Scottish Highlander Cattle Eat Pakistani Himala Salt In Southwest Massachusetts

A newspaper headline for sure. 

But it's true. Our cows are now licking salt from pink salt boulders which have been extracted from the Himalayan mountains. Some of the highest quality salt in the world.

Because of a convoluted story which I don't fully understand, it's happened. A friend in the community is, it would appear, a salt magnate. And she's offered us some unused salt boulders for our cattle. And they LOVE this salt.

Black Sheep, Piglets, Feet, and So On.

Lots of updates! Too many things to prosetize (which is like proselytizing, but totally not) - LET'S MAKE A LIST!

• BLACK SHEEP ARE A REAL THING. I went to go check on the sheep about two weeks ago to spy what I thought was a cat hanging out with the sheep. Dom didn't believe me when I told him there was a black bab lamb (they're apparently rare, duh, that's why the phrase black sheep came around, dee da dee). It's also freakin' adorable.
• SURPRISE PIGLETS! I forgot to mention that the lamb was an utter surprise. As were the 6 piglets I found a few days ago with our sow, Bernice. Man, I really gotta figure out when an animal looks pregnant. How are you supposed to tell when it's already big and round???
• DRIVING STICK - Less exciting than the first two bullet points, but hey, find a pattern and stick to it, right? So, caps. I've been learning to drive a standard transmission, because the big farm truck we use here is, naturally, standard (and MASSIVE). This was thrust upon me when, long story short, a flat tire forced me to drive the truck half an hour back home after a very brief driving lesson the day before. Timidity, timorousness, fear, these were all things that prevented me from wanting to drive the giant box around, but I'm getting used to it. I kind of have to. Yay for learning new skills!
• HOT PEPPERS are hot. Immediately and residually. We make a hot sauce here from a variety of heirloom peppers naturally fermented, and in order to do so, we chop up a ton of peppers. Not quite literally a ton, but a good 50 or 60 pounds. Burning hands for days. I wonder if Honeysuckle can feel the heat when I milk her, and I feel bad about it.
• PIG FEET - I spent most of the day making a soup stock out of pig feet and cooking kidney beans in them. What a cool thing that I got to spend most of the day cooking. And that I cooked pig feet. Never would've thought. Tasted like pork. 
• AUTUMN IS ENDING - I'm so sad all the leaves are on the ground and the animal's water is frozen in the morning. My toes are very cold until about 11am. I feel like on this blog I write about how my feet are cold, alot. My feet are cold. Somebody send me wool socks. Please? Here's my address: 816 Barnum St., Sheffield, MA 01257. Thanks. 
• DESSERT ALL THE TIME - Dom sets up his stand at the Saturday's Farmer's Market next to this woman who runs an organic bakery, and she sends him home with things she doesn't sell. Which means we *always* have amazing baked goods to eat. 100% Belgian Dark Chocolate Layer Cake? Yes, please. 
• RATS, I smell 'em. Found they'd eaten some bread off our kitchen counter this morning. And some popcorn kernels. And a tomato. And so on. They're moving in for the winter. We set traps for them tonight, covered them with toilet paper and wrote TRAP on them so we don't forget and hurt ourselves. I find it very funny imagining the rats are literate and that they think we think they're absolute idiots.
• ELTON JOHN, YO YO MA, PAUL SIMON - These are all people Dom has met. He's always got a good story to tell.
• MINT TEA + JACK DANIELS HONEY WHISKEY. Try it. Do it. Good.

Farmboy out.

The bees are in their boxes; the friends are in their car. We dance in little circles, and the fire warms our boots. The whiskey warms the tea; the radio stays off. Weeks pulse in rhythm.

Long is the amount of time between putting hot water in tea and drinking it. Short is the time between drinking hot tea and drinking cold tea. Absence is long. Presence is short.

Goodnight my friends, sleep well. Sleep at all, and say we meet again.

More Moon In the Pictures

I skipped Thursday's posting, though I promise to make up for it at some point in the future. For now, here's another post that's simply photos of the beautiful chunk of Berkshire land that I live on.

The North Pasture 

Hay Wagon

Me. In Hay Wagon.

Morning Mist

The path to the back field.

The farmhouse.

An abandoned farm truck. And a little bit of my finger.

WINTER SQUASH! SQUAAAAASH.

Sunset.

No, but really. Sunset! SUNSET.

Caterpillar! Parsley!

Tha cattle.

Autumn needles.

Chickens! Eating scratch.

Leaves. Leafs. 

The Brown Duck

The duck sleeps on one leg, its head twisted backwards and tucked underneath its right wing. So, too, sleep the geese. The duck sleeps a little separated from the flock, a part of the group, and, yet, apart from the group.

This duck is brown, to oversimplify its plumage. The shades of brown are exquisite and subtly varied, as variegated patches of white and gray also streak across its feathers. But brown, nonetheless. And its beak, when not buried backwards beneath the wings is petite, and tan. A sort of brown.

In the mornings, and in the evenings, when corn kernels are thrown into the air, sprinklered onto the grass beneath the Linden tree, the duck darts back and forth behind the crowd. The rival gangs of turkeys and geese face off, though the turkeys always win – they’re larger, more aggressive, and greater in number. But the geese are louder. And in retaliation for being pushed to the edges of the spread of corn they push the poor duck off the edge. And so, the duck darts back and forth around the circle of fowl, snatching whatever corn kernels lay unattended.

The duck is adopted, begrudgingly, by the geese, and wanders around with them during the day in the same manner, always on the outskirts of the flock, even now, as the duck sleeps, its left leg hyperextended, stiff, still. The duck blends in with the geese, and is missed upon a quick glance. A moment later, the brown registers. The size registers. Little and brown, this duck is no gray goose nor white gander.

Alone, and surrounded by animals so slightly different (so slightly different is one species from another) constantly, this duck is the sole survivor of a once thriving flock of ducks, picked off so gradually and so viciously by the fishercats. This duck does not complain. Ducks do not complain. Even when the water dish is elevated to the height of the geese’s heads to prevent them from splashing in it and dirtying the water. The water dish is too high for the duck. It must struggle and stretch.

The duck does not twitch as it sleeps. If it dreams, it does so peacefully, or at least in tranquility. On one leg, one foot, it balances, out of consciousness, and slightly separated from the geese. 

Freezer Burn

I can feel the snow falling on my face, because I’m making it fall on my face. In this large metallic box, I am willfully surrounding myself with ice, frost, and snow, a seeming death trap. The floor is slick; a fan whirrs; my plastic ice chipper is broken. It’s time to inventory the fuck out of this freezer.

For the past three days I’ve spent more time than not tackling the glacial shelves of meat in our freezer, cleaning, sorting, and counting the hundreds of packages of meat we have. The saga begins well before my time in many places – the time someone else cleaned out the freezer and then left the door open, thereby coating the entire room with a heavy frost; the time someone put together an order for someone and then buried it at the back of the room to be lost; the time the slaughterhouse labeled both the pork rib chops and the pork loin chops the same thing: pork chops. But the story ends now.

Here, a box so frozen over I can’t open it to figure out what’s inside. Here, all the ground veal in the lamb boxes because someone thought veal and lamb are the same thing. Here, a magical box of sausage – we were out of sausage!

Counting can be much more difficult than you might presume. How did 14 packs of beef bones become 19 on the second counting? Better count again. Why are there beef bones in three disparate sections of the freezer?

At one point, my gloves become so frozen over that it feels like I’m wearing boxing gloves of pure ice. I can’t take them off. My shoes are quickly headed toward the same fate.

I dust the shelves. I scrape the ceiling, I scrub the floor. I hammer boxes to break the ice. I shovel out an entire 5 gallon bucket full of fine frost, and at least three times that much goes down the sink I use to aid me in my quest to remove ice rinks from the meat packages. I wish I had thicker long underwear.

At the end of three days, my list is soggy, my markers nonfunctional, and my mustache could be broken off with an ice pick. But this freezer is in order, dammit. I wish I had thicker long underwear.

Observations

Sideways light is the best kind of light. The way it hurtles through leaves and tumbles onto the ground like fallen pine needles.

Greenhouses are a good place to be during rainstorms. You can’t see any of the rain, but you can see all the rivulets of water traipsing down the walls of your giant fog bubble.

Clotheslines do not work in the rain.

Anticipation of the future to improve it when it becomes the present should not derogate the actual present.

Cows walk just fast enough to stay out of reach as you try to catch them, and much slower than you want once you’ve caught them.

Milking can be a profoundly meditative act.

Three turkeys trapped in a territorial ram’s pasture combined with a hungry calf’s persistent suckling at your pants leads to farm gridlock.

Fresh pears on a hot day are far more refreshing than any water bottle.

Fallen leaves and pine needles create a more marvelous carpet than I’ve seen in any living room.

Roads are meant to be walked in the middle of.

Doing something is almost always better than doing nothing.

Green tomatillo sauce may be hotter than you think. Frozen yogurt will remedy.

Abundance sells.

Overheard at market: “People are so nice in America.” –A Californian Lady in response to someone saying hello to her.

The best time to listen to music is while cooking. The best time to cook is just before you’re hungry. The best time to be hungry is not just after you’ve brushed your teeth.

Harvesting vegetables while they still have morning dew on them feels very much like the earth is giving you a present and asking you to take care of it.

If a spider bites you, and you don’t die, that’s a good sign.

You have as much time as you think you do. The more deliberately you do things the more time you have to think.

If people’s sleep patterns followed the sun, we would all be very well rested.

When dealing with animals, sometimes you have to walk the opposite direction you want an animal to go to make them go that way.

Knives must be sharpened.

Easier and more efficient are not the same thing.

The world is incredibly detailed. Intricacy, complication, and staggering variation surround us constantly.

The mail service is better in rural Massachusetts than in Brooklyn.

The Day I Flew

Hello. My name is Dino. I am a mouse.

I am usually a very fastidious mouse, who likes to keep everything in its rightful place. I don’t like a dirty nest, you see. I like gathered food sorted into piles. Like goes with like. I keep it all separated from my bed, of course. And frankly, I prefer to eat outside of the nest so as not to leave a mess. But this isn’t about my eating habits. I meant to be concise.

Like I said, I am usually a very fastidious mouse. I travel the same paths every day, as much as I can. Until something changes. If my clearing runs out of foods to forage. Or if there are rumors of a cat in the neighborhood. But more or less the same paths every day. I like the way my paths smell. I know I’ve trodden there before.

But on Tuesday, I went outside to find nothing familiar. I hadn’t been outside in a few days, because I had gotten a terrible flu. The McGregors had brought me some acorn broth. Very good for your digestion. Anyway. Everything had changed. The beautiful towering blades of grass I had grown to love lay flat on the ground like dried spaghetti sticks spilled on the floor. And there was a terrible humming in the air. A rattling bass clicking in the distance. Or so I thought. It grew loud quickly, and though I tried to dive back into the front hole-way of my nest I was swept up in the dried grass into a giant churning metal screw.

I tumbled and tossed and scrambled my way along the tines of this dreadful device when I found myself jammed into a thick stack of dried grass. Normally, not an unpleasant experience. Downright cozy in the winter. But frankly, I was squished. And my blood sugar was low. And I was weak. From the flu. Like I said.

I wriggled as hard as I could, but my little mouse legs had gotten wrapped around a few strands of grass that were now tightly matted. And the noise! The racket, you wouldn’t believe. I couldn’t hear myself think. And just as I think I’m going to suffocate from the stuffy grassy air I’m buried in, I feel a slight draft. It seems the whole mess of grass was being pushed along. I could feel my right front paw was cool from the air. Aha! I thought. My escape!

A couple of mighty tugs, with a few graciously helpful bumps from the hell machine, and I was finally on the outside of the grass bundle. Except the familiar ground was trotting along beneath me! I had never known such a velocity. I didn’t dare leave the vehicle I found myself on. I clung tightly to a tuft of dead grass sticking out from the block, trying to think.

And then I WAS FLYING.

All I remember was a monumental SPROING and a fluttering breeze encompassing my whole body as my gut moved weightlessly in a giant arc. The blend of heart-numbing fear and unparalleled adrenaline is nothing I think I’ll every experience again. And before I had time to tuck my tail between my legs I was on something solid again.

A mountain of dead grass in an unusually rectangular pattern spread out before and below me. I was a good 1,000 tails above the ground. And this is where I’m writing from. What I really want to say is, I need help. I need help. I’m trapped up here, and I don’t know where my home is anymore. Please come find me if you find this message. Sorry my story is so long, I just needed to say I need help. But I thought context would be necessary. I meant to be more concise. Sorry.

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A hay baler packs hay, scoots it forward and then launches it into the air onto the wagon, where someone (me) stacks it. The above, if you're wondering, is inspired by a mouse I saw emerging onto the launching end of the hay baler we used the other day.