Slowdown Farmstead

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Full written essay, including comments and additional images, can be accessed via the homepage.

Here’s part one of your questions answered. I should have the second part out early this week. Thank you for such thoughtful and interesting questions. I had fun answering them. Hopefully the answers are satisfactory for one and all.

We’re a hive of industry over here. Saturday (that will be today when this goes out) is the annual bowman competition that my husband, Troy, started a few years ago. Teams of men come here to compete in a grueling competition that includes running through our woods with sandbags and bows strapped to their bodies and pulling sleds full of whatever weighs enough to torture. They do a series of sprints, each two kilometres in length. Then, along the course, there are targets of animals set up that they have to sucessfully hit on the bullseye. Wounding the “animal” (made of foam or wood) is a deduction in points. The idea is to put themselves through extreme struggle and then still be able to hunt with success. After each lap through the woods, the teams come back to the staging area and have to pull heavy things, do pull ups and push ups and… you know, it’s really tough to watch all these half naked bucks running around with their sweaty muscles popping, but alas, we, the audience, endure.

Beyond the competition are the the wives and little kids that fill up that audience. It’s a really fun time to see new babies born and to visit with each other every year. And it’s so incredibly fulfilling to see such a wonderful, good-natured, supporting group of sound men bonding and laughing together. We need more of that, I think. Obviously, Troy, thought so, too. That’s why he started this competition during Covid when the world was being shut down.

This will be the final year for the bowman competition. My fingers are crossed that Troy and our dear friend, Andrew (his teammate in all things) win first place, again, for the finale. They’re the old guys and yet they’ve won first place three times. It would be nice to see him walk away with first for the last year this will be running (on our farm at least). Both of our daughters and our granddaughter have arrived to cheer on their beloved papa and “Buddha” (as our granddaughter has dubbed him).

So, along with butchering and food preserving tasks, there is the utmost prioritized jobs that rule over it all. These include reading as many books as our granddaughter requests. We also must milk the cow together, visit the apple tree endlessley, make ice cream and then do it again, play in the bathtub and check for chicken eggs seventeen times a day. Most important.

So, please enjoy this audio Q&A. As I said, I will return early in the week with part two when I will wrangle up the mister to help answer some of the questions you had for him.

Have a beautiful weekend everyone,

Tara ❤️

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Check out the full written version for commenting and a bunch more of these wonderful drawings of occupations from the 15th and 16th century. They’re so much fun.

In amongst a week of tasks and to-dos, the most marvellous little mice, invisible to all but my heart, marched into my life bearing backpacks overloaded with secrets and quiet stories that jostled me from the mundane. Little mice, smaller than a grain of sand. Don’t bother looking for them, your eyes aren’t cut out for the task. Never mind expecting proof of their existence, they’re light as a feather and when they come, you won’t even notice the weight of their feet on your skin.

I found myself looking at all the tasks at this time in my life and muttering something about “too much, too much, it’s all just too much”. I plopped down on my kitchen floor and lay nose-to-nose with my slumbering pup. He opened his tired eyes and lifted his arm, (or would that be a “front leg” in a dog) to lay it across my shoulder. He hugs me like that sometimes. So I stayed there in the affection of a good dog, both of us breathing into each other’s faces, and that gave those helpful little mice time to catch up to me. Out of the floorboards and up and over my tangle of hair, they came. An army on a mission to remind me of what it’s all about with a good and proper dosing of whimsy.

All week I evaded the mice. And the singing birds. And the moonlight serenades of wailing coyotes and calling owls. My focus needed to be on logistics for a book soon to be released to the wilds. There is food to put away for a year! Meetings to attend, emails to be sent. There are urgent, pressing tasks of life demanding my attention. There are dates to write down in an agenda, important appointments to keep. There are reservations to be made with plastic cards with looming expiry dates. And soon the plastic cards will issue me a demand for the payment of their loaned funds and I must, hastily and without delay, send them money. I am a serious adult in this serious world! I must complete and organize and take this grown-up stuff with the utmost solemnity it deserves!

There is no time to waste on making up silly songs. One mustn’t pretend or imagine. That little frog that could fit its whole family on my thumbnail is not speaking to me. The apple tree is only blowing in the wind, not whistling a song. One must plan! One must demand tangible proof! We must measure and verify, speak to show our prowess, hold opinions that would pass scientific rigour, and if they don’t, be able to back them up with those of experts that do the heavy lifting for us. We polish the prickly bits of our personality off to be pleasant in presentations and swallow our own grit to be smooth enough for consumption.

Mice don’t care. Not the invisible, smaller than a grain of salt kind anyway.

Magical mice just want you to slow down enough to notice the pretty little packages they leave behind. They want to show you the small things that you might not notice in the macro world of seriousness. They grab onto the reigns of your heart and steer you into mysterious worlds that only ask for your instinct, a hunch, your good old, (un)common sense. They offer delicious morsels that they carry around strapped on their legs and they squeal with delight, “Taste it!”, and it’s so small that if you just throw it down your gullet you miss it altogether, so you sit with it and let it melt on your tongue and you notice what food really tastes like again because you had forgotten in the big, complicated, fast-moving, machine-world that insists that food is just fuel anyway.

Phew!

That giant, outside world that insists everything is fuel. Well, a mouse army devoted to light-hearted silliness doesn’t comprehend such things. They lead by example and it’s an example I happily join in on. So we march about singing songs, wildly out of formation, climbing apple trees to peek into the secrets hiding in their knots, having a nap on the earth so the birds can lull us into la petit mort, the little death. Maybe when the big death comes, the real one, my soul will be primed and the birds will remember me well enough to send me away with that same song. Never know. Worth a shot.

Maybe you don’t have magical mice. Maybe you have magical dragonflies or winds that whisper to your heart. Maybe, like me, you sometimes find your mice in the shape of an old milk cow, or a baby calf, or a round and soft child that loosens the tethers to the made up fictions of a world and reminds you of the delights of a soul unburdened. I hope so. I hope you got it, or they, or whatever it is. Something away from all this somber and serious and I-must-labour-under-the-heaviness-of-this-world business and not enough silly and two-steppin’ and being courageous enough to play the fool for the delight of others.

There’s too many grown-ups in this place.

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hey folks, please head on over to the written version of this essay to leave your comments or read the comments from other readers.

Leftover whey, beef vs. dairy cows, staying cool in summer, my thoughts on “contagion is a myth” theory, starting over and big life stuff, cow mastitis, macros and tracking, Troy’s experience adding in more carbs, what I look for in a fermentation crock, sugar vs. honey in preserving, and getting a home gym going.

p.s. I always think of things I wish I had remembered when answering these questions and the whey one was one of them! I have jars and jars of freeze dried whey on my shelves - literally “whey protein powder”. Tucked away for those moments I might need it and when traveling/camping/armageddon.

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.