"Rainy afternoon in the barn"

                                                         "Milking 2/26"

Bailyn greets me with a moo.

She is angry about her overnight separation from Boaz

(her steer calf growing bigger by the minute)

even though this has been the pattern for weeks.

.

A little alfalfa hay and she quiets down into our routine.

I wash her teats

and work ointment onto them

and for a moment the barn smells of a pine forest.

Faint cherry smoke passes my awareness 

as milk begins to pulse into the pail.

Across the barn aisle, 

the chickens practice their innate archaelogy

Unearthing bugs, grubs, seeds

and the occasional piece of slate

(a clue into the barn's past, a tale I've heard from neighbors of a third story, a bell tower and a hurricane.)

Out in the yard, 

Sheep chew their cud.

Chew, chew, chew, chew, pause...

Wide eyed, their cheeks fill with regurgitated grass

as if they're pleasantly surprised.

After a while of zoning off into my thoughts and the rhythm of my hands,

the pail is full.

Inside the woodstove is warm,

the air is dry

and the dogs snore.

Red Sky

Out the door too early for a Sunday morning.
The ground is a crusty concoction of frozen wet snow.
The sun rays peek above the trees beyond the pasture

      (Beyond that misplaced home
      An island isolated in its suburbaness.)

And spread in a  red band across the horizon.

Red sky in the morning, shepherd take warning.

But the rain and snow have passed
Harmlessly westward to the sea. 
The wind blows cold, but the sun shines?
Would nature cry wolf falsely?

Safely indoors now illuminated in the night,
I know the sky does not lie.

One lamb is dead and one wide eyed by the wood stove.

Red sky in the morning, shepherd take warning.

The crosier and the mitre

2/12/2013

The pope said he's going to retire.
I guess he feels old or not up to the job.
Somedays I feel like the pope.

Like the mitre weighs heavy on my neck
and my shoulders ache from lugging around the crosier.

And somedays I don't think I know enough to decide what to do
to take care of those who depend on me.

But I'm not old (yet)
and I couldn't, won't, can't
do anything other than what I do.

So I look around me
and see the sunset sitting in my side-view mirror
and the sheep in the hollow grazing below the cows
up on the hill
where the altostratus clouds soak in the last of the sun's rays,
and I'm energized
and ready for the storms or sunshine that tomorrow might bring.

"Wathcing the Grass Grow"

      Disclaimer: If you're anywhere affected by "Nemo," you might not believe the following story.

      When I stepped out of the truck in my pair of non work, shoe-sandal hybrids the ground squished under my feet and the peeper chorus hit my ears. I could've skipped (with a bluebird on my shoulder--who in reality was sitting on the fence post watching things that bluebirds actually care about) through the old paddock into the new one where the cows currently chewed the cud, grazed, lazed and did cow things.
    
     Yesterday I'd strung the fence up hurriedly (admittedly as quickly as you can walking the perimeter of a 10 acre field three or four times wearing hip waders in the mud with a hand full of step in posts or weed-eating sleeping brambles or dead joe-pye and broomstraw) because I was rushing to meet Emily at the VABF (Virginia Association for Biological Farming) Conference. 

     We were excited to see Karl Hammer speak. He founded the Vermont Compost Company that produces compost for organic growers and raises a large flock of egg laying hens without any grain using food, tree and agricultural wastes from their community. Karl, the self appointed compost czar in the nation in the universe that he occasionally and fictionally inhabits, was as funny as he was inspiring. Fifteen or so years ago, he had around 60? hens and was making compost when he realized that the little bit of grain he still fed his chickens was a crutch for himself and not his hens, so he stopped feeding his hens grain.

    Inspiring. The potential... So if you've got hens, go find some five gallon buckets and food scraps, old hay, wood chips, leaves, manure and kick the grain. Exciting!  Like watching grass grow. One of my favorite compulsive past times.

    Every time I drive into Tuckahoe to move the cow herd, I stare at the old hay meadows (now pastures!) and ignore the road, which is fine on the lane at Tuckahoe where if you drive over 10 miles an hour your truck box or suspension will protest by giving out after repeated trips, but not on any type of highway or country road which I am very guilty of as Emily often shouts at me when we're driving somewhere, "Daniel! Are you okay?" She knows that I'm either ogling cows, ogling grass or falling asleep.

       In the past two or three weeks, I've really noticed that the fescue, clover and orchard grass seem to be growing. Even the first spot on the bottom ground (granted the James helps to heat that micro-climate) which the cattle were grazing less than two weeks ago is starting to regrow.

      There's hope in them blades! Soon the grasses, clovers, forbs, shrubs, veggies and saplings will be growing loudly. So next time you're bored, go watch the grass grow.

Another day of misadventures in hard-headedness

       I didn't see the gate swing open, but I felt it. On the ground, i gathered my thoughts. Then got up to make sure Bailyn went in the milk pen instead of the thirty ewes who exploded after her food. Once she was in the pen, I walked her around so that her udders were easy to get at. You'd think that after a year of this milking ritual, we'd understand each other. I guess we're both hardheaded.
     
      Bailyn is hardheaded because she can be. If she flat out doesn't want to let down milk or move, I can only wait her out. Not like she's got a busy schedule. Not like she outweights me by 600 lbs. Myself on the other hand, I'll blame genetics. My dad's hardheaded. Our discussions generally result in dad shouting at me so I walk out and then, the next time I talk to mom, she says that she hopes we can work it out, but the next time I talk to Dad, we laugh about something. A hard head like a glacier is slow to change (although maybe that's changing?).

      When I crossed the James headed north on 45 late on Friday morning, all I could think was, "no bleepity bleepin' way." Two days ago before Emily and I headed home from St. Stephen's market, we'd been talking to Robert about floods we'd remembered and big storms. We didn't expect much that night.

     Earlier that day, my Dad called to catch up and congratulated me on moving the cows to the bottom ground. Said he couldn't figure out a way to do it. Not really true. Before he moved to Tuckahoe full time, the caretaker, a man who I only know second hand through stories, used to graze his cattle on the lowgrounds. This was back in the day (you know, uphill both ways, barefoot in the snow walking to school) before weather.com and weather.gov. Apparently, his herd was on the bottom ground when a flood came up and washed them downstream. Some of the cattle ended up at the Country Club of VA. Tuckahoe tenderloin was on the menu that week.

      So Friday morning, I felt like I'd been caught with my pants down in front of class. I'd completely forgotten about Wednesday night's January thunderstorms. I raced to Tuckahoe fueled by fear. I crossed the tracks onto the lowgrounds and stepped over the electric fence into the herd. I walked south towards Tuckahoe creek and discovered that a 200 yard stretch of my temporarily permanent two strand electric fence was underwater. Not going to conduct much electricity underwater and caught up in flotsam and jetsam. I knew I had move the cows but I wasn't sure how far.

      I called up my brother in law. Even though he lives in North Carolina now, he's a voracious kayaker and learner. I asked him about the river level. He told me it was predicted to crest at 15.6, but looking at the graph, he thought it would peter out and not reach that peak. At that moment, the river was at 14.8. I could see that Tuckahoe creek was up over it's bank and headed into the field with my herd. Down by the railroad tracks, there was standing water, but nothing flowing yet. All good information, but I wasn't settled in a decision yet, so I called my dad.

      From the ski lodge in Utah he told me that 20 feet seemed to be the level when the all of the bottom ground flooded. He also said that if I moved the herd and got worried about the water level that I could just open their fence and let them wander over to Martin Neck which was the highest point on the low ground. Finally, he told me to see how much rain they got in the James River Basin. If they got 10 inches or more west of us, I needed to worry.

      Out in the field with an un-smart phone, I called Emily. After court and between the doctor's office and the post office, she looked on her phone (not while driving of course) and told me that I didn't need to worry. 

      My hard head has ignored Emily's advice before, to the tune of sheep trampling through fences, ewes prolapsing, resulting in grabbing them like a wheelbarrow and tipping them on their heads so that gravity would draw their insides back inside, wasting hours rigging an electric turkey scalder only to use it with a propane tank and many more incidents than I care to type at the moment or you'd care to read about, so I grabbed my step in posts and polywire and moved the cows out of their paddock into one where an eighth of the line wasn't under water and drove home.

      I got home, got some feed for Bailyn and headed out to get her up so I could milk her in the morning because if she stayed out with her calf, Boaz would gulp down all the milk. A few minutes later, that sheep powered gate swung into my head and I found out that maybe a hard head isn't all bad.