It is Sunday morning. Our 17 yr old is downstairs vigiliantly flipping bacon to the strains of Renata Tibaldi on the CD -player; keeping the dreams of both her parents alive. She hands me the Book of Names that I’ve had since 1996. It’s tattered and taped, and retaped. Today the spine is shalacked with grease and slides in my hand.
We are trying to figure on a name for the new baby doeling
in the barn. She is one of a set of triplets, born just three nights ago- our
first spring with Mini Nubians. The Doeling is marked out like a galaxy, with
moon spots and multi colors everywhere. Admittedly, a “foreign” name would suit
her. She’s more a Marlene Deitrich or Greta Garbo than a June Allyson or Jane
Powell. In any case, the birth of her and her brothers came on the Eve of the
first day of spring…the Feast of St. Joseph.
I am feeling anything but spring-like, having damned the
first batch of bacon to blackest hellfire while attempting to make pancakes and
put up a gallon and a half of maple syrup AND watch the bacon at the same time.
Nothing tests a man like anticipating bacon, and then finding it burnt as
pitch. I feel my husband’s pain as he swallows disappointment and salivation with
an admirable will. My daughter’s second sally and a new pot of coffee later has
us all celebrating the new season - and the sabath- in style.
2 years ago severe spondylosis of the spine and an old back injury
heavily curtailed our animal husbandry on the farm. A subsequent return to
graduate school with a sojourn in South Texas brought it to a temporary
standstill. Having experienced the internal chaos of farmers living the
suburban life without daily chores, we were eager to get up and running again
when we returned to our River’s edge St. Croix valley farm last year. Chasing
it was like chasing sanity. Chasing purpose. Connecting the dots of our family
history, and remembering how to live again.
When, for 16 years, you mark seasons by when to tap the
trees, when to start the seeds, when the goats kid out, when the chicks arrive,
when the garden is tilled, when the transplanting begins (as the forsythia
blooms), when the weeding time comes, and the thinning, when it’s time to start
the broiler chickens or get in the feeder pigs, when the onions need to be
cured, when the harvest comes, when the bulbs should be planted, the apple
trees pruned, the wood cut and stacked, when to put the buck in with the does,
and when to butcher the above mentioned pigs…you participate in the earth’s
annual progress around the sun and its daily twist on its own axis with an
open-eyed, hands twisted around the piece of mane of that lively pony that is
life, all in.
“Some people understand the privilege of stillness and can sit and breathe and look and hear and smell the world turning and let what’s next wait the while.”
-Niall Williams “This Is Happiness”
Last summer’s return to farming took the slow approach for
us, as we shored up lose ends and painted the peeling barn, put in a much -needed
gate, and re-seeded poor spots in the pasture. An unexpected accident way-layed
our hopes of re-stocking the barn. I nursed a broken fibula into the Fall,
which I discovered 4 months too late. October arrived. The old nudge to be “out
looking for a suitable buck” faintly revived in my daughter and I. “I wish the
farm would come to life again” sighed my two littlest ones. It was all I needed
to hear. Each season brings an opportunity to jump on or watch it fly by. I was
tired of being a spectator on our own farm. But my new physical limitations
were real, and I was faced with the possibility of having to give it up if we
didn’t adapt and adjust.
Enter: Mini Nubians.
Judge if you want to. I was also one of those skeptical
about any livestock with “Mini” in its name. Same amount of work, less dividend.
Animals for people who are afraid of animals. That’s what I thought. Still, at
50-100 lbs lighter than full blooded Nubians, they were much more suited to my
capacity as a middle aged woman with “the upper cervical of a 80 year old” as
my doctor so delicately had put it. Less to yank on, if they needed corralling,
shorter, easier to sort with a knee here or there at milking time. When I visited
a 4 year old doe in milk up in nearby St. Croix Falls, and her beautiful moon-spotted
doeling, so many of my initial prejudices tumbled down. The barreled body of
the Mini was the perfect conformation for a well producing dairy animal. The
milk was sweeter than that of a Nubian- which was already the sweetest among
all the full dairy breeds. The udder was well attached, and easy to milk with
long teats, and an open U stance that made for ideal accessibility. Best of
all, they were less vocal and needy than my purebred Nubians had been, and they
ate ½ as much. “Mini is mighty!” I found myself muttering; my own newly
discovered riff on Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful”.
Now spring has come, and popcorn triplets drive Beaulah mad with their antics on the Southern side of the barn. They will not stay corralled but must be examining here, prancing over there, taking running leaps at the pile of raked leaves. They soak up the rays of the new sun on a record setting 78 degree day on a Minnesota March gift of an afternoon.
Beside them the
garden is thawing out. The frost is coming out of the ground and seeping away
down to the rivulets and streambeds that hurry toward the river in this unique
watershed district. The frost has learned to do so from the trees whose blood
first began to run in late February, when the sun began to court them, hoping
to defraud them of their buds, until the trees, conspicuous, fan themselves
with unfurled leaves to hide their blushes from the sun.
We are to and fro from the barn again now. The rhythm of chores setting in. Milk buckets swing with foaming milk. Strainers and jars clatter and clutter the kitchen counter. It’s a messy start to things again. Spring is always like this. Always muddy. Always messy.
Meanwhile, while the waiting wears on us: it’s Minis to the
rescue!
From the 4th stanza of Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Spring Song":
Spring came on as she always does,
Laid her hand on the yellow forsythia,-
Little boys turned in their sleep and smiled,
Dreaming of marbles, dreaming of agates;
Little girls leapt from their beds to see
Spring come by with her painted wagons,
Coloured wagons creaking with wonder-.....
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