the Dig and Flow

Up a Creek

True to character, Sam will not release the crayfish, even while its pinch on his finger is making him howl. His persistence is one of his strengths, I often remind myself.

“Just let it go,” I tell him.

“No. Owww! I want it,” he says, juggling his fingers while the claws keep grabbing him until he manages the unpinchable tail hold, looks up at me, and grins.

We’ve been creek swimming with our kids since they were in diapers, across Alabama and Georgia. They grew up in sandy creeks, swamp creeks, creeks cobbled with multicolored stones. Now we’re dabbling in the shallows of Schoharie Creek, not far from where it joins the Mohawk River, our watershed here in New York, which lacks the South’s poisonous snakes and diversity of native freshwater mussels.

We’ve heard rumors of mussels in Schoharie Creek, and Andrew brought snorkels and a viewbucket to search for them here. He wades a short distance upstream from us, straps on his snorkel mask, then flops into the water. Our puppy, Skip, with the overactive sense of responsibility that plagues herding dogs, follows him up the bank, then plunges in heroically behind him, swimming towards his prostrate body. She reaches him, scrabbles up onto his back, and perches there, keeping watch while he searches the creek bottom for mussels.

These native mussels, not good to eat, offer a feast of biological wonder. They captured our hearts in the South, the global hotspot for mussel diversity. First, I loved their names: fatmucket, pistolgrip, heelsplitter, shinyrayed pocketbook, pigtoe, snuffbox, washboard, three-horn wartyback. Then, their reproductive tricks astonished me; they lure fish to host their parasitic larval stage. Also, they’re endangered, thanks to human-driven damages to creeks and rivers.

Freshwater mussels range in size from thumbnail to dinnerplate. They encase themselves in smooth or ridged or pimpled shells that are brown or black or yellow, some with dark stripes fanning across them, some without. Mussels always have a pearly lining—white, pink, deep violet.

This lining glimmers on the few shell shards that Andrew can find on the creek bottom, marking them as the remains of native mussels. Otherwise, this piece of Schoharie Creek seems mussel-less. A creek without mussel seems less alive to me, but the beauty here woos me anyway.

Forested hills frame some cliffs of angled stone, that has shed chunks of rock along the creek bank. Across from where the kids and I wade, the water pools invitingly, and Sam will later practice his own snorkeling there.

Just upstream of our crayfish and snorkeling spot, large rocks form a shoal, where the creek speeds up and thins over the rocks. Water pours over edges, curving into cracks and churning in holes. The water level, lower than average, allows us to wade across the creek on this rock pavement.

Sam and Stella monkey along, dangling from our hands and squat-scooting through the water. Skip worries, unable to follow at our heels, shivering as her fluff slicks against her surprisingly scrawny body. We carry her until she warily curls onto a warm rock, still vigilant as we swim.

This is how we play. We need hours like these, away from farm projects and jobs and the daily needs of everything. Our limbs loosen in the flowing water. The creek sings over the shoals, constant trickle-rush sounds that both invigorate and relax us. We can see our challenges as our strengths, our own pearly linings. We can watch each other laughing and jump in together.

On Mowing: Slow Walk, Big Sky

The sky is moody. Here, the towering golden cumulus. There, the open unstained blue. Now, a dark-bellied cloud creeps over the East. Then, a generous break, dotted with benign puffs. Now, again, a threat of rain. Awash in such shifting feelings, I am a wreck. But with this mosaic of emotion, the sky looks exalted.

Under this sky, I mow. I burn one zillion calories pushing our red Huskee through the grass-weeds, and not very fast. I watch as the broad burdock leaves, dandelions, and occasional blister-causing wild parsnip tidy into a yard. The curving garden beds emerge—small watermelons, hidden zucchini!

Rapid-fire efficiency is not always my forte, I have realized. I can tend to listen a little too long to a client’s stories in the exam room. In surgery, my hands move at their own pace, making sure, resisting speed. My hands do the same thing pulling weeds, washing dishes, chopping veggies, painting walls, typing, eating—not slowly, not fast.

Also, I distract. Small, lovely things distract me. Interesting sounds. Stray odors. Shiny objects. Anything funny. While I am capable of deep focus, the world is often irresistible. Mowing on this big sky day, I find myself yielding to the dark moth with yellow-edged wings. I pause for the electric-looking grasshopper, the ebony cricket, a bumblebee (pollinator), a thumbnail-sized frog (adorable).

I consider a woman in Ohio suburbia, penalized this summer by her local township for choosing not to mow. Sarah Baker simply weeded her yard, removing invasive plants and allowing waist-high vegetation to invite wildlife, until the township forced her to trim the yard to eight inches tall with a scythe. I applaud Sarah’s reinvention of her yard; we all define our boundaries in context.

I consider this farmyard last summer, with shoulder-high burdock, fringed with wild (poison) parsnip, the goldenrod, the milkweed, the thistles. How do we best coax this landscape into a healthy system?

Our farm contains the mowed and the unmowed. The large, sloping hay field has begun to regrow, after first cutting. Just beyond the grass we keep short around our garden, various plants rise quickly in the fertile soil around the wetland. The woodlot was a cow pasture until about 25 years ago, when grazers stopped keeping it short. When my dad visits, he takes “Eloise” the tractor and brush hogs our lower field, much too large an area to weed out invasive plants. In the evenings, we walk the edges, short and long.

As I mow, my ear covers mute the engine into white noise as I place one foot at a time—a walking, sweating meditation. Earlier this summer, my first hours behind this mower were stormy, with furrowed brow and muttered cursing. Heading uphill, my body bent ninety degrees at the waist just to keep moving. Both the yard and I are in better shape now. I can walk upright. I can spot fragile creatures in the grass. I can watch the sky.

The Things With Feathers

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all –

~ Emily Dickinson

Dawn drifted across the lower field with tufts of mist. Cool air made the ninety-degree forecast seem impossible, even though it was true. Our Cornish cross chickens had fasted overnight, as in preparation for a sacred ritual. We ate our five a.m. breakfast, but did not eat again until all was finished, late in the afternoon.

I hoisted the picnic table to an ideal spot, where the cedar limbs draped over it, and propped it level with scrap boards. Our largest enamel canner full of water heated on the stove. Andrew carted the new-to-us chicken plucker—a stainless steel drum lined with black rubber fingers—into position not far from the table. This contraption would pluck three chickens in less than ten seconds, vast improvement from plucking one chicken in over ten minutes.

We scooted the chicken tractor, a moveable shelter with an open bottom, onto fresh grass for the birds’ last morning. All day I found crisp green blades poking from an esophagus or a gizzard, evidence of how these chickens spent their final minutes.

Two metal cones, pointing downward, hung from our black locust clothesline post, with buckets below them. Each chicken squawked once or twice as Andrew snagged them from the grassy pen, making their typical “hey, you grabbed me” sound, not a panicked chicken yell. They traveled down the yard quietly, tucked under his arm. He slid them, headfirst, into the cone, swiftly, without fuss. They rested there, swaddled upside-down, strangely calm in this position.

Throughout the day I took a few photos, I told our friend that evening, who seemed surprised. “Will you be making a horror show?” he asked, half joking. I paused. It was true that the work had been messy, with blood and guts. There was killing. There were dead bodies. There was no horror.

At one point, mid-morning, Stella sat near me on our tree swing, swaying gently. She watched Andrew approaching the killing cones with a chicken and started crying, “Get me down, Mom!” I rushed over to release her, to allow her to run away. As soon as her kicking feet hit the ground, she made a beeline for Andrew.

I watched her stand firm beside him, the chicken’s head at her eye level. She had been sad earlier, wanting to keep the chickens “the way they are.” Now she faced the moment head-on, teaching me again about courage and wonder. Then she turned, dance-running back towards me, chanting, “It’s gonna be yum yum yum yum yummy!”

Does it feel strange, our friend wondered, that your job is to help animals? Absolutely. As a veterinarian, I pour my energies into piecing animals back together, keeping them alive. But this work, too—raising birds from chicks to meat without small cages or long highway rides—fulfills my veterinary oath: the protection of animal health, the relief of animal suffering. In this work, too, I find hope.

All day, a breeze blew through the cedar canopy where I stood, taking apart chickens. Their now-bald skin, soft and cool under my fingers, yielded to my knife. I reached into their still-warm interiors to tease out the tubes and pieces of life, understanding each tender tissue and its job. I saved their hearts, like grapes, and their noble livers, smooth and dense, the color of passion. Sometimes in our work we get the chance to indulge in reverence.

2015-07-27 19.24.42 — Supervising this process is exhausting.

And a Dog

Someday there will be words for how we loved our dog Mesa across the first thirteen years of our marriage, five different states, and two children. Someday I will write how we parted ways in Georgia, our hands running over and over her familiar spots, releasing her. Meantime, I’ve had a dog-shaped hole in me.

It took me a year to be ready to fill that hole. Then, this summer, I found myself combing the rescue groups, impressed that mutt adoptions in New York require screening so rigorous that even after dedicating my career to dogs, I barely seemed to qualify. In other places we’ve lived—especially Arizona and Alabama—the puppy surplus allowed you to adopt a dog just by showing up. Several local rescue groups here actually import puppies from the Deep South to loving, carefully screened, homes in the Northeast.

We (okay, I) eventually found a litter of mixed breed puppies, born to a lovely mutt—rescued while heavily pregnant—who seemed Australian Shepherd-ish and some kind of spaniel-ish. Faced with her litter of twelve puppy internet photos, I picked one.

“Sam, we’ll need to think about what we want to name the puppy,” I said, the day before we got her.

He gazed into the distance, then announced, “Skip.”

I congratulated his idea as one for the list of ideas, then we consulted Stella, who echoed that Skip was a great name. They quickly became a united front on this issue. “You got to name our other pets,” they argued, which was true, since our other pets were a decade older than our kids.

So Skip, our now 8 week-old little girl puppy, has joined the family. She seems not only smart, but wise for her age. Skip has good intuitions about playing right with kids, ducks, and other dogs. She’s house training quickly, shadows us everywhere around the farm, and sleeps upside-down with her soft belly exposed.

I will never truly understand why we keep opening our hearts to these creatures who will inevitably shatter us with their death. I do know that some part of me requires occupation by a dog. I know that nothing can replace those ears flying backwards as a furry body bounds towards me, those eyes meeting mine and understanding something about me, that warm puppy sleeping trustingly across my arms.

Having a Field Day

It was one of those moments when you wonder, “Is this really a good idea?” But you proceed anyway, having already overthought it and needing to get the job done.

My dad sat on the tractor, grinning his nervous confident grin. Sam and Stella perched by the barn with my mom, well beyond danger. I stood far off with the camera, using the zoom to document the action. Andrew hoisted his chainsaw and stepped up to the base of the tree.

Without a doubt, the Eastern white cedar needed to go. It was eating the house. Someone had planted it too close to the front door about 75 years ago—a date we confirmed when Andrew counted its rings. Across those decades, no one invited it to leave, allowing it to thicken and loiter by the front stoop. Now its trunk was wider than I could embrace.

I always feel a sentimental hesitation about cutting down trees. The tree falls so fast and irreversibly, while growing a replacement seems so slow. Any tree we plant will not attain 75 rings in my lifetime. And big trees are so lovely, I sigh, and provide shade and windbreak. Never mind the branches on the roof and the roots threatening the cellar.

By the big day, I had resolved my tree-romantic doubts, and my qualms were more logistical. We’d roughly estimated the tree height, then borrowed our neighbor’s longer-than-the-tree-height rope, thick as my wrist. With the rope tied about thirty feet up the tree, then connected to our tractor Eloise, to provide a steady tug away from our roof, we were ready.

A farm provides constant opportunities to tackle physical challenges like this one. It’s like a never-ending, wacky field day. In addition to lumberjack-type events, we get to try our hands at rock heaving, burdock yanking, brush hogging, fence material grappling, and deer thwarting. With much practice, we’ve improved our times for the nail pry, turning old boards from porcupines into useful lumber. My dad and Andrew performed well in the 72-hour combination event—mortar slinging and stone stacking—that repaired our foundation.

While extending my stamina for the long bendover, I pulled weeds and perfected my slug toss. (Pro tip: Balling the slug with a bit of mud yields the best trajectories from the garden into the duck pen.). Since it’s been rainy, many events involve mud, including the naked garden run, which has, so far, been an event for the five and under crowd. Mud runs seem to be gaining national popularity, however, so we’re glad to be at the cutting edge.

Most of our efforts take place without an audience, but while Andrew set chainsaw to cedar for our tree felling event, the five of us watching didn’t blink. He sliced a clean wedge, strategically angled away from the house. He reached into the wedge, brushing it clear, then revved the chainsaw into the trunk again. As I watched the tree top wiggle, I cheered like any finish line spectator: “Timberrrrr!”