trust the spirit
eight hours later, and the field was mowed. a disorienting day—humming along on that tractor—the powerful noise of the machine underneath me completely envelops me and points all thoughts inwards. eight hours on the tractor, eight hours in my head. storms swirled around my field, drenching people all over town, but i successfully prayed them aside. cold beer time.
it’s amazing how much my life has changed in two oh ten, and it’s important that i ferris bueller myself around every once and a while, so i don’t miss it (the whole scene is great, but 1:12 is the line you’re looking for). it’s a sunday morning, seven thirty am, and i’m scrubbing down a chill tank that will receive over a hundred birds before ten. that’s a hundred birds i will have a hand in killing, chilling, and bagging. a hundred birds on a hundred plates for a few hundred mouths.
as i hollered for the cows they aaalll came runnin’. i guess they knew i was moving them into the woods, which is most likely their favorite paddock. with a very busy schedule ahead of us this week, starting with a chicken kill in the am, it’ll be nice for the cows to be in the most comfortable paddock possible, giving us the option of spending our time and energy on other farm cogs and not on them for at least two days.
“our earliest representational art—paintings from the paleolithic era found in caves from spain to africa, australia to india—shows a singular obsession with herbivores…they figured amongst our first god’s and goddesses. we drew them and dreamed them, sang them and ate them; and our passion for hoofed beings only deepened once we herded instead of hunted them.” goat song, by: brad kessler
a couple nights ago her and i had a friend over for dinner—similar age, similar passions, similarly distant roots that somehow landed us in athens to farm—and he got to explaining his attraction to working with cattle. to paraphrase his simple, and eloquent, attempt at putting his explanation to words, he said, “it’s almost biblical.” without knowing exactly how or why, i definitely understood, but it wasn’t clear. it made me want to investigate a bit.
the summer crops are making their final push before withering away to fall. despite the constant blaze of the sun and the electrolytes gushing out of my body on a daily basis, fall is already on the mind. maintenance has begun on our fall hoop house, amendments are being added to the fall garden, and our fall plant starts are arriving at the end of the week. the summer crops are withering away as the summer heat has been unrelenting. the approaching seasonal shifts are a welcome change to the blaze, and fresh inspiration lurks just around the corner.
I'm High On Cooking