I hurried out into the field. “Alright, girls,” I said. “Break it up. Time to go to bed. And you,” I said to the bull, “should be ashamed of yourself, behaving like this with such a young thing.” The cows followed me back to the barn, because they are good cows, and the bull mooed one last time, then wandered off down the field in search of his own harem.

Still, I double-gated the cows in the barn, just in case. Molly did not appreciate my interference in her romantic endeavors and she let me know it. I let her know that I’m still the boss, which took quite a bit longer than usual. And then we agreed to disagree on what sort of behavior is appropriate for almost-one-year-old cows.

Four more months of this. Whew. (Hope that bull moves out soon!)

(She’ll be ready to be bred at 15 months. In case you didn’t know. Most normal people don’t. And we just have the vet inseminate for us. Its easier and cheaper than keeping a bull.)

Our topic for the week:

Do you have a sibling, cousin, parent, grandparent, or other family member that you look up to? Tell us about this person and why you admire him or her.

RULES: The person MUST BE a relative, but I don’t care how closely related you are. Perhaps you really admire your mother’s maternal grandmother’s third cousin four times removed. I’m good with that. Also, your essay is due on Friday!

See you then!

Where would you most like to live and why?

Ready to link to your own stories?  Have your mom type up your essay on her blog and then you can link to it here so all of us can read it.  Thanks for playing, and I’m sure looking forward to reading what you wrote!

This week’s topic:

Where would you most like to live and why?

Rules:  No rules.  It doesn’t have to be a certain length and you won’t be judged on your spelling or the proper use of commas.  Do your best, of course, but that’s not the point of this club.  We’ll put up a post of Friday where you can link to your essays.  So I guess there is one rule: your writing is due on Friday!  That way, we can spend the weekend reading each other’s work.  Have fun!

Moms: If you help your kids type up their work, please feel free to go ahead and clean up to spelling and punctuation so the rest of us can read it more easily.  If they type themselves, just give it a quick once-over for readability.  You can use any mistakes you find as teaching opportunities later.    And if you ever want to participate, too – go ahead!

]]> http://www.cooperfamilyfarm.com/fbp/index.php/2012/02/young-writers-club-week-1/feed/ 2 http://www.cooperfamilyfarm.com/fbp/index.php/2012/02/four-hours-2/ http://www.cooperfamilyfarm.com/fbp/index.php/2012/02/four-hours-2/#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:41:38 +0000 Jennie C. http://www.cooperfamilyfarm.com/fbp/?p=9065 Continue reading →]]> Davey’s sister and her family were able to make it out here from New Jersey to attend his retirement ceremony. He was pretty excited about seeing her, so – even though they’d rented a car and were quite capable of getting themselves down here – he planned to meet her plane at the airport in Louisville. “Who wants to go with me?” he asked at dinner the night before. Squeals of delight emanated from the children. Only one remained quiet.

“Don’t you want to go, too, Brenna?” I asked her. “The airport is fun and exciting.”

“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t want to leave you alone.” I was going to be the only one to stay behind to do the evening farm chores and prepare a late dinner.

“I’ll be okay by myself,” I assured her with a smile.

The following afternoon, I fed them all a hearty snack, since we anticipated having dinner at least two hours later than usual, and they all climbed into the van without me. I poked my head through the window. “Remember to keep a close eye on your buddies. Don’t lose anybody at the airport!” I turned to Davey. “You haven’t taken all the children out alone in a very long time. Be sure to count them regularly. And drive safely! I don’t want my whole family dying on the highway!”

“We’ll be fine!” they chimed in unison, and I waved as they drove away at four o’clock on the dot.

I stood in the middle of the driveway in a drizzling rain and looked around me. The cat circled herself around my ankles and the dog looked at me expectantly. The cows ambled over to the fence in curiosity. “Well,” I said to no one. “I guess this is it.”

I went inside and began to tidy up the kitchen. I rolled meatballs and put them into the oven to bake. I hung up a load of laundry to dry. I swept the floor. I emptied the dishwasher. I looked at the clock. 4:30. They weren’t even at the airport yet. I checked the flight status on the computer. The plane was going to get there early. I hoped they’d make it in time.

4:45. I put together the milking machine and carried it to the wagon I use to ferry supplies between the barn and the house. I came back in and pulled the meatballs out of the oven. I checked my recipe for dinner, but it was too simple and there was nothing else to do until they were almost home. I filled up my washing bucket with hot soapy water for the cow. I grabbed my stack of clean washcloths and headed out. It would probably be better to milk early tonight, I reasoned, since I’d have to do all the work by myself. It was sure to take longer, right?

The cows were mildly startled by my early arrival, but cooperative, and I was done milking in 15 minutes. Darn. I swept out my little wood-floored corner of the barn. It was raining pretty hard by then, so I grabbed a hoe and dug a trench to help the rain flow away from the barn and down the hill. After all that, I headed back in to strain and bottle the milk. It was 5:25. I checked the flight info again, just to make sure she’d landed. Yup. I wondered what Davey and the children were doing right then. Waiting for baggage? Hugging relatives? Was the airport crowded? Were the boys enjoying the planes?

I put the milk into the refrigerator and washed up my gear. 5:35, and still not time to make dinner. Sigh. I glanced out the window and saw by the light that it was nowhere near time to close up the chicken coops. I went back outside anyway. The barn area was already noticeably drier, so I did a little more hoe work to drain another nearby puddle outside the fence. When the last chickens went inside, I closed the doors and went inside myself, thoroughly drenched.

I decided to sit down for a few minutes and goof off. I was wearing myself ragged. I played a game on my iPod. A few minutes later, my friend Pat called.

“How are you doing, Jennie?” she asked, by way of greeting.

“They left me! I’m all alone!” I practically sobbed into the phone.

“Oh!” she said, caught off-guard. “Well, then, you’re going to like this. Remember T., my neighbor? She’s having some trouble with her cow’s milk supply and thought you might be able to help.”

“Oh, okay,” I mustered. “I’ll call her.”

“Okay! Bye-bye! God bless!” And she was gone. Hm. Maybe I should relax and try not to sound so desperate.

I called T. and we had a nice conversation about what could possibly be going on with her cow. It lasted, oh, four minutes. It was 6:09 when I hung up. Was this night never going to end? Delaney called me from the airport. “We’re going to go with Aunt Debbie to her hotel and make sure they get settled. Can we invite them over for dinner?”

I glanced at the meatball supply. Plenty. “Yup. I miss you. Hurry home, okay?”

I heard amusement in her voice when she replied, “We’ll be there as soon as we can. Love you, Mama!” Click. Alone again.

I was still too early, but I started chopping onions and gathering ingredients. It was a quickie meal, so no need to cook till they were almost home. The phone rang again. I wiped my hands on a towel and answered. “Mommy?” Penelope’s little voice came over the line. “Mommy, I love you and I miss you and I’m tired and want to come home.” Me, too, little one.

I put away some laundry, made the bed, vacuumed the living room. At 7:00, the phone rang again. Davey said, “We’re at the hotel, but they missed their exit and they must be taking the long way around Fort Knox. They just called and said they’re in Radcliff. We’ll be there soon, okay?” I think I’m dying of loneliness. Is that possible? Half an hour later, they called again, Delaney this time. “They’re here and checked in, but they’re not coming for dinner. The baby fell asleep and they don’t want to wake him up.”

“Okay! Just come home, please?!”

I went ahead and cooked the meal, Swedish meatballs. I started setting the table, glancing at the slow moving hands of the clock every three minutes. Finally, at long last I heard the rumble of my van in the driveway. I heard the van door slam shut, heard the voices of my dear children on the porch. I moved so I’d be the first thing they’d see when they walked in and I waited.

I listened impatiently to the removal of coats and shoes and then, finally, the doorknob turned and Tommy popped through the gap. He saw me and his eyes lit up and his smile spread from ear to ear as he flung himself into my arms! Penelope flew in behind him and latched onto my left leg, and Rosie wrapped her arms around my waist from the right. Big kids all squeezed in to hug me, missing me almost as much as I’d missed them. Davey came in last of all and beheld the scene before him with some amusement.

“Where’s dinner?” he asked after a quick kiss. I untangled myself from my beloved children and set the hot pots on the table. They told me about their airport adventure and asked what I’d done at home while they were gone and felt terrible when my tears spilled over, even while I laughed at myself.

“We’ll never leave you again!” one declared, while another wondered, “What are you going to do when we move out?”

“It’s a good thing I don’t have to go to work,” I said to Davey. “I don’t think I could survive that kind of separation.”

Those were the longest, loneliest four hours of my entire life. Next time, I’m going to the airport, too. The cows will keep.

Actually, it is the hallmark of the strong.

from A Right to Be Merry

I’m loving these sweet nuns so much!  I’ll miss them when I get to the end of this book.  Perhaps I’ll just start the book all over again!  Did I ever tell you that we have nuns here?  Augustinian Sisters originally from Malta.  We had a convent at our parish in Illinois, too, but they kept themselves apart and we never knew them.  Our sisters here, though, are intimately involved in the lives of the parish families and it has been such a blessing to us to know them.  Sister Theresa comes every Thursday for bible study.  All five of them came for Davey’s retirement.  They never fail to speak to us at Mass or to welcome us into their home if we happen to stop in during the week.  We all love them and this intimacy has had the happy effect of making religious life seem that much more accessible to the children.  Nuns are people, too!  They tell funny stories, they make mistakes, they teach us tunisian crochet on a whim… and they love.  Nuns rock!

I think for Davey, it was probably his most challenging assignment, not so much because the job was hard, but because the hours were long, the days all the same, and the leadership abusive. For those of us old enough to remember it, though, those three years were some of the happiest in our family life. Strange, isn’t it? It’s like the less we saw of him, the better the together times were.

I used to get up early enough each morning to make him a hot breakfast and pack his lunch, and if it was winter, I’d shovel the snow off the walk and from around his car so that he wouldn’t get snow down his “recruiter shoes”. We only had one assigned parking spot there and I’d always park somewhere else so he could have our spot. By the time he got home at 10pm, there wouldn’t be any FREE spaces open anywhere near our house.

Every afternoon, just after lunch, I’d give him a call just to chat and remind him that I loved him and that I was thinking of him. On the rare occasions I was unable to make that call, he missed it. In the evening, I’d save him a plate from dinner. When he got off around 9, he’d call on his cell phone and we’d chat for the 45 minutes it took him to get home and I’d heat his meal. We often got another hour together at the table when he arrived, while he ate and decompressed.

It was good.

Meggie was little then, though, and she doesn’t remember good times. That hurt me more than a little bit, to read her memory. She only remembers the deployment years, pain, anger, loss. I hope they can make some happier memories together.

Well, here they are. I put them up on an old blog of mine for linkability and so that this post wouldn’t get too long.

Brenna
Delaney
Megan
Jonathan
Rosie

Preliminary results show there might be a little interest in a young writers linky! I’ll post a topic/prompt on Monday and entries will be due on Friday, which will give us a whole weekend to read our little ones’ submissions. I’m going to leave it up to moms whether or not to correct inventive spelling and bad punctuation, but my personal preference is to correct it for readability. (I have a comma challenged child.) You can use their mistakes as teaching opportunities the following week. If children are really small, they might want to narrate their stories to their typists. That’s fine, too. I don’t want this to be another schoolish assignment. I really just want this to be a fun thing for the children, to get them thinking about writing as a way of expressing themselves, and just to get them into the habit. My children are excited about this; they say I think up the best writing prompts.

Sound good?

Davey was home and it was a big party week. Why? Well, because we’re retiring from the Army after 20 years of service, that’s why.

See? I got this:

I thought about blocking out my name, but that would be silly, don't you think?

I would show you his, but all he got was a Meritorious Service Medal, which is awesome, of course, but it says nothing at all about retiring. Mine says we’re retired.

So there was the day of the ceremony and we had a party the next day which – thank goodness – was pretty well attended. A good time was had by all, and one older gentleman even said, “I’ve been to a lot of these here things, and this is the best retirement party I’ve ever attended.” Welcome praise, because while I am quite good at making people feel welcome in our home, organized parties are not my forte. Or at least, I don’t think they are. It’s entirely possible that our guests think I’m doing a-okay.

Anyway, following hot on the heels of the retirement party was Tommy’s third birthday. Ack! My baby is three! THREE! To celebrate the occasion, I gave him a haircut. It’s been a whole half a week now and I’m still regretting it.

See? I mean, these two pictures were taken a mere two weeks apart. But the baby is all gone. He’s a cutie pie, though, isn’t he? And he was asking me almost every night to cut his hair. Sigh. I guess it was time.

But I’m still sad.

It was a good week, I guess. We ate too much cake, but there were balloons and miles of festive red, white and blue crepe paper, and modest gifts in line with the upcoming budget limitations, and pleasant company. One day soon, I’ll get over the habit of sleeping alone, and I’ll remember to check with him before going about my business, and I’ll stop chafing at his “interruptions”. I need a lot of retraining, too.

Later, I’ll tell you about the time they left me alone for four whole hours. I hope I never have to go through that again.

Tomorrow, I’m going to post some essays the children wrote. I’m trying to get them into the writing habit, so I’ve been assigning a topic each Monday, with the essay due on Friday. This week, they wrote about a favorite memory of their daddy, and they are sweet and touching and even a little heart-breaking, but I have permission to post them, so we’ll run with that. If you are interested, I’ll post a topic on Monday and your children can write along, too, and maybe we can have a Friday link-up. What do you think?

But I’m pretty good with the children, and I understand my cows better even than my vet, and feeding random stuff I find in the kitchen to the chickens is one of the highlights of my day. Also, my dog thinks I’m awesome and my prodigal cat came back, and she’s pretty fond of me, too, even going so far as to meet the van in driveway when we come home so she can twist and curl around my feet. The laundry is always clean and the dinners are pretty good and the floor is usually swept and other people know they’re welcome for a cup of coffee any old time at all.

So I guess being a bad blogger isn’t really the end of the world now, is it?

~*~

One of the things I have been working on this week is producing a hard cheese with no added cultures beyond what is naturally present in the milk. The best cheeses belong to a particular place and by trying to make for myself the cheeses that belong to other climates, other forages, other bacteria, I am fighting a losing battle. So I am trying to make a palatable cheese based on our own place. It should, if this works, be a perfect synthesis of our own animals, the weather, the grasses, the native germs, turning ordinary milk into a delicious food that goes well with crackers, and possibly tacos and pizza.

~*~

There are R.O.U.Ses living in my chicken coop. I saw one yesterday when I went out – earlier than usual – to gather the last eggs of the day. They’ve been stealing eggs, too, not just chicken feed. I don’t know how to kill them without running the risk of killing the cats, too. Poison is out, for if the cats try to eat poisoned rats, we poison the cats, too. Rats, I’ve read, are suspicious, but whatever we try to trap them with has to be undercover because of the amount of dust and straw and mess they will encounter in the chicken coop. Rats are disgusting. Evil. Mice are bad, but nothing like rats.

~*~

I’ve been married to my soldier for seventeen years now, and at no point has time dragged on so slowly as these last few weeks in the Army. Five weeks left! But it might as well be an eternity. (Why, yes, I am a little dramatic.)

~*~

People keep asking me how terrible the change from military life to home-all-the-time civilian life is going to be. I didn’t know, honestly, until New Year’s Day. That was our anniversary, and we’d ditched the kids after Mass and gone out to lunch. While we waited for our food to arrive, Davey daydreamed aloud about working out in the back field, seeing me coming carrying a picnic basket, the two of us sharing a meal together on a sunny hillside with the tractor parked nearby. I knew right then that everything was going to be fine, because just a couple of mornings before, I’d had the same daydream. Yes, I really do believe that it’s all going to turn out just fine.

~*~

Hope you all have a lovely weekend. I’m going to email my sisters now about their upcoming visit. Only six months to go!