"Sell That Fine Pig"

Lily is wearing a sleeveless ruffled top with her shorts and cowboy boots. Her long red curls are tied back from her freckled face with two ribbons. She has walked into the sales ring at the Atchison County Fair from a Norman Rockwell painting. I cannot help but be charmed. But when the auctioneer reads her name, she bounds across the sand, with one finger beckoning to the shaggy lamb behind, who follows her, his leash trailing. This makes me clap my hands in delight and sing under my breath,

"Lily had a little lamb....."

And everywhere that Lily went,

The lamb was sure to go."

Surely this performance earned the young lady a couple more bids on the premium for her animal. The lamb knew Lily and Lily knew her lamb.

Jilli's sheep is tired by the time she is called to the sales ring. But Jilli isn't. With enthusiasm that is not entirely communicated to her animal, she somehow moves him to the center of the ring with her hands, rope, boots, and the sheer force of her personality and will. She is working so hard. The bidding takes a good long while, long enough that the reluctant sheep gives in, stands pat, and allows Jilli to mold it into the preferred stance. It may or may not matter at this sale, but her folks have impressed upon Jilli that she should never stop working until the job is done.

Because of the heat and humidity, the sale starts late this year. Whether its the hour, the temperature, or just the ongoing slow decline and consolidation of our county's business community, the stands are full of family members, but not as many buyers as one would wish for the number of exhibitors. Nonetheless, the bidding can be brisk; it is always good-natured; and whether the animal is a hog, a rabbit, a goat or a chicken, the kid will get a nice check and the buyer a round of appreciative applause.

When Lee and Ann and Ben showed animals for 4H and then FFA, the barns were full with up to 70 steers and one year, on top of 200 hogs. Six or seven Hurst cousins worth of cattle did contribute to the bounty. Today's show ring features a solid representation of pigs, a pampered lovely handful of steers, sheep, goats,and a rainbow's worth of rabbits and chickens in arms. Farms have changed in our county, but the faces of the parents watching from the barn, the fence, or the stands are ever the same: focused and intent, alert to the bidders and the auctioneer, poised to offer advice and encouragement to the showman in the ring.

Some of the bidders are the same too. It does my heart good to hear some of the self-same folks bidding that were buying animals at the fair almost thirty years ago when Lee and Ann first led a steer into the ring. Now Lee and Ryan and Ann and Matt are the ones reminding their kids when the pigs were born and how much they weighed and Aaron, Lizzie, Gabe and Abbie are the ones with whips and brushes, ever watching the judge, and stuffing ribbons in their jeans' pockets as they drive the pigs back to the pen.

"Sell that fine pig!" All the pigs are fine by the end of the evening as the stands thin and the buyers settle up. Every time the ring man raises his hand and calls,"Yup!", its a vote for tomorrow, a down payment on the success of the little girls with star spangled belts and boys with sweat running down their faces.

"Sell that fine pig!" and pay it forward for the kid whose pig peed on her boot or the kid run over by his animal in the alleyway. Raise your hand and you'll send a message in a bottle from the past to an unknown future where the lessons of responsibility and conscientiousness pay interest and more.

Sell that fine pig!" and record for posterity the common language of hard work between generations. Support your fair and vote for the heritage of blood and land and tradition personified in kids and pigs, moms and dads, goats or sheep, steers or chickens.

Posted with Blogsy

Let There Be Water Under the Bridge: April

This is what happens in April.

 Saturday evening.  I am watering wilted fuchsia baskets in the big house when Blake calls. He has checked the reservoir for possibly the 50th time this week and likely the tenth time this warm day with wind gusts up to forty mph from the south. "How're you doing?" he asks. This is a shorthand I understand.

 "Are we done? I'm watering sad fuchsias" 

 "Will they die? If you water them now, it will be all salt water.." 

We have a deep well, but it is so high in sodium, we have to mix it with our sweet well.

  I lift a couple of baskets to check...."No, they'll make it til tomorrow."

I shut off the hydrants and walk up the hill to the office.  Lee and Ryan, who have also been at the business end of a garden hose, are ahead of me.  We've done what can be accomplished with the resources we have.  The rest will just have to wait, just as we look to the skies, our phones, and the ten o'clock meteorologist to gauge our chances for relief. When there's no more you can do, you just go home.

At least it is Saturday night.  I've promised to grill some burgers for my husband.  This simple meal will include a head of cauliflower chopped and the seasoned burgers sprinkled with some tomato basil feta that appealed to me at the HyVee and hearty chunks of last summer's lime pickles. Blake will not complain.

Chopping the head of cauliflower reminds me of our trip to California's Salinas Valley last summer.  The Salinas Valley is a potpourri of food production, a crazy quilt of edibles in all stages from transplant to harvest, leafy greens to artichokes, all possible through the judicious and calibrated use of irrigation.  After two years of shortened field crops and the constant worry and expense of providing water to our greenhouse plants, I know what it is to deal with scarcity. We don't have a spigot to turn on when we need it.

But there is no agency turning that spigot off either. We scoop up some dip with our crunchy cauliflower only as long as there is water for those farms in California, only as long as those farms and that produce have sufficient value to society.  If, perchance, some California critter is declared scarce, the vast and productive farms return to the dust from whence they emerged.

The greenhouses are home to creatures above ground and below.  We fight the ages old battles with the rodents human history has pronounced a scourge; we stumble to avoid squishing harmless toads; we clean sparrow nests and wasp nests from our machinery and chimneys.  But there are marvels too.  The first butterflies of the season, the red admirals,  find a flowering oasis; hummingbirds in transit buzz through for a week or so.

  The locals make their best nests cheek by jowl with the working parts of the business. I enjoy the robins of spring, the swallows of summer that scoop snacks off the greenhouse plastic like it was a glassy ocean, the killdeer that ply their wiles in the fall as I pace the watering route in the mum patch. The line between habitat and human is large and blurred and is home to life abundant and sometimes unexpected.

There are two ways to solve the water shortage at Hurst Greenery.  One is to put the flowers on the trucks and send them to someone else to plant and care for; to change this:

into this:

And the other is Nature's way:

Welcome April Downpour

April should be for showers in our part of the world and if we spend some chilly days in raincoats with wet feet, we deal with it stoically, knowing all too well what pristine spring day after pristine spring day yields in the long term of July.  Rainy days in April go into the soil bank, literally, to be withdrawn by crops in the field and mums in the pots and flowers in the garden.  I'm donning my raincoat and three layers of shirts today on my way to work, hoping to squeeze another quarter inch out of the uncomfortable drizzle.

This is one part of April....

....and this is another...

Mud makes the grass grow....