The Reaping

Reaping

Note: The pictures and descriptions in this post are graphic representations of death and dismemberment. I discuss sheep being sent to the factory to be killed; I discuss a lamb being hit by an ATV and then skinned and gutted; I discuss many sheep dying of natural causes. There are pictures. I am not a vegetarian in any sense. Please do not read if this will offend you.

                So now that the snow has turned to rain (at least on the east coast, at least in Baltimore) and everyone is slogging through the sugar crashes that come after the Christmas feasts, it is my chance to turn from funny and vibrant to grim and gruesome.

                 A post or two ago I casually mentioned that if a sheep has a bum leg and it doesn’t get better then the farmer assumes it has a parasite has to kill and bury it. This might also happen if a ewe has a hard udder, or any other number of maladies. If the sheep isn’t getting better, through a number of penicillin injections, then the farmer needs to kill it.

                I also mentioned, quite casually, that if the sheep runs herself (or, in the case of a lamb, maybe himself) aground, if the sheep breaks a leg or bashes their head in, the farmer has no problem skinning and eating it. This is true. This is only true, though, if the farmer has time to skin it. It also isn’t a bonus for the farmer by any means. The farmer already has a freezer full of meat; they don’t need any more.

                Ron and Gay take care of a herd of Merino sheep on a portion of their land that they don’t keep for pasture—it’s wild land and the sheep there are wild, too. Every so often they bring the Merinos in for shearing, so they don’t get too tangled up in Manuka (a type of tree). At that point they’ll kill eight or twelve of them and freeze the meat for “house meat.” They don’t sell the Merinos because unlike domesticated sheep, Merinos don’t walk through an open gate, they leap over where the gate would have been if it was still closed. Unlike a domesticated sheep, they don’t gently run past you; they knock holes in the walls in their effort to escape. Sending them to a factory, making them run in lines, herding them through the runs, would be unkind, and so Ron and Gay don’t do it; they let their herd of Merinos stay as wild as possible. Their house meat comes from those Merinos.

                So every lamb or sheep that does itself an injury is a negative in their account balance.  If a sheep leaps over a fence in the covered yard, while we’re dagging, say, and snaps her leg—that’s an awful thing to witness, first of all. The sheep is terrified. The other sheep can smell the blood, the first sheep is thrashing around, blood everywhere, and what choice does the farmer have? He has to slit her throat. She won’t recover from a broken leg. If he has time to skin her he will, but if she’s a full grown ewe then her meat’s too tough for much else but dog meat.

                Second of all, when that happens, Gay usually says, “Ah, well that’s seventy dollars down.”

                Because it is. They could have sold that ewe to the works for seventy dollars, and now she’s being used for dog meat.

                 It’s worse when it’s a lamb, because a lamb could be sold for ninety dollars, hopefully a hundred if the lamb is heavy enough.

                One morning we are herding a mob of ewes and lambs across the road and a couple sheep billow out to the side of the road to the gully of drift wood, weeds and fencing that runs along the road and the paddock. We run behind the sheep and get them to run back through the gate, and then close the gate behind them, so that they won’t all stream out again, but there is one lamb that jumps through the fence in the wrong direction, out of the paddock (this is not unusual, as lambs are small enough to fit through the wires of the fence, or under the wires of the fence), or had not gone with the rest of the mob in the first place—in any case, we find him in the gully when the gate is shut. He’s frantic, and the bike is on, making a rumbling noise that scares him even more, and the gate is shut. He runs towards the gate, the very hard mesh metal gate, and bashes right into it.

                I’ve seen many sheep run right into mesh metal gates before. They do it on a routine basis. But this one hits his head in just the wrong way, just the wrong angle. It retreats back a few steps and I think, “Oh, it’s ok,” but Gay says, “Oh, poor wee thing, I’ve seen them do this, probably won’t make it, just hit on the brain pan wrong.” The lamb looks unsteady on its feet, like in those cartoons it would have stars circling around it’s head, or little Tweety birds.

                I think, “You don’t know, he looks ok, maybe he will make it.” I don’t say anything, and we don’t have time to stop and check and worry. We have another mob of sheep to shift. We get on the bikes and leave it.

                When we get back it’s lying by the gate, dead, and Gay says, “Ah, well, that’s seventy dollars down,” and I think, “More like ninety, or ninty four,” because he may only be worth seventy now, but by the time they would have sent him to the works he would have been heavy enough to be worth ninety, at least, if not more.

                A few days later we go back to the gate and the lamb is still lying there because we’ve had a busy couple days and haven’t had a chance to collect it. Ron and Gay pick it up by its hooves and put it in a small metal trailer that hooked onto the bike. It smells sweet and foul, like trash, like a landfill. Of course there are flies. The lamb’s stomach has exploded out of its belly from the gas, so the wool has cut away and you can see a green bubble thing protruding outwards.

                Ron drives the bike across the main road to the trail he uses to get across his land, through the various paddocks. He sets the trailer just there, by the side of the trail. He’ll come back later and bury it. For now he just has to get it out of the road.

                Two days later the smell and the flies are still there, by the gate, by the side of the road, where the lamb had been.

                And through all of this I feel nothing.

                I’ve never been particularly squeamish about death, or about blood, or guts. My own cats are a completely different story, and I am choking up just thinking about the support group they advertised in my local grocery store for pet owners who’ve lost a furry loved one, but in general I have not had much experience with death. At the nurses office I look away from the needle, but only because I don’t want to psych myself out about the pain, and because it’s a ritual to do so, not because I’m particularly upset about the fact that my blood won’t be in my body anymore. In biology class I named my frog along with everyone else. Those of you who have lived with me or who are close family members can attest to the fact that I like eating and cooking bizarre parts of the body, like tongue or heart (cheaper AND delicious!). I’m not partial to liver, but that’s because it is genuinely disgusting, and that’s a scientifically proven fact.

                The sheep on Ron and Gay’s farm live a very happy life, all told. They romp and play among the manuka, in the pines, over the hills. They settle in the pasture. Ron and Gay handle them as gently as possible, and when they use their dog, Kelly, as a herding device she doesn’t draw blood, even though sometimes they do get so stressed out by, say, being forced into a small pen where machines are going and a dog is barking that one of them may have a heart attack right there at your feet (I’m talking about Shearing day, which will be a whole post in and of itself, don’t worry). Sometimes they tip over onto their backs and can’t get up; days later we’ll find them just wool scattered around; brown, gooey meat, offal and a pair of ribs sticking up out of the ground are all that’s left from what the scavenger birds have picked off. Sometimes a lamb will milk its mother until she’s skin and bones; sometimes those ewes can be fed up once the lambs are weaned, but sometimes they’re too far gone and have to just be mercifully killed.  Generally, though, they have a great life, a fairly healthy, happy life, especially when you compare it to some of these animals that live in pens just big enough for them to breathe, and sometimes, not even then.

                So I have no problem when eventually most of them have to go to “the Works.” I know that other people would have a problem with that. But that is the trade off. When you are a farm animal, your needs are taken care of. You are protected from predators; you are fed; you are sheared; you are kept healthy; your children are kept healthy; you have no worries and do not have to fend for yourself. But the trade off is that your body is not your own. Your wool, eggs, feathers—your very body is forfeit.  Humans, having such strong personal identities, would say that that trade off is unfair. Would a sheep say that? Would a peacock say that? Can you answer that question fairly? A human’s perspective is so thoroughly based in this concept of “I” and “Me,” that we cannot trade ourselves for anything, but a sheep’s perspective may be much more based in the collective mob, or it may be based on the grass, or on the sun, or on their lambs. It may be based on smells or sounds. If they were able to answer, they may be willing to trade their body for protection and food.  They may consider one to be less important than the other in the short term.

                That is conjecture, though. I do not know what a sheep would want. I assume they do not want to die, but as for the rest of it, I can never know. We can never know. We can only guess, and do the best we can with what we see, how we interpret their reactions to experiences. I see them huddling together, each sheep pressing their sides so close together that you can barely wade through them, following one another as close to the previous one’s rump as possible. I interpret that as them needing to be together, in a mob. I interpret that as feeling like they would rather be in a mob than alone, and that if they are going to walk to their deaths, they’d rather do it in a crowd than by themselves. What else can I interpret it as?

                Fear, I can interpret it as fear.

                The morning of the reaping I wake up late. Ron and Gay told me the truck was coming to take the ewes and lambs away at 7:30, and we had to wean the lambs before then, but I don’t have a clock in my room and if they had knocked on my door I hadn’t heard it.  The house is empty, no breakfast on the table (an unheard of thing), and I can’t see anyone in the yards.

                But there’s an unholy racket of sheep maaing coming from the covered yards.

                So I throw on my overalls and my gum boots and book it over to the shed, where paddocks full of already separated sheep and lambs stare back at me. Ron and Gay had shifted probably two mobs of sheep early this morning, weaned them, and now had them all in their right paddocks. Only two paddocks worth will  go to the Works; the lambs and certain ewes. The other ewes are “replacement” ewes, which just means that they’ll live to breed again. We let the replacement ewes go and they scatter through the yard.

Me and Gay and the replacement ewes

                Everyone is crying and maaing and upset. Ron and Gay are talking about logistics and simultaneously cleaning out the run that will take the sheep from the covered yard to the truck. It’s a small run that leads to a metal loading ramp with weights at the end, so that Ron can lift the ramp at the close end, the weights at the far end will go down, and the far end of the ramp will go higher so that the sheep will be able to climb to a higher level of the truck.

                Then we are waiting for the truck in the early morning light. Simon is taking pictures. He has a giant, million dollar camera that can do everything but zoom in really far, so getting wildlife photos with his camera is impossible. He experiments with the sheep. They finish getting the run cleared out. The truck is a little bit late.

                But the truck comes, we open the gate for it, and it backs in as if it’s done this a million times before. Out pops a man in Richard Simmons’ gear (tank top and short shorts in faded neon colors), with giant ears and a shaved head. The second man, his driving mate, is in less ridiculous clothing. The first guy is leaping over fences and each time I’m slightly terrified that I will see something I’m not sure I want to see.

                But both of them know how to handle sheep. Immediately Ron, Gay and the two men get the first lot of ewes into the run and up the loading ramp. The ewes respond to the run like they respond to every run—the weaning run, the dagging run. Some of them get turned around, some of them balk, but generally when they see their fellows turning a corner or going up ahead in front of them, they follow along behind. They want to stick together.

                 I feel a little useless because I know I couldn’t be as effective as these two truck drivers are at getting the sheep into the truck. They are sheep herding professionals. Ron and Gay don’t ask for Simon and I’s help—they need to get this done quickly. They don’t have time to baby us through anything.

                Soon it’s the lambs’ turn. The lambs go up the ramp just as well as the ewes did. Every once in a while one of the men from the truck will shut a gate in the truck, and open another one. Or Ron will hike the ramp up a little higher, so that the sheep can get to the next level of the truck.

                In half an hour it’s done. Ron’s made his own count, the guys on the truck have made theirs, and the numbers match up. Ron and Gay will send about 70 ewes and 73 lambs to the works today. They won’t get paid for these sheep for another ten days. As Gay says, “Most farmers work on an overdraft most of the year, so it’s nice to see that overdraft go down.” They’ll do this several more times in the course of the season until their lambs are all sold. They need to keep enough ewes and enough lambs to repopulate for next year, but they also need to remember that winter is difficult and a lot of the sheep won’t survive through it, so it’s better to sell them now.  They need to sell enough lambs to cover the cost of the farm—the cost of the machines, the cost of repairing the machines, the cost of gas (10 dollars a gallon, without government subsidies and with extra taxes) for the bikes and the tractor and the mower, the cost of running a house, the cost of day to day living, the cost of taking care of these animals. They need to sell enough lambs to make it all worthwhile. So if you’ve picked through this post and done the numbers and figured out how much they made from this truck load of lambs and ewes and you thought, “wow, that’s a large number,” remember that their costs are high as well, and that this predicated on the assumption that Ron and Gay are healthy and able to work 365 days a year, with volunteers who just ask for food and shelter.  What if Ron gets sick? What happens then?

                Gay and Ron have been doing this for thirty years. They know how to run a farm. Their fences are in good order, they’ve got their timing right, they’ve got all their tracks set up to the best effect so that herding goes as smoothly as possible. When they were starting, when they grew up on farms, they would pick the wool off the fences to sell that, so they wouldn’t waste any. They would sell the dag off the back ends of the sheep for use as fertilizer in town. They don’t have to do that now because they’ve gotten to a fairly even keeled position. There are a lot of ways they don’t have to cut corners, now.

                But still. I can’t help but think that it’s a precarious position to be in. As Gay says, “Ah, well, that’s seventy dollars down.”

                When the yard is empty and silent again, when the truck is gone, we go up to the house and have breakfast.

                Later that day we wean more lambs, which means shifting them. We have them in several paddocks. Weaned lambs are notoriously difficult to shift because they don’t flow in a mob the way regular sheep do. They break off in clumps and spook at everything. They’re used to following their mothers, but now they have no mothers to follow, so it’s sort of a blind leading the blind, and things can go terribly wrong.

                So what happens is Ron pushes them, with the bike, to go through one gate, across the road, and hopefully through another gate. But instead what happens is that they get onto the road, look around, and decide that instead of going through the gate on the other side they’re going to run right up the road. Simon is standing on the road in order to try and stop them from going that way. If he stands with his arms out and makes a noise it might scare them into stopping and turning around. But he’s standing too close and the lambs have got up a good speed by the time he realizes they’re coming for him. They rush right past him and don’t see his spread arms. He has no chance to stop them, and they run up the road.

                Some of them run through the gate we wanted, some of them run back into the paddock they came from, and the rest gleefully bound away down the main road that connects to another main road, where cars whizz by at a million miles an hour.

                So Ron and Gay rush away to try and herd them back up. They are experienced herders, and manage it, but that was only half the mob of weaned lambs, so when we get them through the gate we want them in (finally, after like, forty five minutes), Ron goes back to another paddock for more. I’m standing at the gate by the road, waiting to herd more in, when Ron on his bike zoom up to me. Simon and Gay are off ushering the last lot up the trail into the paddock where they’ll stay for the duration.

                Ron hops off the bike, closes the gate, and I’m confused but I see something on the back of his bike, the part I sit. It’s a rough piece of grippey material so you can hold things just because of the texture. You don’t have to strap things down.

                On the back of his bike is something white. Ron is talking and making appropriate hand gestures.

                “I was just coming out from the trees and I saw one, two, and I thought, oh I bet there’s a third one and there was a third one, but it leapt almost clear across the windshield, but in fact it hit right there,” here he gestures to where the lamb hit the bike, his elbows sticking out, “Did about five hundred dollars of damage to the radiator. Just there. But it ran out and I thought, oh, did I get it, but then I didn’t see it moving so I doubled back, and yes, I did get it.”

                Over the course of the afternoon and evening Ron will repeat this story three or four times. In fact, every time I bring up the lamb he will repeat this story. He won’t repeat it word for word—sometimes he’ll add description, sometimes he’ll take away description, but he will repeat himself in a pattern, in a predictable way.               

                “So, hop on.”

                “What?”

                “hop on. I’ll take you back. I’m going to skin and gut this. The bruising means we won’t be able to use the left side, where I hit it, but we’ll be able to use the right side all right.”

                I look at the bike. The white thing on the back of the bike is the dead lamb.  I hear in the back of my head Gay’s voice saying, “Ah, well, that’s seventy dollars down.”

                “Is there room?” I ask.

                “Ah, yea, just maybe budge it up, probably room,” Ron says.

                I swing my leg around so that I’m behind Ron. The lamb is splayed out across the back of the bike, blood flecked across it’s muzzle, it’s eyes open. There’s not too much blood, but what is there is spread over the wool, in thin lines and webs, caught from one clot to the next. What is more bizarre to me is that as the bike picks up speed the lamb’s body jiggles with the movement. I’m worried about one or both of us slipping off, so I clench my fingers into a non-bloody portion of wool, to hold onto the body, in case we go around any sudden corners.

                But there are no mishaps, and Ron takes us to the shearing shed. I pause for a moment, wondering if I should follow, not sure, but then I think, yes, I should follow, he has not told me to stay, and so I follow where I saw him disappear to, and after that I follow the small droplets of blood that I find on the floor, and I eventually find Ron and the dead lamb in the shearing shed.

                The Shearing shed is where the shearing generally takes place. You will hear all about the shearing shed when I tell you about the shearing. Today there are maybe twelve sheep waiting to dry out for Ron to shear them in the morning, so they watch the proceedings.

                I ask Ron if I can watch, too. He’s sharpening his knife and he looks at me for just a moment before agreeing, readily. He has shown other volunteers how to kill and gut a sheep physically, so they can do it themselves when they go home; there’s no problem with me just watching.

                Ron cuts the neck and makes an incision along the chest to a knob where our sternum would be, but in a sheep (or lamb), this is called the brisket. It juts out and has less wool on it—it’s right between the two front legs.  He folds back the skin from this incision, and briefly cleared some of the legs. At the brisket he punches the skin loose.

                Then he goes to the back legs and cuts the knee joint at the hock. These cuts are swift and precise; the legs come off easily (the forefeet stay with the skin). The cuts are made on the inside of the leg. He skins around the tail.

                The skin on the lamb is loose around the belly, so what Ron does is he pokes his knife under the skin and through to the brisket so that he’s making a cut from the inside. It’s easier to do it this way because the outside if covered in wool, and also because if he were to slice from the outside he might inadvertently slice the guts open and then smelly green goo would get everywhere.

                He cuts the front feet off, and then he ties the throat with the wind pipe so that when he hangs the sheep upside down the contents of the stomach don’t come up and make a mess.

                He attaches a device called a gambril, which looks a little bit like a metal “}”, to the ceiling, pokes a hole in each back leg between the bone and the hamstring, and hangs the sheep up by these holes. The sheep is now hanging, head down, belly out. The skin is still attached to the back of the sheep, as is the head.

                At this point Ron pulls the belly skin back, cuts round the tail, and then, with a great heave, pulls the back skin off in one great pull. It pulls off easily, in a great sheet.

                That’s when Ron cuts the head off in a single blow. As he says, “if you know what you’re doing, it’s dead simple.” He spreads the head and the skin on the floor, and except for the presence of the head, which doesn’t bother me too much, it looks very much like my sheep skin rug back at home, which I walk on every day without thinking about it. In fact, my sheep skin rug back home is exactly what I’m looking at right now, except a different sheep (and probably mine is slightly larger). This is the skin and the wool, and that is the skin and the wool too. Mine has always had a slightly comforting but antiseptic feel about it, but this doesn’t feel antiseptic at all.

                Ron is continuing, as I’m staring down at the sheep skin. He’s cut around the anus, loosening the piping there. Then he’s cut right through the membrane so that the guts do not get cut and spill out green goop everywhere. The way he does this is he brings his fingers alongside the tip of his knife, with the handle running on the inside of his palm, and gently slides the knife along the membrane of the belly so that he can feel and cushion the guts and the knife from one another as he cuts down. Once this cut is made, the stomach and intestines will flop out whole. He reaches down and cuts the diaphragm, grabs the trachea and esophagus, gives a jerk to free them, and then the guts are free and spill out from the body, totally disconnected. This includes the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, liver—everything.

                He puts these on top of the rug that I am staring at, so that he can wrap everything up and put it in the offal pit. 

                When I look back at the skinned lamb, I’m stunned by how skinny it is. The stomach and intestines and wool took up most of the space. When I looked at the lamb, jiggling on the back of the bike with me, it looked so large but now it is a spindly thing; now it is just muscle and bone.

                Ron says, “Ah, well, that’s done.”

                Ron says he’ll leave it hanging here for a day or so, depending on the weather. In cold temperatures he would leave it for three or four days; in hot weather maybe only a night. He leaves it there to mature and tenderize the meat. I ask about flies and bacteria, and he tells me that any eggs that are laid they can see, so he’ll just cut that part out, or flick them off, or wash them off, and any bacteria will be washed off or cooked out; and that in fact when a meat is just about to go bad it is at it’s most tender, and in those fancy restaurants the state of the meat in the kitchen is sometimes a state you might not really be too happy with knowing about. They won’t sell this lamb; they can’t sell it; so it doesn’t matter, anyway.

                Gay and Simon have come in at some point. They are in high spirits, laughing and joking. I’m in high spirits too, but I don’t add anything to the conversation because I’m also trying to mentally record as much as possible.

                Ron tells the story of how he hit the lamb again, and I realize, later that night when he tells it the third time, that telling the story, skinning and gutting the lamb, taking the time to do it when he had other things to do, were in service of helping himself recover from the shock of hitting a small animal, his own animal, a baby animal that was just trying to follow its fellows in a scary situation and didn’t know any better.  This is how he’s dealing with a small incident—telling this story and skinning this lamb so that at least it’s contributing a little bit, so at least it isn’t a total loss. But what, they’re going to get four or five dinners out of this lamb, but they’re losing the cost of fixing the bike, as well as the cost of selling the lamb. It IS a loss. A large one.

                Simon starts talking about his biology teacher and their recent dissection of pigs in class. Gay pokes around in the offal and points out the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the small intestine versus the large. She notes that the lungs have lines of red and purple down them where they were bruised against the ribs in the accident. The bruising on the carcass is minimal, just a little along the left leg, where we can see blood dribbling down. The flies might get to that bit, but if so they’ll just cut that part away. Really, the lamb was killed by the trauma to the lungs and head.

                She points back at the carcass and she notes that the muscles are still spasming. Light flickers along one hip, one thigh, even without a head, without a heart, without feet, still there are these small movements, remnants of life.

                It makes me feel better because when I was looking at another ewe that had died I swore I could see it breathing, it looked so lifelike and I thought—don’t, no, wait, it’s still there. But at that time, again, it was just the muscles still spasming. Again, it was still the extra electrical impulses shocking it, and something in my brain recognized movement. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it.

                A similar thing (though different) happened when I went to see David, in Florence, Italy. David is, of course, much too big to be a real human. Also, he happens to be made out of stone. But the proportions are such that something in my brain recognized—human­—and I found myself trying to match my breathing to his, or trying to jump start his breathing with my own, or at the very least tracking his lack of inhale and waiting, always waiting for him to take that next breath, which I’m positive that he will. Sometime, he will. Where is that next inhale; why isn’t he inhaling; is he ok, is he ok, why isn’t he breathing?

                I actually couldn’t stay in the building for very long because I was getting light headed.

                I worry about myself sometimes because I felt more for David than I do for a dead sheep, or for a live sheep. Maybe that is a construction though—Michelangelo wanted me to feel something more, so I do feel something more, whereas a sheep does not need my emotions, and so I am not stirred at all.

                How come there are some animals that we feel so much for that when we die we feel physically hurt by their passing? When Sherman, my cat, died I could physically feel his death; the grief wasn’t just emotional or mental, it was physical too. Like an orange fish of hurt swimming through my blood stream. And you can say that that is love, and yes, ok, you are right. But that is an easy answer. Why have I chosen to love this cat? This small furry animal that is really just the same as any other furry animal? In the Marshall Islands, way out in the Pacific Ocean, the islanders are afraid of cats the way we are afraid of spiders or mice. What am I asking for when I take care of a cat? I do not shear it or collect its eggs or babies or meat. I collect its love. Does the cat give me its love as forfeit, because it knows I require it, as payment for food and protection? Would it give me its love if I didn’t provide food or protection?  Does it have any love to give, or am I just interpreting its movements as love because I don’t know any better?

                When you love someone and they die—I have no experience in this—you know, theoretically, where you stand. You know what relationship you had with that person. You know, theoretically, what that person wanted. But with animals, with the death of animals, you do not know. Some animals get thrown into the offal pit. Some animals get skinned and eaten. Some animals get taken to the pet cemetery and their graves are tended to with wreaths every Sunday. It seems almost arbitrary, and that arbitrariness seems almost cruel. This animal should be loved, but this one should be eaten, and this one should be neglected and hated.  

                Just like when the weaned lambs rushed past Simon, there is no way to stop it now. There is no way to stop the killing of animals, the arbitrary love or hate of animals by humans. You cannot now go back and study each animal, asking, “What would you like? Would you like to be eaten? Offal pit more your style? Or would you like to be stuffed into pink sweaters and made to be posed for calendars with various jazz instruments?”

                You cannot now say, “Humans, stop making determinations. Stop being so individualistic. Stop playing God.” Or, you can say that but how many would hear you? The rush is too heavy past you in one direction, and there are no motor bikes to get everyone rushing in the other direction. The cultures and religions that celebrate the removal of the self are becoming archaic, are becoming less a true way of life and instead are becoming relegated to snippets of reading or an hour long class two days a week; they are a way of pretending so that some people can feel better about themselves in comparison to the poor shmuck next to them. And yes, some individuals genuinely operate this way, but they are not mobs of people. I have no experience with this, but even the cultures that practice these less individualistic ways are also adopting western methods and practices, are changing and shifting and molding to a more global culture, and soon things will not be as they were before. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it just is. 

                No one on the farm wants a lamb or a ewe to die because it means seventy dollars down. If the ewe snaps her leg it means a terrifying thirty seconds while she struggles to free herself and then Ron has to slit her throat. It is panic and it is fear. It is smell and flies and an offal pit.

                But that is routine on the farm, and so feeling nothing is helpful, is expected. The lambs are cute but also stupid and fearful. They are not malleable or willing to be helped, so when they bash their brain pan in—it happens. You leave them where they lie and come back for them later.

               

               There are ewes, “pets,” that were raised on the bottle because they were orphans. Some of them have personalities and names and get remembered, year after year, and live through year after year. Pets don’t get sent to The Works if they can help it. They’re less skittish around humans.

                I recently met a pet, Heidi, who weighed in at 288 pounds when we took her through the run to dag her. She’s currently fourteen years old and her feet have been buckling in because she can’t support her own weight. She’ll live on the farm until she dies in her sleep, or of natural causes. There are sheep that Gay and Ron track, like Heidi, throughout the years, and fondly keep a hold of because they produce lambs every year and keep themselves out of trouble and have a long life on the farm. They’re few and far between, but they are there.

                We sheared Heidi, and then herded her and one other (slowly, because Heidi was not particularly afraid of us nor inclined to walk too fast) up out of the mud paddock behind the covered yard into another paddock, where they could put her on half feed so they could trim her up a bit, so she could lose some weight and hopefully walk a little better. As we were coming back, Ron stopped me. I didn’t have my camera with me, for which I apologize sincerely.

                He stopped me and motioned me to be quiet, and then parted some grasses.

                There was a mother peahen, and right behind her was three—no, four—no, five, oh wait, a sixth one just scuttle around that plant—little baby peachicks. The peahen had been sitting on her eggs and they’d just hatched, and Ron must have seen a movement in the grass. They were small, brown, duckling like things, but they were probably only a couple days old, if that. Ron says that it’ll take them several months to grow to any size at all. Ducks grow very fast, but peafowl take a much longer time. She may also only end up rearing one or two, because if she takes them in the shorter, wet grass, the peachicks will get cold and wet and will die a lot easier. So if she keeps them safe and off the wet grass, they’re more likely to all live.

                But with thirteen peacocks strutting around already, they really don’t need six more.

                Still. It was really lovely to see six little peachicks waddling along.

Next up: the Shearing Post, the Catlins, my flora of NZ post, and the birds of the farm post! (aka, that's enough death and dismemberment for now. Thanks for reading.) 

Christmas 2012

Christmas, 2012 

Warning--There are a lot of pretty pictures. Maybe go through and look at those, first, so you're not distracted by them.  Then, go back and read. 

The weather on Christmas Day-- View out the back of Sal and Grant's
living room and lawn for dinner

When I first decided to go to New Zealand for Christmas I thought that I would miss Christmas entirely. I thought that, somehow, they either wouldn’t celebrate it, or I wouldn’t end up celebrating it, or it would be not as big of a deal in the southern hemisphere as it is in the U.S.

                They may give fewer gifts than in America (although that doesn’t mean they don’t give any, nor does it mean the gifts are sparse, but it does mean that instead of a “mountain” the gifts are merely a “pile”), but they have no less Christmas spirit. Ron listens to exactly one radio station, Coast radio, which plays easy listening—all his oldies favorites; including but not limited to: The Beatles’ pop numbers (you will not find “Helter Skelter” or “Norwegian Woods” here), Elton John’s Piano Man, and that Limbo Stick song you play at roller skating birthday parties. Coast Radio has been interspersing Christmas Hits with the above numbers for the last two weeks, downplaying the former and upping the latter steadily, but they’ve been growing desperate for more and more Christmas songs, and they refuse to dip into newer stuff (Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” is too avant garde for these guys), so they end up using Christmas songs from fifty’s commercials, or fifties cartoons, which has the effect of a jumble of high pitched squeaky voices throwing out racially inappropriate terms and “ho ho ho’s!” and then bursting into songs that sort of get lost in a lot of electronic static and bubblegum jangle. I generally tune it out because I’m busy trying not to get knocked over by Doris number 487 while I get her and Cleo into the small pen.

                Ron says Coast Radio is the most popular radio station in New Zealand. He says this to prove something to me about music, about how the sheer number of people who prefer music from the 60’s (see the list above, including that limbo stick song) prove that it’s actually better than the music from the 80’s, but I say, “Well that says something about New Zealand, doesn’t it?”

                We’ve gotten to the joking to each other stage, so he takes that well.

                But really. It DOES say something about New Zealand. I’m pretty sure it does.  

                So Coast Radio has been shoving bad Christmas music on me all week, but I look out and I go outside and it is like, a million degrees out.

                That’s another thing. Technically, the temperature is only 75 degrees. The Kiwis (New Zealanders call themselves Kiwis—it’s a fun and short term and I will use it) are all opening windows and fanning themselves and saying “aye! It’s a hot one! Can’t stand too many more of these!” and I’m looking at them going, “It’s only 75 degrees out. Get a grip. In America we deal with 105 on a routine basis!” and they say, “Oh but we have humidity.” And I’m like, “Yeah. So do we.”

                But by the end of the work day, when I’ve been planting trees out in the open and gasping for water, or in the shed with five hundred sheep all running in circles around me because I can’t find the leader, and knocking my shins on fences, or even just when I take off my blue overalls (you’ve noticed in every picture of me I’ve been wearing blue overalls to protect my other clothing—the overalls also afford some measure of protection from the sun and rain and thistles. Also, they tuck into the boots that we walk through all the mud and mire in) –even when I just take off my blue overalls I find myself fanning my shirt, opening windows going, “man! It’s a hot one! Can’t have too many more days like this!”

                It’s hard to get into the Christmas spirit when it feels more like we should be prepping for Fourth of July (Side Cultural Note: The Kiwi’s have Waikiko day, which falls on the 9th of February, and is supposed to be a sort of national New Zealand day—people who work get the day off. Generally people use the day to protest whatever they want to protest. They don’t do fireworks or have parties or anything. It sounds like a lot less fun).  And yet Gay is going around humming Christmas carols under her breath, and she’s making all kinds of puddings and cakes and things, and Simon’s been working on learning “Silent Night” on the piano.  

                So it sort of feels like I’m a bit of a grinch this year.

                The first day or two I was in the house, Gay and I, her daughter Sal (short for Sally) and Sal’s son Alex (aged 1) went and cut down a pine tree to put up in the living room. We got a tree for Sal and a tree for us. Since Gay and Ron have such a large farm, and since a lot of it is wild mire with pine trees and bog, there were more than enough trees to choose from. I think they also plant pine trees by hand there to keep the forest going.

                When we got home Gay and I decorated the tree in the living room with her ornaments. She stuck the tree in a bucket (no fancy christmas tree base) with rocks to wedge it up, dropped a couple aspirin tablets into the water, and then covered the bucket with wrapping paper to make it look festive.

                I set up my laptop with my “Christmas Tree Decorating Playlist”—and yes, I have a whole playlist specifically dedicated to decorating Christmas trees.  In past years we’ve had issues with the specific CDs we needed and in the specific order we needed, etc. The CDs must be in the right order. THEY MUST. We must put the ornaments on in the exact same order the exact same way every year; we get the same type of tree every year; we argue about the tree exactly the same way each year (mom wants a smaller tree, I want a larger tree); I do this, Rissa does that, etc. IT ALL MUST HAPPEN THE SAME. TRADITION.  For instance: We always listen to the opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, which then transitions into The Clancy Brothers Christmas Irish music, which then transitions to Zydeco, which then transitions to more traditional stuff if there’s still more to go. Usually by that time we’ve finished with the tree.  That is why I have a playlist constructed exactly that way on my laptop. TRADITION.

                But Gay only had one string of lights and maybe forty ornaments, so I got through maybe three songs of Amahl and the tree was finished! The Wise Men had just knocked at the door. The peasants hadn’t even danced yet. The mother hadn’t stolen the gold—nothing! The tree was finished. And I was trying to explain the plot to Gay and she was sort of hmming and uh-huhing like it was a little bizarre that every year our family listens to an opera while decorating the Christmas tree.

                 I didn’t think it was so odd at all. Doesn’t every family listen to a full opera that is not so totally religious, thought it has religious elements, but is more about the relationships between people of different backgrounds and our own human natures and what we’re willing to do for each other in times of struggle (sometimes small struggle? interior struggle?familial struggle?)?

                Apparently not. 

                The next Christmas involvement Gay thrust me into was making the Christmas cake. Christmas cake is actually fruit cake. Right now my father is reading this and making a really grossed out face. If you imagine me rolling my eyes and going, “Ugh, Fruit Cake, No thanks. No Thanks,” with a shake of my head and maybe a shudder thrown in for good measure, then you will have a female version of my father saying the exact same thing. My father has had, I think, negative experiences with fruit cake, although at the moment I forget why.

                So when Gay said that for her Christmas wasn’t complete without it, and that one of her favorite traditions was Christmas Cake, I said, “Sure, I’ll try some!” because really, if it’s so awful in his experience, then there must be something absurdly crazy about it to elicit such a reaction. She gave me some from the store and it was a little wet and a little thick and a little fruity, but generally all right. (“Well, Corrie,” Dad says, “You can have it. You couldn’t pay me to touch it. Un-un. No way. Nada. Baby, You can have it.”)

                A couple days later it was her birthday and so Sal, her daughter, took her out for dinner. She charged me that evening with making the Christmas Cake because it would take a couple hours to bake and I would have all night to sit with it. I’d baked in her kitchen before so I knew basically where everything was. She set the recipie on the counter and left me to it.

                2 pounds of fruit. Well, the bag of fruit Gay gave me was 1 kg, so that corresponds. The fruit was soaked in ginger ale for several hours. Check.

                ¼ pounds of butter.

                1 pound of sugar.  These two grossed me out because that sounds like a lot until I did a google conversion search. 1 pound of sugar is roughly one cup. Or something more reasonable. ¼ pound of butter was a quarter of the block I had in front of me, so I have no idea how much I actually put in. It’s a mystery.

                The rest of the measurements on the card were not in pounds, not in grams, but in cups, which just goes to show you that the Europeans and the New Zealanders switched over to metric not as long ago as you might think, because this recipe was handed down from Gay’s mother.

                Anyway. So I put the cake into the oven. I put it on the temperature and time it says for. Gay came home before it’s done. She said, “Oh, you used that pan? I never use that pan.”

                The pan I used was the only pan we’ve ever used for baking anything in this house, besides muffin tins. It’s a bizarrely extendable pan (it breaks in half and then slides together again, so you can have it as long or as short as you want, although I don’t know how the batter doesn’t just seep through the crack in the middle). But apparently there’s a deeper pan that’s squarer then the pan I used and didn't make square (even though I could have made it square, since it's extendable), a pan that takes a longer time to cook that blah blah blah blah. Anyway. How was I to know when she didn’t pull it out for me?

                 She pulled it out of the oven at the right time but the corners and edges were black because the extendable pan was shallower than the normal pan, so things got a little bit too cooked. The recipe said, “Do Not Cook Too Long”. But this extendable pan was too shallow and so yes, it cooked too long.  Also, Gay told me later, sometimes she puts brown paper around the pan and that stops the edges from getting too brown.

                HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THESE THINGS ABOUT YOUR VERY FAVORITE CAKE. YOU SHOULD NOT DELEGATE IMPORTANT TRADITION ITEMS LIKE THAT TO SOMEONE WORKING WITHOUT SUPERVISION, IN A STRANGE KITCHEN WITH AN OVEN THAT DOESN’T ALWAYS WORK RIGHT. 

                I felt like a Christmas fruit cake failure.

                She ended up cutting off the edges “to square it up a bit” and then wrapping wrapping paper around it. And then she forgot to take it to lunch with Ron’s sister’s house on Christmas day. (Mind you, by this time she had made probably TEN other types of dessert items to bring to various houses—fruit salad, jellos, trifles, etc.)

                *hangs head* American fail.

                Christmas Morning we had French toast, instead of wheaties and toast, like normal. I normally don’t mind wheaties and toast, but Christmas morning is a good time to mix it up a bit. So I made French toast. Simon left a couple days ago to spend Christmas with some friends of his in Queenstown (a large city a couple hours away), so it was just Ron, Gay and I.

                We opened presents. For once, I was the youngest! I was the youngest person in the room! Isn’t that exciting! Normally I have a sister around who is always younger than I am, you see.  So I was Santa and distributed the presents around to everyone, and decided who got what, when.

The tree I decorated!
Presents under the tree! 

                I had brought three presents for Ron and Gay—my father made bowls for them, I brought honey and a beeswax candle (customs took the honey but let me keep the candle) and then I also brought a small wooden, handcrafted  bird house ornament that I got from a local artisan in Iowa. They liked all of them but I actually think they appreciated Dad’s bowls the most, and I’m not just saying that. I was able to explain the process of glass blowing a little bit, and talk about how much work goes into it, and how sometimes the glass just breaks you know, mid blow, because of the heat or coldness, so that was exciting. And I think they were really touched that he would send them something so personal that they could link to me, specifically. They’ve heard of his glass blowing before from me—I’ve mentioned my mother’s stained glass and my father’s glass blowing, so to get a set of bowls was really lovely.

                They gave me a couple presents, too—a peacock pencil case full of tea bags (honey ginger, peppermint, and apple), a small tray with a colorful drawing of a local marsh bird, the pukeko, on it—a sort of giftey, touristy thing that I really liked because it’s the sort of thing that will be easy to carry home because it’s small and light, but will always remind me of NZ, and will always be useful, but which I wouldn’t necessarily buy for myself. They also gave me a calendar with lovely pictures of various sights in New Zealand! So all year round I’ll have beautiful photographs in case I don’t take any good ones myself.

                Once that was over we headed to Ron’s sister’s house. We picked up Ron’s father on the way. Grandy (short for Grandfather) is in his 80’s. I’m not sure how senile he is. He seems to understand most things, but in the morning he rang to wish us a happy Easter. He has a fluff of white hair coming off the top of his head, straight up, and I think that’s the best part. He also has a tendency to lean over and toot, which I’ve only heard described in books as a thing grandfathers do to their mortified grandchildren, but never had the pleasure of experiencing, seeing as I’ve only had grandmothers, not grandfathers.  This seems like a negative, but I would like to stress that when you have never had a grandfather around, and then one is around doing something so grandfatherly, tooting out the side of the chair (only the once) becomes something of a novelty, and I was quite pleased with the whole incident, actually. Grandy was very nice. He and I chatted when we could and slept the rest of the time. He and I slept in the car, slept in the living room when other people were cooking, slept when the baby was running around, nodded off while trying to read—it was great. 

Ferg, Barb's husband, through a tunnel.

                Ron’s sister has a son with three children. I immediately became painfully shy, and when someone asked me even the simplest of questions I became stunningly unable to articulate myself—frenetic and fumbling and I spoke too fast and with my American accent it was a wonder they understood a single thing I said. So I glued myself to the wall of photos they had, where they had pictures of animals I’ve seen a million times—elk and grizzly bears and salmon and I was like, “well these are interesting animals but I am a little bored with this, actually, why doesn’t anyone have anything different.”  And in the living room she has a wood and metal plaque of an elk with pine trees—you know, something touristy you see in Colorado or whatever all the time, and it took me forever to figure out, to remember, that New Zealand doesn’t have bears and elk, and that all these animals are new and exotic to Kiwis. Once I figured out that to Kiwis this living room looked like a fantasy island wonderland, I turned to Barb and said, “So where in the USA have you been?”

                That was the question to ask, apparently.

                Out came the photo albums, the stacks and stacks of them. Turns out that this year they went to Alaska, then down to San Francisco, Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, etc. In fact, several times they said, “Have you seen ____, at Willamette state park?” and I was like, “I’ve never heard of that small out of the way place in our large country, of which I have only seen a small part,” and Barb looked at me either like she was a little disappointed or bemused or maybe satisfied—like she, a Kiwi, knew more about my country than I did. Which was good—I’m glad to have been the American that made her proud of her traveling accomplishment because really, her travels in America and around the world have been extensive. And I haven’t seen enough of America. I do want to see more.

                They did have a picture of a statue of Paul Bunyan and Babe, his blue ox, and I leapt on it, shouting, “It’s Paul Bunyan! Paul Bunyan! And Babe the Blue Ox! You know the stories of Paul Bunyan and Babe?”

                They shook their heads, bemused. No idea.

                So I opened my mouth, ready to give them the whole story of Paul Bunyan when I realized—I couldn’t remember any stories about them except the one that Megan White wrote about them during a creative writing class a couple years ago—so, a story not part of traditional canon—and much as I would have liked to start shouting across the table, “That’s Paul Bunyan and Babe! They were giant as babies and the whole town had to feed them giant pancakes! And then, when Paul Bunyan was a teenager, he lived in the subway system of D.C for a time, and people could see his breath coming up from under the city! He would burrow in the tunnels and go to all the art gallery openings and the people all loved him and they stood by him in times of trouble! He carved the tunnels and he sometimes lay in the Mall on sunny days and they made the Reflecting pool and Washington Monuments as toys for him to play with! But then he had to leave for some reason I can’t remember and then he straightened out the Mississippi with one tug! He and Babe straightened out the Mississippi! Did you hear? They just straightened it out--” I couldn’t do it—what if they repeated that story to an American and then got confused and cynical? So instead I just got flustered and panicked and someone had asked me about Redwoods just a moment before and I wasn’t sure if I’d given them the right information then, and here was Paul Bunyan, and I couldn’t quite remember which story was Megan’s and which was the real myth, and it was hot and children were shrieking (why are children always shrieking? Why is that their natural state?) and I just wanted to be not around any more people. So I stammered out something about the Mississippi, then someone took pity on me and changed the subject.

                I just wanted to go home and dag some more sheep. Really, why couldn’t we just do that.  

               

Pavlova--this one's textures were
more defined between the layers 

                Lunch consisted of cold seafood pasta, cold chicken legs, cold ham, cold rice salad, cold fizzy juice, and regular lettuce salad. Dessert consisted of a million things—cheesecake, Trifle (sponge cake with fruit and then custard on top) jelly, fruit salad, and then something called “Pavlova,” which is like a meringue. It’s basically whipped egg whites and sugar. It’s got various textures of these two ingredients, so the base is a soft cakey texture, the middle is a crunchy texture, the top is a light whipped texture, and the edge is a shell crunchy texture. All of it is sweet, and biting into it is delicious but basically an instant sugar coma that sweeps through you.  There were TWO pavlovas at Barb’s lunch.

                After lunch everyone exchanged presents, and in New Zealand, since it’s summer, it’s quite common to give fruit as a gift, especially since cherries are so expensive. So Grandy, for instance, gave cherries to all the nurses who take care of him. Unfortunately, all the nurses got cherries from all of their other charges, and apparently told him that they got too many cherries and didn’t need any more, so he was a bit peeved that his gift wasn’t received too well.

                I escaped soon after lunch. I pretended to go to the bathroom, but then I high tailed it out the door with my camera, and I started taking pictures of Barb’s gardens, which are extensive.  The flowers in this post mostly come from her garden. 

                After lunch we took a drive around the countryside to see Barb’s husband’s work sites, where he cuts down trees to make pastureland.  I mostly slept in the car. I think it was an excuse to get the men out so that the women could do dishes.

The trifle Barb made for lunch. 

                We eventually ended up at Sal’s place. Sal (Ron and Gay’s daughter) and Grant live on a Dairy farm, so when we got there Grant was still doing the afternoon milking, and about an hour or two in came in all dirty and tall from milking cows. I say tall because the man is about seven hundred feet tall. He has more leg then I will ever see in my life time on myself, even looking at my own legs over and over again.

                Sal and Grant have a small child, Alex, age 1, who is all smiles and cheerful countenance, really a very good baby who almost never cries, and who everyone coos over. He is the first grandchild and Ron narrates all of Alex’s movements like Alex is a new machine that is particularly ingenious at performing simple tasks badly, but Ron is overly cheerful about it.

                I like my small cousins just fine (in fact, of all small children, I think that my younger cousins, Ava, Maddie, Ellie, Annie and, although I haven’t really gotten a chance to meet him, Little Leo, are probably cuter and more intelligent than the average small child. I don’t know how it happened that way, but I suspect it’s true), and I really enjoyed sitting for Maddy and Pat when they were eight and older, but I suspect that my stiff back and meager smiles when it comes to Alex are probably fairly apparent. I feel bad about this, I really do. I wish that I felt all the maternal instincts in the world (I do not wish this; that is a lie); I wish that I had many urges to scoop him up and babysit him (oh god, I do not wish I had urges like that); I wish that I could coo over him like they are cooing over him, but I cannot make myself. Most of it is that I do not know how to coo.  Mom tells me I do not have the right hormones.  She tells me that when you have a child suddenly all children become likeable and miraculous and—anyway. That is a part of life that I am apparently not a part of yet. So, for all mothers out there, I am sorry that I have very little empathy.  I apologize for my lack of baby-love. Sometimes I wish all babies were cats or sheep that I could herd into a pen and dag—I know this is blasphemous.

      So they gave me a book to read.

      The book is called The Bronze Horseman and is set in Leningrad, 1941 (which tells you something right away) and is an epic drama between two star crossed lovers who are inexplicably drawn to each other blah blah blah blah. I have skimmed the first two hundred pages and they still haven’t had sex. WHAT’S TAKING SO LONG.

       It’s an eight hundred page book, that’s what it is.

       I didn’t mean to start reading it, but it was either that or watch Alex roll Grandy’s walker over his foot over and over again.  

                I’m meant to be reading Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, which is about him finding endangered species all over the world. I’ve started it. I have. It’s funny. It’s great. It really is. There’s this part about him going to see a venom specialist and the specialist really doesn’t want to talk about venom, instead wants to talk about hydroponics—it’s great. But.  

                CURSE YOU, BRONZE HORSEMAN.

               

Pavlova with fruit

                Dinner at Sal’s was nice because there were less people. Gay had asked me earlier about how to make a turkey because I’m an American and everyone knows about American Thanksgiving and the predominance of Turkey in thanksgiving. So I asked mom how to make one. Everything went fine. The only unusual thing was when people were being served no one had a preference for light or dark meat. I am used to everyone critically evaluating everybody else at the table thinking, “Ok, Jim’s going to take most of that thigh, but Linda’s clearly trying to lose a few pounds so she’ll take a slice of breast;  Mom’ll take a slice of breast because she always does, and Uncle Roy’ll take the first leg, Julie and Evan will take both light and dark meat, but that’s almost the end of the dark meat—the only question is Chris, will he take the second leg? Dang it! He’s taken the leg. God damn it. That means I have to take a little of each otherwise Mom’ll say ‘leave some for the rest of us’ like she did last year and I hate white meat...”

                But with this family I heard Gay say, “Do you want dark meat?” and Grant say, “I don’t really know the difference, honestly. Don’t really care.”  And she gave him the whole leg and he tucked into it as if he couldn’t care one way or the other. It was incredible.

                It was like type of meat with a thick culture surrounding it was reduced to just the meat again.

                There were more desserts after that (another Pavlova, more fruit salad, another cheesecake, another trifle, more jellies).  Alex was put to bed, gifts were exchanged, Grandy was taken home, we went home and I fed the pigs.

                I watched the pigs eat for a while because it was wonderfully soothing. Just the pigs and their snuffling, their snorting and nosing around in the grass. Nigella, apparently, is pregnant, although how they can tell I have no idea. The sky was getting darker and the goats were looking at me from beyond the pigs pen, and why can’t human interaction be as easy as feeding the pigs? I realize we call certain humans “pigs”—I don’t wish to draw those connotations. What I mean is that it was calm and lovely outside with the grass and the birds calling to one another and the goats trying to sneakily climb through the fence to get to the food they see the pigs eating, and the pigs lazily butting at each other to move each other out of the way. The air was cool but not too cool, and the ducks were swimming in the pond, through the rushes and the flax, and a gray one spread its wings and advanced on another one and honked, until the other one hopped back into the pond. 

                Why can’t Christmases be like that?

                I collapsed into bed feeling like I had spent more energy merely existing then I had in a very long time.

                Every single person was lovely and helpful and friendly. It must have been uncomfortable to have a stranger in their Christmas celebration—just as uncomfortable for me to be a part of their Christmas celebration.  It’s hard to be in someone else’s family.

                And seeing pictures of the Redwoods made me want to go back to the Redwoods. I think that my brain would get used to seeing such large trees. When we were there last summer—Megan White, Sarah & Pat Burke and I, I would look at a sixty foot circumference tree and think, “My god, that’s a huge tree!” and then I’d look away, and look back and think, of the same tree, “Oh, actually, it’s not so big. That other one over there is bigger.” Sixty feet around.

                The silence and peace in those woods was wonderful. The scale of those woods was wonderful. The feeling of those woods, the feeling that you were so small, the prickle at your back that meant that the trees kept going up and up and up, way further than they should have—that was a wonderful and scary feeling.

                I miss the Redwoods.

                Sometimes I think about all the places I could go, that I want to go—like the Redwoods, or Alaska—and right now I’m thinking of all the places I could go while I’m actually in a place that I could go. I’m here, in a place, New Zealand, thinking of other places, Redwoods.  Sometimes thinking about traveling is actually better than the traveling itself, and sometimes remembering traveling is better than traveling. I think it’s more rare than you think for the actual moment of traveling to be better than the anticipation or the memory of it.

                But if you didn’t do the travel then you wouldn’t have the anticipation or the memory, and you wouldn’t be different afterwards, and you wouldn’t be able to move onto the next place.

               

 Actually, the Christmas cake turned out all right. We ate it for lunch today, Boxing Day (we have Boxing Day in America--look on your calendar! It's just the day after Christmas Day), and it was fine tasting. Gay said it was a lighter cake than she was used to. I'm not sure if she liked it or not.

      I feel as though I would have loved for it to be possible to luxuriate in the feeling of the types of photos that you see here, but the imagined feelings and the actual feelings aren't really the same. And the intended feelings aren't the same either.
              But it was a good Christmas, all considering. It was a new type of Christmas. New Foods, new people, new types of presents. It's always good to shake things up.

These flowers were outside Grandy's nursing home. 

        I hope your Christmas was healthy and happy and that you didn't get into too many screaming fights with your relatives. If you felt like you had to just escape out of some sort of crowded situation--I feel you! You are not alone! If you felt like you wanted everyone to stay longer--I'm sorry, I cannot empathize with that at all, I have never felt like that in my life. For those of you who had a white Christmas, I'm sorry to have missed it, but as you can see I sort of had the exact opposite, which I'll have to be content with. Many thanks for those of you who have been reading along with me, and many greetings for to those of you who are just starting!


 Cheers!

Christmas Day Evening, 2012, near Invercargill, NZ. 

(Note: when I post an update I notify Facebook and my parents. If you would like to be notified via email along with my parents, please let me know if you would like to be added to that list.  It takes no effort at all and is my pleasure!)