On Death and Farm Life

Last week, I spent a morning lumbering over a 6-months-along-but-looks-more-like-8-months pregnant belly, collecting tools from the shed to pick away at a small shallow grave in still frozen ground near the back of our shelterbelt.

I'd found my favorite cat dead in the barn that morning. 

When she got sick, I'd wrapped her in her blanket, the one she used to curl up with on our bed, and less than a day later, when I found her dead, I kept her in that blanket as I placed her in the grave – the biggest one I could muster in mid-winter, mid-pregnancy.

I vacillated from “it's just a cat” to wailing uncontrollably at the foot of the grave, from grunting with the pick axe and just getting it done to shrieking like a scared child at the stiffness of my sweet cat's limbs, claws out, still clinging to the blanket.

As I buried the little black and white cat, I was struck at how equally I felt guilt for feeling too little and weakness for feeling too much.

I'm no stranger to dead animals. I've mourned my share, especially as farm kid. But, it was different then. I had someone to take care of the aftermath for me, leaving me with just the emotion, the heady wrangling that comes when you're faced with death, and none of the actual logistical chores that come with it. Whether it was the day the “custom slaughtering” vehicle pulled up to the house or the day I watched my cocker spaniel get hit on the highway, my reaction was allowed to be emotional only.

But now, as an adult, I have to deal with it all – the emotion and the cold, hard logistics. I have to cram the already rigid beloved cat in a too-small grave. And, I have to slit the throat of the Thanksgiving turkey, carry the blood bucket, pluck the feathers, cut the meat, throw away the dead baby turkeys or dispose of the body of a goose who strangled itself in the fence.

Death is part of any life, but on the farm, it's part of everyday life.

That has meant a bit of hardening in my heart. I actually cringe a little at admitting that, but it's true.

I used to be the one who brought home stray cats to the farm to “save” them. I insisted as a 10-year-old that Peter, the cat I'd saved from the tree in town, get extensive surgery to reset his leg and stitch his ear back on. Just a few short years ago, Jacob and I spent hundreds upon hundreds of dollars on the very cat I buried last week when she came down with some weird auto-immune thing. Back then, I wrapped bandages and applied ointment several times a day. This time around, I just wrapped her in her favorite blanket, made her comfortable and let her die. (In my defense, she was an older cat and had something obviously serious going on that I was pretty sure a vet couldn't fix. And, she'd become a barn cat – no less valuable than the house cat she was before, but just in a more natural habitat. I like to think she was happier there – in life and in death. But, also, she was just a cat.)

See? The equal parts guilt and weakness.

But what was worse within all of that was the strange, terrible feeling that somewhere along the line, life took away a little smidge of my sensitivity.

I'm still wrestling with that – whether it's a good or a bad thing. There's a fine line between becoming strong and becoming heartless. And, I'm trying to remind myself that the juxtaposition of practicality and sadness I felt burying that little cat is a good thing – it means I haven't crossed that line.

I never want to stop feeling the emotion about the loss of any life, whether that be a cat or turkey or a pig. But I also don't want to go back to that naive place I was as a child in which nothing should die, ever. And if it does, I don't have to see what that really means. Too often, I think we shelter kids (and ourselves really), girls in particular, from the full picture of life, showing only the pretty stuff and letting them, and ourselves blissfully ignore the hard, yucky stuff.

My first instinct was to wait for Jacob to get home and have him deal with the cat. My friend Renee suggested I call my Dad. My friend Brooke offered to come over and do the deed. But, for some reason, I felt like I had to do it. For one, I don't want Willa growing up thinking that only Papa deals with the hard stuff. And secondly, I just felt like I need to continue to prove to myself that I can be soft and sad and hard and practical all at the same time -- that I have the capacity and strength to deal with both the emotion and the realities.

Still, I took Willa to a friend's as I did the burying, not wanting to expose her to that just yet. It was the same instinct I had this fall when, just before the first turkey was killed on slaughter day I brought her back to the house and spared her the blood.

But both times, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. Maybe it would be easier on her to know, early on, the dichotomy I'm just now coming to grips with. Maybe it will be smoother for her to just know from the beginning that death is hard and sad but also necessary and inevitable.

Then again, she's two. We still have lots of time to talk about it and many, many opportunities. And maybe by the time we get there, I'll finally have figured it out for myself.

The New Farm

I feel like we are really starting from scratch.



I should have been documenting this whole thing -- the big leap our family has taken since I last wrote -- but it's almost as if it were too precious, to fragile to really put into words out there in the world. Not just yet anyway.

See, since my last post, we bought a farm. A real, honest-to-goodness farm -- of our own.

We've been working toward this for the last four -- eight, really -- years.

"If only," we'd say, "we had a place of our own."

"Someday, when we actually have a farm..."

"If we ever own our own farm we'll..."

And now we're actually here, on our own farm. 

We did first things first. We moved our stuff, turkeys and equipment.

Then, we broke ground.

Then we butchered said turkeys and delivered them across the state for Thanksgiving. (We have so many thanks to give for all the help we got with that.)

And now, that the dust has settled, it's started to sink in that this magical place is ours. Ours.

Then the panic really set in.

When you finally get something you really, really, really want, it can be a bit paralyzing.

Because now, we don't have any somedays. We have todays.

All the things we thought we could make happen if -- they don't have ifs anymore. They have whens. Now the real work starts.

And all that stuff I thought about our someday? Some of it was true and some of it wasn't, reaffirming that darnit -- life, motherhood, farming, love -- it all takes work, no matter how magical the place or how nicely situated the outbuildings or how well-organized the kitchen.

Everything is a bit easier, yes, and we're doing it all in a breathtaking place, but it all still takes hard, heart-ful, back-aching work.

One thing hasn't changed, though: It's still so very worth it.

When Things Make Sense, And Then They Don't

There are days when your life make sense. And then there are days it doesn't.

Being aware and respectful of how quickly it can change from one to the other can make you more thankful for the days it does and more patient on the days it doesn't.

On Monday, it all made sense, all this scrambling around, all this juggling. This cobbled-together existence of farm and work and home and parenting -- it's for something.

Mostly, it's for what I get to do on Mondays when I deliver farm shares to customers and veggies to the Mountain Front Market in Choteau. On those days, I get to: 1) get food to rural folks who are so appreciative of good food and good farmers and good local economies and good community and 2) do this while my daughter, who I often worry will someday resent the fact that we spent our summers schlepping vegetables all over the Golden Triangle, has a big time helping our friend and market owner Jill. This week, she helped stock apples.

Jill told me later that Willa would pick up an apple and stare at it for a few moments, intently exploring each curve and bump and color before handing it up to Jill to stock. "Isn't that what we should all be doing?" Jill asked. Stopping to smell and touch and really see the things in our lives?

After all that hard work, Willa sat down for a glass of milk with Jill in the back and Willa colored while Jill made new labels for the produce I'd just dropped off. I had a vision of her at 5 or 6 or 7 doing the same thing every Monday -- helping Mama deliver veggies and drinking milk with Jill in the back of a grocery store.

I thought about the stories someday she might tell her kids about those afternoons spent in the store. Picking out treats. Coloring. Hanging with her pal Jill.

I thought too about how similar her stories might be to the stories my Mom tells me about her childhood in her grandparents' store.

(My great grandparents, Lebanese immigrants, owned and ran "People's Grocery" in Great Falls -- which my Great Grandpa Mike called "Pe-op-o-lee's" -- for many, many years. Maybe the retail side of food was in my blood as much as the growing side after all.)

Sometimes, that full circle stuff just chokes me up, I tell you. I turn into a big, sappy fool. 

But, then, on Tuesday, wham. Nothing made sense. There were many tears, too much to do, not enough time, calls and texts and urgent emails, lettuce wilting, needing ice, conference calls wedged between my shoulder and chin while I tried to walk a squirmy, hot, cranky toddler in a stroller (nap, dammit!) for the third time around the neighborhood, spilled liquids on keyboards, sticky skin, dishes piling, dog puke on the couch and a mountain of laundry that seemed to have doubled in size overnight. Oh, and a veggie pick up at our aforementioned disaster of a house.

No, I don't have any photos to illustrate this s*^tshow.

But then! Wednesday. Harried, but manageable. Willa's pal Carey, who takes care of her occasionally while I work, saw the ridiculousness the day before in our house and so she offered to take her for the whole day. (And, she baked one whole cake and brownies and cupcakes for us to boot. That woman has saved my life more than once, I swear.) And then to cap off a productive day, we had our awesome farm apprentices over for dinner.  (Stuffed zucchini. Recipe to come.)

As I finished dinner prep and got everything out to the table, finally, I felt a calm I hadn't felt for a few days.

And I was able to stop long enough to witness this little girl's Papa tickling her with a few leaves.

Things made sense again. Just. Like. That.

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By the way, I'm back on the column writing for The Daily Yonder (a very cool online journal about Rural America) this week and my return column is about making room for special things to grow.

Cheap Sunglasses and a Book, a Real Book

I mean really. Who knew a cheap pair of sunglasses and a new bike helmet could create this kind of joy. (Or, whatever that is.)

In other news this week, both Jacob and I are published -- like in a book, a real book -- writers.

Our copies of Greenhorns: 50 Dispatches from the New Farmers' Movement came this week and wowza, I wasn't prepared for how cool and different it would feel to hold a book -- that contains my words -- in my hands. Pretty neat-o.

The book is really gorgeous and well done. Among other great essays, it contains this one, titled "The Value of Our Produce," which I read just as I really started to struggle with this whole how-we-value-food-thing. (I say "started to struggle" because the inner conflict continues to build in me. But, that is a topic for another time.)

Anyway, here's a little gem from that essay, written by Ben James. 

"What is a carrot worth? A bunch of kale? A handful of berries? Too often, I find myself on the tractor making quick calculations in my head. For a bed of carrots, there are the soil amendments, the cover crop last fall, the chicken manure, the organic fertilizer, the plowing, tilling, seeding, irrigating, thinning, weeding, harvesting, washing, bunching, packing, and selling. Plus the cost of the tractors, implements, and fuel. Plus the cost of childcare and preschool. Plus, somehow, all the time spent on the computer (where does that fit in)? And I haven't even mentioned the cost of the land (hundreds of thousands of dollars, in our case). The sheer number of labor hours and material and property costs that went into helping this soil produce these carrots. I ought to shellac the carrots and hang them on the wall."

Sometimes, I feel like shellacking everything we grow.