week 9: when there's a crack in the door...

this week on the little dream farm

This week welcomed us all into the third month of the year and here on the farm we filled it with many many things!

As I sit down to write this Farm Note, Micro and Little Lady are plastered to one of the living room windows watching a bird singing in the Sugar Maple tree just outside the front of the house.

We got a hefty eight inches of snow last night, and while we’re still firmly planted in the thick of winter, even the birds know it won’t be long now until spring returns.

I’ll begin with the sad news first, although fortunately we haven’t had a whole lot of that here on the farm as of late :::crosses fingers, knocks on wood, re: head, for good measure:::.

We said a very sudden and unexpected goodbye to one of our hens last Saturday. She was outside hanging out in the snow with three of her hen friends, eating seeds and getting ready to make their way to the coop for the evening. Chris went back outside a few minutes later to usher them all to the coop when I heard him yelling frantically to me from outside.

There’s a specific type of panic I’ve come to feel living here on the farm.

It was the feeling I had when we realized Molly-Max couldn’t get up the morning after he and Dominic arrived here. It’s the way I’ve felt about each one of hens when we’ve discovered them in the hunched over “sick chicken stance” as we’ve come to call it. It’s the way I felt with my hands clenched tightly around the wheel as I drove our beloved Mr. B the 45 minutes to the emergency vet in the dead of night in the unrelenting rain trying desperately to make it before his heart could no longer keep him here with us…and ultimately it didn’t.

So when Chris is yelling in a panic from outside the house it’s sobering…instinct sets in and I’m immediately jumping into action having no earthly idea what kind of potential catastrophe to expect.

She was already gone before I even made it to his side. We stood there confused, aghast, and disappointed…the ninth hen we’ve lost. Not a moment later, though, I was searching her warm, soft body, our sweet little hen, for answers.

No blood.
No injuries.
Nothing broken.
Nothing noticeable on her face, in her beak.
No noticeable issues with her neck, crop, or belly.

I had Chris take her for me so I could inspect her backside.

And we had our answer.

A prolapsed vent.

Without going into too much chicken anatomy, the vent is where both eggs are laid and feces expelled. In the case of a prolapsed vent, the lower part of the oviduct turns inside out and protrudes through the vent.

She likely died of shock.

If caught early, it can be treated, though the outlook is not always promising as it can continually reoccur. Like we’ve learned with almost all of the issues we’ve dealt with in our flock, there’s a short window to intervene, and everything we’ve learned and tried so far to help our hens we’ve come up short on. In this case, she presented no noticeable symptoms that would have clued us into thinking we needed to check her or that something was wrong.

I’ve come to realize it’s equally awful to know something is wrong, to try and fix it, and fail—and—to not have known or had a chance to even try. The hopelessness stings.

As we do with each of our hens, Chris and I put on our snow gear and hiked the big hill to the mossy tree where we’ve laid the eight other hens to rest. David shared with us that he practiced something similar in his years here on the farm.

He felt that offering their body back to nature helped to continue the cycle of life. We’ve found peace and comfort in this practice as we each say a few words and thanked our sweet hen for the eggs, for the laughs, and for her beautiful life here on our farm. The remains of our other hens are never there—swept up by that cycle of the living.

We got back to the house and we talked about the fact that it it feels cold to say it has gotten easier to deal with the loss of our hens. Chris said he doesn’t want it to feel easier…that the gravity of their loss must still weigh on us.

Deep in my soul I know exactly what he means.

If it gets easier…if we grow cold…if their lives are simply fleeting, then slowly everything loses its meaning.

It is a gift to be alive. That, we must celebrate, hold onto tightly, and do our best not to take for granted. And the passing of those we love—even if “just a hen”—should also be celebrated for the beautiful life lived, and serve as that ever-beating reminder that all of this—each of us—are here on borrowed time.

Prior to life on the farm, death was really tough for me. But the farm has a way of changing my perspective on just about everything, I’m finding, and the cycle of life is chief among that list. Not that it’s any easier. It’s just different. I guess maybe I have more peace about it.

Before that took place Saturday evening, Chris and I were riding a high having just gotten back home from purchasing our very first farm truck.

We spent months last year looking for a truck. And the market was absolutely bonkers. Used truck prices were just totally off the charts and without an urgent need or projects pressuring us into having to buy in an inflated market, we decided to wait and save our money for when things looked a little better.

Last week we began that search again in earnest and a clear winner stood out from the pack of our search—a white 2013 Ford F-150 Lariat SuperCab with cream leather interior.

If it had been up to Chris…the most practical and non-materialistic person I know… we’d have gone with a beat up old farm truck. I would have been fine with that too, save for the fact that neither of us are adept at fixing cars. So we found the perfect compromise of a reliable vehicle in tip-top shape with 100K miles and just new enough to have things like bluetooth, a backup camera, heated seats, and advanced towing. The two previous owners serviced the truck every 5K miles right on schedule and took extremely good care of this truck. Since we plan to do exactly the same, we’re anticipating this truck could last us 10-15 years, hopefully well into the 200-250K mile territory.

Now instead of sharing one vehicle—the Corolla—and having to shove absolutely everything in that little car to get our farm chores and projects done, and now that we don’t have to pester our neighbors to borrow their truck on the regular…we can get to tackling all those projects I talked about in our February Farm Notes.

Life is not about stuff…but there’s something to be said about having the right tools for the job…and we were so looking forward to the day when we could pull a truck up the farm driveway. It feels like we’ve crossed a right of passage. Like we’re just a little bit more farmer now.

We’d planned to pick the truck up on Wednesday, so having that to look forward to, on Sunday I jetted off to Florida for my time with David to capture his story of his life before, during, and after the Little Dream Farm.

For those of you who followed along in Instagram Stories this past week, you got to see a few glimpses of that trip.

It truly was better than I’d anticipated. We spent all of Monday afternoon, after having met for coffee, sitting on the patio of my cool little Airbnb and talking in the breezy warm shade. I learned so much about David and feel like the two of us really bonded more closely as farmers, as gardeners, as spiritual seekers, and as friends.

I’d anticipated that I’d want time to regroup and would have follow up questions and I’m glad I planned the trip that way, so that Tuesday we met for coffee and continued our conversation.

I haven’t even had a chance to play back through the hours of conversation I recorded, but one thing David said to me has been rumbling around in my head all this last week.

He said, “When there’s a crack in the door, have the courage to open it up and see what’s behind it.”

He said this in the context of talking about how his life has been filled with one moment or experience after the next in which he wanted something or was presented an opportunity that he then courageously stepped forward, let go of the need for control, and allowed the universe to guide him along the way.

That quote in particular created this visualization in my mind that I’ve been thinking about all week.

That the door was this new life Chris and I have embarked on.

It cracked open the day we found the listing for this farm on Zillow. And we were just curious enough…I’m not even sure if you could call it courageous…to call the realtor, to get in the car and drive 4.5 hours to Upstate New York on a whim, to consider this farm as our potential home, and to open that door up—open this life up—and see what’s behind it.

There are so many little bits of wisdom like that from our time together and I’m looking forward to finding some quiet moments to sit with the recording and revisit our conversation again, and then to share that in some form or another with you.

During that Florida trip I also had time to visit with my mom, aunt, and uncle and made a specially-requested dinner for them at my mom’s house. I just booked a trip for my mom to come back up here to the farm in April so I’m looking forward to having more time with her here on the farm soon.

Chris picked me up from the airport midweek, we stopped and picked up the new truck, and the rest of this week as been a race to catch up on work, catch up on snuggles, and catch a break today (after shoveling, of course) with all the snow outside. I spent the day organizing the cut flower garden rows into the order in which all the flowers will be planted. I’m in the middle of printing out photos of all the flowers and laying them out in the same order they’ll get planted and looking forward to being able to show you that next step in the cut flower gardening process—it’s really coming along!

I also had an initial meeting on Friday with our local soil and water office, the Natural Resource Conservation Service, to talk through some conservation projects we’ll be working with them on for the farm beginning this year. Let’s call this mentioning of it a teaser for now, because I’d love to dedicate an entire Farm Note to telling you all about the process, the planning, the considerations, and the projects as we get further into it.

I drove to that meeting in our new farm truck, got to sit with two incredibly smart and talented young women who both have a love of the land, of agriculture, and a passion for helping farmers improve and conserve their farms, and I left that meeting in awe of how far we’ve come—of how much Chris and I have learned and changed since finding this farm—and smiled at the way in which it feels like this farm and our vision for it is really beginning to take shape.

That we get to think about these things—stewarding the land, saving an old apple orchard, protecting the pond, a precious water resource and habitat on the farm—has brought an indescribable joy to my life.

I’m headed back out the door again to Massachusetts for several days with the Reverend and his wife—Jay and Linda. I booked myself an off-season priced room at a beach resort on the coast just 20 minutes or so from their house so that I could wake up on the ocean and watch the sun come up and I’m looking forward to the time with Jay and Linda and learning more about their lives and their life here on the farm…back when it was called Shekinah Farm.

The first time I talked to Jay on the phone last summer I asked him what the farm was called when he lived here.

A man of faith, he said it was important that the name be one that glorified God.

And thus the name Shekinah Farm.

Shekinah - the hebrew word to mean, “The visual manifestation of the presence of God.”

And the absolute most perfect word to describe the essence of the Little Dream Farm.