To say my first week has been an adventure would be an understatement.
It’s basically been one catastrophe after another. Okay so maybe that’s a bit
of an exaggeration (we all know I’m prone to those) but it has been rough. The
best place to start, as they say, is at the beginning so let’s travel back to when
it all started;
I never
really set out to become a farmer but I guess you could say it’s in my blood, I
did after all grow up in a county where it’s more likely for you to be driving
down the road and see a cow before you saw another car. So when my mom
remarried and it turned out that the guy was a farmer, I’m talkin full blown
farmer here folks manure on his boots and all, it kind of felt like a piece of
my soul fell back into place. I’m a born animal lover and prefer to be outside
rather than sitting inside watching what our society calls T.V these days. But
I also have a restless soul. One that craves new places and faces. So after
high school I hit the road. I traveled. I wondered. I settled here, then picked
up and settled over there. I had fun, I saw new things, I met new people, I
tasted new food and I allowed myself the opportunity to experience a side of
life I had been missing in the small town I had grown up in. Over the ensuing
years, that man my mom had married and I began to forge a relationship. We
discovered we shared the same sense of humor, the same beliefs in the important
things (like which Will Farrell movie is the best, and where to get the best
slice of pizza in town was), had the same taste in food (but not music) and shared
the same feelings about the family farm, in short we became best buddies. Over
the nine years since I graduated high school and hit the ground running I had
visited home every now and then and each time it got harder and harder to leave
as I slowly began to realize that everything I loved, and everything I loved
about myself, was on the farm. So I decided to come home. It was both the
scariest and most freeing decision I had made in my life up to that point.
That
was a long roundabout way of leading you into the timeline of the past week, bear
with me though it will be worth it, you’ll totally want to hear all about our
adventures.
Last
Sunday was a very trying day. I had to say goodbye to the family I had lived
with and worked for, for the past five years. When I pulled out of the driveway
I looked in my side view mirror to see them all standing there on the driveway
waving goodbye to me. It seemed like a fitting end to the five years I had
dedicated to them. And while I had accepted the fact that I had made the
decision to leave and was at peace with it, leaving was no less difficult. I
left around 2 pm on Sunday and had planned to drive about 6 or 7 hours (it’s a 12
hour drive from NY to MI) sleep for the night and continue on towards home on
Monday morning. I was cruising along fine, hitting zero traffic, zero bad
weather, basically zero problems at all. I was listening to an audio book (A
Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens if you’re interested) and was about three
hours into my journey when I got a text from my mom. I had called her earlier
in the day, just after I had left but hadn’t reached her so I was surprised that
instead of calling me, she had texted. But since I was driving I didn’t check
the message and instead just called her back via the Bluetooth in the rental I
was driving. She immediately informed me that she couldn’t talk long because
she was trying to conserve her battery since they had no power at the house. In
fact, she told me the entire county had not power, turns out on Saturday night
that had had a powerful ice storm that had put nearly an haft inch of ice on
the power lines and trees which was a dangerous combination. Well great, that
was just great, here I was on my voyage home, the prodigal child returned home
and all and I was going to be greeted not with flashing lights and popping
champagne bottles, but instead by rolling blackouts and roads a haft inch thick
with ice. Not ideal. But I rolled on anyways and when it came the time when I
had originally planned to stop I decided that I was feeling pretty good, no
fatigue, no butt soreness, so I rolled on. The entire time I’m driving I’m
thinking that they’d have power by the time I got there. The power had gone out
sometime near midnight on Saturday so there was no way it would continue to be
out for much longer. With this positive outlook I made it to the house around
1:30 am, a mere 11 hours and 30 minutes after I had left NY. I rolled through
the streets surrounding our house and found down power lines and roads so icy
it was almost too dangerous to go 20 mph. Nonetheless I made it safe and sound.
I was greeted at the door by my very sleepy mom and three barking dogs that
couldn’t wait for me to give them attention (we have a Chihuahua – moose, a rat
terrier- bunny and a beagle- Lucy). The house was pitch black, the glow from the
roaring fire in the fireplace like a beacon as I made my way up the icy walkway
and into the house. It was freezing, the temperature outside somewhere around
20 and the temperature inside in the low 60’s. Might not seem so bad for some
but for our house it was near freezing. We utilize an outside wood burning furnace
to heat our home. It uses a series of hot water pipes which travels through a
coil and into the house. When the house needs heat hot air is blown through the
coil that creates the hot air for the furnace, the hot water is then used for
the hot water in the house. No joke it’s normally a balmy 72 degrees in our
house. Dead of winter you can walk around in a tank top and shorts and feel exceptionally
comfortable. So for it to be in the 60’s its cold, my mom was walking around
here like an Eskimo. The only sound was the gentle, okay it totally wasn’t gentle
it honestly sounded like an enormous swarm of bees out there, hum of the
generator that was plugged in out back which was being used to run a blower on
the furnace, so we could at least have a little heat, and a small lamp. But the
stupid thing had to be filled with gas every five hours, you can imagine how
much fun that was in the middle of the night with the wind and snow blowing and
temps below freezing. So here I was my first night home and I had to sleep on
the floor in front of the fireplace in order to keep warm and so I wasn’t scared
(you might not know it but I’m terrified of the dark, usually in my room I have
between two and three nightlights to chase away the darkness). It was not an
enjoyable experience but it wasn’t miserable either.
On
Monday we had to unload my car, which was packed full of things my mom hadn’t brought
home at thanksgiving, things I was convinced that I would need in the three
weeks I would remain in NY (I didn’t). After spending like 30 minutes
unloading, my stepfather- who will henceforth be known as WIZ which is my
nickname for him, and I caravanned to Lansing to return my rental. There was
still no power and the winds continued to blow which meant that the roads were
drifting with snow. We took it slow and made it near the airport in about an
hour, however the road was packed full of cars, bumper to bumper of people who
were looking for gas, no doubt for their own generators, and last minute
Christmas shoppers, what they were doing out there I have no idea since there
was literally zero power, no gas stations, no stores, no stoplights. We quickly
forged an alternative plan and escaped to a less congested roadway and made it
to the airport in a little more than an hour and a haft. Now normally when the
power goes out you’d think of it as an inconvenience something that meant no
heat and no flushing the toilets or opening the fridge, annoying but livable.
But here on the farm it’s downright unbearable. No power means no water, and no
water is no good for farm animals. Some of my grandparents live in town so they
still had water, which meant that we were near on continuously running back and
forth for water. Right now on the farm we have, 5 Cows (2 of which are still
calves), two pigs and 270 chickens. That’s a lot of water needs and a whole lot
of water trucking, it was exhausting. And it lasted for an additional three
days. Let me repeat that so you grasp the gravity of the situation in all the
power was out for FOUR DAYS. If you’ve been keeping track you know that that
meant we had no power for Christmas. That’s right no Christmas tree, no
Christmas dinner, no Christmas coffee. It was rough. Eventually around 9:30
Christmas night our power came back on, the three of us were jumping and
dancing around the kitchen like it was New Year’s Eve. It was glorious. But it
was like Mother Nature took that as a challenge, no sooner had the power come
on but the temperature decided to continue to drop. We had to work double time
in order to catch up on farm work that was supposed to have been done during
the power outage and as the ice got covered with snow and the temp continued to
drop the conditions continued to decline around the farm. The sheer amount of
ice we had to deal with was mystifying, it was everywhere and on everything.
The first thing we did when the power came back on was check the electric waterier
for our big cows and wouldn’t you know it, it wasn’t workin proper, due to the
amount of ice covering every available surface it wasn’t really that much of a surprise.
It took days for it to thaw out once the electricity started humming through
it, by the end I was literally exhausted from hauling water back and forth to
it.
Anyways
back to the ice. In those first couple of day’s I can’t even tell you how many
times I hurt myself. I’d slip coming off the walkway and onto the front yard. I
fell getting out of the truck, I fell walking into the barn. It became a
running joke between my mom and Wiz when we would come back inside “So where’d
she fall this time, someplace new? Or that same spot from yesterday?” and it wasn’t
just falling, I slit my finder cutting a feed bag open, I slit my palm putting
wood in the furnace, I burned my back sitting too close to the wood stove down
in the little barn (wait I have to just have to take a second to tell you the
story of this one. We have a small wood stove in our little barn that the wiz
lights up when he’s down there dinkin on one project or another, and I have a
sitting log that I pull up near it and watch him work. So here I was sitting on
my log and enjoying the conversation and the warmth when all of a sudden I feel
a spot on my lower back starting to sting and before you can say “Hot Tamale”
it was full blown burning me, I hopped up so fast I knocked my log over and
started screaming at the Wiz, “I’m on fire, I’m on fire” to which he turns me
around and pulls up my jacket and tells me that no I am not on fire and just
calm down so he can get a good look. I settle down for the most part but am
still dancing around because that sucker hurts, turns out a spot of my belt had
slid over the lip of my pants and one of the rivets had heated up and then
proceeded to burn me. Lesson learned) I had even cut my hand when a chunk of
ice had fallen off a branch and to protect a spot on my chest (which was
already bruised) I had covered it with my hand-what are the odds right. I
became a walking- talking bruise, it wasn’t pretty. But we got a lot
accomplished and I learned a lot. I learned how to drive the big tractor, how
to properly load hay on the truck to take to auction and how to not get poked
in the eye by branches when pulling trees out of the woods to cut for firewood
(You wouldn’t believe the amount of trees down from that ice storm, it was
remarkable. All over town you see trees, and branches down.). All in all it was
an adventurous week, and one I won’t soon forget.
In the
end we still had a nice Christmas and I got to spend a lot of time with my
family over the past week. I just know there are more adventures to come, with
me that’s always the case though don’t you think, and I still have so much to
learn. I’m still adjusting to my life out here in the country so you can expect
me to have lots of stories to tell, but also I plan to keep you up to date with
all aspects of my life, like how I’m exercising without access to a gym-there
is no gym within a 30 mile radius of our home (unless you count curves- which I
don’t), and how I’m coping without access to a Target (it hasn’t been easy).
Stay tuned my
friends because I think things are about to get interesting!!
Laters!!!
