Keeping It Real

There is nothing like raising farm critters to keep you firmly grounded in reality. Tonight, amid all of the Jeopardy! joy and adoring local news coverage, we were nursing one of our original flock members, who had had a bad accident sometime in the night out in the barn.

Tani Chick (above, left) a gorgeous brown Araucana with the loveliest colors and the sassiest attitude, had become tangled up in the corner-mounted hay trough some time in the night. Her foot was stuck and she was almost upside down, so she couldn't roost and protect herself from the cold. Not only that, she was in a compromising position until Andy found her this morning. He tucked her into the wheelbarrow, surrounded by hay and with water and food close by. When I got home close to 5pm, I figured we should bring her in for the night. She seemed okay, to be getting better even, but around 6:30pm, she had a spasm and went to the great big coop in the sky. Her duck BFF Thierry will surely miss her so.

We don't leave home because there are three ducks, two sheep, five chickens, two dogs, and a cat who rely on us for just about everything. Asking someone to come stay in our quirky (NOT quaint) 140+ year-old Vermont farmhouse and take care of that menagerie is... Well, it's not something that we do. The last time my brother stayed with us, so that we could attend Andy's niece's wedding, the cat died (a different cat, the late Snake Plissken [below] not the one in residence now). These are not the things you want to subject people to, believe me! 

But, these are the things that happen when you live where we do. It drives home the responsibility that we have on the farm. We have had to put animals down, we have lost animals to predators, we have endured every leaky pipe and frozen this-and-that that you could imagine. There are windows that don't close, sinks that don't work, and the lovely breeze that comes through the soffit, even though we have spray-foamed the $&@%# out of every crack and crevice.

It takes a certain couple to live on Hell Mountain, and by George, I think we're it.