Lowerpondfarm

Dental Surgery and Deck Painting

Yesterday, I went in for some dental surgery. It was my first experience with dental surgery, and therefore I celebrated the day before by painting the back deck. I don’t know if you have ever painted a deck before, but if you haven’t, let me tell you this: deck paint is not like regular paint. It’s thicker, a lot thicker, about the consistency of tooth paste. Except it doesn’t come in a little tube, it comes in a five-gallon bucket, so there is no squeezing involved.

When I scheduled my dental surgery, my surgical dentist, not my regular dentist, explained that there were five levels of pain management available to me, some came at an extra cost. “Level 5,” he said, “involves being cryogenically frozen until such time in the future that these procedures are accomplished without any pain whatsoever. In fact, there would be no need for these procedures at all.”

I was so freaked out by his explanation of Level 5 that I completely missed what he said about Level 4.

Level 3, he said, “Involves two pills. Take the first one the night before the procedure, and you will sleep better than you have ever slept. Take the second one an hour before the procedure, and you won’t care what I do to your mouth.”

Level 2 is “Novocaine.”

Level 1 is “Best described as ‘Suck it up, buttercup’.”

I thought for a moment and asked, “Does Level 3 cost extra?l” (Since I retired, my dental insurance sucks, but that’s another post.”)

So, on Monday when I finished my celebratory painting of the deck, I was putting away all the Colgate paint and the tools and so on, and as I was making my last trip to the shed, I opened the door and felt something tumble down my forehead and in between my glasses and my left and then sting me about half an inch below my eyelid. Within an hour, my left eye was all swollen, and I could hardly see out of it for two days. I had to squint to write this, and I’m still squinting a little bit almost two days later. But I took that pill he gave me and damned if I didn’t sleep like a baby.

The next morning, I got up, took my second pill a hour before the procedure, and Vanessa drove me to the dentists office, where apparently stuff happened that I only have a vague memory about. This morning, the day after the surgery, I’m feeling fine, though I am not going to operate any chain saws or other complicated machinery for a while.

I took the picture of my feet not long after I took the first pill on Monday evening. I didn’t do it for any particular reason. The camera was just pointing that direction, and it seemed good enough.

Harold and the Whack-a-Ram

So, after raising sheep and rams for seven years, I got knocked down by a ram for the first time this afternoon. I would say it was my fault, but it was Harold who came after me at feeding time. I wasn’t paying enough attention because, well, I’ve been feeding rams twice a day for seven years and never been knocked down before.

Rams will come after you if you get in their space and they think you’re after their ewes. And Harold loves Maude. Maude is one of the two ewes we currently have, and I think she’s in heat right now, which tends to ratchet up all the excitement. Sometimes rams come after you just because they like you and they think it’s a game. After all, they’re called “rams” for a reason.

When a ram attacks, he will lower his head, back up half a step, and then charge. That’s when you should spray him with a vinegar and water solution, which discourages such behavior, or do what I prefer, and smack him on the forehead with a whack-a-ram. My whack-a-ram is a red bristled brush with a two foot handle.

When I smack Harold with my whack-a-ram, he backs up and looks at me like he’s real confused, as if to say, “That’s not how the game goes.”

Right, Harold, so just back off.

And he usually does. Today, though, I didn’t have my whack-a-ram with me when I fed the sheep in the evening. I was putting their bowls down and listening to a Dawes song on my iPhone when the world suddenly went topsy-turvy. My glasses went flying, and the music suddenly stopped, and I instantly went from looking at a feed bowl and some dirt and some sheep pellets in the dirt to looking at the blue sky and some clouds.

Then as I was trying to get up, Harold decided that since the first one went so well, he should have another go at me. So he did. Knocked me down again. He didn’t hurt me, not permanently at least. He did piss me off, though, so I immediately got my whack-a-ram, and gave him a good talking too, which he has already forgot. Rams have very thick skulls.

This is a picture of Mac, our first ram. He had several goes at me in the three years we owned him, but he never knocked me down. I generally try to sell rams by the time they are three. They seem to get meaner as they get older.

22Elyse Nida, Kate Panebianco and 20 others14 CommentsLikeCommentShare

The Weed Puller

I feel at odds in church, among men
discussing religion. God won’t come,
won’t sit with me on those hard pews
to hear the pious sentiments of the pulpit.
There is too much of man, there.

Oh, they’re important, the churches.
The keep us straight, remind us of mercy,
bind us in fellowship; separate us, too,
from the mites and the whiteflies and the grubs,
but also the melons and the rain and the sunshine.

God comes when I am in the garden, pulling
weeds from the bolting lettuce, on my knees,
fingers combing the dirt for roots,
tossing grasses, green and strong, to die
in the wheelbarrow and be carted to the compost,
soil for the next generation. Generation and

re-generation. God comes when the only voice
is in my head, when it’s just me and the weeds
and the bolting lettuce, fingers searching the soft soil
for roots, bound, sinewy, flesh.

God comes then; I needn’t search
for that which I cannot avoid, the
inescapable fingers of the weed puller.

June, 1994

I wrote this poem over twenty-five years ago, and I still feel basically the same way. I suppose one could argue that shows my lack of spiritual growth over the years.

That may be true.

But over the years as I’ve built more gardens and grown, ate, and shared more vegetables with friends, colleagues, and local charities, I’ve felt more and more connected to something larger and more lasting than the world we live in most of the time, a world dominated by the day’s current events.

In the last few years, raising animals here at the farm has deepened my sense of connection to a whole other world. Attending their birth, helping them find and attach to their dam’s teat, feeding them, raising them, watching over them as they grow, trimming their hooves, administering their shots, calling the vet when we’ve done all we can to help a sick one, sometimes burying them, and occasionally taking one or two to slaughter. All of this has helped me connect more closely to a world that utterly disregards the week’s latest social scandal or political outrage.

None of this is meant to disparage people who do have strong religious beliefs or who find solace and strength in whatever church they attend. “Good for them,” I say. If someone’s church helps them find peace and connection to like-minded souls, encourages kindness, and engenders patience, generosity, greater acceptance, and good planetary stewardship, then that person has a worthy spiritual home.

It just never worked for me. I tried for several years. I went to church, got involved with numerous activities, played gospel music, met a lot of wonderful people (and some jerks, but churches are made up of people, after all, and people can be jerks no matter where they are), and I even got baptized near the end.

It just didn’t take. As much as I enjoyed the music, liked the people, and admired much of the mission, church was never my spiritual home. Perhaps, I am the seed that lands on rocky soil and never sprouts.

Or perhaps my seed sprouted in the garden. I sometimes like to imagine myself as a strong, well-tassled stalk of corn or perhaps a long, leafy heirloom tomato, one of the indeterminate varieties. More likely, though, I am a weed growing up in the bean row, living in the cool shade, searching for sunlight, eventually to be plucked from the soil and tossed in the compost.

Their are worse fates, at least to my mind.

September, 2021

Mike

“Mike is in the house!” Vanessa shouts, her tone somewhere between a plea and a laugh.

I’m walking through the living room, on my way to the kitchen where she’s making dinner. “Mike?” I ask.

“He’s in the house!” There’s an urgency in her voice that alarms me, though I can’t tell if she’s disturbed or amused by this situation, or maybe a little of both.

“He’s in the house?” My question has a purpose. Mike had been in the dog run just a few minutes earlier. The dog run is a long, narrow porch at the back of the house. It has a sliding door that leads out to the back deck, it’s lined with windows, and has overhead lights but no heat or air conditioning. It’s a sort of half-inside, half-outside area that connects to the Florida room on one side and to the little room off the kitchen—a room that still has no name, though we’ve named every other square inch of this property—on the other side. The dog run is as close to being “in the house” as Mike ever gets.

Mike is not an inside dog. He’s a working dog, a mix of Great Pyrenees and Anatolian Shephard. The American Kennel Association describes Great Pyrenees as a “large, thickly coated and immensely powerful working dog bred to deter sheep-stealing wolves and other predators on snowy mountains.” They describe the Anatolian Shepard as a “rugged, imposing flock guardian of ancient lineage. Protective and territorial, but also intelligent, patient, and profoundly loyal….” That last sentence—protective, territorial, intelligent, patient, and profoundly loyal—describes Mike perfectly. Note, however, that neither description mentions “good to cuddle with while watching TV.” Mike is not an inside dog, but it was stormy, so I’d fed him out in the dog run.

“Yes!” Vanessa shouts, “He’s… in… the… house!”

About that time, I cross the threshold from living room to kitchen and look to my left. There’s Mike, all hundred or so pounds of him, his long white fur a tangle of dirt, cockleburs, twigs, leaves, and slobber. He’s standing in the little no-name room, looking bewildered.

Mitty Kitty, our smallest dog, cruelly named, is in the kitchen proper, lying under the over-hang on the island we use as a breakfast table, watching all the Mike excitement unfold with a skeptical and bemused look on his face.

Mike hesitates, partly, I think, because he has two options, and he doesn’t know which to take. To his immediate right, a set of French doors leads into the living room, and one of the doors is open. But the odors—Vanessa is cooking lamb—come from straight ahead. If he darts to the right, he’ll be running into the great unknown. From his vantage, all he can see is the back of the couch, and he doesn’t know that on the other side of that couch lay bedrooms, a hallway, bathrooms, closets, and highly coveted lying-down space in the office. If he goes forward into the kitchen, he’s moving toward the smell of lamb, which Mike finds very enticing, but also the consternation of Vanessa. He freezes long enough for me to emerge from the living room, grab him by the collar, turn him around, and lead him back into the dog run.

Mike has never been in the house by design. When we first got him, nearly seven years ago, the idea was that he would be a livestock guard dog. Theoretically, he would live in the back of the property—the barn, barnyard, pasture, and the back three or four acres we call “the way-back”—with the sheep and goats, protecting them from predators and having minimal contact with us humans. He would bond with the livestock and not with us, so we thought.

Mike had different ideas. He liked us and he wanted to be with us. Try as we might (and, honestly, we didn’t try that hard) we couldn’t keep him in the back with the sheep and goats. When we first got him, we had a fence and metal gate separating the backyard from the barnyard. The gate had grating about three and a half feet high, then a space of about eighteen inches and then an additional bar above that. Mike would look at the gate, back up, take a run, and leap through the eighteen-inch gap. If I closed the gap with rope or wire, he’d just climb the fence beside it. Several times, I’ve watched him climb up a four-foot fence and shimmy over two strands of barbed wire. For Mike, boundaries have always been a suggestion.

For years, though, he seemed happy outside, sleeping in the cool dirt under the back deck in the heat of summer afternoons or resting underneath the magnolia tree or in any number of perches in the yard that gave him a clear view of which trucks were coming down the road. A couple of those trucks, which he can identify by the sound of their mufflers, carry dogs. Mike and those dogs have developed a sort of relationship. When he hears one of the trucks coming down the road, he races down to the pond, and runs along the fence line barking at the dogs who are riding in the truck bed barking back at him.

At night, he naps in a wicker settee that he claimed on the front porch. Livestock guard dogs are nocturnal. They’re bred to stay up and guard the flock from dangers in the dark, and they do this largely by barking. They hear something, and they bark. Then they run to another location and bark again. Then to another location, giving the appearance of being a small army. That way just a couple of guard dogs can protect a large area. I think it’s pretty effective. Even though Mike is alone, lying on the front porch two or three hundred yards away from our livestock, we’ve never lost a sheep or goat to a coyote or any other predator. But he does bark intermittently, all night. That’s another reason for not wanting him in the house.

For years, Mike seemed satisfied with his life outside. When it was really cold at night, in the low twenties or below, we’d lock him in the barn with the goats and he’d nestle into a pile of hay and stay there until we showed up again around dawn. In the last year or so, it’s been harder and harder to get him into the barn on cold nights because he wants to come in the house, with us. He keeps lurking around the sliding door between the back deck, where we keep the barbeque grill, and the dog run. So, I have to be really careful to slide the door shut it if I go out there, for instance, to flip some burgers. As soon as he sees a crack, he noses the door open and takes up residence in the dog run.

Which is okay. It is the dog run, after all. But then, as in the other night, he takes the next step, noses open the next door, and suddenly he’s in the little no-name room off the kitchen, and Vanessa is yelling, and there’s lights everywhere, and Mitty Kitty is laying on the floor up ahead looking skeptical, and Mike gets momentarily confused and hesitant, but, damn, something sure smells good.

I take him outside and rub him in his favorite places—his breastbone, the upper bridge of his snout, the place where his skull attaches to his neck—and I talk to him, yet again. “Mike, you know we love you, and I know you want to come in the house. You really want to come in the house. But it won’t be what you think it will be. You don’t like it when we yell at you for peeing on the wheelbarrow in the barn. You have no idea what’s gonna happen the first time you hike your leg on the corner of our leather couch.”

He looks at me with the kind of loyalty that comes only with a complete lack of understanding.

“You’re gonna have to trust me on this, buddy,” I say, rubbing his ears between my thumbs and forefingers, for who doesn’t like to have their ears rubbed, especially when they’ve just been disappointed. “Trust me.”

Mike moans, and gives me that far away stare, as if to say, That’s it. Right there. Keep rubbing.

Spring Report

The garden is mostly planted. We’re waiting a week or so to plant a few more short rows of corn and beans. The varieties we like (Silver Queen corn and Roma beans) come in all at once, so spacing them out helps lengthen the fresh consumption period. We stopped trying to preserve corn and beans a couple of years ago, since canning, or even freezing, takes a lot of work and we often ended up forgetting about them later. We’d look in the pantry and find a five-year-old jar of green beans or in the bottom of the freezer and find three giant, ice-encrusted cornburgs.

So, now we eat as many as we can while they’re fresh and give the rest away.

Vanessa getting ready to plant cilantro a few weeks ago.

The big project this spring was renovating and expanding the front garden, what we call the “well garden” because it’s down by the well. It turned out quite nice. We now have two fenced in areas down there. The old one is about 18′ by 20′ and the new one is about 24′ by 26′. Both contain raised beds that we use mostly for herbs and vegetables and have raised beds around the outside of the fence for flowers.

We’re migrating our main garden vegetables to the well garden because of easy access to water and good light. The soil in the main garden, near the barn, is better–deeper, less rocky, and more friable–but the trees on both the east and west boundaries are getting so tall that they’re cutting into the available sunlight in both the morning and evening.

Also, our chickens live near the main garden, and in the afternoon when we let them out to roam, they hop the fence and scratch around. That’s not a problem after the plants have gotten fairly large, but in the spring one good dirt bath can tear out an entire row of cucumbers.

Swiss chard in the well garden gets morning sun. In the afternoon, it’s shaded by a rose directly overhead and a Spirea bush which is just now starting to bloom.

“Heirloom” Flowers

I’m not generally a sentimental kind of guy, except when it comes to plants. I have flowers that I’ve moved from house to house for almost thirty years. Last year, I wrote about a Christmas cactus that came from a plant I remember sitting on my Aunt Noma’s back porch when I was a kid, almost 60 years ago. It still blooms (or its offspring does) every year.

I also have a few patches of false dragonhead (a.k.a. obedient plant) that I got from friends in the early 90s. The friends long ago moved away, and I’ve moved several times, but I keep digging up starts and taking them with me. And they thrive every time I move them, no matter the conditions.

Below are a couple of pictures of a columbine that I bought from Lowe’s ten or twelve years ago and planted at our previous house in Lebanon, where it still lives, I think. I brought a start here six or seven years ago, and now it’s living up near the barn, in a bed next to a hydrangea that I got from my sister, who got her start from mom. (Mom was the source for most of my “heirloom” plants.)

A Great Year for Irises

A lot of the plants I’ve moved from house to house are irises. Partly that’s because irises transplant well and partly that’s because like so many other people, I love them.

These lavender irises came from my mom’s yard in central Missouri several years ago. I’m pretty sure that she got them from her mom in southern Illinois many years before that. Now they live in a flower bed up by the barn. The fence is to keep the dogs and goats out.

These driveway irises have been here since we moved in. For a long time, though, there was a large Bradford pear tree shading them so they didn’t bloom very well. We took the tree out a couple of years ago, and now the whole circle is starting to bloom better.

Below are some shots of irises that we inherited when we moved in and that we’ve planted over the past couple of years–thanks to Sherry, Jennifer, and Davina for the rhizomes. Most of them didn’t bloom this year because I got them in too late, but they are doing well and will bloom next year.

Wild Flowers

It’s been a good year for wild flowers as well. The first summer we lived here, the entire hill in front of the house was filled with Queen Anne’s Lace. For several years after that, we kept it mowed so the sheep and goats could graze on it, but now that we are reducing the number of sheep and goats, we’re letting it revert back. It’s easier to maintain, and it’s good for the insects and small animals.

Queen Anne’s Lace growing along the pond bank.

I have thing for thistles. I like to let them bloom before cutting them down. So, at this time of year, they are growing up along the driveway, down by the pond, in the marsh. There’s a six foot tall one along the garden fence.

Unfortunately, Vanessa doesn’t share my thing for thistles. Oh well, I say, it takes all kinds….

Spring and All

The storm last night passed us by. We got warnings on our various devices, and we got some rain, but the high winds and tornadoes all went south. When we went out this morning, there were no limbs or branches on the ground–or at least no more than any other morning–and the sun was coming up over the hill to light a bright blue sky.

I love the soft clarity of morning after a rain.

The yard is full of small, delicate wild flowers that we called Juicy Fruit when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure that’s not the official name.

For the past two weeks, I’ve devoted most of my outdoor time to building a fence around a raised-bed garden we have been developing over the past couple of years down by the well. There has always been a small garden down there, one that we inherited from the previous owners and that we used primarily for flowers and herbs.

But things change. When we lost some large oak trees in the front yard last year, there was suddenly a lot more sunlight available to grow herbs near the porch, which makes getting them to the kitchen a whole lot easier. At the same time, we are getting less and less sunlight around the main garden up by the barn because the surrounding trees are getting taller and taller.

As a result, we’re slowly migrating most of the garden down to the well, where the soil isn’t as good, but where there’s abundant sunlight and available water.

Pictures from last year’s Well Garden. Lots of cosmos and zinnias, along with basil, dill, oregano, rosemary, and thyme. Now we’re adding tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil, dill.

More garden means more fencing, hence my last couple of weeks. I was writing to a friend last night and trying to think of an analogy for what it’s like to build a fence. I have built many of them in my life–sometimes I’m good at at, sometimes not. Sometimes I’m lucky and don’t hit many rocks; sometimes it’s a rock fight all the way to the bottom. Sometimes my lines are reasonably straight; sometimes they have more of an organic look.

Anyway, if you’ve never build a fence, here’s the basic process: You start off by digging post holes twenty-four to thirty inches deep (about the length of your arm). Then there is setting the posts, pouring concrete, and making sure everything is level. I can average about one post per hour, a little faster if the soil is soft. On the other hand, I have spent as much as three or four hours on a single post, when there are major rocks or roots in the way. This fence has fifteen posts–which for me is three good days of work.

Since this is a garden fence, I stretched wire fencing on the post to slow down the rabbits. I know it won’t stop them completely, but it will frustrate them. Then I put on the railing–16 foot pieces of rough cut poplar–built gates, and trimmed all the posts.

I think building fences is a little bit like having babies. You’re all dreamy about the first one, thinking that it will make your life so much better, and not really understanding all the work and baby poop involved. It’s a wonder anyone every builds a second fence, except, like having babies, you forget what you had to go through the first time. And, like babies, eventually you start to realize that they won’t always make your life wonderful, but they are still necessary and worth the sweat, work, and worry.

This last picture was taken down by the pond. Across the street from us is a big hay field rising up over a hill. It’s one of my favorite places on the property because whenever I’m down there (usually walking Bobo) it feels like the hill is a giant wave coming at me.

Last year, the family that owns most of the property around here built a house just past the crest of the hill, and now it looks like a pirate ship on the horizon, just over the swell.

A Lovely, Cold Morning

It was 12 degrees when we woke up this morning. Two cups of coffee later, it was still 12 degrees. When we went outside around 6:40am, it was still 12 degrees, and an inch of snow lay on top of half an inch of sleet, which lay on top of a quarter inch of ice.

At first, we groaned about having to go outside to feed the animals, but, as is often the case with swimming pools, hot tubs, and other sudden changes of temperature, it’s best just to jump right in because once you’re acclimated, it’s really quite lovely.

Cold, gray, quiet, a light snow still falling.

The first thing we do every morning is give all the sheep and goats grain. Then we make the rounds with hay. Vanessa generally tends to whoever is in the barn, and lately that has been females–Justine, Molly and Maude. I feed the boys–that is, the bucks and the rams.

Pokey was not all that impressed with the weather. Goats generally don’t mind the cold, but they sure don’t like being wet.

If you look closely, you can see Mr. G, on the right, giving Pokey (left) the Hairy Eyeball. Those flattened ears are goat-speak for “Back up, buddy, or I’ll kick your….” Buck (center) is oblivious to the little drama going on around him.

We have four ram lambs right now. Two are intact and two are wethers (castrated males), almost a year old, and this is one of the most fun groups we’ve had. They aren’t skittish or afraid (lots of sheep are—they are prey animals, after all), and they aren’t old enough to be aggressive yet. Rams are not generally aggressive, but they are protective, and getting hit from from behind by a two-hundred pound ram is an experience you don’t want to have often. These are about 125 pounds.

#6 and #7–Molly’s lambs from last spring.

Molly–looking for some extra grain. She’s already had her first serving, but she sees me out in the barnyard and makes her play for it.

Justine sees Molly outside angling for more grain and comes to the door, but won’t come outside. It is snowing after all.

Generally, we keep two five-gallon water containers for each group of sheep or goats, and every day I empty and refill at least one of those containers. When it’s this cold, though, everything freezes, so our goal is to keep one clean, unfrozen container for each group. When it’s really cold, we carry hot water from the house.

Robbert generally gets pellets, a handful of alfalfa, a carrot, and two minutes of undivided attention at the evening feeding. He loves to have his ears rubbed. (Who doesn’t?) This morning, I took him some warm water, but he wouldn’t come to me–he can be very fickle.

Late last summer, we had three large red oak trees cut down from the front yard. We cut the limbs into firewood and have been using it all winter.

The near-empty rack of firewood we’ve used.

The firewood we have have left. Let’s hope it warms up soon.

Mike usually sleeps outside. Mostly, he sleeps on the front porch–on a settee lined with a fleece dog bed–from where he surveys his kingdom and barks at random throughout the night. Great Pyrenees are nocturnal.

When it’s real cold, below 20, we try to get him to spend the night in the barn, which he does not like, but which has straw for bedding. I usually end up trying to coax him in with food. Last night it was the last serving of Shepard’s Pie. Tonight it will be left over chicken casserole sprinkled with raw hamburger.

Thanks for viewing. Hope you enjoyed it.

A Family Resemblance

First Contact

At the age of 67, I figured there were several things I would likely get at least one more time—things like a new couch, a new car (I want another Subaru, a red one), a colonoscopy, a new passport, a chance to use a new passport, a toothache, another hay delivery, a speeding ticket….

And there are things I figured I would never get—another full-time teaching job, a full-time job of any sort, another Martin guitar, another VCR, tickets for a rock concert, an STD, dentures, another tractor, a toupee’, another motorcycle, a new brother or sister….

Then late last October, I got an email from someone named Ruth Ann. She lives in a small town in southern Illinois, and she had gotten my name and contact information from Jim K-, a first-cousin on my father’s side of the family. Ruth Ann wrote that she’d had her DNA tested by both Ancestry.com and 23andMe, and that the results showed she, too, was a first-cousin of Jim. She explained further that the tests indicated she was related to other cousins and second cousins of mine, all on my dad’s side, and she thought we might be related, but since neither I nor any of my siblings had done a DNA test, she couldn’t be sure.

In order for this to make sense, I have to explain my father’s side of the family. My paternal grandparents were born in the 1880s, got married in the early 1900s and had four daughters between 1906 and 1912. Memories of those four aunts (Noma, Mabel, Frankie, and Jessie) are burned into my brain. They were like Greek goddesses, and someday I want to write about them. My father came along in 1926, when Noma, the oldest, was 20, and Jessie, the youngest, was 15. So, growing up, my father basically had five mothers, which explains a lot about my father.

But back to Ruth Ann’s email. If she was a first cousin to Jim and other of my cousins on my dad’s side, there are only so many ways that could have happened. The word “dalliance” comes to mind. Since my four aunts (Noma, Mabel, Frankie, and Jessie) lived within 10 miles of each other and my grandparents for practically their entire lives, and since Ruth Ann was born in 1955, when Aunt Jessie would have been in her early 40s and Aunt Noma was approaching 50, it’s highly unlikely that any of them would have had a baby on the sly. The simple process of elimination, therefore, leaves my dad.

I read carefully through Ruth Ann’s email as well as a Facebook message she’d sent a few days before, but which I had not seen, looking for signs that she was crazy. After all, it was 2020, and we’d all been through months of craziness, but there were no signs that she was looney. I looked for signs of being scammed—a mention of treasures awaiting in some foreign bank account if only I would send my login and password—but I found no red flags there either. In fact, Ruth Ann’s email and her earlier Facebook message were polite, considerate, to-the-point, grammatically correct, and punctuated well within acceptable parameters for email. She even offered to pay for the DNA test.

If she’s looking for money, I thought, she sure picked the wrong family.

Still, I didn’t respond on that day. It was Halloween.

Initial Follow Up

I wrote back the next day. In my response, I gave Ruth Ann a thumbnail sketch of our family—how my parents got married in 1950, had six children between 1951 and 1964 (seven really, but one, Mary Louise, died in infancy in December, 1954, when I was eleven months old), moved from southern Illinois to Rolla, Missouri, in the winter of 1962, and lived in the same house from 1962 until Dad died in August, 2007. I explained that my Mom had passed away last January. (Coincidently, Mom died on Wednesday, January 22, the day the first case of COVID 19 was reported in the U.S. I remember that I had the first meeting of my Introduction to Film class that night. We met as scheduled. It was that kind of year.)

Ruth Ann and I started emailing back and forth. She told me about her life in rural southern Illinois, about going to cosmetology school and getting her license but never practicing because she was too shy. “I think I have since changed,” she wrote. She worked as a pharmacy tech in the 1980s, and when the pharmacy closed, she got a job in a factory. “I never thought I could do the factory thing, but I loved it and the people were so nice, just like family.”

She described her family. She had been married 35 years when her husband died from complications related to a stroke a few years ago. She has three children and three grandchildren. She told me about her parents and her sister, about growing up in a small town in southern Illinois close to where our family is from, and where much of our extended family still live. Her dad, she said, was a quiet man. He didn’t talk much, but was a great father. She wrote that she never met anyone from his side of the family until 2003, when he was dying of cancer.

I found that detail interesting, partly because when we lived near family it seemed that everyone was in everyone else’s business all the time, to the point of eaves-dropping on telephone calls on party lines. I have sometimes wondered if that’s one of the reasons my parents moved to Missouri. On the other hand, Ruth Ann described her mother’s family as being much more like what I had known: big and busy, lots of aunts and uncles, piles of cousins, everyone close, constant action and interaction, some a little wild, not being afraid of much.

Somewhere in there, I told her I would get a DNA test. I signed up for Ancentry.com, spit into a tube, and sent it off.

Digging into the Past

Ruth Ann started this journey several years ago, when she and her husband took a DNA test. The test results showed she matched with an aunt and uncle on her mother’s side of the family, but no-one on her father’s side. At the time she was mostly interested in her ethnicity, she wrote, not in family relations, so even though the report listed names she had never heard of, she wasn’t too concerned about it. Then a couple of years ago, she started digging deeper into genealogy and DNA testing (and by this time, I’m sure the databases were much larger and more complete). That’s when she discovered she was related to my cousin, Jim. She originally thought Jim was just someone from her father’s side of the family whom she had never met. She was correct about that, but not in the way she thought.

She asked her sister to take a DNA test, and when the results came back, they showed that her sister was really her half-sister. Ruth Ann wrote that the news, “Broke my heart in pieces. Even though we are nothing alike it still shook me up. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her, as I had to get it right in my head before I could explain it all to her.” It was not until she told her sister that Ruth Ann felt comfortable reaching out to me and my siblings.

“I… always felt something was off as a young girl and I always tried to figure out why I had brown eyes and dark hair. Dad had dark hair but… hazel eyes. Mom had green eyes and my sister had blue.” When she met Jim, she realized why she didn’t resemble anyone in the family she had grown up with. “I cried for days and I looked on the internet…, scoured Facebook and came across Donna M- [another cousin of mine and Jim’s] and sat there in shock. I looked like her. I finally fit in.”

At some point during these email exchanges, my DNA test results came back, confirming what I already knew to be true.

Further Back into the Past

The DNA evidence as well as pictures showing a family resemblance point to the conclusion that my father and Ruth Ann’s mother spent some time together in January, 1955. Ruth Ann was born that October. The question is, how did they get together?

I remember my mom saying once that we had lived in a small town near where Ruth Ann is from for a short time when I was very young. I never thought much about it; we moved quite a bit back then. Dad worked in the oil fields, and Mom generally worked as a waitress. They were young—in their twenties—and trying to get established in their own lives, which really didn’t happen until much later, in 1962 when we moved to Missouri. My older brother, who would have been three at the time, seems to remember a period when mom and dad separated. That’s possible as well.

Dad was a part-time musician playing country dances at places like the V.F.W. and Moose Lodge for much of his life. He had a golden baritone voice and an innate sense of music. He could sing lead or harmony, and he could play various instruments from guitar to bass to piano to (years ago) trumpet. And he did so without being able read a single musical note; it was all in his bones. He could have very well been playing in a band back in the early fifties. So, it’s not an unreasonable guess for him to have met Ruth Ann’s mother at a place like the V.F.W.

The best Ruth Ann can piece the story together is that her mother had gotten married in spring of 1953 and moved to Virginia with her new husband, but “something happened” and her mother moved back to Illinois, alone, a few months later. Ruth Ann never got the full story about what happened, but clearly that marriage was over. Back then, of course, it took a while to get a divorce finalized, and during the waiting period her mother started seeing her dad. Her mother and father got married the day her mother’s divorce was final, and Ruth Ann’s mother always insisted that the man who raised her, the man Ruth Ann called a “great dad,” was her biological father. Ruth Ann wrote, “Anytime…I asked [mom] how long they had been married she always said ‘how old are you?’ and would always add a year….” After the DNA test showed that the quiet man, the great dad, who raised her was not her biological father, Ruth Ann set out to find her biological family, which led her to my cousin, Jim, and eventually to me and my siblings.

Ruth Ann’s mother is no longer living, so she asked an aunt about the events that took place back in the winter of 1955. At first, her aunt insisted, “Your dad is your dad.” Her aunt confirmed that by the time Ruth Ann was conceived, her mom’s first husband (the one from Virginia) was out of the picture completely. Ruth Ann wrote that she “kept pumping her [aunt] and she never changed her answer. Even after mentioning Eddie H-’s [my father’s] name, she never changed until I mentioned that he played in a band. Her face changed completely. She said, ‘I remember’.”

This is all speculation, of course. All the principal actors are beyond asking.

Back to the Future

Ruth Ann has spent a lot of time—countless hours, over months and, now, years—piecing all this together. (I have only relayed the broad outlines in this post.) From her perspective, I imagine that it must be like taking the deck of cards your life was dealt from and tossing it into the air. She has been generous, though, never blaming or judging her mother. “I couldn’t be upset, or I wouldn’t be able to get through this,” she wrote.

She’s also been generous in giving me and my siblings time to process all the information. It’s a big deal for us to find out at this point in life that we have a half-sister we never knew about, and we are each dealing with it in our own way. My youngest sister, Betty, has apparently struck up quite a relationship with Ruth Ann, and they call or text each other practically every day. But then, Betty’s young, only in her fifties, and still agile. My preference is to go a bit slower—an email every week or two—I don’t particularly like talking on the phone. Our other siblings are processing these events as they will. Ruth Ann wrote that she has known about us for over a year and a half, and I do appreciate that she waited until after Mom died to contact us. Regardless of whether mom knew about this or not, and I prefer to think she didn’t, there was no reason to clutter up the end of her life with it.

When I first got the information, my initial response was a little snarky (imagine that): “Well,” I said to Vanessa. “It doesn’t seem out of character. My dad had a lot of good qualities, but fidelity was not among them.” However, as I have thought about it for a couple of months, now, I’ve come to some different conclusions. In January, 1955, my parents had just lost an infant child, Mary Louise. I can’t imagine the pain that causes—the initial searing pain or all the quivers that come later. There weren’t any grief counsellors or self-help groups in rural southern Illinois at the time; people were largely left to work out their feelings on their own. American literature is strewn with characters in such situations. Read practically anything by Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner, pick a play by Tennessee Williams, any play. It’s possible that my parents were separated when this happened, which does make me wonder what my mother was going through at that point. It’s also possible they were living together, but separated by a grief that neither could come to grips with. They were young. They were struggling. They were in pain. It was January, for god’s sake.

Whatever happened in the past, however, is in the past, beyond recovery. We’ll never know the specific circumstances that lead to a relationship between my father and Ruth Ann’s mother, the nature of that relationship, or what it meant for either of them in the long term. About those things, we can only speculate. What’s before us now is the present and the future. We have a new sister, one who has a whole life ready to share, and one who doesn’t seem to want anything other than to share it in whatever way seems to work. Ruth Ann hasn’t asked for any money, at least not yet, and I don’t think she will, which is good because I’m saving for a new Subaru, a red one. Ruby red.

Winter–A Few Years Ago

Winter

We haven’t gotten much snow this year, at least so far, and I wanted to escape all the weirdness in the world for a while, so here are some photos from snow falls in 2015 and 2016.

Mr. Gladstone–aka Mr. G.–was named after the the desk clerk played by Buck Henry in “The Graduate.” Mr. G. has been Buck’s constant companion for practically their whole lives. If you ever smelled Buck or was around him much during mating season, you would understand just how patient Mr. G. is.

We got ducks one day when I took Jordan to Tractor Supply. It was spring, and she saw a grab bag of ducks for in a bin. No specific species, no specific sex. You just got what you picked up. We ended up with a couple of female Rouens, a male Rouen, and a male Mallard, which should not have been there because Mallards are wild ducks and can’t be kept in captivity. We named the Mallard “Orville,” because he was First in Flight. Rouens are “table ducks,” and get too fat too fly more than a few feet.

Sophie Walker was our first stray sheep–we’ve had two, Sophie and Molly. Sophie showed up one day in the fall of 2015. I saw her standing outside the perimeter fence behind the barn. She was watching our small flock and clearly wanting to join them. I opened the gate and let her in. We had never seen any other sheep in the area, but we went house to house and made several calls looking for her owner. We could tell from her tag (23) that she had been part of a flock somewhere. Judging from the tan spots on her rear, she was at least part Katahdin and maybe part Dorper, too.

The pond seldom freezes, but it did in February, 2015, and again in January, 2016. Skating is not recommended.

Two female Rouen ducks. I’m not sure **why** I like this picture, but I sure do.

Buck Henry in his full, youthful glory, January, 2016.

Marinara — A Recipe

All good marinara sauce begins with an argument. That’s what gives it spice. At our house, the argument comes in late February, and it usually takes place in the little room right off the kitchen, which is the only part of the whole farm we haven’t found a name for other than “the little room right off the kitchen.”

The argument starts like this: “I don’t think you’re planting enough tomatoes,” I say looking at the little trays of seeds all lined up under the grow lights on the plant rack that we have set up by the window in the little room right off the kitchen.

Last year’s tomato crop (bottom) starting in the little room right off the kitchen.

“What do you mean?” Vanessa says. “I planted like… twenty seeds.” She starts counting off, “Let’s see… six Amish paste, four Carmellos, two Cherokee Purples, a couple of Brandywines—one red and one yellow—two Black Vernissage, two or three Mortgage Lifters, uh… uh… something else, and a couple of cherry tomatoes for Buck.”

“Exactly,” I say.

“Exactly what?”

The tension in her voice and the slight flaring of her nostrils indicate that I should drop this topic, but then I think about the possibility of abject tomato poverty looming over late July (an infestation of tomato worms, a blight, swarming locusts), so against both my nature and my better judgment, I forge ahead. “Exactly,” I say again. “Exactly not enough.”

“You always plant too much,” she says. “And then I end up taking care of it.”

She’s right. I do always plant too much. Call it a character flaw if you want. (I prefer to call it a character feature.) It’s just that the only perfect garden is the February garden, the one I am planning (not even planning, really, just dreaming about), the one that exists months before we put a single seed or a tender shoot in the ground. The February garden is amazing—lush, green, weedless, perfectly watered, and filled with beneficial insects, pollinators from the dreamiest reaches of my mind. That is the garden that gets me through late winter, the garden I’m protecting.

“If you want more,” she says, “you plant it. But you also have to take care of it.”

And she’s also right about the tending. She does end up doing more of the daily weeding and cleaning and snipping and picking and bagging than I do. I make a mental note to work in the garden every morning this coming summer, even though that’s the time that I usually reserve for writing. The root of the problem is perspiration. Vanessa hates to sweat, so she does outside work in the early morning. I like to sweat, and I’m happy to sweat after lunch in exchange an hour or two at the computer with my breakfast and a cup of Earl Gray. For us to work together, someone has to give something up. Hence the tension.

“That’s okay,” I say, trying to convey a slightly downcast tone as I slowly step out of the little room right off the kitchen to the actual kitchen. “I’m sure these will be enough.”

This may sound as if I’m giving in, but it’s part of the recipe. Good marinara may get its spice from argument, but great marinara gets its depth (what we now call “umami”) from a pinch of resentment.

—

By mid-July we are over-flowing with tomatoes of all sizes, shapes and colors. Heirlooms (Red and Yellow Brandywine and Mortgage Lifter, Cherokee Purple) litter every counter in the kitchen, a cereal bowl of bright red cherry tomatoes sits next to the coffee pot, golf ball-sized salad tomatoes (Black Vernissage) line the over-turned cardboard tops of copy paper boxes, and two mostly full milk crates of Amish paste plum-style tomatoes sit on the floor of the little room right off the kitchen.

If I were to admit it, which I won’t, Vanessa was right. She had planted enough, though in early May I did drag home a couple pots of some variety or other, like puppies, and ask if we could keep them, p-l-e-a-s-e.

On a hot afternoon, I drag out the scales, the food mill, and the biggest pots and bowls we own, and I check the propane tank to make sure we have enough to bring about four gallons of water to a boil and keep it there for about an hour. I am generally in charge of making marinara for a couple of reasons. First, I have the upper body strength to lift a five-gallon pot of water or tomato juice, and second, I’m not afraid of propane.

Plum or paste tomatoes are best for sauces because they have heavier, meatier flesh, but you can use any type of tomatoes, including cherry, in a sauce. We use whatever’s ripe.

The following recipe is based on one we found in Put ‘em Up: A Comprehensive Home Preserving Guide for the Creative Cook, by Sherri Broo… (years ago, one of our dogs chewed the cover off the book and it’s now held together with a large binder clip, so that’s all I got).

Marinara Sauce

Ingredients:

25 pounds of tomatoes (I have made it with as few as 15 lbs.). Plum or paste tomatoes are best because they have less liquid, but you can use whatever you have and adjust the cooking time.
1 pound of onions, finely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and minced
3 tablespoons of bottled lemon juice per quart (added to the jars, later)
1 teaspoon of salt per quart (added to the jars, later)

Making the Sauce:

Cut 5 pounds of tomatoes in half, quarters if they are large, and put them in a large non-reactive* pot with enough water to cover the bottom—to keep them from burning. Bring them to a boil while crushing and stirring. A potato masher works well for this.
After you have crushed the tomatoes and they’re starting to boil, cut 5 more pounds and add them.
Continue until you’ve used up all your tomatoes or the pot is full.

Boil the tomatoes for about 15 minutes to release the juice.

Note: you don’t have to peel or seed the tomatoes, though I usually do cut off any greenery that might still be attached.

Once all the tomatoes are included and crushed, reduce the heat and let them simmer for fifteen or twenty minutes. (This is a good time to dice the onions and mince the garlic.)
Remove the tomatoes from the heat and let them cool for five minutes or so.
Run them through a food mill to remove the skins and seeds. This is the messy part because the skins, seeds, and pulp will fill up the food mill pretty quickly, so you are constantly cleaning it out. Just be sure to have a couple big pans within reach and don’t be afraid to make a mess. You will make a mess. But everything can be cleaned.
Once you have run all the tomatoes through the food mill, you will have separated the tomatoes into two parts: juice and glop. The juice will become marinara, the glop is good compost, and chickens like it if you have chickens.
Pour the juice back into a large, non-reactive pot. (If you used 25 pounds of tomatoes, you should have around 3 gallons of juice.)
Add the diced onions and minced garlic, bring to a simmer.
Sherri Broo…suggests cooking the sauce for about 1.5 to 2 hours. We usually cook it for twice that long, and still the sauce is too thin to use without thickening later.

*Note: A non-reactive pot is one that won’t react when cooking acidic foods, like tomatoes. Examples of non-reactive pots are stainless steel, Teflon, ceramic, glass, and metal with enamel coating. Do NOT use cast iron, aluminum, or copper.

Simmer the tomato juice until it has reduced by about one-third or more. You will likely still have to thicken the sauce with two or three tablespoons of tomato paste when you use it. Vanessa says it’s dangerous to add the paste before canning; I have learned to trust Vanessa on such things.

Canning:

Transfer the sauce to sterilized quart jars, leaving a half inch of headroom.
Add 3 tablespoons of lemon juice and one teaspoon of salt to each jar.
Wipe rims with a clean cloth.
Put a sterilized lid on each jar and secure it with a band.
Process in a boiling hot bath for 45 minutes.
Remove the heat and the canner lid to let the jars “rest” for 5 minutes.
Remove jars from the water and set aside for 24 hours before removing the bands.
Store for up to a year.

Notes: 25 pounds of tomatoes normally yields 6 to 7 quarts of sauce, depending upon how long you cook it, and how thick it gets. Vanessa likes to add a few tablespoons of tomato paste to thicken the sauce when she’s simmering it for use.

This year, we ended up with about thirty quarts of marinara sauce for this winter. They are safely stored in an old cedar armoire that we converted to a storage pantry a few years ago. Vanessa thinks we will have plenty to get us through the year.

Personally, I think we could use a few more.