Rain Showers, Family Fun, Animal Farm
Let it rain, let it rain. Grateful for a couple more showers this week. Hopefully more to come in the days ahead.
It was a busy week but nothing out of the ordinary. We put another couple hundred chickens in the freezers. Can’t say enough good things about the friends and family that come out to help on chicken processing days. They are a pleasure to work with, making chicken processing days, laborsome as they are, one of the most looked forward to days of our week.
We’re still keeping the animals moving. I moved a group of pigs to a fresh paddock in the woods. Chickens are still being moved to fresh grass daily. Keeping the four different cow herds moving to new pasture every few days.
Amy’s brother and his family came up from Tennessee for the weekend. Lots of cousin fun for the kids. The cousin fun continued down in Tennessee early in the week as Amy and the kids delivered meat to families in Knoxville and stayed the night to spend more time with family. While they were gone I did some bush hogging in the pastures. Amy and the kids made it back in time to catch chickens Tuesday afternoon for Wednesday’s harvest and then helped take chicks out to the field from the brooder in their place.
This farm life can be all consuming if we let it. For years it was and arguably still is. With animals on the farm it’s hard to get away. Doing things off the farm takes intentionality and planning. Every year Amy and I tell each other that we’re going to quit work early a few afternoons throughout the growing season and take the kids hiking, swimming, or kayaking over the mountain at Hungry Mother State Park. Next thing we know the year has past. “We’ll do better next year,” is what we been telling ourselves for years. In the 9+ years of being a dad, I don’t suppose I’ve ever taken our family over to the park to swim although they ask about it nearly every time we pass by. After processing chickens on Wednesday, I quickly made the rest of the farm rounds, then we headed across the mountain for an evening of swimming in the lake. Our swimming fun was abruptly ended by a welcomed rain shower. The perfect ending to a good day.
Yesterday afternoon Amy and I went to Bristol and Kingsport to make more meat deliveries and turned it into a date night on the way home. Obviously we’re together a lot, but rarely do we get hours of uninterrupted time to talk just the two of us. The trip to Bristol and Kingsport is the perfect time to drive and talk and evaluate the direction of the farm, home life, and how to bring balance between the two. Evaluating our direction is always important. Making adjustments in response is equally important. As always, we have some adjustments to make. Thank you Bristol and Kingsport families for continuing to eat ORVF meats and giving Amy and me a good excuse to go on a date and spend time together.
This week while bush hogging, I listened to “Animal Farm” by George Orwell. I love learning and often listen to farming books on how to better care for our land. This is not a book about farm animals. I read this one for a class in high school, but I couldn’t remember much about it. It’s short but profound. It was not only a prophetic writing for the days of Orwell, it’s a timeless prophetic writing for the days of all mankind.
Mentioned in the forward, in an article “Why I Write” Orwell says, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism. ‘Animal Farm’ was the first book in which I tried with full consciences of what I was doing to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.”
C.M. Woodhouse says this about “Animal Farm” in the forward, “The fairy story that succeeds is in fact not a work of fiction at all, or at least no more so than, say, the opening chapters of Genesis. It is a transcription of a view of life into terms of highly simplified symbols. And when it succeeds in its literary purpose, it leaves us with a deep indefinable feeling of truth. And if it succeeds also as Orwell set out to do in a political as well as an artistic purpose, it leaves us also with a feeling of rebelliousness against the truth revealed.”
Have a good week.
Will