Snow, Re-scheduling, Cannery Row
Snow and cold. More snow, more cold. I’m ready for spring. Stockpiled grass doesn’t do the cows much good covered in a 6 inch blanket of snow. A couple more inches of snow last night. Not supposed to get above freezing until Monday. And so the regular hay feeding begins. I fed about 30 rolls of hay fed to our cows this week.
Amy kept the on-farm kitchen warm with multiple batches of broth through the week. She delivered to Bristol and Kingsport yesterday afternoon, but we had to reschedule Monday’s delivery to Knoxville and this Saturdays’ deliveries to Marion and Abingdon. Amy has a hard enough time keeping up with emails on a regular week when all goes as planned. Re-scheduling three deliveries and communicating back and forth with everyone has been time consuming. It’s a lot for her to keep up with. Thanks for your patience. We want to keep everyone updated and safely deliver meat to your family.
We’ve been feeding the wood stove about 4 times a day. We probably have enough wood left to get us through February, but we usually keep it burning through May. When the weather clears, lots of firewood needs to be cut for the rest of this year and next.
The kids made snowmen and got their sleds out and enjoyed sleigh riding down the hill. When their hands got numb from the cold, we spent inside time playing dominos and board games.
This week on the tractor using the front end loader to scrap the snow off our driveway, the barn entrance, and the two cabin driveways, I listened to “Cannery Row” by John Steinbeck, a story themed around good intentions that don’t turn out so good. Here’s a few quotes:
“It don’t do no good to say I’m sorry. I been sorry all my life. This ain’t no new thing. It’s always like this… Everything I done turned sour… If I done a good thing, it got poisoned up some way.”
“He went to his bed and pulled his blanket up over his head and didn’t get up all day. His heart was as bruised as his mouth. He went over all the bad things he had done in his life, and everything he had ever done seemed bad. He was very sad… Hazel felt so bad that he walked to Monterey and picked a fight with a soldier and lost it on purpose. That made him feel a little better to be utterly beaten by a man Hazel could’ve licked without half trying.”
“They had become social outcasts. All of their good intentions were forgotten now.”
“They drew into themselves, and no one could foresee how they would come out of the cloud, for there are two possible reactions to social ostracism: either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier, or he goes bad, challenges the world, and does even worse things. This last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.”
“It has always seemed strange to me the things we admire in men: kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling are the concomitance of failure in our system. And those traits we detest: sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second… Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?”
Have a good week.
Will