In some ways, all we’ve done in the past decade has prepared us for now! The Plague! We thought it’d be Peak Oil, or Climate Catastrophe (maybe it is Climate Catastrophe, by proxy), or locusts, locusts would be cool but harder for us to isolate from, I guess. But an honest-to-god plague? Well, unlike virtually every other plague that humanity has faced, we actually have a pretty good idea, and basic sanitation necessities, to survive it. Unless previous plagues, we don’t immediately dash to our public square or local place of worship to pray it away (well, most of us, anyway), and unlike many people, we’re already pretty isolated, with some decent prep already well underway. So, even though this site has sat dormant for a good long while and some Evil Russian Hackers have hijacked our original domain, maybe I got frozen stuck in the fifties. Maybe I was stoned throughout the sixties. Maybe I nearly died in the seventies. But I’m here!
Hi. It’s been a while. The farm has been going about how farms go – some failures, in various degrees of costliness. Some successes, mostly small, all cute, except the ones we eat. The Native is home indefinitely as he’s been deemed non-essential for any other practical purposes. The Squirrel, now a second grade genius despite the reality of public school, provided a video tour of her Chick Hatchery the other day in her virtual classroom. One well-intentioned classmate asked her if she intended to eat the ducks’ eggs: if these ducks are girls, yes. Otherwise I’ll just eat the ducks. Crickets on the other end of the Zoom. These may be rural kids, but they’re not farm kids.
Exemplary of farm life, our Mama Goat dropped her year’s bundle of cuteness, who’ve been learning to frolic now, two days into their life, in the freakish May snow, while on the other side of the field, her wethers from two years ago were slaughtered for the freezer. The wethers (whom we by rote choose not to name but to whom we’ve referred informally as Stew and Burger) had developed a habit of heatbutting both the Squirrel and their own younger sisters, so when seeing their carcasses hanging, the Squirrel’s first reaction was a defiant “you deserved that!†Back on the birthing side of the goat pen, the new babes are thankfully both does, and cute, easier to put in front of unsuspecting would-be farmers in the time of pandemic.
So it’s easy for us, with our bathroom full of chicks and freezers full of pork and shop full of what was once head-butty Stew and Burger and what will soon be delicious stew and burger and the cold frames and grow lights full of greens and garden beds prepped and covered in fucking snow, easy to run to the supermarket once a week masked but with no intention of robbing the joint. I mean, we miss friends, Squirrel does particularly, but for the most part, if this is the new normal, it isn’t so bad. Excerpt for the snow in May.