This is the first time I've been with internet in almost a month-- crazy, yes? I'm writing this while watching a replay of Barcelona vs. Real Madrid Copa del Rey final, a game whose outcome I already know (and don't like) thanks to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me spilled the beans last Saturday. Lame. I hate taking the suspense out of the thing. It's Friday and we have a surprise day off so Henry can drive down to Alabama, pick up his son in tornado ravaged Tuscaloosa, and drive back in time to work tomorrow. So a day off, a day on, and repeat. well. one time. Then it's going to be plant-city! We have spent two rainy weeks doing every odd job possible on the farm waiting for the soil to get dry enough to plant and hoe. The trench-digging, gravel sifting, thistle wrangling, box making, and chicken-sitting made up our days. Something's been eating the chickens, so I've spent a lot of time on my knees in the wet grass on the outskirts of the chicken pasture, building wonky boxes on the uneven ground. The critter would come in the middle of the day, sneak over or under the fence and get two or three chickens at a time, often leaving a couple headless bodies in his wake. During his intrusion a few more chickens would somehow manage to escape both the mystery critter and the pen, only to be found later, moseying among the greenhouses and then alluding capture by running into the thorny outskirts of the tiny woods. I have only successfully caught one chicken in my time here and that was because the idiot got stuck trying to run back through the mesh plastic fence and I was able to grab her floppy self and just dump her on the other side. The guys are pretty good at it, slowly pinning the chicken against a building or between a couple of us and then diving at the bird, grabbing leg or tail feathers or whatever. I'm taken back to the eighth grade when my soccer team's goalie ran away from home and I, being the tallest and thus clearly most intimidating girl of the bunch, was put in her place even though I was terrible and still too cool for glasses. I hated it. I hated knowing I was going to have to dive to the ground, hated seeing the person running towards me and knowing, knowing, knowing that I didn't have it in me to stop that ball going into that net. Same with chickens. I go into the chicken-corraling with the full knowledge that if that bird deems me the weakest link and makes a run my way, it's done for for all of us.
So now we've had someone sitting vigil in front of the chicken pasture, hammering together vegetable boxes or sifting soil with the sole purpose of spotting and stopping whatever the critter is that's eating the birds. We discovered the last couple birds probably moments after they were killed-- heads off and stuck in the fence, still warm and ready for pick up once the little bugger finished up whatever else he needed to do in the area (“what, like pick up his drycleaning” says Brian). Near the end of one of these fox-attack days, Henry had to go to Peoria to pick up the car he and his wife bought the day before so I was left on the first watch while Mustard scooped up the birds and took them back to the trailer. He dressed them (or undressed them? Why is this the term for de-feathering and pulling the guts out?) and made a chicken soup with some of the remaining roots and some deliciously thrown together homemade noodles. I didn't get to the trailer until 8:30, after the rest of the chickens, seemingly unruffled by their diminished numbers, ambled their way home and Zoe and I closed them in for the night. She came and helped me chase down two escapees, crashing through the woods after the birds who wound up finding it much more enticing to run through the open door to their shed than deeper into darkening woods. I schlepped myself home, down the big hill, across the stream, and under the moon to a steamy trailer full of the comforting smells of Mustard's soup.
My post-work life has been quite different these last few weeks. Brian's girlfriend basically lives with us now, so Mustard and I are hanging out a lot more while they do their own thing. He and I started playing Farm-Scrabble, a game of our own invention, and Banana Grams in the evenings. After a particularly hard day of sifting gravel from some super wet dirt shaved from the lane-- a wet, hard, and seemingly pointless ordeal, we took ourselves out for greasy dinner and pie at the Sheris-type diner called Busy Corner, followed by beer and Jameson at the smoke-filled bar just outside Eureka. Isn't it illegal to smoke indoors in all of Illinois? Surprising. We had some farm-late nights, but this week was kind of a last hoorah before we begin starting at 6am come Monday. Things are planted, things are growing, and pretty soon our days of sifting lane-dirt to kill time will be over. Can't wait! 9pm bed times are certainly nigh!
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