Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [64]
First I have to clear the way. I put most of the panels up when everything was still winter-dead. Now the nettles and burdock are knee-high. I don’t own a scythe or a grass whip, so I have at them with a hoe, which is not pretty but gets the job done. I’m slashing away like a grass-stained Sweeney Todd when Amy ambles down. “Oooh, nettles!” she says. “Yum!” She watched Anneliese drink nettle tea throughout the pregnancy, and the two of them regularly collect nettles and bake them in our lasagna. This is all a reflection of our friend Lori the wild foods expert. Lori has taken her daughters and Amy on several foraging expeditions, and as a result Amy is forever eating dandelions straight from the yard or bringing me fistfuls of wood sorrel. The wood sorrel is evocative (as a kid I plucked it from a damp patch out where the sump pump drained) but a little too sour for my taste. The back of my hands and forearms are sweaty and tingling with nettle-sting, so it’s nice to have Amy remind me of its happier attributes.
Once I’ve cleared away the foliage, I begin placing insulators. To save money on posts, I planned to secure the insulators directly to the panels, but first thing I discover is there is no way to do this without seriously modifying each insulator. I do a quick calculation of time and gas money versus the price of a bag of plastic insulators and decide to forge ahead. The required modifications involve profound misuse of a tree pruner, but it works (if necessity is the mother of invention, I am its ham-fisted stepchild), and before long I am placing the insulators while Amy follows along behind, happily hand-tightening each threaded retainer ring. During this time our old friend Mister Big Shot reappears, squawking and flapping around the perimeter. Amy rolls her eyes. I quietly hope she will learn to recognize similar chest-puffing inanity in the males of her own species and react with the same disdain. It’s a long sail from six years old to safe harbor.
By the time we get all the wire strung and snug, it’s nigh on suppertime and I decide I’ll hook the power up another day. Returning the tools and fencing equipment to the shed, I see my beloved International pickup sitting over in the corner. The carburetor is leaking. I need to fix it. Another day. I notice the lawn needs mowing. Another day. I’d like to fence off a big chunk of the yard and get sheep. Another day. Through the screen, I can hear Jane blaring.
We’ve been slowly emerging back into the world as a family. Relatives begin stopping by, and for the first time Anneliese’s grandmother holds the baby. Grandma Scherer is ninety-four years old and has only recently traded world travel for the Internet. A preacher’s wife who raised five children while holding down a teaching job after her husband died young, Grandma is one of those women who makes you feel sluggardly. When I leave the room to get the camera, I return to find Grandma rocking Jane and singing a lullaby in the original German.
Nearly once a day now someone will hold up Jane, look at me, and say, “So—what do you think of the baby?” and what I want to say and sometimes do is how above all the arrival of this tot has only expanded the love I feel for my wife. The vision of her pushing fiercely, then the sound that rose from her when first she held that baby close—there is something of an eye-opening ear-tweak in there for a man. I remember thinking, lioness.
Now, however, she is drawn and pale. After months of pregnancy-induced insomnia, she had been longing to sleep. And indeed, she has been able to sleep