Thyme flies

It's been almost two months since my last post. In the meantime, I taught two summer classes and kept busy with gardening, raising chickens, late spring cleaning, reading, and all the things I love to do in the summertime.

So here are some highlights. The title of this post comes from a very strange occurrence in the garden. We have grown a variety of herbs this summer, including a very nice thyme plant that was growing slowly but steadily. Then one day we noticed that it had simply vanished. There were no signs of disturbance, no tracks around it to indicate a hungry critter, no stubs of stems or leaves--absolutely no evidence to show that it had ever been there. Now that has to be a metaphor for the swift speed with which this beautiful summer has passed. It simply flew away.

Speaking of mysteries, there was also the mystery of our one-eyed tree. We have a big, gorgeous maple in the backyard on which we put a sculpted face. To be honest, it creeps some people out, but it reminds me of the trees in The Wizard of Oz. (Come to think of it, those trees were pretty creepy, too.) Early in the summer, the tree lost its right eye. I found it broken at the foot of the tree and glued it back together and put it back. A week or two later, the tree lost the pupil of its left eye, and this time there was no trace of it anywhere. This is especially odd because I was sitting outside at the time and saw it fall. We combed through the grass all around the tree, but no eyeball. So we glued a toonie (that's a Canadian $2 coin) in its place, but I'm pretty sure the tree has no sight in its left eye.

I have no idea what the metaphor in that might be.

Then there was the disappearance of our last brown hen. In late June, she vanished for several days, and after a while, we thought the worst. She was old, after all, and there are a lot of predators in the woods that surround us here. But on the third day, she returned ravenous with hunger and thirst. Then she left again. Just when we gave up on her for the second time, she reappeared, gobbled up food and water, and took off again to parts unknown. This went on for several weeks.

Then one Sunday morning I was out enjoying the sun when I noticed a lot of color and bustle in some ground cover. There was the brown hen with a flock of 11 newly hatched chicks. Now we had already hatched 10 chicks in the incubator, and that was a few more than we really wanted. (We put in extra eggs because we didn't believe they would all hatch.) Suddenly we had 21 chicks. Good thing they are so cute when they first hatch!

The lesson there is never to count your chickens before they're hatched, I guess.

Life here is full of lessons, some ordinary and some profound. This summer I've learned to make two really excellent kinds of rhubarb pie and some respectable hummus. I learned that saskatoon berries are great for baking, but the jam is absolutely disgusting. I've learned about the four kinds of snakes most common to BC when one appeared in our garden one evening. (That time I was the one who vanished without a trace.) Mostly I learn to love this place more with every passing year.

Reading report: On Canada Day, we celebrate in a nearby town called Salmo that features a parade, a homemade pie sale, and a remarkably good used book sale to support the library. I got a whole stack of mostly light reads this year and worked my way through them on warm afternoons. The last I read was Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. Funny--I knew a few pages into it that I had read it before (probably when it was first published in 2001 because I read everything she writes), but I remembered so little that it was like reading it for the first time again. Now I'm reading a really interesting and edgy novel called American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It's all magical realism all the time, and yes, I recommend it . . . so far.

Chicken Trauma Unit

Well, it's been a hectic and traumatic few days in the hatchery (which also happens to be my home office). Let's start with the good news: since this photo was taken, we are now up to 7 chicks.

The bad news is that one of those was born by c-section, sort of. On Saturday, we had an egg that had pipped early Friday but wasn't making any progress toward hatching and seemed to be weakening in its attempts to break through. So I googled hatching problems and found instructions for helping a chick in trouble.

I don't know about you, but I always heard you should never, never, never, ever help a bird out of its egg. This had something to do with them needing the stimulus and exercise of breaking out themselves. But apparently that is not always true.

I'll spare you the gory details, but I followed instructions to help this chick hatch, and she is doing fine. But let's just say I was not cut out for any sort of medical career, and for a half hour after doing chicken surgery, I felt like passing out.

Yesterday we lost one that no one knew had pipped. That was our first loss, and it was hard. If I'd realized that chick was in trouble, I would have saved it, too. That's when we started feeling like a Chicken Trauma Unit.

To end on a positive note, Chick 7 hatched without incident and with all three of us watching late last night. There are three more eggs in the incubator, and then we're done for the year. We need some time to recover, but I know that next summer this will seem like a good idea all over again.

Reading report: Back to Canadian lit., I am reading The Spirit Cabinet by a new favorite writer, Paul Quarrington. (His novel King Leary about an aging hockey star won the Canada Reads competition this year. Another novel Whale Music won Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award.) It's hard to describe his work except to say that he's the Tom Robbins of Canada. He writes about eccentric characters in crazy circumstances, and yet they are essentially so human that we can all imagine ourselves behaving exactly the same way in the same situations. This one is about two European magicians who perform in Las Vegas, and the focus is on their relationship, how people appear and disappear from our lives, and what constitutes "magic."

Crimes of nature

In some ways, Sugar was everyone's favorite chicken. She was the Tiny Tim of our little flock, the fragile, lame banty hen that had a harder way to go because of her deformed feet. But she was also a trooper because she managed to keep up with the other chickens.

Sugar had a charm all her own. The other day Selby told me she loved Sugar's tail because it was "like an enormous rudder on a tiny boat." And if chickens could talk, Sugar would have been the one to hobble forward and say, "God bless us, everyone!" just like in Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol.

That's why it was so upsetting this morning to find out that a coyote got her last night while we were asleep. Our chickens have free range of our place during the daytime, but they always come back to roost in the chicken house at night. Last night, though, Sugar decided to nest under a huge cedar tree right outside our back door.

Donald was concerned about her, and he waited as late as he could to close up the chicken house. Still, she didn't come out from under the tree. Then sometime overnight a coyote found her there and carried her off to our pasture to kill her.

The coyote was still hanging around this morning when Donald went to let the other chickens out of the henhouse. It approached within feet of our back door, and even when Donald charged at it, it ran off only a little ways and stood and stared at him, waiting for its chance at another chicken.

That's how the day started. Life in the country has moments like these, and the fact is that most farm chickens live relatively short lives because when they stop laying, they end up in the stewpot. And when you think about it, you realize that it's all part of a huge cycle that goes on forever and ever. Every creature needs to eat, and most of them--ourselves included--eat other creatures.

But it feels a lot different when you know the victim. Then it feels like a crime.

We did a lot of work outside today so we could keep an eye on the other chickens. Now we're down to three adult chickens. We talked about how fortunate we are to have two of Sugar's chicks who just hatched earlier this week. And considering that we eat storebought chicken on a regular basis, we felt ridiculously sad at the loss of our little lame hen.

As the day ends, our sixth chick is working its way out of its egg, and our five new chicks are peeping sweetly from the brooder. Right now I can't imagine ever letting them out to range in the big, wide world, but of course we will . . . eventually.

That's just the nature of things.

An ordinary miracle

When we bought our little farm a couple of years ago, we inherited a rag-tag flock of eight chickens. We knew absolutely nothing about raising chickens, but we were open to the experience, especially as people who are concerned about the healthfulness and sustainability of food production.

Those weren't spring chickens we inherited, and over time our flock has shrunk to just half its original size. This was a problem since we'd gotten hooked on truly fresh, truly free-range eggs. So last August we purchased four "laying hens" that were about 8 weeks old. After raising them to maturity, we discovered that every last one was a rooster.

The problem, of course, is that you really can't have more than one rooster in a small flock. They will fight to the death for supremacy. And as the little guys were growing up, we got attached to them, so it was sad to have to find homes for them. (No, we don't eat them.)

So this year we decided to try the old-fashioned way of growing a flock of chickens. After all, we already had the raw ingredients (that dominant rooster did come in handy!), and it was easy enough to buy a secondhand incubator on Craig's List. One of my online students from the spring semester gave me perfect and simple instructions to follow, and we put several eggs into the incubator, turned them several times a day, and--voila!--on Monday, our first two chicks hatched like tiny, ordinary miracles.

The first two eggs to hatch were from our banty hen Sugar (more about her in another entry), and they seemed impossibly small to hold anything that would turn into a chicken. But the chicks popped out singing in their high, flutelike voices. Within an hour or so, they were on their feet exploring the incubator.

On Tuesday, two standard size eggs hatched out two yellow chicks that are identical except for a dark spot on one's head. (We named that one Smudge.) In the wee hours of this morning, a fifth chick hatched, this one obviously the offspring of our brown hen because it is honey-colored.

At this point, there are six more eggs in the incubator, though two (not ours--we bought these) might not be viable. They are too dark to candle to see if there are chicks inside.

It's hard to describe how something so ordinary and in many ways so trivial can seem almost like magic or--well--chicken alchemy. Putting an egg in the incubator is a lot like planting a seed. It requires faith and patience and imagination to believe that life is so inevitable.

Reading report: I'm currently reading Isabel Allende's novel The House of the Spirits because it's on the list for my course in Banned Books and Censorship. It's full of magical realism (which is another term for ordinary miracles, now that I think of it) and fascinating characters. I can see why it has been challenged by those who want to control what the rest of us read, but it is a gorgeous book.

Memorial Day and memories we didn't know we had

Warning: Don't read this post if you're hungry!

So this is Memorial Day weekend, and we have a family tradition on long summer weekends of making an enormous cook-out so we can have leftovers for several days. That's why I found myself in the kitchen this morning making side dishes and thinking about the episode of Unwrapped that I saw last night. Unwrapped is a food network show about how various food items are made, and it alternately inspires me with American ingenuity and depresses me about American laziness and our disconnection from the food we eat.

The episode last night covered a new business concept in which people come into a store to choose from several dinner recipes, all of the raw ingredients of which have been chopped, peeled, etc., by store employees. Customers dump the raw ingredients into a pail that looks too much like our compost bucket and then into a Ziplock bag, which they take home and freeze. Then when it's time to make the entree, they dump the contents of the bag into a pan and heat it up.

They do this to feel like they are actually cooking for their families (as opposed to, say, buying processed food in the grocery store and heating it). I sat there and wondered how much time and effort it takes to drive to the store, dump your ingredients, pay an exorbitant price for them, drive back home, and plop your Ziplocks into the freezer. If you're going to go to all that trouble, why not just chop your own onions and peppers?

I just don't get the concept, I guess.

That's what I was thinking about this morning as I prepared sides for today's cookout. I had taken requests, and each of us had chosen a favorite. For most holiday dinners, we share the cooking because I want to make sure our kids know how to prepare their favorite holiday dishes in case they ever find themselves far from home, hungry, and homesick on a holiday. But with cookouts, I "call" sides, and others do the grilling, make appetizers, etc.

I made green Jello with cole slaw floating in it for my daughter and that nasty stuff with Cool Whip, Jello, cottage cheese, and mandarin oranges for my husband. (OK, I admit: it tastes delicious, but anything with Cool Whip is automatically gross to think about.) I rarely use Jello in anything, so using it in two dishes for the same meal made me reminisce about my childhood when every festive occasion required at least one Jello "salad" (most of those "salads" could rot your teeth with sugar), and many of them featured--you guessed it!--Cool Whip.

Coming of age in the 1960s and 70s, we were the children of convenience foods and mass marketing of highly processed foods. For example, we were the first generation to think of "green bean casserole" (you know, canned green beans, canned mushroom soup, and canned onion rings) as every bit as essential to Thanksgiving as turkey. Processed food appealed to our mothers beyond all reason--or maybe because many of their own mothers and grandmothers had grown up on farms where producing the family's food required huge amounts of time and energy. It was hard and dirty work.

It was easy to convince them that growing, preserving, and even chopping one's own food was too much trouble, especially since more and more of them spent their days in offices, classrooms, and other workplaces. As their children, we never thought twice about the dubious nutritional value of boxed macaroni and cheese, Jello, or canned peas. We ate what was put before us without much thought.

Grateful as I am for the Women's Movement of the 1960s and 70s that opened so many doors for my generation of women, it also presented a marketing opportunity for food that barely deserves to be called food.

Eating has become such a speedy pit-stop of an affair that we rarely think about how many memories food evokes or how it reflects the place and time in which we grew up. I thought about this as I assembled my own favorite cookout side dish--macaroni salad (which bears no resemblance to the stuff you can buy at any grocery store deli and--for reasons I don't understand--tastes like aluminum foil). I always forget that macaroni salad requires relish, and when I thought of it, I panicked because living out here "in the bush" (that's Canadian for "out in the sticks" or "the boondocks" or "the toolies"), you don't just run down to the corner grocery store when you run out of something.

Then I remembered that I have six pints of homemade zucchini relish from last summer's garden. (If you've ever grown zucchini, you'll know how relieved I was to find a recipe for relish when I had run out of ideas for using it up.) I thought about how one of our daughters grumbled incessantly last year that we were spending more time and money growing our own vegetables than just buying them at the grocery store. She demanded to know why we would do such a foolish thing. And her father--in one of those rare perfect moments of parental wisdom--replied, "Because it is a worthy thing to do."

We give our time and energy to what we value. How did marketers ever convince us that preparing and eating food isn't worth the time it takes?

Once I'd taken care of the old favorites, I decided to try something new with a bowl of leftover sauerkraut. I made an Amish sauerkraut salad, a recipe I've been wanting to try for a couple of years. I'm interested in Amish cooking since discovering that somewhere in my family's past, there is "Pennsylvania Dutch" or Amish heritage.

This discovery also came by way of holiday food. Growing up in Ohio, I assumed that everyone celebrated New Year's Day with a mandatory pork roast with sauerkraut. When I moved to Arizona, I was stunned to find that not a single grocery store had pork roast on sale for New Year's. Turns out that pork roast and sauerkraut is not the universal fare to kick off a prosperous new year (in our family we always joked that if what we were experiencing was "prosperity," we couldn't afford not to have pork and sauerkraut for New Year's). It is distinctively German.

Those of us who grew up with only the vaguest sense of our cultural heritage--and let's face it: so many of us Caucasians are really mutts from various European traditions--need to search for clues of where and whom we came from. When I teach storytelling and we're digging for family stories and cultural folktales, I often recommend that people think about their families' holiday traditions, especially foods that are always prepared for certain occasions. These can provide important (and delicious) clues about our family backgrounds.

They are rich memories we didn't know we have. They satisfy more than our appetites.

No amount of convenience or time saved in the kitchen can replace those memories once we've lost them.

Home again . . .

After a busy and productive spring semester (during which I taught an all-online schedule for the first time and loved it!), I am home again in beautiful BC. Actually I arrived in early May, but we've been so busy digging out from under winter and getting ready for summer that I haven't had much time to write lately. Too, living in two places causes just enough confusion that it takes me a bit to adjust to where I am.

Our biggest accomplishment so far is to get the garden in. (This photo shows our garden at the end of the season last fall.) Selby planted some seedlings in milk-jug "greenhouses" before I got here, and that gave us a jump start on planting. This is only our second garden season here, so everything we do is still experimental. Last year we reclaimed garden space from the lush, verdant grassy pasture behind our house. We had no idea how deep those grass roots ran, but we battled them all summer. This year we got smart and spent a lot of time pulling out tap roots and covering the aisles between rows with plastic to keep down the grass. (Yes, this is very hard on the back, but then so is weeding.)

Some of our garden residents are perennial--bless them--such as raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, currants, and rhubarb. But the rest have to be planted annually, and we always begin with more ambition than expertise. Here's what we planted this year:

• Sunflowers
• Corn
• Beans (yellow and green)
• Tomatoes (5 kinds)
• Hubbard squash
• Cucumbers (2 kinds--I love to pickle them)
• Chives
• Lettuce (2 kinds)
• Cauliflower
• Broccoli
• Radishes
• Green onions
• Peppers (2 kinds)
• Cilantro
• Basil
• Thyme
• Rosemary
• Savory

Along with that, we've been tending to other planters, hanging pots, etc., because I am still fascinated by the fact that anything we plant here actually grows and thrives.

Our other big experiment for the summer is incubating chicken eggs. We have a tiny flock of chickens (a rooster and 3-4 hens, depending on who shows up at the henhouse at night) that we want to grow and diversify a little. Right now we have 10 eggs in the incubator, and the farthest along are due to hatch in about 4 days. (I will post photos when the babies arrive.)

I'm looking forward to teaching two online classes this summer--ENG101 and ENG217. I'm also still finishing up my online Canadian literature course for Fall. There are so many wonderful Canadian writers that we in the States never have a chance to read. Right now I'm reading The Piano Man's Daughter by Timothy Findley, whose novel Not Wanted on the Voyage (the tale of a cat who stows away on Noah's ark) was one of the five Canada Reads selections for this year. He creates such richly complex characters, especially women (Not Wanted is really the story of Mrs. Noah), that I am totally absorbed by his books.

Remind me one of these days to tell you why we've come to think of the town of Winlaw as Scofflaw and how our banty hen Sugar turned a tragedy into a triumph (a real-life fable!).

Until then . . .