New Life Old Farmers

More dumb luck on our part, but our new valley is abundant with fresh apricots.  We love apricots, fresh apricots, canned apricots, but especially apricot jam.  Sitting on our kitchen table is a darling bowl (once filled) with fresh apricots from our neighbor and a jar of apricot jam from the teen’s boyfriend all within 2 days.  We are delighted to be living not only where apricots grow, but where people are neighborly and share abundantly.  Once we stop ‘chain saw’ gardening and start some serious planting, I am sure a few apricot trees will be on the list.

With only two neighbors we are old enough to appreciate how blessed we are.  It is as if we have a ‘his & her’ set.  There is one gal neighbor for me, who enthusiastically viewed my few wedding pictures of the kids, informed us of an early morning estate sale and promises to keep an ‘eye’ out for loud bangs & smoke, while the teen boys are home alone.  Pat’s farmer pal is knowledgeable in all things, but still did manage to blush a bit when explaining to me that there were ‘male and female pumpkins’ (which I didn’t actually know).  Unfortunately for him their big tractor got stuck in the mud in the field next to our home, fortunately for my loving spouse, he was home at the time they were attempting to retrieve it, so he could ‘help’.

Our valley is so beautiful and we wonder if our neighbors who have lived here always wake like we do, look out the window and marvel at another beautiful day in Ellensburg.

I got cranky last night.  It seemed to come on kind of fast, but truthfully I had been working up to it all day.  I spent the day doing something that I do not like… house work.  The big cleaning, 409, rags, vacuums, cat liter scooper, trash taker outer, smashed fly picker upper, dust, cat hair… the works.  Old houses get dirty fast, and farm houses get even dirtier faster, but we couldn’t figure out why our old farm-house floors (yes, our beautiful, newly refurnished hardwood) got dirty so quickly.  ?? After all the teens take their shoes off outside on the kitchen porch (usually in an inconvenient spot where the rest of us trip over them) so it couldn’t be that they were tracking in much dirt, dry grass and farm bits.  I was just at the end of my vacuum hose when I saw them!  Two, not one, teenage boys running outside in their socks over the dry grass, across the dirt and back into the house.  Luckily for them, my loving spouse walked in and was immediately dispatched, “You deal with those darn (not really ‘darn’, but something like it) boys…” as I stomped off with my vacuum and rags.  It might have ended there but then I swept the kitchen porch and along with the dirt I swept the pile of shoes, socks and sandals out onto the lawn.  I knew I really needed a warning label, letting the teens know, that I was getting cranky, so I did pick up all the offending footwear and lined them up neatly out-of-the-way on the porch.  Then I warned all the teens, that I was getting cranky and to be careful.  I explained (fairly nicely) where to leave their footwear and patiently informed them that if it was left elsewhere, I would see if my arm and my aim were good enough to throw their item from the porch into the pond.  No one’s tried me yet, but the day is young.

Thankfully with some humor behind the repeated warnings to be careful because the Mother-ship was getting cranky, a yummy dinner and a gin, my mood lightened up.  It helped too that the evening was beautiful, the breeze was gentle, the teens were fed and my loving spouse and I went out to pound in a few fence posts.  Fence post pounding is not quite as therapeutic as tractor driving, but it is not bad.  The bonus of course is that we’ll soon be able to move the horses to an additional site for them to graze.

The task we’ve under taken, to restore the home and the farm is not a small one.  It cannot be done quickly.  Many, many parts are underway, but few are done and won’t be done for years possibly.  This is just the reality of the matter, but some days it is harder to see the progress through the mess and on those occasions a warning label for those around me would be good.

I’ve just sat down and it is 9:25pm and I am beat.  I am too tired to get up and go to bed.  All the animals are tucked in.  The teens have finished cake so now they’re making popcorn.  When the kids were little I was always afraid of losing one of them, not a problem now, I could just follow the trail they make every night with popcorn.

My loving spouse and I are thinking we must have a virus.  We’re tired, our backs hurt and so do our heads.  OR we could  be restoring a farm, feeding & negotiating 4 teenagers, 17 animals, starting a new job and dealing with multiple piles of legal paperwork.  I don’t know, seems like a virus to me.

The hen-house is now done!  Once a milk parlor it is probably the only hen-house sporting a bull on its weather vane, which will stay as we love its style.  The perches and the nesting boxes were revamped from the old hen-house by Pat with help from various teens.  The ‘opportunity’ to teach teens sometimes butting up against the desire to just get the job done.  However now that it is done and checked off ‘the list’ it is quite sweet the number of hands that have brought this project along.  The girls gave the nesting  boxes the mandatory coat of barn red paint, so we are officially ready for fresh eggs.

Tomorrow the older-shorter teen heads to Utah.  She is the current cat whisperer and the only one little Roo really trusts.  She has our blessing to take Roo to Utah, she just can’t seem to clear it on the other end.  Roo may make it yet, as she and the little brother are planning a double team assault on the Utah parental units.  “It followed me home (on the airplane) can I keep it?”.

Moses Squeaker Pants (our little rescued sparrow) was released back into the wild.  We drove 5 miles to let him go near the Yakima river.  We figured if one of the (many) cats around here ended up with a sparrow in its mouth, we wanted some peace of mind, that it wasn’t Moses.  We packed his lunch box and packed up the 4 teens for the send off.  Pat gently threw the little bird off toward the trees.  It was a beautiful moment, there should have been music playing gently in the back ground, but  then Moses turned around and flew right into Pat’s head.  Pat threw him again, we held our breath, Moses flew and turned back to land on the truck. Pat picked Moses up, put him on a bush and we piled quickly into the truck.  The goodbyes ended swiftly as the spot we’d picked was infested with mosquitoes and we were being eaten alive!   However, we did leave knowing there would be plenty of bugs for him to eat.

It does appear, that we really do have 3 fierce and mighty barn kittens.  Tigger & Pooh have happily accepted Roo as one of their own.  Roo is currently just a small ball of fluff that purrs.  Honestly, I am not a cat person however, I am not a ‘rodent’ person either, so I am hoping that if nothing else this little trio might possibly ‘play’ a mice or two to death.  The older-shorter teen is our resident cat whisper and keeps finding more of them!  All I can think about is the book from my childhood… Millions and Millions of Cats…. please, Lord NO!

One sweet friend has asked us if we ‘relax’ in the evening.  Well, we ‘horse relax’, after dinner Pat and I go out to our horses (you’ve no idea how that statement makes me smile.. “our horses”).  Dixie is a yearling (horse word for one year old) so she knows nothing.  First she must be ‘caught’, Pat goes quietly up to attach her lead rope.  The first time the ‘little’ 700 pound filly reared up high on her hind legs.  As you can imagine bringing her along takes caution and patience, so I’m glad Pat can teach us both.  Once caught, we  brush them and give them grain.  Grain to horses is like chocolate chip cookies to me, they smack their horse lips and lick the bottom of the bucket to get the last crumb.  And somehow, in an amazing way, this is relaxing….

The teens and I spent yet another morning cleaning up a huge pile of logs and wood debris.  More gifts from the darn tree that was cut down.  The yard is finally looking better, except for the fact that we still have one-third of a very tall tree sticking out of the lawn at our otherwise beautiful home.  Our saws are too small to cut it down and my loving spouse has been off working instead of dealing with this annoying situation.  We’re now giving directions to our home by saying, “make a right and when you see the house with half a tree in the yard, you’re there!”

When we moved in we thought this tall tree was a ‘pine’ tree, but then one of my siblings visited and informed us that it was indeed a ‘spruce’ tree.  However, this last weekend one of my other siblings visited and declared it a ‘fir’ tree.  I have two more siblings who have yet to visit, so until that happens, it seems that we won’t be adequately educated as to the exact species of the tree.

Spruce, fir, pine, I don’t really care, I just want the rest of the darn tree out of our yard.  A ‘neighbor’ stopped by who had said he could cut down the tree with his ‘manly man’ saw.  I’m desperate, so I did ask if he was going to cut it down.  He somehow didn’t think I was serious, so I gave his wife “the look”.  Ladies, you know the ‘look’.  It is the one that says ‘don’t even mess with me, because I am as serious as a heart attack’.  His wife knew “the look” and told him he’d be free early the next morning to be here and cut that darn tree down!  I really like her.

Keeping an old farm-house clean is like walking backwards up an escalator and expecting to get somewhere.  The windows are done outside with a garden hose.  This removes the latest spider webs and waters the window boxes at the same time.  The windows on the inside are done with the vacuum cleaner hose, again to get the spider webs and any flies that came in to take a break from annoying our horses.

Growing up, my mother ruled our roost as something akin to an organized drill Sargent.  I have to admit to instituting some of her tactics for this summer.  The teens are organized into age-old categories – boys and girls, with dishes assigned to every other night.  I’d have to say it is working pretty well, every body is happy with the arrangement, well at least every other night.

I sweep and sweep and sweep and dust with anything in my hand that is on its way to the laundry room and I do a lot of laundry.  I don’t mind laundry, I just do it my way.  If it is in the laundry room, I’ll wash it, but I will not go ‘find’ it.  If it is inside out, I just wash it and fold it this way.  I do not check pockets, so I do wash a lot of stray items and occasionally receive a ‘tip’ for my efforts.  White boy-men socks all go into a basket to be retrieved by the owners.  Almost everyone is smart enough to not complain about the laundry service around here, as they know they’re old enough to do it themselves.

The best mess is of the teens enjoying childhood once more, this I handle well and smile.  There are currently 3 Lego building sites and a 4 foot K’nex roller coaster in the living room.  Kites played with, badminton out, croquet out and if we can figure out how to keep the damn cat away from it we’ve plans to put a jigsaw puzzle out.  Summer is good, messy, but good.

To say we have a small orchard would be an exaggeration.  What we have is an old apple tree with no fruit, 3-4 trees bearing what we believe to be plums, 5-6 trees that have no ‘plums’, an ample supply of suckers shooting up out of the ground that are nothing more than glorified weeds.  Cleaning up the orchard was a job that I felt I could manage.  I ear marked the small non-producing trees and backed Jubal up to start ripping them out, a job we’ve gotten quite good at.  The Bride was here to help me and together we tackled the job.  What I hadn’t planned on was pulling a giant wheely on the tractor and scaring the pants off of us both!  Once I ‘landed’ the tractor, we broke out laughing, grateful that there were no men around to have seen it and grateful that Jubal and I were still in one piece.  As she knows me well, she ran to gather her camera just ‘in case’ I did it again, which of course I did.  Well, not exactly, the second time as you can see, when doing the wheely it did not go up nearly as high, but only because this time I was prepared for the hair-raising experience and I had learned how to land the darn thing.

I still have a lot to learn about both tractor driving and tractor driving instructions, especially when recited by my loving spouse.  We have a small space between the dog run and the garage.  It looked big enough for the tractor to go through, but to be cautious, I asked Pat if the tractor could fit through that spot.  He’s exact words were, “I don’t know, why don’t you try it”.  What I thought this meant was, “Sure, there is plenty of room”.  What he meant was, “Are you crazy?  Only if you go very straight and grease both sides of the tractor so it will squeak through.”  Needless to say, Jubal and I did not make it.  Both the garage and the dog run are still standing, although there are some fresh skids marks on the dog run.  I ended up with a wrenched thumb, a bruised elbow and a broken nail.

The tribal drums must have been beating announcing that there was both tractor driving and pulling stuff down going on.  Pretty soon most of the men on the farm materialized to have their turn on Jubal as well as guide the newest teen (freshly arrived from England) to productive tree pulling tractor driving fun, with NO wheelys.

The declaration of “no more new animals for a while” apparently made God laugh.  A stray kitten immediately found its way to Glory Farm, which in itself, is no small fete.  It is a tiny thing, mostly skin, bones and a few ticks.  It had been seen but not caught until it went into the hen-yard, where it drank chicken water, curled up in a ball surrounded by calm black-speckled Cuckoo Maran chickens.  The Marans who are afraid of their own shadow, didn’t seem to mind the small cat at all.  Caught and calmed by the older-shorter teen, it is happy to have food, water and a warm barn bed.  Tigger & Pooh have adapted to the additional fluffy feline, “Roo” quite well, so we could possibly have 3 fierce and mighty barn cats.

The hen-house has had lots of activity.  If there is a pecking order for chickens, I’m guessing our Marans are at the bottom.  Our tiny (still cute) Rhode Island Red chicks were showing signs of flying out of their brooder, so the teens and I gathered them up and put them in the big yard with the Marans.  We’d been instructed to ‘watch’ them to make sure the little ones did not get picked on, hardly a worry.  Only one Maran rooster felt the need to strut its stuff at the tiny chicks.  However, one tiny red chick took him on, sending all 10 larger, older chickens running for safety.  We were assured that the little reds would be just fine, right as they all walked straight through the links in the fence, which sent the teens and I in a flurry of chick catching, scrambling to catch all 6 and reconsidering exactly where in the world they were going to live .

Moses Squeaker Pants and his lunch box have been kept away from all the other animals in the safety of our master bath.  Moses is ready to be ‘kicked out of the nest’.  He will be released a few miles away, so that if one of our cats catches a sparrow, we’ll be assured it is not him.  In the mean time, we do need to remember to keep the toilet lid down, as he has learned to fly, but we’re quite sure he hasn’t learned to swim.

I’d say that everything is back to normal around here, if I knew exactly what ‘normal’ is.  We are still reveling in the wonderful memories of the kids’ special day* and are unusually worn out.  There was a clear feeling of lethargy around the farm yesterday.  I broke down and had a very rare but delightful nap!

We woke this morning as we have for the last week with Moses Squeaker Pants demanding to be fed.  The little bird is fully feathered, flutters his wings, poops exceedingly well and should be ready to leave his lunch box nest any day now, unless we’ve managed to raise one of those creatures that have figured out how good they have it at home and has no plans to leave.

One of my struggles is seeing not the progress we’ve made, but the work that still needs to be done (and there is plenty of it).  I am feeling overwhelmed, so we’ve planned the perfect antidote to this, a trip to the dump.  There is nothing like a good tossing of crap to lift my spirits.   Today is a ‘work’ day, so we’ll be rousing the teens early (early to them means being woken up to work).  The teen level raises to four tomorrow and we are attempting to structure life around here for them as a day of work and then a day of play.

Pat was heard to say, “No more new animals for a while”.  Whatever ‘awhile’ is?  In the meantime, we are awaiting delivery of the little filly, Dixie and currently settling in 6 new Rhode Island Red baby chicks.  I will take responsibility of the addition of the new chicks, (who are darn cute).  I was having an artistic moment thinking that a yard with black & white hens would not be as pretty as a yard with black & white AND red hens.  If you are planning a visit to Glory farm in a few months, I hope you like eggs!

*As requested here are more pictures of the wedding fun.  As I didn’t take pictures, the best I can do at this point is shlurp (shlurp is a computer technical term for pilfering pictures from others) to share with you.   Thank you all for your kind comments and congratulations for our new family, it means so much to us.

Pre-wedding wait with a few rounds of Hang Man.

Pre-wedding mischief.

The vows at Whitworth University, where the kids met.  Alex, the officiant was the Groom’s RA (Resident Assistant) for his dorm freshman year and  this was his first wedding!

Pat feeding Moses at the wedding.

First dance for Mr. & Mrs.

Mother & Son dance

The second cake….

Post-wedding mischief