Lowerpondfarm

Welcome to 3625 Mitchell Road

The property is 12.66 acres, set on a hill in northern Wilson County. The house is approximately 900 feet from the road. We called the place Lower Pond Farm. If you visit, you’ll see why it has that name.

The Pond

The first thing you notice when arriving at the property is the pond. It is an acre in size, average 10-12 feet deep, aerated from April to November, and stocked with bass, crappie, and various sunfish.

The pond freezes over occasionally in January, seldom for more than a few days–and never enough for skating.

Flowers

The property is full of flowers, both annual and perennial. There are irises, daylilies, roses (wild and domestic), and countless wildflowers. Something is blooming every day from St. Patrick’s Day through Halloween.

The Barn

Built in 2014, the barn was the cornerstone of the farm operation for us. It is divided into three roughly equal sections. The south side housed our animals (sheep and goats), the north side held the tractor and other equipment, and the center served as a workshop. The hayloft holds approximately 300 bales of hay.

A few of the animals we raised. (They don’t come with the property.)

The Gardens

One of our goals on the farm was to raise as much of our own food as we could. To do that, we built two vegetable gardens. The “barn garden” near the barn is roughly 50′ by 50′ and currently has raspberries and a small strawberry bed. In the past couple of years, we have developed the “well garden,” closer to the well.

Thank you for looking at these pictures.
If you would like to see more pics or read stories about our adventures on Lower Pond Farm, feel free to browse any of the posts on this website.

RIP Mike

We got Mike from a farmer in the hills somewhere south of Carthage, Tennessee. I don’t recall exactly where, but I do remember driving through a “holler” and down a long, rutted, gravel driveway and up to a compound of buildings that included barns and outbuildings in various stages of needing paint, a white-frame house, and a small but apparently active slaughterhouse. The farmer we bought Mike from – Mike is the only dog I’ve ever owned that had a cash value – seemed nice enough. He was raising sheep, goats, and cattle. It was quite an operation so far as we could tell as we drove up with our trailer and goat-tote. “We” included me, Vanessa, and a young Jordan. We still had the Subaru, so it was very early in our own farming operation.

After the appropriate greetings and handshakes, the farmer took us even further back into the holler to a large, old wooden barn that had never seen a coat of paint but was standing nonetheless to introduce us to what we all hoped would be our new Livestock Guard Dog. There were two dogs in the barn—both LGDs—and at first I approached the wrong one, a youngish-looking Great Pyrenees. “No,” the farmer said, “That’s Mike over there.” Mike was hanging back—a little leery. Though I had little knowledge of Great Pyrenees, it was easy to see that Mike was not purebred. He was an Anatolian/GP mix, the farmer told us. Mostly Anatolian. He was two and one half years old, sweet natured, and a bit shy at first. Two hundred dollars later, we loaded him into the goat-tote strapped on the trailer hitched to the back of our Subaru and started back down the long, gravel driveway, through the holler, past the fields, and eventually to pavement. When we got home a couple hours later, Mike had vomited and shat all over the trailer floor as he was so scared. The contents of his vomit consisted of undigested scraps from the slaughterhouse. The contents from his other end had been more thoroughly processed.

After the initial trauma of traveling, though, Mike was happy here, and he never got in or on anything with wheels again for the rest of his life. On many afternoons, he’d lie out on the hill that is our front yard, looking down toward the pond and the road beyond that and the hill rising up on the other side of the road, and he was as content as a creature can be. This was his farm. He had the perch to prove it.

He was never purely a Livestock Guard Dog. LGDs are trained to live with the flock and have minimal contact with people. The flock is their pack, but Mike wasn’t having any of those restrictions. No matter how many times we took him to the back of the farm where the sheep and goats lived and no matter how carefully we closed and locked the gates behind us, he’d find his way back to the house and wind up on the front porch. He protected the sheep and goats, and he liked the other dogs, but he loved us. That’s why, I think, when I approached the wrong dog back on the farm south of Carthage, the farmer was quick to correct me.

But as it turns out, the wrong dog for some people is exactly the right dog for others.

So, Mike became our FGD—our Farm Guard Dog. Guard dogs are largely nocturnal, and Mike spent his nights on the porch or on the driveway or in the yard listening. When he heard coyotes yapping in the distance—there are packs of them living in the wooded hills around this area—he’d bark a few times, then run to another part of the property and bark again, then a couple of other places. It’s apparently a strategy they use to convince the coyotes that there’s a whole pack of vicious dogs over here, so they best do their hunting in a different location. And it worked. Even though Mike never took up residence with the livestock, we never lost a single sheep or goat to predators. For the first couple of years, I worried about Mike’s barking keeping our closest neighbor awake at night, but eventually I realized I cared a whole lot more about Mike than I cared about our closest neighbor.

Mike was the Official Farm Greeter. Though he slept a lot during the day, when people came up the driveway he’d be in the parking area to greet them, barking. If it was someone who didn’t know Mike, I’d go out to tell them it was safe to open the car door, that he wouldn’t bite, “unless, of course, you’re a coyote in disguise.” People who knew Mike were by and large happy to see him. A big, fluffy, friendly, barky pillow of a dog who was tolerant of all forms of human activity, including a two-year-old who poked him in the eye repeatedly during a cookout one summer.

For nine years, Mike lived here with us, watching over the farm, making sure we were all safe and sound, and if that included the livestock he was okay with that, as long as he didn’t have to live with them.

Since Mike wouldn’t go to the vet for his annual shots, the vet had to come to Mike, so we had a standing farm call once a year for all our dogs’ vaccinations. Mike never trusted the vet for some reason—it wasn’t that the shots hurt him, because the vet was always gentle—so I’m not sure what the issue was, but when the vet showed up, Mike would start shaking and try to escape no matter how much I tried to calm him. It got to the point about three years ago, Mike crawled under the back deck where he liked to sleep on hot summer afternoons, and the vet and I had to crawl under there with him to give him his rabies shot. For the next two years even that didn’t work. Mike never snapped at the vet or got aggressive in any way. He just got scared. In the end, the vet started giving us the syringe full of rabies vaccine so Vanessa could inject Mike after he left. The vet said he couldn’t sign the form certifying that Mike was vaccinated, but Mike would still be protected, and since Mike never left the farm, the paperwork seemed unnecessary.

As most people know, large-breed dogs often suffer from hip dysplasia as they get older. For me, hip dysplasia had always been an abstract concept. As we watched Mike go downhill over the last year, it became a more tangible aging issue. Essentially, the hip bones start to deteriorate and the tendons and muscles connecting the hips to the legs and the spine start to weaken. A little over a year ago, Mike started having trouble getting up sometimes. He could still run down the hill to the road when certain trucks or tractors went by, but he was stiff legged and walked back up the hill slowly, probably in pain. By early summer, he had trouble getting up more often. He’d have to maneuver his hind legs underneath his belly and rock forward enough to gain momentum. Then he became fecally incontinent. Other than the day we brought him home and he shat all over the trailer floor, I never saw Mike poop for the first eight years he lived with us. He was a private pooper. Then one day last summer, poop just started falling out of him. I won’t describe the mess it made—either on the driveway or in his long, white hair.

We started giving him arthritis meds a few months ago, during the last vet visit, and they seemed to help for a while. Then about two months ago the vet upped the dosage to include pain meds. Those helped for a while too. Sometimes, he seemed fine. He often had trouble getting up, and sometimes his back legs would collapse while he was walking. He’d usually sit for a moment and re-collect himself, then he’d arrange his feet under his belly, and rock himself back into a standing position. When it rained, he liked to go into a covered porch we have on the back of the house—he especially liked it after we put a window AC unit in there for him—but he had to climb five steps to get there. Sometimes he could make it. Other times we had to carry him, which he seemed to find demeaning, or at the very least, uncomfortable.

About three weeks ago, Mike had a bad week. He was sleeping a lot, struggling to stand, falling regularly, pooping and peeing all over himself. He was still eating and still alert, but it was as if the back half of his body was shutting down completely. Vanessa and I had been talking about it for some time, and we knew this day was coming—had known it for a while—but it was getting harder and harder for me to ignore. So, I dropped the dime.

I asked the vet if we could get an oral sedative to give Mike before they came out, and the vet agreed. Then I went to Hartville Foodland and bought a big package of raw hamburger to spread like icing over his meals for several days. About an hour before the vet appointment, I gave Mike a cocktail of sedatives (seven pills, in all) wrapped in little raw hamburger sliders, hoping that he would go to sleep peacefully. But when the vet showed up an hour and a half later, Mike was still wide awake.

It took two more syringes and an I.V. of sedatives to get him somewhere in the range of sleepy. Then, kneeling over Mike, the vet explained the process to Vanessa and me. He would shave a front leg and inject the euthanasia drug. About fifteen to thirty seconds later Mike’s breathing should stop. Then the vet would check for a heartbeat and a retinal response, the final test of life.

Five minutes after the first injection, we were still waiting while Mike took long, deep breaths. A few minutes after that, the vet called for more of the euthanasia drug, which he administered. A few minutes later, he shaved another leg and tried again. Eventually, after enough of the drug to kill a two-hundred-pound animal—Mike breathed his last.

I had already dug a grave in the swale where I buried Clara, our long-beloved milk goat, a couple years ago, so the vet and his assistant helped load Mike into the scoop of my tractor and I drove him down the hill. Digging a grave, especially at the end of a hot, dry summer, is hard physical work. Covering up an animal that has meant so much to you is hard in a different way. As I shoveled dirt onto his deteriorated hind quarters, I looked toward the other end, the end that had remained alert through all of this, and I saw that Mike’s eyes weren’t completely closed. They remained open just a slit. I couldn’t throw dirt into his eyes, so I took out an old, blue kerchief I carry in my back pocket and covered his face. It was my oldest kerchief and the most worn, literally coming apart at the seams, with threads dangling from one corner. I loved that old kerchief, but it was the least I could give to Mike, who had given us so much.

A Few Friends

In the fall of 1989 when I first started teaching composition at Volunteer State Community College, Betty Nelson, one of the professors in my new department, had taped several cartoons and quotes to the door of her office. This was back when we were allowed to tape interesting tidbits to the door of our office.

One the cartoons I’ve always remembered showed a middle-aged man lying in a tattered recliner with a defeated look on his face. His wife, clearly frustrated with him, was standing in front of the recliner holding a letter that had just come for him in the mail. The caption to the cartoon was her saying, “Look, if you can’t handle the rejection, stop sending out that god-awful poem.”

The second piece from Betty’s door that caught my attention was a quote from Moliere, the French playwright: “Writing is a bit like prostitution. First you do it for love. Then you do it for a few friends. And, finally, you do it for money.”

I’ve remembered these two statements about writing for so many years because they capture my feelings about the process so well. I love writing, and I have written for much of my life–essays, fiction, the occasional poem and even the less occasional song.

But I’ve never seriously tried to publish. Partly, that’s because I don’t think I could handle the rejection. Also, I’ve always been put off by what I imagine to be the sheer amount of shameless self-promotion needed to be successful financially as a writer. I’ve always known that I’d make a crappy salesman. If I sold cars for Chevy, for instance, I’d probably pull potential customers aside and tell them in a whisper how great the Hondas were next door.

But also, doing anything for money turns that thing into a job. God bless the people who can deal with that–but it’s not for me. I want to write what I want to write because it interests or amuses me, and I hope that it will interest or amuse some of my friends as well. That’s enough. A few friends.

With that in mind, I am hereby announcing (shameless self-promotion) that I’m publishing a novel that I wrote a few years ago. My plan is to publish one chapter every Friday for the next 23 weeks on a platform called Substack.

Don’t worry. It’s free.

The novel, which I originally wrote from 2014 – 2018, is titled The Inner Workings of a Universe: A Love Story for the Aged. The story is about a retired farmer and his wife, Mike and Marilyn, who are trying to figure out what to do with the land they still own but no longer farm. Different characters, including their kids and neighboring farmers, all have different ideas. Mike resists them all.

The story is also about how hard it can be to give up those things we cling to long after we have any right to continue clinging. It’s also about what happens when your three-year old Ford F150 starts talking to you.

I am publishing this story on Substack rather than on our website, Lowerpondfarm, for a couple of reasons: first Substack has a cleaner appearance and will be easier to read; second, it’s a different kind of writing than I generally do on Lowerpondfarm, and I don’t want to clutter up people’s emails with postings they are not interested in.

Again, my plan is to publish one chapter a week, on Fridays. I’m only starting today (Monday) because it’s my birthday and it’s snowing, and the first two chapters are short.

The link below will take you to Chapter One: Comfort Zone. If you want to subscribe, you can click the box in the upper-right corner and put in your email address. Then, you should get an email every week when I post the next chapter (there are 23 of them). You can read the story on a desktop computer, a tablet, or (if you have the eyes for it) your phone.

https://micknleb.substack.com/p/the-inner-workings-of-a-universe?sd=pf

Did I mention, it’s free?

Thanks,

Mick

How I’m Probably Gonna Die

This morning, I made the mistake of using a butter knife to retrieve a piece of toast from the depths of our toaster while Vanessa was in the kitchen. The mistake lies in the last part of that sentence–while Vanessa was in the kitchen.

Normally, when Vanessa is in the kitchen and I want to drag a piece of toast out of the toaster with my knife (or fork, whichever is handy), I make a big deal out of unplugging the toaster first. I reach behind the toaster–the plug is right there, easy to access–and clear my throat, “Harrumph! Harrumph!” which is code for “You don’t have to worry about me, Honey, I’m being safe!” Then, when I’m sure I have her attention, I pull out the plug and snag my toast.

This whole peacock display of safety slows down the toaster-to-mouth process by a mere six or seven seconds, so I should unplug the toaster every time I stick a shiny utensil into it, regardless of Vanessa’s location. But of course, I’m not doing it for safety’s sake. I’m doing it because I love Vanessa, and I don’t want her to worry.

I know that I’m not going to die from sticking a fork down the throat of a live toaster. I’ve done it my whole life and never felt so much as a tingle. Yes, I know that electricity courses through the elements inside the toaster–that’s how the thing works. But at 110 volts it’s not that much electricity, and I never, EVER attempt to retrieve toast while standing naked, up to my shins in a bathtub full of water. I mean, who wants soggy toast?

The issue here is that Vanessa sees my death lurking all around the property, lying in wait like a coiled viper under a flat rock that I’m grabbing for a flower bed, or a cold-blooded brown recluse sleeping on the backside of a rung half way up the ladder to the hayloft. Deep in the recesses of Vanessa’s mind, I think, there’s an image of me going about my business one moment, maybe even whistling, then suddenly something goes SNAP and I’m lying on the ground, going cold and stiff.

I have to take a moment to recognize that Vanessa’s fears don’t come out of nowhere. She did lose a young husband to disease a few years before we met, leaving her with three relatively young kids, medical bills, and a mountain of grief. So, I get it. I really do.

But I don’t feel it. Despite the fact that my 69th birthday is just a week from tomorrow, I’m only now beginning to feel mortal, mostly in my knees and breath. The particulars of my demise are still unimaginable to me.

But not to Vanessa. For her they are as real as the 24-hour forecast on the weather channel. Close enough, that is, that you should be prepared. Here are the three most likely scenarios of my demise in Vanessa’s mind:

Falling: Either out of the hayloft or off the roof. If it’s the hayloft, it’s because I get a sudden and severe bout of vertigo while I’m lowering a forty-pound bale of hay for the goats. This is unlikely, I argue, as I’ve never had vertigo before.

If it’s the roof, I slip or get a sudden and severe bout of vertigo while I’m standing at the very peak, up by the chimney, blowing off leaves. Then, I roll down the admittedly steep slope of the main house, across the relatively flat section over the porch, and fall three hundred feet into a pit of vipers, and while we’re at it, let’s toss in a lake of molten lava from an erupting volcano. Man, I’m a goner.

Chopping: This generally involves the chainsaw, and sometimes it involves the ladder, which brings in the element of falling as described above. In this case, however, I have to admit that Vanessa does have some historical support.

Before I tell this story, though, let me assert that, unlike the toaster, I do try to be careful with the chainsaw regardless of where Vanessa is located at the time.

We have a lot of giant, old trees on this property. One of them, an old oak tree that is half dead, was leaning over the fence separating the backyard from the barnyard. The tree had been there, fighting gravity for years. In fact, it was leaning before we built the fence underneath it. But it was never a problem, until about a year ago when gravity started getting the upper hand. The tree began sagging far enough that I couldn’t drive the tractor under it, and it was about to make contact with the top rail of the fence. I had to do something.

I got out the chainsaw, a ladder, and the tractor. I also asked Vanessa to be my spotter. “Your job,” I said, standing in the kitchen, right next to the toaster, “is to watch me cut down the main trunk with your finger poised over the call button for 911 in case things don’t go as planned.”

Then I got to work. Cutting off the little limbs at the tip of drooping tree was easy. Buzz. Buzz. Drop. Drop. Drag out of the way.

For the portion of the tree trunk hanging directly over the fence, I had an ingenious plan. I drove the tractor up to the fence, raised the scoop and slipped it between the fence and the tree trunk. Then I walked around to the other side of the fence, climbed up on the ladder, cut the trunk and let that section fall directly into the scoop. It was slick.

All that was left was the main portion of the trunk–about fifteen inches in diameter and ten feet long. That’s when Vanessa said, “Why don’t you call someone to come and do this? We can afford it.”

I looked at her like she had suddenly started speaking Russian. “Huh?” I asked. “Why? I mean, the chainsaw’s already warmed up. It’ll just take a minute.”

“Are you sure?” she implored. “Do you have to do this now?”

I looked at her slyly. “Just keep your phone handy.”

My main mistake, other than being too caught up in my earlier successes, was ladder placement. The chainsaw, as planned, cut through the tree trunk in under a minute. The tree trunk, weighing about a hundred pounds, fell immediately, and as it fell it rotated, hitting the forward legs of my step ladder.

I went flying one way, the chainsaw, still buzzing, went flying the other, and Vanessa, finger frozen over 911 , saw her worst nightmare unfolding in front of her.

Fortunately, I survived, landing on my right hip and shoulder, and spraining my wrist. My hip and shoulder were sore for a couple of days, but my wrist is still tender two weeks out. The ladder went to the recycling bin.

I’ve already written about the third way Vanessa figures I’ll kill myself, which is Werewolves in the Way Back. So, all I’ll do here is include a link that story, in case you’re interested.

https://lowerpondfarm.com/2018/12/24/the-way-back/

I still can’t imagine the scenario of my own apparently always imminent death. I’m just hoping my last words are not, “Hey Bubba! Waaaa….”

Gratitude and Beer (and Jed)

The story below came up on my Facebook feed this morning. It made me think of all the things that I’m grateful for over the past ten years. The list is long, so in the interest of not being overly maudlin, I’m truncating it here:

Vanessa
Our children and grandchildren
The farm
The dogs (Jed has long since passed, but we still have Bobo and The Others)
The fact that Elon Musk did not buy Facebook

Jed – You had the softest ears I’ve ever rubbed.

From FB: November 18, 2012

So, this morning we are making beer, Rae-Ray’s In-Town Big Blonde, Batch #2. About the time most people are starting church, I’m standing at the kitchen sink, thinking about how much I like making beer on Sunday morning. On the stove, we have two and a half gallons of wort boiling, and the sweet smell of malt and the bitterness of hops are filling the house, and Vanessa is standing next to me cutting up veggies for tonight’s dinner, and Jed-the-red-tick coonhound is standing behind me, hoping for some morsel to fall his way. I’m thinking how great a ritual Sunday morning beer making is for a slightly OCD agnostic. All is right with the world.

I am also filling a five-gallon carboy (that big glass bottle) with hot water and sterilizer, and the bubbles are getting closer and closer to the top, where I have stuck the sprayer nozzle. Unbeknownst to me, the sprayer nozzle, which fits perfectly on the lip of the carboy, has created a seal, so the pressure from the suds is building as it fills with hot water and soap. When it’s nearly full, I take the nozzle out and suddenly there is an explosion. A major explosion.

Boom!

Vanessa had left her rings in a small cup on the window sill above the sink. The cup goes flying, rings scatter. I have no idea what just happened, and I’m thinking: water main break, gas explosion, boiling wort, terrorists, massive dog fart. I have no idea, but I turn around and Vanessa has somehow teleported herself into the next room, from which she is looking at me slack-jawed, and Jed has disappeared completely. I know now that if there ever is a real emergency, I’m on my own.

So, I check everything, starting with myself. All my parts are still there, intact and functioning, so far as I can tell. The carboy has not exploded, the stove is not on fire, the cabinet under the sink is not filling with water, and there’s not a terrorist in lurking outside.

Jordan saunters out of her room as only a fourteen-year-old can and asks, “Hey, is everything okay?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes.”

I collect Vanessa’s rings, which are scattered over the counter and in the sink trap, and check on Jed, who is lying on the couch in the den, having forgotten the entire event. I am grateful for everything I have. I am especially grateful that it was Jed behind me, and not Bobo, who is still young enough to pee when he’s startled. That would have been a real mess, flying wedding rings and dog piss all over the kitchen.

Gratitude is such a gift.

Amen

Cheers

A Routine Morning

Every morning around sunrise, I take the dogs out for a walk. By the time the sky starts to lighten, I’m generally into my second cup of coffee and I’ve read Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letter from an American,” checked the weather, read a couple of articles on NPR and the New York Times, and started the daily Wordle.

By this point, Vanessa has read me a few excerpts from The Daily Beast, possibly the Washington Post (to which she recently subscribed), and Twitter. I don’t have a Twitter account. And I don’t like to talk much in the morning, but I don’t mind listening. And she only reads me the juicy parts. I kind of like it.

Though I don’t always show it.

If it’s a lucky day, I’m done with Wordle by the time the sky outside our east-facing bedroom window starts showing off its rosy fingers of dawn (Sorry Homer–the blind one, not Simpson). If it’s not a lucky day, I may have to set Wordle aside and come back to it again. And sometimes again. And occasionally, even, again.

About this time, the dogs start getting restless. Little Lord Mittford, who sleeps at the foot of our bed, unless he can manage to slither up between us in the middle of the night, starts looking around the room and stretching. Cooper (a.k.a. Thumper) either comes into the bedroom, tail wagging ninety beats a minute (thump, thump, thump, thump), or he crawls out from under the bed, tail wagging ninety beats a minute. And Bobo, who sleeps in any part of the house he wants, starts darting in and out of the bedroom. If he licks my hand, he needs to pee.

So, Vanessa and I get up, dress, and she helps me hustle the dogs out the door.

The dogs do their morning business on nearby bushes and shrubs while I finish buttoning up my jacket, organizing my socks inside my muck boots, and generally readying myself for our morning trip down the hill. I always check to make sure I have at least one leash draped over my shoulders. I’ll need it for the trip back up the hill.

Morning from the bottom of the driveway.

Somewhere between the top of the hill and the bottom of the hill, Mike joins us. Mike sleeps outside, where he likes to spend the night barking. We originally got Mike as a livestock guard dog, which means he should be sleeping in the back of the property with the sheep and goats. But Mike sees his own role as much larger than that. He sees himself as Guardian of the Realm. Midnight barking right under our bedroom window aside, we can’t complain. We’ve never lost a sheep or goat to coyotes.

By the time we get to the bottom of the hill by the pond (about 300 yards from the house), Bobo, Mitt, and Cooper are in a near frenzy, running around, sniffing out deer scat or mole rats or the lingering scent of passing mammals while Mike and I stand on the driveway, looking on, waiting for the excitement to come to an end. Mike has only one basic question for any creature that ventures onto the property: Are you a coyote? If the answer is yes, he will heap the Wrath of Mike upon you. If the answer is no, then help yourself. Take whatever trinkets you want.

A couple of years ago, the neighbors built a house just over the crest of the hill across the road. The roof always makes me think of a ship coming over the horizon. A pirate ship.

Every morning, I am surprised by how quickly the light changes. It’s like, one moment I’m looking one way into mostly shadows and darkness, and then I turn around and someone turned the lights on. The sky has gone from cobalt to pool blue, and the deep rosy fingers of dawn have faded to pastel.

This is when I need the leash. Bobo is pretty directional when we’re going down the hill. I’m not so confident about him going back up. He used to want to eat the neighbor’s dog–a sweet lab mix named Molly–and he would try to get across the fence and do just that on a regular basis. But that was years ago, and Bobo is now older. In fact, he has surpassed me in dog-year equivalence. And Molly died a couple years ago (not, thank-god, because of anything Bobo did).

But old habits remain, so at the bottom of the hill, I leash him up, and we head back up to the house.

A few minutes later, we are climbing the hill. There is an occasional foray to the dock, but there are no mole rats on the dock, so the dogs soon lose interest in that real estate, and besides, they know where the treats are waiting.

A few minutes later, and we are back. The dogs have run. They’ve dug for mole rats, sniffed for passing mammals, and rolled in whose-so-ever droppings they wanted to roll in. I have either solved Wordle, or I’m waiting for the answer to bubble up from somewhere in the shadows of my consciousness, or Wordle has kicked my butt, and I am grateful just to be in living in a place where I get to watch the day start afresh every day. Morning after morning.

Justine Becomes a Mother

It was March, 2020, spring break of the last semester of my career teaching composition in a community college. As a nation, we were in the early stages of the COVID pandemic, isolating ourselves, trying to figure out how to scrub packages left on the front porch by UPS, learning how to make masks because there weren’t many available for purchase, and watching the residents of tall apartment buildings in large cities cheer health-care workers as they trudged to and from the hospitals where they were trying to save as many lives as they could. The death toll mounted.

I was sitting in my home office one afternoon about two o’clock, working at the computer, trying to get all the materials for all of my classes ready to go online. That included all lecture notes, overhead slides, assignments, assignment instructions, quizzes, discussion questions, everything. Literally, everything that I would normally deliver and explain in class had to be written out, formatted, proofread, and uploaded into empty course shells so students could access it from home. It felt like a Herculean task, especially considering that it was for the last two months of my career.

Vanessa opened the door and said, “I’m heading to the barn. Justine’s about to deliver.” She was excited. Vanessa, I mean. I’m not sure how Justine felt about it. Confused, I suppose. Justine was a two-year old La Mancha dairy goat. This was her first delivery. She had always been a skittish goat, a wall-flower, last one to the feed bowl. Now, she was big, very big, and she was especially wide. Earlier in the afternoon we had coaxed her into the barn from the brush yard, a distance of about fifty yards, by offering handfuls of grain every three or four steps. It was a slow process, and not entirely linear: step, step, step, pause, grain; step, step, step, pause, grain; then a random noise or quick motion would scare her back several feet, and we’d start again; grain, pause, step, step, step….

A few minutes later, I followed Vanessa to the barn. Our barn was almost new. We had built it just a few years earlier. It was divided into three roughly equal parts: one side with a gravel floor for the tractor and related implements; the center, with a concrete floor, for a workshop and grain storage; and one side with a dirt floor and hay for animals. The latter section is what we called “the barn,” or when we needed to be more specific “the barn part of the barn.” Using T-posts, wooden pallets, and bailing twine, we had fashioned a make-shift pen in the barn part of the barn for such events as goats giving birth.

When I arrived, Vanessa was already in the pen with Justine, and a little caramel-colored hoof was just starting to emerge from Justine’s backside. But just one, which was not a good sign. We waited for the second hoof to appear, but it didn’t. We waited some more. When it still didn’t, we waited some more. And then some more.

Vanessa had already helped deliver many baby goats, and she had read THE BOOK several times, so she knew what to do. She washed her hands, soaped up, and slipped her fingers inside Justine to get the second hoof in position. This job fell to her because we both acknowledged that my hands are way too big to fit inside the rear-end of a goat.

This was one of those moments we truly missed having Jordan, our youngest daughter, at home. Jordan, who had moved to North Carolina a couple years earlier on the pretense of starting a life of her own. had the perfect combination of gifts for this situation. She’s small, patient, agile, quick to strike, and fearless when it comes to working with animals. She was a champion chicken catcher, sheep wrestler, and goat midwife. She has the hands of surgeon—thin, nimble, and precise. For years, whenever I dropped a screw or a nut into the dark crevice of some contraption I was tampering with, the first words I uttered were “Jordan! Where are you?” But, alas, she was three hundred miles away, so I looked at Vanessa and sighed, all the while secretly thanking my lucky stars for having hands the size of a personal pan pizza.

Vanessa was working. My job was support. “You’re doing great,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster as she carefully searched Justine’s cervix with the fingers of her right hand. “I can feel it in there,” she said, her eyes half closed in concentration. She winced and then closed her eyes completely, in order to focus, I assumed, sight being completely useless or even a distraction in this moment. “I can almost…” Another pause. “I can…”

Then suddenly, she opened her eyes and withdrew her fingers, and just as suddenly there was half a goat baby sticking out of Justine’s posterior. The kid—soft, white with beige trim, covered in a kind of slimy, graying goo—just hung there, half in and half out, as if having second thoughts about the wisdom of this journey. It was alive, occasionally opening its grey eyes through the mucus and membranes. Pretty. Confused. Vulnerable. In shock.

Justine continued to contract, and with every contraction, the kid emerged a little further into this world, until she eventually spilled out onto the hay and lay there while Justine turned around—the placenta bag dangling between her hind legs like a balloon half-filled with water—and started to clean the baby with her tongue, as goats do. We named the baby Blossom, and we thought we were done. Dam and daughter in the manger. All was well with the world. Or at least the small one right in front of us.

Then, however, we saw another caramel-colored hoof peeking out of Justine’s caboose. It didn’t take us long to realize this was clearly not a spare hoof in case Blossom had a flat; it was attached to a whole other goat. Worse, it was upside down. That could only mean one of two things: either it was a terribly deformed goat, or it was a rear hoof and this was a breech birth. Then a second upside down hoof appeared, and Vanessa, sweaty, tired, and smeared with goat blood, mucus, and the veiny membranes of afterbirth, looked me squarely in the eye and said, “You might want to go get the book.”

I did as she asked. I knew the book would tell us what to do, but mostly I just wanted to get out of the barn for a moment. I took my time walking to the house, checking on the dogs, making sure the toilets weren’t running, doing anything to stretch out this break as long as I could. As I was strolling back up the hill toward the barn, book in hand, I heard Vanessa yell, “Help! Help! Help!” I picked up the pace, and when I got back to the pen, I saw Vanessa standing behind Justine, this time, with her hand up Justine’s backside all the way to the wrist. At that moment, it looked sort of like Justine was trying to suck Vanessa inside of her through some sort of Caprine Uterine Witchcraft, and I wondered, briefly, if I should grab Vanessa’s ankles and hold on for dear life.

Vanessa, on the other hand, had a much more realistic view of the situation. “I’m trying… to turn… the baby… over,” she said.

“And you’re doing great!”

She wasn’t really doing great. She was doing her best, but the kid wasn’t cooperating, and Justine seemed to have no idea of the drama being acted out behind her. After a few more moments of closed-eye, intra-uterine, woman-goat midwifery, Vanessa pulled her hand out of Justine’s backside, for the last time that day, I hoped.

Now, we were back to tiny, caramel-colored goat hooves peeking out from the thick curtains of Justine’s cervix, She was still contracting regularly, and on each contraction, the hooves would come out a little, then retreat. Then they’d come out again, then retreat. “Hang in there,” I said, again, stuck in my role as cruise director, “You’re doing great.” This time, Vanessa’s response was a stone-cold stare.

At some point, I suggested tugging on the hooves a little with each contraction. I was thinking that maybe we could coax the little guy out gradually, like we had coaxed Justine into the barn earlier. We worked on it slowly, together, taking turns, and after a while there was a second goat baby in our midst. A male. We named him Pat, after a female friend. We were done, we thought, at last. It was dinner time. It was past dinner time. We were hungry, we were dirty, we were tired, we were covered in various forms of goat muck. It was dark outside the barn.

But then, somehow, in a Coronavirus-induced fog, a third baby goat appeared. At least partly. I won’t describe the actual birth because I don’t remember it. What I do remember is clearly thinking, This baby is not going to make it. He struggled to breathe, we were holding him and bouncing him, and Vanessa stuck her finger down his throat to clear the passage, while I wiped away mucous and blood and afterbirth. All this time, Justine was cleaning Blossom and Pat, and looking at them as if trying to decide which she wanted to keep.

The third one—we later named him Buddy—never made it, never really had a chance. Justine never gave him the attention he needed; she never tried to lick him to life, as she had instinctively done for the others. Perhaps she knew there was something wrong in Buddy that was beyond our ability to sense. Try as we might, and we did try, Vanessa and I were poor substitutes for a willing mama. As I recall now, two plus years later, he died within twenty-four hours wrapped in a towel on our bed.

Blossom and Pat, on the other hand, were fine. Within an hour, they were both up and wobbling around the pen, nosing for nipples, taking naps and waking up, taking in their surroundings as serenely as baby goats do. A couple of days later, we opened the gate and introduced them to barn, and, not long after that, the barnyard. And the world was a little larger for it.

Adapted from a FB post from March 20, 2020

The Wasp

(Note: I found this little story from October 20, 2020 when I was cleaning out some old emails this morning instead of doing what I should have been doing, which was actually write something. Some days, hitting the delete button over and over is more satisfying, however. In the year and a half since I wrote this, I have become more concerned about the fate of insects on this planet, and I’ve day dreamed about turning Lower Pond Farm into some sort of an insect rescue or bug haven.)

This morning about 10:30, I was getting ready to go outside and do some work. I was hungry, so I made myself an open-faced peanut butter sandwich with the sour dough bread Vanessa baked yesterday. I put the sandwich on a paper towel and took it to the front porch, which faces the east and was in full sun. Then I set the paper towel and sandwich on the deck railing, in the sun, which started melting the peanut butter. Then a wasp flew into the warm peanut butter and got its back leg stuck.

The wasp floundered around in the warm peanut butter for a few seconds while I wondered what to do. I wanted to help, since I don’t want to watch even a wasp suffer, but realistically how can you wipe peanut butter off a wasp’s hind leg without getting stung, which I didn’t want either. Then, the wasp got off my sandwich and started walking around on the paper towel. “Good,” I thought. “Maybe he will fly away and clean his own leg.” But he didn’t. He got mad and attacked the sandwich, getting peanut butter all over his wings, too.

I was about to give him the damn sandwich when somehow he slogged all the way to the other side and fell off the porch railing into a late blooming Stella D’Oro day lily. Go figure. From now on, I’m only eating peanut butter with bread on both sides.

Good Morning!

Morning is my favorite time. We usually wake up around five, or five-thirty if we’re sleeping in, and whoever is the most awake, usually Vanessa, paddles out to the kitchen to push the coffee button. Then, we sit in bed for about an hour, drink coffee, check the weather, read the news, and scroll through Facebook. And lately, I’ve been playing Wordle, but I won’t go into all that now.

Just before sunrise, the dogs start to get antsy. Mitt, who sleeps with us, starts stretching and yawning, and Cooper and Bobo, who sleep on various couches, starting wandering in and out of the bedroom and staring at us expectantly. They know the routine. When I close the flap on my iPad, they get real excited, so I get up and dress, and they bounce around by the laundry room door while I put on my hat, my coat, my gloves and my muck boots. When I finally open the door, they fly across the driveway like they’ve been shot out of a cannon.

They generally run down toward the pond, into the swale where there is a little grove of mostly black walnut trees, and start digging in the soft ground for mole-rats. Vanessa had never heard of mole-rats before, but then she didn’t grow up out in the sticks in Missouri. A mole-rat is any number of little creatures that live underground and make tunnels. Anything, that is, between a mole and a rat, or any combination of anything thereof.

Anyway, just before dawn every morning, three of our dogs (Bobo, Mitt, and Cooper) are Kings of the Mole-Rat Chasers. The mole-rats on our property are generally safe, being smart enough not to be where the dogs are digging. Mike tags along, but he doesn’t have the mole-rat instinct, so he stands back and watches, wondering, I suppose, what all the fuss is about.

The front yard in January. Mole-rats everywhere!

I generally take a leash and snatch Bobo by the collar about fifteen minutes into the morning mole-rat foray. That’s the signal for the other dogs to head back to the house, where Vanessa is filling their dog bowls. By they time they eat (or decide they don’t want to eat, which is Bobo’s normal routine), the sun is just rising over the hill.

So we head to the barn. If it’s really cold, like the last several mornings, we’re carrying buckets of hot water to melt the ice that froze on the water bowls overnight.

Vanessa gives all the dogs a treat, which is why they come with us. Treats aren’t as tasty as mole-rats, I guess, but the dogs know they’re a sure thing. Then, Vanessa feeds grain to the goats in the barn, lately that’s Pokey and Justine the Justinator. I feed grain to the sheep and to Buck and Mr. G. over in Buck ‘n’ Ram Palace, on the other side of the garden, and then we give them all hay, at least in the winter time. When we’re not carrying up water, the morning feed takes about fifteen minutes.

Which means we’re coming down just when the sun is a few degrees over the horizon. Those are some of the most beautiful times on the farm, especially in winter, when it’s cold and clear, and the slant of light hits the frozen limbs in a particular sort of way. If we’re coming down early enough, and I think I can capture some of it, I will run in and grab my camera to take some pictures.

Our “Forever” Home

We closed on our “forever” home in early October, about a month ago. I put forever in quotation marks because this is the third or, maybe the fourth “forever” home that I’ve purchased. I can’t speak for Vanessa–having long ago learned the folly of attempting that. I do know this is the fourth house she has owned, but I don’t know what her expectations were going into the other three. So, this post is mostly about my various reactions to closing on our new forever home.

First, let me acknowledge how grateful I am to even be able to buy a house. I grew up in a house my parents rented for nearly fifty years. Granted, it was a good deal–a small farmhouse on several acres about three miles north of a small town in Missouri. I imagine they could have bought a house, had they wanted. They both worked, had stable incomes, and were able to stash away some savings over their lifetime. They just never bought a house. They weren’t house-people, I suppose.

Not me. As soon as I got settled into a good job, I wanted a house of my own. I wanted to garden and I wanted to build things–fences, sheds, bunk-beds. My first forever house was a 1,200 square foot remodeled brick farmhouse, originally built in 1928, on two acres just outside of Portland, Tennessee. It was a nice, little house, but with two growing kids, it didn’t take long to realize we were going to have to add on or move.

We moved. My second forever house was a 1916 mostly remodeled Sears Craftsman on one of the main streets in Portland. It was a rambling old two-story that was just shabby enough to be comfortable. One thing I remember about that house was that the hardwood floors in the main hallway had been laid directly on the joists without any sub-floor, so in winter when the heat was on and the humidity dropped, the floor boards would shrink slightly, and I could feel them clatter when I walked across them in sock feet.

I also remember thinking, This is my last house. I even said to my wife at the time something along the lines of “I’m not moving out of this house until I’m in one of the boxes.” It didn’t work out that way, however. Six years later, after the divorce, we sold the house and went our separate ways.

My fourth house, a 1938 cottage style in downtown Lebanon, had been owned by the same family from when it was built until they passed away in the early 2000s. It needed a complete remodel when I bought it in 2006. That’s why I bought it. The front porch was about to fall in, plaster was crumbling from the ceilings, every hardwood floor in the house needed to be sanded, and the big, flowery wall paper in the kitchen was straight out of Laugh In. Every time I walked in that room, I half expected Goldie Hawn to jump out and shout, “Sock it to me!”

I don’t recall ever expecting the Lebanon house to be a forever home. It could have easily been. I loved the house, and still do, but by that point I had pretty much given up on the notion of anything being forever.

Vanessa and I lived in the Lebanon house for a year before we bought the farm in 2013. A year before that (2011-2012) we lived in her house in College Grove. Both of our houses were good houses and would have been perfectly fine forever homes, but we wanted “our” place and we wanted a farm.

I’m not going to go into how much we have loved this place in this post. I’ve written about that extensively over the past few years. We’re not moving any time soon, anyway. We have too many animals. Some of them we can either sell or give away to good homes, a couple we will send to freezer camp, and three of the dogs, of course, will move with us. The hold-outs are Buck and Mr. G. (both goats) and Mike. They are all getting old, and none of them are suited for life in downtown Lebanon. Mike would bark all night long, Mr. G. would be lost, and the first time our new neighbors watched Buck aim a stream of pee at his own beard they would pretty much stop talking to us altogether.

So, we plan to make some repairs and rent the place in town for a couple of years while we sort through all the animals, tools, gadgets, implements, and machinery.

The house we’re moving to is just over half the size of our current house, so the challenge will be to figure out what goes with us and what goes away. We plan to have a massive yard sale.

Most rooms have lots of windows and the ceilings are nine feet high, so the place feels larger than it actually is.

The house was built in 1919 and needs some work. Quite a bit, actually. It looks good, but that’s just cosmetic. It’s been rented for the past 15 years, and it needs a new roof (completed last Friday), some updated wiring, a new breaker panel, new plumbing, and some masonry foundation work, and lots and lots of tinkering. The fellow who inspected it for us gave us a list of 95 items to be repaired, about two dozen of them with red flags.

But he also said the place was structurally sound and if taken care of would be standing for seventy-five more years. That’s not forever, but it suits my purposes.