Family – Page 11 – the Dig and Flow

How We Survive Early Spring

Perhaps it’s the curve of their peach-colored bills or the slight narrow upturn of their eyes, smiling. Maybe it’s what Stella calls their “lellow fur” or their too-big feet. It definitely has something to do with their ludicrous wings, poking fuzzy and useless from their shoulders.

Whatever it is, I succumbed to it, and we now have six ducklings living in our kitchen.

2015-03-31 17.21.27 Usually, my resistance is strong. I repeat my mantra, “All babies are cute.” The second part of that mantra, “and then they grow up,” can remain unsaid while I walk away from the cute babies. Except on April 1, when I walked away with a box of ducklings, carried from the store by a jubilant Stella.

My head has been bursting with the South’s dogwoods, azaleas, and magnolias, but my eyes meet brown fields, brown trees, gray skies, and not a single blooming plant. The air has been cold and odorless. I’ve been battling a funk that sunk deeper as the snow shrank away. Winter dazzled me; spring feels bleak.

How do people buoy themselves until spring truly arrives here? We dabbled in one tactic, visiting a local saphouse for breakfast, leaving heavy with pancakes, sausage, and generous portions of maple syrup, but lighter for the rising sweetness of trees. When another joy of spring occurred to me, I knew we were in trouble.

“At least I didn’t buy bunnies, or lambs, or a puppy,” I pointed out. Andrew—who kindly encouraged my duckling pursuit, which I did premeditate by about a week—agreed that it could’ve been worse. Ducks are smaller than lambs, more useful than bunnies, and less work than a puppy, or so we figured. I did expect them to be messy, however, and have not been disappointed.

Ducks are completely uncivilized. In our kitchen, they slap around on pine shavings in their livestock trough, always cheerful on the verge of panic. Their heads snorkel into their waterer, which turns brown within five minutes of a refill. They poop prodigiously.

Every day, Sam weighs each one on a small gram scale, tracking their growth for his science fair project. He mostly loves watching them crane their necks and launch from the plastic bowl, but he diligently writes down the numbers.

We watch them thrashing exuberantly around our bathtub in several inches of tepid water, showing us how zealously ducks really do take to water. Then they cluster in hysterics while I scoop them into a towel to transfer back to clean shavings while I disinfect the bathtub.

Then those stinky little hoodlums hear our voices and tilt their heads, lifting one eye towards our faces and peeping, “sweet sweet,” and I’m glad they’re here, warming April.

The First Animals of Our Barnyard

First, we noticed small feline tracks in the snow around our cars, leading towards the barn. We soon spotted the large black cat, too long-haired to see how bony he might be after this cold winter. Skittish, he bolted if he even saw us peeking out the kitchen window. He seemed to appear and disappear.

Next came the wild turkeys, fat bodies clinging to the spindly sumac trees behind the barn as they pecked the furry red sumac tufts. The toms proudly dangled their beards from their chests. One turkey carried a clump of burdock velcroed to its feathers. We followed turkey tracks right around the front of the barn, and over the largest drift near the old milkhouse.

One evening since snowmelt, we watched a possum saunter up our driveway, looking stoned. “Do they always walk like that?” I asked Andrew, laughing.

“Maybe he’s just waking up from hibernation,” he guessed.

The possum hunch-waddled straight into our barn. I wondered if he’d encounter the cat.

Last week, a bunny appeared. This was not a wild bunny wearing various shades of brown. We’ve seen those all winter, eating the red-berried thorn bush outside the guest bedroom window, ducking below the small deck at the side door, and trafficking under the loading dock that holds old trucks. But this bunny was white.

It just hopped out of our barn one morning, as if it had been there all along. Andrew walked out with an apple, sliced in half, spooking the bunny, and set the apple by the brick pile. The bunny emerged again; bunnies like apples.

We speculated—an escapee from the renting college student who kept rabbits in a camper until mid-December? A drive-by drop-off bunny, set free at our place by owners who were done with it? A stray bunny, busted free and gone feral?

Two days later, as the sun drew dusk down over the farm, Andrew and I stood at the bay window, facing away from the barns. A wild bunny hopped into view, visible crossing patches of snow, then hidden on the grass. Behind her came the white bunny, hard to see on the snow, but bright across the grass. He pursued her around the yard, casually, reminding me of Peter Rabbit going “lippity lippity” in Mr. McGregor’s garden.

That was the last we saw him, that symbol of frisky springtime fertility. I like to imagine that the white bunny continues to evade coyotes and chase wild lady bunnies. “I guess he moved on,” Andrew explained gently to Stella. “He was a traveling bunny.”

Old Pines Learn New Tricks

Once these were trees. They must have grown slowly, with lines layered more closely together than the pine boards we purchase today. One board near the kitchen stands out as extra finely-grained, with lines just millimeters apart. This board might be ponderosa pine, Andrew guesses, and I trace it with my fingertips, transported to high forests near the Grand Canyon, hiking in grasses among thick trunks.

2015-03-15 16.40.56 I think of loblolly pines growing fast in Alabama and Georgia, cut with machines with giant insect-like pincers that grasp their trunks and snip them like weeds. I wonder who felled the trees under my feet, with a saw or an axe? Who milled them into boards?

2015-03-27 00.50.42

I have never spent so much time scrutinizing a floor. It began with cleaning. We traced the shop vacuum along each crack, then washed the boards. With a rented sander, Andrew buzzed back and forth for about fifteen hours, interspersed with more vacuuming. With a hand sander, we addressed edges, corners, and stubborn spots left by other people being careless. Finally satisfied, we vacuumed again and wiped with a cloth.

Five coats might seem excessive, but some determination seized me, as if a strong coating on this floor would protect the whole property from crumbling, would keep us all safe.

So at 11 pm, I sponged on the polyurethane, ending at the bottom of the stairs. Then I packaged everything and went straight to bed. The next morning, I began to scritch the floors, sanding over the boards for hours. Then another vacuuming, wiping, and the next coat before bed. A week tumbled past in this rhythm.

Now these old pine trees glow. The house feels clean for the first time since we arrived. We sprawl across the floors. Stella lounges on her belly reading books; Sam cartwheels like it’s a gymnasium. Now we are moving in.

A Fresh Angle on the Project

In the glare of construction lights, I dance with a pole. On the end of the pole, a paint roller spreads white primer across a mostly white ceiling and walls. I spin and dip it towards the tray on the floor. The lights make me feel famous.

Last week, I swung a vacuum hose around, sweeping white powder from ceilings and walls. That dance partner weighed more, awkward and noisy, chasing the kids upstairs.

Stella returned when it was quiet, jutted out her hip, and pointed my phone around the rooms, clicking the shutter fast like she was photographing glamorous models—shop vac, buckets, chairs. She zoomed into the pith of the project, giving me a new angle.

Now there is music playing and an audience—the kids, the cat. I am calm in this work. Like shoveling, painting invites thinking. I smooth the walls and my jumbled brain, creating blank surfaces. These surfaces become a canvas for beauty and creativity and home.

I want color. I’m hungry for any green, deep orange, blue-greens, rich browns. In the drywall mud-white and primer-white rooms, paint cards stand in stacks and litter walls and windowsills. In the bedroom, I force myself to tone down from “wild life” blue to “rocky shelter” gray. For the kitchen I choose “natural soap,” a color with less vibrance but more longevity than “subtle glow,” which is not subtle.

The kitchen ceiling, since I have washed off its decades of soot, seems the right kind of gold-greenish-beige to be retro, instead of just outdated. It appears to be old milk paint, which doesn’t contain lead. But it’s peeling, and the ceiling boards required some patching, and, in the end, I will paint over it.

I can nearly see the final products: a living room with a real sofa for crashing at the day’s end, a room with a large bay window and light pouring in onto the rug, a downstairs guest room in restful colors with windows facing south to the mountain and east up the hill.

We Are Not Alone: A Cell-Based Model

My dad hangs up from our morning conversation to make a necessary business call. We’ve been rambling about the brave and terrifying endeavor of farming, and how Andrew and I will be insulated by our jobs from the raw risks that my dad and mom faced, farming. After he signs off, I forget myself for a minute and keep the phone pressed to my ear, not ready to disconnect. In the silence, I hear my pulse.

Our bodies keep a fine balance between allowing blood to flow and stopping blood from flowing; it’s called hemostasis. I used to think financial stability was linear, like medicine’s older models of hemostasis. In veterinary school, we charted how blood clots as two pathways, separate until they join at the end, neatly. Until recently, I’ve viewed keeping money in our accounts as a similarly straightforward process.

Put in money from our paychecks. Pay sensible bills. Refrain from spending extravagantly. Draw some arrows, add some Roman numerals for effect, and you arrive at the bottom of the chart with a magical balance that prevents uncontrolled hemorrhage of money.

The past year or so, however, blew up my chart. We followed the formula, with paychecks and sensible bills, but unexpected variables appeared. The cat, the car, and I all required surgery. We lost money on a house we owned, then finally sold. We moved for the second time in two years, then planned to move again. Our bank account looked anemic.

This fall, I took a veterinary continuing education seminar on hemostasis, “My Patient is Bleeding and Won’t Stop.” It was a prelude to transfusion medicine. Some patients just won’t survive without transfusion. “The ideal donor,” the critical care specialist said in his British accent, “is healthy with a good temperament—placid and sensible—and very food motivated.” My parents, who kept us from crashing this year, were ideal donors.

Not every bleeding bank account gets the support it needs and survives. We are beyond lucky. I have whole new definitions for stability, humility, and gratitude.

Having a frugal temperament and minimalist tastes, I’ve enjoyed modest financial stability since my first real job at age sixteen. I don’t recognize myself in critical financial condition. New arrows and factors clutter my tidy chart for stable finances. My emerging understanding of managing money as an adult has shifted from, “Why does this seem so hard for some people,” to “This is more complicated than I thought,” to “How does anyone stay afloat in this real, real world?”

Medical experts have recently had more complex insights into our bodies’ processes for hemostasis. Stepping back from tidy, separate cascades, they’ve begun drawing messier pictures with more circles and arrows weaving around each other. It’s called a “cell-based model,” which tells me that its okay to look at things in context, to consider the complications, and that the tangles are just what happens when your heart keeps pushing your blood through your messy body. It tells me that the processes of living don’t happen neatly, in a void, and that we are not alone in trying to figure them out.