Chickens in the Road Read online

  The generator was a pull-start model, and I couldn’t start it myself. No matter how many times I practiced and tried, I couldn’t do it. I had no control over the generator, which bothered me immensely. I had to ask permission from 52 for everything that was plugged in, and if the generator died, I couldn’t restart it.

  We moved the generator around as needed and wanted and allowed. We ran the coffeemaker and the radio, the refrigerator and freezers. We ran the blower on the woodstove, keeping the house warm.

  In the evenings, we watched a couple hours of TV and ran the Christmas tree lights and a few lamps.

  The worst part of a power outage in the country is not having water. The well ran on electric and required 220 volts. We didn’t have a generator that would run the well, but we had water tanks at the house to hold extra water. We rationed carefully. Showers were out.

  Baking was out, too, since the generator couldn’t run the electric oven. And it was Christmas. I had to survive a holiday without baking. The power outage, which extended to a week, began just as I was preparing to launch full force into holiday baking.

  Anyone who has been without power for an extended period knows—it’s a different world. Your life takes on a surreal perspective. Even with a generator, it’s not “normal” life. You take care of your food stores and your animals. Survival mode takes over. Certain accustomed basics go by the wayside as if they never existed. Standards change. True necessities rise from the rest. And you find ways to make things happen that are special to you.

  I was determined to not let the weeklong power outage defeat me. I experimented with some alternative baking. I honed the art of wiping out and scraping out mixing bowls to reuse because I couldn’t do dishes under our water rationing plan. I tried to bake biscuits in the woodstove, but it wasn’t cut out for baking. I could simmer beans or chili or a coffeepot on top, but baking inside it meant burning.

  I made a second attempt on the gas grill, which worked out much better, only I baked the biscuits in a glass pie pan, due to the dearth of clean dishes, and the glass pan exploded, taking the biscuits down with it as it shattered.

  I did manage to bake homemade pizza on the gas grill, and even a cake. Christmas Eve dinner, without an oven, was ham, corn, green beans, and no biscuits, with cake for dessert—by candlelight. On Christmas morning, we had eggs, bacon, and crullers fried on the stovetop.

  In a seeming Christmas miracle, on our seventh day without power, the electricity came on just as I finished frying the crullers. It stayed on for about an hour. We spent the hour restarting the well pump and getting water up to the house. Weston and Morgan immediately took showers. I got the dishwasher loaded—but didn’t have time to push the button to wash them before the power went out again. I hadn’t gotten a shower. I cried.

  The electricity came back on that evening and our winter test was finally over.

  We passed.

  Except for the crying.

  And that was just me.

  A few days later, we made it off the farm to a post-Christmas get-together at my cousin’s house. I brought Georgia half-pints of blackberry jam and orange marmalade, some homemade candy, a “Chickens in the Road” calendar, and a coconut-oatmeal rum pie. She loved treats, and she didn’t bake anymore.

  For my cousin, I had made some drunken rum cookie logs, with Georgia’s recipe, and a big batch of my homemade pepperoni rolls.

  My cousin told me to close my eyes, and he brought out a surprise for me. He put something in my lap. I could hear a clink of glass that sounded familiar. I said, “Did you get me some canning jars?”

  And then I opened my eyes. Oh, yes, he and Georgia had given me some canning jars. But not just any canning jars.

  Three of Georgia’s vintage jars with the bail wire lids! A pint, a quart, and a half-gallon jar. I was thrilled, and as usual, went straight home to write about it on my website.

  By this time, I’d built a community on my website and had opened a message board forum. 52 periodically and with growing frequency asked my readers questions about milk cows.

  He was going to buy me a cow, I just knew it.

  I was excited, scared, and worried.

  We were broke.

  Didn’t cows, like, need a lot of food? And pasture?

  But I wanted a cow, so I pretended like I didn’t notice.

  I stopped saying I wanted a cow.

  Let the chips fall. Either he’d get me a cow, or he wouldn’t.

  This was not a very good method for financial health, but it was my way of ducking responsibility. I knew when 52 got it in his head that he was going to get me something, most of the time, he did. Even if it was ridiculous. I hadn’t exactly succeeded at goat milking with flying colors. Was I seriously going to milk a cow?

  But I wasn’t scared enough to say I didn’t want one. I just stopped saying I did want one, though I’d started experimenting with homemade cheese again, using store-bought milk. I’d successfully made a farmhouse cheddar, and I’d tried Monterey Jack. 52 had made me a homemade cheese press so that I could make hard cheeses. We were jumping over the cliff before we even had the cow.

  Meanwhile 52 kept asking questions on the forum about milk cows.

  This should pretty well explain how we got into so much trouble every time we turned around. And all the while, we were still running a pretty bumpy road relationship-wise. The gap between us had widened as I talked to him less and less. Conversation with him often included being cut off, snapped at, and told I was too loud. When I tried to talk to him about our problem with communication, he was emotionally distant and cold. I didn’t know where the man I’d met had gone. We worked well together when there was a project around the farm to be tackled, or a power outage to survive, but he didn’t like talking to me otherwise. He was very friendly and talkative with other people, but as soon as we were alone, he wanted nothing but quiet. Any but the most succinct conversation with me annoyed him, and yet here he was still wanting to give me a cow. It was as if he loved and hated me at the same time, and I was completely confused.

  One time early in our relationship, he had taken me to visit the old farm where his great-grandparents had lived. Someone else lived there then, but that didn’t stop us from taking a peek inside when we found no one was home. He wanted to show the house to me, and there was a childish sense of excitement about daring each other to go in. We didn’t look around long, afraid the ninety-year-old owner might return, but just inside the door, I pulled 52 to me and kissed him for the first time.

  I knew he wouldn’t trespass so much as to kiss me. His reaction was almost embarrassed yet happy at the same time, which was endearing.

  We went back outside and sat down on the porch and he told me about his great-grandparents and his love for the land and a dream he’d cherished to someday come back to a farm. We sat close together and held hands. I loved nothing more than to listen to him talk in his deep voice—and to talk to him. Then it all went away, and he became the last person to whom I could talk.

  I had begun to feel like his whipping boy, the one specially picked out in the world to be the focus of his wrath, and I didn’t know what to do about it. The farm was my whole life.

  I couldn’t have the farm without him.

  And he knew that.

  Chapter 11

  West Virginia winters were brutal—but beautiful. I loved them as much as I feared them. I’d always wanted to live some place where it snowed. There was something both inherently peaceful and innocently magical about it.

  Our farm turned into a winter wonderland. Snow tumbled on fence posts and slid down rails. No matter the upheavals in my personal life, it was impossible not to love my life on the farm.

  I loved the soft crunch of the snow beneath my boots. I didn’t even mind going out to do chores. In fact, the chores got me out of the house, where I might have stayed huddled away by the fire otherwise. It felt good to get outside and breathe the crisp air. But winter did make life difficult—more
than it should have.

  I thought they had it right in the old days when everything was close to home. One-room schoolhouses in every tiny community, little white steepled churches around every bend in the road, mom-and-pop storefronts on farms. What you couldn’t get nearby or didn’t have stocked away, you didn’t really need.

  You walked everywhere you needed to go or took your horse and buggy. Doctors made house calls.

  My father went to school in a one-room schoolhouse just across the river from our farm. He grew up about a mile down the road. My grandmother was the teacher. On snowy mornings, I could almost see them walking down the road in their coats and mittens.

  They didn’t have to worry about getting to school. It was no trouble to walk down the road.

  My great-grandfather kept a little store by the road on his farm, also just across the river. Anyone who needed anything could walk there, too.

  The church was in the meadow bottom on our farm. No excuses for missing Sunday services when it was snowing. You could walk.

  I longed for those days in the isolation of winter on our farm. But in these days we are so very, very sophisticated with our superstores (twenty miles away), our centralized schools (twenty miles away), and our high-powered vehicles (that sometimes can’t get twenty miles away).

  We were all so much more self-sufficient when we arranged our lives so we could just walk everywhere we needed to go.

  We can’t do that now because we are too advanced.

  Our first weeklong power outage that winter, leading up to Christmas, was good practice for all the times it went out again. The first foot of snow melted, flooding the river, just in time for a second foot of snow to fall. Even if one was courageous enough to try to make it out on the road, the river was too high to ford and everything was iced over in the other direction.

  We all carried piles of wood and kindling up to the house. Water and generator gas was rationed again.

  I walked through the house at night carrying my homemade hand-dipped tapers for light and felt like Jane Eyre.

  I cooked bean and egg burritos on homemade tortillas for breakfast, and we made coffee. The hum of the generator was a constant accompaniment to life, background noise to the slow beat that the world seems to take on when electricity goes away. I practiced my knitting and walked down to the meadow bottom with 52 when it was time to check on the sheep. Since we still had no barn, we kept stacks of hay at the bottom under weighted tarps. Between the sheep, donkeys, and goats, we needed a couple hundred bales of hay that winter. We had no place to put it, so we couldn’t stock up much ahead of time.

  The sheep were always eager for their daily bale. They were two-ton balls of heavy fluff. The Cotswold wool was long and curly. I had an idea to try my hand at spinning since I was learning to knit, though I wasn’t sure I had the patience for it. I wanted to try more new things than I could possibly handle.

  52 and I usually got along well during power outages. It was a survival challenge. We always did best when we were engaged in an activity, be it a hardship, a new DIY skill, or a new animal.

  Whatever new thing I wanted to try, 52 would say, “All right,” and help me find the stuff. I’d been wanting to try soap making for a long time, and he called every hardware store in the city until he found one that carried lye.

  First I contemplated making my own lye. If I was going to make homemade soap, shouldn’t I start with the lye? Lye is made from wood ash. I had a woodstove! Upon researching this idea, I decided it was one of my more harebrained ones. Our great-grandmas made their own lye by leaching wood ashes, resulting in uneven levels of strength. This is where homemade soap got the bad rap for being harsh. Commercial lye available today is of a standardized strength, which makes nonharsh soap a reliable accomplishment. Lye used for soap making is the kind sold in crystal form, which specifies that it is 100 percent lye (sodium hydroxide).

  Along with their homemade lye, our great-grandmas also used rainwater (boiled) for purity. Today, most people use distilled water. I almost felt like I was cheating when I used distilled water instead of collecting water in the rain and boiling it. But I’d already given up the idea of making homemade lye, and modern convenience is a slippery slope.

  Learning to make soap became my project from late winter to early spring as I researched how-tos, collected ingredients on days we could get out, and built up to getting past my fear of handling lye.

  Lye is a poison. It’s corrosive, fatal if swallowed, and harmful if inhaled. It will burn the skin if it comes into contact with it, and it reacts to water, acids, and other materials (such as aluminum).

  Many people today don’t realize that all real soap is made with lye. This is because lye is a scary word, so it appears on labels as sodium hydroxide. Many commercial personal cleansing bars that appear to be soap aren’t soaps at all but synthetic detergents made without lye. (If it doesn’t say soap, it’s not soap, it’s a detergent bar.)

  Soap is created by combining fat with lye. The fat can be all sorts of things—lard, tallow, shea or other butters, and all sorts of oils—many of which you can find in your kitchen. There are two ways to make soap.

  In hot process, the entire saponification process takes place over a heat source. This is how our great-grandmas did it. In cold process, the saponification process takes place away from the heat source. (Saponification is the chemical process that occurs when fats/oils are combined with lye.) External heat is only used in the cold process method to melt the fats/oils before being combined with the lye.

  Although cold process can produce a smoother, prettier soap, I was most attracted to the hot process method. It would take me the closest to an old-fashioned experience, and I preferred the more rustic result. Cindy Pierce, a friend I’d met through the forum on my website, coached me on how to make hot process soap in an enamel Crock-Pot and showed me how to calculate recipes.

  Our great-grandmas would have used an iron kettle over an outdoor fire, but a slow cooker sounded close enough to me. (A stainless steel pot over the stove would also work. Do not use materials such as aluminum, tin, or copper because they react with lye.)

  I already had a Crock-Pot and the rest of the typical kitchenware required, such as bowls, spoons, spatulas, measuring cups, and a digital kitchen scale. I bought a stick blender because I’m lazier than great-grandma and didn’t want to do all that stirring by hand.

  I also bought safety goggles and heavy gloves for handling the lye, and pH strips for testing the soap. I saved up cardboard dairy quart containers to use as soap molds. I’d talked about making soap for months by this time, and no one was more surprised than me when I actually did it. I made sure 52 was home in case I blew myself up.

  And, of course, it turned out to be a lot easier than I’d built it up to be in my mind. (See Hot Process Soap, page 280.) First I decided on a recipe. (You can find online soap calculators available for free. A recipe should always be calculated with a soap calculator if you’re making up your own recipes, or use a professionally vetted recipe.)

  I was in love right away with the magic of hot process soap. Our great-grandmas knew what they were doing. I tried the cold process method, but quickly abandoned it. The cold process method requires taking the temperatures of the lye mixture and fats/oils before combining them, then pouring the soap immediately into the mold after trace. You have to “incubate” the soap by wrapping the molds in towels to keep the mixture warm while it continues the saponification process away from a heat source, and you have to wait weeks for the soap to cure. With the hot process method, the soap is soap as soon as you finish cooking it.

  It was nearly spring, and I was heady with my soapy accomplishment. The driveway was thick with mud from the melted snow. Even so, most days, 52 would manage to get his truck up the slippery road. I’d go back down with him to feed the sheep.

  One evening, one of the Jacob ewes didn’t come to the fence for the daily feed delivery. The next morning, I walked down to the bottom to l
ook for her in the daylight, starting to worry. I saw two little black things gamboling about on shaky legs in the far pasture. I raced back to the house for my camera. By the time I went back down to the meadow bottom and hiked out into the pasture, they were in one of the sheep shelters.

  I was so excited that I didn’t even notice for a few minutes that this wasn’t the ewe that had been missing the night before. I heard a tiny, plaintive baa baa from somewhere behind me and turned to find another baby on the bank across the creek. Three babies!

  Then I saw what that baby was running toward—the missing ewe and another baby! Four babies!

  Each Jacob ewe had had two lambs. The babies were all nursing and healthy. When I went down later to check on them again, the babies came right to me and let me pet them and pick them up.

  We’d had the sheep for a year at this point, and these were our first lambs. Initially, we’d had the Jacobs and Cotswolds separated, but they kept managing to bust down fences and get back together. We got tired of chasing and separating them over and over, and we didn’t have a Jacob ram. After consulting some experienced sheep farmers as well as a farm vet, we put the Jacobs and Cotswolds together, assured that the Jacobs should be able to deliver babies from the mister. An added plus was the promise of some interesting fiber with the combination of the Jacobs’ naturally variegated wool and the long, crimpy curls of the Cotswolds. Months went by and no babies had appeared. Sheep are woolly, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on in there . . . until something frolics across the meadow.

  The sheep needed more pasture than we had, and they were expensive to keep in hay. They escaped often and had to be corralled back in the gates (usually by me, by myself, because I was home). We’d had little luck selling wool, but maybe this new combination of fibers would serve us better, and we could also sell the lambs. Finally, the sheep might start paying for themselves.