Greetings Dear Ones!

I try to keep my hands clean and dry. Honestly, I do. I wash them every time I start work on one of the twelve wedding gowns frilling and frothing up my shop. If I could sew in satin gloves, I would. But these little work-paws do more than pick invisible stitches out of hemlines encrusted with beaded embroidery. The white satin backdrop shows how insanely dirty the rest of my world is right now. Winter hands are chapped and clean. Summer hands are as un-cleanse-able as Lady MacBeth’s—only it is not death but Life I cannot wash off.

Being Alive, nurturing Life, planting, protecting, watering, weeding…these are very dirty hands-on things on a homestead. My hands are a rainbow of colors—brown from working in the sun, red-raw from thorns and bug bites, blue-bruised from angry beaks, aching colorlessly from hand stitching Carhartts and attempting to take a flat tire off the lawn mower. The nails are dirty. These are not the hands of a parlour maid paid to work on wedding frocks. “They aren’t the hands of a lady at all,” sniffs Prudence critically.

I simply don’t know how to live, or learn, or mend or make anything better without getting my hands dirty. No matter how you touch it, LIFE is Dirty!

There are two broody hens in the chicken coop attempting to become mothers. One has made a nest in a most unfortunate place—high up in the eaves under the very edge of the roof. She squeezed herself through a gap in the chicken wire mesh that is supposed to prevent her from getting there. The other has taken over a clutch of eggs in one of the nesting boxes on the wall.

A few days ago, morning chores were disrupted by the discovery of a frantic mother and two chicks darting around the bottom of the coop. The chicks had hatched and fallen out of the nesting box and the distraught mother had left the nest to protect them. I looked at the mother and cheered her, “Success! You did it!” She had managed to hatch two eggs. She was pleased with herself, but “success” now presented her with a whole new batch of problems (this often happens with success), which included the fractured devotion she felt towards continuing her work of hatching the rest of nest and the distressing inability of the hatchlings to return. All the other chickens were very interested in the new arrivals, and the new mother did not appreciate their interest one bit. She was taking shots at them by hopping in the hair and popping them in the face with her feet like she was in a no-rules cage match, sans cage!

I immediately get some wire and make a separate pen for them within the pen. The chicks are so tiny, I figure that even though they can slip through the wire, they will stay with their mother. I don’t want them to drown in the water bucket, to which the rest of the flock needs access, so I don’t fill it very high. I give the chicks their own tiny watering apparatus designed for chicks, some food, and I make a nice new nest on the floor and move the rest of the eggs down to the fresh circle of clean hay. I notice the eggs are cool to the touch. Not a good sign. The mother must have been off the nest for several hours for them to be that cold. But she readily climbs aboard and the babies settle under her wings and peace is restored to the coop. This is the best we can do for now.

Success?

I rush back as soon as I can, after a long day at the shop, anxious to see if any of the other chicks have hatched. Instead of being greeted by all the charms of infant poultry I’d imagined, the place is a crime scene. The nest is strewn everywhere. A drowned chick is in the two inches of water in the big flock’s water bucket; the mother and the other are dashing around in panic, the mother boxing the ears of anyone who dares look at her remaining baby. I let all the other chickens out to graze and free-range the gardens. I try my best to capture that little chick. It is like trying to catch a mouse. The mother comes at me again and again, with feathered rage and everything that is Red in her. She comes at me with Motherhood itself, clawing and biting, to save the young, even though she has not managed to take any better care of her offspring than I have. We get nowhere in our passionate disagreement about what to do next. Success eludes us both.

I find a large dog crate with a roof and a door and mesh that a chick cannot escape and start over. I collect the eggs. I make a new nest. I decide to catch the mother first, despite her fury, and stuff her in that crate so that I can capture the chick without so much interference. While the mother caws and screams obscenities at me from the cage, her baby is as elusive as a flea. It is so tiny, it actually manages to stuff itself into a mouse hole for a second before my filthy hands grab it and make a small cave for it—a flesh and bone geode encircling the black sparkle of mad eyes within. I opened the clamshell of my hands inside the cage, blocking the entire door with my body, and the chick runs back to its mother. “Success!” I say, spitting out a mouthful of poultry dander and sawdust, and slamming the door.

I figure that while I am covered in chicken dust, I might as well winkle wee Gretchen out of the rafters before that situation becomes the next disaster. I crawl up there with an egg carton down the front of my shirt, take 8 eggs from her, and put them in the carton. Then I grab her. She is actually quite nice about it and I am able to climb carefully through the hole in the wire back to the ground without hurting either of us or the eggs. I make a nest of hay in a cat carrier, give her back her eggs and some food and water, and carry the whole parcel up to the house and put it in the mud room so I can keep an eye on her. She seems very happy.

By then, it is nearly eight o’clock. TUB TIME!! My clawfoot tub is still outside so I use a hose to run the hot water out from the laundry hookup in the cellar. I revel in bubbles and the poetry of Robert Frost as Gus and Otie graze nearby. I slip my dusty head under the water and can hear their lip-vicious, smack-munching passing through the ground, as little vibrations. “They could be voiceover artists for cartoon termites,” said the Career Agent in my head who is always looking for ways for those boys to earn their keep. Ears underwater, eyes staring up, I see the first stars appear. I hear the music of the tree frogs through my aquatic headphones. An unusually dirty middle-aged woman is taking a bath outside. “I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;/I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away/ (and wait to watch the water clear, I may):/I shan’t be gone long.—You come too…” says Frost. It is the usual magical blend of bucolic and ridiculous that makes me so grateful to be alive, bug bites and all…

The urge To Live is bossy enough to drive dandelion roots through bedrock, yet as fragile as a drop of two degrees in temperature. The next day, the whole place stinks. In the house, there is a horrible smell.

My GOD... WHAT A SMELL! It climbs right up in my nose colonizes my brain. I can’t think straight.

The dog has gotten into the compost pile again. He ate some and then, not content with making himself sick on the inside, rolled in it and made himself disgusting on the outside. He did a proper, thorough job of it too, so much so that he was able to leave at least three differing colors (orange, green, and brown) of slime on the couch and surrounding pillows and my shirt, which I had tossed over the armrest. As I enter and take stock of the scene, he arches his back and disgorges the contents of his stomach on the only pillow he has missed. I eject him from the nearest exit to finish vomiting on the grass and later observe him having diarrhea under the apple tree. He manages to hold on to enough sick to come back in and make one last retaliatory barf on the rug.

So! Another night in the tub—this time, with less poetry, more scrubbing, and the addition of a dog full of rot and regret. All clean and wet, he bolts for my bed to dry himself off. (Of course he does.) I strip the couch and scrape and scrub the carpet.

Somehow, the house does not smell better… It’s enough to make my eyes water.

I work all evening at sewing (and the obligatory couch laundry), keeping myself busy and awake until late, until the heavy brocade of new-moon darkness falls. I need it to be very dark for what I must do.

I reach into Gretchen’s nest and one by one, sneak the eggs from beneath her. I place each one on a cardboard tube that I have saved from an empty roll of toilet paper and shine a very bright flashlight into the tube from below. This is called “candling.” The light enables me to look within the egg. Her eggs are all infertile and beginning to rot. The yolks are black. There are no veins, no heartbeat, no placenta visible. Some are filled with gas. Two have exploded. This is what has been STINKING to high heaven (and low heaven and all the heavens in between, including chipmunk heaven, which, as you know, is really low to the ground). She has spent 28 days cooking duds that are about to become bombs.

“Success is not always about the work we put in,” I tell her sadly. “It requires Collaboration, Divine Timing, Fertility, Chemistry, a Spark…” There is no collaboration in these eggs—just corruption and good intentions about to explode, spark or no spark!

Having located my collection of strong flashlights, after I candle her eggs and dispose of them (reminding me NOT to put them in the compost pile until I mend the fence!), I take one with me down to the barn (a flashlight, that is, not a rotten egg) and sneak into the coop, where all the chickens are asleep. The little missus down in the dog crate has not hatched out any more babies but the lone chick still survives. (Success!) My guess is the others got too cold the night the hen was down, running around chasing the first two. I have to say, the hen house does not smell nearly as bad as my house, so maybe they are ok...? Did they warm up in time? Usually, a clutch of eggs will all hatch out together within 48 hours and it's been way longer than that. To no one’s surprise, the candling reveals that all the eggs were fertile. And all the eggs are dead and must be buried.

Such is “Life” on a farm.

Afterwards, I walk the night outside for a bit, the flashlight dark and heavy in my hand. It has shown me Death. Other lights show Life. The fireflies are glinting in the grass at the edge of the woods. Gus and Otie are camping out under the stars. (It must be nice to eat until you are tired and then lay down right in the middle of the buffet and just start eating again when you wake up!) I stand there, filling the cups of my eyes with starlight—just a middle-aged little girl, standing on a planet somewhere in the cosmos, with grubby hands that can hold a wedding gown or Death and shine a light on it, somber, satisfied—feeling SO lucky to be here to witness it ALL—bugs that sparkle, eggs that reek, lace that is only for a day...

Grateful that, despite our bungling, and all that conspires against it, sometimes Life wins the toss; one chick survives.

Keep Mending, Dear ones! Thank you for the Good Work you are doing!

I love you Sew Much!

Yours aye,

Nancy