Living Like a Rabbit

          

      This morning, being Saturday, we were a little late letting Mr Beezhold, the rabbit, out of the hutch. “Did he hop out?”  I asked when Mark came back in. “No,” he shook his head, “he just chomped on that old cabbage stump he’s been ignoring for a week. Pouting.”  What if we all took lessons for how to live from a backyard rabbit?

1.       Insist upon your rituals. You must be let out by 7:15 AM. If you are not, pout while everyone is watching, then slip out to eat something they would rather you left alone.

2.       Demand nose rubs. Especially when someone is trying to haul the bike cart out and keep you from escaping the back yard. Wrinkle up your nose and look at them beseechingly.

3.       Try all possible foods. Just a nibble. Even rhubarb. You just might like it.

4.       Be comfortable. Dig down to cool earth in the summer. Burrow in straw in the winter. In the between time, know where the sun lands all day long and move accordingly.

5.       Survey your kingdom from High Places.

6.       Celebrate life. There’s nothing quite like a quick dash across the yard, with a twist and toss of the body into the air to express your inner joy.

Passing of David Crosby

 

Crosby, Stills and Nash were the soundtrack of my 20s.

                My first car was a four door yellow Rabbit from 1979, with an automatic transmission. It was a great little car. My friend Brian showed me how to work on the brakes, Gordon taught me how to tune an engine, and I did regular work on the engine. My biggest success was a series of switches that controlled the temperature of the engine, turning the cooling fan on. I spent a lot of time in auto parts stores and at the front desk of my mechanic, asking questions.

                My wardrobe for this work was a Crosby, Stills, and Nash t-shirt from the Daybreak Again tour. It was faded and had a couple of battery acid holes in the front. Perfect to rummage around an engine in. I would walk into the auto parts store with a question, wearing my shirt. The guy at the front counter would smile—cute little girl coming in with a dumb question. But, when I got to the front, inevitably, he would say “That was a great concert. I saw them in Portland.” “I did, too. It was great.” And there would be this moment when we would both remember those voices, braiding together on an old familiar tune, on a warm August night in Portland Maine.  A long pause that brought us together, made us equals. Then, he would smile again and ask “What do you need?” I would explain, consult, listen closely, and head back out, full of serious information.

                I am sad that I will never hear those three voices braiding together, live, again.  

The Biggest Mess

 

                I knocked over half a quart of deep yellow paint this morning. It was a moderate mess—the paint was thick and I had just washed the floor, so I was able to scoop quite a bit back into the can before washing it all up. There have been worse messes—the day the coffee pot exploded all over the kitchen; the dropped half gallon of salad dressing in the walk in fridge at the grocery store where I worked after college; the quart of primer that exploded all over my bookshelves, leaving my books still marked 30 years later. But the biggest mess I have ever seen was the cauliflower cheese soup at Ceres on winter afternoon.

                I was carrying a 2 gallon metal insert of just heated soup over to the steam table. It was the middle of lunch. The counter was packed. There was bread all neatly packed for delivery under the racks. People were hungry; they liked the soup; they wanted more.  I slipped. The soup went up into the air and came down…everywhere. It was all over the floor. It went up the walls and the glass of the big fridge. It splashed onto the phone. It covered the neatly packed bread. It dribbled onto the counter. The floor became a skating rink in the middle of the lunch rush. I grabbed the dustpan to begin to scoop up soup, slipped, and the dustpan flew over the counter and landed in…someone’s soup. She was not amused; it took all of Chris The Boy’s considerable charms to settle her down with a new bowl, extra bread, and desert. The chaos was worse than the day a mouse decided to visit the front of the store and Jeffery announced its existence, loudly, to one and all.  

                We did get it cleaned up and the bread went out on schedule. But cauliflower cheese soup, because of its texture, its scent, and its slightly oily constancy, created the biggest mess I have ever seen.

                What was yours?

 

Enough

 

I burned the stollen. I blame it on the school district, who, in their infinite wisdom, and despite considerable feedback this year AND the last time they made the same bad decision, kept us in school until December 22^nd.  Students were dropping off like flies—sick, tired, leaving early for planned vacations and rescheduled flights as the weather turned bad and everyone tried to get somewhere while they could. “Why are you here?” I asked one miserable looking junior on the last day. “I didn’t want to miss anything,” he said. “”Why are you?” “There are no subs,” I replied, equally miserable with peak cold and a slowly fading sinus/ear infection.  “I was praying for an ice storm.” He nodded. The ice storm came the next day, when we were already out of school.

It has been that kind of December—nothing catastrophic, but just off. The Winter Lights on our arch and fence shorted out because I did not fix the duct tape that kept the rain out this summer, when it was dry. I was late with the cards and struggled to find an idea that stayed positive. I was just a little sick for weeks before I finally broke down and went for antibiotics, so I miscounted the number of eggs I needed to do all of the Yule baking, and was baking the stollen on Christmas morning, when I was tired and unfocused. I (wisely) decided against attempting anything complicated for dinner and we had leftover latkes instead.

When I realized that the fence’s lights were out for the duration of the rains—which could be months in the Willamette Valley—I found the small strand I bought for a night bike ride a few weeks ago. A dozen of us decorated our bikes and cruised around our neighborhood, waving at cars and dog walkers. They are battery operated and remarkably bright and cheery. I wrapped them around the wreath we have hanging on the front porch and turned them on. It’s not perfect—they will not guide someone through our yard on a dark evening—but they will do. Some years, a small strand of lights might just be…enough.

 

Goal Setting: Winter hikes

 

     

           Every year, at the Solstice, Mark and I review the past and set our intentions for the coming cycle of the sun, usually on our walks through Finley Wildlife Refuge in the rain. Some years, we have lofty goals to change the world (Mark, at one point, wanted to learn three more languages), but, other years, they focus more on our daily lives. In 2004, I bought a black hard cover spiral notebook and took notes on all of our walks, forcing us out into the natural world every Sunday that winter, to look closely at the changing seasons. These notes led to long lists of wildflower blooms as well as close observations of moss and lichens and grounded us in the Pacific Northwest as our home bioregion.  It may have been our best goal setting ever.

                I want to revisit this goal in the coming year. Although we regularly walk around town for our daily lives—work, groceries, meetings, library visits-- we have not moved off pavement as much as we would like in the past few years. So, this is my goal for the year: off pavement every Sunday, somewhere between four and ten miles of trails, mostly local. And I am announcing it publicly, in case you all wish to hold us more accountable--or join in.

Chicken Tractor

 

The garden is quiet these days. There is a lot of pruning waiting to happen—hedges and trees--  and a few more leaves to rake onto beds, but, for the most part, if I don’t get out there, it will wait. The only thing that has to happen regularly is moving the coop, which is a chicken tractor.

When we first designed our gardens, I found a book on our co-op’s lending library shelf: The Chicken Tractor. The basic idea was a moveable chicken coop that would shift from garden bed to garden bed over the course of a year. Because we live in the Pacific Northwest, where we can garden all year round, this was a great idea. We proceeded to build out our garden beds four feet wide by ten feet long, and overbuilt the first coop as a four by five by five foot square with plywood sides. It weighed a ton. It did, however, sit neatly on the garden bed frame. We learned our lesson, and, when we rebuilt the coop five years later, the design—from Mother Earth News—was a much lighter A frame, still sized to sit on the bed. When there are two chickens, they root around on half of the bed and we slide the coop over after two weeks, then, two weeks later, move it to another bed. When there are more than two, we fence the entire bed off and let them at it for a month.  If I pay attention, we can rotate through all of the beds between late September and late May.

We moved the coop this afternoon. The ladies were thrilled to be let out for a bit. They ran, flapped, and flew over to the rabbit hutch to root around in the fallen straw. We cleared the way, lifted the coop, and moved it over two beds, then re-fenced it, leaving a space for the ladies to move in when it grows dim and dusky.  I turned over the old bed so that the straw and leaves, mixed with poop, had more surface area with the soil underneath, disturbing several fat earthworms in the process. Sometimes Aussie will come over to “help” with the soil turning and eat the worms, but, today, she was jostling for straw and missed out.

This combination of chicken, straw, composted in place old veggies, and leaves keeps our beds full of organic matter year after year. We have not had to purchase “fertile mix,” which is half compost, for 15 years, at least.  The soil tilth is lovely and rich. The garden is lush all summer long and I can save the compost Mark generates from the piles of trimmings in the far back corner for all of the beds that are not tractored by the chickens. And, even when a chicken is too old to lay an egg, she is still contributing to the household economy.

Early Winter

 

              We are fermenting in our kitchen. Yesterday, I had sourdough bread rising, beet and apple kvass to be sampled, beet and horseradish kvass chopped and resting on the top of the fridge, and two jars of cabbage chopped, massaged with salt, and packed full, then pressed down with the glass fermentation weights.  We started with sauerkraut right before the pandemic and I was convinced that the live bacteria kept us healthy all spring that year. When yeast was scarce, we started a sourdough culture because I always wondered about wild yeasts in the air of my kitchen. Now, along with kombucha and yogurt, the live yeasts are wildly multiplying, usually on top of the fridge.

 

                When the heat was out for two weeks, we returned to our old habit of closing the curtains at night to keep in the heat. Mark wandered around for several days, pointing the covid pruchased forehead thermometer at everything he found—the wall, the cat, himself….one day, he hit the window with the curtains open followed by the window with the curtains closed. Four degrees difference! “Hey,” he called out, “that is significant!” Now, when I am late coming home, he closes the curtains himself. The room feels more cozy, especially with the heat back on.

 

                In winter, our bedroom is cold. I shut the heating vent into the room and hang a heavy curtain over the door.  We open the window by our heads every night. The cat loves it; she curls up on my pillow, right over my head, sucking in the heat radiating off of me and loving the cool air on her full fur coat. We snug down under a heavy pile of blankets, lots of layers so that we can adjust to a warm spell moving in with the rains.  I sleep better on these  long cold  nights than any other time of year, like a bear hibernating in a den.