my blessings, and appreciate the ordinary beauty of my corner of the world. 

Hope and I were talking today about the state of the nation, about the disruption and the uncertainty, the fear and the despair for the future we are all feeling. She said “these are shitty times.” I agreed with her and said “yeah, compared with five years ago, these are shitty times indeed. But compared with almost every other time in all of human history, these are wonderful times. Look around you.” 

Look around you. 

Look. 

DQ45 - Beltane (May Day)

Being in lazy lockdown mode, I have not laid a Beltane altar.  But I can share a virtual altar - the one I laid two years ago. It was one of my favorites. 

Welcome to the divine bridegroom, who arrives today to wed the Goddess. Welcome the quickening fire. Welcome the bearer of the flowering rod, the staff that brings forth water in the dry places. Welcome the loving embrace of the divine masculine, of which this world is in dire need.

Celebrate as you see fit (winky face). 

My husband is celebrating May Day today too - a newer tradition but an important one is to celebrate International

Worker’s Day on this date. Most years we attend a march as a family, which calls for farmworker and immigrant justice. This year there was no local march, but there was a call for a caravan to Olympia and a drive-by protest to demand the state impose stricter workplace protections for farmworkers. Current standards for housing, transportation, and work in packaging plants does not follow CDC guidelines for social

distancing, nor do farmworkers get sick leave, or usually have access to healthcare. 

As most of you are no doubt aware, the pandemic has played havoc with our nations food supply chains. Farmers are rightly worried about this year’s planting and harvest seasons and they don’t want to lose crops or money. But just as other industries have adapted new rules to protect workers, so must the agricultural industry, even if it hurts the bottom line. They should appeal to the federal government for pandemic relief, and the government - state and federal - should step up with funds, FEMA housing, or whatever is necessary to ensure the safety of these essential workers. 

Rant over! Enjoy the beautiful Beltane evening and eat something sweet. 

DQ43 (???) Meat Math 2020

One day blends into another. I can’t believe it’s been over 40 days of quarantine. Insanity. Anyhoo. 

Tomorrow is Paloma’s birthday. She’s turning 15 and it was supposed to be her big fancy quinceañera party but of course that isn’t happening. She is having ONE friend over and we are eating cheeseburgers and carrot cake (her request) out on the lawn where we can socially distance. 

The pigs are meeting their maker tomorrow at 9 am. Since these pigs started out as Paloma’s FFA project, she gets a share of the profit. The catch is, she has to actually figure out the profit (if any) from the following facts:

- two piglets cost $100 each

- we bought 10 bags of pig food at $15 each (give or take)

- we are selling the bigger pig, in halves, and keeping the smaller pig for ourselves. The sale price is $3.50/lb hanging weight. We won’t actually know the exact hanging weight for a few days, but I guess the big pig will weigh in at about 200 lbs. 

- for one of the halves of the big pig, we are accepting in trade a butchered lamb worth $200. The value of the side over and above $200 will be paid in cash. 

- the other half of the big pig will be paid in cash. 

- we are not attempting to place a value on our labor (that’s a fool’s game). 

A little quick estimating tells me two things: a) this particular pork venture was more financially successful than past ventures have been. I feel that we came out ahead this time, very handsomely ahead. And b) Paloma is going to be disappointed in her share. 

I haven’t decided what value to let her put on the pig we are keeping - should it be the same $3.50/lb, even though we are not actually getting any money for it? Or should it be the cost of the same amount of pork if we bought it at the grocery store, even though we never actually would buy that much pork? Or should it be zero, because it just counts as free meat for us? What would an actual bookkeeper say? Any actual bookkeepers out there? 

Paloma wants to know. 

DQ39 - Today’s Art

Today’s page in my sketchbook. 

Passing the time today making rhubarb gummies (slice rhubarb thinly on the bias, macerate in sugar and vanilla, dehydrate until leathery) and canning tomato sauce. 

DQ38 - Time Flies

There’s not a lot to report. It’s friday, and I’ve been back at work all this week. There hasn’t been much work though. Clinics are empty, because all routine care has been postponed. The only appointments are prenatal appointments, well child appointments for children under two years old, and emergent illnesses and accidents. All the interpreters are competing for the same smaller pool of jobs, and I have to be checking the website every fifteen minutes if I want to get as many as I can.

I did hear on the radio today that Governor Inslee is considering the possibility of allowing elective surgeries to start again. “Elective” surgery is a slippery term; it covers a wide swath of procedures that I think most people would consider extremely important - for example, biopsies and lumpectomies for breast cancer diagnosis. Joint replacements. Today I had an OB client who had intended to have a tubal ligation (sterilization) when her child was born, and was told that she would not be able to have that procedure. They couldn’t say when it would be available again. I really felt for her - in addition to the stress of giving birth in the middle of a pandemic, with all the disruption and uncertainty that entails, she is now being told she can’t get the procedure that would afford her permanent birth control and permanent peace of mind. 

On the home front all is quiet. The pigs are awaiting the butcher this coming week. The goats will not give birth for another couple of weeks. My kids are plugging along valiantly, doing those homework and their chores. Homero

is working, but not getting paid much. Fixed cars are piling up, but not getting picked up, presumably because his clients don’t have the cash to pay him. He has offered all his established clients payment plans. 

The garden is growing. I’ve been sketching. Here’s today’s project - I made an outline and tomorrow I will color it. 

DQ34 - Food and Finances

It’s been two weeks since Paloma broke a fever, and she’s now been totally symptom free for ten days. Nobody else in the house so much as felt a little warm. Who knows what virus she had, but it’s gone now. 

I went back to work today. They are still doing temperature checks at the doors of the clinic, and I am required to wear my mask. Felt good to get out of the house, and to get back to being “useful.”  There are not very many appointments available - clinics are still only seeing acute illnesses, or well child checkups for kids under two years old, or OB appointments. My next check will be slim. Luckily Homero still has some clients, though his business has been down as well. 

Thank goodness for gleaner’s. There’s plenty of food coming in the front door. I even canned a few quarts of salsa last week and a few cups of lemon curd yesterday. This time of year we have an absurd surplus of eggs, and gleaners had provided a couple dozen lemons. Add sugar and butter and presto: lemon curd, one of the most delicious substances in the planet. 

The pigs are scheduled to be butchered sometime this week. We are keeping the smaller pig for ourselves, and I sold the larger one in halves. In exchange for one half we are getting a whole lamb (well, it’s cut and wrapped, but I mean an entire lamb), plus a little cash. The other half is a cash sale, and ought to fetch about $300. 

The goats will give birth in about three weeks, and two weeks after that I can start milking. Then it will be cheese season. 

There have been some ominous noises in the news about disruptions in the food supply chain - some of which are clearly visible through the lens of the gleaner’s pantry - and it would not surprise me one bit to see prices for some foods rise quickly. But here on the farm we are well insulated from worries about food supply. 

DQ32 - Art in the Garden (R is for Rhubarb)

Trying to make drawing a habit. Pages from my sketchbook over the past two days 

I love rhubarb. I love its ruby buds that are the first bright color of spring. I love its fresh tartness and its celery crunch. It’s so beautiful, and so hardy. Rhubarb is a survivor. It thrives on neglect. It laughs at frost. It is almost absurdly abundant, producing food continuously from April straight through August. Its leaves are lavishly, unecessarily enormous. In the cool shade of those leaves, buried underground, beats a wanton scarlet heart, sending up stalk after crimson stalk like fireworks. Rhubarb is irrepressible. 

If I were to make a garden alphabet, the image for R would be rhubarb, and the text would say “Rhubarb for Resilience.”

DQ30 - Getting Antsy

It’s day 30 of the stay at home order, and day 3 of organized school at home. Guess which one has been harder? My kids, who had been fine at home when they were totally in charge of their own time, are now unhappy, overwhelmed, and anxious. 

When they made their own schedules, they spent their time reading, writing, exercising, cooking, working in the garden, embroidering and sewing, and doing schoolwork whenever they felt like it. Now they are receiving daily assignments from 6 to 8 teachers a day, each of which is SUPPOSED to take no more than 30 minutes. In fact, though, they are spending five or six hours a day on schoolwork and not being able to complete the workload. I saw one emailed assignment from a teacher that involved reading twenty pages (of dense material), watching two videos, and taking a quiz. There’s no way that’s 30 minutes of work. 

Without access to, you know, actual teaching, they are having a difficult time with some of the material, and I cannot help them with a lot of it. My math skills only go up to 6th grade or so. I’m encouraging them to take lots of breaks, get outside, and don’t sweat it too much. I also emailed that one teacher and asked her if she really considered this assignment to be 30 minutes of work?

The enforced immobility is just getting to everybody. Paloma had a small breakdown over her birthday, which is coming up in a couple of weeks. She’s turning 15, and before all this started we were planning her quince, which, for the non-Latinos, is a huge fancy party that is second only to a wedding in a girl’s life. We’d rented the hall and bought the dress and bought plane tickets for her abuelita and tía to come from Oaxaca. Not only is none of that happening, but she can’t even have a few friends over for a regular birthday party. It’s just another day in quarantine. 

It’s a big deal to her, and I didn’t want to minimize it, but I did spend a little time talking about how many things we actually have to be grateful for right now. We are safe, healthy, together, and have no worries about getting enough to eat or paying the rent. It’s a beautiful spring and we have a beautiful farm to observe and enjoy it. The trees are in blossom and there will be baby goats soon. She has a sister that she actually likes and gets along with. Her papa and mama are both home and available. We got Disney Plus. 

It IS difficult. I’ve only been off work for five days and I’m already going a little stir crazy, and the girls have had a solid month pretty much without leaving the property. We got more bad news, which I haven’t even told Paloma yet. The county health department recommended that festivals and gatherings be cancelled right through the end of August. That would mean, among other things, no county fair. Fair is the apotheosis of teen summer social events, and the only time she gets to see her friends from all over the county. This year she asked if she was old enough to stay until closing and I’d said yes. She’s going to be so upset when she finds out there (most likely) won’t be a fair this year. 

Nothing makes me sadder than seeing my children sad. I’ve got to keep myself cheerful somehow, for their sake as much as my own. 

DQ27 - Starting Up Again

The rosemary in the greenhouse is absolutely stuffed with blossoms. Hummingbirds love it and while I’ve been in here potting up some pepper plants several have visited. I originally thought that the totally green ones and the red-headed ones were two fmdifferent species, but I have been corrected. They are just female and male Anna’s hummingbirds, respectively. 

 

Make Anna’s hummingbird (from google). If I could figure out I would post a lovely little video of two hummingbirds going at the rosemary blossoms. 

What we do with leftover Easter egg dye. Now we have lovely particolored hounds. In retrospect, perhaps red wasn’t the best choice for Haku. He looks like he just went berserk in a sheepfold. 

Paloma is pretty much all better. Second day without fever. Still no appetite, but apart from that she’s her usual self again. I will observe strict quarantine through the en s of the week, but I told my work I would go ahead and start accepting assignments again starting next week. 

School is back in session - remotely - and the girls were outraged that we decided to start imposing something like a schedule again. We said we would wake them up at 9:30 - four hours later than they get up during regular school -

And you should have heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

This first day back has been frustrating, especially for Paloma who says her teacher’s instructions are unclear, but I told them to relax and take it slow. There will certainly be kinks to be worked out. There’s no giant rush. Grades will be pass/fail for this quarter, so no stress. 

Tonight we have a bucket of oysters and plan to make a fire. 

DQ25 - Setback

Paloma woke us up at 4 am sick again. The fever was back, and this time accompanied by stomach pain and diarrhea. All day today she’s pretty much been in bed, and hasn’t wanted to eat anything. Still has headache, too. Still no respiratory symptoms. She’s not horribly ill, not even as sick as a regular nasty cold, but she’s not happy either. I’m a bit worried now because apparently this back-and-forth fever thing is typical of Covid. Nothing we can do but wait and see. 

Just finished dying eggs and setting up the altar with Papa and the kids. It feels weird not to have Rowan with us. 

DQ25 - Reaching Out for Easter

First things first - Paloma is much better today. She awoke without a fever, and her headache has much improved. She’s still a bit lethargic and without appetite, but I’d say she’s most of the way back to normal. 

I’m relieved for her sake, of course, but we have to proceed on the assumption that she has Covid19. That’s not just the CDC guidelines, it’s also common sense. Flu season is over. What’s circulating now? Covid. We are in hard lockdown mode for the next 10 days.

Which means that Hope missed attending my sister’s Seder yesterday, and that Rowan will not be able to come share Easter morning with us on Sunday. There has not been a year since my first child was born, 26 years ago now, that I have not dyed eggs with my children. And it’s been many years since we havent  gone to gather for Easter brunch at my mlm’s  house. It will be a diminished Easter celebration this year, but I insist there will at least be colorful eggs and fresh flowers on the altar. Even if our eggs this year will be dyed with household spices (tumeric! Onion skins!) and the chocolate may be Hershey bars from the gas station. 

I am not the only person who will be experiencing a much altered Easter this year. My local church, Zion, has a congregation made up almost exclusively of elderly farmers who are now isolated in their homes. Like a lot of other churches, Zion has made pans for online services. I’m not paying a lot of attention to that because I am wholly computer illiterate - probably more so than most of the aforementioned elderly parishioners. 

So I was thinking about what I could do to participate in Easter celebrations. I decided to make cards, Easter cards, just like Christmas cards. A few weeks ago, before businesses closed, I had sent the girl a to a local craft store to stock up on craft supplies, so we had a set of blank cards and envelopes. I spent a happy couple of hours this morning drawing spring-themed scenes and addressing them to friends from  Zion. They went out in this morning’s mail. Hopefully they will arrive in time to brighten up a few people’s day. 

DQ24 - Fever

Yesterday Paloma woke up with a high fever - 102.4 - and a bad headache. She was hot and lethargic all day. Tylenol and ibuprofen brought the fever down to about 101, but no lower, and didn’t really touch the headache. 

We are being told to assume that any febrile illness might be Covid19 and to behave accordingly. The lack of respiratory symptoms doesn’t mean much in a kid her age - fever is often the only symptom, if indeed they show any symptoms at all. So I called my work and asked them to cancel all my appointments through the end of next week and we decided to step up the level of quarantine to “nobody leaves the house unless it’s absolutely essential.” 

I sent messages to the mothers of each of my daughter’s best friends to let them know. These two kids are the only people Hope or Paloma has had contact with in the past two weeks, and they were ostensibly practicing social distancing the whole time. 

The most likely scenario is that I brought the virus (whichever virus it is) home with me from work. You’d think, that if I had contact first I would show symptoms first, but not necessarily. The incubation period varies. So now we just wait and see if any more of us get sick. Paloma is already better. This morning she woke up without a fever and says her head hurts a lot less. 

Hope and I were supposed to be in Chicago right now, touring the University of Chicago campus. We had a three day weekend planned, which included staying with my cousins who I haven’t seen in many years, seeing the Chicago Field museum, and meeting up with my brother for a very fancy dinner at a very fancy famous restaurant. Instead we are staying home taking our temperatures. Oh well. 

DQ21- Sketches

Pretty ordinary day - two appointments, a little work in the garden, some cooking, and a bit of sketching:

Rosemary in the greenhouse 

Some Beautiful gladioli I got from gleaners 

DQ20 - Feelings About the News

This morning Homero and I were reading the news over our morning coffee, as we do every day, and the girls were just waking up and coming into the kitchen looking for breakfast. I happened to be reading a rather terrifying article about the lack of space in morgues in New York City and the plan to “temporarily” use city parks to bury bodies of Covid19 victims.

I said “Wow” and read part of  the article out loud to Homero. He reminded me of the video he showed me the other day of bodies piling up in the streets of Guayacil, Ecuador, because there was no functioning system to collect them. That made me think of the first time I had heard of something like this happening, about two or three weeks ago in Italy. A man had posted a video to Facebook saying his (mother? Sister?) had died at home two days previously and he couldn’t find anyone to come get her body. At the time, there had been fewer than 100 deaths from Covid19 in Italy, and I wondered how it could be that such a small number of excess deaths could cause a complete breakdown in the death-care industry. I asked my brother - a systems engineer- if he could explain it and he said No. 

Hope broke into this conversation and said in an angry voice that she didn’t believe it, she thought the media were whipping people into a frenzy for ratings and it wasn’t true that bodies were going unburied in New York City. To my shame, I didn’t immediately recognize this as an expression of anxiety, and instead started to argue with her about media literacy and to talk about reliable versus unreliable sources of news. She said  “I choose not to believe it” and I replied “then you choose to be misinformed” and she grabbed a muffin and stormed off to her room. 

I felt remorseful pretty much immediately. After all, I’m shocked by the news and I also struggle with the urge towards denial, and I’m middle aged. It must be absolutely terrifying to be a teenager and to be realizing that here’s a situation that your elders are totally unable to control, that many adults are running around with their hair on fire panic buying toilet paper because that’s all they can think of to do. It must be awful to experience your plans for your future - in Hope’s case, the SATs, college applications, a summer job -

dissolving into uncertainty. 

Speaking of which, we got another piece of bad news this afternoon. The Governor ordered schools to stay closed through the end of the year. Kids will not be going back to school this spring. There will be no commencement, nobody will walk down the aisle and get their diploma and shake the principal’s hand and hear the applause if their relatives and friends. No graduation parties. No prom. 

There’s nothing I can do about that. I AM helpless to change the situation. But at least I am not helpless to provide them with some consistency, some stability, and the going on of ordinary home life. Things really haven’t changed much on the farm. Today has been gorgeous and warmer, sunny and dry. We got a bunch of work done. Homero is shoveling out a winter’s worth of deep litter in the barn. I mowed the front lawn and the orchard. Then the girls and I moved some more dirt and planted some herbs and some carrots. 

Now I’m sitting out on the lawn in a lawn chair next to Homero; he is reading  and I am writing. the dogs are laying in the grass chewing on some bones they found in the back pasture. Paloma is doing cartwheels and Hope is playing with her ferret. Soon I will go inside and start dinner. 

DQ18 - Accomplishments

The rosemary in full bloom inside the greenhouse. Greenhouse cleaned up and cardboard laid over the ground to stop weeds. 




We borrowed a rototiller from a neighbor, and Homero tilled the compost pile, at least enough of it so that the girls and I could bring over a few wheelbarrows full of dirt to fill some new garden beds. The bathtub in the foreground in a new bed - we discovered it upside down under the pear tree after the tree was pruned and the blackberries cut back two weeks ago. Haven’t decided what to plant in the new tub yet. Might wait until it’s time to plant warner weather crops like beans or tomatoes. 

There are two 4x4 beds in the background, near the lawn chair. They are almost entirely falling apart, but they still have enough cohesiveness to serve as garden beds, as long as we stay on top of the weeding. One is planted with radishes and one is planted with cylindrical beets. 

We also broke down a couple dozen cardboard boxes and laid them down as as a prophylactic against the weeds. It’s ugly, but it’s necessary. 

Harvested nettles yesterday and today made a nettle and Swiss cheese quiche. It looks good but I don’t know how it tastes because el sent it to our neighbor in exchange for the use of her rototiller. Hope they liked it. I have the other half of the nettles blanched as stored in  a ziploc in the fridge. 

Today’s page in my quarantine art diary. I’m going to try and set a good example for my kids - being creative and making art isn’t about the product, it’s about the process. It really doesn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things, if the art I make is “good” or “bad.” What matters is that I enjoyed the time I spent doing it, and that I’m creating a record. My mom managed to instill in me - accidentally, of course - the idea that a thing is only worth doing if one is “good at it,” and that if one isn’t, then any effort expended in the pursuit of a given activity is a waste of time and probably a sin. 

Thats not a message I want to pass on. 

Today was a good day. My shoulders and back ache gently from moving a ton of dirt. The girls helped a lot, they are each stronger than I am now. I’m grubby and tired, but happy.