WONKY WING

I don’t think I was fully prepared for the challenges that I would face here on the farm. I had an idyllic vision of a life shared with animals of all sorts. I imagined gathering eggs every morning as I clucked along with the hens. I envisioned possibly milking a goat or cow (a very small cow). I even had thoughts of a few piglets who would all be as terrific, radiant and humble as Wilber in Charlotte’s Web. What I did not anticipate was acting as caretaker for a handicapped chicken.

I ordered my first batch of chicks from McMurray Hatchery. I carefully chose a mix of rare breeds who were proven to be good egg layers. I specified all females and placed my order, then anxiously awaited delivery. For those of you who have never ordered chickens by mail, let me tell you what the process is for receiving your day old baby chicks. You are given a delivery date, and very early on that date (like 4:30 a.m.) you get a call from your local post office. The person on the other end of the phone informs you that your chicks have arrived. You hurry to the post office to collect them and are met by a frazzled looking postal worker with a small box that is cheeping to beat the band. You take them to the car and open the box to see 25 chicks crammed very tightly together. It is vital that you keep them warm, so you hurry home with them and lovingly place them into whatever you are using as a brooding area. In our case it was a plastic wading pool with a heat lamp suspended overhead.

The chicks seemed very happy to be out of the box they came in and immediately begin to explore their new habitat.  We placed a small chicken waterer and a chick feeder into the wading pool. These are both designed to prevent the chicks from roosting on the edge and pooping into their food and water. They are moderately successful. You would be astounded at how much baby chicks can poop.

After a day or so the chicks were adapting well, all except one. This little chick seemed to have a problem with one wing. She held it a little awkwardly and couldn’t flap it like she could her other wing. We also noticed very quickly that she was at the bottom of the “pecking order”. She was the one who got picked on (or should I say pecked on) by the other chicks. She would fall over, could not get herself up due to the left wing problem, and the other chicks would pounce. She was obviously not able to hold her own in the flock, and we were advised to let nature take its course. Well, I couldn’t stand to watch the tragic way that she was being treated so I made her a little brooder all her own and lovingly cared for her. I watched over her, hand fed her, set her up right if she fell over, and watched her grow.  I named her Wonky Wing because, well, she had a wonky wing.

Chicks grow very quickly and within a week the chicks were all escaping from the wading pool. We put a chicken wire barrier around it to keep them in. By the end of three weeks it was time to move them outside to the chicken coop. Since we couldn’t keep Wonky Wing with the others we housed her in the dog kennel right outside our back door. We had an unused rabbit hutch that we outfitted for her to roost in at night. This was an ideal situation because I could keep a close eye on her and put her back on her feet when she fell over, which she often did. Mainly she would get excited and start flapping her wings. One wing would flap madly while the other caused her to lose her balance and down she’d go. Then she would flail around in the dirt trying to get up, to no avail. I tried to teach her how to right herself when she was down, but she could hardly ever do it. It became a regular thing for someone to holler “Wonky Wing is down!” and whoever was closest would set her upright.

One morning my oldest daughter, whose bedroom was closest to the dog pen said, “That chicken sounds like and elephant.” I asked her what she meant and she demonstrated the “Errrrr” that Wonky was making in the morning. After a few days it was “Errrr Errrr.” Then it was a full fledged “Errr Errr Er Er Errrr!” Damned if Wonky wasn’t a rooster. Are you seeing a pattern here? (See Duck sex change.) Luckily his name was unisex so we were good on that front.

Wonky continued to live in the dog pen for several months. The other chickens were free ranging so they would come and hang around outside the pen and taunt him with their freedom. It’s like he was grounded, permanently. Eventually we moved the rabbit hutch next to the chicken coop and built a fence around it so that he would be more a part of the flock.

Contrary to what you might think, roosters do not only crow at daybreak. That is when they begin, and they continue to crow throughout the day as the mood arises. Some find this annoying. I, however, found it to be quite reassuring. Every time I heard his joyful noise I knew that he was on his feet and announcing his pleasure to the world.

With winter coming on I had serious doubts about his ability to survive the cold. I was sure he would fall over and freeze to death before we realized he was down. We checked on him several times a day, giving him a lift as needed, and sure enough, he survived to see another spring. He lived through the summer, and one early autumn evening he was snatched from his enclosure by a predator. As heartbroken as I was to lose him, I felt a great satisfaction in the knowledge that we had helped him to overcome his handicap. He added a richness to life here on the farm that none of us will ever forget.

MILDRED THE TRANS GENDER DUCK

I have always loved animals. As a child I collected turtles, fish, stray cats, and the occasional field mouse. My mother was not as enthusiastic as I was about these creatures. She did not encourage me in my attempts to amass a menagerie in our small house. At Easter time one year the local toy store owner had the brilliant idea to give away baby chicks. My brother and I went uptown and each brought one home. We raised them in the living room in a wooden box - for about two weeks. Then mom made me take them to my grandpa’s farm. I never ate chicken there again.

As soon as we bought our “Country Estate”, I began making plans for the animals I had always dreamed of living with. The spring after we moved in, a friend brought my grandson a baby duck. We named her Quackers. She drove us crazy with her “quacking”, so off I went to the local farm store to adopt a playmate for her. I came home with a little girl named Gouda. As you can see, I am far more creative in the labeling department than my husband is.

That same Easter, a friend of ours bought a duckling for her daughter, and named it Mildred.  After a few months they realized that Mildred was lonely for other ducks, and being a sucker for any animal that is in need, I said join the flock.

Mildred fit right in, following Quackers, Gouda and our medium sized flock of chickens in and out of the coop every morning and evening. A small wading pool satisfied the urge to swim and splash. Bugs and toads abound here on the farm, so life was good for a little duck.

After a few weeks I began to suspect that Mildred was an imposter. A deep throated quack was the first clue, and a bit of ducky hanky-panky with Quackers and Gouda convinced me that Mildred was in fact a Milton, Millhouse, or Mickey. Mildred was definitely male.  Not wanting to actually change his name, we started calling him Mildred the Trans Gender duck. He became the ruler of the poultry yard.

My grandson Nicholas was about five years old at the time, and lived here with us. Being a five year old boy, he quickly became Mildred’s arch enemy. Nick would run around the yard, ride his bike through the middle of the flock, and generally make a nuisance of himself as far as Mildred was concerned. Before long, if Nick was anywhere near the ducks or chickens, Mildred would mount an attack. Wings spread, head down, he would go after Nick with a vengeance, nipping at his heels with his little beak.  Nick tried to avoid these attacks by running away, throwing things at Mildred, or grabbing him by the neck and holding him up in the air so that he could not nip at him. Nothing discouraged that duck.

Mildred came to know the sound of Nick’s voice and recognized his mother’s vehicle when it pulled into the driveway. Before Nick could get out of the car, Mildred was right there waiting to pounce. When Nick was riding his bike, Mildred would run alongside quacking like crazy. One time he got his wing caught in the spokes of the rear wheel. Luckily he survived it, and continued to chase the bike and it’s rider. I heard Nick yelling out a second story window one afternoon, and saw Mildred come running toward the house ready to do battle. He was one funny duck.

Sometimes Mildred would take a notion to go after one of the adults here at Sunnylawn Grange. If your back was to him, he would take up the chase, but the minute you turned to face him he spun 180 degrees and acted totally innocent. Once you turned back the other way, he resumed his attack. You could go on like this all day if you had nothing better to do than enjoy playing chicken with a duck.

Mildred eventually met his match when he tangled with a raccoon or fox after dark one summer evening. I am sure he was trying to protect his girls from a threat more real than a small boy. Mildred provided us with a lot of entertainment while he resided on the farm. He was a little duck with a very big personality.

HOMESCHOOLING ON THE FARM – THE ADVENTURES OF A FIVE YEAR OLD AND HIS MAMAW

My grandson Nicholas, having an autumn birthday, seemed a little young to go off to kindergarten when he was still four years old. His mother and I decided that he would stay home with me and be homeschooled for his kindergarten year. I was very enthusiastic about this. I had homeschooled three of my own children for a few years and had mostly enjoyed it. We made a list of the things that we would be studying and of the materials we would need. What an adventure that year turned out to be.

August 23^rd, 2004 was our first official day of kindergarten. We were learning about the letter B, so we ate bagels for breakfast, picked beans in the garden, and searched the house for things that started with the letter B. We played ball and rode our bikes. Nicholas put one of the hens in the hammock and gave her a wild ride. I had to let him know that this was not part of my lesson plan. I don’t think she laid an egg for a week after that.

The next day, still concentrating on the letter B, we sprayed a big pile of shaving cream onto the kitchen counter. We wrote lower case and upper case Bs, B words, and made shapes of things that started with B in the shaving cream. When we were done, Nick was understandably covered in the lovely white stuff. I took his clothes off him, and sent him upstairs to get clean clothes. Evidently he thought his clothes were on the porch roof, because when I went to see what was taking him so long, he was on the roof in his underwear. I invited him back inside, gave him a stern lecture regarding the dangers of falling off the porch roof, and proceeded to secure every window on the second floor with a strategically placed screw. Nick was disappointed. He said, “Now I can’t squeeze out the window anymore”. I put him into the bathtub and went to get the clothes he had not found on the roof. While I was in his room he snuck out into the kitchen, got six eggs and cracked them into the bathtub. He said he was experimenting to see if they would float.

On our third morning, just as I thought maybe this homeschooling thing was not going to be the wonderful experience that I imagined Nick asked, “Mamaw, what are we going to learn about today?” We played a game, took a walk, went to the library and the cider mill. It was a lovely day and I felt new hope for our endeavor.

Each morning after breakfast we would get dressed, make our beds and brush our teeth. Then we would go outside to feed the animals. One morning as we let the chickens and ducks out of the coop Nick said, “Come on girls, come on. Now no pushing, no shoveling.”  I imagined little poultry sized shovels waiting to be put to use by our “girls.”

Most every day we did some kind of art project. During one artistic session Nick suddenly wadded up a piece of paper and threw it across the room. I told him to pick it up. He went and got it and said “I don’t know what came over me; I just don’t know what got into me.” I don’t know either.

 One day Nick told me he would like to have a rooster to wake him up so that he would not miss the school bus. I reminded him that he doesn’t take a bus. He said “What about when I go to college? I don’t want to be late for the bus.” I agreed that he should have a rooster when he goes to college.

Over the course of the year we took many field trips. On an excursion to Hudson Mills Park we learned about butterflies. Nick asked me why I always planned the field trips. He wanted to do some of the planning. I asked him where we would go, and he said Burger King every day for lunch. This is why I did most of the planning.

Nick became very interested in the computer, particularly playing games. I encouraged him to send e-mail to family members in order to foster his reading and writing skills. One morning he sent an e-mail to his grandpa and one to our friend Betty. He also wanted to send one to our dog, Jules. I asked him if he thought Jules would send him an e-mail in return. He said “No, she can’t. She doesn’t have opposable thumbs”. I agreed.

Nick and I both learned a great deal that year. I will always treasure the memories we made together exploring the world of a five year old. Homeschooling is not for the faint of heart or the old and tired. Nick had more energy than this grandmother, so the next September he went off to 1^st grade at Charyl Stockwell Academy. He is now a 7^th grader and taller than I am. I wonder if he remembers that he is going to need a rooster when he goes to college.

WHERE TO BEGIN

At the closing I began to get this panicky feeling in the middle of my stomach. What if I hated living way out in the country? What if it was going to be too much for us to restore the place? How many times can you hear “money pit” before you have a total meltdown? We had made a final inspection of the place the night before the closing. The previous owners still had not cleaned up much of anything, and the barn was full of junk. We insisted that they put $1000 in an escrow account to cover the cost of a dumpster if necessary, and gave them thirty days to finish cleaning the place up. This was actually the first time we had met the owners. I asked a lot of questions like, “do you know why there is water in the basement?” and “how much does it cost to heat the house in the winter?” The woman said that they had never had water in the basement and that the house was always toasty warm using very little fuel oil. It was too late to back out, so I signed the papers and turned over the check. We were committed, or should have been committed to some institution where the walls and the food were very soft.

I was anxious to get started cleaning, so my daughters and I drove out to the house that evening. All three cats that we had seen on our first visit were still in residence. We put them outside with bowls of water and food on the porch. Thankfully all of the dogs were gone, but the dog shit was not. It was a hard to know where to begin. I handed everyone a garbage bag and told them to dig in. They were not happy.  I must add that my children were extremely unenthusiastic about moving into this house. The first time we brought them out to see it they thought we were kidding, that it was some kind of sick joke we were playing on them. Ha ha. Most everyone who saw it for the first time had a stricken look on their face; I could see the wheels turning as they tried to think of something to say that was less than totally negative.

When we came back on the following day, the cats were all in the house. We discovered that there was a broken window in the attic. The cats climbed up a tree, out onto the roof, and in the window. We succeeded in boarding up the window, and eventually had to cut down the limb which hung out over the roof. One of the cats soon presented us with a litter of five kittens. We were now up to eight cats. This led us on a desperate search to find a veterinarian who would spay and neuter them without putting us in the poorhouse. That is a whole other story.

The first time we used the washing machine, which was in the kitchen, all of the water drained into the basement via a rusted out waste pipe. That provided a more accurate answer to the first question. (Maybe the woman never went into the basement). We soon realized that the dryer vent went through the wall and behind the refrigerator.  The end. The lint and humidity just spewed out into the kitchen. I’ll just throw in here that we did indeed use thousands of dollars worth of fuel oil the first year, and I wore long underwear from October 15^th until well into April. Answer to second question.

A month went by, and the barn was still full of crap (literally), so we got the $1000 and the joy of cleaning it out. We rented a two yard dumpster and started filling it up. It was emptied every Friday, so on Thursday we would get all excited, “it’s dumpster day, it’s dumpster day!” There were bags of garbage in both barns and on the hillside behind the house. Piles of miscellaneous refuse were just about anywhere you cared to look. There was an entire room in the basement that was three inches deep in composted dog manure (we still call it the dog shit room). The farm was over one hundred years old; you’d think you might find some treasures digging through all of that stuff. Not a chance. Nothing that you could take to the Antique Roadshow and find out it was worth $$$$$. It took us months to finally be done with the dumpster.

We cleaned and painted the inside of the house for three months before we moved in. One weekend we invited all of our friends and relatives out for a painting party. I promised to feed them and many of them were actually crazy enough to come. These are the kind of people I love to have in my life. The one’s who see me jumping off a cliff and come to bid me farewell. We made the house (barely) livable, and transported all of our belongings from town out to the farm. We hummed the tune to Green Acres for weeks.  

TRASH- AND EXCREMENT-FILLED COHOCTAH FARM IS OUR DREAM HOUSE

grange/grānj/

noun
1. a farm, with its farmhouse and nearby buildings.
2. Chiefly British. a country house with its various farm buildings, usually constituting the dwelling of a yeoman or gentleman farmer.
3. Archaic. a barn or granary.

I figure if Scarlett O’Hara's house can have a name, so can mine. My uncle claimed that Bradley Lott, who built the farm back in 1902 or so, had named it Sunnylawn Grange. I have not been able to determine if this is in fact the case, but I like to think so.

The barn was built first, and the house was built over two years or so using a contraption bought from Sears Roebuck and Co. The concrete blocks were produced with their Wizard block making machine. Using this machine, you could make 50-70 blocks a day. The blocks necessary for the average basement would take nearly four weeks to make. Sears advertised the homes produced with this miraculous machine as “almost identical in appearance with hand finished stoned…(and)…more sanitary than the average house.” I try to keep this in mind when I recall the condition of the house when we first saw it.

My great-grandparents on both sides of my family were farmers, and I loved playing in the barns and fields when we visited them. My maternal grandmother, who was raised on the farm, could not wait to get away from there. She wanted nothing more to do with slopping hogs, gathering eggs, or weeding the garden. I, however, could think nothing I wanted more. I was nearly fifty years old when I finally had the opportunity to “buy the farm.”

I love to look at those real estate magazines that are always so strategically placed right inside the supermarket doorway. I can sit for hours paging through them, imagining how I could make this or that house my own. So one day I came home from the Village Market with one of them in the sack with my groceries. After I put the groceries away I sat down at the kitchen table to look for my dream house. Now, mind you, my husband and I were not looking to buy a house. We already had a perfectly good house.

The houses that always get my attention are the older ones, built well before I was born and usually needing a little attention. I am not afraid of hard work. On this particular day, the ad that jumped off the page at me with big bold letters said “Diamond in the Rough.” It was a big old farm house, listed for sale with 15 acres. The price was too good to be believed, so I convinced my husband that we should go out and see it. He is a sucker for my enthusiasm so he agreed to go along.

I contacted the Realtor and we made an appointment to meet at the house. My husband and I got there first. It was a cold day in March, about a foot of snow covering the ground. Even this much snow could not hide the amount of junk laying around the yard. There was a dog pen next to the driveway, its  several occupants barking furiously as we exited the car. Two barns in serious need of repair loomed ahead of us, doors wide open (were you born in a barn?).

The Realtor pulled into the driveway and introduced herself. We made small talk as we walked up to the side porch. Broken concrete steps led to the door. As she put her hand on the door knob, she said “remember, it needs a lot of work.”

The first thing I noticed was the overpowering smell of urine. A stack of dog crates with little yapping dogs in them seemed to be the source. The kitchen was full of dirty dishes, garbage on the floor, cabinets missing doors, and a cat sleeping in a bowl in the cupboard.

We walked from room to room in utter amazement. There was not a door hanging on its hinges in any room except one (the bathroom). What had once been beautiful wood trim had been partly painted or just flat out  ripped off the door or window frame. The wood floors were scratched and uneven. The upstairs bedrooms had some sort of horrible textured material on the ceilings, evidently to hide some plaster damage. One closet seemed to have been used as a bathroom at one time, sporting the remains of a toilet, peeling wallpaper and a fine crop of cobwebs. There were little piles of dog shit in every room, and the baseboards all had drip marks on them. I could easily guess what had made them.

We went to the barn and peered inside. It was full, and I do mean full, of raw garbage, broken furniture, ancient farm equipment, and cats. The hillside behind the barn was also covered with garbage, bagged at one time, but now spilling out onto the landscape.

The Realtor did her level best to play up the finer points of the property. She told us that several people were definitely interested in buying it. Her mouth seemed to be a little pinched at the corners and I couldn’t help wondering if she was struggling not to laugh as she made these outrageous claims.

We told the Realtor that we would think about it and contact her. When we got into the car we looked at each other and started to laugh. “What the hell?” said my husband.

“Who would try to sell a house in that condition?” I said to him.

Looking back as my husband turned out of the driveway, I knew it my heart that I would live in that house.