22nd August, 2018 Wednesday
Tea this morning is an Earl Grey with locally sourced fresh honey and fresh goat milk. And when I say locally sourced, the local in locally doesn’t mean within 200 miles. Its right here. The honey I bought at a tiny farmer’s market nearby from a man in his 70’s who has been tending a hive for thirty years five miles from my house. The goat milk I used in my tea comes from a cattle rancher’s family’s Nubian goats who are milked by their 5 year old daughter.
My dreams were vivid last night but elusive to my memory. Last night was like many nights at this stage of my life. Sleep solid for a few hours and then not. The wee hours of the morning are now my friends. I have discovered how wonderful it is to read by listening. Technology. Ear pods and a cell phone. I have read more in the last four years by listening than I ever did by reading with my eyes. I set the timer on the phone depending on how interesting the read or reader is. And I am usually guaranteed to be asleep shortly.
I am on the left side of 60 if you look at a line of numbers from right to left. Age has not been something I was aware of until menopause took my hormones 2 years ago. I feel it now creeping in at my capacities. Facing the irreversibility of its fact is a strange concept for me.
Lets see, last period a little over two years ago, six months later my daughter marries as my mother is diagnosed with lung cancer which takes her to the other side 9 weeks later, Trump gets elected, three months later mammogram sets off alarms which prompt three weeks of fret and frustration at being caught in the Breast Cancer Diagnostic machine for nothing, two months later my mother’s memorial which I knew I shouldn’t have gone to leaves me spent and questioning all my life choices, and then I find a new house in the land of locally sourced food, I mean really locally sourced food, which warrants a spontaneous move which took almost a year to actually get everything in the new house including the melding of households between my husband and I, our animal zoo and my daughter and her husband and their cat and dog. And then came the chickens. Are you still with me? Or have you wisely left the vicinity?
The new house, which is now home, sits on a lovely cleared relatively flat five acres. The five acres is one of four 5 acre parcels which are the last big pieces left from an old dairy farm which was probably part of the first settlements here. Our farmer’s irrigation water rights go back to 1908. Our rock wall probably does too.
Our five acres is an open field. My daughter and her husband being 30 somethings with several degrees and several years of experience in environmental and wildlife fields ranging from teaching in classrooms to tracking the charismatic megafauna in the wilds of the American West, had for years imagined that they would want to setup life in this community of locally sourced food locally sourcing food. Oh, I forgot, sustainable is a keyword in all this.
This home with a separate apartment above the garage and its five acres of open field beckoned as a place for all of us to live out the dreams we all had been longing to manifest.
For me, it was being closer to family in a non urban landscape in a comfortable house and I will admit, my definition of comfortable might define me as “high maintenance”, yes, indeed. For my husband, his landscape also needed less urbanity as long as he could reach the outside readily and have tasks to complete with his hands, he would be happy. For my daughter and her husband, it was about being closer to his sister and her husband and their vegetable farmer’s life. And to have the possibility to create a sustainable locally sourced food project of their own.
So the Project that came aborning was pasture raised chickens which rotate across the field in movable structures called chicken tractors thus lightly tilling while they fertilize. Moving them prohibits the build up of too much scratching or pooing in one place so they benefit and the field benefits. Happy chickens and happy field. Right? Sure. Sounds good.
So the chickens came. And a Farm was born.
Tea With Me 