Who Cooks for You?

Out along the edge of the moon-feathered woods, the Barred Owls sound their call: "Who cooks for YOU? Who cooks for YOU? Who cooks for YOU-all?"

Tonight, one of our farmhands has taken on the task, stepping gracefully into the gap on today's chore list. The Piper and I worked off the farm today and had resigned ourselves to bacon and eggs when we first noted no one had signed up for supper. Instead, I arrived home from a day of hospital chaplaincy and she arrived home from a day of social work to find...a three-course dinner kept warm on the stove. There are pork chops. There are apples simmered with raisins, spices, and nuts. There are buttery rosemary mashed potatoes. He shares the news of his day on the land: thirteen eggs collected, snowpeas and lettuce nearly sprouting in the hoop house, snowbanks melting away, healthy livestock and a well-exercised dog.

We aren't fools enough to count on good news, nor do we count on such feasts. The food was unexpected and tasted sweeter for the surprise. Weather changes, priorities change, people change, relationships require maintenance and even promises require occasional renegotiation. Besides all that, it's early Spring. Our muscles are twitchy and our brains are itchy. You just can't count on much, this time of year, except melting snow and a whole lot of mud.

So, we try to pry open the tight fists of Winter. We try to open up a bit, stretch our bodies and our minds and our spirits. We flex the muscles of gratitude and remind ourselves to meet each day on its own terms, with whatever grace and goodness we can muster. Sometimes, the firewood's all wet and we slip on the ice. Some days, all we can see is the mud. And some days, we walk wearily in and find a warm supper waiting, a farmstead well-tended, and owls calling at the edge of the woods, questioning each other sweetly under the great, round moon.

Just Ducky

I was a water baby. Almost forty years ago, I swam out into the world under the sign of The Fish. I spent most of my growing-up years on an island under grey Northwest skies, surrounded by salt-water rhythms and moon-drawn tides. I commuted to high school by ferry boat.

After a desert pilgrimage of sorts to attend graduate school in Colorado, I headed back out to the sea as quickly as possible-- this time in another direction, but with no less thirst in the journey and no less relief to arrive at a different ocean's shore.

I love oceans. I also love the North. I have spent time in Southern climes, testing my vocation and my ability to itinerate, but the North always feels most like home. It is my belief that we each carry an inner landscape--mostly a reflection of the place or places in which we grew--and I've found myself most at peace when my outer landscape contains the same elements (salt water, evergreens, mountains) as my inner one.

It made sense, then, to choose Alaska after Venezuela. It made sense, I thought, to choose Colorado for my next sojourn from my growing-up island--it had mountains and evergreens at least--but in that dry, high state I found myself thirsty and homesick nearly all the time. And then I made my way to Maine, seemingly the best of all options: ample salt water along its beautifully complicated coast, forests of spruce, hemlock, fir and pine, and mountains more ancient--if less dramatic--than the upstart Cascadian and Olympic peaks of my childhood home. Oh, and then there was the snow: famously cold, snowy winters, a longstanding source and inspiration for songs, poems, and legends galore. Add to this the lure of a certain bagpiper, and I was hooked.

So, now it's late February in Maine. Along with my birthday today, I celebrate almost a decade of full-time residence in the north-easternmost U.S. state. I have braved wild winds for New Year's Day walks along the shore. I have shoveled my share of deep, drifting snow. I have strapped on skis and snowshoes to traverse the winter woods in search of frozen water in all its beautiful permutations. But winter is changing.

This is our driveway today. In spite of my best efforts yesterday afternoon, the farm truck could not *quite* be coaxed all the way onto higher ground. I suspect my best hope is to make no attempts to move it until the weather shifts, the ground (hopefully?) dries out and the currently liquified muck freezes hard again.

Global Climate Change, I've read, is all about extremes. Wet seasons will be wetter, dry seasons will be drier, and storms will be stormier. Our current storm started yesterday morning and flood warnings are posted for our entire county all the way through tomorrow night. We often get similar conditions in April, but February?!? Oh dear.

But there are some things a flood does well. It may not beautify the landscape with white fluffy drifts, but it does help a farm dog find all her snow-buried tennis balls. It also highlights, for a farmer, those areas of the farm that would most benefit from some serious Spring Cleaning. For us, the work area beyond the woodpile demands the most immediate attention. That's where the spare lumber got stacked from last year's farmhouse renovation. That's where the leftover gravel sits, a remnant of plumbing and fencing projects. And that's where the farm dog dropped a most illustrative object that rose to the occasion for this February flood:

Time in a One-Toilet Town

We wouldn't want to get too far above ourselves, so this past weekend we took a wee break from the drudgery of house-building and mud-farming for a holiday in a one-toilet town.

We were headed to Muscongus Island, a small (3 miles by one mile) island in Midcoast Maine. Our friends Julia and Fred, of Castlebay, helped us get the gig--the job of preparing and leading worship for this wee island "community" the morning after a Castlebay-led ceilidh on the deck of one of the summer residents' homes. This island no longer boasts any year-round residents--the last one left more than a generation ago--but the older Summer Folk can still recall many of the permanent residents, their ways of life and their stories.

The island has some odd dynamics. It is an ever-changing collection of people who live in close proximity yet rarely think of themselves as a community. There are no electrical lines, no televisions, no paved roads and no land-line telephones. (Actually, they tried to install a telephone system several years ago, but it never quite worked. You can still find remnants of the wire decaying along the tractor-paths that connect some of the more remote houses.) The island--until very recently--also had no flush toilets.

Everyone still proudly uses their outhouses except one Mr. Plimpton, who first earned the other residents' scorn by gutting a historic island house of its ornate decor to make way for modern decor. He then used his lawyerly skills and deep pockets to acquire permits, bring over heavy equipment and materials, and install the island's first flush toilet and septic system.

The other Summer Folk responses ranged from disgust to righteous indignation. By tacit agreement, they had abided by the common understanding of minimal impacts and respect of limited resources. They had invested in solar lights to cut down on their use of kerosene. They were careful to pack out all their trash...but Mr. Plimpton, apparently, couldn't trouble himself to abide by Island Common Sense.

As I prepared for the weekend on the island, I wrestled with my sermon. What could I say? After all, I was just another non-islander, another Person From Away. It was Julia who suggested I think in terms of other islands--the islands I've visited in Scotland, and the island, far to our west, on which I grew up. That was helpful-- every island has some sort of resource-use issue. Every island copes with the tension of building and maintaining a sense of community. But I still figured I'd have to go off-lectionary.

The Common Lectionary is a three-year ecumenical cycle of Bible readings designed to expose congregations to the vast majority of the Bible's themes, books, and important stories. Each week's readings include a reading from the Old Testamant/Hebrew Scriptures, Something from the Book of Psalms, Something from one of the Gospels, and a reading from one of the New Testament Epistles. Usually I try to stick to the lectionary readings--it's a good discipline, a sort of "writing prompt" for preachers. The weekly challenge is to find, in the assigned readings, something that speaks to a news item or community issue, and then craft a sermon that reflects honest engagement with the historical texts in light of our contemporary situation(s).

I figured I'd have to go off-lectionary for sure--what could a two-thousand-year-old collection of letters, poems and stories possibly say to a bunch of islanders in 2009 who were upset about a flush toilet? Well, might as well read the lectionary list for this week before I get on with the work... HAH! What I found were a bunch of people stuck in the wilderness together, worried about their food supply, and an early church congregation arguing over the relative value of each other's gifts. As they say, "That'll preach." (Readings may be found here. I used the readings from Exodus 16 and Ephesians 4.)

The piper and I arrived on the island Saturday evening by small power-boat. We weighed down the three-bench boat with unusual cargo: a fiddle, a guitar, Great Highland Bagpipes, Scottish Smallpipes, assorted flutes and whistles, bags of food and clothing, a large Celtic harp, three musicians, one preacher, and one very nervous farmdog. There were folks waiting at the dock to haul all our gear up the hill through the deep, dark mud created by a summer of unusually heavy rain. We set up for the ceilidh on the deck and enjoyed a lovely summer evening: music, potluck snacks, and an after-ceilidh supper at the home of the island's spry 85-year-old historian.

Sunday morning dawned with sweet birdsong and pearly light. The Piper and I had slept in the parsonage attached to the island church--our room was right next to the belltower. As instructed, I pulled the rope and rang the bell at fifteen minutes to nine to call the islanders to church. The Piper was poised and ready outside. As soon as I finished ringing the bell, she struck in her pipes and played in the thickening mist as the islanders made their way along the footpaths. Children were carried on shoulders. Dogs came as well, too rambunctious to tell if they were wearing their Sunday-go-to-meeting collars and leashes.

After the welcome and announcements and prayer of invocation, we had a hymn sing. People called out suggestions and a woman jumped up and offered to play the piano as we sang a few verses of each favourite hymn. As they opened their mouths and sang out the first hymn, such a glorious blend of strong voices and sweet harmonies arose--such a joyful noise in such a dear wee kirk! I felt deeply blessed by the Spirit moving in that place.

A young woman from the congregation read the first Bible reading, and I read the second. Next came the sermon:

SERMON FOR LOUDVILLE CHURCH, MUSCONGUS ISLAND, AUGUST 2, 2009:

It was a summer Sunday like this one, the air heavy with moisture and salt, no other cars on the roads, just the rise and fall of the ancient stone hills before us. We were in Scotland. We had just finished a week on the island of South Uist at a traditional music school. Now, with another student, we had rented a car to spend the weekend exploring the rest of the Outer Hebrides. It had seemed like a great idea-- pack four musicians and all their gear into a station wagon, grab food along the way, and wander merrily wherever we wanted.

Our traveling companion was fascinated by standing stones, and since he was our driver, we happily agreed to let our path be plotted by the locations of significant stones. Saturday had gone well enough-- we'd meandered through empty fields, along sheep paths and near low stacks of drying peat, to stand in front of this or that ancient monolith, used for nobody-knew-quite-what. It was a lovely diversion, and we'd been well-fortified by a full Scottish breakfast at a bunkhouse on the island of Harris.

Saturday afternoon, we headed north to the Isle of Lewis, my father's ancestral stomping grounds. The plan was to reach the biggest town, Stornoway, by nightfall, then spend the entire next day heading from one great stone wonder to the next, including the great stone-age fort called the Carloway Broch and the ancient circle of stones at Callanish.

Somehow, though, we'd missed a crucial bit of information. People had warned us, but we hadn't quite believed it. “Fill up your tank the night before; Lewis is closed on Sundays.” We didn't quite realize what it would mean. Lewis, it turns out, is a stronghold of conservative Protestant devotion, and when they keep the Sabbath, they really keep the Sabbath—to the point of padlocking the swings in the public parks.

The morning was beautiful. We went to the lighthouse, dipped our toes in the other side of the Atlantic on a wee white-sanded beach, and watched endangered seabirds wheel above the ledges of some of the oldest rocks in the world. We romped through the remains of thousand-year-old fort. We polished up the last of our crackers and cheese and looked forward to afternoon tea at the Callanish visitors' centre, complete with a view of the standing stones.

But the visitors' centre was closed. The grocery store in the next town was closed. The petrol stations and convenience shops were closed. Even on a summer weekend, even at the height of the tourist season, Everything Really. Was. Closed.

We kept driving, bellies grumbling and growling, scanning the wide expanse of peat bogs and lichen-encrusted stones that reached to the horizon, hoping less and less for another picture-perfect monolith, hoping more and more for a convenience store around the next bend... Our panic continued to rise as the light faded from the sky. We realized we'd misunderstood the rules, misinterpreted our guides. We wanted bread. The island offered us nothing but stones.

Then we remembered Maggie. Maggie was a classmate of ours at the traditional music school. She'd introduced herself as a local girl—she lived on Harris. In the friendly, welcoming way of the Highlanders, she'd invited us to drop by. “Especially if you're there on the Sabbath;” she had said, “You'll need a home-cooked meal then.” Her remark had seemed oddly pointed at the time, but we understood her meaning now, all too well. We rummaged through our packs and found a copy of the school contact list. Tired and hungry and unsure of ourselves, we put in a call to Maggie.

“Och, sure! You're just doon the road! Come, then, the lot of ye! I've got supper on the stove.” One slight wrong turn and twenty minutes later, we were on her doorstep. She ushered us in with exclamations of welcome and genuine delight, took our jackets, offered us tea, and showed us to the kitchen, where dinner was indeed on the stove: four enormous dishes, heaped with food, cooked the day before, the pilot light's heat just barely enough to give them a hint of warmth. She had made this enormous feast the day before, so as not to trouble herself with the work of cooking on the Sabbath. There were bashed neeps with butter and curried rice salad with apricots. There was a platter of cold sliced meat and a tray with bread and cheese. It looked like enough to feed a village—certainly more than Maggie's small household, more than enough for them and four hungry musicians.

Maggie's hospitality startled us, dazzled us, and moved us deeply. She had known us only a week, and then mostly in passing. Yet here was this feast, and afterwards the demand that we put up our feet by the peat fire, rest a while, and share some tea. Her unqualified, whole-hearted welcome fluttered around us like a flock of quail landing in the wilderness, like manna in the desert. Here was pot-luck beyond our wild imaginings, canceling out all our fears of scarcity.

Islanders or desert wanderers, we all move with the burdens of hunger and fear. For the Israelites, it was the fear that their resources would not be sufficient to nourish their whole community. On Lewis, we faced a similar, though far less drastic, fear.

The island where I grew up has its own community struggles. Our island, unlike yours, has no bedrock. It is merely a pile of silt and gravel, the remnant of a glacier that got tired. To the executives and engineers of a mining company, all that pre-crushed rock made our island the perfect source of raw materials for all manner of lucrative clients, near and far away. They threatened to take a portion of the island—including protected shoreline and sensitive woodlands--by Eminent Domain in the name of Public Works.

We raged. We whispered. We made phone calls and wrote letters. We gossiped, prayed, and picketed. We raised such a stink that the county commissioners, engineers, and other highly-placed personages made their way from the mainland to the island. The cause became a celebrated one.

I wish I could tell you that we won, flat out. But real life rarely wraps things up so neatly. Nobody got exactly what they wanted. In the process, though, something has changed on the island. We've learned to be clear with each other. We've learned to work together—farmers, lawyers, schoolkids and grandparents, mechanics and politicians—to understand what matters most to us, what makes the island such a vital, precious and important place.

It remains to be seen whether all those tons of gravel will be pulled from that particular lump of earth. In the meantime, we have sowed seeds of good stewardship, and we have begun to reap a harvest of wisdom. As Paul said in his letter to the Ephesians,
“We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way... into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.”

Speak the truth in love-- how hard that is, when anxiety and frustration—and even righteous indignation—crowd out compassion from our hearts. And how hard it is to grow together, to find some all-too-uncommon Common Ground. On Lewis, that place of ancient stones, they wrestle with the decision to run ferryboats on Sundays, raising the fear that this will cheapen and weaken this tiny stronghold of Sabbath Rest. Here on Muscongus Island, you have your own struggles with resources, your own hard quests for Common Ground. But you also have sources of wisdom, strength and nourishment. You have auctions, workdays, and wonderful potluck feasts!

On the old agricultural calendar, today marks the beginning of Lammas or Lunasdal: the harvest season. On the Isle of Lewis, as on the Scottish mainland, it was a time to honor those who laboured in the fields. Bread and beer-- gifts of grain and the fruit of the earth—were shared in abundance. It was a kind of communion. There were toasts to praise workers and landowners both, ways to honour the well-rooted and the drifters. Although most of us no longer till the fields with our own muscles and sweat, the memory of these things is powerful—so powerful that the Common Lectionary, the shared cycle of bible readings heard in churches around the world, offers on this particular Sunday a plate full of manna, fresh harvests, heavenly bread.

Here, on this small island, on this particular lump of stone and earth, our fieldwork awaits. Let us ask ourselves and our neighbors: what shall be our harvest? What nourishment will we share with others, to keep the Spirit's gifts moving among us? What manna will we gather, together, in this place?
Amen.


Manna, indeed: for the rest of our stay, we were invited to share meals and hailed cheerfully on the footpaths. We shared more stories and savoured the hospitality of many...and used more than one of the island outhouses, each decorated thoughtfully and distinctly. Farmdog, Piper and I roamed the island's beaches with our friends. I swam in the cool saltwater. We read books from the island library by solar flashlights after dark. It was a time of renewal, a time of nourishment for body and mind and soul. We've even been asked back for another Summer Sunday, next year!

Pig Deal.

Grunt.

.....grunt...grunt.

...sqeeeee! Grunt squee squeeeeee!

For the record, in case anyone out there is wondering,
these are NOT the sounds to which a farmer enjoys waking.

Roosters aren't so great either, but I'll take a nice, normal, healthily-crowing early morning rooster any day over...

Seven Escaped Pigs.

To start with, here's how the weather looked by the time I came in for a short break in the late morning:
That's better than the image on the weather radar this morning at around 6:30, when we were suiting up to go chase pigs. The 6:30 image had a lot more yellow, orange, and red in it. What you also can't see from this image was that our farm was right...in...the...middle of the storm (think of those ellipses as thousands of rain drops).

The incessant rain has seriously hampered our pig management this year. Enclosures that, in a normal summer, would serve the pigs for a few weeks are turned into muddy morasses in a matter of days. We try to keep them on fresh, clean ground with a lot of places to root, plenty of shade, and an array of twigs and green-growies to chew on and scratch against. Not only are they trampling the greenery too quickly, but the rapid onset of storms has been spooking them enough to bust through the four-strand electric fence.

So imagine a sudden downpour at dawn on a small Northland farm. Imagine the distant rumble of thunder, then the sudden hard patter of arriving rain. Then imagine...Grunt...grunt grunt....squeeee! Yep, that's how our morning began.

Here's a sampling of the clothing we went through during our pre-breakfast "running of the swine." (I should mention, by the way, that we have a total of eight pigs. While the rain poured and seven pigs gleefully jounced around, up the braes and down the glens, Pig Number Eight trundled back and forth inside the fenceline of the old enclosure, fruitlessly calling to all its escaped comrades. I was torn between praising its law-abiding nature and mocking it for its stupidity. In other words, I was not at my compassionate best as a farmer.)

Here are some of the pigs, exhausted after several circuits of the yard, the gardens, the cattle pasture, and the woods. Note that five pigs are sleeping peacefully INSIDE their new fence. Note that one pig is sleeping peacefully OUTSIDE the fence. Oh, well. You can only do so much on a farm after half the workforce departs for an off-farm job. I thought five pigs inside the fence was pretty good, with just myself and a mostly-untrained Border Collie on the job!

Here are two other pigs, NOT sleeping peacefully. They are, instead, pulling the tarp off of the firewood pile, unstacking the wood, rooting in the herb beds, and generally making themselves as much of a nuisance as possible. To put it as mildly as I can, these particular creatures are, umm, "not especially appreciated" right now. (The only reason I'm blogging is that I've given up.)

The renegades seem to be staying fairly close to their fenced-in friends, so my goal now is to just keep an eye on them from the house--with occasional stick-brandishing screaming raids if they get too close to the gardens again--until The Piper comes home. Seven days a week, she picks up a bucket or two of plate-scrapings from a local "breakfast served all day" restaurant. The pigs ought to come running for these syrup-soaked pancake bits, eggs, hash browns, orange slices and triangles of whole-wheat toast. (She'll dump it in the middle of the new enclosure and we'll work together to lift the fence and usher the renegades in.) Heck, I'D come running for that, too. In fact, after chasing pigs all over Creation for the last six or seven hours in the pouring rain, I would eat just about anything sluiced in a trough in front of me, as long as I don't have to cook it myself.

A Bad Case of Hoof and ...Truck.

The Bagpiper Speaks!
Today's blog entry comes from Tir na nOg Farm's Other Farmer, a cattle-tending, bagpipe-playing food bank manager.

"I was taking a long, hot shower, getting ready to go to a party. The steam, the hot water--after not much of a holiday vacation, it just felt good to stand there and let myself relax. I was thinking about how great it would be when our friend Ed shows up tomorrow to push some round bales into the pasture. (They'd been delivered this morning--eight bales at about 1,800 pounds apiece.)

Ed's a retired truck driver who lost his wife to cancer nine months ago. His wife was a regular volunteer at the food bank. Like her, Ed's always looking for people to help and stuff to do, stuff that will get him away from "the gawd-damm tee-vee." Ed came in to the food bank last Friday and announced he'd just got himself a new Ford 4WD pickup with a plow rig. "I bet," said Ed, "if I was to give you two minutes, you could come up with a pretty good chore for me and my new toy." Well, I thought for a moment, then told of our impending delivery: eight big round bales, too heavy to move on my own, each needing a mighty 200-foot shove into the pasture. Ed responded with a double-thumbs-up and an exaggerated wink. "Sounds like a plan!"

So, there I was in the shower. I was thinking how sweet it would be to not have to worry, to not have to pitch and wrestle hay twice a day. I was thinking my cow-feeding worries would soon be over. I stayed in that shower a long time. Tomorrow, I'd have to leave the farm again for my full-time job, and I wanted to enjoy this hot, peaceful moment for all it was worth. But there was that party to get ready for... eventually, I had to get out. I was just coming out of the shower, mindin' my own business, when I heard a man's voice in our house.

I scrambled into the rest of my clothes and found our friend, Mr. Ed, standing in the kitchen. I figured he wanted to show off his new truck, so I looked out the window. "Oh my God," I said. "There's a cow in the yard."
"Yep," said Mr. Ed, "That's what I came in ta tell ya."

I tried to clear the steam out of my head and make sense of the situation.
Me: "How did the cow get out?"
Ed: "Cows. Two of 'em. Came out through the gate."
Me: "Why was the gate open?"
Ed: "To push the bale through with the truck."
Me: "Why didn't you close the gate?"
Ed: "Cause the truck is stuck in the gate. Stuck in the mud. Can't go forward. Can't back up again."
Me: "Well, how are you gonna get that truck back out?"
Ed: "I have NO IDEA."

My hair was wrapped in a towel. I sent Ed out ahead of me. I'd join him as soon as I lost the towel and found my boots.

The first thing I saw when I got outside was Iona, our alpha cow, munching the remains of an old bale on the wrong side of the pasture fence.
The second thing I saw was Mr. Ed, hunkered over a five-foot-high round hay bale, grasping at it for support. For a moment I thought he was having a heart attack, but he was just trying to regain his composure, having slipped in the muddy yard on his way to the pasture. He grasped briefly for his dignity, too, but there was no retrieving THAT when his truck was still firmly entrenched between the posts of the pasture gate.

The truck was muddy and definitely worse for wear. It didn't look much like a brand new truck, and I told him so. "Well, this ain't my truck. Ya see, my buddy Lenny, here," (he gestured to a shadowy figure slouched in the cab), "Lenny's got them winter tires, and I figgered I'd use his truck today, 'cause mine's got summer tires and no weight in the back."

Ed climbed into the cab, leaving muddy handprints on the door panel as he manuevered up and in. He and Lenny conferred for a while as the cows munched. April, the two-year-old heifer, made a tentative move towards the pasture, but Iona exercised her alpha-cow rights, tossed her horns and blocked the narrow truck-free avenue. April backed away and plodded up the hill to eat the old hay in the yard. Iona, with a saucy twitch of the tail and a queenly, authoritative snort, marched over to a freshly unwrapped round bale. It sat just inside the pasture, right in front of the stuck truck.

Ed rolled down the window and asked to use the phone. "We'll get Josh and Billy down here with the jeep. They'll pull this thing right out in a minute."

Several minutes later, Josh and Billy arrived in The Jeep, bearing a twelve-foot chain. They hooked it up to the back of Ed's--I mean, Lenny's--truck.

You can probably guess the next bit. Ed and Lenny and Billy and Josh, with their combined ingenuity and horsepower, proceeded to get stuck, stuck, and stucker. April and Iona went on chewing. A yearling heifer daintily sidestepped all the flying mud and testosterone and snuck through the opening when Iona wasn't looking. She paused to look back at the pasture fence, then joined April on higher ground.

Here was a dilemma with some serious horns. We had two trucks stuck where the cattle should go, and cattle out where we'd rather see trucks. After chewing up a significant amount of ground, Josh and Billy had eased Lenny's truck backwards until it rested with the snowplow blade nearly filling the open gate. "What ever you do, guys," I pleaded, "Please, please, please don't hit the gateposts. If you snap them on your way out, I'm really, really screwed." Lenny gave me a thin little smile. Engines were engaged and the vehicles started to move again...and I turned away. Everything ELSE had gone wrong...surely the fence was next.

By some miracle, they cleared the fence. Then they kept on going--no thumbs-up, no cheers, no goodbyes, just four angry men driving off in abject embarrassment. With the help of some portable fencing, we rigged up a wedge-shaped temporary electric fence and tried to shoo the heifers back toward the pasture. Unfortunately, Iona had declared the freshly-rolled bale a queenly outpost, and she refused to let the heifers anywhere near the gate. I stormed back to the house and called Mainecelt at work in the British Goods shop: "If you want to be a freakin' writer, you better get home right now, 'cause we've sure got something to write about!"

She sped home and pulled out the secret anti-Iona weapon I'd forgotten about: a bottle of organic flyspray. Iona hates the smell and shies wildly away whenever she sees, smells, or hears it. Mainecelt did a rapid change from shopclerk-clothes into farmgear, stomped down to the pasture gate, and started squirting in Iona's direction. Our startled alpha cow grunted, shook her head, and lumbered down into the middle of the pasture, thereby clearing the way for The Return of the Heifers. We closed the gate in pitch darkness. The temporary fence could damn well wait to be gathered up in the morning light.

I missed the party. I ate dinner, played my pipes for a while at the kitchen table until I felt better, then called to check on Ed. I wanted to be sure that he'd hurt nothing more than his dignity. He seemed to be in good spirits. "How's Cowboy Ed?" I asked.

"Well, Cowboy Ed's been thinkin'... next time, why don't you have them fellas load them hay bales, one by one, right into the back of my truck. I'll just drive 'em right down."

Don't tell Ed. Don't tell Lenny, Billy, or Josh--but we're thinking of getting a tractor.