September42009
Exeunt
There have been a lot of changes on the farm in the past couple of weeks. All of them stem from the fact that the farmer and his wife have decided that this will be their last season here. They’re in the process of selling the farm, not simply as land and a house, but hopefully also as a business. I’ve known this since the first week I got here, but it didn’t seem like much of a reality until things started disappearing. First to go were the two pigs and one of the cows. The pigs weren’t such a loss, since they were a bit brutish and literally ate like pigs and the biggest one, the Larry of the Larry-Moe-and-Curly trio, was a thorough bully. (That pig was a true pig, and the farmer considered rewarding Larry’s superlative ability to feed himself by making him the first to go to the slaughterhouse, but then he decided to be fair and send send him with his lackey, Moe. Someday we’ll figure out the connection between the fact that, of all the domesticated animals, pigs eat the most like us and act the most like us.)
More of a disappointment was the departure of the black cow—the cuter of the two—who followed me around whenever I went into the cow pasture. Saying goodbye to the chickens was also not so bad. They’re dumb, loud and dirty. I think if more of us knew just how unattractive an animal the average chicken is, we’d all eat a lot fewer chicken wings and omelets. They shit on their own eggs, break them, eat them, and are generally uncooperative. The farmer sold about fifty of the nicer-looking White Leghorns to a local, and kept the nine older hens. The flock had already slowed down their egg production as summer was ending, leaving us with only about two dozen eggs to sell at market. Now we get just enough for our breakfasts. With fewer to worry about, we tried letting them out of the run, but then we left the farm for a few hours and came back to find a grizzled chicken corpse by the back porch. Barney, the vicious beagle who can’t even keep raccoons out of the garden, was in the midst of stripping the feathers off a second hen when we caught him. We gave up on the idea of having free range chickens pretty quickly.
The biggest loss was the farmer’s wife and son. She had been looking for a job closer to their relatives since I arrived at the farm, and a few weeks ago she found one in Florida. So she and the four-year-old son took off a few weeks ago. It was tough to say goodbye to them, since they had been my family for the past month, but for their last dinner on the farm we had a good time and cooked a big leg of lamb that no one had bought at the market yet—valued at about $60.
“You guys are going to starve once I’m gone,” said the farmer’s ife. She seemed more concerned about how the farmer and I would cook and clean by ourselves than about selling the farm or starting a new job.
“We’ll just make a lot of hummus,” said the farmer.
“And drink beer,” I said. “We’ll be alright.”
