The Old Smith Place

Daniel and Polly Smith were the very first to deed our little piece of paradise from the United States government, back before Wisconsin was even a state. 

We are frequently asked, "Why The Old Smith Place?" when the topic of our farm name is raised; especially by family members (We are the third generation of Andersons to inhabit). I suppose we could've called it The Old Ehlert Place but nobody around here called it that to our knowledge. Dane's grandfather Mervin Anderson grew up next door to this place and as a kid watched Fred Ehlert and his family farm all these acres and more.  When Fred's family put it up for sale after the passing of his wife Annie, Mervin wasted no time in making his offer and was awarded the Warranty Deed on March 16th of 1946. Although there is no record of a mortgage attached to the property, Dane said his grandpa paid for it in two years time raising pigs up in the woods on the north side of the farm.  He must have been so proud! I'll bet he was equally as proud when his son Delmar bought the place from him in 1971 for the grand sum of $28,000.

Dane has many happy (and some not so happy) memories of time spent here on weekends and holidays with his brother Scott, his dad, his uncles, his grandparents and his bonus brother and sisters after his dad remarried. At one time they had the run of over 600 odd acres on which to hunt and fish and work and just do what boys do. I don't think Dane ever really thought he'd be back here farming the place as an adult. He met his first wife Melva in Janesville while she was still in school, they lived and worked and raised two wonderful boys together and after that battled cancer together until her passing. When I met Dane some years later and learned he was the husband of only one wife for nearly 30 years you'd better believe I paid attention. That seems to be so rare in this day and age. In many ways, I inherited a whole family when I married Dane, the product of his upbringing and his marriage to Melva. Though we never met, as the years go by, I feel closer and closer to her the more I get to know Dane and his boys and my dear daughter-in-law Margaret.

Despite the nearly 75 years of Anderson history on this place (probably well over a hundred if you include adjoining properties!) we never really found a way, or felt right about weaving Anderson into our farm name. As we walk these acres we often feel the presence of the many who have gone before, and not just those recorded on paper or those whose stories that have been passed along to us. Nearly every season we dig up something that causes us to wonder, to reflect... And sometimes, it's just a feeling in the air.

When we stumbled across the abstract to the place in a box of papers, it just seemed right. The Old Smith Place. It fit. It was a specific part of the place's history, and yet generic enough (Smith) to be somehow honoring to all that had gone before.

Thanks for listening to a bit of our farm history. My farm neighbor and friend Carissa challenged me recently to the 10 day farm photo challenge. It seemed a fitting reason to fire up the old blog which I've been meaning to do for quite some time. Perhaps by the 10th entry I will have formed a new healthy (for me) habit!  Here's to trying...

Homecoming

Stinkers!
Sometimes when I return from a trip I come home to sweet cuddly kitties who I can tell really missed me. And sometimes I  get this: stony-eyed looks from across the room, and a husband whose been nursing a bad tooth until it became an emergency, and all the work that's been piling up since I left, and a hilly farm that's a treacherous sheet of ice day after day after day...

They say the best part of going away is the coming home and normally I am 100% in agreement. I got away for a couple of days to attend the MOSES Organic Farming Conference, the largest gathering of organic farmers in the nation, for my very first time. Although it is difficult to get away from the farm I had two really great reasons to go this year.

First of all, two of my friends and I have been working on a SARE grant this year to determine the need for additional meat processing and an MSU (Mobile Slaughter Unit) in our area of Southern Wisconsin. April Prusia of Dorothy's Range spearheads our venture and Bethany Emond Storm of @thelittleredhome.stead (on Instagram) and I pitched in to help with surveying the folks in our farmhood and the many other administrative tasks and research necessary to determine that yes, we are indeed in need in this area. We were all able to attend MOSES this year to present our findings and talk about next steps with other like minded "Women in Meat" from around the country hosted by Lisa Kivirist of Inn Serendipity wearing her In Her Boots hat. Pretty heady stuff for a beginning farmer such as myself! To enter into the conversation you can go to our Facebook Page or  if you raise meat and want your voice to really count take the online survey and express your needs. Use your outside voice!

My second reason for wanting to attend MOSES was to find out about finally jumping in and going for organic certification on our farm.  Although we have been learning about and using organic practices since we began our farming journey in 2012 it hadn't seemed worth the effort, until now.
Until growing hemp was legalized nationwide by the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill. Until my friends FL Morris of Grassroots Farm and Steve Acheson did the amazing and crazy hard work of forming The South Central Wisconsin Hemp Cooperative so that many of us small farmers can cooperatively produce Organic Hemp. WOW!!! I am so very proud of them and the rest of their team.
For some excellent words on why Steve is so passionate about this, click here  Visit their websites, enter into the conversation and by all means join the Coop, it's not just for producers!

So, moving on to coming home...  Can we just be done with this winter? I gotta say it's really starting to get to me. Usually coming home after being away is just amazing, the icing on the cake. It makes me sing with gratitude and reminds me why I go away to do the work, to do the learning, to practice advocacy. It grounds me, helps me to release the breath I didn't even know I was holding... I am an introvert you see, somewhat of an empath, going away takes major effort and sacrifice for me. It's worth it though, time is short you see, and there are still so many things to be done.  This girl though really is in need of some serious R&R, not gonna lie.   Maybe next month!

Beginnings

I hadn't intended this blog to be a book review; more of a homesteading journey, a chronicle, a bit of an almanac, a how-to recipe organizer kind of place. Oh well, this is a season I suppose. I just re-read the first chapter entitled Beginning in Emilie Griffin's 'Clinging' on prayer. The opening paragraph really grabbed me by the throat. 

"There is a moment between intending to pray and actually praying that is as dark and silent as any moment in our lives. ...an abyss of our own making that separates us from God"

It hit me where I live. Where I am. Where I've been before. In that gulf, that dry place; questioning, anxious, afraid, cringing at the change to come if I really jump off, enter in, relinquish the driver's seat (realize I'd never really been in it). I'm hesitant to even begin the next chapter (entitled Yielding!) much less begin to pray. 

Prayer changes things. Once entered into who can know where it will lead? I mean really, a conversation with the all-knowing, all-powerful, maker of heaven and earth? Sounds fabulous. Who wouldn't want to enter in? Why wouldn't I? Maybe because I have a sense that change is in order, perhaps overdue. Maybe I don't want anything to change? 

Maybe if I'm really honest, I don't want to change. 

I like my life. I love my farm, my home, my animals, my dude. Not necessarily in that order.  I like growing and preserving our food and sharing that with others. I like my job, my boss, what we do there and how that impacts our community. I want to do more, not less. I want more hours in the day, more time. Approaching the end of my 56th trip (or 55th or 57th, hard for me to nail that down.) around the sun I am impressed that time is short and that there is so much more to be done. Tomorrow is not  promised! I've always known this, we all know this. It just seems so much more real now. 

I'm the healthy one, the one who doesn't get sick. But I just spent several days in the hospital on IV antibiotics with a life-threatening infection on my face. On my face! Right up there near all the really important real estate, the heart, the lungs, the brain. I was told not to worry when I asked, "How do I prevent this in the future?" When we see this on the face it is usually a one and done sort of thing they told me. Just go home and do your thing. Do what you always do they said. So I did. I came home. I finished the antibiotics and all the horrors that that implies. I don't do antibiotics well. But I was good. I did everything I was supposed to do. 

When we are good, when we do what is right, what is good for us and good for others we expect good to follow. Good results. But. Hahaha, there's that but! But the thing came back and I panicked. Panicked! Really panicked. Three trips to the VA in four days panicked. Back on the awful antibiotics panicked. Reading books on prayer and being afraid to pray panicked. Doing the 'what ifs' panicked. I'll spare you all the what ifs, I'm sure you have our own list. 

I think Dane was getting a little irritated with me, "It could be worse" he said. He knows. He really knows.  He's seen worse, been through worse, up close and personal. He survived his first wife of 30 years who died of cancer. I'd hate for him to have to go through that again. The truth is though that one of us will. Barring a freak accident that takes us both, one of us will outlive the other. We are all dying, it's just a matter of time. 

I'm not afraid of dying. What I am afraid of is living. Living with illness, living with infirmity scares me. I don't do sick well; my pride prevents me from asking for help. Dependency scares me. Being a burden scares me. Not being able to do what I set out to do scares me. 

And so, here I stand (or here I soak, as this is where I do my deep thinking these days) on the brink of that abyss. Here in that moment between thinking about praying and actually entering into prayer. Entering into the presence of the one who made me, fashioned me in my mother's womb, knows my every thought before I even think it. Loves me unconditionally. What could go wrong...?

Muscovy Flight

I am nearly bereft. I've been re-reading Annie Dillard's 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'. I have just one chapter left and I am already grieving.

This morning I read, "Last year I saw three migrating Canada geese flying low over the frozen duck pond where I stood. I heard a heart-stopping blast of speed before I saw them; I felt the flayed air slap at my face." I was instantly transported back to Sunday morning when I was again lying in bed reading Dillard.

Since a recent unexpected hospital stay I have been consciously carving out time each morning for silence, and reading, and coffee; for feeding my spirit before I face my day. My husband has very graciously accommodated me by delivering me my first cup of coffee before I get out of bed. He probably has no idea the deep impact this small gesture has upon my day. Sunday morning I was there later than usual, with the window open. Our headboard is a window looking out over our front yard. The birds were singing, the breeze was fragrant and I was reading the chapter entitled Stalking.

In it she writes about a summer she spent stalking muskrats and an astounding instance where she had been standing in a bush motionless and staring at a group of bluegills at the bottom of a deep sunlit pool along Tinker Creek. As she stared, lost to herself and her surroundings she had this encounter,

"All at once I couldn't see. And then I could: a young muskrat had appeared on top of the water, floating on its back. Its forelegs were folded langorously across its chest; the sun shown on its upturned belly. Its youthfulness and rodent grin, coupled with its ridiculous method of locomotion, which consisted of a lazy wag of the tail assisted by an occasional dabble of a webbed hind foot, made it an enchanting picture of decadence, dissipation, and summer sloth. I forgot all about the fish."

I read on as she described methods of stalking and waiting, and seeing and being seen; of physicists becoming mystics, of causality and the Principal of Indeterminancy, the lines blurring between the Natural and the Supernatural. She wrote of Moses begging God to show him his glory. And of God telling him to hide in the cleft of a rock while his glory passed by and he should perhaps look upon his backside as he passed. I was remembering my Bible reading of this encounter and how Moses' face shown so afterwards that he had to cover it while he addressed the Israelites lest they be afraid.

I was transfixed, transported. Suddenly, inches from my face, through the screen at my head the air exploded! Two of our Muscovy flew past my own window and frightened the living daylights out of me. I was exhilarated. Heart pounding, delighted I began my day, new born.

This morning, as I remember, yes I grieve the finishing of this amazing read. I think I may postpone the reading of this final chapter til Sunday morning as an offering of thanks and gratitude.

Time to stop reflecting now and do the work of the living. Wash the eggs, feed the fowl, release the captive flock from their evening imprisonment and get myself dressed for the office. Perhaps I'll be rewarded by the muscovy taking a loop around the farm? I've seen and delighted in this often, but never quite so up close and personal.

RIP Sugar-bugar and you too Jen.

Today is one of those broken-hearted, questioning-everything sort of days.

My sweet and feisty Sugar-Bugar came to me almost a year ago now. My surprise Christmas gift pregnant goat that turned out to be...not pregnant.

She was wearing a pink collar with a bell on it. Oh how I wish I had stripped her of it that same day!  She came to me along with Big Momma who really was pregnant and dropped two darling little kids to amaze us with in January. Big Momma was also wearing a collar (no bell). I assumed the bell was due to her feistiness and figured a warning was a good thing rather than have Miss Feisty. aka Suger-Bugar sneek up behind me unannounced.

Today there are no more collars in our pastures.

Sugar developed a trick. She would lure one of the wethers over to the fence with her feminine wiles, then she would slip one of her horns through the fence and through his collar (yes, the wethers had collars too) and hold him hostage up against the fence, hooked! We thought, how clever... how cute! Who knew it would end up being the death of her?

Jen was our King of the Wethers, and kind of a butt-head. A lovable butt-head most of the time... but a butt-head none the less. In hindsight I should have put him down the day I saw him grab Big Momma's leg between his horns and flip her to the ground.

Why did I ignore my gut instinct?

Big Momma was being separated that day from the rest of the herd so that we could beef her up a bit before winter arrived. She hadn't been looking all that well and was in need of some space and some pampering. In the midst of the rush of getting the job done Jen and his aggression slipped to the back burner. Who wants to face a job like that anyhow?

This morning Jen slipped his horn into Sugar's collar and hooked her.  A taste of her own medicine. He'd probably done it a hundred times before. Today was different.Today it got twisted in their struggle. Today our sweet and feisty Sugar-bugar was strangled to death. As I write this, my heart is in my throat and the tears are welling up again.

I let her down. I let them both down.

I should have seen the potential for disaster. Why didn't I do something different? Any number of things could have changed today's outcome. Today's outcome. Today there are two dead goats, skinned and dressed out in the barn waiting to be cut up and put in the freezer.
I can't get the picture of Sugar lying there dead with Jen trying to untangle himself from her out of my mind.

I was filled with love and admiration for my Dane as I saw him jump over the fence, cut off the offending collar and begin administering CPR to my goat before I could even get out the door and hobble over to the gate. Damn this knee!

Today's outcome...

I can't get the sound of the shot out of my head. The shot that killed Jen who I also loved, butt-head that he was.

Today's outcome...

My heart is heavy. My eyes are puffy and my throat hurts from crying. Danes in the kitchen dishing up some ice cream. (Good medicine!) I love our life out here on the farm. But some days are really, really hard. Some days I wonder if I'm tough enough. I have so much to learn and my mistakes have consequences...

I'm sorry dear Sugar-bugar.  I'm sorry Jen. I'm sorry I let you both down.