After a winter that continues to cling tightly with below freezing nights, snow and ice storms, signs of spring are finally starting to emerge.

All the spring birds have returned including our pair of Eastern Bluebirds and Mourning Doves, not to mention a host of other birds like Red-winged Blackbirds, American Robins and Sandhill Cranes. The morning air is awash with birdsong and it fills the heart with joy.

The grapevine shoots we snipped off in Feb. and stuck in water until we could plant them outside are growing leaves.  We can't wait to have more of this wonderful, 50-year old grapevine popping out clusters of juicy purple Concord-tasting grapes.

The maple sap has nearly finished running and the trees are budding out.  So far we've boiled about 10 gallons of sap down to 2.5 pints of syrup. And somehow it tastes even sweeter knowing it came from our own trees.

The apple seeds we planted are sprouting (yes yes, we know specific apple varieties don't grow from seeds, they grow from grafts... but we're willing to take a chance - all the best applesauce and cider apples used to be planted from seeds - aka Johnny Appleseed-style).

And to top it all off, my first batch of turkey eggs are hatching!!

And yes, I can already see the resemblance to my breeding pairs of Blue Slate Turkeys, although we can expect a mixture of colors to come out of our slate-to-slate pairs including black, slate and self blue.

Of course I will love them all no matter what color they are.

My heritage turkeys can breed naturally, unlike 99.9% of the turkeys in this country, the Broad-Breasted Whites that grace most dinner tables during the holidays. 

I feel honored to be witness to this miraculous event, the looping 'round of the circle of life, right beneath my eyes.

Cheers -

I almost titled this "the things we do to avoid doing our taxes," but  my mother-in-law might read this and then we'd be in trouble.  Because she's our accountant.

In fact, if you're my mother-in-law, you might want to skip this post and just imagine us diligently working on our taxes.

I also want to warn you that if you're following my blog by RSS or e-mail, this is a post from April that I never posted.  I'm posting it now and back-dating it, mostly because I want my on-line journal to reflect what I was doing back when I was actually doing it, so when next year I scratch my head and think, "When did we order those heritage turkeys?" I don't have to check my June posts for something that happened in April.

I know I've not been posting very much so far this year. There is a good reason. And it's not that I've been too busy preparing my taxes.  I've been neck-deep in a 5-month certification testing process for my job. It has quite frankly sucked all the free-time and creative-writing-energy right out of me.  Not to mention, all my time - day and evening.

But I'm almost done certifying now. Light at the end of the tunnel and all that.

Rah-rah!

I don't study on the weekends, since that is sacred time to spend with Papa Bear and all the farm chores that get put off during the week. So here's a snippet of some of the stuff that's been happening around here lately {and by "lately" I mean last April} when I'm not studying {and we're not doing our taxes}.

Playing with the turkeys. My original batch of turkeys are still alive and well. All four of them. They escaped Christmas dinner. They escaped Easter dinner. My females have been laying fertilized eggs since January, and there are a dozen turkey eggs in our incubator about a week away from hatching.

{EEP!} 

Or rather, {CHEEP!}

We keep meaning to eat some of them (the adults, not the incubating eggs), but my females keep jumping in my lap to snooze and cuddle, and my boys are so tame and sweet that unless they suddenly turn nasty on us, it looks like they may stick around for awhile. 

I also ordered about 15 heritage turkey poults from Porter's Rare Heritage Turkeys last week, and I have a local source for some Midget Whites that also might be showing up some time in May.

Yes, I know this puts me at risk for being labeled "the turkey lady." I'm OK with that. 

Have you seen a baby turkey before?  Have you heard their little peep peeps and trills?  It is nothing like a chicken, and I think baby chickens are freakishly cute, too. It's like a little flock of tree frogs.

But much much quieter and sweeter. 

{mostly quieter}

It snowed up through the first week of April and is still threatening to snow again.  My friends at The Big Farm nearly got their tractor stuck in our pasture trying to move some large round bales out of Molly's Haymow.  In April.  Which was a darn good excuse for PB to put off doing taxes for the entire day, "helping them out." 

And then we found a dead racoon in the machine shed.  Just lyin' there frozen stiff, back leg all busted up. Kind of creepy, I'm glad PB found it instead of me, and I'm glad he found it before it thawed.

The coon's buddy however is alive and well - we discovered him (her?) hanging off the gutter of the house one night reaching for our bird feeder and later snoozing in the haymow with a dead opossum lying next to him.  I am guessing the opossum was there first and the 'coon didn't want to share.

Or the opossum is just really good at playing dead. He joined the dead raccoon out in the hay field.

You can barter hay for just about anything after a bad year for rain.  We bartered some of ours for pigs and lambs this year.  We're hoping for more rain this summer so nobody has to send their herds to auction just because they don't have enough hay to feed them.

The local auctioneer drove down my driveway last week to personally tell me he had some sheep in the auction the next day that I should come and take a look at. And bid on.

We sat in the back row, behind the young Amish farmers bidding on cows. I almost bid on a Brown Swiss steer yearling. 

{Almost}

I didn't bid on the lambs. They were vaccinated and conventionally grown {read: GMO grain-fed} and me and my customers want GMO-free, grass-fed.

We boiled down about 8 gallons of Maple sap into nearly 2 pints of maple syrup. It took 1.5 days on the stove in the kitchen.  Which means we have 7.75 gallons of maple water in the air in our house now.  And it gave us 1.5 days not to work on our taxes.

Zoey decided she can climb the big white pine by the house.  Kali is extremely jealous of Zoey's front claws.

Mojo followed us all the way out to the back pasture.  He's never done that before.  He did spend the entire jaunt complaining.  I think he was saying, "You're going too far!  Come back to the safety of the house! 

{Come baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaccckkkk!!!!"}

Big News - we've renamed our farm.  But I haven't had the time or energy to fix the website I'm creating for it. So you'll have to stay tuned for the grand opening celebration.

There will be door prizes and lots of clapping.

Cheers - 

I remember visiting a sugar bush once when I was a child. It was a family event, traipsing out into the snowy March woods.  I don't remember the tapping or the collecting.  All I remember is I had to pee really badly and we were a long, long way from a bathroom so I had to wait a really long time.

And when you're little, a really long time seems to take a lifetime. 

Then when we lived in Duluth I volunteered with the Outdoor Program at UMD. One of the programs we offered was tapping maple trees with elementary students from the local schools.  With a hand drill we took groups of kids out, showed them how to identify leafless maples, place taps and hang the buckets, told them stories about the way the Native Americans had collected sap, then made them snow cones with finished syrup on top.

So naturally with all of this memory and experience behind me, I wanted to tap our maple trees this year.

Here is our short list of things you will need for this project:

Maple Trees
Free buckets with lids {try your local cafeterias, grocery stores, etc.}
Taps & tubing {or old fashioned metal taps and metal sap buckets if you have them or can borrow}
A cordless drill with a battery that still holds a charge, with a drill bit size 11/64 or an antique hand drill
An old, clean shirt
A large stock pot
Canning jars and lids
A heat source - preferably outside

Last fall in all my wisdom I decided we should traipse up and down the ridge flagging all our maples with pink tape so I could still identify them when the leaves all fell off.

After all the traipsing we had identified exactly four maple trees on the property.  

That didn't deter us from continuing with our plans.

We get a lot of free buckets from the food co-op and cafeteria in the building where Papa Bear works. We use these buckets for everything.

I've been told you can't farm without a skid steer, but I think rather you can't farm without free buckets.

We borrowed some new-fangled plastic taps & tubing from our friends at The Big Farm.  They're modern and plastic and work really great in that the buckets can keep their lids on with this setup and keep out most of the rain water and bugs.  And you don't have to hang the buckets on the tree, you can keep them on the ground.  Papa Bear drilled small holes in the side of the buckets big enough to thread the tubing through.

This task required buying a whole new drill, because the rechargeable battery for his old drill wasn't made anymore.  So I guess it's not really "free" maple syrup, because Papa Bear bought a drill.  But he did buy it with his own allowance money, so I guess it was free for the rest of the family.

{Thanks Papa!}

Our spring was so odd this year, with daytime and nighttime temps below zero for so long, then jumping up to day and night temps above zero, that for the first several days we collected absolutely zero sap.  The sap runs best when the nights are below freezing but the days are above.

At the end of the first week I checked the bucket on the tree near the house and was startled to find it half full. After traipsing up and down along the ridge (next year we're running the tubing down from the trees to a level spot) we had collected a whopping total of about 8 gallons of sap.

I know that's almost nothing but it felt like quite the haul to us.

We brought one bucket in the house and poured the sap through a clean shirt into the largest stockpot we had.

We put the pot on the burner on high and kept it boiling all day. We added a little fan to help the evaporation process.

We added more filtered sap as the day progressed, but by night we had not finished it, so we turned off the stove and went to bed.

The next morning we resumed boiling. It took about another 4 hours or so until it had reached the right consistency.

Lacking a syrup hydrometer we used the "spoon test," watching for "sheeting."

We kept disagreeing at this point as to whether or not the syrup was done.  (I didn't think it was done yet, PB did).

We got out our store-bought bottle of syrup and compared the way the syrup dripped off a spoon. We watched several YouTube videos. Then suddenly the syrup changed the way it was boiling and indeed when it dripped off the spoon now, a little bit clung in a peak after the last drip.

It was done!

Before this point we had sterilized our glass jars & lids so there was nothing left to do but pour the syrup into the hot jars and screw on the lids.

And taste a little.

There's just nothing sweeter than syrup you've made yourself, from your own trees, for {nearly} free.

Cheers -

I grew up in the country and have returned back to living in the country where it is, to borrow a phrase, "darker than the inside of a cow" at night.

This isn't a problem unless you're afraid of the dark.  As far back as I can remember, I was terrified of the dark.

Family gatherings at our house with other kids inevitably led to rounds of hide-and-go-seek in the dark edges of the woods around our large yard, with me camped out as close to the porch light as possible, nearly in tears that something would eat me before anyone found me.

In high school I was often let off of the activities bus after dark, facing a 1/4 mile hike down the pitch black road to my parents' house. These hikes terrified me. I would sing as loud as possible and run as fast as I dared (no, I did not own a flashlight at the time).

I always figured if there really was something scary on the road, a wolf or a bear, I would probably run smack into it, scream my head off then die of a heart attack, nary a scratch on me, my untimely death forever an unsolved mystery.

If you have an intense fear of the dark or aliens in the cornfield or clowns with fangs hiding out below the sewer grates you know exactly what I'm talking about here.

{Luckily, there are very few sewer grates in the country where I live now, as I would not step foot on one for about, oh, 30 years after reading Stephen King's IT.}

So a few years ago {maybe about 20} I decided I was tired of being afraid of the dark.  I didn't like feeling like a spooked cat every time I went outside, or forcing family members to accompany me, or dragging my little indoor dogs with me to venture out into the dark every time I had to retrieve a bag of groceries from the car.

It was a slow process.  And I'm not completely over my fears.  But I am so much farther down that path that I wanted to share a few insights I've learned along the way.

I'm not a fan of "tossing-a-kid-in-the-pool-to-teach-them-to-swim" method. In other words, I didn't lock myself outside every night until I "got over it." I'm more of the "to-eat-an-elephant-take-one-small-bite-at-a-time-and-chew-slowly" kind of a person. 

Being afraid of the dark was a big, bad elephant in my psyche.  Here are some of the small bites I took to get rid of it.

{Note: Only perform the exercises below if you live in a safe place. I'm not advocating going outside alone in the dark if there is a good chance you will be mugged or worse.}

baby bites

Stand outside near your house or other safe place and breathe slowly, smell the fresh air, let your eyes adjust to the dimmer light, and appreciate the beauty of the night.

You can do this right outside your house (if you don't live right under a street light).  It would be best not to be standing by any bright porch lights either, as that will increase the relative darkness outside of the light's beam. Same goes for using a flashlight. I have a Maglite as long as my forearm that could crush an alien, but it will only illuminate what is directly in the beam. When I turn it off and let my eyes adjust, I can see much, much farther. Not with as much detail of course, but much farther away.

Once I click off the light or step away from any streetlights, my eyes start to adjust to the dimness. I notice the wind blowing through the trees, the moon rising above the pasture, Boo with his snowy white fleece lying near the chicken coop.

Repeat the above exercise as often as you can handle.  Try to stand a little farther away from the house each time. Don't force yourself if you're scared.  Set a goal of 3 minutes, then when you can stand that, try 5.  

give yourself a pep talk 

Self-talk isn't just for learning how to be more confident or gathering courage to talk to a cute guy. If you're afraid of the dark or cornfield aliens, you probably already have a long-standing running commentary going on in your head that feeds your fears.  "Oh it's so dark outside... I'm so scared of the dark... I can't see anything past the porch light... I bet there's lions and tigers and aliens out there just waiting to eat me..."

If you catch yourself doing this, stop the soundtrack.  Replace it with a new, more positive one. "It's dark outside but wow, look at those stars!  I'm being so brave coming out here. I bet I will be even more brave tomorrow. I can walk to the barn without turning on my flashlight. Then I'll turn it on to go check on the critters. I can do this!"

{Nobody can hear you, so go ahead and talk corny to yourself. Sometimes you need to cater to your inner-4-year-old.}

Once you can stand near your house, then a bit farther away, and spend several minutes outside alone without having a panic attack, it's time to move on to something more challenging.

stretch yourself to try scarier things

For me, that meant going on longer walks.  In the woods.  Alone.  I allowed myself to carry a flashlight, and to use it for part of the way, but I would also make myself stop and stand still and turn the flashlight off for several minutes before turning it back on.  Occasionally this exercise was preceded by a glass of wine. Or rewarded by a glass when I returned home without being eaten. Or both.

stretch to even bigger, scarier things

I decided I would try renting a small hermitage cabin at Camp Amnicon as a real test of my fear-fortitude. Three days, two nights, all... by... my... self. I had no problems during the day, going for long walks, enjoying the fall colors, reading, writing, taking photos. 

And then the daylight faded.  And then I realized there was no lock on the door of the cabin.  That night, after shoving all the furniture up against the door, I stuck my earplugs in, gave myself a pep talk, pulled the covers over my head and after tossing and turning, eventually fell fitfully asleep.

The second night I figured I better put on my "big girl panties" and take a walk down to the lake after dark. I had to work up the nerve for this exercise all day.  I stretched out my dinner for-ev-er.  I had an extra glass of wine.  I sorted all the items in my suitcase. Finally, I had no more excuses or procrastination tactics left.

I walked all the way down to the lake (about 1/2 mile) with my flashlight on, but on the return trip, turned it off and walked most of the way back by moonlight.  I was amazed at how much I could see when my eyes adjusted. Small noises still startled me, but did not terrify me.  I did not run into any long-legged beasties.

the scariest test of all

For my 30th birthday I tested treated myself to a solo, 3-day canoe trip to the BWCAW.  I had been on canoe trips before, but always, always, with some form of a big macho guy or pack of tough ladies. This time, I was the big macho guy.

Just like with the retreat cabin, the days were idyllic - perfect weather, paddling at my own pace along my own chosen route, stopping to eat and snap photos whenever I chose. I picked spots to camp that I had stayed at before, to give me some sense of comfort and familiarity. I chose a route that required no portaging.

And I made sure I went into the tent and went to bed every night before it got really dark. With my earplugs in. And the sleeping bag pulled over my head.

Yes, I woke up and heard things several times every night which scared me.

No, the Blair Witch did not come and eat me.

Yes, it was scary AND liberating all at the same time.

Since that time I've backpacked parts of the Superior Hiking Trail solo several times with similar results. My favorite memory was when I was camped in Judge C.R. Magney State Park in my ultra-lightweight Hennesey Hammock, which hugs you like a cozy cocoon.

I woke up after I had been asleep for awhile, and wasn't sure what had woken me. The night was quiet, but then I heard an owl hooting. I felt like the universe was hugging me and cradling me in safety. It was the best feeling I've ever felt while alone in the wild.

At a recent dinner party a guest asked, "Aren't you afraid of living out here in the country where it's so dark and you're so far away from anybody?"  I was surprised by the question, as yes, I've always been afraid of the dark.

And then I realized, my response to her of "No, I'm not afraid of living here in the dark," was finally the honest truth.
 

From ghoulies and ghosties

And long-leggedy beasties

And things that go bump in the night,

Good Lord, deliver us!

~Scottish Saying

Cheers -

How often do we just sit still and listen?

I can tell you, for me, it's not often, even though my child is grown and gone and my husband works off the farm, leaving me all the stillness I can handle.

You'd think it would be easy then just to sit still for a minute and do nothing but soak up the sights and sounds around me.

It's not.

I'm a driven person - driven by my endless 'To Do' list which revolves in my head like a carousel, a new Task ever revolving into view, the circle of tasks endless no matter how many I accomplish in a given day. 

I also have a full-time job.  Which most of the time I can do from my home office.  A blessing - but again, more stillness, more alone time, more time with my carousel of unending tasks.

In my "free time," I am primary caretaker for over 40 animals on the farm, making sure each one is fed and watered and mineraled, that nobody is acting "off"  or in need of an intervention.

Sometimes this means sitting in the barn for 45mn waiting for one of our turkey hens to lay her egg, watching her pace become more and more frantic in her search for the "perfect" spot. 

I tell her (out loud even) that "It's OK, you can lay your egg in the corner and I will take care of it.  I am here."  She continues to pace, her vocalizations rising in urgency.

I am reminded of myself whenever I watch her.  Of how worked up I can get over the little things, the things that really don't matter and will be forgotten by tomorrow, and forget the big things that do matter - family, friends, my health, this farm.

So this afternoon after my second round of chores I decided I needed to just "sit still and listen."

Despite the cold wind blowing across the hayfield, despite the fact I had already been outside, dressed in my insulated Carhartts, for nearly an hour.

We have two massive white pine trees flanking the west side of our house. When the wind blows through them it transports me to places in the Boundary Waters that I love to visit.

So I chose a tree and sat.

The wind blew around me and above me, making sweet music through the pine needles.

After awhile I heard a strange noise and looked up just in time to see a flock of about a dozen wild turkeys gliding in over the hayfield, most of them landing on the steep bank that rises up to the highlands of our property.

{The tiny speck in the photo above is a turkey running towards the hillside.}

Our heritage turkeys also saw them and called out to them, but the Wild Ones were on their own mission.

Despite their distance from me, I could still make out their calls to each other - slightly strange yet oh-so-familiar, cousins to my own small flock, their calls not so different from my own birds.

I felt a surge of unexpected Kinship with the Wild Ones.

I decided to climb up the steep hill to the highlands and see if I might spot them wandering around.

The climb involved a lot of snow, slippery slopes and crawling on my hands and knees, but eventually I made it up to the top. The turkeys were long gone, although I did manage to startle the last 4 who took off silently, gliding through ancient oak branches and out across the back pasture.

I circled the highlands and started to make my way back down.  My turkeys and guineas were creating a ruckus despite the wild turkeys being gone.

As I made my way down the hillside I realized why - a fat opossum was making it's way up the hayfield toward the poultry paddock.  I slid down the hill coming from behind him (her?).  He never even noticed me, and paid little attention to the noisy paddock of birds.

From there I followed him through the fence (thankfully he crossed near a gate) and wandered his way up to the old garage, stopping to sniff Papa Bear's antlers on the way by, then stopping under the Butternut tree to much on a pile of something I could not see.

By now I was only about 10' from him.  He seemed not to notice, or care.

I wondered momentarily about rabid opossums.  Shouldn't he be scared of me and run?  What if he came snarling after me?  What would I do?

Then Molly showed up meowing and when it appeared he was going to head in her direction, I made a noise and he turned and walked the other way.  As I followed him and walked past the Butternut tree, I looked at the spot where he had been munching something and realized... it was a pile of cat poo.

And then I realized,if I had gone back inside after my earlier chores like I normally do, I would have missed it all.

The music of the wind through the pine branches.

The surprise of a flock of wild turkeys gliding past.

The crawl to the top of the hill.

The slide down, watching the progress of the opossum.

The realization of what an opossum eats for dinner when it can't catch my chickens.

All I had to do was sit still and listen, to be present for a few moments.

So basic. 

So difficult.

So necessary.

Cheers -

In Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir "Eat, Pray, Love" she describes the Balinese practice of deliberate acts of generosity as a way to supplement a person's "karmic bank account." 

Whatever the person gives away to others will be returned to the person tenfold in ways they could never imagine or predict.

The best time to give something was when you have nothing to give.

I used to think this concept was crazy - how can you give money for example when you are already short on paying your bills?

Or give your time when you're already strapped by your calendar?

But I'm starting to agree with the Balinese.

Let me tell you a couple of stories about why.

Papa Bear and I moved to our 40-acre farm in southwestern Wis in June a year ago. He was still on LOA after our winter in Hawaii, with no "return to work" date in sight yet. 

In July I was laid off from my job of 7 years.

Not even two months after signing our new mortgage, we had no income.

The first thing I did after I stopped crying and panicking was find a charity to donate to.  Two weeks later, I had a new job; a week after that, PB was called back to work as well. 

"OK," you're thinking, "Coincidence."

My new work, although a blessing, and the farm chores, often kept me at home while PB's work often kept him on the road. 

Midwest winters tend to be long, cold and dark, a triple whammy with the isolation of working at home. 

I probably could have made it through the rest of the winter OK, slowly upping my doses of Vitamin D to counteract the effects of loneliness and SAD, but then the unimaginable happened.

I reached out to one of my few and closest friends in the area in hopes of striking up some after-work-hours social activities to fill up some of my alone time.

To my shock and disbelief, I was curtly rebuffed. My "friend"  it turns out was only interested in time spent directly or indirectly benefiting their farm business.

I was welcome to go over and help do their chores, or they could make time to come over if we had cheap hay for sale or to talk about our collaborative farm enterprises, but anything else was beyond the scope of their interest.

In other words,we were just another farm contact on their business Rolodex.

My spirits, already faltering in the late of winter, were now completely crushed.

I allowed myself to wallow in self-pity and anger and grief for a couple of weeks (OK maybe 4 or 5) and then I decided I had to do something about it. I couldn't just go on being disappointed and sad and lonely forever.

But what could I do? I knew nobody in the closest town, a small village with a population of only 471.

My closest friends were over an hour away - not easy to slip into an after-work evening.

And so I thought about the Balinese and the karma of generosity. 

And I thought about eggs.

We have a flock of a couple dozen laying hens who pump out a dozen or more eggs a day. PB sells a few and we eat a lot,  but there are always extras.

I decided to take a week's worth of extras - 6dz - and give them away, in hopes of sparking something new and positive in my life. I would meet my neighbors in the process.

So I headed out in the direction of a few of my neighbors. Nobody was home on that weekday mid-afternoon.

I stopped by the little white Lutheran church on the ridge - everyone in the building was in a meeting behind closed doors.

My spirits fell even further. 

One more neighbor - not home. 

"I can't even successfully give something away!" I chided myself.

I thought about heading home full-handed and my heart sank.

In a moment of whim (or divine inspiration?) I decided to stop at the tiny local library and look for a good book to raise my spirits.

As soon as I stepped inside I was warmly greeted by the head librarian. She got me a new library card then told me I also needed to meet the group of knitters gathered in one corner.

After introductions I agreed to come back the following week with my needles and yarn. On my way out the door I asked, "Anybody need some eggs?"  I saw a few nods so I ran out to the car and came back with my hands full, gleefully leaving them all stacked on a shelf near the group.

I did go back the next week, and have returned nearly every week thereafter.

The rewards I have reaped in return have been far beyond my imagination.

I now have a new circle of wise and funny women friends, all of whom are deeply tapped into the local community (need a piano tuner or electrician or farm sitter? Just ask the knitters!) and eager to lend a word of advice or recommend someone for a particular job.

My weekly date with the knitters allows me to spend time with my knitting - something I never make time for when home alone.  A few of the women are also spinners - and after 6 years of owning fleece animals, I am now learning to spin.

Through connections in my knitting group I have also gathered some new younger friends whose many acts of generosity often leave me speechless.

Upon hearing my husband no longer owns a bow but loves to hunt, they immediately gifted him one of theirs - not only a bow but a left-handed one at that (PB is right handed but left eye dominant so only shoots left-handed).

And then there was the 4th of July, a sweltering holiday when these friends spent their entire day off helping us  move over 300 hay bales into the haymow. Then 3 days later showed up again, unasked, to help us finish the job. 

"That's what friends are for!" Came their cheerful reply to my choked "I can't believe you're here again!"

All of these friends - young and old - have made room for us not only on their farms but also in their hearts and lives and families.

I am still sad that I lost some good friends this winter.

But my heart rejoices in all that I have gained. 

Have you ever given something when you feel empty, only to have something better come back to you tenfold again? 

I'd love to hear about it.

Blessings - 

Allspice is our bantam Americauna rooster. He was the first of our 4 bantam roosters to start crowing last fall. 

Allspice was also the first of our bantam roosters to start, ahem, "dating."

We have a full-sized rooster named Vigor.  He's bold and beautiful and everything you'd want in a full-sized rooster.

He rules our flock of 38 birds (a mixture of full-sized and bantam chickens, Guinea fowl and turkeys).

But... he doesn't rule the barn floor.

Allspice learned pretty early on that he couldn't out-run, out-muscle or out-compete with Vigor.  If Vigor caught him sidling up to one of his full-sized ladies, he quickly got yanked off his feet by the scruff of his neck and tossed to the barn floor.

{The lady in question might also get a peck on the neck for her transgression.}

It seemed like it would be a long, lonely life for Allspice, hiding in Vigor's shadow.

But that is not the end of Allspice's story.

I noticed pretty soon after Allspice starting having "dates" with the bantam girls that he was also dating the full-sized hens.

Behind Vigor's back.

He'd wait until Vigor was outside the barn chasing ladies around the pasture, then he'd grab all the remaining hens in the barn and "date" them all.

When Vigor takes his ladies to the roost at night (which he does pretty early in the evening), Allspice stays on the barn floor "dating" every last hen who comes by for a late night snack before bedtime.

Allspice is out-sized and out-classed in every way. 

But it doesn't matter to him.

He makes up for in courage what he lacks in size. 

And at the end of the day (or night), guess what?  Allspice gets more dates than Vigor does, a hundred times over.

What's my point in all of this?

All of our lives we are absorbing messages.  First from our parents, then our classmates and teachers, friends, neighbors, coworkers, bosses, significant others.

Sometimes the messages are positive and encouraging: "You sing great!  You should try out for choir!"

And sometimes, despite perhaps the best of intentions, those messages are less than supportive: "You really should pick some other type of career - I don't think History Professor / Actor / Singer / Dancer / Artist is going to put food on the table."

 Over time, these messages change us.

The child who doodles in her notebook during Math is scolded and told to pay attention in class. Eventually she stops drawing and becomes a librarian instead of an artist.

The boy who animatedly engages the class with his comedic gestures is told to be quiet and sit down. Eventually he becomes an accountant instead of an actor and playwright.

The teenager who dyes his hair pink, gets a nose ring and tattoo and plays loud music in the garage is told to get serious, he'll never be a rock star. He takes the first paying job that can take him out of Smallville and is now is stuck in middle management, paying the second mortgage and the second vehicle loan and wondering what happened to his dreams.

That unbridled passionate joy that we expressed in so many unique ways as children gets smothered by a thousand expectations of how we should be/act/work/live/love. 

As the spark inside of us grows dimmer, we turn to distractions like work, TV, social media, our kids' schedules, food and addictions to numb the pain.

Where did our uniqueness go?  What happened to that child so full of life and hope and tenacity, with the world at her fingertips?

She or he is still there.  Bruised perhaps, dormant most likely, but still there. 

Like Allspice tossed to the barn floor.  Bruised & dusty & humiliated.

But resilient.

Allspice doesn't have an education.  He doesn't have a flock.  He doesn't have big spurs to fight with or a big car to impress the ladies, or any other external advantage.

The only thing he has is a big belief in his own worth as a rooster, the cajones to take risks and chances where he knows he could fail (and often does), and the ability to, when tossed to the ground, pick himself up off the barn floor, shake the dust off of his feathers, sing his little heart out, and keep chasing after the ladies.

We could all learn something from a pint-sized rooster.  What are your dreams, and what's stopping you from chasing them?

Cheers -

P.S. - Most of the pics in this post were shot with an iPhone and shared in Instagram. Have an IG account? Let me know so I can follow you!