Progress despite rain

May has turned out to be extremely wet with daily, heavy thunderstorms typical for an East Tennessee Spring. Despite the rain, Mike (our contractor) refuses to let the weather slow him down. For instance, Thursday he arrived at the farm at ~6:30 AM to paint the porch so it would dry before the rains hit at 10 am.

Pictures attached include a couple of the rebuilt stone porch with the original 1899 woodwork and a photo of the happy goat family.

Lebowski Fest in East Tennessee

This weekend, we took Walter on a field trip to see Dude and Maude, the two silkie banties that we had given Lance's colleague, Joy, a couple of months ago. The proud parents of two fluffy chicks--little achievers!--they strutted around in style (and Dude occasionally wandered into the corner of the pen to take a sip of what we thought was a White Russian). Walter behaved himself and didn't wave a gun at the other goats, even though they were rather hostile, as Nihilist goats are wont to be.
We know this story is ludicrous, but we share The Stranger's optimism and will sleep better knowing that there are "little Lebowski's" out there keeping the tick population in check.

Show Cancelled

Today, I was going to write a blog entitled “Survivor: Chicken Island” about Lance Jr.’s surgery and recovery. I was going to explain how I had performed emergency surgery on her a couple of weeks ago to relieve her impacted crop*; how I had slit it open and emptied the contents: grass, cracked corn, and a twisty tie (much like Inman’s neck wound for those of you who have read Cold Mountain); how she was such a good patient, staying calm and still as I jabbed into her throat with a paring knife; how Lance had given me the silver star for surgery and had sewed her wound up that night with stitches he had brought home from the hospital; how we had religiously kept the cut slathered with iodine and Neosporin and given her oral antibiotics; and finally, how she had fully recovered and was following me around the farm again in her typical cheery way.

But yesterday morning, I found her dead on the floor of the coop. Perhaps her crop had gotten impacted again; perhaps she had contracted some internal infection that the antibiotics we had been giving her had failed to defeat; or perhaps Mother Nature was sending me a message that I shouldn’t mess too much with the natural order of things, that Lance Jr. had a genetic defect and she was destined to die an early death, that I was selfish in trying to keep her around, and that she would have served a better purpose stewing in a pot with dumplings. “Go ahead and cry, Heather,” Mother Nature was probably saying, “but I warned you not to get too attached to your animals. Survival of the fittest…you understand that don’t you? Animals have value because you assign them value…In reality, they are only part of the food chain, following the planetary creed of eat or be eaten.” (Lord knows, Lance Jr. herself could even be punishing me for naming her after a boy. “I’ll just die…see how you like that!”)

Either way, “Survivor: Chicken Island” had a short run. But I will continue to tread on here at Walnut Grove, making use of humankind’s inventions, improvements, and illusions, such as clapboard farmhouses, heirloom seeds, Martha Stewart bakeware, and pets. What else can such a highly evolved organism do? For me, I guess, survival is not so much about being fit as it is about fitting in.

*a crop is a space below the neck where chickens store undigested food