The Swallows in Flight

by Laura Parker Roerden

I. Every night now the swallows
fall and rise together over the hayfield,
slicing the sky as if skinning it open
to feed on insects.

I can imagine DaVinci must have seen them.
His drawings of flying machines spoke of
curved elegance; of momentum that turns
planes of existence upside,

down.

Of alacrity and dreams
made visible
by wind—

aloft a spark of heart applied
to mathematics and unified through computation,

which brought us to soar impossibly
off a beach in North Carolina—to step on the moon,

though he held only a simple pencil to paper
fueled by a thirst for knowing.

 

II. Our ancestors’ myths rose like birds and
connected us to truth as sinew,

told us of our place in clan,
in dirt and cosmos.

But modern myths divide us.
They take off as false words and ideas

—unreal facts crumbled in

angry knuckles of hate.

They do nothing to open hope’s heart.
They do not flip the trigger in your throat

that speaks only of the rising and falling
and dawn that is a truth
known as world without end.

III. DaVinci was said to buy birds in cages
at market
and set them free.

What would he think of the
prisons we now willingly enter;
of those we deny even exist?

Yes, these new myths keep us from knowing;
they separate us from the land and each other

like a knife expertly removes bone
from flesh. If we accept it in hand,

we will never soar in ballet together
like the swallow.

 

IV. I’ve watched these swallows in flight
long enough to see—

if you wing out your perspective far enough—
there is utter cooperation among them.

And that the road to freedom
is one where we release not ourselves,

but one another from these cages,

one by blessed one,
each now enfolded unto one another.

We can instead choose to be as origami
and turn the simple flat dimensions
—in which we all seem to dwell—
into birds in flight

for peace.

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The Birches

For Lara and all the Garden Moms

by Laura Parker Roerdenheadshot

(August 28, 2015)

This summer was a long march of loss. Three parents of the kids we grew up with in the neighborhood of the farm died, one after another, as if the branch they were hanging from no longer could sustain them. Each was in their eighties. You could say they were simply taking their place on the ground, though that would be of little comfort.

Last week, it was a contemporary who died: Lara, a 45 year old wife and mother to a 13-year old and the best friend to a close friend of mine. We had all become friends in Boston’s South End when our first babies were born. Several of us had already lost our mothers before our first babies were born. We met in parks and in neighborhood cafes or called out to one another when we noticed infants in buckets hanging from our arms as we awkwardly juggled our keys, strollers, and diaper bags up the long climb of concrete stairs of our front stoops. Our friendships grew quickly, like weeds and the odd flower growing through the cracks in our hearts and confidence.

Lara had been an attorney, a brilliant researcher and lecturer at Harvard Business School. Many of the women in this mother’s group we formed had similar accomplishments under their belts, though once our babies were born our pasts mattered not one bit. We were instantly transformed by this mothering task that required so much resorting of who we were and what was important to us. What we didn’t know about this new role could fill volumes of books. While we sometimes shared tips on feeding or getting our infants to sleep, mostly we simply held the hard stuff for each other while we watched our children grow, like a giant stand of birches holds still, oxygen rich air.

Our small group of moms was called “Garden Moms” for the Garden of Eden, a cafe in the South End where we first met and often gathered. Snowy mornings when the city was paralyzed and no one could work would turn into moments of unexpected joy as everyone walked in the street and turned up at what we simply called “the Garden” for scones and coffee, while snow erased the soot and grime outside of the large windows looking out onto the now quiet street. Other times, we’d run into each other at our neighborhood parks and end up spending the day together.

As the years passed, we split off into smaller groups and dyads—friendships that have stood the test of time, but have remained fluid in their expression, as water in a river clinging to eddies might suddenly make a break to rejoin the flow.

Lara’s passing, like so many of the other younger ones who have left too soon, defy our tidy images of nature’s cycles. It matters little though, since it’s clearer to me as I age that our hearts defy any such logic of loss, no matter how pretty.

The day that Lara passed away, many us received a text from her best friend Maria, who was with her bedside holding her space and dignity. I was on my run at River Bend Farm, where the Concord grapes were just ripening and read the text from Maria near a simple stand of birches. I was listening to Keith Jarrett’s “My Song” while I stretched (strange how the details about those moments when you receive such news can be so easy to remember).  I looked up and noticed that the riverine birches had started to peel their bark, an accommodation to their fast growth that leaves them particularly thin-skinned.

I texted back to Maria an image of the birches, as I had no words to comfort a close friend who was watching her best friend die at 45. I could only bring to mind the heart space we had so many times held for one another over the years, as we left strips of bark from our former lives on the ground.

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In Praise of the Roo

8 Reasons Roosters Rule

by Laura Parker Roerdenheadshot

Should you have a rooster in your small flock or backyard farm? The question comes up a lot. Roosters are noisy, are not necessary for hens to produce eggs, and many ordinances in residential neighborhoods forbid them. So unless you’re wanting to hatch your own eggs, which obviously requires them to be fertilized by a rooster, why would you want one or two (or ten) roosters?

  1. Roosters are the front-line of your flock. They not only will aggressively attack any predator that threatens your hens, they will also announce oncoming threats to their flock providing ample warning for hens to take cover. This role is essential whether or not you free range. When we had a weasel during the winter entering our coop every night, we lost nearly all of our roosters first, as they were the ones defending the hens. If not for the roosters, we would have lost another dozen or so hens in addition to the forty we lost.
  2. Roosters teach hens where to find food. If you watch a flock free-range, you’ll see group of hens commandeered by a rooster who will sound the dinner bell when particularly tasty treat is found. Interestingly, scientists who have studied this phenomena have noticed that hens will ignore a rooster’s call for food that they are used to finding on their own. They will only respond to calls for novel finds.
    chickenseatingtoms
    The hens were brought to these tomato skins, which were discarded after canning, by the white rooster in the foreground.

     

  3. The social structure of a flock is often correctly described as the “pecking order.” While plenty of drama is ascribed to the hens in a henhouse, it’s actually the rooster who creates and maintains the social order of a flock. Rooster-less flocks will have a lot more in-fighting among hens for social dominance to fill the vacuum created by the lack of a rooster. Hens in flocks without a rooster have been known to peck another hen to death. I suspect I’ve never had a hen-pecked hen in my flock because we’ve always had roosters to maintain a healthy order.
Picturebookmoment#1
This story-book moment accurately depicts a rooster’s attempt at dominance by finding higher purchase to crow from. But interestingly, I have never seen our most dominant roo do this.

4. We’ve all read the storybooks: roosters announce the morning so that the farmer  knows when dawn has arrived and it’s time to get up. It turns out that roosters anticipate the dawn, crowing in the dark. Only recently did scientists learn that the famous crow was not light driven, but rather based on an internal, circadian clock. By crowing just before dawn, roosters are thought to be announcing their territory and dominance just as other birds are about to become active. I learned during our most recent weasel-geddon that our roosters start crowing as early as 3:00 a.m.

5. If you want to maintain fertilized eggs for hatching, you’ll need 1 rooster per 12 hens to ensure each hen has been mated with sufficiently. This means for a flock of any size, you’ll have multiple roosters. It turns out that the most dominate rooster of the flock is the first to crow each morning, with the next in line and so on following. A group of hens becomes the favorite of each rooster. This daily roll-call, if you will, helps to maintain the flock dynamics and pecking order, ensuring a well-run flock where all members are accounted for and protected. Researchers also speculate that this helps females sort out dominance in potential mates.

rooster
This medium sized Australorp is currently our most dominant rooster, commandeering a flock of 120.

6. Multiple roosters breed increased intelligence and fitness into a flock. Researchers have discovered that submissive roosters in a flock will use clever behavioral tactics to divert attention away from the more dominant males. The more clever the tactic, the more successful the rooster at breeding. If you hatch your own chicks from a flock with several roosters competing, over time it stands to reason you will be increasing the intelligence and fitness of your flock.

IMG_9953
A very unique scene of a group of juvenile roosters together.

7. Seeing the lowering sunlight hit the cerulean and magenta hues of a rooster on a spring pasture is a siren call to the imagination suggesting afternoons lingering on a Mexican patio or dining under a grape arbor in Tuscany. Or perhaps, our roos help us to appreciate and know deeper shades of simply being sure footed about our own slice of here and now.

roostermilkroom
A Marsh Diasy rooster, originally from Lancashire, England. © Zophia Dadlez

8. And last, but not least: there is always the quiet thrill of collecting fertilized, warm eggs for an incubator or allowing a broody hen to hatch her chicks as mother nature intended. Watch this beautiful video. You might just want a roo or two (or ten), afterall!

 

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Do You Know Where You Are?

(And other thoughts on eating locally wherever you are)

by Laura Parker Roerden

What does it mean to be here? I mean right where you are at this very moment.

I can distinctly remember the first time I actually understood what being present to where I was meant deep in my bones. Like a lot of my epiphanies, I was eating when I had it.

I was in Positano, Italy, along the beautiful Almalfi Coast. I had sat down at a casual seaside restaurant, which had a patio that looked out on the colorful fishing boats moored in the Gulf of Salerno. I chose the restaurant for its post card view, so my expectations for the food were secondary.

I looked up at the fishing boats unloading and noticed the lemon trees hanging innocently enough above the deck.

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My first thought was: “What a nice way to bring color onto a patio.”

Then my food came: il pesce del giorno (the fish of the day)—a delicate white fish pan seared in olive oil with a very simple rosemary and lemon garnish.

I looked out. In the dirt that gathered in the outcropping of rocks that lined the coast, rosemary bushes were moving like fans in the breeze. They were growing wild in crevices and by the side of the road.

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Everywhere lines of olive trees were planted in terraces built to stabilize the sharply inclined hillsides prone to mudslides.

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I breathed in the sea air and took my first taste of the fish. I could feel the slight spray of salt on my skin—a grandular bitterness rolled on my lips mirroring the salty texture of the wrinkled skin of the fish on my plate. The low earthy note of the rosemary was balanced by the higher bite of the lemon, the soft flesh of the fish in contrast to its crackled skin—each distinct flavor a stitch connecting me more deeply to the very earth from which it had sprung.

I was eating not just any fish, but this particular fish whose giant eye looked up at me and was unmistakenly once alive and moving torpedo-like through the waves as one long muscle only hours ago.

In that one bite, I suddenly understood what it means to be nourished by a meal. How land, sun, and sea intermingle in this a kind of holy communion to sustain life. How we too spring from the salt of the earth.

We read a lot about eating local—how it’s better for the environment and our communities. It’s better for our bodies. But in that moment I understood that eating locally sourced foods is also better for our souls.

Environmentalist David Orr suggests that our modern malaise evidenced by high rates of violence, depression, and other maladies has at its roots our disconnection from nature. “We do not know who we are,” he offers, “because we do not know where we are.” It’s an interesting thought to consider.

Yes, it’s true: we are what we eat. But do you know where you are right now?

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Signs of Spring on the Farm

by Laura Parker Roerden

It’s that time again, when the hens become broody and build hidden nests that make morning egg collection a treasure hunt rivaling the White House Easter Egg Roll.

Last spring we found this nest in our calf barn.

hiddeneggs

Naturally, we left the eggs so that the mother hen could tend to them; though they did not hatch. Nature can be like that, life pressing forward always under the thumb of death, like some mad tiddlywinks game that makes progress in fits and starts.

We take our annual trip to the feed store to “pick up chicks.” This year, we went to Tractor Supply, where the chicks are kept in galvanized steel tubs that call to mind wholesome images of hand-washed clothes hanging on a line.

In no time my youngest son and I had thirty Rhode Island Red chicks settled into brooders in the barn, the chicks lounging under heat lamps like beach goers splayed on warm beach sand. In the morning, chores sound like a busy restaurant, with the clanging of scoops and grains meeting accents of chaos and urgency. Listen here.

chickssmaller

At night peepers and chicks compete for the soundscape as the sun sets over the upper pasture, having slid north so slowly over the winter days that I am shocked to notice it no longer sets over the lower pasture.

Photo by farm intern Anja Semanco, 2012.
Photo by farm intern Anja Semanco, 2012.

My nephew Ed Parker opens the upper pasture and the cows move north, too, like some oversized sundial stamping out time with hooves.

Photo by farm intern Anja Semanco, 2012.
Photo by farm intern Anja Semanco, 2012.

Rain from the west crawls along the river valley and comes up our hill as if a legend, depositing rainbows in the eastern sky and worn clay riverlets along our road.

rainbow

Swollen mud waters the fiddleheads and bluets, which will soon press forward from spongy ground.

fiddlehead-274840_1280

Everywhere, life is hungrily feeding or being fed.Mama Cow

Morning Poem

Reflections on Spring’s Shoulder

by Laura Parker Roerden

Photography by Ben Roerden, age 9, 5th generation farmer.

Winter’s frozen fingers still
clutch the ground,
unwilling to yield to a muddy grave.

Some years are like that:
everything worn to the bone,
promise blunt and fragmented.

This morning has no choice
but to rise clumsily against a thick
attempt at erasure.

At best, a hole had been rubbed
into now paper
thin winter.

Rusty bits on trees
suggest disuse.
Nuggets of shriveled fruit,

now hardened
like silent stone,
do not speak of potential.

It’s easy to understand on a day like this
that what we are about to be given
is as easily (and too quickly) taken away.

Still, very soon we will forget
and be lulled into knowing
that rain,

like a child’s hand,
is the bird
upon which we fly into riotously blooming fields.

And our hearts, like leaves, will
stretch before us in a shimmering
river of dressed warmth.

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(Photography by Ben Roerden, age 9, 5th generation farmer.)
© Laura Parker Roerden 2016. All rights reserved.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founder and executive director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She is also a part-time, fourth-generation farmer.


 

 

 

We’re All Bigger on the Inside

by Laura Parker Roerden

blackandwhitekarina.jpb

We’re still patiently awaiting the arrival of Mezzie’s first calf, which has felt just minutes away for five long days. My own first baby was born during a snowstorm in late January, when everything is quiet and suspended and nature gives us the blank slate on which to write a new beginning.

Last night a group of about ten farm campers were here to do our normal routines. But nothing about the evening felt routine. Mezzie showed signs of pre-labor, leaving puddles of thick, yellow colostrum on the floor of the barn. Yvette, a nurse, noticed the baby moving inside the cow’s ballooned abdomen and the stream of mucous extending from her tail to the ground. The plug that keeps bacteria from entering and threatening the calf was making its inevitable retreat in preparation for the birth.

Crazysnow

The kids were hushed and stood for long periods of time, just watching Mezzie. She watched back. We cleaned her stall and replaced her bedding. The kids hauled buckets of fresh water for her. Someone mentioned boiling hot water when we ran out of things to do and we laughed, though I had done that in the morning to melt the layer of ice formed on her water from the extreme cold. We stood together as a group in silence in a way I haven’t felt before. As the darkness of night descended the one, tiny spiral of LED light in the barn reminded me of candles in the window, as if a single flame curled upwards.

Once we were back in the farmhouse, we googled the stages of labor in a cow. Though I had witnessed dozens of calves being born in my childhood, I never had before shared the responsibility for tending. How would we know if she was in trouble? What was normal? We needed to work on procuring backup should something go wrong. My father had pulled cows out with chains and the tractor or turned them if they were breach himself.  He rarely had to call a vet for assistance. But so much of that on-site knowledge had died, among other things, with my brother. Fortunately, my nephew Ed already had  secured a local farmer at the ready if we should need help and was also monitoring the situation when not at work.

Through our research, the farm campers and I learned that the mucous and colostrom letdown meant that Mezzie was in pre-labor, which can last up to two weeks or be a sign of imminent birth. We also learned that once the sack presents, she is considered in active labor. A heifer (a first time mom) should take no less than a hour and no more than three and a half hours to calve from that point. It was suggested that “a dairy farmer who had a cow in pre-labor should check her every three hours.” My shoulders dropped, even as I laughed at the irony of the daughter of a dairy farmer googling such a thing. I can do that, I thought. The farm campers were nearing the time to head home and  made me promise to contact them if anything changed. They wanted to be sure to witness the calf’s birth.

So last night I set my alarm and got up to make a frigid, moonlit walk to the barn, the only sound being the exaggerated THUMP of my boots on the frozen ground. I pulled on my boots feeling heroic like James Herriot, but by the time I got to the barn I was back to being just a half asleep version of myself. Mezzie was laying down in the fresh bedding we had provided, presumably sleeping when I arrived. It was so dark in the barn even with the light on that I half expected to step on a hoe and end up passed out cold on the ground.

I had neglected to bring a flashlight, but had my cellphone. By the time I finished taking off my gloves and fumbling with the phone to find the flighlight app, Mezzie had stood up, as if to say, “WHAT is wrong with you?” I needed to see her hind quarters, so I walked behind her. She turned around. We did this for a full two rotations, until I laughed, realizing that we were both chasing our tails.

Yet even in a manger where the water is frozen by morning and poop needs to be scraped off the ground daily, there can be sacred moments that feed us. And we might find signposts to our winding way home to ourselves in a love, a friendship, or a rescue—

I sat down for a minute and gave her a moment to settle. I talked to her softly. I calmed myself down. Mezzie just then turned to walk away from me, with a swish of her tail, giving off a sense of utter dismissal and I got the look at her I needed. Nothing had changed. There would be no baby tonight. These things always look so much more romantic in the movies, I thought to myself, as I walked back to the farmhouse.

Mezzie, a Jersey Girl in Massachusetts

This morning, a friend from college Andy Parker (no blood relation, but I do think of him as a spiritual brother) posted a lovely piece by Parker Palmer (again with that name) about his relationship with Thomas Merton through his books entitled A Friendship, A Love, A Rescue. In this essay Palmer talks about following our own calling back to the true homes of ourselves. Among other wisdom, he offers this nugget:

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity.

I so often have thought of that long journey back to our true selves that is the real work of living to be a solitary job—more resembling moments from my childhood when I skipped on stones down a fast moving brook, occasionally falling into eddies from which my only rescue was self-reliance and a willingness to walk home in water logged boots.

But the calf that is rolling around in Mezzie’s belly, turning over like a worry stone, has me thinking more about how who we are on the inside is tended by who we are with on the outside and about the quality of that time we spend together. There are so few moments that have that sacred hush to them as that moment of standing before Mezzie with a group of five 15-year olds did. I’m sure you’ve had those moments, too: when time is suspended and the air crackles noticeably, when the “invisible fecundity” to life is visible. Why am I only now noticing that those moments most often happen when I am in the face of some true mystery with others in companion?

Sometimes moments like that we miss because they are in window dressing that is less desirable than we might have hoped. Or they arrive when we are out of cash and time or inspiration. Yet even in a manger where the water is frozen by morning and poop needs to be scraped off the ground daily, there can be sacred moments that feed us. And we might find signposts to our winding way home to ourselves in a love, a friendship, or a rescue—whether or not we deserve it. As Andy Parker points out to me and Mezzie is testament to, “It’s as Dr. Who describes his ship, the TARDIS: ‘We’re all bigger on the inside.'”

It’s as Dr. Who describes his ship, the T.A.R.D.I.S.: ‘We’re all bigger on the inside.’ — Andy Parker

(January 15, 2015) Went to the barn this morning and saw Mezzie and thought--"Ehh. Nothing happened." Then I started to feed the chickens and heard the unmistakable moo of a baby calf. Well played, Mezzie. Well played.
(January 15, 2015) Went to the barn this morning and saw Mezzie and thought–“Ehh. Nothing happened.” Then I started to feed the chickens and heard the unmistakable moo of a baby calf. Well played, Mezzie. Well played.

 

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A Stitch in Time

FeaturedPostlogo-2(July 5, 2014)

by Laura Parker Roerdenheadshot

It was a dark and stormy night. . .and we were celebrating the 4th of July and our dear friend Janice Kimball’s birthday at the farm with the Yankee Independence Day tradition of salmon and peas, a gaggle of children, board games, and soggy fireworks and poppers.

We took a break in the action to go see the cows and chickens and ended up in the upper loft of the Big Red barn, where our 8 year-old son found this:

nimbus2000

My first thought upon seeing the old half broom extended with wire and the handle of another: “I guess that’s one way to reach cobwebs.”

fullnimbusdoor

But an 8-year old mind goes right to Quidditch: “I think that’s a Nimbus 2000,” he stated matter-of-factedly. Our 9-year old disagrees. “It’s obviously a Sidesweeper 100.”

We often find these treasures in our barn, left exactly where they were last used by hands now passed.

Nana

I tend to leave them where they were found, so that others too can answer the call of the past to their imaginations.

ropeonwindow

 

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Farm Kids

by Laura Parker Roerdenheadshot

Growing up, I knew exactly one other dairy farmer in town who had a daughter my age. The other family I knew with a daughter a year younger had moved away to upstate New York before we were teens. Her father had been able to trade his 100 acre farm in Massachusetts for more than 300 acres there.  Thinking back, it was strange that the one remaining farmer’s daughter and I, who were classmates in high school, never compared notes about growing up on a dairy farm.

It would take another fifteen years for me to talk about my unusual childhood with anyone other than my siblings or close friends who had grown up playing on our farm. Ironically, that conversation took place on a drive back from New York City with my workmates from my job as a publications director at a nonprofit in Cambridge, MA. Unbelievably, among the five people in the car on that inter-city drive, three of us had grown up on farms. That we all ended up living and working in Boston was not entirely a mystery.

The two in the car who hadn’t grown up on farms were treated to quite the conversation. The rest of us spent the entire four hours trading stories about our childhoods. It had never occurred to me that the childhoods of farm kids—one growing up in NY, another in NH and the third in MA—would be virtually identical.

Throughout the drive we talked on and on about the elaborate forts we had built among the hay bales and our death defying leaps from the hay lofts into soft piles of loose hay. We had all similarly scaled the walls of our silos to dizzying heights, using the thin metals ties that held the boards in a circular shape as our only hand and foot holds. We all remembered being buried in piles of green grass or corn as choppers flung sileage into sileage boxes in which we were laying for simple sport.

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We clung to scoops as tractors rounded corners and bounced along fields. And watched countless animals being born, heroic feats of assistance such as chains on tractors being attached to emerging hooves by calloused hands to pull out dying calves from their mothers. These high drama moments from our childhood were coming not from fictional characters in Herriott novels, but from our farming parents.

We all had raised dozens of barn cats, whose seasonal litters took our steadfast attention, as we brought injured or dying kittens into our farmhouses for feeding condensed milk enriched with Karo syrup with eye droppers. We helped out during haying or planting, the sweat that mixed with the dirt or hay chaf bringing sweet relief when the odd breeze finally would blow.

We had commandeered calf barns, straining to hold oversized bottles of warm, sweet smelling milk replacer with two hands while 100 pound calves pulled on the nipples, nearly toppling us with their strength.

Caleb with Agape. Photo courtesy of Town Line Dairy in Upton.
Caleb with Agape at Town Line Dairy in Upton.

We played in pastures and picnicked on massive rocks and rode rough shod on wild, wild horses through the fields and woods. We followed meandering brooks until we were lost and then found our way back again, our sneakers thwukking with muck and water. We’d return with leaches that we’d casually remove and fling in the wind.

We’d graze as we’d go, eating wild blackberries or raspberries or a random cucumber or tomato from the garden. We played among the grease in toolsheds where farm equipment would go to be fixed or explored barns full of a centuries’ worth of old windows, clipped buttons, and saved National Geographic magazines.

We built forts and swings and made up plays singing to untuned pianos long forgotten in old outbuildings. We buried pets and found arrow heads and the stray old bottles in abandoned dumps and napped in meadows with bluettes and butterflies, after soaking our pants cuffs in sulfury muck that smelled of skunk cabbage.

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We helped by washing dishes in milkrooms or to clean udders and secure automatic milkers. We swung hammers when fences needed fixing. We collected, washed and candled eggs. We fed chickens and carried water or mucked stalls. We roamed through corn fields, the odd paper cut from the fibrous leaves drawing blood as we emerged hours later.

We watched our parents worry about losing our farms—our family’s way of life—as they fought recessions, energy shortages, rising taxes and plummeting prices for milk, and still somehow managed to make it work.

We knew that the childhood we were experiencing was different, but like all kids, we longed to fit in, realizing only later that our childhoods had been like rare diamonds that would pay dividends as we grew and aged.

Monique
Monique showing her Hereford with the Sutton 4-H.

In conversations since that car trip from New York City to Cambridge, I’ve noticed that many of the farm kids I know share similar scars and strengths, though it’s dangerous to generalize. Indulge me while I try to imagine what we have in common, if only for a second.

Research says that we have healthier immune systems than our counterparts. I’d guess that farm kids are generally a resilient and stubborn lot, with a healthy reluctance to give up on anything important enough to throw our attention to. We probably work harder than we should. And forget to ask for help. I know I am sentimental to a fault.

We might be considered reliable, resourceful, and smart and I’ve noticed many of us work in creative or community service-oriented fields. Many of us forget to take care of ourselves, so ingrained is our caretaking of others.

We’re deeply compassionate, having loved too many animals to list, and even an odd tree or brook and rock. But I believe we also are all too able to distance ourselves from the river of loss we have witnessed, as if constantly: still-born calves and favorite barn cats, pigs, and ducks, chickens, the farewell nuzzling of a horse.

Jameswithcow
James Maranda with “Boss,” the Brahman Bull.

Many of us have a razor sharp ability to read the weather and refer to the cardinal directions like a sailor. We mark time by chores and think of food as a living relationship—a reciprocal sacrifice—where we take care of our food and then it takes care of us. We understand who we are, by largely understanding where we are.

We’re acclimated to smells, and have witnessed outrageously unsavory things up close. Perhaps that makes us stoic or simply able to withstand all manner of discomfort.

I would venture to guess that we are a diverse group, as well, with a wide range of political persuasions, professions and interests. Some of us have become city folks; others are still working on farms or in the country. Have I gotten any of this right, farm kids?

I recently have reached out to other “farm kids” by starting a Facebook group by the same name so that we can keep the conversation going and delve deeper. If you are a farm kid or know of others, please check out our group. We’d love to hear your stories of farm life and how it shaped who you are today.

What are your farm kid memories? What about your farm background most resonates with who you are today?

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Among Large Animals

For My Big Brother David

by Laura Parker Roerden

(May 9, 2014) This morning I got a call from our most patient of neighbors. It was a familiar refrain: “Your cows are out,” she simply said. Before I could get off the phone this particular neighbor’s husband was already half way up the street to gather some grain from our milk-room to coax the animal back onto our side of the fence: the side of the fence where the grass was decidedly not greener.

Minutes later, I was on my way to Feeds and Needs to get more hay to keep the cows satiated until my nephew returned from a weekend away and could fix the breach in the fence. The only thing greener than a neighbor’s lawn, it turns out is. . .hay.

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Life among big animals has its challenges. When I was a kid and the cows would get out, it would often take the entire neighborhood to get them in. Of course, we had more than a hundred head then. We’d all be out there in our pajamas with flashlights, following the trail of cow manure left on the paved road until we found them. My dad then would orchestrate us like we were trained special ops agents. One would be stationed at an opened gate to the pasture; two others at a positions both up and down the street. Others were enlisted to do a full-court press on the herd, while our very smart collie Puppy would round up any strays.  If you had good survival instincts, you’d grab the biggest stick you could find. But I had to learn that on my own. We were on a need-to-know basis.

My dad once stationed me below the opened gate to the pasture. The only instructions I received were: “Hold ’em back, Laura.” I didn’t quite know what he meant at the time until I saw all seventy or so cattle running down the street toward me, while I stood there in my nightgown. “Hold ’em back!” he yelled.

“Ha! Well. Okay!” I thought, even as I planned my escape. Of course, my father knew that they would break for the pasture opening instead of for me; but no one mentioned that to me at the time.

I remember I told that story at my first interview to teach high school in a rough-around-the-edges school outside of the city—a position for which they had received over three hundred applications. The interview team laughed too hard at this story as my answer to their question about why I felt qualified to teach adolescents. I got the job. But something about the stray tear running down the face of the tired looking administrator’s face as he laughed tipped me off that I probably didn’t want the job after all. It wasn’t the last time I would back down.

Many years ago, we had just moved back to the farm from the city and my brother Dave was called to Canada to help restore electricity during terrible ice storms. He was there for weeks fighting his own battles without adequate sleep or warmth. I was here helping by feeding the cows and the chickens. I thought I had the better deal.

The first couple weeks while Dave was in Canada were uneventful. We had a massive bull then, Hal, who I always strategically fed first, then would back away from keeping my eye on him while I fed the others. But the truth was, I was afraid of him and he knew it. I was losing ground with him each and every time I entered the barn. I was like a rope bearing a heavy weight against a post beginning to fray.

The free-stall barn where I fed the cows was separated from the dairy barn by a ramp and a gate. As my fear grew, it became my new habit to leave the cows grain bins by the gate, so that I could easily slip to the other side if Hal became agitated. This turned out to be a huge mistake. What it did was invite Hal to lean into the gate to get a better vantage from which to take the other animals’ feed.

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Then one morning I discovered Hal waiting for me, pressing against the gate as I came with a pail full of grain. I backed off, pouring the grain from the safe side of the gate, spilling it without much luck in reaching the bowls. Hal became furious and grunted and head butted in a way that I knew meant business. I dropped the pail and ran, closing the door behind me and trying to catch my breath.

I had no idea how I was going to ever get that pail back, but as a reflex, I called my brother’s cell phone. Dave had a previous time been away doing electrical restoration on another storm and over the phone had talked me through how to fix the electric fence while rain fell in sheets around me. Even though he was in Canada, I knew he could help me.

My brother’s phone went to voicemail. I hung up. Now he would know something was wrong, so I had to call him back–this time with the intent to leave a detailed voicemail. So I opened the barn door to peek at the situation as to describe it more accurately. Hal had broken the gate. Now only a flimsy door separated him from the source of his grain and me. I shut the door, pulled a few heavy items from the barn in front of the door like I’ve seen in countless horror flicks and bolted for the farmhouse.

Minutes later, my brother’s white truck pulled into the barnyard. He was back from over a month of being away. The timing was so uncanny, I started to cry with relief. But the full import of what had happened was beginning to sink in. I had not only not stood my ground, I had created an unsafe situation for my brother to now deal with. I was never asked again to feed the cows.

The next spring,  I would learn, however, what life without Dave would mean, when he died suddenly from a heart attack at 52.  His towering frame was no longer walking the farm; there would be no more riding in in his white truck to save me from an angry bull.

But loss has a way of teaching us about ourselves even as it rearranges every molecule of your heart like one of those etch-a-sketch tablets moves shards of metal around with a magnet. Those who knew Dave well often described him as a “bull” of a man, even as they also told of him tenderly carrying a bunch of balloons down their driveway on his way to a small child’s birthday.  He was a warrior who could mend fences and fix broken things. And so I came to rely on my big brother as true north in my life and lived in the utter assurance that he would never abandon me.

What I hadn’t realized until he died, however, was how Dave really had been teaching us all along how not to abandon ourselves either. This past week, at farm camp, seven kids ages 7-14 and I were working in the pasture pulling weeds. We turned the corner by a fence and in the process spooked the cows. The herd bolted—legs kicking, they were running at full speed towards us. I grabbed the closest stick on the ground and told the kids to go to the trees. The herd was now running at me.

What I hadn’t realized until he died, however, was how Dave really had been teaching us all along how not to abandon ourselves either.

My brother would not have backed down, I thought.  So I lifted the stick high and firmly said, “STOP.” And they did. The herd stopped their charge as if on a dime.

Today when I fed the cows, I confidently filled each bowl, being sure to not put myself between the animals and their food. And I sang to them while I dolled out the hay, one flake at a time.

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