I’ve never made any bones about that fact that Stephen is the power house behind our farm. He’s the muscle that brings the hustle, he’s the man with a plan. Except. Well except for the fact that he’s human and can break. I know this because I watched it happen. Over months discomfort turned into pain, which turned into debilitation. After ‘treatment’ for back pain that only made things worse, we finally found out that Stephen’s back had herniated. It…
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Diwali, Happy Eid (some years!), Blessings of the Yuletide be upon you. Oh, and Happy Holidays. There are a lot of words we can say to each other over the course of this dark winter season, I know that bothers some people but I say the more the merrier. Any chance to share words of kindness, to wish good things for other people, is a good thing. I don’t have to share a person’s…
In the heat of summer, when just moving around sets the sweat dripping down your back, we are thinking about winter. From the first leaf of green peeking up through the mud and snow, to the last red and gold leaves that cover the ground with a luminous carpet, there is another colour that is always on our minds. White. Everything we work on, every project, everything we build is centred around the coming season. From the seeds we plant…
It’s hard to know where to begin isn’t it? The onslaught that has been the last week has blindsided so many of us that it’s hard to know how to have a reaction. How do you react to an entire country being given over to hatred and oppression? How do we react to our neighbours advocating for behaviour that taints and diminishes us all? How should we react to individuals and institutions that threaten people we know and love? That…
It would be impossible to sum up a season in just a few words, but given that I’ve not written here for months I find myself trying to do just that. Of course that is partly why I haven’t written in months because every time I try to encapsulate our life neatly, succinctly, I come up with nothing. But then who has a neat life? Certainly not me. So I’ll probably write about different aspects of the last few months…
First of all thank you to everyone who said such nice things to us after I wrote about Morag. In person, on facebook, in the comments section we were met with kindness and understanding. Thank you. Well last week was a bit of a funny one. We are used to death in some ways on the farm, we are used to being in control of the lives of animals and part of that is deciding when the end should…
3 years ago, when I was in the UK visiting my Dad with the boys, I got a message from Stephen saying “I just bought a cow!”. My response was something supportive like “You bought a what?!” until I eventually established that no he wasn’t kidding and yes he’d bought a cow. A real one. Granted the messages had been preceded by ones like “I’m at an auction!” and “They have cows here!” so I really should have seen it…
Today I have actually reached the point of feeling that I can actually use the word ‘spring’ officially without a) crying at the same time b) using some kind of prefix like “what the $&@#$ is up with….” and c) expecting there to be some kind of weather related retribution that will bring at least 10 cms of snow in the next 24 hours. It’s been that kind of spring. A few times in the last couple of months I…
According the the larger world, the world that includes mythical things such as the economy, I am unemployed. I do not bring in an income, I do not pay taxes on that income, I do not exist. That’s cool with me frankly, as I can’t remember the last time I gave a rodent’s rear end about what the wider world thought of me. It was definitely pre 2008. Definitely. However, that is not really the issue in hand, the issue…
My friend and I were chatting the other day about how our two boys will be turning 7 in the next few months. Her eldest and my youngest, the fastest of friends, are slowly moving out of that first phase of childhood and into the next. The boys have been friends since they were both 3 and it occurred to me that they would not be able to remember a time when they didn’t know each other. Since there first…