This morning before work (so sometime between 6:30 and 7 a.m.), Anne came in as I was going out. Well, intending to go out. She wouldn’t let me leave, wanted to show me something.
And she did.
Welcome, then, to this little chick; the first live domestic birth here on The Quarry Farm.
As temperatures climbed and the sky turned hazy yellow from blowing topsoil, we anchored the canine hammock in the Forester. Sophie is joining us every day through Thursday this week at all eight branches of the Putnam County District Library.
The first stops were among the shelves at the main branch in Ottawa and the community room in Kalida. I should point out that Sophie was to visit with young patrons on the neat linoleum rectangle of floor off the French doors in Ottawa, but just try and tell a pot-bellied pig that he or she isn’t going to wander through the fiction section or the young adult reading room. I dare you. Luckily, we had a banana with which to entice her back to the party.
Back at the farm in the cool of the evening, Miracle Max came out to dance. If only Humperdink and Inigo had joined in, we could have filmed a quadrille.
Lots of things are happening along Road 7L as summer rolls in: Summer Family Day, art workshops, the 3rd Annual Quarry Farm Jam and, looking ahead to autumn, The Quarry Farm 5K. But don’t wait to run or walk that last one; there’s a virtual event starting June 17.
Click on the cover to the left, see what spring brought and mark your calendar to-do list for the months of high sunshine.
I dig deep down to find my soul, or something to revive hope, some days.
There’s an election that lends itself to a soulless outlook, and the loss of a young primate, totally out of place in his life but unsuited to a natural existence–one with an unpromising future anyway. Lots of fingers are pointing.
There’s a disconnect. We, the human sort of we, are a lonely species. Every other living thing of which we are aware speaks the language. They know who is in and out there as well as what each other is saying, even if it’s, “Mine; go away.”
I sat in the dark last night, drank my tea and pointed an angry emotional finger at all the people out there who, in my opinion, are wrong. There was lots of screaming and name calling. Finally, there was a whole lot of sad.
Then I heard a bizarre puffy sort of clicking whine (that’t the best I can do to describe it) to the west outside. With no moon through the windows, it took a bit to find my way to the front door where I could see three dark shapes near the fence line. Something had the attention of the bronze turkeys. Since the donkeys weren’t sounding the alarm and no two-leggers, in cars or on foot, were in sight, I went back to the dregs of my tea, nearer to sleep because of the distraction.
This morning, Humperdink, Inigo and Miracle Max still stride up and down the barrier, feathers puffed and air bladders booming. The geese are there, too. Bob grazes nearby, his dulled tusks not quite reaching the ground. Outside, her long neck poking up from a lavender patch, stands a hen turkey. She sees me, ducks back under the comfrey, lavender, sorrel and whatever else we’ve sandwiched in over the years.
June blooms around the cabin, spring pinks become intense oranges and burgundies. Still pink, yet befitting summer with their Rubenesque excess, peonies.
Below in the floodplain, blues flag the quarry, cricket frogs creak, catbirds mew. A raccoon washes, reaches under the duckweed for larvae, small fry and crayfish.
Listen.
The sad’s not gone. Because I am human and caught up in our human insular world, there will always be some sort of turmoil spinning around inside. Thankfully, a peace is just outside, my soul a little further up the path.
That is all.
This isn’t a fine example of camera work. The ‘film’ is still a treat: seven-month-old Nemo blowing bubbles in her wading pool.
She started doing this two days ago when we filled the pool for the first time. I kept trying to catch her in video, but she was too interested in what I was doing. This morning, I found that if I stick my hand in the water and swish it around, she joins in by ducking her snout under the surface and bubbling.
I’m melting, and it’s not because of the heat.
Two weeks ago, cold wind and rain sent us shivering for hot chocolate.
Today, temperatures hit the upper 80s. Since Nemo is too long for the little pink wading pool that kept Beatrice and Carlton cool last summer, we purchased the next size up yesterday, one with little sharks on the sides (but no slide; that wouldn’t be pretty.)
There’s plenty of room for two, although the molded plastic walls are too high for Sophie. Cold wet, mud will have to do.
Couldn’t catch on the moments when Nemo blew bubbles through her nose in the water. Since it’ll be plenty warm for the rest of the Memorial Day weekend, there may be other opportunities.
The Quarry Farm’s Spring 2016 intern has been working with us for seven solid weeks now. Last week, I suggested that she might like a nice t-shirt with honeysuckle leaves imprinted across the front. Her response was to fall forward on the ground and curl her dancer-like frame into a fetal position.
But Emma has made a break in the invasive’s hold on the forest of The Quarry Farm. She’s shed her long sleeves in favor of cool Ts as the temperatures rose from the 30s to today’s high 80s, so she no longer has to roll up her sleeves to pull bush honeysuckle seedlings. The exposed skin has made her more vulnerable to insects and an overprotective goose, but this Antioch College first-year has accepted the challenge.
Along the way, she’s taken a few photos. You’ll already know that, though, if you’ve been following along. Here is the latest album.
Right now, as the sun sets on Saturday, Sophie is rooting grasses for a bed to sleep under the stars. In a week’s time, she seems to have developed a penchant for the outside rather than her nest inside her outbuilding. Her stint as visiting ambassador at Sauder Village, for porcine everywhere, and here on The Quarry Farm for two days of welcoming two schools from two counties, must have made this so.
As for me, my voice is gone, but the temporary loss is well spent on two full days of spring fields trips with over 170 people painting lasting leaf t-shirts, getting up close and personal with macroinvertebrates as water quality indicators, and meeting a six-spotted tiger beetle, pot-bellies, turkeys and Sophie herself.
Thursday morning, preschoolers and parents from the Pandora area hiked around the Red Fox gardens to select interesting leaves. With a little help from the adults, the children arranged dandelion, violet and burdock on their white shirts and spritzed paint around the greens. Several malfunctioning spray bottles later, there were some very colorful shirts, not a single one exactly like the one next to it.
Third graders from Chamberlin Hill Intermediate School in Findlay arrived on Friday in two shifts. The first 70-some got off the bus around 10 a.m., made their shirts (using all new spray bottles) and hung their finished wearable art in the bushes and trees before hiking down the hill, along Cranberry Run and splitting into two groups at the north gate. Half went through the gate to meet the farm animals, the other to see dragonflies, damselflies, crayfish and the amazing boneless swimming acrobatics of fish leeches.
Thanks to Zoe for showing everyone that fish leeches won’t suck human blood, even after 10 whole minutes.
With a lot of paint left in the bottles after the second bus drove away south on 7L, we tackled the north picnic table with splashes of red, purple, green, and blue. The other table remains for another visit and another day.
Sophie meets Jamie Napolski, Assistant Curator of Education & Special Events for Sauder Village.
Yeah, yeah, yeah…I did go there with the title of this post.
But it’s true; Sophie the pot-bellied pig had her first road trip as an educational ambassador for The Quarry Farm, and this happened as a result of a choice she made on Friday.
As testified by the previous post, “Sticky toes and hiking sticks”, an entire third grade class joined us onsite for a Friday filed trip alongside Road 7L. The students and their teachers and chaperones rotated through stations, including a visit to the farm animal sanctuary. As we always tell visitors, once inside the gate, humans will have the opportunity to meet the sanctuary residents, but only those residents who choose to walk down the path for a face-to-face encounter. While it’s almost a guarantee that the bronze turkeys will show up, as well as at least one of the donkeys and a goat, the pigs are a little more unpredictable.
For instance, if the sun is shining and the temperature moderate, Carlton may mosey on down the hill for a belly flop and scratch. Queen Beatrice may sashay through the floodplain. If she could do the royal wristwave, I have no doubt she would, stopping only long enough for a brief pat before moving on for a nap in a warm pool of light.
As for the others, their early years were so harsh at the hands of neglectful humanity that visitors only get a distant glimpse. In Sophie’s case, beatings, poor diet and exposure left scars that have left her much older than what we think are her actual years. So it was a wonderful surprise when she chose to join the second group of students to rotate through. She even stayed close, allowing the third rotation to pet her softly on the forehead.
Because of Sophie’s decision to trust in the kindness of strangers, we took her on an hour-long car ride north for a program at Sauder Village in Archbold. While 19th-century reenactors read “If You Give a Pig a Pancake”, Sophie charmed young visitors and their families outside a log cabin in the Little Pioneer Village. Marshmallow the Nigerian Dwarf goat went along for the ride, too, but he’s an old hand at programs and conducted himself in his usual sweetly-mellow manner.
