GrongarBlog – Page 30

All this and a mystery, too

Rainy day.

I’ve been quite inclined to do very little. But the dog will have none of that.

We walked in the rain, which is actually very fun, assuming 1) you abandon yourself to getting wet, and, 2) you can come home to dry, clean clothes.

The walking gave me time to think about words and things I ought to be doing and people I miss. It also gave me time to watch the river, in a big ol’ hurry to get over the rocks and under the bridge, where it settles into a slower flow.

After we got home, I dried the dog with a towel, then went to make tea. The dog disappeared. I don’t know where he went. I looked upstairs to make sure that I wouldn’t find a soggy dog on the guest bed. Nope. No dog.

I looked on our bed, but all I found was a napping cat. I didn’t find the dog anywhere. After awhile, he reappeared and curled up on his bed next to my desk. I’m trying not to pry, but am very curious where he was.

A Wednesday mystery.

I think that’s kind of great.

And all this is mine.

This afternoon, I’m turning that rhubarb into jam by roasting it with brown sugar, ginger, and cinnamon.

Oh, and I enjoyed reading this article about R.F. Scott’s Antarctic medicine chest.

And this? Well this just made me smile.

52 Photos ~ Waterdrops

http://youtu.be/uj4Ub5v6mg0

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These photos and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

Wordless Wednesday ~ First fortnight

52 Photos ~ Crop It

Crow’s Fall

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.

He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun’s centre.

He laughed himself to the centre of himself

And attacked.

At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.

But the sun brightened—
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.

He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.

“Up there,” he managed,
“Where white is black and black is white, I won.”

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Note: The photo above is a cropped (and black and white, and fiddled with) version of the original, which you can see here.

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This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

Bittersweet

Foggy, overcast Monday morning.

The long-planned-for weekend is twelve hours behind us.

The delightful guests of the weekend have left for home. We don’t see them often enough, and parting is always softly sad.

We ate well, laughed a lot, sang a lot. We celebrated a birthday with cake.

The musical H and her schoolmates have been preparing for all semester is over.

She lost her voice after the first show, but went on in spite of that, mouthing the words, playing her part, happy to be there and sad to be silent on a stage full of song.

The lead roles were mostly filled by seniors who are right now making their plans to leave this rural nest.

We’re not their parents, but on closing night we still felt a tinge of that bittersweet tug, knowing we were seeing the last of something. In four years, that will be H, singing her last song on that stage, and then, of course, we will be puddles.

We had a wonderful weekend. Monday marches on.

And this song seems kind of perfect today.

Briefly, about the names

At the risk of boring you with baby goat blather, here’s just one more. Then I’ll be quiet. I’ll try. Really.

I just wanted to take a second to explain the origin of the names since a few people have asked.

First of all, we are following the convention that many goat breeders use, which is to choose names that begin with a specific letter of the alphabet. The letter changes every year, advancing in alphabetical order. This year’s letter is “D” (last year’s was “C”, next year’s is “E”. You see how it works…). Our does were all born in 2006, a “W” year.

We had a lot of “D” ideas (including “Doctor Who”), but it turns out it was fairly easy to name the doelings once we met them.

Doris Maurice (Dory)

Dory’s name comes from one of our favorite essays by Alan Coren, about the brutal reality of returning home after a two-week sailing trip in Greece and finding that the housekeeper has abandoned the house and pets.

Get to fishing pond, three fish floating in it, belly-up and covered in white spores; suddenly, oh my God, remember Doris Maurice! Doris Maurice is tortoise, so-christened by four-year-old son since no-one knew whether it Doris or Maurice, tortoise-sexing not being family talent, go to tortoise-run behind greenhouse, discover matter of sex purely academic now, as Doris Maurice look extremely deceased. Rotten housekeeper, tortoise needs water daily, pick up Doris Maurice, little legs stay outside shell, no panicky withdrawal, look at little face, Doris Maurice dead as doornail.

What can I say? It’s a sad ending for poor Doris Maurice (which we’ve always pronounced as “Doris Morris”), but the writing is hilariously harried and exasperated. We’ve laughed about it for years, and the name “Doris Maurice” just makes us smile.

Doris, or Dory, she is. But we will keep her well fed and watered.

Darcy

Partly named for Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, and partly for the song “Darcy Farrow”, an old favorite from John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High album, which I listened to fairly obsessively when I was kid. The song is another bit of sadness (we do tend to like the sad songs and stories around here), but it’s also beautiful, and delicate, just like Darcy herself.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3VgSOYsUBo]

Today, D & D are one week old and they’re bouncing around the barn and goat yard, testing their springy legs, exploring every corner, claiming every rock peak as their own Everests. The other day, I saw Darcy chasing Lars, the three-year-old wether, up the hill. I think they’re pretty well settled in to the place.

After a year+ break, we’re back to milking (just a bit right now, to help relieve some pressure from the side of Wellesley’s udder that the babies aren’t nursing from yet), and we made our first batch of cheese today. It’s busy, and all kind of wonderful.

52 Photos ~ Street Art

19 years this summer. That’s how long we’ve lived in this house. Three times as long as I’ve ever lived anywhere else.

Some days it feels like I never have lived anywhere else. Until I take a new turn off a familiar street and discover a road in my own town that I’ve never seen before.

That’s interesting. Maybe they just put that road in?

Well, it’s nice that this old place can still surprise me.

I gripe about the unimportant things that annoy me about living here, but my list is pretty short: the cold winters, the dearth of decent restaurants, the frost heaves in the road that sort of never go away, the bicyclists who can’t seem to ride single file, the lack of places to shop for basic housewares, like sheets and pillows.

But, really, my only significant complaint is that we can’t get a pizza delivered to our house.

Mostly, I love living here, in the house of my childhood fantasies, posts and beams and creaky floorboards and all. The comforting hills, the foggy morning river valleys, the piercing peeper chorus, the star-strewn nights.

I love that I drove all over Vermont today, on my way to pick up a used mini refrigerator where we can store milk for making cheese, and I looked hard for some graffiti that I could photograph, and you know what I found?

Not much. Sets of initials on bridges, summed together with heart operators. A sketch of a funny face on a highway overpass. The word “Respect” on the side of a building. And a mural entitled “Community,” painted on the side of a rough, cement wall that buttresses a railroad bridge. At the bottom of the mural, the river is painted wide, bright blue, the foundation of everything else. Above it are the mountains, a pair of hot-air balloons, a rainbow, a sun rising above puffy clouds, a leafy tree with a little owl in its branches, and hand prints, in all colors and sizes, some perched on branches like birds, some taking flight on a perpetual summer day.

It’s an idyllic image of a place that doesn’t really exist. Except when it does, briefly, out of the corner of your eye, when you can’t feel the difference between your body’s temperature and the air’s temperature, and you and the day are one perfect thing.

Silent Sunday ~ Blooming

One morning in May

We’d been on kid watch for a week, with Wellesley’s due date this past Monday. I’d cleaned the kidding stall down to the bare floor, swept it clean, filled it with fresh bedding, and assembled the “kidding kit” with supplies we might need.

Saturday afternoon, we read the changes in Wellesley’s body (softened ligaments, raised tail, hollowing hips) put her in the stall, turned the baby monitor on so we could hear her from the house, and waited.

But we’re still new at reading the signs, and had never gone through a kidding with Wellesley, so we were a bit premature. She wasn’t ready for another few days.

I spent most of Monday and Tuesday in the barn with her, reading and keeping her company. She got to listen to a lot of NPR. And we talked about some things.

Wednesday morning, we knew something was afoot. She was making different, quieter sounds. And she didn’t gobble up her morning grain. We made a plan: M would take H to school, and then come back to check on things and then decide whether or not to go to work for the day.

So, naturally, Wellesley had the first kid between the time M left and returned. Minutes after M & H left, I heard a different-sounding grunt through the baby monitor. Out I flew to the barn, where Wellesley was lying down, beginning to push out those little front hooves, and the first kid was born by 7.30 am.

Wellesley went to work cleaning her, and I helped where I could, wiping the kid clean with towels, cleaning up the stall, keeping an eye on Wellesley’s posterior to see who else might be on the way.

M returned in plenty of time to help with the second kid, who, like the first kid, came out in proper position: two front hooves, followed by a nose. This time, though, there was a little waiting period between the time the head emerged and the time the rest came out. Which was a bit odd looking. Two hooves and a face in one world, a body and two hooves in another.

And then there were two.

And then we checked. And found they were girls. And there we were, us two humans, wearing big grins and our blue surgical gloves, high-fiving each other with happiness.

Girls!

Another step up the Guernsey breeding ladder. Future mothers of future daughters.

We spent much of yesterday afternoon glued to them. They grow so darn quickly, we didn’t want to miss anything. Within minutes of their birth, they were trying to stand. 30 minutes later, they were walking. Another hour and they were beginning to “spring” around the stall. Look away for ten minutes and you could miss a lot of development.

We even put them in a basket to take them on their first car ride when we picked H up from school.

Just like human babies, the gentle engine vibration made them soooooo sleeeepyyy.

This morning, they were fluffy and clean, and full of spring. They nap a lot. Then they eat. Then they explore. If you sit low, on the floor or near the floor, they’ll come over and sniff you, and then try to climb on you. Awkwardly, with those new hooves, but persistently, because they’re goats and they’ve got so much curiosity in them they’d put a cat to shame.

And today, they also have names: Darcy and Dory.

Welcome to the world, little ones. You have a sweet, attentive mama and good genes from your gorgeous father. And those long, airplane ears. And those darling hooves. And those sparkly eyes.

Let’s PLAY!