 
81

The Fava, the Sun, and the Holy Goat

A Year On Our Farmlet

by

Christi Killien

Drawings by The Bearded One

The Fava, the Sun, and the Holy Goat

A Year on our Farmlet

Copyright 2012 Christi Killien

Smashwords Edition

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. Thank you for your support.

Spring

Chapter 1: Living Cheaply and Richly

"Teeney tiny" is Texan for less than three acres. My husband aka the Bearded One and I were both raised in Texas, but I've been up north now for 32 years, him for 17. He still has an accent, and it comes out in print now and then when he chimes in.

Our farmlet is just 2.5 acres, and half of that is forest. The Bearded One is a retired lawyer who still has law firm nightmares, but mostly he dreams of motorcycles and endless outdoor projects. I am a free-range writer and an empty nest mother of three Twenty-Somethings. We have a dog, Ruby, and cat, Garfield, and together we are living cheaply and richly. This tale will be about our chickens and goats as we acquire them, and our gardens...the Fava, the Sun, and the Holy Goat, as the Bearded One put it last summer when we were working in the Circle Garden and feeling particularly grateful.

We're Boomers in our mid-fifties. As a generation, we've had it good, from the 1960s-70s hippies and the Awakening, to the 1980s-90s yuppies and the Unraveling, to this 21st Century Crisis where our job now is to support the younger generations. It's no longer about us, and we need to stay out of trouble.

To borrow from The Red Green Show and to slightly revise its men's club prayer: I'm a Boomer, But I can change, If I have to, I guess.

Chapter 2: Crop Circles

The Arab world is blowing up, state and federal governments are crumbling, and there is a world food crisis upon us. Our only real local crisis here an hour south of Seattle is that we had just 15 days of 80+ temperatures for ALL of last year. Every plant was stunted. We talk about the weather a lot.

Neither the Bearded One nor I grew up producing our own food. The America I grew up in is far removed from nature. But it feels fundamental to me to know how to grow food, to know what animals I eat and how they were raised and treated. So this farmlet is for my life NOW, not in some post-economic-collapse future. The Bearded One is a bit more of a survivalist than I am. He talks about the coming collapse, especially of the distribution systems that require cheap gas, and it motivates him.

We've lived here for 4 years. We built the gardens the first year, hauling in two dump trucks full of soil and digging out countless roots. You can see our three circle gardens from outer space. They total about 3,000 square feet. The Google Earth satellite image of our forested farmlet clearly shows the Rings Garden and it looks like a bull's-eye target, a bit disconcerting since we're so close to Bangor and all those nuclear submarines.

Last year, when President Obama came to Seattle stumping for Patty Murray, a float plane violated air space at Lake Union, so jets tore up here from Portland and broke the sound barrier right over our house. Scared us to death. It was like lots of dynamite going off just outside. The house jumped. We figured at first it was an earthquake. We didn't know what it was. When it dawned on us that it was a sonic boom, we assumed it was the mail lady coming down the road.

Our Twenty-Something kids appreciate our small life, they just don't want to stay here for more than two nights. We get only one bar of cell phone reception, and did I mention we talk about the weather a lot?

To lengthen our growing season, we're building a hoop house in the largest circle garden. Hoop houses are relatively inexpensive greenhouses made with bent pipe or PVC tubing and covered with clear or opaque plastic. My friend Sheila showed me a picture of her recently constructed hoop house, which was our inspiration.

The idea is to keep it cheap, so we are using cedar branches instead of tubing, because we have so many of them. Our hoop house will be 20′ long and 10′ wide. Currently we're debating the plastic purchase — Home Depot plastic for $100 or special UV treated greenhouse plastic for $250. I argued for the expensive stuff last night, but today I'm not so sure. Will the plain plastic disintegrate in a year or two? Is the expensive stuff just hype, especially since UV protection really is not our issue?

Meanwhile, infrastructure work continues. This week, latches on the barn doors, and trenches for the chicken pavilion's predator-proof fencing.

After the crop circles, we built the barn using wood from the 2 huge cedar trees we cut down to make the Circle Garden.

We dug the 350 foot long electric/plumbing trench -- a dear relative commented that usually you have to be in prison to do that work -- and then built the chicken coop.

Last summer I dug two small root cellars. They're like hobbit holes in the side of the hill with a big wooden trap door. Nothing fancy. One has a Tupperware in it the size of a big cooler for dry storage — onions and apples. A mouse got into it and ate all the apples. I'm still using the small, hard storage onions, though.

The other root cellar has a lining of straw and holds the potatoes, carrots and cabbage. We've gone through all the carrots and cabbage, but still have potatoes.

Three different neighbors on our road have come to see our root cellars...and one is getting her son to dig hers with his backhoe. Smart lady. When we're ready for chickens, a neighbor is giving us our first hens from her flock. Lou next door keeps us supplied with Golden Retriever books from the used bookstore, and we give him jam. I look at the satellite photo now, and it's surprisingly hopeful world.

Chapter 3: Growing What You Can — Canning What You Grow

Canning appealed to me from a young age. My mother never canned anything as far as I know, and was happy to be spared the job, but my Montana grandmothers did, on both sides of the family. Chokecherry syrup was their specialty, a bitter sweet concoction made with teeney tiny chokecherries that grow only in the mountains.

Neither of our daughters have set aside time for canning training, I've noticed. The older one is looking for a job and the younger one is torn between two seemingly conflicting life visions, and they both call me regularly for listening and life advice. This week, the younger called me her "Solutionist", which sounds like a chemist, which gets me to alchemy, which is what canning is, of course. Canning is transforming cyclic raw life experience into lasting nourishment. I look at a library of jars as I talk with our daughters on the phone.

But first you have to grow the garden, which is like living the life you want to create from. Gardening and canning both are great metaphors for life, and I use them liberally. We get advice from neighbors on the road all through the season. Growing the garden includes creating a community, friends who are facing similar challenges.

For those who don't live among cedar trees, cedar branches grow downward and then lift into an upward curve. They look droopy because the leaves, which are spiky like rosemary, hang down from the branches on twigs. It all makes great building material, as the coastal Indian tribes have shown us. The Bearded One has made objects d'art from them as well. This strikes me as a form of canning.

As we build the hoop house and plan the garden, the rhubarb has come up! Rhubarb is another bitter plant, like chokecherries, that grows only in the north. It grows in Montana, too. Our older daughter has stated that she wants rhubarb pie at her wedding instead of cake. Not that she is engaged or has a boyfriend, but that's the plan because she loves it so. We have four rhubarb plants and they produce from April 'til August. Last year I canned a rhubarb jam series: strawberry rhubarb in June; marionberry and boysenberry rhubarb, dubbed rhuberry, in July; and peach rhubarb in August. Rhubarb adds a great tartness to them all.

In a few years, gardening may well return as a critical skill. So I plant what I like to eat. I plant what grows well here and preserves well. Things will not go perfectly smoothly, and I have to adjust. Maybe I'll get out of my comfort zone and rally others to my cause — this past weekend, I helped preserve the middle class by attending a protest rally. Rights are like food, and we preserve what we grow.

Both daughters were happy I went to the rally, however the younger told me not to get shot. In fact, it was very peaceful, there were more men than women, and there was a good feeling of just seeing each other — we're usually sitting behind our computers — and expressing our sense of injustice at the backwardness and wrongly-placed responsibility for our country's fiscal crisis. It may be a jarring experience, girls, I say as I hang up, but keep the lid on. The center will hold.

Chapter 4: The Farmer and The Sacrum Should Be Friends

It's been a humbling week on the farmlet. Nothing much has happened on the hoop house construction. We are both trying to get this aging thing and its requirements through our heads, but the Bearded One hurts the most this week. He carried 20-foot long poles down the hill by himself and skronked his back.

He also karate-chopped kindling with his foot — he is a 55-year-old man, by the way — until his knee hurt. The only thing moving fast around here this week was stem cells.

"The Farmer and the Cow Man Should Be Friends" is a song from the musical Oklahoma. One of the biggest thrills of my life was seeing our now 20-year-old son playing the lead role Curly in his high school's performance of Oklahoma two years ago. He sang "Oh What a Beautiul Morning" to the packed Seattle University Auditorium and I was in utter shock. Who was that grown-up person? The Bearded One cried, although I didn't notice because I was transfixed. I was very sad about this later because I've never seen him cry.

Anyway, "The Farmer and the Cow Man Should Be Friends" is about land usage in balance with nature and other humans. It's really quite poignant. "Territory folks should stick together" they all sing and dance....in fact, the song specifically prescribes dancing with each other's wives and daughters as a way to ensure peace.

Aside from that, though, fences are what help on the range, and they're also what we're using to keep our chickens and goats safe from the coyotes, weasels and cougars. We don't want to create a war zone, where we curse the coyote even as we intrude into the wild. We want to create a place of peace, where all can flourish.

So I admit I've been a bit grumpy toward my sweetheart this week. The partner of the injured is affected, too, as she says Poor Sweet Baby, ties his boot laces and does all his chores. The stages of injury might even parallel the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. We're both at acceptance now, for this round, but let's face it, getting old is frustrating. I read once that aging cells copy themselves like photocopies of photocopies, getting grainier and more illegible over time. My jaw clicks with every bite. My hip sockets are genetically wimpy. Each day we ask each other, who's got the brain today?

Because there is nothing harder than doing nothing, we went into Gig Harbor to Costco and several hardware stores on Sunday. The gas lines at Costco — for $3.56/gallon — were stacked five and six deep, reminding us both of the 1973 Embargo. And how fragile are our country's supply lines. As we shopped, we heard many times how high prices were. I stocked up, sort of, with 2 bags of sugar and 4 of flour. We bought supplies for constructing the hoop house, which has, by the way, become a full-fledged project with lots of parts.

Jobs are always bigger deals than you first think.

We've also decided to hire a neighbor's kid to help with the huge, ghastly fencing rolls. Better to pay him than the doctor. Avoiding the doctor is central to living cheaply and richly. So, no lifting anything away from the body. No kicking out. No twisting and bending simultaneously.

I'd also like to say a word for the nap. I'm fer 'em.

On the way home from Costco, we were both feeling wiped out. The Bearded One started telling me about a cartoon he'd seen on PBS about an old couple coping with the husband dying of old age and cancer. The husband had written his wife a love note every day for decades. PBS radio aired their interview (which is the sound to the animation shown on PBS TV) and then he died the same day. The widow received thousands of letters from people who'd heard them on the radio, and in her old age apparently she reads one each day in lieu of his love notes. I didn't understand the ending at first because the Bearded One had choked up. I looked over and saw that his face was flushed. His eyes were swimming. He was crying.

It's actually been a pretty amazing week on the farmlet.

Chapter 5: The Boys and the Bees

Daylight Savings Time has started and we were still a bit stunned on Monday when we left, late, on our daily walk. I slept in because it was dark at 7:00 a.m. The Bearded One dreamed that a bear was chasing him, and he was pondering the episode at breakfast. It's spring and everything is waking up. Time to eat and mate and pollinate!

"Got somethin' for ya." Our neighbor, a Scandinavian-accented 75-year-old man named Lou, waved us into his driveway. He has a small orchard and last fall had promised us some Mason bee tubes, and here they were.

The males will emerge from the mud-packed tubes first and wait for the females. Then they'll mate, the males will die, and the females will do the pollination work in our fruit tree orchard, three circle gardens, and berry trellises as part of their nest building. I know this because Lou left us instructions in an envelope with the bees. We used to have peach and apricot trees too, but we had to dig them up from leaf curl.

The female bees pack the tubes like this: pollen/egg/mud/pollen/egg/mud/pollen/egg/mud. There can be 10 eggs in a tube, all set to feed on the pollen in their little cell through the winter and emerge next year. They're called Mason bees because they're mud workers. They don't make honey, they are not aggressive, and they don't have much of a sting. They're all about getting pollen and they're good at it. Her furry legs are the main attraction. She can pollinate 1,600 flowers in one day.

I will keep watch, and, as farmers do, I will count. When did I do that last year? And the year before? How many seeds in how many rows, how many poles in how many holes? Calendars are very important to gardening. Time springs ahead and falls back, it takes big leaps and giant tsunami gulps and never flows like sand through the hourglass. This Sunday we'll celebrate the Spring Equinox when the length of night and day will be nearly equal everywhere on the planet.

When we got back from our walk, 6-year-old Hansel and 4-year-old Gretel (not their real names) from next door came over. "We're making cupcakes," Hansel said breathlessly. "We need to borrow an egg." Gretel smiled.

"One egg coming up," I said. I am a good witch, and they were not afraid to follow me into the house. They've been here before several times with their folks.

I opened the refrigerator and thought about offering them two eggs. They both looked at me with large eyes. They were on a mission, and they wanted just one egg. Not two. To offer two would confuse and dilute the moment. Two would have been a pain in the butt. Sometimes you don't want more, and I decided not to risk messing them up.

"One egg?" I said.

"ONE," Hansel said, holding up his index finger. "For CUPCAKES." He took the egg, they both thanked me, and then they raced out the door and down the steps. We've lived here for four years and watched both of these kids growing up at what seems like a furious pace.

"Time changes everything," our younger daughter said to me as she arrived later that afternoon with her boyfriend. She was talking about her brother maybe changing his college major, but her words resonated across the landscape. We lose track, our gauges break, we fall in love. The two of them held hands and kissed, yet appeared to be interested in the as-yet-unconstructed hoop house.

Then the two lovebirds headed for the trampoline, where they jumped and laughed and the boyfriend did so many sequential back flips that we all gasped. We even forgot to count.

Chapter 6: The Whiskered One

I love everything about him, his face, his smell, his attitude, his voice. He fascinates me. I'm sure that we have had many lives together. My heart leaps for joy when I see him after even a short separation. I'm referring to my 4-year-old tabby cat Garfield, of course.

He's a big part of my personal Happiness Index i.e. things that don't have price tags but have real value. I read about the Index this past week, how England's Prime Minister David Cameron, as part of his Big Society project, "is trying to measure the happiness of a society, rather than its growth and productivity alone" with a quarterly household survey.

Philosophical critics say that our problem is that we would even try to measure or control happiness, that advancing technology is death to the spirit. Political critics say that government is trying to weasel out of its collective responsibility by focusing on individual responsibility. I say there's a lot of tension in the world these days. I wish everyone had a cat.

The Bearded One regularly reports moments of happiness when he is outside savoring his freedom from a job. Our older daughter had many truly happy moments this week when she landed a job. I contributed to the Gross Farmlet Happiness this week when my childhood pen pal from Scotland contacted me through Facebook. It's been over 40 years. She wrote, "Oh Christi I am so chuffed that I got it right, you still look a bit like the girl in the picture."

Chuffed!

We got Garfield on Craigslist 2-1/2 years ago from a soldier stationed at Fort Lewis. He and his wife were expecting a baby and Garfield plus their dog was too much. So Garfield, who they got at a shelter, was used to dogs, which was good because at that time we had two golden retrievers. Jake has died since then.

Garfield is an indoor/outdoor cat. His litter box is on the enclosed front porch. In this forest, cats go missing, but Garfield is a great tree climber and he stays close to home. Still, I could lose him. I know this. He disappeared for a whole week once, right after we got him. When he returned, I was ecstatic: he was not only reborn, but I was also free of the burden of fearing his ultimate death. I'd already been through it. But please don't test me again. The Bearded One says cats are fungible. The next one will be just as great.

Living with animals is teaching me about death. How to die, what to treat, what not to treat. They give steady reminders as their lives are so comparatively short. Jake died 1-1/2 years ago. He was 9. Honey Girl, a beloved Akita on our road, died this past weekend from kidney failure.

Garfield also heals me, lying on whatever organ is acting up at the time. Our younger daughter is in nursing school, and she and her two nursing student roommates have a cat who nurtures whichever one of them needs her most.

I wonder how it will be with the goats and chickens, if that connection will be there with some of them. Herd animals are fascinating in their own ways. The leader of the goat herd is the oldest female mother, not a male. I want to get Pygora goats, which are a mix between Pygmy and Angora goats.

This next week I'll buy some broccoli, cabbage, and onion starts at the nursery. It's still freezing here at night. I don't have a hoop house yet, and the plants that I started from seed indoors last year were super leggy. It's still very cold and wet here. Nothing dries. There's moss on the moss.

But that's okay. Garfield plays indoors, too, with his Mouse-on-a-String, which keeps him sufficiently chuffed.

Chapter 7: Hosed

"You foll'a how the petcocks work?" the Bearded One says. "Yes," I say, through gritted teeth. "I foll'a." Do I? Vaguely. They turn. I had just stomped into the house after FOUR trips back and forth to the faucet, trying to turn on the bleeping hose. This week was the week to uncoil my own personal garden nemesis and become reacquainted. Righty-tighty. Lefty-loosey.

Synchronizing the on/off valves, called petcocks around here (motorcycle lingo), screwing together several hoses to reach distant spots, and lassoing the twisty things so they will spiral down all flat and in place could bring Mother Teresa to her knees.

First, petcock confusion. A task that should be mindless — turning on the water faucet and expecting water to be available at the unseen end of the hose — suddenly becomes a thinking and remembering thing. Which direction is the petcock cocked, and am I examining the correct petcock? There's one at the end of the hose, and two at the start. Plus a handle. I'm not spatial. Is the faucet cranked all the way right or left? Odds are high I get something wrong.

The Bearded One says that infinity for him is a computer or a guitar. Endless possibilities. For me it seems to be two hoses screwed together. The more hoses you add to the queue, the crazier it gets. I speak from experience. We attached FOUR highly individual and idiosyncratic hoses end-to-end from the faucet to the goat barn before we finished the 350 foot long trench. It was like trying to hook Tunisia to Libya to Egypt. There were petcocks all over the place.

But even when dealing with just one humble hose, they are unpredictable. Something about twisting the pulled-out chunk of hose one full turn for every loop of hose you pull out? Huh? I planted a nice, neat little village of broccoli, cabbage, and onion starts in the Rings Garden this week, and sure enough, the hose flopped out of its logical trajectory — picture a hula hoop motion — and snapped off several broccolis. A bad hose day.

Some smart folk install drip systems, which you lay down once and forget about. At least that's what the commercial says.

Water is necessary for cement work, which is where we are this week with the hoop house. The entire hose gets filthy as I drag it from the Rings Garden over to the Circle Garden — it's been cold and cloudy and drippy all week — where the hoop house is taking shape.

My job is to mix the cement. This requires some petcock finesse, so I don't like the Bearded One to watch.

More cement is needed, so I go to the barn where we also store the dry hoses for spraying snow off the barn roof should it become too heavy.

We finish the cement work for the hoop house, rinse out the wheelbarrow, and leave the hose lying out on the grass. I've handled a hose or two in my time, I think. They're not THAT big a deal. Progress everywhere you look!

Inside we have a bowl of chicken soup, which I make every week with onion and rosemary and cabbage and carrots. It tastes good and keeps us healthy. I feel good, even before the Bearded One points out the "yella" sun in the newspaper weather forecast diagrams.

And so it g'hose.

Chapter 8: Planting Time

This week the rubber meets the road. Shovels in the soil, seed potatoes out of the root cellar and sprouting, seed packets stacked on the kitchen counter, and rain and hail storms every ten minutes reintarnating the potholes we volunteer to keep filled. It still dips into the 30s at night. We're still wearing knit hats. But it's the first week of April and every sun ray feels like love. We have spring fever. Sunday was a New Moon.

The moon, it turns out, is a Farmer's Almanac basic. Its ebb and flow, wax and wane, affects ground moisture, and the timing to plant both underground and above-ground crops.

The water issue really isn't a problem here — our issue is the cold – but I like the idea of the moon pulling the earth's water. Potatoes and other root vegetables like to be planted on the waning moon (getting smaller). I think hiddenness. Plant peas and cabbage and broccoli seeds when the moon is waxing (getting bigger). I'll plant the sprouting seed potatoes after the full moon which in on April 17.

I've been weeding and sifting huge moss slabs and other green stuff out of the soil. It was an experiment to leave the thick layer of straw off of the gardens this year. We had so much still half-decomposed last April that I thought some minimal moss build-up would be preferable to hauling all that wet straw to the compost. Wrong. The mossy ground cover here takes in a full inch of top soil. And it chokes out the seedlings. I don't use any poison, so I'm sifting it out on a nifty screen. And then I'll plant my first outdoor seeds of the year, sweet peas.

Our younger daughter called this week from nursing school and expressed concern about the picture of the first cedar arch . "I hope it's not an eyesore," she said, "with all that plastic." She was a bit cranky, having just gotten out of a 3 hour lecture on breastfeeding. She thanked me for breastfeeding her, and reminded me that she'd been born with a tooth, as though I could forget. Vampire child. As we talk, our conversation veers happily toward love, and I gaze out at sunlight glistening through the five glorious, feminine, curved arches and dark, fertile, freshly turned earth.

We are actually digging holes! At least in the garden. We're filling them up out on the road, where at this time of year, the holes spit out the gravel overnight.

A woman in a black Lexus offered the Bearded One a religious tract on the road earlier this week. When it gets nice out, the evangelical traffic really picks up. Neither of us is in the market for a religion, though. So when we step out on the road, I scan up and down for proselytizers.

The Bearded One/Moses sees my concern, and knows I struggle with what to lovingly say to well-meaning religious workers. So, as Ruby the Golden Retriever rushes to the edge of the road to deliver her pee mails, he sings out in a low, rumbling, Charlton Heston baritone, "LET MY PEE PEE GOOOOOO!" and it's like magic, I laugh, leapin' and hoppin' on a spring moonshadow, and say that if Brother Love himself comes up our road with his Traveling Salvation Show, I'll help him set up the tent. Maybe even bake them their daily bread.

Chapter 9:...just one word...Plastics

I scroll down the Greenhouse Megastore webpage to buy a gigantic 24′x55′ sheet of UV tolerant plastic for our eco-friendly, "green," sustainable hoop house, and Dustin Hoffman appears to me, poolside in the 1967 movie The Graduate, receiving the secret to success in modern America.

MR. McGUIRE: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.

BENJAMIN: Yes, sir.

MR. McGUIRE: Are you listening?

BENJAMIN: Yes, I am.

MR. McGUIRE: Plastics.

BENJAMIN: Just how to you mean that, sir?

MR. McGUIRE: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

BENJAMIN: Yes, I will.

MR. McGUIRE: 'Nuff said. That's a deal.

The movie was about questioning the values of society and the company man, but plastic still means garbage to me, as well as phoniness, lifeless conformity, materialism, and corruption. The Bearded One adds that it also means clean, safe, hygienic survival. I laugh nervously. I need to get over it. A quick walk around the farmlet -- garbage cans and bags, buckets, tarps, the clear plastic barn roof -- and I am prepared to be a little more honest. Plastic is with us and we love it.

We also love "plastic" baling twine. It's some kind of polymer, I feel sure. It's orange and extremely strong and durable. We buy it in enormous spools, and we use and re-use it. Plastic isn't BAD, is it? It's an oil product and therefore a part of our planet's ongoing focus on resource depletion and environmental stewardship. But I'm old enough now where I know cutting all plastic out of my life just doesn't make me or the world better. Am I rationalizing? "Is plastic natural?" I ask the Bearded One. "Is a 2 by 4 natural?" he replies.

We no longer need chicken wire for the hoop house because the orange twine will do just fine. The fancy greenhouse plastic cost $200, which was actually a bit less than I thought, so we are still hovering in the $500 range for our now 30′x10′ hoop house.

I jumped the gun on the planting last week. It's still too cold. It was 28 degrees on the deck this morning, and we're still using the space heater at the kitchen table. We're not only an "outlying area," according to the weather people, we are also the Convergent Zone. Yep, the Convergent Zone is our property. Neighbors have commented how the temperature dips when they walk past our place.

So, as sunny as it has blessedly been a few days this week, I'm still just weeding and sifting moss out of the soil. I did put in the sweet peas like I said I would, though. I'm considering laying a plastic sheet over them at night.

Like I should have done with the poor asparagus. But I still had plastic block back then. The news is that our asparagus has drowned. We planted the gnarly, octopus-shaped root clops in the two inner circles of the Rings Garden two years ago. The male spears and female ferns came up last year in late March. This year, I waited and waited, and no little purple spears. Asparagus likes it dry. We are just too dang wet, especially since I didn't cover the bed over with tons of straw like I did the first year. Asparagus is a rare perennial vegetable, but, honestly, neither of us has ever craved it.

The hoop house plastic should arrive within the week, and I'll be able to plant practically anything! This makes me happy, and I will embrace the plastic film with my whole heart when it arrives.

It was our younger daughter just two weeks ago who used the word eyesore regarding her fears about all that plastic, and so we've been pondering how the plastic will wrap around the ends with little if any cutting and nailing on the arch itself.

Our son called this week from college to tell us he's changing his major from Architectural Engineering to Civil Engineering. He wants to be outside, not inside, he said. He used the words environment and water systems, and I think he even said ecology.

I feel proud and a little goofy. I want to walk him out to the hoop house and show off our cutting edge ecological miracle. Focus on the superb do-it-yourself, low-tech solution to no sunlight. Help point him forward into his newly chosen field. "I want to say one word to you. Just one word...Plastic."

Chapter 10: Dog Man

Living with a dog man for 15 years now, I've learned a few things about dog training. But when two different neighbors called within 24 hours this week for advice — jumping up, digging, submissive peeing, and attacking a cat — they didn't ask for me. I don't have the Bearded One's gravitas. Love and fear is the magic mix, and I get lost in a muddle between the two. The dog man just wants to know the breed and the age.

There are no bad dogs, as Barbara Woodhouse used to say, but there are more difficult-to-train breeds. Huskies and golden retrievers are a world apart. Still, it's an authoritarian relationship. The dog must believe you mean business, that you will go drill sergeant on them if they foul up the maneuvers. It's very military. Think of Sergeant Carter on the old 1960s TV series "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C." Love in formation. Affection at attention. Early training is all a game with lots of fun and treats. Once they know the commands well, though, there's a protocol. They don't have a choice.

Ruby is a well-trained dog by most reckonings i.e. she can be walked without a leash around other people and other dogs and get a passing grade.

Here's what I've watched and learned about keeping dogs trained:

Say a dog's name once. It's the pause afterward that they hear and it is powerful. It creates anticipation which is 90% of the game.

Do not hit a dog, especially from above. Only pop them under the chin to get their attention. Holding their muzzle and compelling close eye contact is also potent. The idea is never humiliation, but momentary attention.

Set the dog up to do the behavior you don't want and catch them in the act. Then make a big deal of it. Race over to them, swell your chest up big and make them look you in the eye. Make a scene. This is the part I hate. A sensitive, beloved visitor who once witnessed a disciplining scene when a dog ignored the "come" command – the Bearded One doesn't care who is watching him go ballistic with a dog — was aghast and asked if that was really necessary. Yes, I said sadly. You must make a fool of yourself. Intentional theatrics are the whole point; you can do the job once or a hundred times; once is better. This is for enforcement, not early training.

The set-up works with cats, too. A variation, anyway. The hoop house plastic arrived, and we are contemplating a catastrophe for Garfield so he doesn't climb and claw the plastic to shreds.

He will for sure if we don't watch him closely, and when he reaches for it, we'll guard-dog him with a horrible "iNNNNN!!!" nasal buzz that scares and irritates even me. The Bearded One invented the sound to keep Garfield from following us on long walks in coyote country. Works like a charm.

We'll have to rig reminders ever so often. Like with Ruby and the gardens. This week I planted the seed potatoes, even though it's still in the low 30s at night — this has been the coldest first half of April in recorded Puget Sound history — and Ruby loves the bone meal I added to the soil this year. Potatoes like phosphate for their root development, not so much nitrogen, which is for leaves.

The last scene we made with Ruby over the gardens was months ago, so I set up a little fence for a couple of days. Sticks and flagging.

Indiscriminate digging is another problem altogether, and just about unsolvable. You have to fence-in precious places. It's not a problem with Goldens, fortunately. The set-up technique works for jumping up problems, too, and to some extent attacking cats. Ruby has had trouble with both in the past, but both of these problems have been solvable.

Submissive peeing is the toughest problem on the neighbors' list. It's usually with one person, and I, unfortunately, have previously been that One with a family dog. Every time I went to pick the kids up at their father's house after the divorce, Pepper the Australian Shepard would pee in the entry. I think Pepper was overwhelmed with confused feeling when he saw me — a dog of divorce — and months of one-on-one, I'm-here-for-you love would theoretically have been the only cure. It was not to be. Our younger daughter always had a towel nearby; she adored Pepper.

I will try to make up for all that mopping by taking excellent, loving care of her cat who will be summering here as she works as a nurse at the VA Hospital.

"How old is the dog?" the Bearded One asked the neighbor who called about their Labradoodle jumping up. The answer, six months, made him laugh, and them relax. No way could you expect a six-month- old pup to be trained yet, he explained and then added, "It's a DOG, man!"

Chapter 11: Up Through the Ground Come a Bubblin' Crude...

There's water burbling up on the northwest corner of the farmlet. It's been there for weeks now, a bog, ever replenishing, threatening the neighbor's electric box and washing out their driveway, but also making everyone giddy. We're all talking about digging ponds. It makes me feel a bit like hillbilly Jed Clampett out huntin' for some food and ending up with Texas tea.

I walk down the easement each day, which is a bit of a hill, just to witness the miracle. Three years ago, our neighbors built their house on the 2.5 acres to the west of us and dug a 300 foot long trench down the side of the easement in order to get electricity. Toward the end of their long trench dig, they scooped down about 2 feet and water just gushed out. The lower 150 feet filled with water, and at the bottom of the hill the water was standing 5 feet deep in the trench. The neighbors filled it in, and since then the rain water has run off out its normal creek bed. This year, the coldest April in record-keeping, water is gurgling up big-time giving us a bona-fide groundwater mystery.

We have a family friend — he took the photos at my parent's wedding in Helena, Montana in 1954 — who is also a water expert. He sat in our kitchen with us 3 years ago and said that potable drinking water is now scarcer than oil. We'll run out of it long before we run out of oil. Cheap oil, anyway.

I wrote him yesterday about our mystery — he is currently in Hawaii working on his novel which is set in the southwest USA in 2102 and entitled Where Did The Water Go? — and he said, "I am thinking it is an artesian spring. You must be sitting on a large aquifer. How lucky!" I'll say!

The Circle Gardens all lay along an ancient creek bed, as far as we can tell. They're at the low point in the road and surrounding forest, but there is no surface water. Our well is only 35 feet deep and people have remarked at how sweet and good the water tastes here. It tests as super "soft" — no minerals. It's snow melt from the Olympic Mountains.

I remember when Mt. St. Helens blew in 1980, ash showed up in the water hundreds of miles away within hours through the underground streams and rivers. Last year we watched as the BP disaster spread oil throughout the Gulf of Mexico and up the east coast. This year it's Japanese radiation polluting the water and seeping into the earth's sponge, entering the water cycle. Since our bodies are well over 60 percent water, how can we not be affected?

Saturday was so warm and delicious — the only sunny 65 degree day of the month. The Bearded One and I spent the day cleaning out the Strawberry Circle, and gave a bucket of starts to the neighbors as well as planted a bunch up in the goat pasture.

We both now have sunburned red necks. I'm hoping the dose of sunshine and Vitamin D helps my twitchy gardening legs. My hip paid the price for all that kneeling and bending, and the Bearded One joked that he cried himself to sleep because of his various aches and pains, but at least I didn't kick him in the night, as I've been known to do. Like the Eagles' song – "Ooh, hoo, twitchy woman, she's got a twitch in her thiiiiggh....Woo, hoo, twitchy woman, she'll wake you up in the niiiiiigt."

It started raining again on Easter, at least here. Down in Texas, I see it's so hot and dry they're doing rain dances. Our rain would make a Texan feel rich right now. Our groundwater makes me feel rich, not that we'd ever try to sell water. Water is like air or fire. It's everyone's. The rain, as tired as I get of it sometimes, keeps us green.

And the rhubarb loves it. The colder and wetter the better. Our older daughter, who has been in her new job and new housing for a month now, is throwing a May Day housewarming and wrote requesting rhubarb pies. So let it be written. So let it be done.

We'll serve it warm with cool, sparking farmlet water.

Chapter 12: Security Briefing

The slug invasion is sustained, slimy, and has devastated the newly-planted daisies. We've researched the deterrents and fortifications, again, and are weighing the costs. Second, a neighbor told us on Monday that he had just watched a weasel cross the road straight onto our property. We believe that weasels cross the road to eat chickens or to set up chicken operations near future chicken sites, so our former fencing plan isn't enough. We're switching to the smaller fencing holes in poultry wire. Finally, our 20-year-old truck's security system drained the truck battery and left us stranded at home. This, too, has been addressed and the one-and-only farmlet vehicle is secure.

Slug security is an illusion. Still, we try. To lessen the carnage and to make ourselves feel useful we can bait, trap and/or block the slugs. We don't use any poisons at all. Non-toxic slug bait options include beer and Sluggo (iron phosphate). Both are expensive, and Sluggo, which we use, disappears in the rain. Only a small elite of the slugs drown happily in the beer. Traps — overturned flowerpots with a stone placed under the rim to lift it up a bit, grapefruit halves and wide boards or plastic placed likewise — all attract slugs, but again, it's a bucket in a waterfall.

Blocking strategies like seaweed and copper strips, and abrasives like diatomaceous earth, lava rock, and coffee grounds, also have unintended side effects and consequences because of the salt and caffeine. Plus they just don't stop the dudes. We frequently see a slug crossing our gravel road, unimpeded. Why would he undertake such a trek? To make his escargot, of course.

We have heard that chickens eat slugs, and will cross the road to do so. So, to keep the chickens safe from the secretive, tricky, nocturnal, carnivorous weasel, we have ordered four 50-foot rolls of 1 inch chicken wire ($167) to reinforce the 2×4 inch squares of the goat fencing. The hens will have a huge cage to sleep and awaken in, ready for a day of slug grazing elsewhere in the pastures above or below.

On other garden security fronts, the bunny fencing — chicken wire around the entire base of the yard fence — is holding this year. Or maybe we remembered to close the gates. Anyway, there have been no droppings sighted. Last year we bought a catch-and-release bunny trap when we spotted several rabbit poops near the onion starts, but it was never sprung. The bunny left, we double-checked all the fencing, and we called the trap a success.

Garfield is getting a mole a day now, and he soon will have a cat buddy — our younger daughter's girl kitty named Ditto who will be summering with us — for backup.

Ruby the Golden Retriever goes reliably berserk over dog intruders, but almost always holds her tongue when people arrive. We're working on this. We want a watchdog sounding out, and she did so magnificently until the day her brother, Jake, died. This week she barked briefly at a strange man (to her, anyway...) in our driveway, which brings me to the gravest threat to our grocery shopping security — the loss of our vehicle.

I turned the key in the ignition of our 1991 Toyota Four Runner last Thursday morning and there was no sound. Dashboard lights came on, but the engine made no effort whatsoever, as if it weren't even there anymore, stolen in the night. I tried again. Same. I waited. I stroked the steering wheel, whispered, but the truck wasn't buying it. An hour later, a carrier backed into our driveway — I love AAA — to tow the truck two miles to Virge, the local mechanic, for resuscitation. This is when Ruby barked. We're still very happy about that.

Virge called in a couple of hours to confirm a screwed-up security system and a dead battery. The culprit was a long-forgotten fancy alarm the dealer had installed 20 years ago. To unhook the alarm looked like a job for specialists, Virge said, but he could supply a manual battery cable release — an inch round knob — so the cable itself is pulled off of the battery. A short-term solution. If we suspect we won't be starting the car for a week, we'll disconnect the battery.

This is a trick Virge usually reserved for old people. But with gas at $4/gallon, there might be more of us, old or not, who stay out of our cars for a few days in a row. Our truck gets only 16 mpg, which would be a sin as well as a bank-breaker if we drove very much. But we don't, and the insurance is just $45/month. We sincerely hope to never buy another vehicle.

About 4:40pm Virge drove the fixed truck into the driveway (they deliver!), and the Bearded One met him and returned him to the townlet while I prepared a bucket of warm soapy water. Then, when he got back, the Bearded One hosed down the truck and I washed the permaculture from its eyes and wiped its nose. All is well. We have peace of mind. Really. The bears are only scratching things up at our neighbor's house.

Chapter 13: Companion Planting

Our younger daughter called this week to report that relationships are work, that she and her boyfriend will be separated this summer because of jobs, and that it feels complicated. "Sometimes it's easier to be single," she said. I look out at the gardens where the Bearded One and I have been working on separate projects. Males and females can communicate, I tell her. If enough different flowers are planted between them to facilitate pollination.

This week I planned the garden according to the principles of companion planting, at least as many of them as I could absorb. One or two. The idea is that some plants help each other grow and thrive, while others will hinder. As with plants, so it is with humans. Side-by-side, 'til death, or something, do us part.

Principle One: Like the smell of your companion. So I moved the chives out of the Circle Garden to the Rings Garden with the other onions and the onion-friendly potatoes, cabbage and broccoli. Onions are pungent and affect the taste of their bedfellows, plus they stunt the growth of beans and peas. Oh, and the sweet peas came up this week. I see little hearts, while the Bearded One points out, seriously, how they look like a row of darts thrown straight down.

Principle Two: Split up the work. In the place where the chives were, on the south side of the new hoop house in the Circle Garden, I'll plant the "Three Sisters" combination which is corn, beans and squash. The corn stalks support the pole beans, which return nitrogen to the soil that the corn leeches out, and the squash covers the ground and keeps it moist. American Indians planted this way for centuries. An image of The Three Sisters planting technique is on the reverse side of the Sacajawea dollar.

"I am my own person," says our younger daughter, still talking about her relationship. "I am myself, an independent individual. We are two different people." Yes, I say, so true, and with very different perspectives. While I continue my weeding and plant the snap peas and carrots (with the cabbage, broccoli, and onions), the Bearded One finishes everything about the hoop house that can be finished, but the plastic still cannot go on, he says. I am impatient for the plastic, I admit.

Principle Three: Attract sweetness and repel harm. We are watching Garfield exploring the hoop house. We really can't train him not to go on something that's not there yet, and so we watch him with amusement and a bit of trepidation...I wish the plastic was on, and we could be legitimately keeping him off of it.

Why can't we put the plastic on? I ask, patiently. Not bossy. The Bearded One is in charge of this part of the project, and I am exercising my right to know.

Sometimes I like to know a reason, I say. Garfield swings from the arches.

And then the Bearded One becomes, before my very eyes, the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate from Monty Python's Life of Brian, complete with lisp — which he's been seeing me do for days since I saw it again on YouTube. "Vewy well," he says from the deck, sweeping his hand out across the yard. "I welease the Weason!"

The grass is too wet and the circus tent-sized plastic will stick to itself when we lay it out. Also, the wind keeps kicking up. Oh. Okay. I can wait a day. If I have to. I guess.

Garfield is a great companion to the gardens on a molecular level. Five or six a day -- dead moles -- is starting to be normal.

The mason bees aren't active around the cookie can "hive," but it's still cold here. Most days lately it never makes 50 degrees. We'll plant all kinds of flowers among the vegetables, maybe even start them in the hoop house. Next week. Once we get the plastic up. When the timing works. It's a two-man job.

Chapter 14: It's Not That Bad

The plastic was on the hoop house for a day, draped loosely, and then the storm hit. We couldn't anchor it at the base until we tested it with water. Nature obliged. Buckets of water began to pool between the support strings and the Bearded One ran out to gently poke the stretching pockets of water from inside the hoop house with a broom to empty them. Then he came back in and we watched the torrential rain and wind from the window as new pockets filled. The Bearded One was morose and mused, "No spine. It wants absolute rigidity to solve its problem." I said, "That's what he said." Neither of us laughed. We ended up taking off the plastic as dusk was going dark. It's heavy. Three inches of rain fell that night.

The next morning, the Bearded One was in a dark mood and called his cedar arch hoop house design a debacle. He hated the look of the "clear" (milky white translucent...) hoop house plastic; he likened it to looking at a propane tank straight out our back window. "Butt ugly," he said.

I wouldn't say that, but I was surprised and a bit disappointed at the opaqueness. We had both dealt successfully with the idea of the plastic, but not the reality. Hoop houses should be out of sight. We just don't have another sunny place. Our older daughter happened to be here on the single day the plastic was up. "It's not that bad," she said.

It's amazing to me that I had never heard of a hoop house three months ago. We went to the dentist early this week and on the way I saw at least fifteen hoop houses. At the dentist, I overheard another patient talking about his huge tomato hoop houses. They're springing up everywhere all of a sudden — a strange, huge mushroom crop — because last year was so cold. It's starting out that way again this year. The hygienist said she'd noticed them. She was curious, diplomatic. She didn't use the word eye-sore, but I could hear it in her voice.

Our veterinarian was also here on that single plastic day. She is a rural doc who comes out to the house in her minivan, like the vet in the book All Creatures Great and Small. She taught us how to immobilize a cat for treatment — grab its neck skin confidently like its mama once did and with your other hand hold the back legs together. The cat instantly succumbs and it is an amazing thing to watch.

The Bearded One did the honors and both animals got their overdue vaccinations. Ruby got a Leptospirosis shot, which is for a specific bacteria that killed a dog, Honey Girl, on our road last month. They get it from drinking standing water and it shuts down their kidneys. It's apparently a bad year for it. Ruby will lie down and roll over to the command "Medicine," which always cracks up the vet.

The vet has said that she will teach us the vaccination and worming protocols for the goats when we get them, and that Ruby's teeth had too much tartar. We need to brush them or give her a nyla-bone (Ruby won't touch them) or there could be trouble. As she left, she didn't comment on the hoop house, and it was right there. Well, the edge of it is visible from the driveway. Was she politely ignoring it?

The bright side in all this hoop house business is the inside, we both agree. The hoop house with the plastic on is wonderfully light and still and warm inside, exactly what I'd hoped for. The plastic is thick and sturdy feeling, and the Bearded One has rigged a rigidity solution.

Lengths of cedar decking tied to the arches the full 30 feet of the hoop house will SURELY solve the problem.

"Some projects eat you up," says the Bearded One, and I kiss him. Our daughter is right. It's not that bad.

Chapter 15: CATastrophe

It appeared to be loathing at first sight, as if they were fresh off an unfortunate former life together. She growled and hissed. He hissed back and said, "Mama! Mama!" I'd never heard him do that before, and it was quite distinct. I was so excited about having our younger daughter's cat Ditto here this summer with our cat Garfield and Ruby our Golden Retriever that I kidded about having a little wedding in the hoop house. At least hang a banner. Anyway, the fanciful greetings are off.

We hope it will get better. Give it time, at least a few hours. Keep them separated. Spend quality one-on-one time with each of them. Let them eyeball each other and vocalize through the screen door of the enclosed porch we call the cat condo...where we hope they will be roommates. Ha!

The low point came on Monday night when we had maneuvered them both into the house. Garfield nestled with me on the couch. Ditto was in the kitchen with the Bearded One and our daughter. Ruby was still outside. The cats hadn't seen each other inside the house yet, was our best guess. Our daughter walked over to me. She spoke to Ditto, who trailed her. "Garfield is here," she said. And then Garfield spied her and hopped off my lap to say "hi" and play. Ditto hissed and smacked him with her paw, claws presumedly out. He smacked her back and then chased her upstairs where she hissed and growled from under the bed. She spent the night there.

Ditto is exquisite, a loving apartment cat to three nursing students for an entire year. "She is the perfect cat for me," our daughter says, "which is why this sucks. I understand what she wants, like you do with Garfield." We all have our fierce, ruthless, feral side. Our daughter was just now seeing Ditto's. Literally. She had never even heard Ditto's unsettling, now ever-present, warning growl.

Tuesday morning, Ditto left and we didn't see her all day. The Bearded One had spent a couple of days pointedly teaching her the sound of the call whistle we use for all animals, to help her find us if (when) she bolts into the woods, and, ugh, coyotes. We whistled for her and thought about her as we worked on the hoop house. The design upgrade is a happy success. Water does not pool, and the wood slats make it look more like a barn and less like an iceberg.

The rhubarb is going gangbusters, so I also made a pie. I used my big 9×9 square pan, since my usual round pies have been boiling over. Which reminds me of my favorite pie joke. The farmer asks his son what he's learned at that fancy, expensive college. The son proudly says, "Pie are squared." The farmer shakes his head. "I knew we was wastin' our money on that college," he says. "Son, CORNBREAD are square, pie are ROUND."

Wednesday morning, I awoke with two spectacular sneezes. The influx of cat fur blows my mind since Garfield started shedding, and Ditto is a shedding machine. The fur sticks to the lotion on my face, and I feel tarred and feathered. But I am a sucker for soft things.

Now Ditto is back, alive after spending the night in the woods, and we're playing it by ear. Our daughter heard the two cats yowling at each other early this morning. Maybe they'll work it out. Miracles occur matter-of-factly every day everywhere you go. Just yesterday Ruby trotted up to us with her mouth full. (She knows she's not allowed to eat debris on the road if we're there practically staring right at her...) "Drop it," I said, and she let go a perfect open-face cheeseburger with pickles still on the cheese. "A Big Mac and fries!" The Bearded One was thrilled. "Were there any more of those?" Then we ran into a neighbor who told us that his son was just accepted as a contestant on "Wheel of Fortune". Anything can happen.

Summer

Chapter 16: Dancing with the Jars

Jars are the stars,

Stay outta your cars,

'cause the fruit's

the big loot.

Just put your ink on the label,

There'll be food on the table.

Oh baby, I'm dancin' with jars

'cause jars are the stars.

Okay, so rap isn't my calling. But jammin' sure is, and this week I'm happily taking inventory, counting jars and lids, ordering pectin, and getting psyched. There's no such thing as too much jam.

Our son has helped me can fruit numerous times, voluntarily. We also sometimes make bread together when he is around. He is a calming soul in the kitchen just as he is on the Ultimate Frisbee field, which is his preferred territory. This past weekend I watched him play in the National Championships. After I got over the thrill of seeing him live on my computer screen (thank you CBS Sports), I basked in the language of the Land of Ultimate. The frisbee is the disc, and you can huck, pull, cut, flick, hammer, grab or dump it, but never diss it by spiking it.

Likewise, canning has its language, and we know the parts. Jars, lids, rings, funnels, jar lifters and grips, and the magnetic lid wand. The beautiful glass jars, molded with diamonds and fruit shapes and classic Ball and Kerr logos, can be wide-mouth or regular mouth; and quart, pint, 3/4 pint, and half pint in size.

You can seal them with lids, which are single-use, available at grocery stores for 20-25 cents each (12 regular mouth for $2.50). You can also seal jam with wax, but I haven't done that in decades. The metal rings are just to keep the lids in place during processing, and later for protection. I have a huge box full of them. Once the jar is opened, I throw the used lid away and use nifty storage caps.

People have returned jars to me from cross-country trips, packing them with their socks. Most of these are jam jars, but I also give away other soups de' jars -- fruits in syrup, tomato sauce, spiced cabbage and pickles. I don't have a pressure canner, which is for less acidic vegetables. Straight tomato sauce with no other veggies is acidic enough, though, to use my regular old, inexpensive 21-quart water-bath canner.

I also dry tomatoes in my dehydrator and then mash them down into plain old recycled jars with olive oil and spices and voila! Sun-dried tomatoes which keep on the shelf just fine. I make pesto, too, to go with the sun-dried tomatoes on pasta all year-long, and I freeze those jars. This year, I'll get the basil for that pesto from the finished hoop house.

The entire hoop house bill came in at $600, and there's 330 square feet of ground and lots of hanging space. I'm going to try those Topsy Turvys for tomatoes.

The Bearded One and I installed the plastic together, in between watching Ultimate Frisbee games. The whole time I imagined our son watching us from the sidelines and describing the action: "He cuts the plastic with a nice breaking flick. He dumps the little trimming. Cuts again, this time a big one. He hucks it downfield! Mom comes down on the floaty plastic. She goes to the inside and rolls the edges. The Bearded One, on the outside, places the lath and hammers it. Good job, you guys. A nice, clean game."

Chapter 17: The Heat Is On

It's the first week of June, the rest of the country is burning up, and we still have the kitchen space heater on. This morning it's 44 degrees, 48 in the hoop house. I look at the newspaper weather map of the contiguous U.S.A. and picture Mother Nature Herself dipping the entire country in fire, but her thumb is over us. Achilles' heel.

Sixteen hours of light here on the 47th parallel at Midsummer, the most northern latitude of any major city in the USA outside of Alaska. The days get longer and longer but no warmer. We work feverishly preparing for the coming heat (late July through September), eat dinner at 9pm when it's still light out, and go to bed at night with barely enough energy left to shake hands. This week our son helped roll out 400-500 feet of 5-foot no climb goat (horse...) fencing over hill and dale.

The only place on the farmlet that has hit 80 degrees is in the hoop house, which I can see out the window. It magnifies the heat, like a mini-Earth, trapping the heat once it gets in. The plastic is all foggy with condensation right now (and just a smidgen warmer than outside), so its less-than-clearness, a disappointment to me at the beginning, is academic. But change is afoot! The heat is coming. If any sun comes out and stays out, the hoop house zooms up toward 100 degrees, water dripping like a rain forest. We have to keep the doors open so that it stays at about 85 degrees.

Last year the cold and slugs wiped out half of the beans and all the zucchini and cucumbers. So this year, I've started all the beans (bush and pole), squashes (pumpkins and zucchini) and corn in pots in the hoop house. The plan is to transplant the starts to the Circle Garden in 3 weeks.

It's two steps forward, one step back \-- is that a Law of Nature? -- on the security front, though. At night, slugs doodle their way across the hoop house plastic, leaving loopy trails in the condensation.

Garfield actually carried a live, unharmed crying baby bunny down the driveway, up the deck stairs and through the cat flap in the gate, then down the stairs into the backyard and carefully sat it in the Circle Garden. Our bunny-proof yard. This is called security blowback. We scooped it up and carried it to a nice thicket outside the fence.

He's just as crazed and confused as the rest of us, though. Ditto, our daughter's visiting cat, still does not like him, so until we find a new home for her, we have to keep them separated. Which means Ditto has the enclosed front porch we call the cat condo. Garfield now has an auxiliary residence on the back porch. A cat carrier we call the trailer house. He likes it.

It's a weird time. The numbers are in. So far this year, the average temperature is 10 degrees lower than normal. There are hardly any bees. This is two years in a row. Crazy. At least the baby tomato plants are thriving, upside down, in the hoop house. Maybe Topsy Turvy is the new normal.

Chapter 18: Won't You Be My Neighbor

When we moved to the country, we imagined more of a hermit lifestyle. There are 25 households on our 3/4 mile long dead-end dirt road, each with a minimum of 2.5 acres. The ones with horses have ten. You can't see many houses. Acres of woods surround us. I was worried that I'd never meet any neighbors. The truth is, the more rural you get, the more community you get. We all recognize on some level that we need each other. Even the hermits wave.

We moved here in January, 2007, in the middle of a blizzard. Neighbors still remember that winter because everyone lost power for a full week. Losing power is an especially big deal when you're on a well and suddenly have no water. It's the 19th century again -- candles, buckets of water to flush the toilets, gallons of water heating on the wood stove. Neighbor kids home from school hang out on the road and keep everyone informed. Most of the time, it's so dark and cold we just hunker down. We all live in a valley.

In the summer, though, the days are long and the neighborhood warms up. The triathletes run with their baby stroller. The horses get saddled up and exercised, and the alpacas get sheared. They roll over and scratch their backs in the sun like kittens. Puppies chase roosters, and then roosters chase puppies, and men who are turning 65 buy Mustangs. "Stay out of his way!" the wife says to us as she drives by, "It's a standard!"

You can't force friendship (especially on cats), but neighbors in my experience are only rarely friends. They're neighbors. And, for the first time since my childhood, I know the name of pretty much every family on our road. Everyone knows us because we walk our golden retriever Ruby every day, and because we fill the potholes.

One neighbor is an inventor and is currently marketing a gardening tool called the Hardy Pull. It works. Another has recently returned from Japan where he experienced the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. He's threatening a slide show to us neighbors this summer. We have a firefighter, a cop, a serious badminton player, a high school computer/robot club advisor, and a nuclear submarine mechanic (who has offered to get us a tour) all right here on our little road. Out in the middle of nowhere. Our beloved 80-year-old chiropractor neighbor, frequently renowned as the smartest person on the road, died two years ago.

And no, it's not all peace and love. I can't really just lay out tales available to tell. Someone would likely sue us. Maybe shoot us. Virtually every household is armed. There are lots of concealed carry permits for sure. The hermitage sneaks back in here.

"Engage your core!" my nursing student daughter sings out from the deck. I'm digging in the garden, turning the soil for all the sprouts in the hoop house. After I yell back "Engage YOUR core!" I smile and give her a thumb's up. I tighten my torso before I plunge the shovel deep back into the soil.

We added three inches of topsoil when we first built the garden, but didn't till it in. Now I'm involving all parent material as the soil scientists (pedologists) say -- clay, silt, sand, minerals, organic humus. I have a gardener friend who actually trucked in the soil from her father's garden to her garden when he sold the family home. The contents of soil are living links, the medium of growth and change. An inch of fertile soil takes a thousand years to be formed in nature. We had 3 inches hauled in at once.

I breathe the smell in, taste it on the sensitive places of my tongue. Earth. I ponder the soil of my life, the elements of family, friends, and neighbors, as I hold my core steady.

It's been 30 years since the Bearded One went on a 7,500 mile motorcycle trip throughout the U.S., sleeping by the side of the road for months, and this week his riding partner pulled into our driveway on a bike -- Kawasaki 1200.

He's been on the road a week, from Memphis, Tennessee to Utah and then up to Idaho and then over to us. Canada yet to come. Over 2,300 miles so far, and all of it full of potholes. Except for our road.

Chapter 19: Fur -- a bit of fluff...

If there were a pill that would make me grow fur, I'd take it in an instant. Fur is soft, beautiful, warm, and a natural sunscreen. Furs were used as money here in the Pacific Northwest in the 17th century, like tulips were being used in Holland. Furs and tulips both have a sensual beauty, a magic, that everyone agrees has value.

We live in a fiber rich environment. It's the light, not heat, that triggers shedding, and on this Midsummer's week when the sun rises at 5:14 a.m. and won't set until 9:12 p.m., the fur is flying around here. Fibers stick to our corneas and hang from lampshades. We inhale them, drink them in our coffee, and watch them float across the room like bubbles. Clops of fur glued together with sap and seeds dot the landscape.

But it's this fur that is the big lure for our three kids, who are all working full-time, real-life regular jobs in the Emerald City this summer, and crave the comfort of fur, as well as long naps and good food, to recover after the work week. They come here separately or in pairs and sit with the finished-shedding dog and still-shedding cats for hours.

Yes, catS. Ditto, our younger daughter's visiting cat, who dislikes our tabby Garfield (a lot, apparently...), is staying with us for ten more weeks until she returns to her duties at nursing school. We put her on Craigslist and our older daughter, a social media maven, put her whiskers out, but people who want a cat now can have their pick of kittens, and anyone who loves cats and just wants another one already has one, and Ditto just doesn't like other cats. AND our daughter just broke up with her boyfriend and needs her cat. This daughter also wanted to cut her bangs this weekend, an archetypal impulse. Women cut their hair after relationship break-ups.

The CATastrophe was a month ago now, and the whole upsetting issue is finally resolved. Ditto has the cat condo and the east side, Garfield has his little trailer house and the west side plus the inside of the house. In between is Ruby, who they both like, and a spray water bottle which either one will experience with any hissing or growly-prowly posturing. Détente. Compliance not optional. Sort of. They're doing better. We have yet to squirt one of them, but we told both cats and the bottle stays in plain sight.

Time-out. A retreat. A nap. That's what this place is to the kids. And as they pick up the dozen eggs on their way here on Friday night as I requested, they joke about whether or not we will ever get the chickens, much less the goats. We explain that we are doing all of our fencing grief up front.

We point to the finished hoop house, make them walk through it and check the temperature. It's 105 degrees! Too hot. Open some doors.

And then they return to the napping house to pet Ditto and sip a bowl of homemade chicken soup before falling into bed. Fur, food, sleep. It's worth a lot.

Chapter 20: Buggy

A mosquito bites our younger daughter on the face as she sits out in the yard with her cat and decompresses. She works as a nurse at a hospital this summer, and the bite is truly the least of her stresses. What really bugs her she can't talk about. Patients. I ask her if she thinks I could do what she's doing. No way, she says. "You would get way too caught up in the meaning and not get anything done. You couldn't keep up. You would protest and walk out before you got ten minutes in."

She swats at another mosquito and goes inside having just succinctly and beautifully described why her generation is coming into power now. Metamorphosis before my eyes. The nymphs have hatched. The face of America is changing. Boomers are too easily bugged.

But there sure are a lot of bugs to be bugged by now. I slap the kitchen countertop and then myself. That's me in the garden waving wildly as I weed. I've been snatching at seemingly nothing all week, blowing specks from my nostrils and scratching mercilessly. Bees hover at the salal and blueberry bushes, dragonflies and bats feast on mosquitoes over the still-not-ripe strawberry patch, and even the State of Washington has chosen our road for an official government insect trap. Which, I admit, I was very suspicious of at first, in keeping with my generational stereotype. Like, what in the hell? I check it out on the internet.

Inside the bright green cardboard box is a dark string coated with a sex pheromone that specifically lures the male gypsy moth into the box which has a sticky interior surface. It's the gypsy moth caterpillars that eat the trees, and in Illinois this month airplanes flew over 11,000 acres dropping pheromone flakes which aren't toxic but confuse the mating. I hope it doesn't come to that here. Let the monitoring begin. I guess.

A bee stings our son as he helps with the chicken fencing. "Hey," he says, "I think a bee just stung me. Yeah, it got me." We are all impressed with his casual acceptance of the pain. I would have been outraged. I wonder if he is enlightened. Maybe he's another species. He heads back to the house, working his way through six gates, which are becoming more focal points as we hem ourselves in.

The dog wakes up and snaps at a fly. She stands, stretches, then looks baffled on the other side of the wire with no way out. She's 70 in people years. I feel her pain.

The Bearded One and I encounter our neighbors, a family with 3 young children, walking on the road on their way back from another neighbor's garage sale. Hansel and Gretel, ages 7 and 5 now, and their little brother, age 3, who approaches us firing two stick guns (as in twigs from a tree...), each with a barrel, a grip, and a bit of a trigger. "Pow, pow-pow." This is archetypal behavior for 3-year-old boys and none of us is the least bit alarmed or concerned. His beautiful, young 32-year-old mom laughs and shrugs and I tell her how I admire her for requiring him to make his own guns.

Gretel plays with a bottle of perfume just purchased at the garage sale. Giorgio Armani. She's waiving the bugs away with it. When she drops it, and the bottle shatters, I am stricken. "Oh, no!" I wail and offer to buy her another one at the garage sale -- was there one? No. I gnash my teeth. I blame the bugs. The Bearded One has an elevator flashback from Dallas two decades ago, trapped in a box with too much pheromone. Way too much. The perfume smell is overwhelming.

Hansel flaps his two new stuffed animals to relieve the stench. Gretel is quiet, but she doesn't cry. Her mommy comforts her and her tall, athletic daddy brushes the glass off to the side of the perfumed road. The younger generations are not easily bugged. I feel hopeful, but still wonder if gypsy moths like Giorgio Armani.

Chapter 21: The Jam We're In

Every jam batch -- four in all -- separates into layers, the fruit at the top, the juicy jell at the bottom. What am I doing wrong? This has happened in previous years, but never in such quantity. I google and troubleshoot. One site says that jam will separate if the fruit is too watery, and that means not crushing it or chopping it the day before, and never puréeing it. Okay. The last two batches I dry the strawberries and the rhubarb with a paper towel, and the jam still separates.

I'm getting desperate for explanations. Could it be the ongoing Fourth of July fireworks, or the continuing war games between Garfield and our visiting cat Ditto? The Bearded One suggests turning the jars upside down, essentially shaking them up, which is against every jamming rule in every book. These are not snow globes, thank you very much. The jars are delicate. The seals!

I open all the jars, throw the used lids away (Grrr...) and re-process all four batches. Five more hours later the jam is perfect. I have no idea why.

I head out to pick another 16 cups of strawberries. I'm excited and optimistic. I have all this ripening fruit and it is still 40 degrees at night. Each berry is precious. I eat just one. Strawberries taste like sunshine to me, and I want every one of these for the long cloudy winter -- time in a jar. I want delicious, consistent, unseparated, peaceful, happy jam. I pray to the Goddess of Jam as I pick and am treated to a series of rapid-fire explosions. Fireworks.

Ruby watches me from under the cedar tree between the two cats. She was raised from a pup on the Suquamish Indian Reservation where we used to live, and fireworks \-- thunderbombs, palm bursts, silver bullets, rockets, shells, cherry and head bombs -- none of them faze her. The cats are awake and maneuvering. Garfield digs in.

Ditto leaves her enclosed porch and walks slowly past an armored hut -- actually, it's just the compost cooking nicely under its camouflage tarp. She crosses behind the hoop house and I can't see her. Definitely maneuvering.

Garfield, ever mindful, watches from his own high ground vantage. His eyes lock on her, his haunches twitch. He yawns hugely.

Ditto is headed for the recently-planted corn and pole bean transplants to pee and whatever. I holler at her from where I'm still picking in the strawberries. More artillery explodes, but this time it's a farther-away rumbling, not fireworks but the deep rumble of ordnance at Joint Base Lewis-McCord, twenty miles away. It goes off all the time.

Ruby looks up. Garfield stretches and lopes down the back deck steps. He stops at the hot tub, where just two days ago Ditto whacked him.

Ditto leaves the corn and ducks into the salal bushes. Garfield licks his tush, considers his options. A few more weeks, I tell them all. You're doing great! I pick enough for two more batches of jam, and as I leave the garden I hear a couple of rocket screechers, not the cats.

Before starting my fifth batch of jam, I decide to check the Pomona Universal Pectin website, which is the pectin I'm using this year. Look what I find! "What you have is called 'fruit float.' When the jars of jam are very hot and there is no jell yet, the pulp, which is lighter than the juice, is able to float to the top of the jar. Strawberries are prone to fruit float although it doesn't always happen. Other fruits can have fruit float also." And finally, the most beautiful line of all, "You are not doing anything wrong." The co-dependent part of me will always thrill to these words.

And then I laugh out loud at the only solution the Pomona Universal Pectin people offer: "In the future, when you take the jars out of the water bath, leave them for about an hour to start cooling and sealing. Then come back and check to make sure they have all sealed. If you see that you have fruit float, turn the jars upside down to force the pulp to redistribute through the jar."

I can't wait to tell the Bearded One as I strap on my 10" flex lumbo-sacral support. This week I earned by black belt in jamming.

Chapter 22: Observers

"None of us sees the whole truth," says our son's ex-girlfriend, a beautiful 20-year-old math genius now majoring in Ethnic and Gender studies and destined for law school, as she sits with the Bearded One and me at our kitchen table during a rare, lovely visit this week. "We have different truths." She is talking about Ultimate Frisbee, the sport that both she and our son love, and then she suddenly stops chewing. "This is the best broccoli I have ever had."

"Thanks," I say, but I'm still thinking of how this brilliant young woman sees Ultimate Frisbee as a tool for social justice. She's worked as a legal advocate in Africa. She talks about the common good, and how Ultimate has no referees, that it is self-officiating based on the Spirit of the Game -- a statement of inclusion and clean competitive play. Any player can call a foul and disputes are solved between the parties on the field, only rarely inviting in agreed-upon Observers to offer their truth. The former girlfriend acknowledges cheaters exist, even on her own team, usually calling fouls as a tactic. She's working with young, poor girls in south Seattle now, coaching them in Ultimate and in life.

I think of the cats -- Garfield and our daughter's visiting cat Ditto. "We've broken up three cat fights this week," I say. "No claws. They just sit a foot or so apart and yell at each other." Ruby is supposed to Observe. She's the official diplomat they both tolerate, but she's usually asleep when the feline yowling starts and isn't a great help.

"Bummer," says the ex-girlfriend, and eats another broccoli floweret. We decide to tour the farmlet before dessert, and stop at the single blueberry bush left in the Circle Garden. She says, "Aren't blueberries one of those plants that need two?"

The Bearded One tells the story of the other blueberry bush, how there used to be two but a year or so ago we discovered one sheared off and dragged, by a bear according to the Bearded One's reading of the 'sign', across the yard into some thicket and stripped clean of berries. There were no Observers. Since then, we say, there have been fewer berries. None? Maybe that's why. It takes a Gender Studies major to point this out to us.

We need Observers. As this young woman tours the barn and chicken house, I make my case to her, that these animals will not be slaves. They will be protected and have tons of free ranging time, I crow.

I will not insist that the goats stay pregnant their whole lives in order for me to milk them. She nods. Back at the house, we have cheesecake I made with store-bought Lucerne low-fat cream cheese and sour cream, which came from enslaved cows somewhere. Still, it's one of the most delicious complements to fresh strawberries I know of.

Later, I tell my younger twenty-something daughter, the nurse, about the visit, how hopeful I am for the world, how her generation is so can-do for the common good, and how we need each other for the whole truth because that is where compassion comes from.

She listens and nods as she eats the last piece of cheesecake. She pats my wrinkling, 54-year-old hand, gently guides me down off my soapbox, then laughs as she leaves to sit with her cat. "Ditto is my slave," she coos.

Chapter 23: The Perfect Food

The oldest person on our road is a World War II veteran, a black man who once told the Bearded One that beans saved his life. He was standing on his porch talking about the 1920s and zoot suits and the Depression. "The black people would have most likely just died off without beans," he said. We grow lots of dry shelling beans as a direct result of that conversation. It's so wet here that I have to finish drying them in the dehydrator, and then, if kept cool, they will last a decade.

Food preservation excites me. Part of my fascination is with saving money, part with having healthy, delicious food no matter what the government and the economy do. Another cool part is how satisfying the work is, with beautiful jars to show for your labor. But most of all, there's something metaphysical about it. Real lead into gold stuff. Alchemy.

Forms change, essences survive, life cycles expand. Broccoli is an annual, born in February, lives through the summer and then goes to seed and dies in the fall. But once I dry the leaves in the dehydrator for winter soups, they become immortal. The nutritional value is superb.

Strawberries are perennials, they "die back" (go dormant in winter) each year. The mother plants send out many shoots in the early spring called daughters which take root, flower and make berries for a few weeks in July (used to be June, but the weather is changing), then they all, mothers and daughters, die back in the fall, only to come roaring back in the spring all over again.

The strawberries themselves last for a few days if left unwashed and cool. This makes us wonder how all those gorgeous store-bought baskets of strawberries from Chile can survive long enough to be shipped. Our home-grown berries will last for up to 2 years as jam. After that they are suspect. They also are a big hit dried, but slicing small strawberries gets crazy real fast. We now buy huge ones for that.

I dehydrate, can, and freeze, although I do very little freezing. It takes up too much space in our little freezer and we lose power enough each year that it's too big a risk without a generator. Last year I froze twenty bricks of pumpkin pulp. I still have 18.

I have a good recipe for chocolate chip pumpkin muffins and imagined making many more batches than I actually have. But the pumpkin bricks are still good.

This year's pumpkins will go into the root cellar for the chickens which are imminent. We are finishing out the coop/aviary. If allowed to, and if protected and lucky, chickens can live for 10 years. Most, though, especially roosters, expire much sooner.

I'm not a big fan of canned vegetables, so I don't mess with them. I can all kinds of jam, some fruits in syrup (blackberries mainly for cobblers in the winter), and tomato sauce.

These are my dehydrating success stories: zucchini, peaches, strawberries, tomatoes, beans and herbs. I put the zucchini in soups and chili; the peaches and strawberries are to-die-for right out of hand, chewy and naturally sweet; the dried tomatoes go in jars with olive oil and basil and voila! sun-dried tomatoes for pastas, pizzas and sandwiches. The beans go into chili and burritos. Dr. Oz says beans are the perfect food for humans. Our older daughter helps me make batches of 24 burritos, then she takes most of them back to Seattle to freeze.

Practically everything on earth, animate and inanimate has an expiration date, including the Bearded One, Yours Truly, our elderly neighbor, the Federal budget ceiling, and even beans. The only exception is cats, of course, who have nine lives.

Chapter 24: A Chicken Expert in the Family

The Bearded One sits at the kitchen table with an ice pack on his neck and reads about chickens while I sort red huckleberries for jam. "Chickens don't urinate," he says and I am stunned.

Another piece of farm information I'm learning in my 50s. He's researching roosts after finishing the last outdoor gate this weekend, carrying said gate backwards and downhill being the culprit for his neck skronk. I look up from my work. Tip: sorting small berries from loose leaves and debris is easier if you put them in water and let the leaves float to the top.

"They exhale moisture and their poop is wet," he explains. "Basically water guns." "Ahhh," I say, and remember another amazing chicken fact. Roosters don't have a penis. That's right. A little secret that I've shocked even veteran farmers with. But it's true. Rooster's tushes look very much like hens'. They just sort of line them up, I guess.

The conversation runs its course and the Bearded One leaves with the dimensions he sought -- the roosts should be 2-3 inches in diameter -- and I begin to mash the berries. Two hours later, the huckleberry jam has not jelled and so I'm on the jamline again. The solution is to open all of the jars, re-heat the jam, add more pectin and re-process. Which is what I'll do because the jam is good and I'm trying to learn.

My mind shifts to the just-scalped strawberry garden and whether to completely rotate the crop -- dig under all the strawberries and plant a short-season vegetable -- or renovate by thinning and composting. They've got crazy-thick root systems now.

The strawberry hill, as I think of it, is seriously female. All the plants are called either mothers or daughters. She has stretched the stereotype for fertility this year, producing 13 gallons of sweet berries in her 3rd season. But she has a high maintenance beauty regime. According to the master gardeners on-line, it's time for a complete make-over or a thorough tweezing -- a big eyebrow project. Our younger daughter suggested stepping back to check the effect after every third pluck.

I can see the Bearded One up in the chicken house from where I stand on the strawberry hill. He's coming into the home stretch, actually talking about getting chickens "before the weather turns." I love it when he explains to our son, "We will insulate the chicken house with styrofoam sheeting or else their combs and wattles will freeze." I have no idea what a wattle is, but I am thrilled to my bones.

It's the same feeling, I think, that our younger daughter, the nurse and owner of our houseguest cat, has when I say that I brush Ditto every day. And that I know how Ditto drools, and how she is an expert jumper and can leap from the deck railing to the roof -- at least 6 feet -- with a flip of her well-turned-out paws. Our daughter says these stories make her feel deeply pleased. I'm attuned to the little details of a creature that is important to her. And so it is when the Bearded One talks chicken, which are completely my idea. I fall in love with him all over again.

Our older daughter calls that night to say she is coming over this Friday, and can I believe it, she, a total city dweller, is critter-sitting her neighbor's two hens! "TELL ME EVERYTHING!" I say, as if she were now the Chicken Whisperer. "What color are they? What do they eat? Have you collected any eggs yet?" I can't wait to pick her brain on Friday.

"MOM," she reminds me, "I don't even like chickens!" But I don't hold that against her. I feel awe for her, my daughter, as she has actually fed a chicken twice.

Chapter 25: The Cabbage Family

I lift the old straw and newspaper shreds from the bottom of the root cellar and pile it in a wheelbarrow. Then I trundle the dead brown stuff down the hill to the compost to mix with the oldest strawberry mother plants I've uprooted. Compost is all about mixing browns and greens.

My goal is to get the strawberry garden converted to fall cabbage by next Thursday when I leave for a Montana family reunion and my Grandma Milly's memorial.

Grandma died over a year ago at age 93, and this is her life celebration and burial of her ashes next to Grandpa's in Helena. She didn't want a service. Of course we're having one. No preachers, though. We're going to circle around the gravesite and each tell a memory and then lay a flower on her urn. I'm remembering how much Grandma loved the entire cabbage family, all the Brassica, including cabbage, broccoli and kale.

Like them she was crunchy, full of vitamins, beautiful, and she gave all her heirs gas. Half Irish, half Italian, she had a judging eye, spoke her mind, and believed that children should be given money and treats.

She also believed that no one who hadn't lived through the Depression had a clue what hard times really were, that America worshipped the Almighty Dollar, and that cabbage and pork go really well together. Cole slaw, kraut, steamed and boiled cabbage, she loved them all. She was born in 1916 and married Grandpa in 1931 when she was 15 and he was 33.

Grandpa was a butcher, and then a school janitor, and then a butcher again. Grandma kept a store and lots of children, fostering and babysitting for extra money. I remember Grandpa doing slightly-drunken handstands at a wedding when I was 10 years old. I think Grandma was mad. Years later when I was 22, they took me in when I was in a life crisis. I went back to my roots, to Grandma Milly's aqua and yellow kitchen, and learned how to cook.

I whistle to the Bearded One from the strawberry garden. He's been sawing pieces of styrofoam in the barn, and now I hear a series of squeaking hinges and latching gates and know he's on his way to fit the custom insulation into the walls and doors and ceiling of the chicken house. My whistle means I'm coming up.

I breathe in the sweet pea perfuming the entire backyard. I open the gate and walk up the hill past the root cellar which is still wide open and airing out. Past the huckleberry bushes and their tart red jewels shining in the long-awaited sunshine. I'll miss this place for the four days I'll be in Montana, but I just figured out my idea for the memory I'll share at Grandma's memorial.

See, Grandma went to church regularly, but wasn't a religious woman. She loved to party. She loved people and gossip and bawdy jokes. Her spirituality was practical. She once told me, I remember this clearly, that like her Irish mother, she believed that when you die, you become what you hate in this life. If that's true, she is now either a cat or a spider, but happily not a cabbage.

Chapter 26: The Best Laid Plans

"When are you going to get the goats?" asks 7-year-old Hansel, again, from next door. It's the question that must be answered -- everyone we take on the Tour de Farmlet asks it -- and I'm still fumbling with my answer. We've been working on getting goats and chickens for 2 years now, but the truth is that we have no timeline. No business plan, just long hours. The farmlet is a way to have fun and love each other 'til we die. Why rush it? The Bearded One likes to say, "I don't care if we ever get critters. I just wanted to build a barnyard."

Maybe it's because this is such a hot, divided, gritchy summer for so many people, many of whom are sweating over money. Maybe it's because I'm leaving on a road trip \-- all I want to talk about is how to love each other better. Somewhere I read that there are 5 ways people give and receive love: Gifts, Touch, Time, Words, and Food. All of those seem to me to be about this place.

First stop, the sweet peas. My sister-in-law and her cousin, both women I've known for over 30 years now, are here and we're standing next to the sweet pea teepee talking about another woman we all loved who died. I cut them each a bouquet, a Gift. We breathe in the scent and the memories.

Second stop, the corn and pole beans. My experiment in companion planting. The pole beans give nitrogen back to the soil that the corn leeches, and the corn provides the stalk for the beans to climb. They cling and wind and Touch all summer long.

Ruby the Golden Retriever and Garfield have begun a whole new world of Touching since Ditto the temporary enemy cat showed up (2 more weeks!) Ruby rolls over and smashes Garfield flat. He doesn't even move. They nap together. They tour the yard together. Touch, touch, touch.

Third stop, Time, and the recently transplanted cabbage into the strawberry hill. My experiment in crop rotation. The strawberries needed cleaning out, and the young cabbage plants needed thinning. Now all they need is Time. Time to set their roots, long days in the sun to grow and fill the space. I feel loved mainly through Time together. The Bearded One and I had a lot of time apart. We still miss each other a little.

For the fourth stop, Words, I go through the gate and back up the hill (we are always walking uphill...), past the root cellars on the right and onto the path to the chicken house where the Bearded One is devoting his considerable tool skills to all things chicken. He is good with Words. He is also the stick man artist and has been busy in the chicken house with his markers.

Last stop, back to the house for lunch. This is a big way I show love. Like my Grandma Milly, I cook meals and give jars of jam to everyone. Food is how she showed her love. I don't think that's how she received it, though. She was never that impressed with my baked goods. She much preferred a phone call or letter.

I rummage through the freezer, past the ice packs the Bearded One keeps in there for his neck and whatever other owie he has at the time, past the frozen muffins and burritos and cheesecake I've cooked for him while I'm away, to the ice tray. We're having chicken soup, open-faced basil- tomato-and- mozzarella sandwiches, and cheesecake with red huckleberry jam, but first the iced tea.

Just then the Bearded One hobbles in. He has hurt his left foot, and he can't put any weight on it. "Poor sweet baby," I say, Words he loves to hear. I Touch his face. And then I get him an ice pack and crutches. "So much for having the chickens here before you get back," he says, revealing the toxic timeline that doomed him. He's been pushing hard. He never should have tried a plan.

Chapter 27: To The Place I Belong

We stop at the Local Boys fruit stand for peaches on the way home from the airport shuttle Park 'n Ride lot. I'm thinking ahead, how to feel home the quickest and easiest. Although we both love peaches, the Bearded One is like his Grandma Leona. Biting into an unpeeled peach sends an electrical storm through his body. Don't talk about it, please, he says and shivers as I select the fuzzy fruits. Why should such a genetic trait have ever evolved? I wonder.

The Bearded One is off crutches after spraining his foot before I left for my long weekend in Montana and my Grandma Milly's memorial, but he is still limping. His groin hurts now, too, because that's where Garfield landed from a high shelf on Saturday night when my sweetheart was laying spread eagle on the den bed watching Harry Potter. Still, he managed to make the chicken nests, get them installed, put latches on all the gates, tie a pile of kindling bundles for our winter fires, and make a surprise object d'art as well. I unpack, start the washing machine and feel more and more myself as we head up to the barn.

Everything has grown! I grab a plastic bowl and pick snap peas, zucchini, and tomatoes. These tomatoes are the first we've ever managed to grow after 3 summers on the farmlet, and it was ten degrees above freezing on the back deck the last 2 mornings. Bless the hoop house and the Topsy Turvy system.

I circle by the Rings Garden and the potatoes are all died back now. A few more days and I can cut the tops off and then let them cure underground for several weeks before I dig them up. Some have already worked their way up, and are on top of the ground all of a sudden. They're new potatoes you have to eat right away, but they're so creamy and good.

The tops of the Walla Walla onions are all bent over ready to be pulled and laid out in the sun for a few days. The carrots are ready, but they can stay in the garden just fine until I'm ready to store them in boxes with sawdust and straw in the root cellar. Next week.

The transplanted cabbages are struggling but seem to be making it. Their life cycle is just beginning.

Up in the chicken house, the Bearded One has outdone himself. The nests are exquisite. They are built with cedar scraps from the two 150 year old trees we cut down to get some sun and to make the Circle Garden. Most of the cedar is on the goat barn. I'll make pretty curtains for the front of the nest boxes. Chickens like privacy when they lay.

And then I see the surprise, mounted on the wall of the chicken coup. It's a board with 16 circles glued to it, each a cross-section of one of the 16 wooden poles holding up the entire aviary and its huge 30'x30' tarp roof. With this, the Bearded One says, we can monitor the aging of the poles. Sort of. Cracks will show up in the art as they develop in the larger structure. There's some pretty big cracks showing already.

My Grandma Milly was 93 years old when she died. The gathering for her memorial was in a small Montana pioneer cemetery on the mountain plains. We stood in a circle around the grave and ashes, 13 of us, a baker's dozen, ages 19 to 84. We passed a bottle of Montana Gold whiskey Irish-style and told our memories and thoughts.

We laid fresh pink roses on the grave and laughed and cried. I looked at how we had all aged. How my aunt has Grandma Milly's mouth, and my nephew has my brother's mouth. How my cousin has my Grandpa Cy's art talent. I heard for the first time that I was induced with castor oil 54 years ago, thanks to Grandma Milly's recommendation. I felt privileged to be that old, to have memories to share, to know people for decades.

The Bearded One and I hug and kiss and walk back to the house. It's so good to be home. Inside, he dodges the two boxes of fuzzy fruit perfuming the kitchen, and I get out my peach pie recipe. As Grandma would say, the nuts don't fall far from the tree.

Chapter 28: Dust Baths

"Meow." It's 4:15a.m. and I hear this inches above my head, outside my dirty-but-open bedroom window. Garfield is on the roof. I leave the windows closed on this side of the house during the day, when there's dust from our beloved dirt road. At night, I like the cool breeze. Our second story bedroom is right over the cat condo which was the temporary evil cat Ditto's territory all summer. Now Garfield is bravely experimenting with the idea that the exchange cat from Attackistan really has returned to nursing school with our daughter. He won't take our word for it.

"Go to bed," I whisper to him, and close the dusty window. It's been two days since she left, but he still won't go back into his old digs even though I cleaned it and smudged it with sage smoke.

It's the time of year when dust coats everything, when cleaning feels pointless but also more necessary than ever, and when I realize just how much dirt there is on the farmlet. I see on the calendar that last year I cleaned the blinds and ceiling fan this week. They need it again already.

I could have legibly drafted this week's family emails in the dust on the side of the truck, but instead the Bearded One and I go to the farm supply store for root cellar straw and more chicken wire for the coyote-proofing.

Our neighbor who was going to supply us with our first chickens told us this week that she's been wiped out by eagles, never mind the dang ground forces and coyotes. The eagles are relentless. Another neighbor saw an eagle soaring straight down the middle of our road earlier this summer, 8 feet off the ground, never flapping even once. We see owls doing this from time to time. The neighbor presumed the eagle was after a chicken she'd seen loose up at the dead-end of the road.

All I've seen on the road lately are fog banks of dust and loud gangs, very appropriately called murders, of crows. Twelve angry ones scream bloody murder at us at the road entrance as we turn onto the main road. I'm thinking about my compulsion to clean, which I'd like to be shed of. The Bearded One (who wouldn't notice dust if he was swimming in it...) talks about eagles and says we should be okay because they need a pretty long glide-path and we're a small clearing in the middle of some really big trees.

The lady at the farm supply store tells us that bulletin boards and Craigslist are the best places to get laying hens this time of year. "Do you want hens or chicks?" she asks. "Hens," I say right off. "We'll work up to chicks." I tell her that we need a chicken starter kit, and she says that chickens are easy. "Just have a dry place for them. They clean themselves in the dirt, you know."

I go out to the parking lot and the huge bank of ripe blackberries I spotted when we drove in. I pick while the Bearded One loads the straw. And then he comes over and helps me. The berries are huge and bursting with juice and we fill my gallon jug in fifteen minutes. I just happened to bring it along. Blackberry jamming this afternoon.

When we get home, the Bearded One hauls the straw bale up to the chicken house with the hand truck. I see Garfield curled in a ball in the lower goat pasture. He felt safe from Ditto over there, but after the eagle stories, I go out and scoop him up. "She's gone, dude," I say to him. "You don't know, man," he says. "That's what I thought last time. She's around here somewhere..." He was about half her size. This may take a few days.

He and Ruby follow me up to the chicken house which is wonderfully eagle-proofed.

Garfield checks out the straw and then rolls in the dirt for a nice bath. All the animals do it, chickens, cats, and Ruby especially, after I bathe her, she wants nothing more than to race outside and roll in the dirt. And her coat positively gleams! This strikes me as incredibly profound. What is dirt? What is dirty?

Garfield feels so good he races down the hill ahead of me. By the time I open the gate, I can see he's jumped up into the open window of his cat condo. He's perched above his very own little bed, the dust billowing off his golden fur in the sunshine. "MEOW!" he calls out. "She's gone!"

Chapter 29: Jamageddon

Outside the world of jam, it isn't that big a deal. Within Jamdom, it is utter devastation, a category 5 wipeout. I have had to throw out 60 plus jars of jam I made this summer -- all of the strawberry and strawberry rhubarb and half of the peach. The seals failed, and they've sat on the shelf long enough, some of them 8 weeks, so that they can't be trusted even though they are probably perfectly good. I am trying to keep this debacle in perspective.

I mean, really. At roughly 5 hours of picking, cleaning, peeling, chopping, mixing and measuring, cooking and water bath processing per batch, and 60 jars representing 12 batches, that's 60 hours of work. An hour a jar. I never really realized that before. Plus growing the strawberries and rhubarb took some time, too. Each batch takes 2 cups of sugar, lemon juice and pectin. Ka-ching, ka-ching. What are a couple weeks of work and a mountain of wasted jam in the Big Picture? The Goddess of Jam says to buck up, view it as an opportunity. Go back to canning school, she says.

It started 8 weeks ago on the noisy 4th of July weekend. The jam kept separating, the fruit floating to the top of the jars, the worst I'd ever seen it in the 3 years I've been jamming. The books said this can happen because the fruit is too watery, but it still happened for me even when I patted each little berry's head dry.

In the end, I tried the Bearded One's snow globe suggestion -- turning the jars over after they'd cooled for about an hour -- because I found the same advice on-line. Well, it does solve fruit float, BUT it also contaminates the still-hot seal with particles of jam and the seal will eventually fail, even if it seemed perfectly sealed at first. Check it a few days later. Lift the jar by the lid. Will it hold its own weight? Can you pop the lid off with your thumb? If so, it isn't sealed properly and the jam at the top will eventually discolor. This is panicky stuff to the Bearded One in particular after lawyering over unsafe food in an earlier life.

The only safe solution to fruit float I've discovered is to stir the jam a few minutes and let it cool down a bit before ladling it into the jars. It thickens a bit that way. You can also reprocess the entire batch, but that's no guarantee. Otherwise, just live with the float. Stir it up after you open it for use. And for goodness sake, DO NOT MOVE THE JARS FOR SEVERAL HOURS after they come out of the bath.

On to my next lesson. The God of Dehydrators is waiting. It turns out there are other worlds of failure and devastation this week, namely my $50 dehydrator burns out. I must face its cheapness and poor design, even though I have loved it for three summers now. The little electric motor/blower is in the bottom of the unit where it gets dripped upon. And it cannot be opened and cleaned.

I salvage the zucchini that was drying when the dehydrator bit the dust -- I dipped the slices in lemon juice first, so they should be fine in the fridge -- and then order a new $150 machine that has a better positioned motor, has 8 trays, AND comes with 8 mesh sheets which keep things like peaches and tomatoes from sticking to the trays.

Outdoors to the gardens now that the Kitchen Gods and Goddesses are finished with me. They hand me off to the God of the Harvest for more life lessons. Sure enough, with the jam ruination and dehydrator collapse darkening my mood, I'm a sitting duck. As I begin to enjoy the soft pop of the carrots when they release the earth, the Grim Reaper blows through to remind me that all must die to make way for the new. These are the End Times, goats and chickens will die, eagles will swoop down upon the land! I tell the Reaper to beat it, I'm just harvesting carrots, but his presence lingers.

Garfield is awake and comes over to cheer me up. He's his old self again, hunting all night and delivering the corpses of two rabbits, a rat and a mole just this morning. He inspects the buckets and straw that I'm using to pack the carrots for the root cellar.

I find the weirdest shaped carrot and set it aside to show the Bearded One. Then Garfield follows me up the hill with the full buckets. I can hear the neighbor children in their backyard, 7-year-old Hansel and 5-year-old Gretel. They are homeschooled and are on a recess, and seem to be having a magic show. Hansel has performed some trick and Gretel is cheering him on. "Let's really hear it!" she says to their 3-year-old brother, the audience, and they scream and clap in approval. The Grim Reaper vanishes.

"I have the Boy Power," Hansel yells. "You have the Girl Power."

"I have the Boy Power, too!" Gretel says. And I laugh out loud. The next generation's Goddess in Training.

Fall

Chapter 30: Build It and They Will Come

"She's real pretty," says our neighbor, standing in our driveway by her turquoise pickup full of rescued chickens in dog carriers. "She" is a black and white speckled wild banty hen, looking a lot like a pheasant, which our neighbor has just rescued from a defunct farm where the neighbors are complaining. I am ecstatic. This is pure magic -- the Bearded One finished our chicken coop and aviary just 17 hours earlier. "She's got 7 chicks, 3 days old. No pressure." We weren't planning on chicks yet. Winter isn't far off here. The Bearded One has questions. So do I, but to me they are already our chickens.

Our neighbor, our personal Mother Goose, is in her mid-40s. She has dyed bright red hair and is a welder. She and her husband raise chickens, turkeys, and ducks. They have become our friends and teachers. Is our setup adequate for babies? Do they require extra heat and special food? What will we do with the ones that turn into roosters? Don't basic dog-raising guidelines on avoiding the mating of siblings apply? What's the timing on that?

We walk up to the barn. Mother Goose inspects the fence line of the enclosed 30'x30' aviary. Five foot no-climb wire fencing plus filler fencing strips cemented a foot into the ground, plus chicken wire outside that, then just chicken wire all the way up to the roof.

"You'll know it's weasels that got them because of the Dracula Effect," says Mother Goose and lights a cigarette. "They're sucked dry. Two little holes in the neck." I picture a carcass that's been in my dehydrator for a day. Mummy dry.

"Do weasels climb?" asks the Bearded One. "Don't know," says Mother Goose. "Mainly they dig. The raccoons -- the raccoons will climb, but they're so big, they're like bears. They'll climb halfway up this and then blow it off and climb down." She looks up at the wall of chicken wire. "No eagle and raven problem in here!" she says, and then tells us that they have now installed poultry netting over their bird yards -- they lost all their layers to eagles this summer -- and recommends we do the same if we let the chickens out of the aviary and into the goat pastures. Hang it from tree to tree. The Bearded One is not enthusiastic. Covered pastures? A circus tent? Wouldn't tree branches fall into it?

I change the subject. "What do we feed the chicks?"

"All-purpose chick feed crumble is fine," she says. "I'll give you feeders and a watering system." She is making this so easy for us. "With the chick feeder, be careful to close it completely, though, or the chicks can get their little legs chopped off on the edges." It looks like a big industrial metal ice tray.

"Right," I say, and try not to cry out in grief at the very prospect.

She laughs. "When they get hurt, like get pecked, which they will, treat it just like a human. Put Neosporin on it."

"What do we do with the chicks that are roosters?" asks the Bearded One, who is against roosters crowing at all times of the night.

"You'll be able to tell the cockerels in about two months. They'll start getting aggressive with each other, and then they'll get combs. Give 'em to us. We'll either keep them or make a stew. They're small, so it'd probably take three!" Who knows, I think, by then we might have decided to keep one. No -- wait -- there's still the mating problem. We accept their invitation to attend their poultry harvesting at the end of October when they rent all the equipment -- killing cones, scalding pots, feather pluckers.

Mother Goose warns us that the eggs this banty will lay are small, but she'll get us some full-sized layers soon. "This is a Poultry Palace!" she says, and then tells us that we could comfortably and humanely raise 20 chickens in it. We plan to let them out into the goat pastures some of the time, once the chicks grow up, and once all that fencing has had the poultry wire treatment at the base to discourage the diggers -- coyotes, raccoons and weasels, just for starters.

"How can I say no?" says the Bearded One to Mother Goose and shakes her hand. "Thank you. Yes."

I hug them both. This beautiful hen is our primal chicken, our first, and so we name her Kimber after our son's kindergarten girlfriend.

After Mother Goose leaves, the Bearded One and I go up to the chickens with lawn chairs. We laugh at their cuteness and antics, and then, before our very eyes the impossible happens. The smallest chick squeezes through the fencing! I shriek and yell for the Bearded One go get it before Garfield does. And then another chick slips through after the first! I cluck and flap my wings. The Bearded One has to go through THREE gates to get to where the chicks are! Halfway there he stops and comes back. "I'll scare them away," he says. Just let them come back the same way they went through. And he's right.

Kimber is calm. Br..Br..br.brk.... she clucks to them. We decide Okay, We'll Let Kimber Handle It, and go to the barn. Five minutes later we return and the chicks are back inside with their mama. Pure chicken magic. Kimber knows what to do. We don't have to know everything.

Chapter 31: The Age of Shovelry

I'm standing at the kitchen sink peeling literally the 78th peach this week when the Bearded One approaches and touches my back. I lean into his hand and request a scratch. I'm on my last peach for the eighth and final tray of the new dehydrator, my hands are slimy, it's hot and my back itches. Ever chivalrous, he obliges. Oooooo, I say. To the left. Yes, yes. Down. I shiver. We now call this sex.

Earlier we had both been in the garden digging up potatoes. At this time of year especially, when there's so much physical work to do, whether it's digging potatoes or turning compost, we try to be sweet to each other, offer encouragement and praise, say thank you and please and make each other sandwiches. I help adjust the TV antennae to get the football channel. He vacuums the red rug. The shovel may be the centerpiece of the farmer's life, but it's the chivalry that makes it all work.

Shoveling potatoes is tricky because you don't want to stab them. Just loosen the soil, then I use my bare hands to feel around in the trench for them. The Bearded One wears gloves to just reach in and force them out. It's exciting and we shout and show our biggest and weirdest to each other, but it takes ages. My back not only itches, it aches.

"Could you rub my left lat, Sweetie?" I say. He kneads my tight, aching latissimus dorsi, which I hurt angling the buckets of potatoes into the root cellar. I'm using the recycled plastic buckets because last year's cardboard boxes disintegrated.

The compost didn't completely cook this year (too cold), so shoveling it has been a huge pain. You have to fork it because the straw and other garden debris is still interlaced. It doesn't smell, it just hasn't completely disintegrated. We've both been forking it out. "Up," I say to my masseuse. "More. More. Right there." I lean back hard into his hand.

The Bearded One has designed a new compost system for next year which will include the straw with chicken poop. We've spent many hours watching our new hen Kimber and the Seven Chicks, which have easily doubled in size in two weeks. They run and flap and actually get some hang time, as the Bearded One says. But the poop is starting to be noticeable. It will greatly enrich the compost, but there's another thing to shovel, load, haul, dump, turn, empty and spread.

I stretch to the side, then to the other side. I'm finally finished with the peach and am about to say my thanks and tell him how much I love him when he cries "Ouch!" His own sore back has spasmed. "Oh, Sweetie," I say, "thank you for the back rub!"

He shuffles away, crippled and incoherent. "The gift of the Magi," he mutters.

I laugh and wince. Shovelry is not dead, but it could kill you.

Chapter 32: Pick up Chicks

We watch the YouTube video "How to Pick Up a Chicken." The woman holds out her open palm full of cracked corn and the hens come over and gently peck at it. Kimber won't have any of this. She freaks out when I get within three feet of her, and the Seven Chicks hop on their little chick motorcycles and peel out, too.

Back to the video. The woman calmly picks up the hen, carefully holding the wings against its body, cuddles it next to her breast like a baby and then pets it. I am sick with jealousy. "That's a stunt chicken," says the Bearded One.

This weekend, we were at a neighborhood barbecue and a 70-year-old woman from Texas gently pooh-poohed all of our excuses -- Kimber came from the wild, she's a protective mother, she's a banty and quicker than average chickens. "Throw a towel over her and she'll stop in her tracks." We came home, the Bearded One tossed his shirt over her, and she shot like a cannon ball out the other direction screaming that she'd just been mugged.

Back to the video. Cracked corn probably isn't any better than the bowl of oatmeal and blueberries I bring them each morning which they love, and they only flock to that after I step back. The Bearded One managed to touch Kimber once and she pecked him. He says it didn't hurt. No blood, but we both agree that grabbing her seems rude. Plus, all week she has been losing her tail feathers -- molting -- which we read is normal in the fall, but she pulls them out like baby teeth, and it looks stressful.

Between the house and the poultry palace, which is on the highest ground on the property for drainage purposes, are the gardens -- and each morning as I go to open the chicken coop I pass through the pumpkin patch.

The neighbor children, Hansel and Gretel, picked out their pumpkins this week when they were over meeting the chickens. They, too, wanted desperately to pick up a chick, but we said no, not yet. As if it was even possible.

They are 3 weeks old now, fuzzy with new feathers, and all have names. The two blondes are Marilyn and Dusty; the five black ones are Blackie, Spot, Steve, Steve, and Tux. Different roosters could have fathered them. We believe that Tux was sired by a penguin.

The host of the block barbecue is going hunting this week and we rigged for him to take some zucchini to his cabin to fry as there will be six men congregating. I'm going to throw in some cucumbers and cabbage, too, to go with all their meat. "Give 'em kale!" my devilish inner voice says. I have tons and am tired of it. We've had a lot of stir fry this summer. But it would wilt by the time they used it. IF they used it. Not everyone is a fan.

Kale chips were a disappointment, I hate to say. I sprayed them lightly with olive oil and put them in the dehydrator as instructed; they were as light as tissue paper. Or snowflakes. To me, it was too much work for too little return. As the Bearded One said, "I'm agin 'em." He called them a retelling of The Emperor Has No Clothes. There was nothing there. A man could starve. No kale chips for the hunters.

And no kohlrabi, either. This is the first year I've grown it -- shoot, I thought kohlrabi was a Middle Eastern country until recently -- and I haven't harvested it, yet. It's a mild, sweet bulb that grows above ground. It looks like a human heart. They'll be going to the root cellar and maybe to the chickens.

The Bearded One and I will pick the chickens up eventually. Surely. Even though now, as Kimber screams at the neighbor's cat, we turn away from the video and race down the stairs, through the pumpkins and up to the poultry palace.

We spot her sounding the alarm on top of the feed trash can.

Little Star Wars troopers on flying motorcycles circle the aviary. Chick missiles swoop from the top of the coop, and Marilyn is a hard-hit line drive, foul of course, from the fence post. "Oh, yes, let's go pet a chick," says you-know-who. We duck and cover.

Chapter 33: Cave Woman

It's dusk -- 6:30 this week -- I'm walking Ruby to the end of our road, and we see the young coyote at the same time. It's alone, small, grayish brown with big pointy ears and a beautiful long bushy tail. We stop. Ruby bristles. I'm breathless as it trots a few more steps toward us, 50 yards away. They rarely get this close. It sees us, pauses to consider, and turns into the woods.

The next day on our walk, the Bearded One and I meet the neighbor who lives where I saw the coyote. She has alpacas and a night-time "Critter Cam" which she tells us has recorded lots of coyote pups recently -- an ultrasound in the dark belly of the forest. The pups were born last spring, so they are 6 months old now and in training to hunt for their own food and make their own dens. "I heard about your bear sighting," the Bearded One says, referring to a conversation at the men's table last weekend at the neighborhood barbecue. He wants a Critter Cam now. "Yep," says our neighbor, "it's that time of year."

We get back home and are both seized with winter preparations. The Bearded One insulates the pipes on the water faucets up at the barn and the poultry palace. The Seven Chicks, who are now 4 weeks old and gigantic, fluff their feathers out on cold rainy days as they peck away at any unprotected styrofoam insulation. One book said that they wouldn't peck at it, but the neighbor who gave us the chickens, aka Mother Goose, rolled her eyes and assured us they'd peck it to smithereens. She was right. The Bearded One covers up all the low-lying insulation with pieces of old siding.

Kimber, the den mother, puts the chicks to bed in the nest boxes now. Each night she chooses a different one, they all fly up to the perch or walk up the plank, and then all eight of them cram in. I wonder how long they'll be able to fit into just one.

To help keep the flock warm, we've decided to use a red heat bulb. The ceramic ones, according to the guy at Ace Hardware, could catch fire because of the coils. The red light won't, he said, throw off the chicken's day-night cycle. We will check with Mother Goose on that, but she's already told us they use a red-lense heat bulb.

The chicks, specifically Dusty and Tux, have begun to butt chests and flap wildly at each other. Pretty obvious they are roosters.

Chicken people call young roosters cockerels, and young hens pullets, so I suppose I should, too, now that I'm a chicken-person-in-training. I still haven't picked one up -- any gesture toward them makes them run like I'm coming at them with a steak knife -- but I have gotten them to come around my feet as I give them my homemade bread and, most especially, corn.

A rain storm this weekend knocked the corn over, so we decide it must be harvest time in the companion-planted garden (corn, pole beans and pumpkins), at least for the intertwined corn and beans.

We pick a heaping five-gallon bucket of corn and a pile of pole beans, which I've put in the barn to dry. I'll add the bush beans to them in the next week or so -- the leaves are starting to turn yellow -- and then let them all dry for a few weeks before I shell them. Even then, I'll have to put them in the dehydrator for a few hours, to completely dry them in this wet climate. I'm going to try drying some of the corn, too.

But first, I'm painting our bedroom and bathroom, fortifying my own winter place with color. "It'll look like a cave, woman," the Bearded One says when I show him the dark brown paint color I chose for our bathroom. He is skeptical.

I look out the window. Change is in the air. It's the Equinox and the New Moon, too. Dark and cold are coming and are here. I hear the coyotes howling. I see the distinctive little handprints of raccoons in the dew on the deck in the morning after their thumping around in the cat condo last night.

Yes, Townsend Harbor Brown, that's what I want. White paint is so overrated, so 1980s. Forget all this "light and bright" real estate talk. Give me a warm, dark brown place. "It's not just a bathroom," I say, making my sales pitch to the Bearded One, "it's a cave."

Chapter 34: The Last Straw

As the mother of three, I have dealt with my share of poop. The Bearded One's nose is less sensitive although his poop credentials are just as impressive from caring for 150 Iditarod sled dogs years ago in the wilds of Alaska. He says the chicken coop smell isn't that bad, yet. But for me, she of the delicate olfactory, the fall rains heightening all the farm smells are the last straw. Something must be done.

We have just 8 chickens -- Kimber the banty hen and her Seven Chicks -- and they've been here for five weeks. They live in an 8x8 foot coop inside a large 30x30 foot covered chicken aviary. We'll let them out into the pasture when the chicks are 2 months old. In the meantime, the poultry palace is their environment and they are thriving, even as it gets stinkier.

Kimber is a good mom, and the chicks are growing as fast as the potholes on the road, gorging on sweet, homegrown corn. They flock to it and us, but we still haven't picked one up. Kimber is very leery and apparently psychic; she calls the chicks to her when I even think about picking one up.

I've been processing our corn harvest of 35 cobs this week. Last year I froze the cobs, but neither of us was crazy about the mushy texture of them defrosted. And they took up valuable freezer space.

So this year I'm drying the kernels and grinding it into cornmeal, which smells so deeply and wonderfully corny I wonder what they do to the store-bought cornmeal to make it so cardboardy.

Through the open kitchen window, as I process the corn, I can smell the sawdust from the two hemlock trees we had cut down this week.

Hemlock's not as pungent as cedar, but the moisture in the air swells the wood smell to the point that I want to snort it.

The Bearded One comes in from cutting up the branches and I snuffle his shirt and hair. He spots the pile of freshly cut basil in the fridge and is happy to hear I'm making pesto later. One of the richest parts of our lives is the food we get to eat.

What I like about farm people, including our neighbor Momma Goose who gave us the chickens, is that no one acts like they know it all. Instead they smile and say I do this, I used to do that, try this or, like at the farm store this week, "I read in Mother Earth magazine over there (points to book stand) to use peat moss. Straw doesn't absorb. It's great for warmth in the nests, but you need something absorbent on the ground. Use wood shavings or pellets in the bottom of the nests."

Peat moss is the Deep Litter Method of chicken poop management in an earthen floor coop. You spread a very thick layer of "browns" like in a compost pile -- pine shavings or peat moss -- and then the high-nitrogen chicken poop is the "green." The chickens do the aeration with their scratching, and theoretically, there is way less smell. You clean the coop out once or twice a year, end up with compost, and the lucky chickens get to scratch through the beneficial microbes. It's good for them.

We come home and I open the poultry palace gate and push the wheelbarrow into the chamber. Kimber cackles and eyeballs me. I rake the smelly old straw into piles. "It doesn't absorb worth a hoot," I explain to her. This is the last straw we'll need around here except for the nests, where it will get changed frequently.

She isn't interested. She herds the chicks to the waterer, which is gone because we're cleaning it. Instead she finds the Bearded One shoveling gravel into a low plateau to help keep the water area cleaner. "Brr -kk!" She swoops onto the straw piled in the wheelbarrow and the chicks follow. "Brr-k! Where in the hell are we supposed to be?" she complains to me.

I rake the old straw from the corner of the coop and the chicks all flutter over to peck at a teeny little bit of exposed styrofoam, which they lovelovelove. Kimber calls them back -- Brrrr--kkk! -- and they all respond, except Marilyn, whose head is deep in the hole. I don't even think, bend over and with both hands pick her up. She freezes, lets me nestle her light little body against my palms. I call for the Bearded One. "I'm holding Marilyn!" But he has gone back down the tractor trail and can't hear me.

"Brrrr --KK!" Kimber rushes in, ruffled and flapping. "Enough excitement for one day!" she caws. "This is the last straw! Put her down!"

I open my hands to let Marilyn fly. I'm sure she hesitates leaving my own maternal embrace, just for a moment. Pretty sweet.

Chapter 35: Cheep Meat

It's mid-October and a full moon and Momma Goose is on the front deck calling, "Is anybody home?" She has come bearing a gift. Six-and-a-half weeks ago she gave us Kimber and the Seven Chicks, newly hatched. Today it is a welding sculpture she's made, a functional tool rack made from horseshoes shaped into a trophy head configuration she calls Bruce the Moose. I love it and laugh. She can do names, Welcome signs, anything we want. The Bearded One and I thank her profusely and both envision it on the barn wall.

"It'll be just me and the boys on the 22nd," Momma Goose says, reminding us of the turkey harvesting and processing she's invited us to. Her husband has to work. In just over a week, I think, I will be killing a turkey, dressing it out, then bringing it home to eat. I can do this. I want to do this. Don't I? This is all about upping our learning curve so we can do it with our own chickens. Eventually.

"It's tricky dangerous to give those chicks names," she advises me when I tell her that one of the Steves tried to crow this week. The Bearded One is betting that almost all the chicks are cockerels, and will thus be culled (which sounds a lot like killed) when they reach full growth, which is in the next month or so. "We'll process them for you, if it's too hard."

Hell's bells, we eat chicken; I believe in slow, local, sustainable food production as opposed to factory farms and all the hidden costs of cheap meat. But the truth is I am still buying factory chicken. Six at a time. This is starting to feel a bit lazy on my part, I realize. Momma Goose doesn't judge me. I like that a lot.

She bids us adieu, and I get a big knife and harvest the biggest zucchini we have, the one we let grow all summer just to see how big it would get. It's about a foot long and 6 inches in diameter, not really all that big this year. I have to saw through the stem. Zucchini skin gets thick and tough with age. I cut it open, admire the still-creamy insides. Chickens, I think, are not zucchini. I feel the weight of the knife in my hand.

On my way to the chickens, I pass by the pumpkin patch. Nine big speckly pumpkins are clearly visible now, orange seeping through the dark green. Dying leaves wither on the disintegrating stems. Twenty pound pumpkins, maybe 25.

I remember Linus in the "Peanuts" comic strip and his fervent belief that every year on Halloween night, when all the kids are trick-or-treating, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the most "sincere" pumpkin patch and flies around the world giving toys to the most sincere children.

The farmlet, I decide, including this pumpkin patch, will not be sufficiently sincere until I wean myself from cheap chicken. Okay, Great Pumpkin, I say, sincerely. I can do that.

I hear Her reply in my mind --" If you can catch one".

Chapter 36: Yin Yang Time

We meet our neighbor on the road, walking alone, his beloved 16-year-old dog Buster having died last month. "It's Buster!" I say to our dog Ruby. To Ruby, everything from that household will always be Buster and she greets Mr. Buster warmly.

"Have you turned your heat on?" he asks us, rubbing his cold hands together. "Only a couple of fires," says the Bearded One.

"Buster's ashes are still on our woodstove," says Mr. Buster, and I picture a beautiful urn, flowers, a well-chewed Kong ball, and a profile shot of a distinguished Staffordshire Terrier. "We made an altar like that for Jake," I say. Ruby's litter mate died 2 years ago, and Mr. Buster says he can't believe it's been that long. We agree, bid him a good day and finish our mile-and-a-half morning walk.

I'm harvesting the dry shelling beans today -- the red-speckled Bingos and Etnas and my favorite, the black and white Yin Yangs, the Taoist symbol of balance.

I pick out 20 of each kind of the most perfect beans as seed beans for next year, put them on a plate with a candle, and add it to the harvest altar I just decided to make after the morning walk. Farming -- even small-scale recreational farming -- is about hatching and hatchets, growing and killing, sowing and reaping, and I'm feeling the reality of the killing part with our fast-approaching date over at Momma Goose's.

And then the phone rings and it's Momma Goose Herself. The day is clear and perfect, this weekend it's supposed to be raining, the equipment is available and she and "Jonah," her oldest son, are going to process some turkeys this afternoon and tomorrow. Would we like to come this afternoon? Yes, we'll be there. But we won't harvest our turkey today. I offer to bring her an apple cake for after the poultry processing and Momma Goose accepts.

When we arrive, Momma Goose has a little processing camp set up at the back of the property and a huge stump fire going that will also be used to burn the turkey remains. Everything is clean and sanitized, salt and ice and water at the ready, sharp knives, a radio playing softly. This is nothing like a chicken factory. Momma Goose and I walk down to the turkeys.

They are 4-month-old broad-breasted whites that she has raised from chicks for meat. They're healthy, free-range turkeys, already weighing around 40 pounds. There are 50 birds and it's costing her $14/day in feed, so she's reducing the flock some. At $50/each, she still just breaks even. She's giving us ours, though. We're having 14 people here for Thanksgiving largely because of this and the rest of the day's menu, consisting wholly of produce we've grown here, right down to the cornmeal in the cornbread.

Jonah and another friend put two toms into the cage. It all weighs about 80 pounds, they guess, and they carry it back to the camp. They turn the turkeys upside down into the cones where the heads stick out. The birds look alert, but Jonah does it so calmly, they don't flap much. No squawking at all.

Then he takes a very sharp knife, slits the bird's jugular vein and the turkey begins to bleed. It dies very quickly. The eyes dim and shut in maybe 10-12 seconds. Jonah doesn't cut clear through the neck because that would open the windpipe, and when the bird is then scalded in the scalding pot, hot water would get into inner cavities and cause trouble. It's a skilled, careful cut.

I watch as the blood pours out and the bird kicks a bit. Then it is clearly dead and Jonah removes it from the cone and dunks it in the scalding pot for 15-20 seconds. 140 degrees. I hold the feet for Jonah when he is called away for a moment. After it's scalded, the feathers come out much easier. The next move takes a lot of muscle. Jonah lifts the heavy wet bird into a spinning tub with rubber spikes and the feathers fly off. Then he lays it on the butchering table and I help pluck the remaining feathers. It takes a while.

I feel a bit woozy with the smell of the blood, fresh poultry meat, and turkey poop. I watch him expertly cut up the bird, remove the gizzard which has a bunch of white rocks in it, and carefully separate out the liver, heart and kidneys. Nothing is wasted. The cavity is quickly and thoroughly rinsed out with a hose.

"Do you ever think of these birds as pets?" I ask Jonah.

"No way!" he says. "I could never do this if it was a pet." The family ducks, Bob and Lucy, are pets and the only ones with names. I think of Kimber and the Seven Chicks, all with names, waiting at home for us. Their time will come. Lordy.

Chapter 37: Raccoon Saloon

The immense 8-week-old chicks still sleep with Kimber, wings shuffled like cards, the red heat bulb turning the cold coop into a chicken nightclub.

It's not really cold enough yet for the chicks or their water to freeze, but it's close and I've read that the light will help get Kimber laying eggs again when she weans these chicks. Which she seems just about ready to do. Shoot, I would.

Raccoons like the red light, too. Or maybe it's the dog's water that lures them in, mysteriously disappearing overnight, leaving a ton of dirt in the bottom of the bowl.

Farmers learn to read the signs, and we guess right, because every night this week, even after we take the water bowls inside, three big raccoons hang out on the decks for about 45 minutes. We are now on their routine midnight loop. They are undeterred by any lingering scent of Ruby's territorial urine, which is supposed to deter them, by flashlights or taps on the window. Garfield hisses at them from the cat condo. They make a series of return visits during the night. A mom and two big juveniles. It's wrestle-mania, a raccoon rodeo.

When they corner Garfield in the cat condo early one night, before we have locked the screen, our hearts harden a bit -- they are just expressing their Raccoonness after all -- but we decide to buy a trap. Old-timers around here always laugh at "missing cat" posters. They explain -- "There's no such thing as a missing cat, only an ex-cat. People think the coyotes get 'em, but it's mainly the raccoons." We bait the trap with cat food, put it on the deck, and disguise it with cedar branches. The plan is to release them up the road in a big chunk of forest.

The cold is bringing out the wild critters, and our job is to nurture and protect the domesticated ones, at least with regard to the chickens, until we eat them. The more I am around the chickens, I have to say, the more comfortable I am with harvesting the cockerels after the New Year. Tux and Dusty, but particularly Tux, have been pecking viciously on Steve all week. They grab onto the side of his neck and hang on for dear life as he runs in panic-stricken circles trying to escape the attacks.

One evening when the Bearded One was closing up the coop, Steve just fell out of the nest. He stood up, looked around and then marched back up the plank. But a few days later, after witnessing the daytime pecking Steve was enduring, we knew the truth. He was pushed.

"Cut that out!" I shout. This business of establishing the peck order is disturbing to me. It's so violent. I run after them with our son's old toy hockey stick and try to get Tux to quit harassing and hanging onto poor Steve's neck. I remind myself that this is their way. That this is not cannibalism, which I've read happens when chickens are raised in tiny cages. This is Chickenness, oblivious to human behavioral constructs like saloons and spas and courts of law. I don't care -- I will whack Tux a good one next time he chomps down on Steve.

We fill Ruby's water bowl for the day, and as we head up to the chickens before our walk, the Bearded One spots bear tracks on our driveway.

Maybe they're from the same bear recorded on our neighbor's critter cam, although our tracks appear to be a mama and baby. There's more than one bear in these woods.

The chickens flock to us. We've quit trying to grab them, and now they'll eat cracked corn straight out of my hand. It's very rewarding. I give them a piece of toast and some oatmeal leftover from breakfast, a slug-infested cabbage plant, and yet another handful of cracked corn.

The Bearded One sets up their new bathtub with wood ashes and  Diatomaceous Earth to help prevent lice and other parasites. They have a good chicken life, and will have a good (quick and unexpected) chicken death. If Steve can make it that far, anyway.

Chapter 38: Little Ones

It's Halloween Eve and the three neighbor children and their beautiful early-30s mom have come over to claim their pumpkins from our patch. We are isolated enough out here that this seems like a magical thing. Little Ones.

Hansel is 7 and tells us he's going to be Waldo. He's letting his hair grow out for the shaggy look. Gretel, age 5, will be a ladybug, but, guess what? She is going to cheerleading camp next week! Yay!! And the Littlest, the 3-year-old, was going to be a cowboy, but he is having second thoughts. He's not quite convinced.

The pumpkins can wait, though, because first they must inspect the hole in the deck where the raccoon trap sat. Yes, we say, we actually caught a raccoon, and it chewed that very hole in the deck.

The Bearded One tells them the story: "I heard the mama raccoon and her two little ones on the deck at 4 am when one of the two youngsters got trapped. His brother sat on top of the cage for hours, trying to chew it apart. When I told Christi this the next morning, she burst into tears and pleaded to let the raccoon go right here on the deck so as not to break up the family."

I pick up the story. "Then, as the raccoon shot out of the trap down the deck stairs, I tried to sound extra mean and shouted, 'Let this be a lesson to you!' I sure hope he got the message."

The children listen politely. Will we ever get to go pick pumpkins?

And then, up the hill at the chicken coop, Kimber squawks one of her super-duper squawks. I am concerned because we have five new 2-month old chicks, born the same day as Kimber's Seven Chicks, and they are all establishing a new Chicken Constitution and pecking order. It's brutal, and Kimber is going after the necks of the large golden Ameraucana chicks, Jane and Cheetah, like the elder mama hen she is. Momma Goose had warned us she might get really testy in defense of her own little ones.

Steve, the chick so aggressively pecked at by his own brothers and sisters, has bounced back and is, in fact, the only chick pecking the new little ones. He seems quite satisfied in his new role. He's almost as big as Kimber now, and starting to puff up and crow some tiny little "Cock-a-doodle-doos". We've decided to let him and the other roosters (Tux for sure) go to the chicken auction after the New Year. Momma Goose surprised us by saying that roosters are quite popular at the auction. They'll have outgrown their time here.

Gretel twirls into a cheer routine and Hansel pets Ruby, our almost 11-year-old golden retriever. The Littlest looks up at me. "You know," I say, "I have a Batman costume you might like." His eyebrows shoot up and his eyes shine. Batman! They all troop inside and follow me upstairs to where I show them a picture of our son on his third Halloween dressed as Batman.

Then, like magic, I pull out the 17-year-old homemade costume from a dresser drawer. "Our son said the first ears I made looked like mouse ears," I explain, "so I made them more pointy. See? Just like the real Batman."

The Littlest One stands very still and nods yes, so I slip the head-piece and bat ears over his head. It fits like Cinderella's slipper. His mother is stunned. "His head is huge," she says.

"So was our son's," I say.

"Where is he?" Batman asks. I realize he sees the picture as one taken just recently, and obviously represents a new playmate.

"He grew up," I say. "He's 20 years old now and away at college." He's not so little anymore.

I attach the cape around his shoulders and cinch the belt around his poking-out tummy. The resemblance is stunning. "Do you want to wear this costume?" I ask.

He nods yes. And then its pumpkin choosing time, at last!

He whips the head-piece off and back into the bag, scrambles down the stairs with Hansel and Gretel, and races out to the big wide world and the pumpkin patch. He heads straight for a huge pumpkin specimen -- not at all interested in one of the little ones.

Chapter 39: The Dark Arts

The Bearded One belts out Tom Jones's "She's a Lady" to scare away critters as he trudges downhill from the unheatable barn in the dark. "It's only six o'clock and it feels like ten," he says. He prefers to be outside, but it's pitch dark at five now, and 28 or 29 degrees at night.

Indoor projects take on a new premium in the coming cold and dark hours of life in a valley. The Bearded One will pick up the guitar again. By the 20th or 30th rendition of his lonesome cowpoke on the trail song "How I Miss You Baby," I will once again outlaw it outright and demand that he write some new songs.

I will make a science of keeping the fire going in the stove with the luxurious kindling packets he dried and tied together back during the ten days or so of actual hot dry weather we had this summer. I will consider learning to knit, as I consider every fall.

Many wintertime projects are inspired by the farm life and the animals. Last year I wrote a novella about a bear. We have bear tracks all over the place these days. Another winter I wrote an essay about my Grandpa Cy, a Montana butcher born in 1898, who was also an artist who drew coyotes and wolves and cats for us. The essay is about another one of his creations, fashioned on those long Montana winter nights with his brother who was also a butcher -- walking canes made out of bull penises. Yep. You read that right. It turns out making these canes is an "old tradition" -- Grandpa Cy didn't make it up. Which was a relief to learn. You can get one on the internet.

The dog and cat are searching for their indoor selves, too. Ruby is snack-centric, inquiring casually for treats every twenty minutes for five hours every evening -- do I look like a vending machine to you? Garfield's fur is growing thick and he is getting into trouble. He goes wild out of the clear blue and starts attacking the couch. He recently decided to start climbing the fragile, plastic-covered hoop house. He walks it leisurely as we hiss and honk to try and discourage him from doing it any more.

The chickens' lives have changed, too. The five new chickens, all 2-month-old hens, were born on the same day as our first seven chicks. We got them from a breeder for $10/each -- two Americaunas (Jane and Cheetah), a Silver Wyandotte (Danielle), a Golden Wyandotte (Anna), and a Rhode Island Red (Leah). The last three names finish off our son's list of girlfriends. They're all good laying breeds and full-sized birds, not bantams. The Ameraucanas are as big as Kimber, and she's got her hands full all of a sudden with a dozen juveniles under foot. She goes to bed really early now.

Our son made a piece of turkey breastbone art back in elementary school. We put it on the fall harvest altar with next year's bean seeds and a candle, which I light just as the Bearded One gets out his 12-string.

He has a beautiful, deep baritone voice. "How I miss you baby, when we head out on the trail, oh how I miss you baby...and the cold dark nights and the red ant bites and the barroom fights are hell."

His lyrics bring to mind all the Harry Potter books and movies full of spells and charms and magic words designed to ward off the bad stuff and bring on the good -- maybe I'll let him sing it a few extra times this year.

Chapter 40: Chickens In The Trees

I'm in the kitchen making pumpkin pulp and explaining to my older daughter about clipping a chicken's flight feathers on one wing to keep them from flying the coop.

"They're bantams, so they'd have no problem with a six-foot fence and heading straight for South America. They'd probably only make it to the cedars, though, before a raccoon or owl got them." Our daughter gasps and drops the Pumpkin Cheesecake recipe on the counter.

"You mean the Sesame Street song 'There are Chickens in the Trees' is TRUE?"

"Yes," I say, and her shock resonates in me. How is it possible, that in almost 55 years of life I missed the fact that chickens can not only fly, but will also roost in trees if allowed? We are such complete neophytes at all this farmlet stuff.

I remind her that our banty mother hen Kimber is wild, that she's from a feral flock over in Puyallup.

Then I tell how Kimber's siblings immediately flew the coop across the road at Momma Goose's and have lived successfully in her cedar trees, until two of them recently returned to the coop. "Momma Goose says it's not such a bad deal," I say. "Free room and feed. She also says that Kimber will teach her seven babies to fly away, too, if given the chance."

Our daughter works quietly, patting the ginger snap crust into the pan. I know she's taking all of our food source talk to heart. She's even reading The Omnivore's Dilemma. Still, maybe I'm babbling. Maybe there are too many chickens to keep track of. I offer to draw a genealogical chicken family tree.

"Mom, it's okay," she says. "Really." I conclude she means that this is all very interesting to her, and I should continue the flow of chicken information.

Clipping the first 10 long feathers on one wing is like clipping its fingernails, I explain. It doesn't hurt, the feathers grow back the next year, and it lets us let them out of the pen since they can't fly away. We're running out of sluggy, small cabbages and greens to supplement their feed; they need to be able to peck around the pastures during the day.

The refrigerator behind us makes sounds like Kimber -- Br-k, br-k br-k -- and I imagine the chicks all rushing to it immediately. I get out the eggs for the pumpkin cheesecake, a box with a fancy full-color label that we bought at the grocery store for a whopping $3.69/dozen because the label said Cage-Free. When we got home, the Bearded One examined the box more closely.

"They came from Denver," he said. We couldn't decide which was worse, buying local-ish factory farm eggs or supposed cage-free ones shipped 1,500 miles. Kimber and the rest won't be laying until well after the New Year when the chicks are weaned, and the daylight lasts longer. The Bearded One laughs at the notion we get longer days come January. "More like July," he says.

A week passes and this eldest daughter is now in Chicago on her first business trip, a surreal notion in itself. She calls and I tell her it's freezing here, inside and out. "We bought a 14 cubic foot chest freezer," I say, "and the first thing in it was our 30 POUND turkey!"

The freezer cost $400 and is manual defrost, I say, which is a good thing because it uses less electricity than auto-defrost plus the frost build-up actually helps keep the food cold longer in power outages.

The turkey is the biggest turkey of our neighbor's flock, a gargantuan Franken-turkey harvested by Momma Goose, Jonah and the Bearded One on November 11.

I tell her we're going to buy 25 chicks at a time -- birds specifically bred to be "meat birds," raise them, harvest them and freeze them right here. Our daughter is impressed and says she wants to buy chicken from us.

Then she's maxed out on chickens and wants to talk about love. She tells me she really really really likes a guy, but it's not perfect. He's moving soon. His job keeps him away for months at a time.

My long-distance parenting relies heavily on classic movie scenes, so I quote my favorite love movie, Moonstruck. "Love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die."

"Thanks, Mom," she says.

"You're welcome," I say. "You just get him here for Thanksgiving. We'll clip his wings."

Chapter 41: Early Bird

I slip out of bed in the dark. It's 6:30 AM and I'm ready to go. I tip-toe past the second bedroom where, this week at least, one of our exhausted kids sleeps. I switch on the stairway light and descend, breathing in Ruby's sometimes-acrid night scent which floats up through the wood slats from her stairwell cubby. Ruby is not a morning dog. She looks askance at me as I pass by, not budging.

What is the one thing you must have on a farm? An early bird, a morning person to get up and start the coffee and the fire in the wood stove, let the cat out of the hut, fetch the newspaper and most important, open the chicken coop. On our farmlet, that's me.

I'm not an Extreme morning person. That would be the Bearded One's farmer parents and his rancher brother, folk who are excited about a full breakfast with meat at the crack of dawn. The Bearded One is not this. He is, in fact, an Extreme night person, a night owl as opposed to a morning lark. The chicken is on the lark's schedule.

We've switched the all-night heat bulb in the chicken coop from the red-lensed one to a ceramic heat bulb, which uses less watts and doesn't disrupt the light/dark sleep cycle. Kimber was going to bed at 2 in the afternoon for a few days, and all the chicks seemed edgy. The ceramic bulb is a great find.

Chickens need 14 hours of light to lay eggs, so farmers often supplement these short winter days with white lights on a timer. We'll probably be there in a couple of months, but for now all the chicks are just 12 weeks old and Kimber hasn't even weaned her brood yet. With no adult rooster around, it's not exactly clear that she's going to.

The Five, as we call the full-sized breeds we got most recently, sleep on the top roost. When they go to bed at night, they jostle for position. The prime spot is the center, and Leah, the little Rhode Island Red, will crawl right over the top of any of the others to claim it every night. She is most often flanked by the two Wyandottes, Danielle and Anna. Jane and Cheetah, the Ameraucanas who are as big as Kimber now, anchor the ends. Although sometimes Jane makes it into an inner spot, Cheetah never does. She is the biggest chicken we have, but she lacks personal power.

Kimber and the Seven Chicks, including the only two obvious roosters, Steve and Tux, all cram into one or sometimes now two nest boxes, and it's lights out.

Now, a mere fourteen hours later, here I am, walking up the hill in my coat and boots. It's darkish but getting light fast. I can hear Garfield back at the house, meowing loudly to be let in so he can wake everyone else up. It's not quite sunrise, but a few chickens peep from inside the coop when I open the poultry palace gate.

I open the big doors and the chickens all fly out of bed, like the solid morning creatures they are. I check their food and water and throw them handfuls of corn and chunks of cabbage plant.

Then I will head back to the house, and the day's cooking. Bread, chili, and a couple of pies for the freezer. The 30-pound tom turkey has been defrosting in the refrigerator since Saturday. Momma Goose is teaching me her cooking method. There could be 13 guests! So much to do.

Defrost the bird in the fridge for several days, then the day before cooking, unwrap it and soak it in an ice chest with a cool salt/sugar brine -- 1 cup each of salt and sugar per 5 gallons of water -- for about a day. Cook it covered with foil overnight at 250, then uncover it and turn the oven up to brown it off in the morning. "The brining keeps away the bacteria, enhances the natural flavor, and keeps the bird really moist," Momma Goose wrote me in an email, sent at 6 AM.

I close the gate and breathe deeply. Good morning, world! I am a fulfilled and happy and grateful woman with a home and a beloved family, who are all coming here in a matter of days. Hours, actually. What fabulous luck, I tell myself. I have everything planned.

I turn the petcock on the garden hose and spray the bottoms of my boots to guard against any hint of chicken poop. Then I call for Garfield, who has usually bounded across my path by now. He doesn't respond. I tromp up the deck steps to the cat condo, and the specter of Garfield with his own feast. A meaty breakfast chipmunk just before dawn, brought right to our door as a gift for the morning person.

Chapter 42: The Tour

There are 5 cars parked in the driveway. Eleven people, ages 11-84, follow the Bearded One under the entry arches he made from huge cedar branches and into the backyard gardens -- past the hoop house and over toward the berry trellises and onto the Nature Trail.

"Watch your footing up in there," he says. He is in charge of the Thanksgiving Tour since I still have to make the gravy, but I pop in and out when I can. It's interesting to see what he considers amazing and noteworthy on the farmlet.

First up, the Civil War Stumps in the Circle Garden. We had two big trees taken down to get some sunlight, and then we built the barn from the milled wood. We've counted the growth rings and they are at least 150 years old. Second growth.

Next interesting thing? The back stairs. Our house is a pole house, a true wonder constructed on a 16-pole foundation built within several huge cedars. The four-foot diameter tree on the southwest corner has impacted the back stairs over time -- kind of a funhouse situation -- and we really should rebuild them next summer. I'm a little shocked this made The Tour.

"What's that?" the 11-year-old asks. She points to the little building beside the back stairs. "The Hut," answers the Bearded One. It's a tiny 100-square-foot studio with a Murphy bed that Garfield currently sleeps in. It's been a study, a greenhouse for a couple of springtimes, and a place our daughters could actually sleep overnight with the dogs.

The young 'tween girl and her 13-year-old sister spot the painting hanging inside the hut. "I was the model for the lady's hair in that painting," I say, and the young girls are speechless. Everyone seems to be speechless when they see this painting. It is entitled "Looking Within" and depicts a woman pulling open her torso to reveal the universe. Our daughters call it The Vagina Painting, but we didn't say that out loud on The Tour, of course.

I have to duck back into the house now as the group heads to the Nature Trail. Before long, they'll be photographing the 8-foot-diameter Cedar Circle the Bearded One made from cedar branches. "It's just a big Christmas wreath," he'll say. But it's exquisite.

I'd certainly include it on any farmlet tour I gave. When our little neighbor girl first saw the Cedar Circle, she said "It's bigger than God!" Her brother smacked his own head -- in humiliation, not out of any sense of sanctity. Just basic intelligence. God is the absolute biggest, everyone knows that.

I make the gravy, but keep checking out the window at the movement up the hill. They've made it to the chickens and I can hear laughing and shrieking. This makes me so happy. It's okay that I'm not there, witnessing the shenanigans. The sound of family and friends having fun here on the farmlet soothes my soul.

I finish the gravy and do a dozen more little things, at least, before all is ready.

When I get up to the barn, things have quieted down. The Bearded One has told all of his stories. "We heard about the Civil War stumps already," my sister says politely. So I pick up the thread and show off all the shelves and stalls he's made. "Big boy shelves," our oldest daughter says.

"Sometimes animals need to be kept separate," I explain as I run my hand over the stall gate. "This area is for the mamas and babies, sick goats, or the just plain ornery ones."

My sister's best friend, the mother of the 'tween girls, wants to spin and weave wool. She loves everything about the farmlet, she says, and she wants me to show her the stuff that didn't make the Bearded One's tour -- the plants and the root cellars.

Back at the house, the tour is almost complete. Everyone files in and I tell the story of the turkey, how we picked it out across the road at Momma Goose's, that it was the biggest tom turkey they raised, 4 months old and a whopping 30 pounds after processing, that we helped harvest and pluck it, then we brined it for a day, and roasted it for 13 hours at 250 degrees.

Finally I am finished talking. The room is silent in thanksgiving. The Bearded One breathes deeply and sweeps his hand toward the awaiting feast. "Ladies and Gentlemen," he says, his voice full of wonder, "The Biggest Turkey on the road! Step right up!"

Winter

Chapter 43: Oh, Deer!

"There is a deer coming down the trail from the barn," the Bearded One says from the living room window. "Very slowly." He whispers. "It's a doe." I can hardly believe what he's said. We've lived here 5 years and have seen exactly one deer on the property, and that was years ago, a buck. Our dog Ruby and the garden fencing keep them out. But they are everywhere in the area. We see them on our walks all the time -- just not here. Why is this one here now?

"It's stopped at the root cellar," the Bearded One says. I can hear the excitement in his voice. I race out of the kitchen where we have been making fruitcake all morning. They are finally in the oven and the house smells of warm brandy, molasses, spices and dried fruit. Sadly, the Bearded One does not like fruitcake, but he still helps.

"I'll get the camera!" We are both whispering urgently and acting like a Martian has just landed in our backyard.

"It's walking toward the fence." The Bearded One doesn't take his eyes off the doe as I put the camera in his hand. "It's behind the hoop house now," he says. "I can't see it."

I jump onto the couch which is still conveniently located against the window wall after our Thanksgiving shindig. I put one foot on the arm of the couch, hoist myself up to the highest point of the window, and I can just see the doe's head over the hoop house, her lovely large ears and wide eyes. I think she sees me, too. "She's walking along the fence," I report from on high. "She's wagging her tail at me!"

The Bearded One is out the door. I watch him avoid attracting Ruby's attention -- she is asleep under the house -- and tiptoe around the right end of the hoop house. He disappears and so does the doe. I can smell the fruitcake in the oven.

"I don't think I got her." The Bearded One is back. "The camera does weird things with the lighting in the woods." Our camera has to stop and think about the shot for a while after you push the button. I plug the camera into our computer and the doe appears.

He had another photo all set up, he tells me, but just then a chicken argument broke out and the doe ran for her life. The two camps -- Kimber and the Seven Chicks vs. The Five -- continue as sworn enemies, except for Marilyn and Spot, who are peacemakers. Steve still raids The Five regularly. He is the self-appointed sheriff of the chickens. "Move along, move along," he squawks whenever they congregate.

Skirmishes break out periodically and they fly all the way around the coop, inside the aviary. It's quite a rush. The doe probably wouldn't have ventured into the pasture if Thanksgiving hadn't delayed our fence line repairs and chicken wing clipping.

The second photo of the doe appears on the computer screen. She is back further in the woods, leaving the area but looking back. Her eyes glow from the flash, and I gasp when I see it. Now she really does look like a Martian.

"That's so cool," I say. "Like one of Santa's reindeer." I breathe in the fruitcake and kiss him. "Probably Vixen, don't you think? With her eyes so bright?"

"Sent to check out the place. See if we needed anything this year." He kisses me back. "Nope, not a thing."

Chapter 44: Winging It

We've never done this before, so the plan is to clip the chickens' wings at night, 8pm, when they are deeply sleepy and easier to handle. Then tomorrow morning, Kimber and all the chicks will wake up free to come and go all day and forage in the lower pasture and experience full chicken lives. No more worries about flying away.

After dinner, we watch about a dozen You Tube videos on the procedure and study diagrams. It seems straight-forward enough, especially with the two of us, both college graduates, one to hold the chicken, one to clip.

We discuss the issue of clipping one wing or both as if it's circumcision, and decide to clip both. Just clipping one will prevent flight, but the bird's flapping is less awkward and the symmetry more pleasing if you do both.

A coyote yaps and howls up just above the goat barn, and we stop our discussion to listen.

The Bearded One has spent hours this past week, patching the fence line and installing poultry wire along the outside to keep out digging predators. Tonight is the night to clip.

The moon is just two nights off of full, it's finally 8pm, and Ruby accompanies us up the hill to the chicken coop with our flashlight and scissors. The Bearded One also has a nifty new light he clips to the bill of his cap, and, after hearing the coyote, he is really belting out the usual Tom Jones' "She's a Lady" number into the dark woods to scare all the critters away.

The clipping goes surprisingly fast, once we turn on the big light. The chickens are still manageable and don't think it's morning. The Bearded One catches each victim, then sits in a chair and holds the chicken while I stretch out the wing and clip the 10 front flight feathers along the line where the secondary feathers start.

Maybe it's the shadowy light, but all Kimber's chicks look alike to the Bearded One. "This is Stevie," he says of the first chicken he fetches. "No," I say, "it's Steve!" Later he says, "This is Kimber," but it's not. It's Tux. Or maybe Dusty. Half the chicks are Kimber clones now. The chicks are all 4 months old. Just two more months and the pullets will begin laying and the roosters, Tux and Steve, will go to auction.

The next morning, the Bearded One is limping. His foot feels like it is broken, he says, and I suspect sympathetic pain -- although the chickens experienced no pain and went right back to sleep after their clipping. He says it was the fence work. There's lots of irregular ground on the hillside. I cook him and the chickens oatmeal with blueberries.

Then the time of the free-range has come. We take Ruby and Garfield and make them stay behind the fence. I stand to greet the chickens with the plates of oatmeal, which they love. "Let 'em loose!" I say and the Bearded One limps over to the aviary doors.

They have absolutely no interest in leaving the aviary. We cluck and hoot. We assure them that the cat and dog are under control. Still, they will not be called forth. I try to herd them out, and they circle back around the coop. It's the only place Kimber's chicks have ever lived.

Over the course of an hour, they gradually emerge. Steve is first, but Kimber is still calling all the shots. No bird flaps around or tries to escape over the fence. Where their wings are clipped is virtually unnoticeable.

The Five -- Leah, Anna, Danielle, Jane and Cheetah -- come after all of Kimber's chicks have left the building. Cheetah, the biggest of all the chickens, is also the biggest baby, and is the very very last.

Eventually, they scratch and peck their way to the top of the chute, as we call the narrow passage to the lower pasture.

Garfield plays at attack, just as we hoped. He leaps and the Bearded One limps over and tells him "NO!"

Ruby is theoretically more of a real threat, and we theatrically control her comings and goings. She watches Garfield's lesson from outside the fence.

Then, to my shock, after about half an hour of great new eats and freedom that none of them has ever known, Kimber calls everyone back into the aviary...

...and begins a communal dust bath. Good job, she clucks to us. Close the door on your way out.

Chapter 45: Weanus Interruptus

It's 8am and I'm listening to our son snoring in the den. I'm the only one awake as I sip coffee on the couch with Garfield. Two of our three kids are here this holiday week and the nest is full. And so, suddenly, is my throat with tears. I take another swig of coffee.

We are helping Kimber to wean her 16-week-old chicks by boarding up the laying nests, and I'm a bit weepy over the whole thing. It's a pitiful sight, but it has to be done. The chicks are as big as Kimber now, and Tux is bigger. He crowed this morning when I opened the coop.

The chicks were still squabbling and flapping long after we closed the coop last night -- looking for open spots in the roosting lines, trying to fly up with their clipped wings, missing the rung and crashing to the soft peat moss below. Over and over. There's plenty of room. Theoretically. The problem is that they all want to make it up to the very top rung. The endless squabbles and crashes to the ground stem from this.

Our son is congested, so the snoring is pronounced. Great, shuddering gulps. I remember when he used to sit beside me every morning in my beanbag chair. We didn't talk a lot then, either, just sat really close.

The chicks have resisted roosting, preferring to all pile into a single nest box until just this last week, when they spread out to three boxes. It's becoming their norm. This is not so good for a couple of reasons.

First, chickens poop when they sleep, so the nest boxes get all mucked up and are parasite havens unless cleaned out frequently. Second, the nest boxes are for egg laying. They're not beds at all. Kimber won't start laying again until she weans these "babies," who themselves could start laying eggs in four more weeks.

Because we keep no adult rooster around, they're all stuck in "baby chick" mode. A rooster is what makes the momma hen wean the babes. Normal weaning has been disrupted by our gentleman farmer concerns over rooster noises disturbing the sleep of our neighbors with 3 small children.

Last night, when the Bearded One and I went to check on the chickens at about 8pm -- I wanted to make sure they were okay -- half of Kimber's chicks roosted with The Five on the top two rungs, another group roosted with Kimber at the end of the nest box perch, and Marilyn and Stevie huddled together on the floor. Tonight we'll pick them up and just put them on the roost.

This morning, all the chicks seemed rested. They hopped right down and rushed to the new feeder. A few finished eating and chased each other out of the aviary, running like 7th grade boys playing front yard football and going out for the long bomb on every single play. "Hit me -- I'm wide open!" We've taken to calling this behavior "Going out for a pass."

Bantam hens are bred to be fervent and generous mothers, which is why we're thinking we'll keep Kimber and all her pullet weanlings. When we get some meat chicks this spring, I'm hoping these bantam hens will mother them. That's the plan, anyway.

The roosters, Steve and Tux, can't stay because they'll try to breed with their mother and sisters, which isn't healthy. Billy goats have to be changed out regularly, too, a fact of farm life I am just now understanding.

Suddenly, the den is silent. Our son has rolled over and will sleep 'til noon. Let him sleep. He's young. Heck, he's weaned.

Chapter 46: Rooster Broth

Steve and Tux both crow from inside the chicken coup as I open the gate. I stop and sneeze my head off. Then I open the coop, and Steve is the first one out. He flaps his wings as he winds up, stretches his four-month-old neck high and crows. The effort is like blowing up a balloon, or playing a bagpipe, or, I think, sneezing.

Our son is feeling much better after a week of congestion and hacking, the Bearded One is sick now, and I am fighting the bug with vitamins and chicken soup. When our next door neighbor kids -- 7-year-old Hansel, 5-year-old Gretel, and 3-year-old Batman and their parents -- come over on Christmas day to deliver gifts, we warn them about our colds and cover our mouths.

And we warn them about Steve and Tux. The rooster crowings. We implore them to tell us immediately if they ever hear the roosters at night. We think that being shut into the pitch-black coop will keep them quiet. We do not plan to keep them here a lot longer, but they'll still be here awhile.

Not everyone feels giddy joy when they hear a rooster crow. Even out here in the sticks, neighbors can get crosswise over rooster noise, and we are determined not to let that happen here. Our chicken coop, out of sight near a back corner of the property is, nonetheless, about 50 or 60 yards from these same 3 children's house, and they say they've never heard a peep. So far.

Gretel gives us a plate of fudge she helped make. Batman slaps a card he was in charge of carrying down onto the nearest table and says his Christmas was "ONE HUNDRED GOOD!" Hansel plays with the foot massager, which he does every time he comes over, and we adults talk while the Bearded One plays with the kids.

I tell of a neighbor down the road who is moving because of rooster noise. It's sad. Mustn't happen here, I say.

The Bearded One says that Momma Goose across the road has a gorgeous rooster she needs to be shed of -- it's rainbow-colored and so big you could ride it like a Shetland pony -- but we aren't in the market.

We can have eggs without a rooster. Soon, I say, this spring, we'll have eggs to share.

Roosters are for fertilizing eggs if you want to raise chicks, but even then, you don't have to own one. We'll either buy fertilized eggs and hatch them, or buy hatchlings when we want to raise meat birds. Some people even borrow roosters for a few days. Roosters don't have to rip neighbors apart.

I remember our older daughter telling us about an Asian friend's grandmother swearing by the medicinal qualities of rooster broth. Not just chicken broth, but the rich broth from a long-boiled rooster. Hmmm...

Maybe there is another path for Steve and Tux, rather than the auction. Perhaps a healing broth, when the time comes. We can send some to our neighbors. They'll have probably caught this crud by then.

Chapter 47: Guess Whooo's Coming to Dinner

We have an owl on the farmlet. Maybe even more than one, in which case we'd have a parliament of owls, but I think it's just one.

This Great Horned owl is a stunning creature with a 4-foot wingspan. Both the Bearded One and I have seen it on several different occasions. It's playing a game of chicken with the chickens and the chickens are winning. So far.

"Awkkk!" Each of the 13 chickens sounds off and the Bearded One hears them from where he's working in the barn. This is an unusual noise and he leaves the new, bigger roost he is constructing for the coop to check on them.

He sees the owl in flight right at the top of the southwest corner of the aviary, its body sideways, wings vertical. It is mottled grayish-brown, has a white throat, prominent ear tufts which really aren't ears but feathers, and yellow eyes. There's no question what it's there for. It angles laterally and slices silently through the forest, staying about 10 feet off the ground. Great horned owls are one of the best hunters on the planet -- cats with wings.

In and around the aviary, the entire flock is frozen stiff. One chicken is out front, most are crammed into a corner. It's a freeze frame, with every chicken absolutely still, locked in action poses as if they'd been flash-frozen, especially the ones more nearly caught out in the open. They don't do this with Garfield, but they do it with both owls and chattering chipmunks.

It's a good five minutes before the chickens move. Maybe ten. The Bearded One walks among them and tells them everything's okay now but they do not move...at...all. Do chickens have heart attacks?

Then it's dusk and I'm on the deck calling Garfield in when a giant dark cape sweeps smoothly and rather slowly through the trees from west to east, a Harry Potter apparition. I hold my breath. I try to hear something, anything. Not a sound. The bird book says the front edge of the owl's wing has a fringe that silences the flight. I can't even hear leaves rustling as the ghost-bird floats away. Our chickens have escaped Death another day.

Garfield actually always comes when I call him, but he is wired and it's going to be another long haul for him inside. We help him decompress. Tonight our son gets the flashlight and Garfield chases the light beam across the couch, behind the chair, up the wall. Again and again and again. He is single-focused and fierce, the stakes always life and death.

I think of the time we saw an owl pick a chipmunk off the side of a tree, its great wings vertical to the ground as it grabbed the distracted chipmunk -- which was talking to Ruby -- with its talons. I remember watching it glide away through the trees holding the meal like luggage or landing gear.

I felt sorry for the chipmunk. And I'll feel sorry when this owl catches one of our chickens. But with a creature so ethereal, it's hard to cry fowl.

Chapter 48: Casting On

For years I have talked of learning to knit. And then 3 weeks ago on the Winter Solstice, a neighbor gave me a Learn To Knit Kit for Christmas, got herself one as well, and said that a third neighbor, a long-time knitter, would help us if we had trouble.

No trouble here. For 2 weeks the Kit \-- 2 fat needles; 2 balls of soft, thick wheat-colored yarn; instructions to make a hat or scarf -- lay in the living room, stirring up my energy, but somehow, not for knitting.

"You are a Contemplator of Knitting," says the Bearded One. "You want mental yarn."

This would be an insult if it weren't so obviously true. "My problem is I can't envision an end product that I want," I say. Then I ask him: "Do you want a hat?" No. "A scarf?" No.

What I want, I realize, is goats. Maybe I'm just a pretender on that front, too, I think. A talker not a doer. A mere Contemplator of Goats. The Bearded One is quick to point out that a lot more than contemplation has been afoot regarding goats. More like preparation.

I start checking Craigslist for Pygora goats, the goats I've contemplated for years. I tell the yarn and needles what I'm up to every time I walk by.

There are 3 categories of goats -- milk goats, meat goats, and fleece goats. On Craigslist there are lots of Nubians (milk goats) and brush-eating mixed-breed goats, and some meat goats, but there are never any Pygoras, the Pygmy/Angora mix that was first bred in the late 1980s by a lady in Oregon. She wanted a small, "homesteading" goat good for milking and meat if need be, but fantastic for fleece. I love long hair. I love soft things, and I want to shepherd a little herd.

"Have you cast on?" our son asks, eyeing the untouched Knitting Kit.

I am shocked that he knows this phrase. He's known it since 8th grade, he says, when knitting was part of an art class. I feel sheepish. Goatish.

I tell him I saw the neighbor who gave me the kit on the road and she has already cast on and knitted a foot-long thing. She had lost some stitches along the way, she admitted. Still, she started. And she vouched for the quality of instruction in the booklet. She'd checked out other instructions and even videos on-line.

"I don't know what my problem is," I say. Our son is amused. I retreat to my computer.

And then on Sunday night, January 8, a full moon, I cast on. Our son is gone, the Bearded One is watching TV, and I sit in my rocker with the beautiful yarn ball clamped between my knees, the instruction booklet propped against it, a tree limb-sized needle in each hand, and every brain cell I possess focused on the words and drawings.

I work for a couple of hours. I cast on eight foundational stitches, knit the row, and then switch hands and knit another row. This is a gauge square, the booklet explains. Knit it first, then go on to the actual scarf. Or hat.

But I never get there. I knit 4 rows and then go to check Craigslist. And there they are. Three little 4-year-old Pygoras on Vashon Island, a ten-minute ferry ride from us! Impossible but true. They are perfect. Two wethers -- castrated males -- and one un-fixed female. One black, one white, one light brown. The white one is the girl, the ad says. $200 OBO.

The Bearded One comes up the stairs and I shriek and read the ad out loud to him. He thinks they're great. The energy coursing through my body is over the full moon, I type out a letter of interest and receive a response within fifteen minutes. They are still available!

The next day both the Bearded One and I talk on the phone with the delightful owner and learn all we can. She has a pregnant cow and pregnant Nubian goat and will have too many goats. She won't charge us anything, she says, if we promise they will be pets and fleece goats, not meat. At least for several years. And we have to transport them. Deal, we say.

Their names are Pearl, LaLa and Sage. Pearl is the girl and the boss, LaLa is black and a boy and named because he has a loud voice, and Sage is Pearl's brown brother, named for his Brahma-like facial markings.

We'll rent a trailer. We'll buy some straw and orchard hay, a 50 pound bag of "dry cob", feeding bowls and watering troughs. Then we'll pick up the herd THIS Friday.

The Bearded One comes in from clearing out the animal end of the barn and notices my tiny knitted gauge strip with the rest of the Kit, untouched since Sunday night. "Now that's just what I need," he says. "A pinky ring!"

I laugh and wonder how I'll ever cast the pinky ring off of the needles. Goats are bound to be easier than knitting.

Chapter 49: Our Little Butt Heads

"Gather round," the Goat Owner says, and from different angles in the muddy pasture the Bearded One and I and our son and five of the Goat Owner's family members -- 8 of us wranglers in all -- close in on the 3 fluffy little goats. "They know something is up."

The plan is to herd the freaked goats into a smaller pen, then tackle them individually and haul them back across the pasture to the trailer, two men on the horns and me pushing the rear, each goat braking the entire way, hooves digging in. It works, but not before I lay out gracefully in the mud.

Pearl, LaLa and Sage -- our gorgeous new Pygora goats -- were not hand-raised. They have never been sheared. They've lived their entire 4 year lives brush-clearing this beautiful 5 acre farm on Vashon Island, a short but complicated ferry ride from the Farmlet (the Bearded One had to BACK the truck and rental trailer onto the ferry both ways. He is my hero).

"They'll come right up to you," the Goat Owner had told me over the phone. "They're easy to grab or wrestle, but they aren't petting goats."

"Like chickens?" I asked. I have experience with not picking up chickens, then eventually picking them up, mainly when they are asleep. I rarely grab them anymore, however, somehow content with vicinity.

"Yes!" she said. "They're farm animals. They really don't want to be caught. They're not cuddly." I'm learning this. Farm animals aren't pets in the sense that Ruby and Garfield are. They're bonded to each other in their chicken and goat ways, not to me. No hugs, no walking the road together, no brushing their thick coats. Not yet, anyway.

And they come and go. Steve and Tux, our 21-week-old roosters, will be moving on to auction this month.

Pearl, LaLa and Sage were welcome to return to the neighboring alpaca and sheep farm on Vashon Island where they were born if we didn't want them. My role it seems is to provide food and shelter and health care as needed. And be here. Theirs is to be goats and chickens and provide goat and chicken type insights, and hopefully, eventually, fiber and eggs.

I want to touch these goats, though. At least have them eat from my hand. They did this for the Goat Owner. Everyone says to offer carrots, which I've done and they haven't approached yet. I'm a bit sad about this.

The Bearded One reassures me. "They're making friendly gestures, semi-approaching," he says, "and it hasn't even been a week." That's all true, I think. Sage, especially, is clearly dying to get a carrot from me but he gets in trouble for it from his sister and the indisputable boss and brains, Pearl. They are constantly, literally butting heads with each other.

Sage and I have a connection because I am the wrangler who first tackled him in the muddy pen on Vashon Island last Friday. I had him, too, my fingers deep in the gorgeous, inches-thick cashmere fleece. And then he bolted away and I hung on long enough to flop flat in the muck. "I looked so good when I arrived," I said, closing the 5x8 rental trailer with all three goats successfully loaded. The Goat Owner agreed and apologized for not having mentioned it.

That first night the goats were here, the Bearded One dreamed he set up a huge tent and the Occupy Wall Street movement came and took it over. Then last night, just three nights later, he worked in the barn for a couple of hours, playing the radio and talking to the goats. They hung around and watched him the entire time, each species enjoying the other.

Then Pearl butted the gate. Hard. Like a car. Like a car wreck. Then she did it to the inside planking on the barn. Wham!

I knew something traumatic had happened when the Bearded One came in. He was diplomatic, though, and didn't come right out with it. Instead, he talked about the goats sticking around in the barn and Pearl finally nibbling some hay. He called them damn-near friendly.

When he started talking about reinforcing the barn walls and making stops for the sturdy gates I knew we were getting close to what was on his mind. "If Ruby weighs 60 pounds, them sheeps weigh 180," he said, and then told me about the blow to the gate, which hadn't hurt it one speck, but impressed the Bearded One nonetheless.

"The goats are going to knock the farm down," he says.

And then we both are laughing so hard we slap the kitchen counter and have to wipe tears from our eyes. What on earth have we done?

Chapter 50: How Peaches Got Us Out of a Jam

"This is not a drill." The Bearded One checks the sloping flat roofs of the barn and aviary and thin plastic of the hoop house as the record-breaking 10 inches of snow falls. "A cubic foot of this wet snow weighs 20 pounds," he says, quoting the TV, and I believe it.

The snow is crazy heavy to shovel. The tarp (and poultry wire) roof on the aviary is about 800 square feet. That's -- no way -- about 15,000 pounds?? The road is impassable, the decks are ice sheets, and the top 30 feet of a Douglas Fir snaps and falls across the path up to the barn as the Bearded One watches from 20 feet away. He says it sounded like dynamite.

No critter wants to get their feet cold and wet. Garfield complains loudly, tiptoes across the crusted snow and then repeatedly shakes each moist paw as if he's stepped in sap. Ruby rolls in the snow, but hesitates before plodding through the deep, hard-crusted stuff in the backyard. The chickens step out of the covered aviary and race back in.

The surprise is the goats. I thought snow wouldn't faze them, but they have hardly moved from the barn and the covered breezeway. Which is nice since I get to hang out with them in close proximity. They've been here a week now, and they're getting their appetites back, nibbling at the grain mix and the orchard hay. But they still won't approach and eat the supposed goat delicacy -- carrots -- from my hand.

Then one afternoon the Bearded One comes into the kitchen -- I am examining a seed catalog at the table -- and announces that Pearl and Sage have both just eaten a bit of blueberry muffin from his hand. I am thrilled, and then a bit concerned -- could they get the dreaded bloat we've heard happens in goats who eat too much grain? And goats can't handle much sugar. We decide it was just a teeney taste. In fact, I make a note to take half a muffin up next time.

But, of course, I forget. Assembling and putting on snow clothes takes all my brain power.

Once in the barn, the goats keep their distance until the Bearded One reaches for the jar of dried peaches (homemade, no added sugar) he keeps on a shelf and shakes it. Sage and Pearl look up. LaLa instantly walks over to the inner fence and accepts a dried peach slice from the Bearded One. Sage and Pearl line up, and then LaLa gets a second slice from my hand. Joy!

Goats have relatively small mouths, rows of even teeth and they chew side to side. I can hear the crunch crunch, the grind, even with a chewy dried peach. LaLa's eyes are dark, but they still have those distinctive horizontal slit-shaped goat pupils giving them increased peripheral depth perception to detect predators. They are smart animals.

I try to touch Pearl's beard as her lips reach for a peach. She hops back light as a feather, tipped off by the merest flick of a finger. A trick! A con! Snow job!

I apologize. I compliment her on her gorgeous cashmere fleece, which I am sure, I say, is coming in handy in this weather. I assure her we won't attempt to shear her until it warms up a bit. She scratches her back with her lovely curved horns. She is ignoring me.

The Bearded One calls for help taking down a tarp. It's strung between trees covering building materials including 4'x8' plywood sheets, and is now full of ice boulders. We've been wanting it gone so as to get a better view of the barn and the goats from the house.

We work together, raking off ice, pulling out support poles, and then lifting -- 1, 2, THREE! -- plywood through the gate and into the barn. I am in the barn angling the plywood through an inside gate when I see Ruby just outside the barn door smelling the new goat poop. She is not allowed in the goat pasture or barn -- for a while, anyway. And then I wonder how she got here. I race out of the barn.

"THE GOATS ARE OUT!" I cry. There they are, walking down the snowy tractor trail toward the road and Port Orchard and Seattle. They jump a bit and speed up at my screaming.

This is my nightmare. These aren't chickens. These are huge livestocks! We could be chasing them for the rest of our lives. Even though the farm hand on Vashon Island said they love to get out but they don't go anywhere.

The Bearded One shouts from the other end of the barn, "Wait -- Don't chase them!"

Okay. But what can we do?

"The peaches!" The Bearded One gets the jar and shakes it.

The goats stop in their tracks. Pearl spins and leads the way as the three fluffy goats jog back to the barn and, unbelievably, right through the gate to the Bearded One's outstretched peachy fingers.

We've got to start shutting gates around here.

Chapter 51: Whodumptit?

The early bird neighbors with jobs notice it on their way out, their headlights reflecting off of the white plastic pile of 15 stuffed, smelly trash bags dumped on the side of our dark, dead-end dirt road.

Hours later, our elderly neighbor Lou points it out to the Bearded One on his "morning" walk -- "Would you look at that?" Lou says he has called the county and the Health Department. Coyotes will get into it, sure enough. Tarping it would be useless.

As they talk, another neighbor's girlfriend drives by, then stops and backs up. We met her at Momma Goose's when Jonah killed our Thanksgiving turkey. Now Jonah's girlfriend commiserates with Lou and the Bearded One over the disgusting pile, and then offers to take it to Momma Goose's to burn, so long as it's okay with Momma Goose.

I feel the energy the second the Bearded One opens the door and comes into the kitchen. I'm cooking \-- bread, casserole, chili. He tells me the story and I say, "I love our neighbors. I love our road." I'm with Emerson, I say, who preferred neighborhoods to communes. The Bearded One has his lawyer hat on and isn't feeling it. He's on a mission from God.

This is the 4th time in 5 years for such a big trash dump, and often as not it is him who cleans it up, hauls it to the dump and pays the fee. He says it would sure be nice to ID the culprit and let the county hammer on them a bit. Still, we've checked with the county before and never gotten so much as our hopes up. Trash dumping on rural roads is nothing new, and not a county priority at all.

He calls Momma Goose to check out Jonah's girlfriend's offer. She is also cooking. Making sausage. She says she doesn't want to burn it -- who knows what's in it? -- but she offers to take it to the dump in her truck this afternoon. The Bearded One tells her that Lou has called the county. Maybe they'll take it. Maybe we won't need her truck.

I overhear this and shake my head. The county won't come. The hopeful thing this time, though, is that Lou is calling the Health Department. Something new. We don't have to wait long to find out.

The phone rings and it's Lou. The Health Department has arrived (how the hell did he do that?) and the Bearded One is out the door.

An hour later, the Bearded One is back and ready to talk. It's the same story he tells the assembled group of neighbors a day later while he fills potholes from the recent snow storm.

Momma Goose came with her pickup. Jonah and his girlfriend, Lou and the Bearded One all helped the Health Department lady, a redhead in her 30s, open all the putrid bags -- some had diapers, which sent Momma Goose to gagging -- and sorted through them for pieces of I.D.

They found three pieces, including a car registration, but the Health Department said it wasn't enough. The evidence needed is 3 items on one human. They found 2 items on the wife, 1 on the husband. Jonah even knew the people, or at least knew who they were. Not the best folk, apparently.

Then they re-bagged the garbage. The Health Department lady said that the county wouldn't pick it up for days, so Jonah and his girlfriend took it to the dump. Several other passing neighbors stopped as this was going on and offered cash for the dump fee. Momma Goose headed home for a long, hot shower.

The Bearded One finished the story, and laid the Health Department lady's card on the kitchen table. "Oh, well, she kept the evidence," he said with some satisfaction. "She said that she had NEVER, EVER had neighbors go through the trash with her and help out like that. She was a little bit choked up."

This made my day. It doesn't look like a neighborhood out here, but we've got great neighbors. I serve the Bearded One a delicious lunch.

Whodumptit? Who cares?

Chapter 52: Oh, LaLa!

The chainsaw on the backyard hillside stops and within minutes the Bearded One appears on the deck. This post-snow storm clearing project means that we can for the first time see the goats from the house. I watch them and wave to their cute little faces as I clean on this glorious clear sunny, almost spring-like day.

"Wait!" I call to the exhausted Bearded One who has just finished cleaning his boots and is hungry. "I think the barn door is open."

"Huh?"

"I can see it from here," I say. "Look!"

Sage, the big boy and the most opportunistic of the three, is nosing his way into the human end of the barn, the door clearly swinging open now. Did he open the latch?

The Bearded One sees this and, clean boots or not, trots back up to the barn, closes the barn door, shuts both breezeway gates so that no critters can get into the barn for a while, and then opens the gate leading to the aviary and lower goat pasture. This opens it all up.

The goats and chickens like to hang out together, but the chickens can't be allowed into the goat barn or they'll fly up and poop on the goat's food. And the goats hopefully can't get into the aviary at all -- there are two chicken-only doors, a big one (17"x20") and a rarely used little one (12"x12") that seems almost too small for the chickens.

I watch from the window, where the Bearded One can see me, too, and I give him the thumbs up as he heads back down the trail.

All three goats then trot through the opened gate and stand before the aviary, where the chickens are. There's been lots of change in there this week. No wonder the endlessly curious goats are interested.

I've got a candle lit for Steve and Tux, who we boxed up this week, each with nice big air holes, straw bedding, and a flattering portrait photograph taped to the box along with their name and "Banty Rooster, aged 23 weeks, born August, 31, 2011". Our neighbor Momma Goose picked them up and is taking them with her own rooster to an auction in Enumclaw and I'm wishing them a superb new home, as the Bearded One says, with "babes everywhere."

It's been a lot more peaceful since they left. I actually miss their crowing, but I don't miss their hassling and pecking the hens.

Plus, we had our first egg this week! Two, in fact. Perfect, medium-sized tan eggs, each laid in the corner nest in a shallowed-out cup in the straw. I wonder if the magnificent full moon this week has affected the hens and tricked them into thinking we have more daylight than we do. Anyway, Steve and Tux left just in the nick of time and neither the Bearded One nor I are spotting any real downside.

The Bearded One is back inside from the goats, having cleaned his boots up once again. He confesses that he had in fact left the barn door unlatched. We stand and look out and can see all the farmlet buildings -- the hoophouse, the barn and the aviary. One farmlet, woven together by the fleece clops now hanging from every fence on the property.

"WHOA!" shouts the Bearded One, and I see it, too. As we watch, Sage squeezes through the large chicken door of the aviary.

"He's in!" I say.

We can't believe our combined four eyes. All three goats squeeze through the large chicken door and are now inside the aviary. Do goats want eggs? LaLa heads for the feeder.

The Bearded One says he'll open the little chicken door (which he actually made just in case baby goats could get through the big door...). Please keep his sandwich warm, and he is gone. Racing up the hill once again.

I watch the nimble goats belly their way back through the big chicken door at first sight of the Bearded One. He admonishes them and they appear attentive. Then he opens the little chicken door and returns to the house. Grinning, he says, "This lunch break is killing me."

By now the Bearded One is tired and famished, but still he is riveted with me at the window. He jokes that we might have to get curtains. We watch each goat attempt to get his or her head through the little chicken door. We laugh, as Pearl's horns are too wide, and then big boy Sage tries, fails, and walks back to LaLa saying It Can't Be Done.

Then, a miracle. Before our eyes, at a distance of maybe 60 yards, we watch LaLa, whose horns are less flared, but who is nonetheless the second biggest goat and easily 100 pounds, tuck his forelegs along and under his body and, pushing with his hind legs, squeeze through the tiny opening. He's gone through the eye of the needle. Inside.

"Oh, LaLa!" I shout. We are laughing wildly and exhaustedly.

The Bearded One shakes his head, reaches for his coat, and mutters, "Holy Goat."

###

About the Author

My fiction publication includes six children's and young adult novels published by Houghton Mifflin and Scholastic back in the 1980s and 1990s, and a novella entitled A BEAR TALE published by Smashwords in 2011. My nonfiction publication includes numerous essays and the book WRITING IN A NEW CONVERTIBLE WITH THE TOP DOWN, co-authored with Sheila Bender and published by Warner and Blue Heron. I live in Washington State with my husband, the Bearded One.

Check out http://farmlet.wordpress.com/ for ongoing Farmlet adventures.
