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So I haven't really written anything about my experiences here at the nature preserve yet, because they come on so fast and complicated that by the end of most days I'm too tired to bother. But life here has been very interesting!
I guess I'll just start with today. This is mostly just about the house where I live, I'll write more about the nature preserve itself later. I live with two other people right now, a young couple named Tim and Miriam who are engaged. We live in a big, old, somewhat smelly, rickety farmhouse on Highway 50 about a half an hour from Chillicothe. We have 7 barn cats, 3 inside cats, 3 dogs, about 15 hens, about 30 chicks, one rooster named Roger, one sheep, 4 goats, one kitchen rabbit named Dexter, and lots of different gardens. We're expecting two new interns to come and live with us in about a week's time, and we're getting the house ready for them.
One of the barn cats
Today was our day off, which always seems to center around cooking and eating all day. So we got up and made some coffee, and drove to the Mennonite grocery store. On the way there the Appalachian foothills were covered in rising mist. I've come to understand a "holler" as a mother of sorts. A cupped area where things are retained, ways and people and living things.
The Mennonite grocery has a fantastic cheese assortment, at very low cost and very high quality. Every time we go we try to buy one more kind of cheese than the last time. Today we bought 6 kinds. The smoked cheddar is the house favorite, and it's very good with the store-brand raspberry salsa. I think this salsa would be a great accompaniment to pork. We usually end up eating lots of cheese and salsa as soon as we get home.
Today was the first time I ate chicken from last year's group of chickens that were raised here. My roommate Miriam stuck it in a crockpot in the morning, and we had that for dinner with some garlicky mashed potatoes, salad and raspberry wine made by Miriam's neighbors in Wisconsin. I've been making a new dressing that's very simple but tasty, and quite refreshing for summer. It's just
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon oil
pinch sea salt
teaspoon lemon juice
1 cup of seedless red grapes
blend in blender for a minute or so until emulsified
It's great for when you buy grapes and have those few stragglers at the bottom of the bag that look a little sad; no one wants to eat them but it doesn't seem right to waste them. The dressing is a pretty bright pink color.
I've got the chicken carcass simmering down with some veggies for stock, tomorrow I'll make Italian Wedding Soup with it. I have to admit it was a bit funny eating all that delicious chicken, in front of the pet chicks we are keeping in our breezeway dining room! My daughter and I decided to get just a few chicks of our own this year, under her strict condition that they not be eaten; we ordered one chick but they sent us 4. One of the 4 chicks has already mysteriously disappeared-- that's the way with chicks. They're sort of-- half-alive at first, it seems. Because our chicks are smaller than the rest, we've moved them inside with us. Our chicks are a different breed than Tim and Miriam's, I think they have White Leghorns maybe? Our chicks are a breed called Barred Cochin Bantams. A bantam is like a very small miniature chicken, supposed to be very personable and plucky. I think this must have been where the term "bantam-weight" for boxers came from. Our chicks are "barred"-- striped. A cochin is a very old breed of chicken from China I believe. They have an endearing look to them due to the fact that their feet have feathers, too. Here's what our chicks look like now, and what they'll look like fully grown:
Today was drizzly and a little chilly, but we resolved to make the best of it. I managed to take an amazing three-hour nap in the middle of the day, and I awoke to find the goats escaped from their pasture, and joyfully roaming the garden, buffet-style. We coralled them back into their area, only to see one of our new stray cats, Linus, dart by with a baby chick in his mouth. It turns out the chicks were escaping from a tiny hole in the corner of their pen and were running around willy-nilly in the pasture.
Tim has been using a "chicken tractor" type method with the chicks, moving their pen around the pasture every day or so to keep the chicks supplied with fresh grass and bugs, as well as fertilizing whatever part of the pasture they are on with their droppings.
We have a rooster named Roger who is the bane of my existence. Way back at the beginning of this group of chickens, there were many roosters. They were killed and eaten in order of their fierceness, with Roger remaining as the most genteel. Well now that he has 15 or 20 biddies to watch out for every day, his personality leaves much to be desired. He's only doing his job; strutting his stuff and throwing his weight around, but it's a bit fearsome. Roosters have big spurs on their back feet that can pierce the toughest leather boots or gloves. Roger and I are walking a thin line between love and hate. Somehow I want to get across to him that I admire him, but that I'm bigger and innappropriate behaviors toward me are a one-way ticket to the chopping block. But I don't like dominating things. Here's what Roger looks like, and just imagine going about your business in your yard and having one of these come running around the corner hell-bent for leather:
What Roger looks like. A SOB. What a cock. Shove it up your crow-hole, Roger.
The garden that the goats were frolicking in is an interesting one. It was an old perennial flower garden left over from Patty, the previous tenant here, that had become overrun with weeds. In the old days, I might have just weeded out all the weeds, cut down the invasive weed trees, and mulched the whole thing back to well-manicured glory. It would have been a lot of work to keep some flowers looking okay for 2 or 3 months a year. What we did instead is pretty great I think. Miriam and I have been studying edible weeds and now cook with them almost daily. So we just went out into the garden, found out what was edible, and Tim marked out some beds around that using branches and hoeing out whatever was in the paths. He built a rough-hewn table and put it under the peach trees there, which are doing much better now that the goats have eaten all the staghorn sumac and ailanthus that was crowding out their sunlight. We now have several giant beds of burdock, which we eat on a daily basis. This is keeping all of our skin glowing with health and tastes great too. There are a few other beds with yellow dock, various mints, lamb's quarters, mullein, and of course the flowers are still there. It's quite a nice place to go sit and watch the sun rise as it is on the top of a hill overlooking the goat pasture and the foothills below.
Delicious burdock-- the sweet and earthy tasting root cleans the blood and liver and is frequently used in Japanese cuisine (gobo)
Mullein--- great for smoking when you have bronchitis.
After dinner we had a walk down the back lane and some dogs and cats went with us. Sometimes it doesn't seem possible that I get to live somewhere so beautiful, but it wouldn't be for everyone. The minutiae of life seem to slip away here, and everyone seems like one big tumble of happy, messy puppies. Most of the things that used to occupy me in the city seem to slip up into the big silence of the sky, and there is only real work, and real clothes, real smells, and real people. Sometimes things are very, very difficult here, and sometimes they're so easy and beautiful it doesn't seem real. I've come to think that maybe that's really living-- pain and difficulty pay for the times of true beauty, and make them sparkle more, too. There is real danger here, but also real wholeness. The two things seem to need each other. Sometimes I think the price we've paid for our modern lifestyle is that we can't really engage with life, things are too easy and predictable-- or might I even say, boring? But I'm not sentimentalizing things. Engaging with life is painful and strenuous, but it's also immensely rewarding.
Thanks for reading!
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