Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [2]
This new place of ours is not far from where I was raised—you can throw in your Essential Steve Earle, go the speed limit, and arrive well before “Continental Trailways Blues”—but it feels far. I arrived at our New Auburn farm in diapers and departed at the age of emancipation. Spent a dozen years away, then returned to live in the village itself. Twelve years into my second citizenship, I was settled and content within the rough bounds of an area framed largely in terms of memories and gratitude. I was in the fire department, I never missed Jamboree Days, I shot the breeze with folks in the post office lobby, and I caught up on politics at the village dump. Over half my life, I have happily punctuated my return address with the same zip code, the nicely rhythmic five-four-seven, five-seven. New Auburn, Wisconsin. The idea of forwarding the mail leaves me queasy and blue.
It would be sweet to noodle along in this minor key, but I’m stopping now because having pried my eyes from the compass mounted in my navel, I see the world is gray with the dust of diaspora and displacement. Any given moment, put your ear to the earth, and you will hear ten million shifting feet. Vicious herdings and abject decampments, perpetually under way and commenced at the business end of boots, bullets, and bulldozers. Whereas we have simply eased down the road a piece.
Our new farm is on hilly terrain, and when I come up the driveway I find myself reflexively checking the windshield to verify that my state park stickers are up-to-date. Having been raised a swamp and flatlands boy, I view all topographical rumples as exotic. I am more attuned to brush than vistas. When I walk the ridge, I can’t help but remember all those Louis L’Amour books I read as a kid, where some fool skylines himself and is culled by a Sharps 50. When we were tots, my friend Harley was orphaned by a tractor when it pitched on a hill and crushed his father, and I have conflated hills and farms with danger ever since.
The ridge runs from the house at an angle straying off the east-west axis. As a result, the first time I came here I got my directions wrong, and I’m still trying to rewire. My disorientation is exacerbated by the fact that some of the outbuildings align with the ridge, while others are set square to the four directions. I am regularly startled by the apparent repositioning of sunrise.
I am nervous about some of the newer houses nearby. They tend to be grand. Again, I must disabuse myself of reverse classism—orthopedic surgeons want chickens too—but I cherish a regular salting of trash heaps and trailers, signaling as they do that the neighborhood will tolerate bad luck and alternative preference. It soothes me that our screen door does not latch, and you can entertain yourself during downtime by dropping a glass marble beside the toilet and quietly betting as to whether or not it will clear the tub surround and roll clear out into the kitchen.
I first perceived my father as a farmer the night he drove home with a giant lactating Holstein tethered to the bumper of his Ford Falcon. There was no cart, just a cow on a rope. And Dad, motoring real slow.
It wasn’t the sort of scene you’d see on the cover of Hoard’s Dairyman.
We went to fetch the cow after supper, from a farm some three miles distant. Owning neither truck nor trailer suitable for transporting the beast, Dad chose the Falcon—a station wagon model with a nifty roll-up rear window and a naughtily noisy Hollywood muffler. This being a momentous event, we kids—six of us at the time—clamored to come along, and we made a carful. That said, I have not discovered any photographic documentation of the event. Perhaps a couple of the younger children remained at home with Mom. When we arrived at the farm, a