(April 14, 2014)

by Laura Parker Roerden

I spent a fair amount of time in farmhouse kitchens growing up. My dad and uncle would often lend a hand to other farmers and they in turn would reciprocate here.

There were the trips to help out old Miss Green and her daughter Miss Green, farmers in Rhode Island. They had one of the prettiest dairy farms I have ever seen. Their salt shaker farmhouse was from the 1700s and had romantic antique roses planted everywhere. My mom would visit with old Miss Green in the kitchen, while I ate Concord grapes sitting under their arbor, spitting seeds and watching my dad help Miss Green pull a tractor out of the mud or fix a corn chopper.

Or we’d head up to the Bosma dairy farm on Williams Hill, where my dad and Dick Bosma would chat for hours about farm business or exchange a bull on a handshake to improve breeding stock. Mrs. Bosma would invite us inside to visit with her and her youngest children.

Someone would be pressed into playing the organ for us. And then we’d all leave to play on the grain bag and bailing twine swings and hammocks that all of us farm families had hanging from the rafters of our barns.

Looking back, there were the usual homemade cookies or brownies offered and a chance to just sit and talk. In some ways, other than church, that’s what our social life looked like while I was growing up—helping other farmers. This exchange was as natural as my grandmother’s lap work of darning socks or cross-stitching: easy, predictable, a gradual building up of resiliency in our community.

I must have forgotten this about farming, because when I first moved back to the farm, I was surprised by all the help that appeared when we needed it, as if on cue from some hidden stage manager.

There was our neighbor and former farm hand Mike Wojnowski, who 35 years since he last worked here still comes on a text notice to feed the cows and chickens when we’re away or to plow us out when the snow is mounded around the barns in the winter.

There was our other neighbor Marty Goff, who came and spent a day of his vacation visiting family here in Massachusetts, sweating in the sun and helping to replace the corner of the barn, using hand-hewn techniques true to the 18^th century provenance of the building.

There was my nephew Ed’s friends showing up with chain saws when trees exploded around us in storms both real and imagined the summer my brother Dave died.

And there has been the parade of amazing young people led by 15-year old Evan Maietta, helping to clean up and restore pastures, feed animals, clean pens, put down bedding, and any number of sundry tasks, which has morphed into a weekly work event we simply call “farm camp.”

Of course, my nephew Ed Parker must be mentioned, who has been the heart  and soul of the farm since he was five, when he’d call my father and tell him it was time to fix fences, and my dad and he would go off and swing hammers. And then there’s all the friends of Ed’s and his brother Todd, who have come to help with haying—a subset of the Uxbridge High football team—bringing both brawn and heart. And farm intern Anja Semanco, who gave up part of her summer to this and had to go home to Pennsylvania when she contracted Lyme disease. And Jane Clarke and family, including her brother Ted, who have helped clean out the barn and plant gardens annually. There was Erin Hawkes and her father Peter, local dairy farmers who have shown up with hay and medicine when we needed more than just advice. And there have been more.

Farms belong to not just a farmer, but to communities and we feed not ourselves, but one another.

It’s a humbling experience to watch people take up a bucket in the brigade and pass it along in service to this idea that farms belong to not just a farmer, but to communities and that we feed not ourselves, but one another.

Perhaps it’s an idea that applies to so many of our challenges today. Our oceans are dying; island nations will be inundated because of global warming; children are starving in Appalachia; the bees are dying; polar bears are losing ground; cancer must be stopped; unwanted pets bound for the gas chamber must be adopted; and still there is more. The list is endless. Devastating stories and problems are stacked up like corpses. There’s no wonder we hide in our houses. It’s easy to feel not quite up to the task.

I do not know how to solve those problems. But I feel certain that what I learned in the farmhouse kitchens so long ago applies. Problems will always be like fires on the horizon threatening our homes. We simply need to be willing to show up together and pass the bucket along.

So for everyone who has shown up for us over these years: thank you. It’s been an honor to stand next to you in the line. And you should know: you’ve carried the water beautifully.

 

by Laura Parker Roerden

(September 24, 2015)

Fall 2014 the young people (ages 8-15) of our Farm Camp raised enough money at our annual Farm Camp Friendraiser to purchase two lambs to begin a fiber arts project. The idea of raising wool at Jo-Erl Farm is a symbolic nod to our beloved Blackstone Valley’s storied past as the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution and the textile mills that still punctuate our river-ways today.  It’s also an opportunity for the young people to run a micro-farm business, balancing both the economics and responsibilities of raising animals on the true razor’s edge that is known as farming.

This weekend,we will pick up the lambs we’ve purchased. It has taken an entire year to be ready! Like all good adventures, the point has not been the destination, but the journey.

The young people started the year by researching the merits of various breeds of sheep and doing presentations to one another. Mother nature’s key design strategy is a bit like a game of Monopoly. You might boast excellent rental return if you own Park Place and Boardwalk, but not have the cash flow after purchase to develop them. Nature is a similar game of trade offs. A fast growing sheep might have lower quality wool than a slower growing one. A prolific breeder might have thinner wool than a less prolific one.

The kids had some interesting conversations at our meetings as they tried to juggle and prioritize multiple selection criterion including price, lambing ability, cost of food and maintenance, quality of wool, temperament, etc. What would be the best lambs for us, as young people just starting out, to learn from?

A vote was then taken with spirited calls from one camp for Dorsets, while the other camp jockeyed for position with an alternate breed. There were closing arguments made, ballots created, and a final count and recount demanded by the dissenters in the group. In the end, the vote was nearly unanimous for Polled Dorsets and every child in the room at the time could describe why.

So we set out to find at least two females to purchase, while we attended to the issue of where to home the animals on the property. What would be the pros and cons of housing them with the cows? Should we house them separately? What sort of protection could we provide? How would we separate them for lambing and shearing? What fencing would we need? What sort of winter quarters would we need? We went back and forth about where to home them on our farm, which gave us the option of several outbuildings. At one point the front runner was to house them in our free stall barn, but an exploration of the costs of  garage doors to be installed to create adequate protection and shelter led us to abandon the idea as too difficult and expensive.

All along, we were eyeing our old calf barn, which lay unused, yet requiring a daunting amount of love and work to bring back to life. Fifty years of living has taught me one thing; when in doubt choose love. We chose the calf barn, though this is what greeted us when we opened the door.

In the meantime, our search for high quality Dorset lambs at the right price was proving unsuccessful.Yet fate has a way of intervening in these matters. Like finding Mr. Right when you’ve finally sworn off dating, our Misses Rights were found on Craig’s List by Farm Camp student manager Evan Maeitta (age 15) when we had near given up in exhaustion: two Leicester Longwools in Connecticut. Who could resist this lovely lamb with the name Juliette?

Leicester Long Wools date back to England in the 1700s and are considered one of the purest breeds of sheep remaining. Furthermore, they are a breed designated as Critically Rare by the Livestock Conservancy, so they more appropriately fit our heritage and endangered breed focus here at Jo-Erl Farm than the Dorsets. How did we not think of them to begin with? Everything about them fits like a glove with who we are and what we want. And clearly they are so stinkin’ adorable—which is really the most important criterion of all.

Here’s Julliette’s dark haired flock mate, whom we are also purchasing (still un-named.) I think someone is going to be knitting a striped sweater come next winter.

Now about that abandoned calf barn.

“Many hands make light work,” “many hands make light work” was our mantra as we attacked the barn cleanup and renovation with an enthusiasm fitting of our deadline. (We had already made a deposit on the lambs, so we had a month in total to get it ready.) Just three, four-hour work sessions and many splinters later the group of young farm campers had the barn cleaned out. We sorted the materials jamming the barn into keeping, recycling, and burning piles. Only ONE bag of trash came out of that building. My father was an efficient up-cycler before the term existed.

Two weeks later, our handyman Keith had ripped out any rotted walls, dealt with a huge granite rock from a stone wall falling into the building during the process (who knew the rock was resting on that wall?), restored antique windows, added a transom for additional natural light, and retrofitted the barn to its original functionality and beauty. Now we await the lambs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by Laura Parker Roerden

Someone recently asked me over a glass of wine in a busy bar why I had gotten peafowl. I fumbled to answer, as the response was not neat or tidy. It was all somehow entangled with grief, a long drought, and my place in a decisive turn of the wheel of time. As we reflect on the violent tide rising everywhere—Beirut, Baghdad, Kenya, Paris and most recently Aleppo—I find myself again returning to her question.

We received our peafowl chicks a short few months ago, but the thought of  peafowl came up two decades ago when visiting an old, dear friend Valerie Quercia in London, who was living there as an expatriate during the first Gulf War, the one simply called Operation Desert Storm. I remember at the time I had lit a single candle in my window in Boston during each of the evenings of the aerial and naval bombardment of Iraq. I was horrified that innocent children might be slaughtered in the name of my country while we ate dinner and went about our daily activities in the U.S.

During my visit, Val had taken me to the British Museum, London Tower, the beautiful Albert Bridge, Kensington Gardens, and other British icons that were monuments themselves to survival beyond war. But it was this one tiny park in her neighborhood that stood out to me at the time: Holland Park. The park had itself been heavily bombed during WWII, but was since lovingly restored, complete with a theater built on the rubble and partial foundation left of the original Holland House.

While in London, I had seen original manuscripts from Charles Dickens marked up in his own hand at the British Museum, yet this paled in comparison to the peacocks and bunnies roaming Holland park, a living Beatrix Potter book, complete with garden gates and misty meadows. This park was a partially manicured landscape with a large portion of its confines still wild, like a piece of art that continues to breathe and grow.

While Europe felt at peace and my visit like a Sunday picnic, just across the Mediterrean allied bombs were lighting up the night sky in a display named “shock and awe,” as if it were a carnival ride and not thousands of bombs dropping over the span of five weeks on 1,000 targets in Baghdad. Estimates of casualties have varied, but conservative accounts put the Iraqi deaths from the combined air and ground campaign at more than 20,000. Baghdad had been shattered.

When my brother Dave died of a heart attack at 52 in 2011, my own heart too had splintered like a glass window thrown a rock.  We had only a few years earlier moved from Boston to our fifth generation family farm when my mother and then father had died in close succession. Claire Corcoran, a dear friend of ours in the city, explained our move away to her three small children, who were at the time the same ages as ours (ages 5, 3, 1), as our generation’s turn at the wheel of the farm.

My brother Dave, who lived next door, was the real farmer. The plan was that we would only need occupy the farmhouse like some sort of ghost or tenant. Claire had been right: we were simply taking our place in a river of time that my family had been carried by for a hundred years. Yet once Dave died,  the broken rubble left felt more like a tumultuous river strewn with stones too distant apart to navigate across safely.

In an attempt to pick up the pieces, I had committed to figuring out how to make the farm economically sustainable without my brother. It was something I could control.  I visited farms across Connecticut and Massachusetts and talked to farmers about what was working and not working for them. And while many of the farms had found clever combinations of ways to use their land and their outbuildings for everything from events to vegetable CSAs, there was a resounding win in the game: perennial flowers and peafowl. It conjured up the most lovely of images to me, peacocks roaming fields of lavender and sunflowers, like some vision Van Gogh would have had in Provence fueled by his singular love for the light.

As the once temporary War on Iraq settled into a second decade and expanded fronts, I learned more about peacocks and created rudimentary budgets where income from fertilized eggs, hatched peafowl chicks and dropped feathers helped defray costs of other farm activities. I read about Flannery O’Connor’s disdain for her peafowl noise or how they ate her mother’s flowers. Yet it was a well known fact that O’Connor loved her peafowl. She often wove images of them into her writing describing the peacock’s tail as revealing a “map of the universe.” In The Displaced Person, O’Connor had longingly written of a peacock and how “tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head.”

I learned in my research that blue peafowl are described in the art of its native India as symbols of “love, rain and separation.” I turned those words around in my heart and felt something shift back into place. Sanskrit poets wrote about the clouds on the horizon as not threatening, but having eerily similar colors to the peacock, bringing hope back to the sun parched land.

In a Sanskrit poem by Kalidasa in his Round of the Seasons the arrival of monsoon rains are announced by a peacock.

Reflections on a Farm Thanksgiving

by Laura Parker Roerden

A few things we are grateful for:

The long shadows of late fall, which ask us to look at things differently.

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We sometimes come home to find handmade gifts from customers—from Richard McCaffrey’s delicious cookies, to home dried sea salt, to preserves and the apron Brenda Marshall made for me for egg collecting. Feeding others is like a long handshake with people you come to care deeply about.

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That chickens can turn table scraps back into food.

 

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That dirt and poop coexist with the more gentile and lovely aspects of living is no surprise to most people. But to intimately know how things that nurture us are created by the unsavory outputs of living can change your life view.

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Hands long-gone have left barns, stonewalls, manure buckets and other gifts that keep giving.

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The chickens roost at about my head height in our coop. Their disembodied sounds in the dark form a line on both of my sides, which helps me to navigate the dark shoals of the room the way ancient mariner might have used the sound of a particular bird in a fog to know they were closing in on land.

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Hidden treasures such as this clutch of eggs found in an un-used barn remind us that our blessings sometimes go unclaimed.

 

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Plenty of room at the inn means we can say ‘yes’ to take in friend’s baby goats and rescue an abused cow from an animal hoarder. There is no greater privilege than being in the position to help.

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That people show up in a hundred different ways when we need help, from Evan Maietta and the farm campers, to local farmers, to handy friends, makes me appreciate the barn raising that modern living should be, but often is not.

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Though the work is hard and the pay can be low, in the right light there is hardly anything more beautiful than kneeling in the dirt.

Photo by farm intern Anja Semanco, 2012.

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Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Jo-Erl Farm to you and your loved ones!

by Laura Parker Roerden

When we first brought our lambs home, our plan was to pasture them with the cows. Cows and sheep have different foraging appetites, making their co-habitation in the pasture more efficient. Cattle are also great predator protection for sheep, aggressively attacking coyote and bonding with sheep within a two week period of time. Together they are considered a “flerd” —a conflation of herd and flock that is so silly it’s irresistible. Truth is we figured they would look like a real life Far Side cartoon in our pastures, with thought balloons fueled by coffee and written on the blank canvas supplied by winter.

But our lambs are still young and we want to keep a watchful eye on them for the winter, while they adjust to their new home. So we created a winter paddock, closer to the farmhouse and enclosed on all sides for warmth and protection from deep snow.

This week a small crew of farm camp kids (Ben, Zach and Sam) added finishing touches by painting the fence for the paddock, so a chicken wire apron could be installed.

 

 

 

 

Our handyman/carpenter Keith built a wonderful sheep door to the paddock, just their size. Or perhaps like Alice in Wonderland, it’s the world outside that has grown.

Just ask Juliette, as she ventures outside here at Jo-Erl Farm for the first time.

At first Juniper and Juliette were curious about the sheep door when I opened it. But it wasn’t until I crawled through the door myself that they followed me outside to the new paddock.

Later as I walked around the area checking for hardware in the grass with a magnet roller, they strolled beside me, at one point Juliette making two full circles around me as she scanned the perimeter and I hummed a joyful version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” And I thought I was imagining the bleated answer to my “Good Morning” today as “MAAAAA.”

Come spring, we hope both Juniper and Juliette and their newborn lambs will  join the cows on pasture.

7 Random Farm Happenings

by Laura Parker Roerden

1. Juliette and Juniper have added a lot of excitement to our lives here at Jo-Erl Farm. We’ve been busy getting a winter paddock ready for them, one that will be safe from predators and close enough to the farmhouse for us to keep an eye on them. This is the beautiful handiwork of our ever-versatile and talented carpenter Keith. We can’t wait to paint it white. Right, kids?

2. This past Sunday, we had Juliette and Juniper sheared. Or, maybe they were shorn?  “Sheer, sheared, shorn.” Though it says on the official Sheep Shearing 101 site that it’s proper to use either sheared or shorn as past tense. Who knew?

Here are the precious lambs before being sheared.

Here they are during shearing:

Isn’t that table setup cool? The lambs seemed completely secure and comfortable throughout the process, many thanks to our skilled new friend Nancy from Lightening Ridge Farm in Sherborn, who volunteered to come out and help us hopeless novices with this important task.

Farmers helping farmers puts the love in this labor called farming.

Notice Junipers’ wool is bluish-black underneath. Isn’t it gorgeous?  The mocha-colored top layer of her wool was caused by bleaching from the summer sun.

Here is Juliette and Juniper shorn.

We are all surprised by how tiny they really are underneath all of that wool. (Did that wool dress make me look fat? Of course, not! You were just fluffy.)

It turns out that two lambs can give you quite a bit wool: two bags full!

Next up is washing the wool, spinning it, and dying it. We are dreaming of knitting projects for this coming winter and googling all sorts of felting projects and crafts for the Farm Camp kids.

3. Our annual Farm Camp Friendraiser was held this past weekend at the farm and was a huge success! Over 80 people participated and generously supported the Farm Camp Kids’ fund to purchase a flock guard llama to keep Juliette and Juniper safe from predators when on pasture next spring. Thank you to all who came out! We consider you family.

4. Sometimes tradition gets in the way of progress! As many of you know, back in the day my great-grandparents and grandparents ran the farm as a poultry named Fairview, for the wonderful views of the church steeples in the valley seen from our perch on West Hill. During those days, we’d hand wash the eggs, using water and wet rags as to not disturb the protective membrane that not only keeps the egg fresh, but keeps chemicals and bacteria from entering the porous membrane of the shell. We have continued to do it the same labor intensive way until this day.

Leave it to a kind-hearted neighbor to point out that I could much more easily pressure wash the eggs with a hose through the vintage wire egg baskets we still use from those early days of the farm. It now takes me seconds to wash eggs, a task that used to take hours. Thank you, Nicole Haker! We might not have a very automated farm, but I can safely say we’ve now at least entered the 20th century.

5. One benefit of restoring the calf barn for the sheep is that my father had already set up systems to make caring for small animals easier. One such system is this manure barrel, which makes mucking stalls a quick ten-minute chore. The barrel travels on a rail throughout the center of the barn, so that you can easily reach it with a shovel as you muck. The heavy load is then moved with a gentle push to a porch off of the back of the barn. A simple shift of a mechanism on the pulley and the barrel dumps the manure through a trap door in the floor. Thank you, Dad! So many of your gifts were like this: simple, yet true and everlasting.

6. We are sorry to report that our beloved Farm Camp mascot Mucky, the white silkie chicken, died in September. Mucky was lain to rest in a private ceremony on the farm. We know Mucky’s special brand of magic will continue to inspire us, as has the kind gift of another white silky chicken from recently retired local teacher and farm girl Ruth Bandstra. The Farm Camp kids have lovingly dubbed our new silkie Un-Mucky.

7. And because we don’t want to leave you on a sad note, we are proud to report that our peafowl chicks are nearing the three month mark. They have grown crests and are wearing a necklace of iridescent greenish blue feathers these days. They have an air of mystery and prance regally though the barn or perch in surprising places. They remind me of vintage photos of travelers on cruise lines dressed in their finest, but frozen in a stance of being on their way to someplace else.

By Evan Maietta, age 14

For those of you who follow farm camp, or anything Jo Erl Farm related for that matter, you have most likely heard of our beloved Jersey Mezzie. For those of you who have not heard of our farm favorite, Mezzie is our four year old Jersey dairy cow. She was rescued on Thanksgiving day 2011, when Laura got a call from animal control in an area town saying that she had an 8 month old cow that needed a good home; Laura’s generous brother Dave dropped everything to go pick her up.  It seems her previous owner was neglecting her basic needs. She was kept in a garage with some ducks and goats as her not-so-pleasant roommates.

This winter is very big for Mezzie. She will be having her first calf in a short amount of time… we think. It could be hours, days, or even weeks before the calf is born; we just know that when it does happen, we want to be prepared. The temperature forecasts for the next few days are how we say in New England, “wicked cold,” as in, nearly negative temperatures, even before you factor in the wind chill. Needless to say, we felt bad for our poor girl. Normally, if not bred, she would be fine in our free-stall barn with the other cows, coming and going as she pleases to the pasture, with a heated waterer and round bale feeder all set up for on-demand feeding. But a wet newborn calf exposed to the elements if born outside might be in danger.

Tonight we decided that the time was right, so we cleaned out the cozy and warmer side of the enclosed dairy barn in which we house the spring chicks. We swept the floor, washed out the food and water bins, and put down some fresh bedding so Mezzie and her baby can be cozy and warm in this frigid weather. We had a slight hesitation to even try to bring her in for the night, seeing as it was only Laura, myself, Zach and Ben working. But we figured that we might as well try and if it didn’t work we could enlist Ed’s help the next day.

We had a quick meeting, almost as fast as football players in the huddle, and put together the plan to action. I took Zach and Ben down to the free stall barn to distract the others while Laura stood inside the newly set up spot with a flake of hay, softly rustling the hay and calling Mezzie’s name, trying not to call the others along with her. At first we were all weary of the plan, thinking it wouldn’t work, but all of a sudden, Mezzie left the herd, walking toward where Laura was stationed. I quickly grabbed a handful of hay and walked calmly beside her, bribing her with the clump of hay so she would come closer to her new “five star hotel room.” Surprisingly, after I went in, she ran inside to snag the pile of hay laying on the barn floor.

Laura and I exchanged a quick glance and just by that look we both knew exactly what we were saying. I ran outside and around the side of the barn, over the rock wall, and to the door which Mezzie had just taken her last step into. I calm walked in and quietly closed the door behind me as to keep Mezzie in, but not stress her more than we needed to. Currently, Mezzie is kicking back and relaxing, munching on some hay, awaiting her baby to finally come. If I had to guess I’d say that we’re more excited/anxious/worried about this baby then Mezzie is herself!

by Zach and Ben Roerden (ages 10 and 8)

(Sung to the tune of 12 days of Christmas)

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me a chicken in a haystack.

On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me two Ford tractors and a chicken in a haystack.

On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.

On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.

On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me five sky lanterns, four Hereford cow, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors and a chicken in a haystack.

On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.

On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me seven broody hens, six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.

On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me eight pullet eggs, seven broody hens, six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.

On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me nine farm-campers weeding, eight pullet eggs, seven broody hens, six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.

On the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me ten Jerseys milking, nine farm-campers weeding, eight pullet eggs, seven broody hens, six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.

On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me eleven of Ed’s friends haying, ten Jerseys milking, nine farm-campers weeding, eight pullet eggs, seven broody hens, six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me twelve eggs a dozen, eleven of Ed’s friends haying, ten Jerseys milking, nine farm-campers weeding, eight pullet eggs, seven broody hens, six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.

 

 

by Laura Parker Roerden

We had an entire blessed week of quiet here on the weasel front. I no longer braced myself before I walked into the coop. We had stopped leaving the lights on all night. I had turned off the baby monitor. I had stopped walking the perimeter.

But this morning, after I fed the chickens, as an afterthought I looked behind the egg boxes and there it was: a headless aracauna chicken, a heritage breed from Chile. Aracaunas are among my favorite chickens. They are the ones that lay the bluish green eggs that look like paint chips or something you’d find in a fairy tale.

Each aracuana hen is different. Some are speckled beige and black; others are reddish brown. This one that was the most recent kill was a heartbreakingly almost cerulean grey.

In that moment I wanted to be like Scarlett O’Hara and just close the door to the coop.

I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I went inside the farmhouse. I took a deep breath. I maybe cried a little. I sent a pressing work email out about a book project. And then once again got back to examining the crime scene with our handyman Keith. We found paint chips and dust disturbed around an area of chicken wire that might provide about an inch of opening: likely the place of entry. We closed more holes.

I went back to the hardware store.

“Do you think the fox pee will work?” I ask the man in the paint department, who no doubt knows me as the weasel lady. “There’s no coyote pee left.”

“The coyote urine had opened all over the floor,” the clerk explained patiently. “We had to dispense of it quickly. It leaves quite the stench.”

“Yes,” I nod knowingly.

When did this happen? When did I begin spending mornings discussing the merits of various dehydrated urines?

I purchase the fox urine, feeling slightly more like Scarlet vowing to rebuild Tara as I leave.

Afterall, tomorrow is another day.

by Laura Parker Roerden

Most games have a buzzer that goes off, signaling its end. Victory is declared for whomever is ahead at that moment. Life is not quite like that. Though, as my good friend and comedian Dana Gould once quipped, “What hasn’t killed you, isn’t finished with you yet.”

So, it’s with great caution that I announce that we’ve finally secured our chickens from the weasel(s). We could not have done it without the dedication of our handyman Keith, who not only spent two entire nights sitting in darkness in a cold barn staking the critter out, but also came every morning around 5 am for days in other attempts to secure the coop and to give me a chance to go to bed for a couple hours before I had to get up the kids.

As you know from following the posts here, this entire experience has been a barn raising, with so many friends and family showing up in so many ways. Showing up is one of the greatest gifts you can give someone. Even the texts from my friends asking, “How did it go?” or saying, “Take a nap” brought a certain feeling of security to me at a time when I at best felt like a failure and at worst felt under a certain siege.

These small problems in our lives, of course, happen in a backdrop of seemingly insurmountable societal problems. It’s been a crappy fall out in the world and in so many of the people I love lives. Every headless chicken lying in the mud begged me to try to make meaning of it.

I’ve tried not to take the bait. It’s just too big. The best meaning I can make at this time—in the wake of the Ferguson decision; in a world where the U.S. puts the most powerful climate denier in the senate in charge of our climate policy; in face of dear friends who are battling cancer, job loss, divorce—is that yes, sometimes it’s true that the fox (or in this case, weasel) is guarding the hen house. And we might not have the answers. Or feel like we have the words. But we need to show up, because it’s going to keep busting our butts if we don’t.

But since that doesn’t sound very Thanksgiving-ey,  I want to also offer this poem by Mary Oliver, who is better at making meaning from the world than I.

Messenger
by Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Wishing you all the gifts of gratitude in our lives. And for the times when you can’t muster gratitude, the gift of showing up.