As usual I find myself feeling more synchronized when I write up and check off items from a task list. Synchronized with what may be described variously as a happy outlook, simple fulfillment, accomplishment, etc. This being the first time since middle school that I am not doing work for which I receive a paycheck and some amount of professional rapport, I find that I’ve gotten used to measured achievement . . . Someone more yogic than I has probably moved beyond such external measurements, but I am still quite engaged in the world outside of my being and will use what I’ve learned to stimulate me here on the farm.
Coordinating the day with a general schedule helps enormously. For all of my 28 years of life, mornings have varied enormously. These days I take a half hour to stretch, an incredibly focusing series of minutes that I keep hearing helps out one’s body into older age. But also a series of quiet moments that have come to be a good compliment to the rest of the day. Spending hours pounding together the chicken coop over the last couple of days, a balance of less aggressive movements feels good. Or even the multiple shouts at the dogs chasing whatever critter unfortunate to catch their attention needs a counter.
The elder Mr. Wickes, Walter (now deceased) had a thing for rabbits. Thankfully he wasn’t cooky enough to keep an entire barnful of them caged or something equally atrocious to other animal gatherer stories (nor did he go down the more feminine tendency of decorating room after room in bunny paraphernalia, such that visitors were not only greeted by 20 garden big-eared sculptures but wallpaper and soap dispenser cottontails as well).

Rather, he bought domesticated rabbits . . . and then let them go! Nearby the stone house, the rabbits have congregated under several sheds. As I walk about I entertain myself with Watership Down tales, a favorite book of childhood. The dogs, of course, think they have arrived in heaven. After mixing with several of their wild kin, the markings on the bunnies is decidedly psychedelic: stripes with dots of calico, etc. They are quite lively at night and I dream of their grass-based dinners before group hops through the pastures. Sort of like the fox hound groups that storm through here on occasion, I imagine these bunnies as a tribe apart, albeit much softer on the land.
Ann and John Moss (who has been a friend of Michael’s since childhood) had us over for a deliciously creative meal recently; they’d made a trip to the Philly Asian market and upon their return concocted several dishes from their eoki mushrooms, squid, duck and other rarities.
These two have quite a barnyard – a Percheron named Unkie that John rides in reenactments (joisting and the like), two horses that Ann rides in dressage competitions (Helium and Grace), a couple of content pigs, chickens, and then some humpty dumpty chickens they raise to eat. In other words, birds that put on weight quickly and find it incredibly difficult to move around on their squat, fat legs running on a small heart.
Ann and I drove the little chunkies over to be butchered by Dutch Amish folk in Parksburg. Of her original batch of 30 chicks, only 12 arrived at their doomsday – the others having arrived there much earlier at the hands of a coon. In 35 minutes flat, the birds had been killed, drained, plucked and gutted. We gathered up the parts and wholes from the assembly line of related women and put them into a cooler to take home and seal-a-meal freeze into place for dinners down the road. Livers, hearts and kidneys also came home. The women chatted haphazardly in Pennsylvania Dutch as they did their work, hair tight in bonnets, dressed in rubber aprons over their calico dresses, legs in large rubber boots, hands nimbly trimming the slippery wet chickens with knives in positions most of us use only on apples. I have yet to kill a chicken, and I am hopeful these chances to watch the process will help me absorb the process. I keep wondering when and if the various Amish people I interact with will offer a smile.