Changes Need to be Made

 

Sometimes, like anywhere else, it's just not idyllic.

  

  We have arrived at the end of a very difficult seven days.  My husband, who is an engineer was sent to an industrial city in Mexico in order to engineer an industrial system.for a worldwide company.  It is not enough that large amounts of jobs have exited the United States due to high taxes and anti-business governmental policies toward regulation.  Now, increasingly my husband's work will take him out of the US.  This also took him to a section of Mexico which quite recently was considered by the US State Department,  a place where Americans should not go, due to drug cartel activities.
             We were all concerned not only for his safety, but from a farm and animal standpoint.  We keep up with chores here because everyone does them, and my husband does some very important and difficult farm chores here. Since I have had atrial fibrillation, I have been unable to pinch hit for him in the ways in which I would have prior. The kids have certainly been helpful but one has a medical problem which is in process, another has a demanding full-time job, one has moved out, and another is in college.  Even with advance planning, we were all left scrambling to get animal care and mowing done. This is also an important part of the year from a standpoint of readying for winter.
               My husband departed and was filled with a great deal of anxiety from the outset. Things began to go downhill here almost immediately. One of the considerations we extended to our daughter in order to enable her to save to buy her new house, is that we agreed to maintain her car for a period of time. My husband had been promising to replace her radiator. He left telling her to check the water level daily and to replace the water if needed.  She drives a significant distance, and one cannot check the water level from the highway when one is half way there.  Ultimately, the car overheated and would not start again. My eldest son then took over, had the car towed and had a mechanic look at it. It was the mechanic's opinion that the car, which has on the order of 100,000 miles on it, has a cracked block from overheating and is not salvageable. This of course upset Stephanie who feels let down by my husband, and who wonders how she will get to work.  Immediately her boyfriend and I crafted a plan whereby she would not miss work this week, and she cancelled some activities related to her second job.  At that point I will admit to doing what I think most wives would do, but this was probably not the kindest and wisest thing given the circumstances.  I called my husband to hold him accountable for his failure to complete his promised task to our daughter and to tell him the results.  He of course, was in a high level meeting I knew nothing about and was not pleased to be bothered by what he considered minutia.  By then, we were behind on animal care, even on the first day, so I ran out to catch up. I fed alpacas and forgot their vitamins.  I watered dogs, and fed them in the regions of the farm which dogs patrol.  I was pretty breathless when I got to the chickens, in part because of the work I had already done, and in part because asthma is a problem for me particularly when working with chickens.
By then, my husband called back and proceeded to rail at me for calling during a meeting and giving him information on a problem he was powerless to change at the moment.  Our exchange was heated and he hung up on me.  That evening I woke up in atrial fibrillation.   I took medication, and magnesium and prescription potassium, and the kids sat up with me until I converted in the middle of the night.  I felt lousy the next day, short of breath, and weak.

 

                 I tried to take it easy the following day, but animal care did need to be done.  I paced myself as best I could and made very simple meals.  Asthma is an a-fib trigger for me, and I fell into a-fib for a short period the following day while taking care of the chickens.  I later found I had left one pen without water as a result.  One of the kids found it later on a routine check during the day and rectified this.
                 For the remainder of the week I didn't go near the internet, or the telephone, and I didn't talk to my husband, nor did he call.   The third episode of a-fib occurred later in the week.  By that time, I really should have gone to the ER some distance away, but our insurance now requires a three hundred dollar copay for ER visits, and my husband had not left that much money here.  The two hundred I did have had been spent on the towing, and on the mechanic.  I eventually converted an hour and a half after taking medication for this purpose, but each time it was a harder conversion, and I felt worse.   I also was unable to do any work whatsoever on the two books which my publisher needs asap for a pre-Christmas launch.
                The animals are all fine. Haphazard care has had no effect on any of their health. We were fortunate that the weather was cool here this wee making all of the tasks easier.  However, my husband's trip to to Mexico has had a serious impact on my own health.  My husband is back to running back and forth to his job within the US. My daughter still has no car. My husband spent his weekend trying to resurrect a car the mechanic says is dead. I remain short of breath, dizzy, and easily converted to atrial fibrillation.  My asthma is worse, and this may be the cause.  Some things have to change otherwise the natural progression is that I will be inadvertently joining Daniel.   Changes need to be made.



    
         

Nelly Furtado, featuring Josh Groban              "Silencio"

Visitors in the Heat

The only camera close by when I saw our wild turkey friends was my cellphone.  I snapped pictures, but the pink covering on my cell obscured part of them. This is the best pic I could find which resembles the larger group which visited yesterday.

  

       When you live on a farm you are closer to the routines of the Earth, and I think, perhaps closer to seeing that our place on the Earth is a fleeting one.  We are here for a short time, and hold a figurative baton for just a while, before passing it off to a successor, sometimes too quickly, I am afraid.   In nature, animals in a place do this too.   For a time, this farm was overrun with black bears. We made all types of adjustments so as not to encourage them here too much.   We moved hummingbird feeders from the porch to a hummingbird feeding station, we put out less birdseed at a time, and we cleared up dry dog food after feeding, as all of these things will attract a hungry black bear.  In time, all of the bears but one moved on.  Now, we rarely see a male yearling, and he tolerates us, as if we are landscape, and occupy a parallel dimension.   For a time we had the era of the rabbits, then the era of the blacksnakes, and last year, the era of the foxes.   We had multiple dens of different colored foxes at different locations in our forested farm.  We had mostly red,  some gray fox, and even a black one.   This year, a red one became aggressive to humans, and had to be shot.  Rabies can be a problem here also.  It is a rarity that we have to shoot something here, but it does happen.
           Yesterday, I think we began a new era.  The harbingers of this new era were three adult turkeys and their fifteen offspring who came to drink out of our eldest son's pond, before exploring another area of our forest.   I hope these creatures stay.   Lately, we have had quite the animal exodus here.   Many different types of animals who do not normally make the farm their home have come here lately.    Guineas and herons were the two most recent which come to mind.

This is what a wild turkey hatchling looks like.

           Yesterday, as I drove up to the farm from the feedstore, and then past the farm gate, I saw three adult wild turkeys, and counted fifteen babies, a bit older than hatchlings.   They has been drinking from our son's pond and were heading over to another area of the forest. In all the years we have been here, I don't think I have seen such a large group of wild turkeys together.  I hope they will stay here.



             The knowledge that this farm is a place where we are guests as much as we are owners, and that the animals come here to use the resources, is one of the things Daniel liked best about it. For a place in the middle of nowhere, there is always something to do, something to watch or something interesting to which to listen.


UPDATE:    May 6, 2013:

The turkeys have indeed stayed.  One of them was startled this week by the truck of the equine vet arrived.



          

A Close Call with a Fox

The fox Adam saw is a brighter red, and showed even more teeth

Normally, as we complete our work on the farm, which consists of feeding or moving animals, moving feed, fixing animal housing, mowing or trimming something, we carry handguns on holsters. Sometimes a long gun is impractical when you are moving back and forth and doing things. While wearing a weapon on a belt, one can go a year at a time without having to draw one, and sometimes we feel silly for going to the trouble to strap on the holster when our task in such an idyllic looking place, is a short one. Yesterday, our son Adam was out of town for the day, and returned at dusk. He has a cat which lives in one of the barns that he feeds and places indoors at about dusk or often earlier. Her name is Brielle. Yesterday Adam didn't strap on his weapon as he was still dressed from his day out, and he proceeded to water and feed Brielle. He couldn't find her, and it was getting to be dusk. He looked around and finally located her crouched down in brush. Then he saw why. A large red fox had been stalking our chickens, and Brielle, who for a beautiful cat, is a hunter and defender of the first order, was interfering with his plan. As Adam stood between Brielle and the fox, the fox growled, showed teeth and prepared to attack those he considered in HIS territory. This is when it would have been nice to have a handgun. A fox who challenges a human being in his territory may be rabid or simply too aggressive for his own good and certainly for ours. The standoff continued for a few moments. Just then, as the sky gradually darkened, Adam's maglite blinked off. Of all the times to have a bright light failing ! He couldn't get it to go on again. With that, he shouted, "Brielle, to the barn !" and he threw the mag-lite with all his might at the fox hitting it. Brielle is safe for now in the barn. The fox ran away. The mag-lite is broken. We will need to buy another today. Most importantly, we need to make sure that we are armed each time we perform even the simplest of tasks on the farm. Getting attacked by a fox would necessitate a series of expensive and potentially hazardous rabies prevention shots. This is something we would all like to avoid.   I remember Daniel helping to clear this area where the fox is now, by hand with his brothers, in 2008.  I am relieved that the fox wasn't there then.