The Ponderosa

Written December 30, 2013

There is a ponderosa pine tree growing just beyond the southwest corner of our house. A giant, it towers precariously above the house and only slightly off-set from the power lines that run along the road. Its long-ass needles drop blankets in my yard and huge-ass cones lay landmines throughout its perimeter and I cannot help but laugh at the absurdity of it.

I grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills amongst a native canopy of ponderosa and digger pines, live, black and poison oaks, manzanita and deer brushes. I know this the tree well. I loved ponderosas growing up. I climbed in the small ones growing on my parent’s property. I braided the 5” needles and sometimes tried to weave them into baskets like the local Native Americans I learned about in my schoolbooks. I graduated from Ponderosa High School where a ginormous specimen graced the back athletic fields (sadly I believe that tree was eradicated a few years back due to age and the danger of falling. RIP, big guy).

Ponderosas suited the area of my youth, and their presence in the skyline of my direct and peripheral memory is both vivid and impressive. But here in western Washington the ponderosa pine is sorely out of place. The needles shed in autumn are long, hard and prickly and interact with the environment differently than Douglas fir needles. Also, the cones huge, are super hard and sticky with sap. If you step on one or stub your toe on one it’d hurt, whereas the Doug fir cones are smaller, softer and downright comfortable by comparison. The point being the poor pine is a little unusual for this area despite its ability to thrive here nonetheless.

However, the tree is a great conversation piece, and more than one neighbor has asked if they might take one or many pine cones home for decoration or projects. I myself have piles of them which the squirrels love to riffle through whenever in want of a snack.

One time, my neighbor told me the origin story of our tree. If I remember correctly, it was planted a million years ago when the TV show Bonanza was at the height of its popularity. Apparently the forest service gave ponderosa saplings to local schoolchildren. The kids living in our house at the time planted theirs in the front yard. Those kids have long grown and moved away but my neighbor bore witness to that saplings rise. A tree that thirty years later would welcome me home.

Its like our sentinel.

So much prickly.

The Ducks

Written September 4, 2015

My kids love the children’s show “Peep and the Big Wide World.” It is about a trio of baby bird friends, a duck (Quack), a robin (Chirp), and a chicken (Peep) who explore the world together and learn and discover all kinds of amazing things. The creators of the show wrote it well enough that it is entertaining to both adults and kids. (For example, a favorite episode centers around Peep and Quack finding a fake duck, whom Quack assumes is real, so they titled the episode “The Real Decoy.” See what they did there??  Hahaha!! ) My favorite character is Quack. Quack is annoying. He is loud and presumptuous and talks or sings all day about ducks and how great they are. And he eats. A lot. He is EXACTLY how I would imagine a duck to act if they could talk and think critically like humans can. Anyhow, Quack is fond of telling stories about how great ducks are. One of my favorite lines in the show is where he simply states: Ducks are the best.

I had chickens growing up. Geese scared me. Other birds, like my sister’s parakeets, were uninteresting and kinda messy. So it never crossed my mind I could have ducks, own them in a flock like I did my chickens, until one day Anya said “Mom, for mother’s day I want to buy you a duck because you like Quack so much.” From that moment on, getting a duck was all I could think about.

But ducks were different: I’d need more than one since they are socially gregarious animals, and though I had a tiny fish pond that could easily hold one bird, any more would be crowded. How to keep my water birds watered? A friend of mine who keeps ducks gave me ideas, such as a kiddie wading pool as a stand-in pond. The rest was easy: they could cohabitate with chickens and the eggs were delicious and plentiful just like a chickens. It was settled. We’d get some ducks.

Soon, in the blossoming springtime of 2014, our favorite feed store started selling the cutest selection of baby Khaki Campbell ducklings. We brought home two yellow fluffballs with huge, flat beaks and large webbed feet. They were so different from the chickens: taller, skinnier, louder, messier, they ate waaaaaay more then the chicks their age. But when they were old enough to go swimming in our fishpond, man were they the cutest damn things you had ever seen!! I had more fun watching their ducky antics. Soon they’d waddle around after the chickens, foraging for slugs in the grasses and quacking on and on and on about, oh I don’t know, probably how awesome ducks are or something like that.

We named them Quack and Zarina. We built a new duck hutch for them to shelter in, and painted the words “Ducks are the best” across the top. The kids decorated the sides with handprints and drawings of Peep, Chirp and Quack.

Soon they were fully grown and I started noticing duck eggs laying around in the oddest of places. They wouldn’t roost in the boxes like the chickens, so I’d see the eggs laying in the middle of the muddy chicken yard, in the middle of the lawn, or hidden in the grasses around an irrigation ditch that parallels the coop. Now, to me duck eggs taste a little like duck meat does: greasy/gamey, a sort of oily flavor that I assume is an acquired taste. From the start I felt they had a somewhat off-putting flavor. But it was nice to know we would reserve the duck eggs every morning for ourselves, leaving the precious chicken eggs for my loyal paying customers whose proceeds were keeping the birds in feed.

Soon, however, the eggs disappeared. My neighbor, an old-timer who had presumably raised or been around farm fowl since before dirt, said ducks will hide their eggs if they realize you’re taking them. I laughed at this, because I had noticed my chickens do the same thing. So every day began a duck egg hunt, though ducks are so much better at hiding their eggs that they are almost impossible to find. In time, we had no more duck eggs, though I doubt it was for lack of laying. (Nine months after giving up the hunt, I found a cache in the tall rushes in the drainage ditch…at least four or five. Most broken open by presumably raccoons. One intact that I broke when I poked it with a stick…man it was stinky!)

Autumn arrived and with it the rains. The ducks loved the water that pooled everywhere in the yard: in the irrigation ditches and drainage canals, in the low spots in the lawn, and would make an adorable snappy-snap sound as they used their bills as shovels to burrow into the rivulets and scavenge for slugs, bugs and all other manner of tasties. They would follow water sources, a rivulet to a pool to the canal to the road and beyond. One night they didn’t return at dusk to be locked into the coop. They were there in the morning, quacking up a storm and waiting impatiently for breakfast. A few nights later they disappeared again, but again were back the next morning.

In early December they disappeared one night and never returned. Their fate is still unknown, though I put out an APB with the neighbors and checked neighboring properties for carcasses or evidence they had moved into any of the five large holding ponds nearby. To no avail. A few weeks later I got a tip they might be at a house across the street, about a half mile away, living with an existing flock of chickens and ducks. I called the house but it was two days before Christmas; nobody answered the call or returned my message. I failed to follow up.

And so we are once again duckless. It is sad, really. They were such a great addition to our farm! I loved their constant, though not irritating, quacking. Their antics were so funny, their run/waddle, their bill-burrowing, their swimming around in water. If we do get ducks again I will provide a bigger and better pond (somehow?) and perhaps more of them to create a better community. For now, I just imagine they are living happily with the neighbor down the street, instead of torn to shreds last winter for some coyote’s meal.

Regardless, I submit to propose the idea that ducks truly are the best.

True story.

“Look,” my daughter said. “They think they’re chickens!”

So cute.

The Sparrow

Originally written December 15, 2013

Opening the garage door to check on the baby chicks in their brooder I could see they were all huddled against the near wall of their cage with a curious air about them. It felt similar to the way they were acting a week prior, when an ailing chick had died: something was wrong, so, approaching, I readied myself to find another dead chicken. Arriving I did a quick body count: six live ones and no dead. Hmm. All chicks accounted for, all still huddling by the wall and looking distressed.

Then I saw the body of a sparrow, tiny and stiff, lying just outside their cage wall. How it came to be there is rife with possibility, but the chickens were huddling, staring at it. I wondered if they were curious about it. I wondered if they saw it fly in and die. Six mute witnesses. I regarded the situation for another moment, then went inside to find something with which to dispose of it.

My five-year-old daughter caught me coming in the door. “Will you play with me?” She bubbled over with a list of activities she had planned down to the finest of detail. I explained I had to dispose of a dead bird I found in the garage and regaled my discovery. Her eyes widened with interest and she insisted she accompany me to see. I grabbed a paper towel, and led her outside.

We looked at the sparrow for a long moment before I picked it up with the towel, intending to drop it in the garbage, or bury it if Anya begged, perhaps in the garden graveyard thrice populated with unfortunate baby chicken incidences. Instead, however, she grabbed it bare handed and began an inspection: touching the beak and feet, spreading out the wings, commenting it was so soft and told me to touch the feathers (which I did not), asked me if she could keep it as a toy and take it upstairs to play (uh, no). I found myself explaining decomposition, about bugs and bodily fluids and the stench of decay, trying to make it understood why I didn’t want it in the house. “But I want to watch it break down!” she whined, and I relented by allowing the sparrow to be slipped into a jelly jar and stashed outside on a ledge near the spigot. Satisfied, we went inside to wash our hands.

Outside the bird sat in its circular tomb, stiff with rigor, its beak pointing upwards, its little curled feet resting en pointe on the bottom of the jar. The next day it rained and though safely under the eve, strong winds helped to blow nearly two inches of water into the jar. Two nights later the first cold freeze of late fall created a bird-cicle-pop. It was beautiful, really. This bird, once gorgeous in life, now in the grip of the freeze, suspended eerily upright on its icy pedestal.

The weather warmed. The bird and ice unfroze. Rigor mortis was long gone so the body crumpled against the side of the glass, droopy and slack. Anya examined all of this with intense interest. And then the winds came. Harsh, howling and fierce they sang and yelled and conversed outside our windows and doors and all the while pushing toys, chairs, trampolines, buckets and pots across the lawn and often across the roads into neighboring acreage. It also blew the jelly jar off its perch and sent it shattering against the concrete below. For days I picked shards of glass out of the driveway. The sparrow remained in a box sheltered from the elements for several weeks until one night in midwinter it disappeared.

Anya has yet to notice.

The Guinea

Originally written December 22, 2013

It was Thursday evening shortly before sunset. The kids and I were sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner. The glass door was open, refracting and reflecting views of the yard in front of and behind where I sat. It was lovely outside: late summer with fall firmly in the cooling evening air, the leaves beginning to droop and drop. Warm days still teasingly delightful, but the reality of another summer lost couldn’t be ignored.

I lowered my head to tuck into my food when I saw a chicken run by, its silhouette reflecting two or three times on the glass doors as it passed. A common sight, I had very nearly averted my eyes when another silhouette passed by, somewhat chicken shaped but with a naked neck and pointed helmet atop its white head. I knew in that instant it was a Guinea hen. My head snapped up, at full attention. I don’t have a Guinea hen.

“I think I just saw a Guinea hen,” I announced to Ben and Anya as I stood up, abandoning dinner to confirm my suspicions.

“What’s a Guinea hen?” Anya asked, and I beckoned they come with me as I went out the glass doors to the wooden deck where we chased the sounds of bird feet pat-pat-patting along the side of the house. They stopped in the grass, the Guinea hen looking back with its distinctive attitude. Yup, it’s a Guinea hen all right.

The chickens were rightfully skeptical at first. The Guinea hen mostly chased them around: if it was being ornery or trying to make friends I don’t know. Leaving them to their own birdy ways, I returned with the kids to the kitchen to finish eating. We’d try to shoo the poor bird into the coop with the chickens for the night.

It took a little coaxing and chasing, but the Guinea seemed remarkably tame and domesticated enough to know about coops, feed, and the need to flock. She probably wasn’t wild; most likely a lost escapee from a nearby farm.

The next day The Girls accepted her, and I saw her participating in all manner of normal foraging-type behaviors as she followed the flocks through the yard on their never-ending quest for food. I began to ask around, to no avail, as to where she might belong. It looked like we had a new resident on our ever-expanding farm!

And then she squawked. If you’ve never heard one it is hard to describe, because the songs themselves can take on so many different tenors, rhythms, and imaginative qualities. But ours sounded something like this. Guinea hens are easily startled, thus earning their nickname “watchdog,” so our little bird would sound her alarm whenever she noticed potential threats: Stellar’s Jays swooping, neighbors walking by, neighbors driving by, the dogs, us from a distance, and other such lights and shadows. Life with the hen was like life with a rooster. Like life with six roosters.

I tried to get myself used to the noise. After all, the Guinea hen is a remarkably unique animal with quaint polka-dotted feathers, a bald head and neck revealing white skin, hilarious wattles that rival the turkey, and an even hilariouser helmet – that curved horn-type-thingy atop its head. (They always reminded me of a Skeksis from The Dark Crystal.) They are so funny in a way that is quite different from the chickens and ducks. Despite the noise, I really do like Guinea hens. And they lay beautiful blue-green eggs to boot!

But as the week wore on the novelty wore off. The Guinea hen was just too loud, and would often get herself stuck in the coop unable to find her way out. Frantically pacing the fenceline she’d squawk for hours, until she’d manage to follow another chicken through the door or until one of us humans went in to flush her out. I began to imagine an exit strategy for this bird.

Eating her was out of the question, though it is not only possible but recommended. Guinea flesh is supposedly darker and tastier then chicken flesh, or so I was told. But considering she felt like part of a domestic flock, it felt like eating somebody else’s pet, which in turn felt wrong on multiple levels. Even if I never found her owner, it seemed a bit odd to just up and lob off her head. So giving her away to a good home seemed the only logical step. I began mentally writing my Craigslist ad.

Then a neighbor told me about a lady on a road about a half-mile due south from our property, over the creek and through the woods, who had Guineas. I called her the next day and asked her if she had lost a hen.

“Yep,” she answered. “Strangest thing, they all flew the coop!” The fate of the others were unknown. This one had somehow survived and found its way up the hill from the others to our plot of land. I was relieved to learn all this and set up a time in the days ahead to make the handoff.

The Guinea hen is gone now. Things are quiet once more.

Yep. Reminds me of a guinea hen.

Kind of sounds like a Skeksis too.

The Hawk

Originally written February 8, 2014

There are lots of wild critters to be seen in/around our property. Since moving in May 2013, I have personally espied: eagles, hawks, crows, vultures, dwarf owls, sapsuckers, mice, rats, voles, moles, raccoons, juncos, jays, robins, thrush, hummingbirds, swallows, squirrels, rabbits, bats, tree frogs, toads, deer, snakes. I have smelled a skunk and heard a barn owl. And been told stories from nearby neighbors about cougars and bears visiting their properties. One of my first sunny days outside I witnessed a large predator bird circle the yard a few times and though I knew my kids and dogs were okay, I hovered over my flock of free-range chicks like a very protective mother hen, keeping them hidden in the trees until danger passed. That is until I realized it was a turkey buzzard.

Our house is situated several hundred feet up the sloping foothills of Sumas Mountain (not to be confused with the other Sumas Mountain just across the Canadian border, and within sight of this Sumas Mountain). Between us and the Strait of Georgia lies the flats of Whatcom County, consisting of open farmland, residential acreage, woodlots, and the meandering Nooksack River. Driving along the lonely country roads into civilization is when I see most of the predator birds like hawks and the triplet of bald eagles whose nest is about a mile away in a dead tree visible from the second floor of our house. I know the predator birds could easily come up the hillside into the surrounding properties, but I never see them closer then a quarter mile away, preferring the open hay fields where I assume the pickings are greater than anything they can find up here.

That said, I feel quite secure letting my chickens roam, especially the more full-grown they get. But as I brought my first brood to adulthood, I used to run outside every time I’d hear a high-pitch screeching of the predators, which was often. It had become so often that there was a period late in our first autumn when I was stumped: every time I heard the hawk-screech I’d go outside to find no predator birds anywhere. It confounded me and I remained amazed at their powers of stealth and invisibility.

Then one day I figured it out.

I had run outside to check out a close-sounding screech, and patiently listened to the noise a few more times to locate its origin in the treetops near the driveway. I saw a flutter up there and thought, finally, I’ll be able to identify this predator and know what is potentially stalking my chickens! I waited and then saw a fucking Steller’s jay fly down into our driveway. I was stunned. The jay had made the hawk-like screech. Shaking my head I went inside, mystery solved, and set about to ignore the jay who cried hawk.

Curious about my discovery, I checked the Wiki on Steller’s jays. It is indeed common for them to mimic a hawk or falcon’s screech in order to clear a prime feeding/watering area of competition.

The following week, Will, working from home, came to me stricken with concern about the chickens because he had heard a hawk screeching nearby. I laughed and told him about our resident flock of jays. But to be sure, we went outside to make certain. It was them all right.

So I observed our clan. They love to hang around our fishponds, which are kept filled by a natural spring that runs almost year-round (except the dog-days of summer) and which is frequented by various varieties of avian friends.  Indeed the jays would continually swoop into the upper branches of nearby trees and screech. Flocks of little birds would scatter for safety from the fake threat. Then the clan of four jays would descend upon the pond area to drink and peck around free from the multitudes that had only moments before been in their way.

“Hey! I’m an eagle!”

The Rat

Rats truly are the stuff of nightmares. When infesting your home and sneaking around your children’s rooms at night, eating your foodstores, stealing your chicken feed: rats are pesky. When we first moved to the Everson house it was overrun with rats. And you know for every one you see/kill there are forty more hidden away from view. Still, we trapped, baited, waited and cleaned up the destruction in their wake. First they made a home in my car engine and nibbled through enough wires to render my vehicle inoperable. Then they chewed into every plastic bag in the pantry and made a food cache inside some empty egg cartons. They drank brazenly from the dog water bowl some mornings as we watched in awe from the kitchen table, not ten feet away.

One morning, shortly after we moved in, Will woke early, as was his habit. It was still dark outside, and cold. It was perhaps October or November. I was asleep snug in my bed, but woke up briefly when I heard a bang. It was an unfamiliar sound and my sleepy brain went through the litany of possible things it could be, as I listened for continued clues as to whether I needed to get up or not. When I determined it wasn’t my two-year-old son calling out (as he did most nights) and didn’t think it sounded like anyone else was in distress, I fell back asleep. When I awoke a few hours later I was told what happened.

Will had woken early and was, er, doing business, on the toilet when he notices a huge-ass Norway rat drinking water from the dog’s bowl on the other side of the bathroom. The rat notices him at about this time, stands on two feet regarding Will regard him. It is clear something is wrong with the rat – indeed later that day we checked online for the symptoms and signs of rat poisoning and our rat was certainly in the final moments of his life. Will said his nose was bloody and he swayed as he stood on his haunches.

Despite its compromised condition, it was still a fucking Norway rat and it was 5am and Will had no glasses, no shoes, no pants, no tool in which to do away with this dying animal. I’m not sure if he found it nearby, or left the bathroom momentarily for it, but he decided to trap the rat inside a metal mesh wastepaper basket: the best he could do at that time and space. So, basket in hand, he lunges for the rat, who hops into the bathtub to Will’s left. Will turns and slams the overturned trash can atop the creature with a giant bang – the same bang that briefly awoke me in the next room. He then slips a bit of cardboard under the basket and proceeds to carry it outside.

But the can was mesh and rats have climby, and so Will was struck with a massive case of the oogies as he sees the rat, huge, bloody, terrified and squirmy, clinging to the side of the cage at arms length. He just makes it to the door, not five feet from the bathtub/water dish area wherein this whole ordeal began.

It was cold outside. Freezer cold. Teens and Twenty degrees Fahrenheit cold. Will took two steps outside into the frigid fall morning and set down the wastepaper basket, still upside-down, rat still clinging to its side. He may have anchored it with something heavy on its top, I don’t know. Regardless, considering its condition and the outside temperatures, the rat didn’t have long.

We went back out to look at our rodent-cicle after I awoke. It was several hours later but the outside temps hadn’t risen more then a degree or two. The rat was flat against the ground, frozen solid. It was indeed a sight, accompanied with its own Pulp Fiction style story of Will, standing in the bathroom eyeing his immediate surroundings for the proper weapon/receptacle with which to do away with his mortal enemy.

Since that day I have found and eradicated no less than 20 rat and mouse carcasses from in/around our house/attic/garage. The house is no longer infested inside, that is to say aside from a little mouse activity under the counters I don’t see evidence of rats stealing food and making stores. They certainly don’t bother the kids’ rooms anymore, not since I literally filled every nook and cranny with spray-on insulating foam, blocked holes with floorboards, and walled off the largest access hole into the upstairs bedrooms.

Rats still creep me out, for sure. I don’t like the idea of them living near us but I realize it’s an inevitable and regular part of life regardless if you live in the city or country. Still, I have become somewhat desensitized to them because of their frequency out here on “the farm.”

One June a few years back, Will’s company sent him to a conference in New Orleans. I accompanied him; my first trip to Louisiana and NOLA. I had a fantastic time, roaming the French Quarter while Will was in lectures all day, wandering in and out of fabulous old bookshops, eating beignets with my morning coffee, drinking fresh-squeezed lemonade and watching live jazz after lunch, meandering the many museums and earning a new appreciation for the state and the south.

One evening on that trip Will and I walked through Jackson Park and up to the Moon Walk promenade, which parallels the Mississippi River and Decatur Street. It was a pleasant, clear, and warm evening. As we strolled we approached a family sitting on a park bench off to our left. They were watching us approach and sort of laughing? maybe smirking? it was hard to see in the dark. When we were just about next to them a huge rat comes lumbering out of the rocks on our right, not three feet in front of where we were walking. We stopped, passively watching it saunter across the path and into the rocks and weeds next to the train tracks. Then we continued on. The family was now watching us with a kind of awe.

“We thought you were gonna run screaming for sure!” the father of the family said as his troupe broke into laughter. They told us they had been watching the rat for several minutes now, and the other people who walked by it were understandably freaked out by its entitled presence. We laughed merrily back at them, and quickly explained we “lived on a farm” and were “used to that sort of thing.”

It was the understatement of a lifetime, but at least it earned us brownie-points to these southern, borderline tricksters who would rather watch us yelp then warn us that a disease-ridden rodent the size of a miniature dog was upon us.

 

The Worm

When Anya was in kindergarten, she liked to collect living things like bugs, worms, spiders, etc. Usually they were kept in jars with screen-tops until they die or are released back into the wild. Her favoritest thing to collect was worms, but we haven’t come up with the best place to keep them just yet. Once, she found an earthworm in the yard and devised a worm house out of an old mesh pencil holder, filled it with dirt and leaves and sprinkled the top with water. She buried her worm carefully in the dirt where I presume it was happy and snug.

The next day I was tilling the garden and found the biggest nightcrawler I had ever seen. Like I jumped back a bit thinking it was a small snake. (If you don’t know, nightcrawlers are the largest variety of earthworm. Standard earthworms average three or four inches long, nightcrawlers average eight or nine.) Usually comfortable handling worms and smaller-sized ‘crawlers, I found myself fighting off a massive case of The Oogies as I carried my treasure upstairs to Anya’s worm house; how she’d love this prize! By the time I got upstairs, I was sufficiently tired of handling the wriggling monster, so I simply plopped it down on top of the dirt and left, expecting it to burrow down and make itself a nice home.

When Anya came home from school that afternoon I ran upstairs to retrieve the worm house, boasting all the while to her about The Big One I caught for her. Dumping the contents of the pencil holder onto a plate we sifted through the dirt. We found her original worm and the leaves she picked for it. But no nightcrawler. Re-packing the dirt I realized the top of the dirtline was less than an inch below the lip of the cup, a simple wall for a big snake-like worm to scale. Back upstairs I applied every ounce of forensic technique I’ve acquired throughout the years consuming countless detective, mystery, hospital, FBI, and Nancy Drew media.

From the night stand where the cup had been placed I saw a dirt splotch on the floor directly below. Then nothing. I started picking up nearby toys and peering underneath the dresser, bed, and carpet edges. Nothing. So I thought like a worm: where would I go to burrow somewhere safe and dark in this room? I picked up the carpet again. I shook out the dangling edge of the comforter. I opened up her unicorn pillow-pet and aha! saw a smudge of mucus and dirt as though the worm had tried to burrow up into it. I felt around, my case of The Oogies returning. The unicorn did not appear to have the worm inside its many folds and creases but I couldn’t be sure. I did another perimeter check, this time with a flashlight. Nothing.

I explained all this to Anya and she asked me the standard: it can’t crawl into my bed tonight can it? No, I replied, it cannot. Although, I thought quietly to myself, this one might. Anya seemed OK with a renegade nightcrawler the size of a small snake loose in her bedroom, but I was uneasy. That fucker was HUGE.

The next night as I was tucking her in I happened to spot it. It was dead, flat and stiff like a popsicle stick, and shriveled down to about five inches. It had crawled onto a bare patch of floor between her rug and dresser. It was a fair ways away from the night stand where it escaped, and I wondered where it had been hiding the night before and how far it had traveled around to come back to die in this spot. “It IS huge,” Anya remarked, unfazed, and tossed it in the garbage before settling into bed so I could read her the next chapter in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – ironically a story about a huge renegade snake loose in a castle.

At least my case of The Oogies is gone.

Where good creepie-crawlies go to die.

See? Oogie.

The Fence

Will likes to call my chickens “little cluckers.” At first this was funny and maybe a little offensive. I loved my birds! They were so entertaining to watch, scratching around the yard, waddle-running from food source to food source, bok-boking and generally being great pets that yielded enough sellable eggs to mostly offset their feed costs.

But the poop. Chickens poop everywhere. Just about all the time. You can’t train them like a dog to go in a certain area. There are chicken diapers, but, well, diapers. (Also: eeew!) After growing the flock to about 22 birds we noticed the poop was starting to cover everything. No matter that it was only 22 birds on 3 acres, they still pooped all day long. It was everywhere we wanted to be.

The funny thing about chickens is you can’t train them to respect boundaries. Right away they decided my 3-acres of grass, garden, grubs, trees, leaves, compost and shelter wasn’t enough. Oh no. They had to travel to the neighbors’ yards to enjoy her grass, gardens, grubs, trees, leaves, compost and shelter. To the extent that I have spent two years trying to corral and cajole and otherwise convince the chickens that hey, my 3-acres is plenty of space for you greedy little biddies, please stay over here please.

But chickens don’t listen so good.

And so one day my neighbor called to order a dozen eggs, as was her weekly custom. But this phone call was different. The chickens, who she usually liked to watch scratching her yard, were getting into her vegetable garden and eating her starts, scratching up her wildflower seeds, uprooting her spring bulbs. Could I call them back to my property? I certainly did just that, giving her permission to sic her little dogs on them to chase them away next they invaded her world. The next several weeks I re-trained the birds back to my yard, spreading way more feed then I could afford in the back pasturelands, up the hill, under the trees they never ventured around, over into the other neighbor’s yards where there weren’t prized gardens to protect. This tactic worked, and despite a few hiccups, the chickens mostly left alone the off-limits house.

Then I got a batch of spring chicks. A whole new generation of birds to grow up and train to respect boundaries, to come when called, to teach to return to the small fenced yard every night. The last three generations of chicks fared rather well; their training was brief and simple. But this year’s flock was different. These new birds, 10 in total, were ornery and naughty and stupid and took every opportunity to go, en masse, to the off-limits house and feast upon the now plump and luscious vegetables, flowers, etc. Additionally, there were two “wild” chickens that yet another neighbor had given me: they slept in trees, flew every coop, and were basically rogue birds who abided by no rules. They and the now “teenager” chicks invaded my poor neighbor’s yard daily. The two wild birds often sauntered straight into her house to eat her dog food and poop on her carpet. The tone and frequency of her phone calls to report the latest shenanigans caused me much anxiety. No amount of cajoling or chicken feed was solving this problem. Worst yet, her two small dogs were starting to run into the busy road while several-times daily chasing my chickens away and we worried they’d be hit defending their property. Things were fast spiraling out of control.

It was time to build a fence.

I had not wanted to build a fenced area for the chickens, regardless how large, for many reasons. First off, despite ravaged gardens, myself and my neighbors (including the off-limits neighbor) all love seeing the chickens roaming our yards and being generally fun and funny. We all love the eggs and like the free-rangedness that this community provides them. All these neighbors had been very patient with the birds, and completely understanding of their chicken natures. Until they became destructive beyond acceptable limits and therefore problematic. Or, as I eventually admitted to Will, yes they were being cluckers. Big.Fat.Cluckers.

But a fence is final and easy once built and I did admit after its completion that it was nice not to have to step on/around poop everywhere I went. It was nice not to shoo them away every time the kids and I sat for picnics. It was nice that they weren’t scratching up my ornamental garden anymore.

What wasn’t nice, however, was the frequency at which the chickens escaped the confines of their fence. Never mind that we gave them an acre to themselves – a whole acre! – and did our best to include as many trees and shelters/covers as possible. Never mind their only food-scraps, feed, and water was now inside the fence. No, that wasn’t good enough. They were escaping in droves. I was living in a real-life version of Chicken Run, inspecting daily the fence and patching holes and raising low-spots, stringing yards of netting, and blocking every conceivable exit point I could think of. (“Mr. Tweedy, what’s that chicken doing outside the fence?” –Mrs. Tweedy) Reports from the neighbor were indicating things were better, so I could live with a few escapees in my yard so long as they left the off-limits house alone.

To this day I am still fighting escaped chickens. My rogue birds are the ones that brazenly enter the neighbor’s house and they are the ones that consistently escape, presumably over the fence, and clipping their wings has done little to deter this behavior. They and a few others still roam free most days. And so my fence-building escapades continue as I forever match wits and wills against they, the Chickens of Morchin Farm.

…cluckers…

Busy plotting their next escape.  (“The chickens, they’re organized!” –Mr. Tweedy)

The Fall

Autumn is pleasant and relaxed. Autumn is a warm drink on a cool day. Autumn is a slow decay into winter’s cold grasp, true, but it is also a respite from summer’s smothering omnipresence. Autumn is windy, rainy and chill. Autumn is warm, dry and comfortable.

Autumn is colorful. Green grass returns where summer scorched fields brown. The green leaves of the shady tree canopy retire their chlorophyll collecting and instead turn to storing nutrients in roots, draining leaves of essence so that deciduous rainbows burst forth across the countryside, ebbing into brown, falling into naked hibernation.

If summer is marking time surviving the heat, then autumn is a celebration of life and the beginning of a renewal that, when awakened in spring, will burst forth to remind us with color anew that time flows onwards in patterns and poetry.

Autumn is fog and mist. Autumn is converging air currents and churning cloud formations. Autumn envelops the land in drab and dreary. Autumn yells and howls. Autumn is orange with pumpkins and harvest celebration. Autumn is crisp, stars twinkle brighter through sweet air, planets meandering across the horizon. Autumn is calm and still.

Autumn remembers.

The kids’ jack-o-lanterns, Oct 2015.

The Wind

I have lived through some pretty scary windstorms in my lifetime, though nothing near a hurricane or tornado or anything, so I guess technically I’m not much of an aficionado. But relatively speaking, as far as gusty wind is concerned, the Puget Sound area has its doozies. Seattle windstorms are strong and powerful, but feel in general lofty and dissipated; maybe it’s too far south from the source or perhaps gets its wind from other means. The winds here puts everything else I’ve ever felt to shame.

To. Shame.

Known in these parts as the dreaded “nor’easters” they come barreling down the Fraser River Valley in the cleft between Canada’s Coast Mountains and the Cascade Range. The winds rush, gush, gale, gust, moan, groan and every other kind of spooky wind adjective you can think of. The striking gusts feel like angry ocean surf pounding against the house. I have heard voices, yelling, singing, shouting and other such bizarre and “Who’s there?” kind of moments, especially at night, and especially at night when Will is out of town. The constant rushing around the house creates a loud din, similar to the ever-present whooshing sound one hears on an airplane: inescapable, punctuated by turbulence, and instills the desire to never, ever open the door. Our house sits slightly above the valley floor, nestled against the foothills of Sumas Mountain, and therefore is shielded from the worst of it, which I hear can gust to 80+mph out in the open flatlands. When the nor’easters hit our first November in this farmhouse, wind advisories warned of 35mph winds with 50mph gusts.

Wind moves things. The toys in containers that are usually stored against the side of the house got strewn across the yard, the road, the creek, the gully, into the neighboring acreage. Same for my large stacks of flower pots/containers. Also buckets. Oh, and lawn chairs.

And then there’s the trampoline. The safety netting around it acted as a sail, eventually inching the entire thing forward about 20ft from its original position along the treeline behind the swing set. By the time I noticed, it was 5-feet in front of the swing set, as if the two were in a slow race towards the side of the house and the trampoline had just broken out ahead. The thing had also rotated so that the zipper-door faced a different direction, and one of the metal poles holding the safety net was bent inward at a 45-degree angle. It looked like it had been hit by a truck. We bent it back and cautiously continued to utilize the still-good toy.

The next year another windstorm hit and though we battened down the hatches and secured everything we could think of, we had failed to bury, tie or otherwise secure the trampoline over the course of the previous several months. Again a wind advisory warning was issued for the county. Again the wind raged against our house. That afternoon I happened to be talking to Will in the living room when we heard a THUNK right outside the front door. I had a sneaking suspicion it was a toy or bucket that had flown up against the side of the house but I was unprepared to find myself FACE TO FACE with the trampoline upon opening my front door. The thing had flown, its safety nets like a sail, across the yard, narrowly missing our cars by mere feet, and crashing into the wall underneath a small window.

The house was unharmed: a metallic scuffmark in the paint was all the damage sustained. Trampoline? Not so much. Nearly all its safety poles were pointing the wrong way, the main circular framework was bent, and the legs were torn apart at several soldering seams. Unsalvageable as a trampoline, though we saved the mesh fabric for some possible future usage.

Wind. Wind did this. When it was blowing. Scary, scary wind.

Usually the willow isn’t visible from this window.