Freyja's Day Thing: Jul 15, 2022

The good, the bad, and the meaningless.

Pictured here: Littlefield Fountain Confederate Memorial, a photo used as part of a 4th of July lecture I gave on the history and origins of the Columbia patron deity.

Hello everyone. I have a decent essay planned for the weekend so the majority of what I’ve got to say today is personal trivia I don’t blame you for not caring about and some really light takes on recent events. Without further ado:

• Husbandmouth departed last week for a two-week ‘boot camp’ for a prospective employer, a trucking company, only to return a few days ago after failing a surprisingly intensive physical fitness test (a strength lifting test relatively unique to this company). In fairness, everyone in House Mouth took a massive nosedive in our fitness during the two years of lockdown and remote work in NY before leaving, but Husbandmouth has been slower than Brother and I getting back on the wagon. He’s committing to getting fit, which has led to us working out together, which hasn’t happened in a long time.

  It also led to a frank discussion of career goals, as Husbandmouth remains committed to the pursuit of this new career as a truck driver; we thought we could handle a long-haul, over-the-road job where he would be home, at most, about 2 days a week, and after getting a taste of it, we realised, “nuh uh, not really.” If it ends up being the only kind of job he can land, being a new recruit and all, we’ll learn to live with it, but we ended up agreeing that missing each other is too hard and is worth a paycut if it means getting a local or regional job where he would be home approximately daily, especially if we manage to pursue our goal of finally growing our family this year.

• We had the mother of all “cow outs” last week; an early-morning call from a neighbor that our cows- ALL of them- were seen heading west through another neighbor’s yard. Husbandmouth and I were not home, and by the time we got the message, hours had passed, and a roughly 1-mile radius search revealed no trace or trail of them. We called the local sheriff to put out a BOLO, and even got a call from a deputy later in the afternoon that he’d be doing a search radius as well, but nothing, nada.

  After they had been gone about 12 hours, we got a call from a farmer friend of another farmer that our cows were deep in his corn field, where he didn’t want to drive equipment over his crop to try and herd them, and he decided against leading them into his own corral after our bull displayed an interest in romancing his own cows, and could we swing by and try to get them?

  The cows had apparently walked down to the local biker bar at the end of the road that morning, probably to try to get some last call action, and when they were shooed from the parking lot walked straight back into this guy’s field, now over two miles away from our home.

  We don’t have a livestock trailer. We don’t have any little off-road vehicles like ATVs or Bobcats. We have one lasso. We do not have horses.

  We drove to the farm, where I went on a charm offensive and apologized profusely to the family by giving them steaks and eggs from our home supply, and, after wandering around in a 40-acre cornfield, all the while giving thanks to He Who Walks Behind The Rows, we found and lured the cows out with buckets of feed, whereupon I roped the lead cow and began tugging her along, on foot, off their property.

  We ended up leading them on a (according to my GPS) 2.2-mile march down a side road and then a state road, me up front with my chosen cow on a lead, the others following, Brothermouth walking up the middle with a feed bucket, and Husbandmouth driving at the back at about 3mph to give cow butts a kiss with the bumper if they began lagging or straying.

  It’s a tribute to the character of our community that we were met with laughter, smiles, and sardonic applause by passing motorists rather than blaring horns, curses, and attempted vehicular manslaughter.

  A tangential image burned into my head of Dog #1 about 7 years ago in her puppy days in NYC when she was a “bolter,” running out the front door into the busy street directly outside our house; a man is only stopped from running her down in his SUV by me jumping into the street and putting my arms out; the man tells me if my dog is in his way again, he’ll kill it. I say “do me first.” He glares through the window and debates getting out of the car and pounding a female about half his weight into the ground; I observe his wife sitting shotgun with a baby in her lap and two young kids in the back looking over the tops of their seatback TVs. I find myself wondering what they think about their dad at this moment as he calls “fucking bitch” and swerves around us, driving off.

  It was a hot afternoon and took a little over an hour (I didn’t want to push them harder because they probably hadn’t had water in those 12 hours), but after the panic and frustration and despair of such a catastrophe washed over and away, and I was just walking, chatting idly with Brothermouth, herding cattle, I realized I loved it. I briefly pondered that if this were my apocalypse in a few years- leading cattle down empty, paved roads through lonely countryside- that would be just fine.

  My business partner/mentor responded to the story with “well, you have finally actually driven cattle. You’re actually a cowgirl.”

• As charming as that all was, it was still a disaster and we finally accepted that no amount of metal fencing is going to keep the bull, and hence the herd, in and surrendered to going electric. Brothermouth has been a tireless workhorse over the past week, slipping out to the field on every break from his day job, spending a lot of that time doing “one-person work” that I can’t help him with, and we finally live-tested this morning, to the “delight” of the piglet that ran squealing from their discovery of the new perimeter. The livestock was all visibly relieved to be released from the “lockdown” pasture adjacent to our barn, where the drop-forged steel fencing (which, apart from being impractically expensive to install at scale is now completely out of stock everywhere in the country) was keeping everyone in all week while we scrambled for a solution.

  We’re going to let this run for about two weeks and confirm that a) it consistently works and b) the cattle have all truly learned that they cannot cross these barriers. At that point, we’re going to run it around the entirety of our disused fields, about 7 acres, giving the cattle a now-massive area to graze and allowing us to expand the herd in a practical way. The hogs will stay within the inner pastures closest to the house and barn, which still gives them roughly an acre which they’re already very happy with.

  The electric fencing is insanely easy to install across a large area compared to the costly “cattle panels” we had been running up to now- putting in a roughly half-acre square took under an hour. And now that Brothermouth knows from experience how the wiring goes, that will go fast, too.

  Short of having an actual advisor standing over our shoulder this past year, trial and error is really the only way we could have learned. But I’m so glad we finally did.

• This evening, a graduating class of chicks are mature enough to join the main flock outside, and have been let out of their “training hutch” in the yard in sight of the pasture to join the Big Kids’ Coop. This is the group of 8 “survivor eggs” I rescued a few months back from the carton when, as you may recall, Dog #3 broke into the pasture and slaughtered the majority of Husbandmouth’s flock of rare Delaware Blues and a good number of other birds.

  Freyja's Day Thing, 5/13/22

They look great and I’ll maybe take some pictures tomorrow. Anyway, it was exciting to see how large and healthy they’ve gotten in just two months of life, including hatching time; I handled and cared for each one personally as they escaped from their eggs, watched their distinguishing markings as they aged to try to identify them, and found myself rooting for the runts or the shrimps or too-submissive ones to catch up and get strong, and they’ve all made it to adolescence, which bodes very well; life in the Big Kids’ Coop is pretty safe and easy, murderous huskies aside. So, Husbandmouth’s beloved bloodline will live on after all.

Also, this means that the training hutch will now be occupied by a cohort of 12 Rhode Island Red/Leghorn crosses I started a few weeks after the Blues. In contrast to Husbandmouth’s birds, these were started by me, entirely for the business of productivity; they are big, plump, very impressive meat birds and lay incredibly productively (at least one per bird daily, thus far). They look fantastic and, in contrast to the last batch I ordered as hatchlings (which were wiped out shortly after arrival by an unknown viral infection), had a 95% survival rate.

We shifted them outside to the hutch as the Blues got moved out, and found one very sad case as we were emptying their brooding box; one chick apparently a week or so (from its relative size to the others) got a leg or foot trapped under the corner of a box and went unnoticed as it was lying under crowds of its healthy siblings the entire time. It was laying more or less squashed into the straw covered in its own filth, but was, horrifyingly, alive. As Brothermouth prepared the others for transit, I washed it (which is painstaking, gentle work as they’re so light and fragile) as best I could, cleaned out a few superficial wounds, and tried to get it as warm and dry as possible.

It’s presently laying in a straw-filled cardboard box in the warmest part of the house, under heat. I fully expect it to die in the night, but I cannot ever stop myself from giving living things the best possible shot in circumstances like this. A few months ago, a hen with at least one (possibly two) broken legs, found hiding under debris several days after the aforementioned husky slaughter, was given similar treatment, and amazingly pulled through, regained weight, and is now a tremendous pain in the ass.

I have had many pets and livestock, and obviously seen many die over the years, often breaking my heart in the process (but, of course, I keep coming back for more, because love is that kind of drug). My position on euthanasia of animals has evolved tremendously since my adolescence (I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a long time). I used to be very quick to go to it; it was hard (on me) to see animals in prolonged pain and suffering, and very often my amateur attempts at treatment failed. After a while, though, my feelings shifted: the animals never specifically TOLD me (obviously), “I give up, stick a fork in me. I want to die.” What would I want in that situation? Unless I was a mindless vegetable, I’d probably want to at least be given a fighting chance for as long as possible. I have absolutely no idea what the animal wants, and so I decided at a certain point to err on the side of assuming that most living things want to stay alive, if they can. We tend to anthropomorphize animal suffering, and while it’s true that other living things CAN suffer, they do not all suffer in the same way. And we usually have no way of asking.

So, when we have the resources, we give everything a fighting chance. Mostly, they die, which is to be expected, as they’re in very bad shape at that point. But occasionally, they live and then go on to thrive, and even if it’s just a stupid chicken I’ll eat a year later, it feels worth it.

If the chick pulls through, I’ll certainly let everyone know (but again, it’s barely alive and I don’t expect it to). I suspect this crowd would at least mildly care about that sort of thing.

• I’ve started studying Old Norse in my spare time as I’ve been expanding my reading of the sagas and different translations of the Voluspa/Havamal and it’s becoming very clear to me that a lot is lost (or VERY ambiguous) in translation. For anyone interested, I’m using Viking Language 1 & 2: Learn Old Norse, Runes, and Icelandic Sagas (link is to an academic site where, I believe, FREE downloadable versions are available) as a starting point. If you find this stuff even marginally as interesting as I do, here’s a great video that requires absolutely no knowledge of Old Norse or even the Havamal itself, created by the very eminent Dr. Jackson Crawford of the University of Colorado:

• Fathermouth has had mixed results since returning to his own home in late May; he’s been incredibly lonely, going through periods of calling several times daily (and additionally Mothermouth, with whom he has not been in regular contact for about 20 years prior to his hospitalization), awkwardly inviting himself for extended stays at old friends and being rejected, and having a very hard time navigating really basic day-to-day stuff involving using his phone or simple computer tasks like checking his email. He constantly vacillates on his plans to move down to Florida, where he has no friends or relatives and is sufficiently far that I probably wouldn’t see him more than annually, or to live full-time out of an RV, where he would be completely alone in the event of poor health or an emergency and, based on his current problems with technology, probably unfindable.

  I think dad had a probably unrealistic view of how normal and healthy he would be after making an admittedly incredibly recovery living with me and returning home; he probably saw himself as “better than before.” It’s part of a body of thoughts and ideas that I don’t feel I have the right, as an adult child of a grown man with his full mental faculties, to push very hard on; dad has the right to live how he chooses, and all I can do is offer things like “you don’t seem very happy doing this.”

  Anyway, this dovetails nicely with a situation here on Mouth Farms: our property occupies a roughly 12-acre “square” of farmland encircled by treelines. At about the 6 o’clock position, a roughly 1-acre chunk has been chopped out of the bottom of that square, facing the road, for a tiny lot with a separate house on it, which was apparently a subdivision the previous owning family made to raise some money about 40 years ago. When we bought the place, we saw this little square with a falling-down house on it, the property line clearly visible with debris edging our crop fields. It drove me crazy and I swore that within my lifetime, we would try to buy this up and reintegrate it into our property.

  A few weeks after we moved in, it was bought for a relative song by a young couple who flip houses. To make a long story short, we made friends with them early, told them straight-up about our hopes to have the spot for a home for either our elderly parents or for our own children’s families many years from now (which is a common thing around here; many adult children, rather than move far away, simply build a home somewhere on the family property, if it is large enough) and to reintegrate the largely pointless little back yard into the crop fields. We begged them to PLEASE come to us first if they were thinking of selling, that we could do a deal without brokers to save us both money, and would offer a fair price.

  I wasn’t sure where we’d get a couple hundred grand when the time came, but I was determined to burn that bridge when we got to it. We bought this house outright, so a mortgage wouldn’t be out of the question. We’re still relatively young and gainfully employed. But anyway.

  Fathermouth tells me, somewhat out of the blue, that a neighbor made an insultingly low offer on his home in NC, but in the process of rejecting the offer decided that he is ready to move out NOW and sell the house and explore other options. I took this opportunity to check in on his other, less realistic plans, and mention the little house on our street, which is now very nicely renovated with an older, accessibility-minded resident in mind.

  I remind him of how much he liked our local market, attending Grange meetings, how happy his dog was running with our pack, and how he now has a very high-quality healthcare system he’s already plugged into here with his entire patient history, and that he’d be less than 300 feet away from us but still in his own house.

  He called Mothermouth a few hours later to gush that “I just had a great idea,” which is the way Fathermouth accepts other people’s suggestions.

  This would be a win for everyone in the entire equation: our neighbors are terrified that the bottom will fall out of the market by the time they’re ready to sell in early spring ‘23 (to pass the window of capital gains tax); dad will be in a familiar place he likes and still have his own home and be in driving distance of his old friends who are all still in NYC; I’ll be able to physically help him at the drop of a hat without having to travel across the country or spend hours on the phone calling plumbers or Internet technicians for him, and our future child will have a valuable property, on our farm, to rent out or move into.

  The only thing required for this to work out is the timing: Dad has to be able to sell his house and hang in until our neighbors are ready to sell, and get enough to afford it (if his broker is correct, he should be more than okay).

  So. Interesting things are afoot.

Real essay tomorrow. I’ve found myself really focused on a few foundational ideas around memes (not the cartoons on the internet) and individual/civilizational power that will probably be the foundation for a lot of my “big think” pieces.

One of these days I want to dig into specific current events beyond bulleted spicy takes, but frankly, stuff is moving faster lately than I want to write about it, and I still think the bigger, more enduring issues behind all of it (global tyranny) are a higher priority.

Friends, what is your BIGGEST CONCERN for the future of your life right now?