TGF: A Farm Farewell

It's not easy to be green in a Canadian winter. Just look outside to see why--everything is brown, grey, and an occasional dirty white.

I struggle with this, with how you encourage a child to forge bonds with the non-human environment during those months of the year when the non-human environment can easily kill. We already have had one day this fall when the temperatures dipped to -18C with a wind chill. That's cold.

Yet I think that this bond needs to be based on respect, and the non-human environment is in all cases almost certainly stronger than any person, so learning to avoid the bitterly cold is not a bad thing. I think the opposite would be worse--teaching that winter in Canada is a fuzzy-bunny season of snowmen and sledding would be to Disneyfy what, until very recently, was a brutal season. Even a hundred years ago working and middle class families struggled all winter, when the money for fuel ran out in December and left them cold until Spring.

So we haven't been getting out much. It's been too bloody cold. And while the Life Lessons may be entirely positive it doesn't make for a stirring narrative.

But last weekend the temperature climbed to +7C, warm enough to leave the necks of our winter coats unzipped and make do without mittens and gloves for short periods. So we made our last trip to the local farm, which closes just before Christmas and reopens in May.

The weather was just warm enough to thaw the mud, and all of us got our blue jeans spattered between the car and the farm's door. We bought a bag of cabbage for the rabbits (fifty cents) and went first to the open barn, which for some reason we'd never before visited. Inside were more sheep and goats, two truly humongous turkeys--the rest we'd seen in the Spring must have been slaughtered already for Thanksgiving and Christmas, a few cows, and approximately twenty chickens.

"Look, Frances. Here are the chickens who make our eggs."

"They say 'cluck cluck,'" said Frances.

OK, it wasn't the reaction I was going for. But I was happy to see them, since lingering in the back of my mind was that I was taking their egg advertising at face value and assuming that the free-range chickens must be around somewhere. And here they were, cluck-clucking, gathering at the fence to beg for a snack, beaks and tails and feathers intact. Healthy happy chickens, unafraid of people.

After feeding our cabbage to the bunny rabbits, we slipped and slid back into the store. Onions, garlic, honey from their own bees, butter tarts, a few dozen eggs, ground beef and a roast, and eggnog.

Happiness, for this holiday fanatic, is finding a locally-made eggnog supply two weeks before Yule.

~~~~~

We've been putting peanuts out the back door again, to watch the squirrels and the blue jays come down. It works; every time we are rewarded by black squirrels playing tag in the snow or a flash of blue as a jay swoops in and away.

I'm trying to decide if it means I'm a wimp if, every time a squirrel scampers through the snow to snatch a peanut and run back to its nest, I wince at the thought of its cold, aching paws. But it's probably too much to knit them all booties.

Posted by Andrea at December 12, 2006 7:19 AM under The Green Family

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