revealing

It's the anniversary of the Montreal massacre today, when a man shot 14 women students, after declaring, "You're all just a bunch of feminists." Yesterday Mandela died. As I drive out of town, mostly what I see is bare soil and stubble. The only thing that lightens me is the birds' and squirrels' nests, revealed again. I even see what I think must be an osprey nest, on top of a telephone pole, right next to Gue1ph Lake.

When I arrive, she's in the kitchen, making lunch for the young men I'd seen in the barn. "It's just you, me and the guys," she says, a fact I remain faintly troubled by for the rest of the afternoon. What does it mean for my project about women farmers to have men helping?

She'd already brought my attention to the fact that she, the only woman on the farm, was making lunch for the men who were still out working. She wondered how much more she could take on, get done, if she could work outside all morning, knowing someone was making her a hot lunch, and then work outside for half a day more before someone else served dinner. All afternoon, I find myself trying to keep them out of the frame, especially when they were lifting the heavy things.

During lunch, talk turns to broth, and it's a treat for me to have more than one other person in the room who makes broth and we talk methodology for a bit. She tells us she only makes broth in the slow cooker now, ever since she literally filled the entire house (all three storeys!) with 'protein smoke.' They had to live in a hotel for three weeks while the whole house was cleaned, and even after they moved back in, they couldn't use the kitchen for another few months.

And she tells us about taking her last beloved goats to slaughter earlier this week. I've been wondering why had goats. I could see them as a dairy animal, but somehow they seem odd as a meat animal. Is there much of a market for ethically-raised goat meat? She says she was inspired by Marilyn Waring, who said that goat is the poor person's beef and that she raised goats in solidarity with poor women around the world. So long before my farmer even moved to the country, she decided she would have goats too. I'm a little familiar with Waring, but I think I need to learn more about her.

After lunch, the men go to split wood in the woods, while she harnesses the horses to haul it out. Once harnessed and outside the barn, they're a bit skittish, turning around to avoid being attached to the wagon. She says it's been too long since she last worked them. Eventually they are attached and they move off at some speed. She goes towards the pasture to turn them around and they really pick up speed as they come back down, past the barn and towards the woods. She offers me a ride and I hop on, without much thought. Then she tells me one of the horses has never been in the woods today, so I better be ready to bail. I am suddenly fearful for my gear but I  don't want to lose face by getting off now.

They squeeze between one of the cars parked in her driveway and a tree, with only inches to spare. And the path in the woods is a bit narrower. The horses move fast and aren't always particularly attentive to her commands. Tree branches are flying by and the wagon is bumping and banging, its wood creaking like that old wooden roller coaster I once rode. At one point the wagon seemed dangerously tilted to my side, so I got down in the centre to avoid my weight flipping it. The thought flashed through my mind that my little urban life is looking awfully good right about now. All this danger just to bring in firewood for next winter, not even for this winter.

Turning the team and wagon in the woods seems more than a little hair-raising, but eventually she gets them where she wants them. She confesses this is also the first time she's had the wagon in the woods and it's a bit wide for the path. I get off with some relief. The fallen tree was very old and big, and the rounds that have been cut are ridiculously heavy. Once again, I feel awkward I'm not helping, but in this case, I really can't be of use. Some of the pieces need two men lifting them at once.

The darkness comes just as my camera battery dies. I leave quickly while she and the guys go back for another load of wood. I always leave her place with some kind of emotion. I'm not sure if it's longing for the fantasy that is so close to her life, or grief that the veil is lifting off my fantasy, and underneath it looks too damn hard for me.

abattoir visit

I left in icy darkness early this morning. By the time I got out to the farm, I swear the stars had brightened and everything glowed with a pale light: it had snowed overnight.

The meat birds were awake and milling about outside their shelter, so gathering them into the shipping crates took longer than expected. Their calls of surprise tolled in the cold air as they were gently packed up.

The morning grew stunning as we drove, such that I found myself giving thanks for 

When we arrived, one lone chicken was loose in front of the concrete building. It was missing so many feathers, I wondered if it had escaped from a plucking machine. But then I remembered that chickens were usually dead by that point, and then I wondered if it was headless. That was how few feathers it had left on its scrawny body.

Later, I discovered piles and piles of crates with the same featherless birds inside, many with big, beautiful, brown eggs. I was confused again, since meat birds don’t usually reach laying age. But then I figured it out: spent hens. These poor birds have spent their whole lives four to a cage, getting pecked featherless, pumping out eggs. I read recently that spent hens can no longer be used by the soup industry as their bones are too weak from the unsustainable egg-laying schedule that's been bred into them. They shatter through the slaughtering process, making the meat unusable. Those perfect eggs so incongruous next to the skeletal creatures that birthed them.

Outside, the smell hits me right away, still preferable to the inside: some kind of burning flesh and of course a hint of shit. Behind the main building, there is a round, cinder block building with smoke coming out it: that must be the smell. Some kind of rendering or something, maybe the viscera. Maybe the feet or heads. And there are more smells puffing out through vents from the main building in clouds of fetid steam.

She talks of Jane Siberry, "Calling All Angels," and the anecdote she heard at a recent concert, of New Yorkers playing the song in Central Park after 9/11.

When we get back to the farm, she tells me my coat will take a while to air out.

At home, I look up the song.

___________________________

Santa Maria, Santa Teresa, Santa Anna, Santa Susannah
Santa Cecilia, Santa Copelia, Santa Domenica, Mary Angelica
Frater Achad, Frater Pietro, Julianus, Petronilla
Santa, Santos, Miroslaw, Vladimir and all the rest

Oh, a man is placed upon the steps, a baby cries
High above, you can hear the church bells start to ring
And as the heaviness, oh the heaviness, the body settles in
Somewhere you could hear, a mother sing

Then it's one foot then the other as you step out on the road
Step out on the road, how much weight, how much weight?
Then it's how long and how far and how many times
Oh, before it's too late?

Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
Walk me through this one, don't leave me alone
Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
We're trying, we're hoping, but we're not sure how

Oh, and every day you gaze upon the sunset
With such love and intensity
Why, it's ah, it's almost as if you could only crack the code
You'd finally understand what this all means

Oh, but if you could, do you think you would
Trade it all, all the pain and suffering?
Oh, but then you would've missed the beauty of
The light upon this earth and the sweetness of the leaving

Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
Walk me through this one, don't leave me alone
Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
We're trying, we're hoping, but we're not sure why

Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
Walk me through this one, walk me through this one
Don't leave me alone

Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
We're trying, we're hoping, we're hurting, we're loving
We're crying, we're calling
'Cause we're not sure how this goes

The Soul Farmer

The first thing she showed me was an aerial photo of her land. It's fitting, as she later told me she counts her relationship with the land and the animals on the land among her most intimate relationships, along with her family. I followed her as she hayed the horses, milked the two cows (whose milk she shares with their calves), fed the meat chickens (and gave the leftover chicken carcass from an overnight hawk attack to her dog) and rotated the cows' pasture.

Her fields aren't as fertile as she would like. She thinks she'll need to bring in more manure. This job of recovering the land needs more manure than it can sustain.

She spoke of this farm as her soul's work. She said she's figured out what orchestra she needs to play in, even what part of the orchestra, she thinks, but she's still figuring out what her song is, what notes are hers to contribute.

I lost track of time listening to her and watching, and rushed out. But as I drank of a glass of water for the road, I overheard her nine-year-old telling his friend, "Do you know what happens when a chicken dies? The other chickens eat its intestines because they think they're worms."

(Yep. He's right on. I saw it with my own eyes this very morning.)

Crazy Grazey Lady

After she gave up with the too-big post hole digger, we sat under an apple tree just outside the pigs' enclosure. The sun was warm and bright and she had to shade her eyes with her forearm, until she pulled her chair a bit further under the branches' dappling. She put a small table over the fresh cow pie between our chairs, and Nick placed a gorgeous tray with two tall glasses of fresh, homemade iced tea with a lemon slice, a bowl of multi-coloured cherry tomatoes and another of deep blue grapes.

It was glorious to be away from my gray cubicle and in the last warm sunshine of September. It didn't smell much like a farm. The wind just whiffed a few farmy breezes now and then.

So we sat in this dreamy setting and watched the pigs snuffle from their feeder and bump each other and watched the cows mow the grass by the driveway and we talked about nutrition and abattoirs and soil health and the problems with organic farming and the problems with conventional farming.

She is deeply pragmatic. "They don't know they'll be dinner in a few months."

"We leave at 9 in the morning and they're dead by noon."

I didn't photograph much, opting instead to get a feel for the place and for her. I hope she lets me come back.