every chick deservers a mother
Autumn glow is special. Autumn leaves intensify the brilliance of the sun. Whenever the sun pops out between the rain clouds, it’s time to put on my boots and go for a walk. I’ve got to be outdoors to see the trumpeter swans flying toward the sun on an early autumn morning.
Every day I appreciate how generous nature is. You don’t have to give nature much of a garden to supply you with more food than you can ever eat. After eating more radishes than you can stomach, you get to play around and see what happens when you don’t pick a radish when it’s ready. Here’s a radish past its prime, and yet it’s more beautiful than ever.
Nature’s generosity reminds me of the part of the Lord’s Prayer which says, “Give us this day our daily bread.” I smiled when I thought about that phrasing: give us. It’s not, give us our daily bread in exchange for eight hours of hard labor, or give us our daily bread if we agree to take a drug test, or promise not to misbehave. It’s just: give us, the way nature works: give, give, give.
It only happens once a year, that magical first day of frost. A clear cold night and this morning the grass, fallen leaves, toadstools, and vegetables were fringed with frost. First frost happens only once a year, which means it should be a holiday, right? Reason to close the schools, shutter the businesses, shut down the freeways, and give everyone the day off to live?
Everyone is working too hard these days. There really are no days off left anymore. Even on Thanksgiving the stores are open and the serfs are forced to toil past midnight to appease the 0.001%. How does that make anyone happy? How did we end up in this feudal system again, the masses working for a handful of lords and ladies? Wasn’t the French Revolution supposed to free the masses? No one is allowed to live anymore, which is why we need a system of spontaneous holidays. First frost could be one of them. No one would know when they are coming. There would be a special Department of Firsts in every county. On momentous occasions like First Frost, First Snow, First Cherry Blossom, and so on, the Department of Firsts would declare a Momentous Holiday. All stores, banks, businesses would be shut, schools let out, and to make sure people took the holiday and lived instead of working, the freeways and airports would all be closed. At least a few days a year, the freeways need to be off limits. No one should be allowed to drive. Everyone should be perfectly still and spend at least ten minutes, five at least, and enjoy an earth with no sound except that of the first frost growing on the fallen leaves.
If you can wipe a baby’s butt, you can make sausage from scratch. This summer we purchased half of a pig from Akyla Farms. They raised ten pigs on pasture on the banks of the Skagit River in Birdsview. They slaughtered the pigs on October 30. After slaughtering, the carcasses were going into town to be cut and wrapped, but I had to go out to the pasture where they were slaughtering the pigs, to pick up the small intestines. I’d requested them as I wanted to try making sausages.
I brought the small intestines home, hooked one end to a hose in the yard and cleaned them out for an initial cleansing. Then I took them inside to thoroughly clean them by hooking one end to the faucet and running water through them until the water ran clear. You know, if you’ve wiped a baby’s butt, you can do this. There is food matter being digested inside the small intestines, but it isn’t until this matter enters the large intestine that the liquids are absorbed and feces formed. What is in the small intestines is more like green baby spit. Ever have a baby throw up on your shoulder? If that didn’t kill you, this won’t either.
Running water through the small intestines made me realize how amazing they are. The membrane is so thin and yet strong. Pigs and humans have very similar internal organs, and looking at and feeling the small intestines made me realize how dependent we are on these living translucent tubes. All our food goes through them and we get many of our nutrients through these tubes of paper thin membranes. A human’s small intestines are about seven meters long, or around twenty three feet. Think of a garden hose that long and how flexible it would need to be to fit inside your belly. One little puncture wound and it is all over. I’ll never look at knitting needles again. They are sharp and long enough to cause a lot of damage. Maybe knitters should wear puncture proof vests just in case they fall over on their knitting needles. If you are around knitters, maybe you need to be extra cautious.
We picked up our cut and wrapped half a pig on Saturday, and yesterday, we mixed ground pork, ground pork belly, cooked brown rice, a bowl of crushed garlic, a handful of dill weed, allspice, cumin, coriander, pepper, and salt in a big bowl, and then stuffed the mixture into the clean small intestines. We made about ten feet of sausage. Some we formed into rings. Some we formed into links. We had no idea what it would taste like. We were not prepared. My expectations were somewhat along the lines of the sausage from the store. The flavor of these homemade sausages blew our minds away. We kept saying, “Wow!” over and over again. We had no idea sausage could taste this good.
Making our own sausage from scratch was one of those life changing moments, like the first time I pulled a carrot out of the ground and ate it, the first time I plucked an apple off the tree, or the first time I butchered a chicken and discovered that it was nothing like what is sold in the supermarkets. I’ve cleaned baby bottoms that were a lot worse than the small intestines of that pig. So if you find the idea of making sausages from scratch daunting, remember, if you can wipe a baby’s butt, you can do it.
Steady rains don’t deter Tangerine’s chicks from roaming the woods. She is no longer caring for her chicks, but the siblings stick together. Sibling relations are one of the pillars of chicken society, but you would never know it from searching the web. Search the web for “chicken siblings” or “the importance of siblings to chickens” and you won’t find anything. You’ll find articles about chicken pox and human siblings, articles about human siblings, but nothing about the importance of siblings to chicken development. I suppose it’s understandable as chicken society is tossed out the window in modern poultry farming. Still, I find it remarkable that there are no scholarly articles about chicken sibling relations as they are such an integral part of chicken life.
After summer’s long draught, the fall rains have given birth to a mini spring. Nettles push up through the damp earth to soak in the morning mist. We’ll get to enjoy nettle soup before the frosts cut them down. The mosses are enjoying the wet too. They spring to life, drinking in the water and fluffing up. Funny isn’t it, that when you caress a soft moss, you’re touching mostly water.
Chickens enjoy the wet woods too. The damp earth digs up easily, revealing juicy earthworms and bugs to fill their crops.
One last flower clings to the stewartia. One last flower next to a crimson leaf. It’s spring next to fall.
The cool weather keeps the salad greens growing. The tub of greens I picked this morning went off to Tweets. The cabbage below I picked in the dark this evening for supper. It’s a wonder how plants grow out of the earth to become these delightful, edible feasts.
Where do vegetables come from? They come from the sky, and this is how. Before you can plant a carrot or lettuce seed, you need living soil. Living soil starts up in the sky where the tips of the trees catch the wind and the rain. After soaking in the sun and drinking the rain all summer, the leaves come fluttering down to earth, where they end up in my wheelbarrow.
Look at a wheelbarrow full of leaves and you’re looking at your future salad. Over the winter and into spring, bacteria and fungi and earthworms and a million other organisms will take this bounty that drifted out of the sky, and turn it into living soil which will grow your future salad.
Speaking of the sky, more than leaves live up there, so do the swans and snow geese. Working outdoors lets you hear and see the trumpeters when they fly overhead. At first you hear them honking. Half the time they go by behind the trees, out of view. It doesn’t matter. Even if you can’t see them, hearing them brings plenty of joy.
When the snow geese go by, you can’t miss them. They love to party. They fly by in the hundreds and thousands, all of them talking at the same time.
I picked the last bowl of tomatoes today. It was time to toss the tomato plants in the compost and save a few tomatoes for the kitchen. The rest of the tomatoes I gave to the chickens. Next to worms and bugs, chickens love sweet, juicy produce like melons and bananas and grapes. They enjoy juicy tomatoes too.
Two summers ago, these tomatoes were tree leaves high above the ground. Now they are inside a chicken, though not for long. They’ll get ground up, nutrients extracted, and the unused bits will soon pop out the chicken’s butt. Then it’s a sojourn into the soil before getting sucked up by tree roots and carried to the top of the trees to spend a summer in the sky again. Everything goes round and round and round.
Today was an auspicious day. The start of Swans-here. Hearing their distinct honking, we looked up into today’s blue sky and were dazzled by a flock of swans flying in off the bay. There are really only two seasons in the Skagit Valley, the time when the swans are here, known as Swans-here, and the time when the swans are away, called Swans-there. Where? Out there, where you can’t see them. All the other seasons are subsets of these two distinct times.
Around when November begins, the swans start flying in from their summer homes in the far north. If you see them for the first time on November 1, it’s particularly auspicious. They leave in early April and once they are gone, we are in Swans-there. During Swans-there, the whole activity of the valley revolves around preparing for Swans-here, making sure that plenty of crops are grown and harvested so that when the swans arrive, there are acres of good stubble and potato buds for them to savor through the rainy winter. The belief is that if the swans leave satisfied, that year’s crops will be exceptional. If the swans leave discontented, it means we have to try harder. The world would come to an end if they decided not to come back. Then we’d be stuck in Swans-there forever.
I describe this salad fork and spoon set as Flinstonian. The woodcarver who made these, Allen Berry, sells his creations at Bow Little Market and the Mt. Vernon’s Farmer Market. He creates an assortment of boxes, spatulas, stirring spoons, salad forks and spoons, knitting needles, spindles, and other wood wonders. If you don’t live in the area, there must be an Allen Berry in your neighborhood who whittles wood into salad forks and spoons you can use.
November begins with rain, rain, rain, like it always does in this neck of the woods. Every thing is wet and lush. The rain intensifies the fall colors. They pop out when you walk through the woods.
