Judging and Not Judging Mammary Capacity

CHICKEN WITH CAT

GOAT ON RABBITS

We are hobby farmers. Hobby farmers live in a relative rural setting, dabble in various kinds of “farming,” and have the knowing of a lot of fascinating farm facts. Or as my son-in-law observed, “ Farming means buying animals that poop and then moving the poop around.”

True.

Poop moving accounts for approximately seventy-three percent of time usage on the typical hobby farm, and clever, new uses for poop or the moving of poop is always exciting news, proving that hobby farmers are inquisitive people eager to know new stuff.

Knowing new stuff is ninety three percent of why a person would take up farming for a hobby in the first place.

Over the years I’ve learned a few important life lessons because of my hobby:

EVERYTHING THAT GETS ITSELF BORN ENDS UP IN A NEATLY DUG BACKHOE HOLE IN THAT BIG PASTURE IN THE SKY—EVENTUALLY. Life is transient and precious, so kick up your heels when spring finally shows up and the sun finally shines down.

MOTHER NATURE IS A B*TCH.  When a mother rabbit gives birth to a deformed, three-legged baby, she will calmly carry it to a far corner of the cage and abandon it—or eat it. Mother nature does not waste time, energy, or resources on diversity.

MOTHER NATURE IS A B*TCH.  And we human beings are not animals. We may have hair, warm blood, and mammary glands, but we also have wheel chairs.

EVERYTHING POOPS.  So stop pretending that you don’t.

ROOSTERS DO NOT LAY EGGS.  Hopefully, this does not require an explanation.

FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS. Except when you try to help your neighbor corral his rampaging steer by vaulting the communal gate, dislocate your knee, and wind up without important ligaments in your knee. Then fences are like Mother Nature.

LIFE IS NOT ONE LITTLE BIT FAIR.  Even after doing everything right, the pony still colic’s and dies, the coyotes still carry off newborn lambs, oranges still freeze back to the rootstock, and cutworms still invade like a Nazi panzer tank division cutting the tomato plants slap down to the well mulched ground. It’s possible that without divine help and assistance we are all dead men.

AND SOMETIMES LIFE IS A 1^ST PLACE RIBBON AT THE OSCEOLA COUNTY FAIR, because your Nubian milk goat has a “mammary capacity that cannot be denied. We have our grand champion!!” And that means that you own a goat with the biggest teats in twenty-three counties, and life is good.

So let’s recap. Hobby farming gets us off the city streets, out of the rat race, and back into the fields where we belong. Otherwise, we run the risk of thinking that chicken eggs are created in Styrofoam egg cartons in the dairy section at Wal*Mart.

Linda (Scooping Poop) Zern

     

 

Putting the F in Family

Someone is always throwing up or urinating or defecating on or around our home each and every weekend. We have ten grandchildren. The oldest is nine. The whole bunch lives five minutes away from us. Do the math.

A lot of people told my husband and me that we were too young to get and stay married. We didn’t listen. We just staggered to the edge of the cliff of life and jumped off. Our oldest child was born thirteen months later.

One of my most vivid, blurry moments of those impossible early years is that of my young husband and new father—naked—stomping around the bedroom, gathering up our wailing first born, sinking (still naked) into the rocking chair, and shouting, “Back to the damn chair.” I know why he cussed, but I can’t remember why he was naked. That part is still fuzzy. Assorted stomping silliness, sans clothes, ensued for the next two decades.

With the help of organized religion and sheer tenacity we managed to raise a United States combat soldier, a ballerina with a degree in dance education, a political science major, and a organizational communications major. So, if you need someone to shoot straight, dance angelically, or talk passionately about politics, we’re your people.

I like to say that we didn’t raise our children to kiss us, as much as we raised them to kiss their children. And they do, because . . .

Firstly:  Our children actually had children or as my son-in-law declared to my daughter, while fleeing a public park with a possessed, head spinning, screeching toddler, “Our life is already crap. We might as well have more kids.”

Secondly:  They chose family over “fun.”  A lot of young married folks like to say that they’ll have kids after they stop having “fun.” Come to our house; I’ll show you some fun.  Or as great grandpa Zern said—as he watched Conner (7) get his loose tooth pulled by Uncle T. J., Sadie (4) sail by in a Fisher Price Dune Buggy, Zoe (9) dig a series of “honey badger” nests, and Kip (4) pee on some ants, “This is better than television. I should have brought my movie camera.”

And Thirdly:  Of children, it is said, “For of such is the kingdom of Heaven.” Then we must conclude that Heaven is a noisy, busy, joyous place. Or as Zoe said when she noticed the full moon for the first time as a tiny little girl, “Wow!”

After one particularly rowdy family event my husband shook his head and said, “There was public urination, wrestling while nude, and sword fighting. It’s like being at a medieval bar.”

Or a frat house on Saturday night where someone is always throwing up, urinating, or defecating in public.

And that starts with ‘F’ and that begins the fun and that stands for family.

Linda (Fun Stuff) Zern

           

CABING FEVER FLING

The first time I contracted cabin fever I came very close to committing murder, and my husband of thirty plus years came whisker close to having his skull bashed in with a baseball bat. The two events were connected. 

 My husband got me to move to a state with north in the title by telling me, that while it got brisk in the wintertime, it never snowed, or at last report, there had not been snow in North Carolina since the Civil War.

I bought it. We moved. Our first winter arrived. There was a freak snowstorm that dumped two feet of snow across a sheet of glacier ice, which floated over a river of liquid sleet, piled on top of hell—which had, in fact, frozen over. The fine state of North Carolina was, to put it nicely, not ready. Our little band of strangers in a strange land was snowed in for two weeks.

I was not ready. 

I contracted cabin fever on day two of our entrapment. Cabin fever is a malady that causes the sufferer to experience irrational irritations over seemingly minor annoyances magnified by a factor of about twelve, times the national debt, multiplied by 666. An infected person gets stinky mean.

Until we were  “snowed in” or as I liked to describe it “buried alive,” I had not really noticed that my darling husband had been saying exactly the same thing every single morning of every single day, for the entire span of our thirty years of marriage.

HE HAS SAID THE EXACT SAME THING, EVERY SINGLE MORNING OF EVERY SINGLE DAY, FOR THIRTY YEARS –THE EXACT SAME THING—EVERY! SINGLE! DAY!

Every morning he has sat straight up in bed and said, “Well, I guess I’ll go and get cleaned up now.” 

And it’s not JUST that he says the EXACT SAME THING. It’s WHAT he’s saying. He “guesses” he’s going to get cleaned up! What would the alternatives be? To get up but not get “cleaned up” and walk around with a Wooly Mammoth on his face all day, or to not get up at all, remain in bed in his own filth, and eventually have his skin grow into the mattress (and yes, that can happen, I saw it on TV!) 

By day five or six of being snowed in and with a cabin fever of about 212 degrees, I had not only picked up on this unfortunate verbal pattern, but I had started waiting for the inevitable, predictable, rhythmic cadence of his morning declaration like a cobra tracking the movements of a wounded mongoose.

On day seven, I rolled towards him and with eyes narrowed to slits and with a reptilian hiss said, “Sherwood, Do you know that you say the exact same thing, every single day, and that if you say it tomorrow I can’t be held accountable. There is a baseball bat under this bed. It is for crushing the brains out of the heads of robbers, but I will use it--on you--if you repeat yourself ever again. I swear it.” 

He backed carefully away from his side of the bed, his eyes focused like laser beams on my face.

“I mean it. I’ll do it.”  By this time, I had quit brushing stuff (hair, teeth) . I was close to terminal.

That day passed as snow drifted, settled, melted, and re-froze.  I floated in our garden tub like a giant lily pad in water hot enough to blanche carrots. The night brought another ice storm and the sound of tree trunks blowing up. The water inside the trees froze, expanded, and then exploded, sending splinters of wood catapulting away into the night—also into the siding of the houses. Trees toppled. Expensive landscaping froze to death. Morning came. 

I waited under the blankets. Wrapped in knee socks, flannel pajamas, a bathrobe, and an overcoat, I lovingly stroked the baseball bat that I clutched to my chest hidden under the covers. Tension pulsated through my hands and fingers and hair, as I lay in wait, er . . . I mean . . . waiting for my husband to wake up.

Sitting straight up in bed, he said, “I guess I’ll go and . . .”

My hands tightened around the baseball bat. He paused and got strangely still, the way a rabbit goes still when it smells fangs.

“I guess I’ll go and . . . get a shower.”

Adrenalin oozed from between my fingers. I relaxed. He showered. The thaw came.

Winter in Florida is a bit different. We have a few of those murky winter days that make going out an ugly business, so we put on a sweater and walk fast to the car. I haven’t had cabin fever as much as cabin canker sores.

As I write this, Sherwood is in bed calling me on his cell phone. He is, literally, ten feet away from my desk, sending a signal into outer space, so that it can bounce off a satellite and ricochet back to earth. He’s propositioning me.  Sometimes he calls me on his cell phone from the bathroom to ask me for toilet paper.

Spring cannot come soon enough.

Linda (Spring Fling) Zern