Saturday Shearing in the Barn

 

  

Good Friday

In Orthodox liturgics a new day begins at Sundown and so it is natural that services for the following day are often held by way of anticipation on the evening before.  Last night was the first of the Good Friday services, a reading of twelve selections from the Gospels recounting the Passion, that is the arrest, trial and crucifixion of the Lord.  In between the Gospel readings we sang hymns and verses meditating on the wonder and paradoxes of what is taking place in that liturgical time of the service which places us simultaneously in Palestine and the present.  Here is an Antiphon we sang which seem to follow with the theme of water that has been cropping up in my posts this week:

Today he who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon a Tree, (x3)

He who is King of the Angels is arrayed in a crown of thorns.

He who wraps the heaven in clouds is wrapped in mocking purple.

He who freed Adam in the Jordan receives a blow on the face.

The Bridegroom of the Church is transfixed with nails.

The Son of the Virgin is pierced by a lance,.

We worship your Sufferings, O Christ (x3)

Show us also your glorious Resurrection.

The full service as translated by Archimandrite Ephrem Lash can be found here.

Holy Thursday

The One who made lakes and springs and seas, instructing us in surpassing humility, girding himself with a towel, washed his disciples’ feet, humbling himself in the abundance of his compassion and exalting us from the depths of wickedness, he who alone loves humankind.

From the service for Matins (Morning Prayer) on Holy Thursday

The Morning Fog Lifts

The Promise of Spring

Steve Hayes commented on yesterday's post from his Southern hemisphere home in South Africa: 

 And I heard noises outside my window this morning and looked out and the wind was swirling the dead leaves. I turned the heater on for the first time this year, and somewhere reported the first snow of the season.

This reminder of the reversal of seasons that comes from living on different halves of a big round ball mixed with the last few days of rain and brought to mind one of my favorite songs; The Waters of March/Águas de Março, by Antonio Carlos Jobim.  Jobim wrote two versions of the song.  The Portuguese original is a stream of consciousness meditation inspired by the rains of March, which in Brazil signal the end of summer.  The second, English, version is not so much a translation as a Northern hemisphere adaptation.  Here is a bit from the lyrics:

The plan of the house, the body in bed
And the car that got stuck, it's the mud, it's the mud
A float, a drift, a flight, a wing
A hawk, a quail, the promise of spring
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the promise of life, it's the joy in your heart
A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road
It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone
A snake, a stick, it is John, it is Joe
It's a thorn in your hand and a cut in your toe
A point, a grain, a bee, a bite
A blink, a buzzard, a sudden stroke of night
A pin, a needle, a sting a pain
A snail, a riddle, a wasp, a stain
A pass in the mountains, a horse and a mule
In the distance the shelves rode three shadows of blue
And the river talks of the waters of March
It's the promise of life in your heart
A stick, a stone, the end of the road
The rest of a stump, a lonesome road
A sliver of glass, a life, the sun
A knife, a death, the end of the run
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the end of all strain, it's the joy in your heart

Reading the lyrics does not do justice to the song, with its deceptively simple syncopation and sweet but melancholy melody.  I counted yesterday and discovered that I own five versions of the song by different artists.  I did not plan this, it is just that I find myself listening to a lot of bossa nova lately.  Perhaps it is the combination of beauty and sadness in the best of it.  Perhaps it is just an urge to listen to music made by grown ups for a change.  The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart maintains in his The Beauty of the Infinite that "Bach's is the ultimate Christian music; it reflects as no other human artifact ever has or could the Christian vision of creation."  This is no doubt true for the big picture.  I see Bach as like the physics and higher math of cosmology and quantum mechanics.  It is true and it is beautiful but it describes a world both bigger and smaller than the one we humans live in.  Here on the human scale the math gets messy.  Coastlines are fractals.  Swirling waters and weather patterns are non-linear, defying easy prediction.  Even the human heart beats chaotically and a "perfectly regular heartbeat is more likely to presage sudden death than good health."  Jobim's little bossa nova about the change of seasons, be it North or South is not Bach, but, for me at least, it speaks of the underlying beauty amidst the ten thousand seemingly unconnected details found in any day in any life if you stop and look around.  Not a meaningless chaos then, but something more:

A float, a drift, a flight, a wing
A hawk, a quail, the promise of spring
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the promise of life, it's the joy in your heart

The View From Home April 21 2008

In the Orthodox Church Calendar yesterday was Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week.  Pascha, as we call Easter, is much later this year than the Western celebration, late enough in the season so the redbud is in bloom and the grass in our fields has turned from winter brown to green.  Here is the view from home this Monday morning in Holy Week.

The National Weather Service has placed us under a winter storm watch for Thursday night. Ice, sleet and freezing rain expected. From the photo archives, here is another picture of the aftermath of a mid-December ice storm.

Our flock has done some strange things, but I've never seen this before.

Light, Shadow, Classics and Packing Tape?

Mark Khaisman is an artist living and working in Philadelphia.  Born in Ukraine and educated in Moscow, Mark has worked as an architect, animator, iconographer, and stained glass designer.  In the last few years he has pulled together the skills from all his previous artistic incarnations and has applied them to creating art that at the same time combines the disciplines of classical drawing with the use of light from glass work to create something wonderful by layering common brown packing tape over Plexiglas.  This is what I mean:

The subject matter is a suit of ceremonial armor, perfect for a classic figure study, accenting detail and exercising the artist's ability to sketch in light and shadow.  Mark suggests it all simply by layering tape over a backlit panel.  Without the light, the figure would be a barely differentiated mass of muddy brown.  With the light shining through it becomes detailed, elegant, even radiant.  (to be continued . . .)

Susan I took a road trip this weekend; no kids, no computer, no sheep except the ones out the car window. We left Friday afternoon for Lancaster County PA and spent the night at a Bed and Breakfast in Bird in Hand. Saturday was farmer's markets, furniture stands, Amish food and a quick trip to Philadelphia, a new hotel and a reception for the opening of an exhibit of work by Mark Khaisman. More about that tomorrow. Tonight it's time for bed.

This is Amy Sue. She was purchased at a livestock sale by a friend who went there to look at horses and felt so sorry for the single bedraggled sheep in the sale that she put in her bid and became a sheep owner. Amy Sue came over to live with us a few years back to take advantage of our larger summer pastures and stayed when she decided she would rather hang with the flock than be a pet. That doesn't mean that she still doesn't want a little more individual attention than the rest of the flock.

From the photo archives, looking out towards the mountain after a mid-December ice storm.

One of the online journals I read regularly is Bishop Seraphim's livejournal. Bishop Seraphim seems to have an inexhaustible interest in almost anything and everyone. Today's entry (posted from Moscow) takes us back to New York to an exhibit honoring Jack Kerouac. At this point in my 50's I should have outgrown Kerouac, but I still find myself rereading On The Road and Dharma Bums every few years. There is a music there you either hear or you don't. As Richard Thompson put it in one of his songs:

Like a myth you rode in from the west
From the go you had my button pressed
Did the tea-time of your soul
Make you long for wilder days?
Did you never let Jack Kerouac
Wash over you in waves?

Here is a picture from back in December of the first lamb of the season.

Among my other Christmas presents was gift card for Borders. I used most of it on a CD sale at the local branch and picked up the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard's A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina). The first I was familiar with, the second I picked up after reading reviews. Both are great listening. I will not attempt to review Blanchard's work until I have spent more time with it. As for Pet Sounds, this is music I have heard for over 40 years, and still listen to. A few days ago, after my umpteenth listening to "God Only Knows" on the car stereo on the way home, I did a little web surfing before dinner and went to Maclin Horton's Light on Dark Water to catch up on a few weeks of his Sunday Night Journal entries and found this appreciation of what us old-timers still refer to as an "album."

If you read here for any time you know that I live outside a small town in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. We have not heretofore been much affected by multiculturalism. Our idea of exotic cuisine is the local Mexican restaurant or carryout Chinese. Because of this I was surprised when the Royal Dairy, an old style diner attached to what was formerly an actual dairy, was sold and reincarnated as a Korean barbecue, Japanese steakhouse and Sushi restaurant called the Royal Garden. Susan and I stopped in tonight and much to my surprise, it was now under new management as the "Samurai Steakhouse;" being in this latest incarnation a Mexican (yes, Mexican) restaurant with a sideline as a Japanese Steakhouse and sushi bar. Being on a post-Christmas diet, we opted for the Japanese grill experience, which was ably executed by the cheery Hispanic chef. It was actually pretty good, and when I have shed a few pounds I might try the Mexican part of the menu.

From Alan Jacob's online commonplace book, comes a link to this story about an unusual link between Indian writer and poet Vikram Seth and the great English poet George Herbert.

I discovered Herbert in high school and re-read him regularly. Here is one of my favorites:

Prayer (I)

Prayer the Church's banquet, angels' age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;

Engine against th'Almighty, sinner's tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days' world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

George Herbert

We did not get the predicted four to eight inches of snow today. Enough came down to give everything a good coating, but most of what fell came as sleet and freezing rain. I have to say I would have preferred the snow. The sheep are fine. No new lambs today, which was a surprise. Perhaps because we had everybody in a paddock close to the barn and they did not have the opportunity to drop a lamb out on the ice it took the fun out of it. If the sun makes an appearance I will try for some pictures tomorrow.

What's on the ipod: Richard Thompson. For proof that a great musician can elevate anything, go to this page and play the interview. It is all good, but what you want is eight minutes and fifty-five seconds in.

Hot Library Smut

Hot Library Smut No, this has nothing to do with lady librarians taking off their glasses and shaking their hair out. If you click the link, you will find photographs of the most beautiful spaces for the display, reading and storage of books one can imagine. I have worked in a few libraries over the years, but these are libraries apotheosized.

Our latest addition to the flock.

 

My law office is in Front Royal Virginia, but our farm is several miles south of town near the village of Browntown. Browntown has a general store, a couple churches, a few houses and an old country school which is now a Community Center. The January issue of Shenandoah Valley Monthly Magazine has an article about our community which is available on-line this month here. The cover shows a picture of our home town after a snowfall.

 

 

Lambs everywhere this weekend. I don't think we've ever had so many born in so short a period of time. The lamb count jumped from nine to twenty between Friday morning and this afternoon, even after losing a few in difficult births. We are expecting at least a few more in the next day. We spent the day at the barn, checking ewes, looking in on the new lambs and getting the barn ready for the new influx. Oldest son and I picked up two truckloads of hay bought from some neighbors and stacked it in the barn for feeding to the new mothers. There are so many new lambs that every time a group of ewes move, there is a kind of chinese fire drill where the lambs run around and sort out who belongs to who. One lamb misplaced its mother for most of the morning, going from sheep to sheep looking for someone who would let him nurse. I was beginning to think that he had been abandoned when he caught up with his mother and his twin. The ewe took him back happily, but did not seem to realize he was missing. Sheep are not known for being smart, but most mothers of twins can usually count to two.

We have one sheep that has mastered the intricacies of the cattle guard. Instead of being intimidated by the concrete grid, she dances across like Baryshnikov and heads out to Browntown Road where, she believes, the grass is greener. Inevitably we get a call from a neighbor or the local sheriff's department that a sheep is distracting traffic and we send one of the boys down to get her back in. Now, we live in the country so the occasional cow or sheep in the road is to be expected. I won't even begin to speculate how this sheep made its way to the Bronx. I ran across the story while searching for poetry on sheep. I must admit, it has a more surreal quality than most police (or livestock) reports that I've read.

After only thirty-five posts last year (and none from September to January) the readership here has naturally enough dropped off dramatically. Perhaps it's time to order one of these.

Here is something I have been meaning to link to for a while. I am not sure whether it is simply another ill-advised arts grant gone wild or truly inspired silliness that actually spills over into poetry. Click here to see what I mean.

After reading it again tonight, I thought briefly of adapting the method for devotional purposes; though in an Orthodox context that would mean painting Lord have mercy on the first forty sheep. Since that would occupy about two thirds of our flock, the remaining one third would be hard pressed carry the rest of the burden for enough combinations of words for a properly lengthy Orthodox prayer. Since we do not plan on increasing our flock size in the near future, I will table the idea for now.

If you would like to engage in a bit of virtual sheep poetry composition, go here to add a little Dada to your day.

When we left the barn last night we expected that by tonight the lamb would make it through but his mother would not. Instead, the lamb took a turn for the worse and died in spite of the best efforts of our neighbor who has such a knack for taking care of weak or orphaned newborns that she has been our ICU for the last few years. When Susan taught Phys Ed part time she used to take lambs in a box to her office at the private school where she worked. Her current job doesn't allow for that. If our neighbor was not available I imagine that clients might hear a little soft bleating from the back of my office during the day. As for the ewe, she seems, surprisingly, to be recovering well. If she survives, I will be glad, but I don't expect she will be a permanent addition to the flock.

Two new lambs today, bringing the total to nine. One of the mothers prolapsed her uterus, making for a long session at the barn after sunset. Susan and I traded off the flashlight while working to return what was outside back inside where it belonged. We will see in the morning if our work was sufficient. Her lamb is spending the night with a neighbor who delights to take in our ill and orphaned. If all goes well, the lamb will come back home tomorrow. The other eight are doing well, two sets of twins and four single births. There are still many more to come. The unseasonable warm weather may be holding things off, since most of our ewes have an unfailing instinct for lambing in snow storms, ice storms, freezing rain, hail, sub-zero temperatures and other conditions designed to dismay the part-time shepherd.

Today was the feast of Theophany and the Blessing of the Waters. It is a wonderful service which follows the standard Orthodox rule of composition that too much is just about right. It can be hard on the feet and requires more patience than we moderns are used to devoting to a worship service but it does allow room for great shout-outs like this:

We glorify you, the Creator and Fashioner of the universe. We glorify you, only-begotten Son of God, without father from your Mother, without mother from your Father. For in the preceding feast we saw you as a babe, but in the present one we see you full and perfect man, our God, made manifest as perfect God from perfect God. For today the moment of the feast is here for us and the choir of saints assembles here with us, and Angels keep festival with mortals. Today the grace of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove dwelt upon the waters. Today the Sun that never sets has dawned and the world is made radiant with the light of the Lord. Today the Moon with its radiant beams sheds light on the world. Today the stars formed of light make the inhabited world lovely with the brightness of their splendour. Today the clouds rain down from heaven the shower of justice for mankind. Today the Uncreated by his own will accepts the laying on of hands by his own creature. Today the Prophet and Forerunner draws near, but stands by with fear seeing God’s condescension towards us. Today the streams of Jordan are changed into healing by the presence of the Lord. Today all creation is watered by mystical streams. Today the failings of mankind are being washed away by the waters of Jordan. Today Paradise is opened for mortals and the Sun of justice shines down on us. Today the bitter water as once for Moses’ people is changed to sweetness by the presence of the Lord. Today we have been delivered from the ancient grief, and saved as the new Israel. Today we have been redeemed from darkness and are filled with radiance by the light of the knowledge of God. Today the gloomy fog of the world is cleansed by the manifestation of our God. Today all creation shines with light from on high.

Translation by Archimandrite Ephrem.

Father Stephen Freeman has thoughts and links on the Feast here, here and here.

The View from Home

 

Older son asked for help to get him started on an English assignment last night. His class had studied Old English riddles and they were to go home and write their own. We talked about it for a while and this is what he came up with:

I am dry as a bone and wet like a fish.
I am solid as a brick,
But I wriggle like a worm.
I am cold then hot.
I am both ancient and modern.
I am loved by nerds and college students.
What am I?

Answer is in the comments.

In honor of International Talk Like A Pirate Day:

My pirate name is:

Dirty John Rackham

You're the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean -- not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network


Regular blogging to resume shortly. Aargh!

We are back from the islands and I am back at work. Our actual return was Sunday night. Monday started with Court hearings at 9:00 am 10:00 am, 11:30 am and 2:00 pm. After five days in the tropics the change of pace was bracing to say the least. Sunday morning I was ready to throw away the return tickets and stay on by hook or by crook. Now that we are home again I have to say it is good to be looking out at our own hillsides. The weather is hot and the more nimble members of the flock have hopped the cattle guard and are dozing under the tree in the front yard. We truly have reached the peak of summer when the sheep lying on the cool shaded gravel in the driveway refuse to budge and I have to drive around them. Perhaps our front lawn with its good grass and shade is the sheep equivalent of the picture above. If so, I can't blame them for not wanting to move.

This is not a note from a hillside farm. This is a note from a hillside (and beachside) vacation. I am writing from a rented computer in a little cafe on St. Maartens. Blogger is in Dutch. The ocean around is the impossible blue-green I had always assumed came from photo retouching in travel brochures. Getting to the hotel, we had a quick tour around the island as the driver dropped off tourists in a loop around the coastline. Strange mixture of overdevlopment with just plain folks. Sort of like West Virginia with an ocean view. Off the beaten path there are hillside pastures with cattle grazing. The fencelines are clear; scrub and low grass on the cattle side, tropical vegetation on the other. Roads are narrow, drivers are enthusiastic, potholes and speedbumps keep the overall velocity down, causing drivers to run their little hyundais like sprint cars. Dash here, cut there, brake, swerve, stop in the road to chat. The clock on the terminal is ticking so it is time to hit "BERICHT PUBLICEREN" and get back to the business of relaxing.

Two of our rams who (mostly) coexist peacefully were lowering heads and crashing into one another as I looked out this afternoon. Looks like breeding season is underway. Most of the year our gentlemen sheep walk slowly and eat far more than some of them are worth. This time of year they make their one contribution to our enterprise before returning to their accustomed role as mobile manure producers and living lawn ornaments. Here is one of the few sheep poems I have in my collection. Written by the late New England poet and folksinger J. B. Goodenough, it looks forward to the end of all our rams' labors:

Sheep On The Town Road

Fenced beside the road
Three ewes doze.
The seven lambs, sleepy
With the work of being born,
Lean together.

The ram, in his own pen,
With nothing left to do,
Stands heavy-lidded
In the April sun,
Counting people.

From Milking in November

I found my copy of the book for $1.98 at the Main Bookshop in Sarasota back in June. The poems are spare, with a bit of a bite to them. The book is out of print, but, from the prices listed here, it seems that others value her work as well.

Here is another from the book:

Inheritance

No rum-money
Slave-money
Whale-money,
My grandfathers
Were landlubbers all.

They left me
A tilted house,
A broken-backed barn,
And six fields
hung on the hill.

Fifty years
I thought I was poor.
But I learned this:
Good dirt
Is hard to come by.

What's in the cd player these days: Jan Krist. Her voice and songwriting seem to hit me where I have been living lately; music about grief and hope, confusion, faith and mercy. You can download live tracks at her website here and listen for yourself. Try "Wounded Me, Wounded You" or "Spirit So Big." About ten years ago she wrote a piece for the arts journal Image; "Mercy Me: Music, Art, and Real Life."

Yes, it's been a while. The farm, flock and family are still here, with the usual changes that time brings to us all. I turned 52 just over a week ago and my oldest child turns 18 in just under a week. No big celebrations are planned. Nonetheless, it appears that our birthdays have not gone unremarked. On the same day last week he got an envelope from the Selective Service System and I received a postcard from Beltone hinting that someone in my age bracket might benefit from their services. I will pass. So far my hearing is holding out fine, which comes in handy to hear the creaking in my joints or the rumblings in a digestive system that has developed strong opinions about the appropriate food choices for a man in his sixth decade. Life is good though, and any morning that still finds me on the right side of the dirt is not without its possibilities.

Another picture from the weekend. Younger son takes a break from wrestling sheep to the shearing stand.

A scene from the annual Memorial Day Sheep Shearing Marathon.

Someone has to be on top of things

Baby, it's cold outside

Things I Have Been Doing Other Than Blogging

Farming (see the picture) The lamb count is up to twenty-four with more expected daily. The weather service is making noise about snow and sub-zero wind chills coming up, so I'm sure the remaining pregnant ewes are already making plans.

Family Like almost every parent in modern America Susan and I seem to spend half our life in a car with a child going or coming from somewhere. Whatever happened to letting kids run wild through the neighborhood until dinnertime? Well, our neighbors are mostly four footed, so I can't blame the guys for wanting to engage in off the farm activities with other humans of equivalent ages.

Reading New in the mail: Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church by Metropolitan John Zizioulas and Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews by Marshall McLuhan.

I have also been enjoying a novel in manuscript (or the pdf equivalent thereof) by Steve "Methodius" Hayes, a blogger, writer, teacher, activist and Orthodox deacon in South Africa. He bravely offered his work to all would-be critics for evaluation and I have been dipping into it as I have spare time in front of the computer. The book is a sort of Charles Williams style supernatural thriller set in apartheid era South Africa and is worth your time if that sort of thing appeals to you. I will be forwarding comments after I finish, but will refrain from posting any here if any one else is interested in becoming a reader-critic.

Dancing Susan and I were back on the floor Monday night for the next lesson. I seem to be improving, but that has more to do with my partner and the instruction than any innate talent. Nonetheless, they may make a Rhumba man out of me yet.

 

The View from Home

Part-time farmer, lamb and llama on a Saturday afternoon

 

Our first snow of the year.

If you look back at Wednesday's post, I remarked on our flocks' ability to sync reproduction with the worst available weather. Well, the baby boom suddenly came to a halt for the past two evenings. I wondered why, and then saw these graphics for Sunday's forecast at the National Weather Service page for our area:

I will be getting the pens ready tomorrow.

I met Mark Khaisman while he was designing stained glass windows for a studio near Front Royal. Trained as an architect, Mark has worked in a variety of mediums; glass, paint, animation, classic Russian iconography and now these wonderful evocative works made of brown packing tape layered over a light box. His web site is still under construction, but check out Galleries Two and Three for his revisioning of film noir, telling single scene stories in a medium so impossible that you can only shake your head and smile at his achievement. More images and information are available here.

The lamb count tonight is fourteen. Traditionally our ewes choose the worst possible weather to give birth, ice storms a speciality. This winter has been unseasonably mild, so they have had to be satisfied with our recent cold snap with near zero wind chills. At feeding time the lambs hang back while the ewes press in towards the feed troughs. With fourteen to choose from, it takes a while to sort out who belongs to whom. They sort first by ear, the ewes and lambs engaging in a kind of call and response, high pitched lamb cries answering back to the lower voiced ewes. The real test though is smell. The ewe sniffs the lamb, sometimes from head to tail, before being satisfied that she has found the right one.

Susan decided that we should celebrate her getting back on her feet from the summer of surgery by signing us up for ballroom dance lessons. Parks and Rec over in Winchester was offering a six week session on Rumba and Salsa, so off we went. Susan studied dance in college before graduating as a P.E. major, so she was prepared by talent, temperament and training. I, by contrast, have so little rhythm and such a total lack of physical elegance that I might be the anti-Astaire, a veritable black hole of terpsichorean ineptness. It was not always pretty (at least on my side of the proceedings), but I did enjoy it. And I discovered that the basic steps were strangely reminiscent of much of the rest of my life. Quick quick slow, quick quick slow, step away, circle back, you hold each other, side step, side step, walk forward, walk backward, quick quick slow. Hold tight, look at your partner and with a little grace and charity it all comes together. Well, if I can live it, maybe I can learn to dance it.

In farm news, the lamb count was up to twelve at evening feeding.

While loading up the now fully functional farm truck with the household trash to go off to the dump along with a variety of boxes and my mother-in-law's Christmas tree, I heard our local flock of crows making a major fuss. I looked up and saw them getting up the nerve to mob a large bird flapping over the upper pasture. From the size, I assumed it was a vulture, but the set of its wings and the way they moved was somehow wrong for either a black or a turkey vulture. The bird turned, flew closer, and I saw the unmistakable white head and tail of a Bald Eagle.

It has been my experience that we never have problems with just one car. Like children, they suffer injury and illness either in tandem or work as a tag team, going down one after another. On Saturday, older and younger son reported that the farm truck sounded funny and there seemed to be something wrapped around the drive shaft. I drove it out of the barnyard mud onto the grass and crawled underneath. Sure enough, somehow about four feet of heavy gauge wire had gotten tangled around the drive shaft. Since the drive shaft's sole purpose in life is to spin, the wire had accompanied the shaft on its revolutionary mission, tightening with each turn until it was tangled and twisted around like a poison ivy vine on an oak tree. I got a pair of pliers and some wire cutters and set to work. And promptly discovered that I needed much bigger wire cutters. Fortunately I had bought a set some while back for work on the fence. Unfortunately I wasn't sure where they were. The curse of the part-time farmer is that everything is done at odd times wedged into the rest of the schedule. This results in tools being used and stashed in places that seemed logical at the time but deeply confusing to your older self some weeks or months later. After a lengthy search they turned up in a rack with the branch loppers and hedge trimmers. I guess that day I was sorting and storing by form rather than function. With the proper tool in hand I was back upside down under the truck out in the pasture. After an hour or so of clipping and twisting, we had a sack of grease covered wire snippets and a drive shaft free to follow its destiny.

New lambs

The car window from yesterday's post is fixed. I learned in the process that 1.) The phrase "roll up your window" is now forever obsolete since all car makers have discontinued hand cranked windows. 2.) The former scissor style of window regulator, rugged and easily repairable, has been replaced with a cable system that is failure prone and must be replaced as an entire unit (a rather expensive unit) when it fails. Ain't progress wonderful.

Turning to farm news, three new lambs have arrived in the past two days. If the rain holds off I will try for pictures tomorrow.

This morning we woke up to a world in the teens, frost covered and colder than it's been since last winter. I scraped off the windshield of the Ford while older and younger son gathered their bookbags and headed out to join me. Younger son got to the front seat first and decided that, since you could clear dew off the window by lowering and raising it, it should work on frost as well. About halfway down you could hear the grinding of something going wrong with the works inside. No matter how he pressed the button, all he could do was drive the window lower and lower until it was irretrievably down, with no signs of rising again under it's own power. We were running late to the bus stop, so there was no slacking on the speed. The outside temperature was 18 degrees. Inside the car this was reduced by a thirty five to fifty mile per hour wind chill. Older son in the back was huddled down in his seat, hood up, hands in pockets, lips turning blue while muttering dire threats directed at his brother. I dropped them off, returned home and parked the car in the sun, hoping that the problem was cold related and it would thaw out before my first Court case later that morning. No such luck. I drove back to town, the temperature only risen to the 2o's, hair still damp from my morning shower with the heater on full blast to compensate, unsuccessfully, for the swirling frigid wind from the open window. As I stopped at the first light on the main drag through town, windblown and near frostbit, I turned on the cd player, forgetting that missing window provided a free concert for all passersby. I had also forgotten that the disc in the player was soprano Dawn Upshaw's recording of Broadway show tunes by Bernstein, Blitzstein, Sondheim, and Weill (which would have been a great law firm name if they had ever tired of the music racket). So picture this; a middle-aged man sits shivering in a Ford Explorer, mind on his upcoming misdemeanor trial when, at full volume, a piercing female voice suddenly proclaims to all within earshot that:

I feel pretty,
Oh so pretty,
I feel pretty and witty and bright,
And I pity
Any girl who isn't me tonight.

I feel charming,
Oh so charming--
Its alarming how charming I feel,
And so pretty
That I hardly can believe I'm real.

I will not describe the looks I got, except to say with the late Rodney Dangerfield that "Sometimes it ain't easy bein' me."

While browsing in a bookstore yesterday I noticed that the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction had a new story by Alexander Jablokov. I loved his first novel, Carve the Sky, and read anything else he published through the 90's. Sometime at the turn of the century, he dropped off the radar. There was a webpage, but it hadn't been updated in the years since the last novel was published. Intrigued, I bought the magazine, which is now waiting on the bedside table. I also turned to Google and found the old webpage updated here with the following explanation:

Disappearances

I never intended to disappear.

In the early to mid-nineties of the last century, I had a decent writing career, with five novels and one collection of short fiction published. A small but discerning group of people enjoyed my work. After my last novel, Deepdrive, I published a few more stories, and then…nothing.

I was not dead. I was not confined in a secure location for my own safety. I had not decided that text was obsolete as a means of communication or entertainment.

I hadn’t even stopped writing. I was writing less, because I now had a family, which required a demanding day job, but I wasn’t happy with anything I was producing. I even dropped out of my writing workshop for a few years.

But here I am again. I’ve written a number of stories in recent years, just sold one, am close to finishing a novel, have rejoined my workshop, and will be visible here and there in the world of science fiction. Wish me luck!

I look forward to reading the new work, and, as a family man with little enough time even for blogging, I sympathise and, as requested, wish him luck.

Owen over at The Ochlophobist has a long post on the decline of the "common man" that covers sex, professional sports, manual labor, class distinctions, mass media, the ipod, the cell phone, Dostoevsky, stereotypes, rampant consumerism, metal work, male-female roles, the "service" economy, law, drug dealing, G. K. Chesterton, body piercing, Belloc, C. S. Lewis, capitalism, human dignity and, at the end of it all, sanctity. It is uneven, even a bit over the top in spots, but worth your time nonetheless. In the years I have been presenting cases in front of local juries I have been noting a steady decline in common sense as the number of older farmers, craftsmen and small shopkeepers in the jury pool has declined and the number of people who push paper for a living has increased. While some of the first group may not have had much formal education and their experience of popular culture did not extend much past Flatt and Scruggs, their experience of living was far richer than most of the younger folks who only know what they have seen on tv. I miss them. I do not know if Owen is correct in his analysis, but I agree that we will not soon again see their like.

I chaired my first meeting as President of the Browntown Community Center Association tonight. The building in the picture was a country school until it was closed in 1970. My wife taught an aerobics class there a few years back, following in the footsteps of her grandmother and mother, who were both teachers when it was still the Browntown school house. Today it hosts a monthly Bluegrass jam, flea markets, Halloween parties, Christmas caroling, and best little Fourth of July celebration you will find anywhere. The parade through town may only take a few hundred yards, but a good time is had by all. Go to the link over on the right for pictures of past events. The schedule for 2007 will be up in a couple of weeks.

It is a quiet Sunday evening; steady rain outside, a late supper and old movies on DVD inside. Yesterday, by contrast, was a beautiful day, sunny and unseasonably warm. I needed the break today after taking a tumble off the farm truck at the dump yesterday, followed later by an incident involving a broken feed sack, and a mob attack by hungry sheep. The end result of the day's adventures were a few scrapes, some bruises and a reminder that I'm really not as young as I used to be.

Friday afternoon, sunset, looking south

When we drove up this evening, we had a sheep on the deck waiting for us. Dorie was a bottle lamb and occasionally gets the urge to go hang with the humans.

Mother and Daughter. This is the first picture taken of the lamb born just before Christmas. When I found her, she was only hours old, but was up and sucking on her own, quite competent at the job of being a young sheep. Over the past few years, we have been moving away from our finicky, high maintenance purebreds towards a hardier, more self-sufficient cross better suited to our hillside farm and its part time shepherds. And if they happen to have really neat spots and patterns in their wool, well that is just fine as well.

A new set of twins today. No pictures; we went out to feed just as the sun was setting. Most of the flock was clustered by the barnyard after seeing younger son with the feed sack. I looked across the little marshy area below the barnyard spring and saw a ewe hanging back. On one side of her was a black lamb. On the other was a second lamb, black in the front, white in the back, with black spots on the white half and white spots on the black, like a small fuzzy Holstein.

As you can tell, if you are still checking after the long silence, the new year has brought a return to blogging. You may consider it a resolution, if you wish. Some time off after Christmas has given me a chance to catch my breath and get back to a few things that fell by the wayside this Fall. 2006 was a year that was perhaps a little too full of, shall we say, "interesting challenges" for the family. Coming out the other side of a few of them, it is strange to find, in an odd an unexpected way, it was all blessing.

Last Saturday I was down at the barnyard drilling a hole with too small a drill with too small a bit into too large a post, making a hole for a pin to anchor the hinge on a farm gate. We replaced the old rusted out gate this summer but tried to fit the new gate on the old hardware. Like new wine in old skins, the pieces never meshed properly, but I didn't have the time, patience or tools to fix it. The result was that, by December, we did not have a gate so much as an unwieldy piece of metal waiting to be knocked down by persistent sheep whenever they wished to go walkabout in the upper field. I discovered Saturday that even with inadequate tools, the job could be done when approached with a little grace and a little patience. That, oddly enough is the lesson learned throughout much of the rest of the year. After more than a half century of working at this business of living I have begun to realize that if I wait for the perfect tool, the perfect circumstances, or for myself to finally become that perfect person, I will wait past most of the best opportunities for living. As G. K. Chesterton once put it, "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." Chesterton of all people was not interested in encouraging bad work. He knew though that the worst work is that which is not done at all and any work, done with heart, soul and prayer has the potential to be good work. This coming year I intend to hang a few more gates.

A few days before Christmas, I headed home early to head back out for some last minute shopping. When I walked through the door, older son told me we had the first lamb of the season. With camera in hand, I tracked down mother and daughter out in the field near the house. The ewe tolerated a brief photo session before heading out with her lamb to graze in pastures free from annoying paparazzi.

From Washington D.C. to Ancient China and back

My friend Jonathan Chaves will be presenting a reading from his new translation of the poetry of Zhang Ji, Cloud Gate Song at Chapters Bookstore in D.C. this Saturday.  The translation is an experiment which attempts to convey the original Chinese rhyme schemes to the English reader.  I would post a sample, but I have not yet received my copy from Amazon, which swears that it will ship it any day now.  Besides being a scholar and poet, Jonathan is a great reader and I would highly recommend the event to anyone in the area.

 

Until then, here is a sample from an earlier volume, Pilgrim of the Clouds; Poems and Essays from Ming China.  It seems particularly appropriate with the changes wrought by the recent election.  As each defeated incumbent slinks home, in his wake go dozens of aides, functionaries and officials all now jobless.  This is a story that would have been more than familiar to the scholar bureaucrats of ancient China.  Some elements of politics transcend time, place and culture.  However, I do not know if our own modern functionaries will have quite the same perspective in defeat:

 

ON RECEIVING News of My Termination

The time has come to devote myself to my hiker's stick;

I must have been a Buddhist monk in a former life!

Sick, I see returning home a kind of pardon.

A stranger here--being fired is like being promoted.

In my cup, thick wine; I get crazy-drunk,

eat my fill, then stagger up the green mountain.

The southern sect, the northern sect, I've tried them all;

this hermit has his own school of Zen philosophy.

Rainy Tuesday morning. Where did the mountain go?

About a week ago I had a visit to the blog from Sue Bell (no relation that I know). She is an aspiring jazz singer from Seattle who, in addition to saying nice things about the blog, provided a link to her own web page where one can listen to samples from her album. I listened, liked what I heard and followed the link to CD Baby and ordered the CD. Is she the next great voice in jazz or pop? No, but I like her. Why? It's hard to explain, but let me try.

Picture this: You are in a little jazz club. The band is great, all old pros who are tearing it up while trying to keep the music accessible to the casual drinker off the street. The club is almost empty. At the table with you is a talented friend who has sat in with the guys before. They invite her up on stage to do a few songs. Not show tunes or jazz standards, but some of those tunes from the seventies that you secretly liked but were too cool to admit to while putting your Clash or Elvis Costello lps on the turn table. She sounds great. Not a perfect voice, but she sings the hell out of those sappy old songs, stripping out the schmaltz and leaving the honest sentiment behind. And the band sounds like they are having the time of their lives. It's over, and as you walk out, you leave smiling.

While down with the flu this weekend I had the rare treat of being awakened out of a feverish sleep by phone call after phone call only to discover that it was not my wife checking in from her business trip, or my in-laws calling with an emergency or any of our neighbors reporting errant livestock. Instead, it was some damnable recorded voice droning on (and on and on) in behalf of one or the other of the rival candidates in the particularly nasty race for the Senate here in Virginia. It does you no good to scream at a robot, but I tried anyhow, croaking from my sickbed as I slammed the receiver down. And don't even get me started on the omnipresent t.v. ads. The professionals who run these campaigns must truly believe the voting populace consists of idiots who can be swayed by nothing more than a breathless voiceover magnifying the real or imagined sins of the rival candidate. I actually began this election cycle with a certain measure of respect for both George Allen and James Webb, which has declined steadily as their staff and supporters have done what they think is necessary to win my vote. Their thinking is, to say the least, flawed. While it may be unjust to judge the man by his minions, if their campaign staffs are a measure of the candidates' character, I no longer trust either of them to be my Senator. In fact, I am not sure I would trust either of them to be the guy who pushes my trash down with a pole at our local dump station before pushing the big red button on the compactor. Nonetheless, at some point tomorrow I will stand up in a polling place and be faced with the choice between one of the two. This leads me to introduce my own idea for election reform; Vote None of the Above.

I propose a law that would require that in any race there be an additional option to vote for "None of the Above" positioned immediately after the candidates' names. If "None of the Above" leads by a plurality of the vote at the conclusion of the election, then a new election would be held within a reasonable time to allow the parties to reconsider their choices. The parties could, if they were so inclined, re-nominate the same candidates and independents would be allowed to run again. If however "None of the Above" wins an absolute majority, none of the previous candidates would be allowed on the new ballot.

It could be argued that this crackpot proposal would potentially delay the filling of public office and throw our system of government in disarray. Well, as they say in the computer world, that's not a bug, it's a feature. Vote None of the Above!