Tag: barn

The Farm Dream

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This time of year our farm is brilliant, verdant and delicious to behold.  The cherry orchard blossoms yield to fruit and the pastures are knee high with grass.  By mid-June, the daylight starts creeping over the eastern foothills at 4 AM and the last glimpse of sun disappears at nearly 10 PM.   So many hours of light to work with!  I yearn for a dark rainy day to hide inside with a book.  Instead the lawnmower and weed whacker call my name, and the fish pond needs cleaning and the garden must be weeded.  It’s not that things don’t happen on the farm during months like this.  It’s just that nothing we do is enough.  Blackberry brambles have taken over everything, grass grows faster than we can keep it mowed down, the manure piles spread on the fields in May are growing exponentially again.  The fences always need fixing.  The stall doors are sticking and not closing properly.  Foals have gotten large and strong without having the good halter lessons they needed when they were much smaller and easier to control.   The supply of bedding shavings is non-existent due to the depressed lumber industry, so our shavings shed is bare and old hay is now serving as bedding in the stalls. The weather has become iffy in the last week so no string of days has been available for hay cutting– we are low on the priority list of the local dairy man who cuts and bales our hay,  so we may not have anything but junk hay in the barn this winter in a year when hay will cost a premium.  No one is buying horses in this economy, not even really well bred horses, so we are no longer breeding our stallion and mares, and for the first time in 18 years, have made the painful decision not to be part of our regional fair.

Suddenly our farm dream seems not nearly so compelling.

We have spent many years dreaming about the farm as we hoped it would be.  We imagined the pastures managed perfectly with fencing that was both functional and beautiful.  Our barns and buildings would be tidy and leak-proof, and the stalls secure and safe.  We’d have a really nice pick up truck with low miles on it, not a 25 year old hand me down truck with almost 200,000 miles. We would have trees pruned expertly and we’d have flower beds blooming as well as a vegetable garden yielding 9 months of the year.  Our hay would never be rained on. We would have dogs that wouldn’t run off and cats that would take care of all the rodents.  We wouldn’t have any moles, thistles, dandelions or buttercup.  The pheasant, deer, coyotes, raccoons, and wild rabbits would only stroll through the yard for our amusement and not disturb anything.  We’d have livestock with the best bloodlines we could afford and a steady demand from customers to purchase their offspring at reasonable prices so that not a dime of our off-farm income would be necessary to pay farm expenses.   Our animals (and we) would never get sick or injured.

And our house would always stay clean.

Dream on.  Farms are often back-breaking, morale-eroding, expensive sinkholes.   I know ours is.  Yet here we be and here we stay.

It’s home.  We’ve raised three wonderful children here.  We’ve bred and grown good horses and great garden and orchard crops and tons of hay from our own fields.  We breathe clean air and daily hear dozens of different bird songs and look out at some of the best scenery this side of heaven.  Eagles land in the trees in our front yard. It’s all enough for us even if we are not enough for the farm.  I know there will come a time when the farm will need to be a fond memory and not a daily reality.  Until then we will keep pursuing our dream as we and the farm grow older.   Dreams age and mature and I know now what I dreamed of when I was younger was not the important stuff.

We have been blessed with one another, with the sunrises and the sunsets and everything in between.  This is the stuff of which the best dreams are made.

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Cast Your Cares

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asset_upload_file707_2983-1In late May, on our farm,  there is only a brief period of utter silence during the dark of the night.  Up until about 2 AM, the spring peepers are croaking and chorusing vigorously in our ponds and wetlands, and around 4 AM the diverse bird song begins in the many tall trees surrounding the house and barnyard.

In between those bookend symphonies is stillness–usually.

I woke too early this morning aware of something being unstill.  It was an intermittent banging, coming from the barn.  I lay in bed, trying to discern the middle of the night noise that could be a sign of a major problem, like a horse stuck up against a stall wall or “cast” in horseman’s parlance,  or simply one of my water-bucket-banging youngsters who enjoys nocturnal percussion.

This was not sounding like a bucket drum set.  It was emphatic hooves frantically banging against metal walls.

Throwing on sweats and boots, I head out the back door into the mere light of pre-dawn, dewy, with the birds just starting to rouse from sleep, the floral perfume of lingering apple blossoms heavy in the air.  Entering the barn, I throw on the lights and start to count the noses I can see in the stalls as I walk down the aisle~all present and accounted for until I get to the very end of the row.  No nose.   Down in the corner is our eleven year old mare on her side, too close to the wall, her feet askew up against the boards and metal siding.  She nickered low to me, and my entering the stall sent her into a renewed effort to right herself, but all she could do was scrabble against the wall, digging an even bigger hole beneath her body.

This has happened infrequently over our 25 years of owning horses, usually when a horse is rolling to scratch their back and rolls too close to the wall, and becomes lodged there.  Haflingers, who have a fairly round conformation, are a bit prone to being cast.  Our older barn,  with dirt floors, is particularly likely to having this happen, as depressions in the floor where horses have been digging end up becoming deeper and trap a hapless horse that was nonchalantly rolling.  The horse literally is trapped like a turtle on its back.

Righting a 1000 lb. horse that is frantically flailing and struggling is not a particularly easy or safe task.  Thankfully Haflingers tend to be pretty sensible in this situation and will calm when spoken to and reassured.  I looped a rope around each lower leg, and with my tall strong son’s help, we were able to pull her back over and then jump out of the way quickly.  She got up, shook herself off and immediately asked for breakfast–a good sign this was not a horse in distress or colicking with abdominal pain.

So my day started early.

I hope when I find myself trapped in a hole of my own making, when I’ve been careless about watching where I’m heading and find myself helpless and hopeless with no where to turn, someone will hear my struggles and come rescue me.  I promise not to kick out or bite,  but to wait patiently, in gratitude, for such gracious liberation.   My cares will be cast upon my rescuer.

And then please, feed me breakfast.

Floating Downstream

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First fluid
Flows in subtle stream
then
Gushes in sudden drench
Soaking, saturating,
Precipitating
Inevitability.
No longer cushioned
Slick sliding forward
Following the rich river
Downstream

The smell of birth
Clings to shoes, clothes, hands
As soaked in soupy brine
I reach to embrace new life
Sliding toward me.
I too was caught once;
Three times emptied into other hands
My babies wet on my chest
Their slippery skin
Under my lips
Salty sweet

In a moment’s scent
The rush of life returns;
Now only barn birthings
Yet still as sweet and rich.
I carry the smell of damp foal fur
With me all day to
Recall from whence I came.
I floated once
And will float someday again.

An Earth Day Lament

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I’m still groggy every morning when I step out my front door onto the porch to make my way down a  gravel driveway to get the newspaper. More often than not, it is still quite dark out at 5:15 AM.  More often than not, my slippered foot lands on something a little crunchy and a little squishy and a lot icky on the welcome mat in front of my door.

The front porch cat, (as opposed to the back porch cat, the garden shed cat, the hay barn cat, the horse barn cat and the 3 stray cats) predator that she is, leaves behind certain remnants of her prey’s….uh, body parts.  Mousey body parts or birdie body parts.  I assume, from the consistency of the little carnivore compost pile, these are unappealing to the kitty, so become the “leavings”, so to speak,  of the kill. Typically, it is a little mouse head, complete with little beady eyes, or a little bird head, complete with little beak, and something that looks suspiciously green and bulbous, like a gall bladder.  I don’t think heads or gall bladders are on my preferred delicacy list either. And they are certainly not on my list of things I like to wear on the bottom of my slipper.  Yet I do and I have.

I’m perplexed by this habit cats have of leaving behind the stuff they don’t want on the welcome mat, even the occasional whole shrew or field mouse, seemingly untouched by claw or incisor, but yet dead as a doornail on the doormat.  Some cat owners naively think their cats are presenting them with “gifts” –kind of a sacrificial offering to the human god that feeds them.  Nonsense.  This is the universal trash heap for cats and a testimony to their utter disdain for humans.   Leave for the human the unappetizing and truly grotesque…

So humanity is not alone of earth’s creatures to create garbage heaps of unwanted stuff.  Not only cats, but barn owls are incredibly efficient at tossing back what they don’t want out of their furry meals.   Our old hay barn is literally peppered with pellets, popular with high school biology classes for dissection instruction.  These dried up brown fuzzy poop shaped objects are regurgitated by the owl after sitting in one of its  two stomachs for a number of hours.  Bird barf.   It’s fairly interesting stuff, which is why these pellets (which we recycle by donating by the  dozens to local schools) are great teaching material.  It is possible to practically reconstruct a mouse or bird skeleton from a pellet, or perhaps even both on a night when the hunting was good.  There is fur and there are feathers.  Whatever isn’t easily digestible doesn’t have much purpose to the owl, so up it comes again and becomes so much detritus on the floor and rafters of my barn.  Owl litter.  There should be a law.

Then there is the rather efficient Haflinger horse eating machine which leaves no calorie unabsorbed, which vacuums up anything remotely edible within reasonable reach, even if reasonable means contortions under a gate or fence with half of the body locked under the bottom rung, and the neck stretched 6 feet sideways to grab that one blade of grass still standing.  The reason why Haflingers don’t eventually explode from their intake is that Haflinger poop rivals elephant poop pound for pound per day, so there must be a considerable amount ingested that is  indigestible and passed on, so to speak–like part of a tail wrap, the branches from the dogwood tree, that halter that went missing… you know, like those black holes in outer space–that’s what a  Haflinger represents on earth.

This is quite different from the recycled “cud” of the typical herbivore cow who regurgitates big green gobs of  grass/hay/silage to chew it  again in a state of utter (udder?) contentment and pleasure.   If humans could figure out how to recycle a good meal for another good chew or two, the obesity rate would surely drop precipitously.   So would attendance at most happy hours. But then, how many skinny cows have I seen?  Probably as many as purple cows.  I never hope to see one, but I’d rather see than be one.

In my daily walk through life, I have my share of things I dump unceremoniously that I don’t want, don’t need,  can’t use, or abandon when I only want the palatable so the rest can rot.  Today is Earth Day, and I feel properly shamed and guilty for my contribution to landfills,despite my avid recycling efforts for the past 30 years.  Nonetheless, I am in good company with my fellow carnivores and omnivores who daily leave behind what they don’t want or need and clearly don’t give a rip about Earth Day.

I now need to figure out that cud thing.  I can go green and just might save on the grocery bill.

Not Playing Possum

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Painting of our old barn by our friend Dick Laninga
Painting of our old barn by our friend Dick Laninga

We are preparing for the Sunday Easter Sunrise service our farm has hosted for most of the last 30 years.  Ordinarily, this gathering of neighborhood families takes place on our hilltop open field overlooking the Canadian mountains to the north, the valley reaching out to Puget Sound to the west and to Mt. Baker and the Twin Sisters peaks to the east.  However, every few years, the weather is foul enough to drive us into the hay barn to worship, so we need to always plan for that contingency and have the barn ready if we wake up to rain Sunday morning.

There still is considerable summer hay stored in our large red barn, so it takes some organizing of the bales to create a seating arrangement for 70+ people.  Once we started moving bales around this week, it became quite apparent that we had a visitor who had decided to make the barn home and ended up not leaving.  Something had definitely died in there. The smell hung thick and pervasive, clinging to us and refusing to be ignored.

We eventually found the source: a dead opossum.  Not just pretending either–no ‘playing possum’.  Truly, utterly, completely, and sincerely dead. Tucking himself between hay bales, he must have gone to sleep and forgotten to wake up.   Having lost his hiding place and his life, we needed badly to find him a final resting place so the air could clear between now and Easter, in case our worship is in the barn.  Somehow the stench of death is just not fitting in the celebration of life on Easter morning.

Yet overcoming death is what it is all about.

Mr. Opossum is now resting in the ground and our noses are no longer assaulted by his untimely death.  Instead we now must prepare for an all-out spiritual assault on our souls this week.  Being reminded of rotting flesh is rather helpful right before Easter.  Death is an overwhelming reality to each of us; how can we begin to imagine its defeat?  Death cannot be faked like some startled opossum temporarily gone floppy.

Where is death’s victory, where is its sting/stink?  No longer in our barn and no longer for us !

We are renewed instead of being unceremoniously disposed of–not buried in the deep pit we deserve.

We are saved, preserved and graciously restored.


Visitors on a Spring Evening

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colorful_hot_air_balloonFingers of twilight shadow
Begin to reach over the hill
Crawling down through the field
Up unto the bank of blackberries
Covering fences along the alder grove.

The Haflingers chew their last
Leaves of clover before
Coming to the barn for night, eyelids heavy,
Relaxed and full, drowsy with spring evening
Peace at hand and hoof.

A sudden change in the air forces
Their heads up and ears forward;
They form a line, staring at the hilltop
Above them, riveted to the spot, alert
To the coming intruder, unfamiliar and foreign.

The roar is intermittent, like a warm wind
Rattling a barn roof, but inconstant;
Then peaking over the crest of the hill
A rounded top of technicolor glory:
The hot air balloon rises.

The horses silenced, baffled, fascinated;
No alpine instinct prepares their response
To this wizard’s act from Oz in their own backyard.
The basket riders wave and laugh at the equine audience below
In formation with golden noses in the air and white manes blowing in the breeze.

The balloon summits the hill, dipping low, almost touchable
Before moving back up to race the sunset,
And search out other pastures, other valleys and hills.
The horses released from the spell
Leap in response, snowy tails high, noses flared-

To race up the hill to catch impending darkness,
Dream mares cavort, float suspended
Until their air is let out, gently, in softening snorts,
To settle down in a shavings bed in the barn
Where night, blissful, becomes ordinary again.

Outdoor Easter Sunrise Service on our farm

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Easter Sunrise Service at BriarCroft
(formerly Walnut Hill Farm)

sunrise view from our hill

Sunday, April 12, 2009, 7:00 AM Easter Sunrise Service on the hill above our farm

When we purchased Walnut Hill Farm from the Morton Lawrence family in 1990, part of the tradition of this farm was a hilltop non-denominational Easter sunrise service held here for the previous 10+ years.  We have continued that tradition, with an open invitation to families from our surrounding rural neighborhood and communities, as well as our church family from Wiser Lake Chapel, to start Easter morning on our hill with a worship service of celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

At our annual Easter Sunrise Service in Whatcom County, we develop a different Easter theme each year through use of scripture readings and songs, led by Dan Gibson. We sit on hay bales on the hill for the worship service, followed by breakfast of cinnamon rolls, hot chocolate and coffee in our barn.  As many of the people who attend come from some distance from all over the county, we try to conclude by 8 AM so they may have time to get to morning church services.

We invite all to come to our farm to participate in this traditional service of celebration.  Please dress warmly with sturdy shoes as you will be walking through wet grass to reach the hilltop.  Bring heavy blankets or sleeping bags to wrap up in if it is a chilly morning.  In case of rain, we meet in the big red hay barn on the farm, so we never cancel this service.

If you would like more information and directions, please email us at briarcroft@clearwire.net.

Dan and Emily Gibson– Nate, Ben and Lea

Steaming in the Pile

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(yes, another story about manure–sorry!  Given I spend an hour or more a day dealing with it, it tends to absorb my creative energy!)

A mid-March cold snap swept down from northern Canada last week, freezing daffodils in mid-bloom, withering berry plant and orchard branch buds, and causing general mayhem in the Pacific northwest.  After a few weeks of rain and temperate weather up to the high 50’s, 17 degrees felt cruel indeed.

Our barn is fairly draft proof, but in northeasters like this, the water buckets ice up and the manure sits in cold hard piles, like so many round rocks.  It is a great temptation to put off the stall cleaning when the weather is this bitter cold and push the poop to the walls for later pick up when it is warmer.  After all, it doesn’t smell when it is frozen rock hard, and certainly loses its “squish” factor, so the horses seem to not mind too much.  So when I went out this weekend to start the digging out process, there were several days of accumulation to contend with.

As I wheeled the loads out to the manure pile, and dug into the pile to tidy it up, the steam poured out into the frigid air–there was nothing left frozen there.  It was hot and getting hotter–its destruction assured through the composting of so much organic matter.  No wonder the cats find a nice sunny spot to stretch out next to this smoldering mountain of poop.  It is as comfy as a tropical vacation spot.

How often have I similarly piled my metaphorical “poop” in piles to deal with another time?  Frozen it seems innocuous, inoffensive, not worthy of my attention, not enough to bother with.  It is so tempting to pass on cleaning up my messes, by shoving mistakes and errors to one side or “under the carpet” and trying to ignore the growing mounds in my own nest.  Admitting one’s sins and proceeding to clean up after one’s self  is not fashionable in this day and age of not wanting to be judged or to pass judgment.  All types of behavior, even some of the most self-destructive, are tolerated as freedom of expression, and referring to anything as sin is considered impossibly old fashioned.  Our pastor is doing a study series on Christian “respectable sins”, like ungodliness, discontent, pride, etc.   I have a ton of them that accumulate daily that I want to simply pile up and ignore.

Like frozen poop shoved aside and not dealt with, sin eventually warms up.  It starts to stink, and generally becomes obnoxious and overwhelming.  Once it gets big enough, it becomes its own steaming inferno, burning and destroying everything else within. The only safe place for it is to move it far away from where we dwell everyday.

I remember a young mother of three children who died three years ago as the heat of her drug addiction overcame efforts to clean up her life, though she was a Christian believer.  Many family, friends, church family and health care professionals handed her the tools to help scoop up the mess her addiction had left behind, but she chose to shove it into frozen piles around her, unwilling to admit how it was mounding up higher and higher, to the point of blocking any eventual escape.  It consumed her before she could dig free with her rescuers’ help.  It crushed her and her family is still trying to recover.

Such tragedy convinces me we must face our own messes without turning away in our shame.  We must dig ourselves out everyday from our mistakes, ask forgiveness for the harm we cause, and gratefully accept the tools handed to us that make possible the impossible job of getting clean.   We cannot do it by ourselves.  Our wheelbarrow is too small, our shovels too inadequate, our muscles too weak.

Blessed are the barn cleaners, for working together, they will find hope beyond the steaming pile.

Mountain Lions in the Shadows

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meetandgreet

Published in Country Magazine 2007

Chores at our farm are rarely routine since our batch of four male kittens were born 6 months ago. They were delivered unceremoniously in the corner of one of the horse stalls by their young mother whose spontaneous adoption we accepted a mere four weeks before, not realizing we were accepting five kitties, not just one.

They were born under a Haflinger’s nose, and amazingly survived the ordeal and managed to stay safe until the next day when we came in to clean and discovered them warming near a nice fresh pile of poop. What a birthing spot this mama had chosen. Thankfully Haflingers are tolerant about sharing their space as long as you don’t ask for a share of their food too…

We moved them and mama to a safer spot in the barn, away from big Haflinger feet, and they thrived, getting more adventuresome by the week, until they are now in full adolescent glory, mock fighting with each other, scrambling up and down the hay bales, using the shavings as their personal litter box, doing rodent patrol, and most of all, strolling along the shelves that line the stalls, breathing in the Haflinger smell, and rubbing their fur up against Haflinger noses through the wire. They are best of friends with these ponies in the light of day, as after all they were born right in a Haflinger bed.

But at night it’s another story. Each evening as I come out to do chores after returning home from work, it is pitch dark and the Haflingers, out in their winter paddocks, must walk with me one by one back to their box stalls for the night. Only this is now far more of an adventure thanks to four cats who glory in stealth attacks in the dark, like mountain lions in the shadows, waiting for their prey to pass by.

These rascals are two gray tabbies, one black and one gray, perfectly suited to be camouflaged in the northwest dim misty fall evenings along a barely lit pathway between paddocks and barn. They flatten themselves tight on the ground, just inches from where our feet will pass, and suddenly, they spring into the air as we approach, just looking for a reaction from either the horse or myself. It never fails to unnerve me, as I’m always anticipating and fearing the horse’s response to a surprise cat attack. Interestingly, the Haflingers, used to kitten antics all night long in the barn, are completely bored by the whole show, but when the tension from me as I tighten on the lead rope comes through to them, their head goes up and they sense there must be something to fear. Then the dancing on the lead rope begins, only because I’m the one with the fear transmitted like an electric current to the Haflinger. We do this four times along the path to the barn as four kittens lay in wait, one after another, just to torment me. By the end of bringing in eight horses, I’m done in by my own case of nerves.

You’d think I’d learn to stop fearing, and start laughing at these pranksters. They are hilarious in their hiding places, their attempts to “guard” the barn door from intruders, their occasional miscalculations that land them right in front of a hoof about to hit the ground. Why I haven’t had at least one squished kitten by now is beyond my comprehension. Yet they survive to torment me and delight me yet another night. I cuddle them after the horses are all put away, flopping them on their backs in my arms, and tickling their tummies and scolding them for their contribution to my increasing gray hair.

I’m a slow learner. These are like so many of my little daily fears, which seem to hide, blended in to the surroundings of my daily life, ready to spring at me without warning, looking like much bigger scarier things than they really are. I’m a highly skilled catastrophizer in the best of circumstances, and if I have a kitten sized worry, it becomes a mountain lion sized melodrama in no time. Only because I allow it to become so.

Stepping back, taking a deep breath, if I learn to laugh at the small stuff, then it won’t become a “cat”astrophe, now will it? If I can grab those fears, turn them over on their back and tickle their tummies until they purr, then I’m the one enjoying a good time.

I’ll try that the next time I feel that old familiar sensation of “what if?” making my muscles tense and my step quicken. I just might tolerate that walk in the dark a little better, whether it is the scary plane flight, the worry over a loved one’s health, the state of the economy, or the uncertainty of what tomorrow might bring.

I’ll know that behind that mountain lion is a soft loving purring fur ball, granting me relief from the mundane, for which I’m extremely grateful. Life is always an adventure, even if it is just a stroll down a barn lane in the dark wondering what might come at me next on the path.

stalking

A Shovel Full of Songs

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shovel

In our barn we have a very beat up old AM/FM radio that sits on a shelf next to the horse stalls and serves as company to the horses during the rainy stormy days they stay inside, and serves as distraction to me as I clean stalls in the evening.  We live about 10 miles south of the Canadian border, so most stations that come in well on this radio’s broken antenna are from the lower mainland of British Columbia.  This includes a panoply of stations spoken in every imaginable language– a Babel of sorts that I can tune into: Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, French and of course, proper British accent English.  But standard issue American melting pot genetic mix that I am, I prefer to tune into the “Oldies” Station and reminisce.

There is a strange comfort in listening to songs that I enjoyed 30-40+ years ago, and I’m somewhat miffed and perplexed that they should be called “oldies”.  Oldies has always referred to music from the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, not the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s!   I listen and sing along with a mixture of feeling ancient and yet transported back to my teens.  I can think of faces and names I haven’t thought of in decades, remember special summer days picking berries and hear long lost voices from school days. I can smell and taste and feel things all because of the trigger of a familiar song.   There is something primordial –deep in my synapses– that is stirred by this music. In fact, I shoveled manure to these same songs 40 years ago, and somehow, it seems not much as changed.  Or has it? One  (very quick) glance in the mirror tells me it has and I have.

Yesterday, I Got You, Babe and you were a Bridge Over Troubled Waters for this Natural Woman who just wants to be Close to You so You’ve Got a Friend.  There’s Something in the way I Cherish The Way We Were and then Love Will Keep Us Together. If You Leave Me Now,  You’re So Vain. I’ve always wanted it My Way but How Sweet It Is when I Want To Hold Your Hand.  Come Saturday Morning we’re Born to Be Wild. Help! Do You Know Where You’re Going To?  Me and You and A Dog Named Boo will travel Country Roads and Rock Around the Clock even though God Didn’t Make the Little Green Apples.  Fire and Rain will make things All Right Now once Morning is Broken, I’ll Say a Little Prayer For You. I Can’t Get No Satisfaction from the Sounds of Silence — If— Those Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.  Stand By Me as It’s Just My Imagination that I am a Rock, when really I only want Time in a Bottle and to just Sing, Sing a Song.

They just don’t write songs like they used to.  I seem to remember my parents saying that about the songs I loved so well.  Somehow in the midst of decades of change, there are some constants.  Music still touches our souls, no matter how young or old we are.

And manure still needs shoveling.