Thursday, August 19th, 2010
When we started farming, one of the things Chet and I realized was how repetitious our life had become. We always wrote notes to ourselves. But on the farm, we found ourselves writing the same notes over and over again. So eventually we wrote permanent notes and kept them handy in the kitchen where they could easily be posted.
Right now I have three notes in the brass clip on the kitchen counter: ”Goat Hooves,” “Deliver Eggs,” and “Transfer Station.” But in the wooden box on the hutch, where I keep the tissue, there are a dozen other notes pre-written on scrap paper.
“LIVER” means I’m not supposed to forget that liver is thawing somewhere and if I don’t transfer it into the refrigerator when it is soft and mushy, it will become stinky mess. I make Moon’s dog treats out of liver from our cows. I have many pounds of liver in the freezer.
“TRACY” reminds me I am having breakfast with my girlfriend, Tracy, in the morning. Otherwise, guaranteed, she would be on her second cup of coffee at the diner and I would be risking getting a speeding ticket on a country road.
“Wine in the freezer” means I forgot or failed to anticipate the demand for cold white wine in my household, and to expedite the chill I have placed a bottle of white wine in the freezer where it will make an unbelievable mess if I forget to take it out before it freezes… Hmmm… How would you explain this to a child?
“Bea in the Bungalow” means the barn cat has come to the house seeking refuge and discovered the new puppy has first rights to the domicile, so she has made a bed for herself somewhere in the bungalow, and she expects her food to be served there, and door service.
“Vote” means you don’t usually do anything special on Tuesday, so if you didn’t remember to put this sign here, your patriotic duty would pass you by and you would have to lie to your friends about who you voted for.
“COLD FRAME” is intended to have a sense of urgency because we don’t love our cold frame the way we should. My housemate, Catherine, and I would not have remembered to water the cold frame in the dead of winter without this little piece of paper on the kitchen counter.
“CAT FOOD” means go buy your cat some food and don’t be late.
“CHICKEN FEED” means go buy your chickens some food or they will hang out around the house and torment you by pooping on the porch.
“WATER GARDEN” is for the buffoon who can’t remember they planted a vegetable garden this year.
“CLOSE CHICKEN DOOR” usually means we had company for dinner and we were just a little to artificially preserved to remember to go outside and close the chicken door when it got dark, something that needs to be done every night to keep foxes, raccoons, skunks, and opossums out of the chicken coop.
“Turn OFF Water” is the last sign in Chet’s handwriting. I couldn’t hear the sound of the water pump running until he died. I never heard the machines in the house. He would wake up in the middle of the night and say, “There’s water running somewhere.” I would do a mental inventory of possibilities and invariably remember I had left the water running in the garden or at a water trough. In the middle of the night I would trek across the farm to turn the water off so we (he) could sleep. Then he made this sign on the back of an old postcard and put it where I couldn’t miss it.
“Goats Hooves” means it’s time to trim the goats’ hooves. I tend to procrastinate about this and then when I finally do it my hands are sore for days and my clippers need sharpening.
“Deliver Eggs” is supposed to remind me to wash and pack eggs and label egg cartons, then drive them to the store. My favorite part about this is getting paid. This sign could just as easily say “Collect Money.”
“Transfer Station” reminds me to take out the garbage. We don’t have curbside trash removal service here on the farm. We have to take our pre-sorted trash to a transfer station where we load it into dumpsters and it is hauled away by trucks. Without the sign my trash would be collecting in all the wrong places.
Now that I’ve shared this deeply personal logistical information about my life, I am reminded just how mundane most of life is….
Tags: farming, slow living, Sustainability