Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [123]
Our friend Karen has come over to make sauerkraut. She and Anneliese and Amy are on the deck, working in the sun. Jane is in her baby bouncer. The poor kid, we go about fifty-fifty with disposable diapers to cloth, and today she’s wearing a cloth pair that makes her butt look like a cabbage. It doesn’t help that she’s wearing them beneath a pair of brightly colored stretch pants. I call this her going-to-bingo look, although perhaps I should not. Lately she has developed a drooly gape-mouthed grin immediately recognizable in my baby pictures from the same stage. But her blue eyes, pale as winter sky—those are all Mom.
Anneliese is using a slaw board that was handed down to my mom from her uncle’s mother and has been in our family for over a hundred years. The board is pretty much just that—a long board with wooden rails on either side and three deadly blades mounted at an angle between the rails. You slide the cabbage head up and down the board, and the blades slice it into strips. After a century of use the wood is smooth and dark. It got dry last winter and a corner of the wood cracked. When I came in from writing late last night, I found it on the table with a note from Anneliese asking if I could fix the crack. I spread wood glue over both surfaces, and then clamped the halves together using a conglomeration of miniature bungee cords and plastic clips. It looked hack, but in the morning the board held solid and the crack was nearly invisible. When Anneliese thanked me for fixing it, her smile was a fine reward, and for the umpteenth time this year I took note of the fact that I need to review my set list.
Almost immediately Karen cuts off the tip of her finger. I have just received a new jump kit from the local fire department, so it’s a great opportunity to familiarize myself with the contents of the bag and review basic bandaging technique. We get the bleeding stopped and I do a serviceable job of dressing the wound. I do not use clamps or bungee cords. Karen is determined to continue, and as I pass back and forth through the house for the remainder of the day the pile of cabbage heads in a cardboard box transforms into a pile of pale green silage in a crock, and by the end of the day the kitchen counter is lined with glass jars set to percolate and produce the perfect side dish to those pigs of ours.
I am not a deadbeat husband—lately I work probably too much. But among other things this year is highlighting the difference between earning and providing. I should be helping with that sauerkraut.
The next day Anneliese and Karen can sweet corn and tomatoes.
When Mills and I began working on the coop, the corn was short. Now it is turning in the field, and my chickens are still homeless. Oh, but take heart, fowl, because today on a sunny morning Mills and I met at his place, deconstructed the coop wall by wall, loaded it piece by piece on an equipment trailer, and hauled it home to Fall Creek. We are assembling it now as we giggle in the sun. Before we flop the floor over on its skids, we insulate it from below with strips of Styrofoam salvaged during yet another one of Mills’s dump runs. I like to think that come January my chickens will have warm feet. Then we begin remounting the walls. We get the first one tacked up fine, but then there is a breakdown in communication (“Slide ’er a tad to the le—RIGHT!! RIGHT!!”) and the eight-foot-tall front wall does a full-on topple, missing me by the skin of my bald head. It’s made mostly of oak, and hits the driveway with a tremendous thump, blowing dust across my toes. “LOOOOORD MISTER FORD!” hollers Mills, his hammer dangling from one hand and his eyes and