As I sit at the computer desk, I hear our little granddaughter Sara shuffling in through the front door and down the hall. As she comes around the corner, beaming, she thrusts a chicken into my hands. Blondie looks up at me, acquiescent.
Not something I expected. How many people in the course of their lives have a two-year-old hand them a full grown live chicken in their living room?
Sara has been spending the past stay-at-home weeks reveling in farm time with few interruptions. Now that our driveway is gated and we don’t have to worry about delivery trucks roaring up the lane without warning, she can go back and forth between our homes on the same property pretty much at will.
With the abundance of fresh rich clover pasture, our other feed has lasted much longer than usual. This morning I finally opened and poured the second 50 pound bag of non-GMO Multi-Species into the horses’ grain storage bucket. This afternoon I cranked the final large hay bale, rolled into the tilt-feeder more than two weeks ago, to its last setting to enable the horses to reach it. Before, we were soaking and feeding a couple of gallons a day of beet pulp to be divided among four horses and eight miniature goats. Now, they just get a gallon once a week, soaked in the probiotic kombucha tea.
After we gently set the chicken down in the front yard, Sara goes with me to rotate grazing shifts. The boys were all ready to go into their pen, but Jewels stood in the way blocking them. By the time I got her to shift position, the goats had taken off elsewhere. “Jewels!” I grumble. “You were no help at all! You just stood right smack in the way!”
“Smack in t’way! Smack in t’way!” Sara adds her scolding as we divert to feeding the bunny while giving the boy goats a chance to reconsider. After picking Vanilla a generous handful of grass and clover, filling his feed bowl, and deciding his waterer is full enough, Sara wants to look for eggs in the boys’ pen. I refill their mineral salt bowl and hold it on top of their fence while Sara hunts through the shelters with no success. By the time she has given up, the boys have deigned to pass through their gate. Sara comes out, I snap shut their metal panel, top and bottom, and set down their salt bowl where they can reach it. We’re ready for the next challenge.
First item at the barn, we let out the barnyard goats, counting six as they stream by (Gabby, Jillian, Isabel, Honeysuckle, Jeremy and Ana Mary Marie.) Sara tucks herself behind the stall gate until they have passed, then begins hunting eggs. Yesterday she discovered that they’ve started laying again under the milking stand, as well as an abundance in the dog house, giving us enough to share a dozen with two different sets of neighbors. Today there are a couple more fresh eggs, both under the milking stand and in the goat cage under the barnyard roof.
“Remember, leave two,” I remind her. It’s a hard concept, but necessary to keep the hens from abandoning the nest site. She gets the first two, then while I am busy elsewhere she appears with two more. Finally I persuade her to return them under the milking stand, then to retrieve two (one for each hand) from the goat cage. By now she has lost interest in preparing beet pulp; she is busy playing with the tethered apple ball hanging from a tree in the barnyard, designed as a toy for bored stall-kept horses.
“Ap’le!” Sara screams, pushing the plastic globe one direction, then running under it and out the other side before it swings back down to hit her.
In the barn again, she grabs a brush from Arrow’s grooming box and marches toward the manger. I watch as she manages to climb into the long wooden feeding area, boosting herself up with the help of a pile of loose hay. “I gee’ in!” she announces. “CiCi!” (derived from “horsie” ) As the horses line up expecting a feeding, Sara points at them in order , naming each one starting with “Myyuh”. With more or less patience, they each allow her to “brush” them, stabbing the large brush at their heads. She reaches for “Myyuh’s” long mane of multi-colored tresses. I watch, distrusting Tamaya’s sometime moodiness.
Suddenly a yearling goat appears in the manger feeder, having sneaked in from the outside near a loosened panel across the hay entrance. “Get out!” I cry, and Sara joins in, “Go ‘way!”
Isabel slides out, then back in. I hurry outside to readjust the panels. By the time I return, Sara has developed a new game, running up and down the manger, darting under tall Arrow’s neck as if he were the swinging apple ball in the barnyard. Sara would probably stay and play for hours, but I don’t dare leave her in the barn without supervision. Finally I persuade her away and we move on to other tasks.