chicken update
Many people have asked me recently, "So, how are the chickens?"
They're great! I reply. Doing fine. Don't mind the cold at all. Friendly and sociable. So much fun!
"And how are the eggs?" they ask.
Eggs? Oh. They don't lay eggs.
Zilch. Zip. Goose egg, as they say, except, you know, without the actual egg. There's a reason, it seems, that casual backyard farmers don't start chicks in August. My father has been joking that I bought the wrong kind of chickens. The non-egg-laying kind.
But still I try to be upbeat and positive. Look how much they love the snow!
snow? we bok at snow.
And how great they are around kids!
future hippy and hippy protein provider
Then this morning I went out with their usual ration of treats and found only three out of four chickens diving at the dehydrated worms. Um, where's the fourth bird? I looked under the coop... nobody there. I went around the coop to look in through the door. Uh oh. There was the forth chicken, lying in the nesting box, not moving.
"Dan!" I came yelling into the house. "I think one of the chickens is dead. I don't want to check all by myself."
Dan, though already late for work, diligently put on his raincoat and followed me outside.
"She's just lying in the nesting box - i don't know if she's breathing - I didn't want to open the lid on a dead chicken - please look for me," I pleaded rather frantically.
Dan opened the lid of the nesting boxes and shook his head with exhasperation.
"Leah, she's not dead," he said patiently. "She's sitting on eggs!"
the first fruits of those who wait
"Go on broody hen!" he called as he shooed her away. "There aint no babies in here. Go peck! Be free! Live the bachelorette lifestyle!"
And so we have our first four eggs today. Just like that. You can't tell me that isn't magic.
old farmers
Harvey likes reading books about pumpkins. Having them read to him, that is; you know what I mean. Other farming-related texts often make their way into our house as well. And I've noticed a pattern: in nearly all cases, when a child in a picture book is described as living on a farm his or her caretakers are grandparents rather than parents. Leaving aside the disturbing question of what happened to the parents (are they dead? drug dealers? financial wizards with no time for their kids?), this shows a disturbing lack of faith in the long-term prospects of American agriculture.
I'm sure there's no slight against farming intended by any of the authors; they just don't expect their readers to believe that a young couple, the sort likely to have a picture-book-protagonist-aged offspring, would willingly tie themselves to the soil for their livelihood. Not that the farmers in the stories seem to be working too hard; it's more the retired-in-the-country-and-fun-to-visit farming. True, there are some good books about farming in the olden days—our last library visit I read Harvey Jane Yolen's Harvest Home—but if you go by most of the books set in the modern day farming is clearly a dying art.
Which it may be, in mainstream culture. But we're fighting the power over here, and we need picture books to back us up and send the right message to our children! One of the rare counter-examples is Nikki McClure's To Market, To Market, which dives right into realistic descriptions of how farmers market vendors grow or make the things they bring to the market. Only there's not much plot to grab you, and the explanations are a little long for Harvey's taste. Oh, he'll listen to them—this child will listen to the dictionary for as long as you're willing to read it to him—but it's not the kind of thing that's going to excite him, either about rereading it or about living it.
So... who knows any children's-book authors?
the winter of our discontent
We tend to be sicker in the winter, I find, and despite the lack of actual wintery weather the trend is holding true this year, with a vengeance. Today it was a stomach bug for all the humans but Zion, and he threw up too anyways because, you know, he's a baby and all. I suppose he didn't want to be left out. Leah always feels like the world is ending when either she or the kids are sick (me being out of commission is I think only a minor inconvenience) and this time I think I might agree with her. Good heavens. Nevertheless, Harvey and I managed this afternoon to maintain good spirits despite bouts of vomiting, and if he makes it through the night without getting sick again I may regain my will to live.
another era's cookery
Since I love both books—not just reading, the actual physical books too—and cooking, it's only natural that I should be drawn to cookbooks. Obvious, right? Of course, I don't like just any cookbooks. No Rachel Ray quick-and-easy generic American food for me; give me the scientific, the ethnic, or the antique. Especially the antique. Not even to cook from necessarily, but to read and marvel at the recipes of yore. I only wish the ones I have went back further, but cooking in the 70s was plenty different enough to be of interest to a historian of culinary trends.
This evening I was perusing The Farmhouse Cookbook, by Yvonne Young Tarr, which was published in 1973. It's a really interesting mix of old-time recipes, alot of them of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, with trendy modern dishes. Soy sauce is an ingredient in at least one recipe, for example, and glazed ham with pineapple makes an appearance. On the other hand, if you had access to 100 lbs of hams you could also follow the recipe for Farm-Cured Ham on page 140 and, "[l]ike the country folk of the past, ... enjoy this time-ripened delight." Time-ripened here refers both to the recipe and the product itself; I only wish I had room to store that much ham, carefully wrapped in brown paper and muslin bags, on the premises. Ditto the bacon, which also calls for 100 lbs of meat.
I was also fascinated by the recipe for Calf's Head Soup, which I read to Leah. Even though she joined me yesterday in vigorously defending, in principal if not in practice, the use of "mechanically separated meat"—doesn't it seem right to use all possible parts of the animal?—she thought the line could be drawn at brains. In her defense she's never been a fan of brains, but I don't think it's entirely a necessary conclusion that she would resist eating them when they were cooked unrecognizably into a soup. The point is moot, however, because I could no more easily get my hands on a calf's head than I could pig meat in three-digit weights. Although I bet if I asked around at the farmers market...
(David Walbert at Walbert's Compendium writes more knowledgeably than I'll ever manage on the topic of old recipes, and I recommend you check out his blog if you're at all interested in the subject.)
a formal introduction
I never had imaginary friends as a child; perhaps it was something to do with my total lack of imagination. Harvey is clearly his mother's son in that respect, because he spends big chunks of his day holding conversations with himself or making his toys talk to each other or "reading" wonderfully creative stories from books. Although, when I say it that way you might think that this wellspring of imaginative play means that he can spend time by himself, which is not generally the case: his conversations and stories are so fascinating to him that he wants to be sure we know about them! Also we need to be around to eat the food he cooks, and to ride on trains and tractors with him. Things like that.
Featuring prominently in all this imagination are Jop and Boonin. I argued for "Jopp" as a spelling for the former but Leah got there first, so I guess I'll follow her lead. In any case, I wish I could remember when we started to hear about these two characters. All I can recall is that Jop showed up first and Boonin followed a little while later, but by now they tend to be inseparable. They live under the flower tree in our yard (Harvey makes his home in the hemlocks and the store is beneath the ivy), but they spend a good deal of time over at our house. Today they were even there when we were out watching the football game with friends! Maybe they're more base hoop fans.
In the car on the way home this evening Harvey was talking about the pair (that's how I knew I could expect them when we got home; he says they let themselves in). At some point in what was mostly a monologue, we heard the following:
"I'm Jop. And I'm Boonin. And we're Jop and Boonin."
So there you have it. Whether he was influenced in his cadence by the football announcers—he didn't seem to be paying attention but we should know by now that he's always listening—or some other source, it seemed like as good an introduction as any to the pair that play so large a role in our elder son's imagination. I expect to continue to hear more from them in the future