Farming & Philosophy Or:

How I Learned to Love the Chicken

(I was honored to have been invited to speak at the annual conference of the Ciceronian Society this past weekend. Below is a formal version of the talk. Cheers.)

* * *

I hope you’ll forgive me. This talk will likely feel far more existential than metaphysical. My hope is to draw a line from the head to the heart, and highlight the possibilities that farming presents to philosophers as I highlight a journey from ignorance to something approaching wisdom. If you’ll permit me, I’d like to begin with a poem I wrote within a few months after my wife and I started homesteading, to set the scene.

Culling (or Killing a Chicken)

my children spied first the hen
half turned and fallen under the roost
eggbound with folded over loamy comb

taking her aside
out of view of the others
and shooing my own brood indoors
who wished but could not bear to watch

i fumbled with the knife
only poorly sharped and uneven 
designed for some other task
and foreign in my unapprenticed hand
untrained if not uncalloused
and clinging still halfheartedly
to cuffs and collars crisp and pressed

		i am no farmer
		and make no quick work

all at once and imprecise
i incised
no sliced
no sawed
no shouldered the blade down
through her smooth neck
and on and on 
into the rich black soil
past flesh and bone 
and body and blood
to be certain
as her colorless talons
scratched an epitaph
on the ground 
indecipherable 
in the waning
evening light
* * *

When people ask how my wife and I ended up living on my grandparent’s small hobby farm almost nine years ago, especially after learning that neither of us grew up on one, I would often tell them it was accidental. And then, almost as an apology, I’d begin a syllogistic explanation of the relevant circumstances and then proceed to justify the logic of my decision.

But over time, I realized that the seeming strangeness of my response was far less strange than the strangeness of the question: that it should seem odd for grown-up progeny to inherit the physical places of their overgrown parents. When in history did such things become the exception? Ten minutes ago? 

I’d spent many a summer vacation on the farm as a kid. It was the highlight of our family’s annual road trip from Utah “back east”, which for my parents meant crossing the Mississippi, though we only rarely crossed the Ohio. My memories are scant but vivid: spying the hens in layer boxes and daring to reach under their plumes to snag eggs; watching my grandfather walk from one barn to the other carrying forty pounds of water in each hand while his corn cob pipe dangled from the corner of his mouth or poked out from his breast pocket; the smell of bacon ends drifting up the shag-carpeted stairs and Gram dropping fresh blueberries from a neighbor’s vines into pancakes made from scratch.

Then I became a man. But instead of putting away childish things, I retraced the memories of my childhood and brought them back to life.

Sarah and I were looking for a place to begin a life together at the same time that my grandmother’s life was slowly but surely but peacefully coming to an end. She was in excellent health, which she attributed above all to raw goat’s milk, but had been widowed the year before Sarah and I were married. After Grandpa died, Gram –– whose life had been slowly drained over the previous ten years during which my grandfather, who was already thorny to begin with, slowly lost his mind to Alzheimer’s –– stopped doing all the things she really loved. No more tennis or cribbage with the other gray haired matriarchs; no more hikes out west with her pack goats; no more patterned vacuuming with the altar society on Tuesday mornings at Ascension Lutheran. 

She did keep milking the dairy goats. And she kept up making cheese. 

She lived on for another five years afterward before dying in an unexpected flash. Those five years were a gift beyond measure to us…to me, especially. With few exceptions, all of my knowledge of farming is native: everything I know about it came from her.

The gift was mutual, I think. I recall a tearful conversation I had with my old man after Gram died, when he wondered aloud whether she would have lived her last years with such fire if Sarah and I hadn’t moved in. 

I suppose, in some small way, there was life in us, and that life became Gram’s light.

Now look. I agreed to help out on the farm, but I never intended to be her unhired hand. I was happy to mow and move heavy things around and come to the rescue in a pinch, but I weren’t interested in committing to a way of life. But then, a few days after Thanksgiving, I woke up early and happened to peek out the bedroom window just in time to see Gram trudging to the barn through six inches of fresh snow. And I thought to myself, “I can’t not help.” So I bundled up and headed outside.

Within a few months, the chicken coop was filled with layer hens again. And a few months after that, we raised our first feeder pigs, which I secretly named Pelagius and Marcion (a buddy of mine gave me the idea of naming hogs after heretics). I spent an entire summer mending broken fences while Gram sat at a new kitchen table in her old farm house teaching my wife and first child how to shell, then blanch, then freeze peas harvested from our resurrected garden.

You can learn how to shell peas from YouTube, but YouTube doesn’t have grandma’s hands or smile or the scent of her fabric softener or her wit or her wisdom.

As it turns out, my well-argued answer to the curious interlocutor’s original question only seemed unnatural because it was unnamed. In the end, it’s not really a hobby farm or a homestead: it’s just where we live. And what we inherited wasn’t primarily land or animals or out-buildings, but the soul of the family, passed along through time. 

It’s not easy. But it’s real. And perhaps there’s nothing more realer than shit, which is the topic of my next poem, entitled, “Mucking”

Mucking

Adam never shoveled shit in Eden—
But this son of Adam surely must.

Shoveling shit is a delicate art.
Thrust the fork shoal, you’ll get back only straw—
Pitch too deep and what you heave falls apart
And the shit weight breaks your back and your will 
And I’ve cracked a fork handle or two
Piling high the dunghill in the load cart. 

But it’s a greasy and thick and nectarous 
Swill for small creeping things to ravage and till.

At first, I’d cut through the muck with a spade,
Spanning a shovel-blade wide and two long;
But that cumbersome step befits a hack,
A novel unrehearsed apprenticeship:
I’ve four stalls to tack before chores, and I thirst.

A fork makes quick work if you know how to wield
Its measured out length from shoulder to tine,
Which makes for a seven-paced pitch in the field.

I am a bricklayer of black loamy gold.
I am Pharaoh and the sons of Joseph.
Gaze on the Romas and new, leggy does;
Look at the sweet corn that blots out the sun;
Attend to the hogs who bark for their milk, 
Pavloved by the clang of the pail on the trough.

This is my tiny paradise, squared-off.

Still, it’s mostly shoveling shit and slime—
The dust of the earth to which I’ll return
Tomorrow morning and late in the fall
And early in spring to the dung in the stalls.
And then on the day when my own pitching time calls.
* * *

People often ask: is it worth it? I’m proud to say that as a business venture, we’ve lost money every single year. But honestly, I don’t spend too much time thinking about that: we’re investing in eternity. And soon enough, I’ll be dead, and Social Security will run out, and my grandchildren – should they hold fast to the faith of their fathers – will be tossed into the gulags or martyred in the public square. How much will my 401k be worth to them, then? 

So, to steal John Senior’s phrase, we try to live “a cheerful poverty”.

Every choice is a tradeoff of time and sweat. Hobby farming, like all really valuable things, is completely useless. It’s nonsense. People ask, how do you make money? We don’t. It’s a hobby farm, and as far as that goes, I might as well have taken up sailing or sword fighting. Leisure loses its value the moment it begins being viewed as instrumental. 

A philosopher wanders in search of wisdom; a farmer wades right into it –– very Aristotelian, I suppose, getting his hands dirty rooting around for the forms in the things.

But the barn serves as a little monastic school of the real, especially in wintertime. (It’s still winter back home in Michigan: we just got eight inches of snow). The barn is quiet and cold and simple and aromatic enough to remind me of what reality actually smells like. It’s a form of Heraclitian contemplation, where I can listen to the essences of things. The animals make the passing moments familiar and uncomplicated: they know what they’re about, especially at kidding time.

Kidding

There was a break of clouds
enough to warm and sun
the drowsy midday drear.

The doe stood near,
nesting a corner with
split yellowed hooves,

then braced with arched spine
as her abdomen rippled
along the barn wall.

My daughter marveled it it all,
at the loins stretching
to pass an angular head

and one soft toe and pastern then the
other one and the rest in a whoosh —
then two more kids just the same.

My sons darted in and
out, dipping their fingers
in the blue slung bucket

and asking my mother
about the viscid blood
on the doe’s cannons and hocks.

The dam nosed the grain 
to find corn and slurped
a dram of warm honey water,

then licked and lapped her
babies’ frames, pushing their ears
down with her tongue

as they made ready to stand
on spindly legs
while she went to work
laboring again.
* * *

Chores are a meditation on the mundane. Meanwhile, the glow from the kitchen window and the warmth of the fire beckon, where Sarah and Benedict are chatting in coos and whispers as soup simmers on the stovetop. Quaint, right? Like something out of Thomas Kinkade painting.

But then the older kids come rushing in, bundled up, red-cheeked, laughing and breathing out the Spirit, creating worlds of their own from snow and straw and sticks and memory, spinning yarns fit for the fireside. And that’s when the painting really comes to life, when reality turns to romance.

So when people ask about our life on the farm and the unpredictable crucible of ordinary time, I’ve found myself more and more describing it as an adventure, which is to say: it’s a glorious, disastrous, slow-motion highlight reel trainwreck of rollicking and unexpected joy, and we’re all of us hanging on for dear life. 

But we wouldn’t have it any other way, even when we wish it were.

I suppose it’s only natural for children to reject the ways of their parents. But if those ways lead to peace, even if not to prosperity, perhaps more and more grandchildren will wise up, even if their parents don’t.

Upon the death of my other grandparents, my family asked me to write poems in eulogy. For both of my grandfathers, I spent a few hours with pen and paper and words. And they were good, and quaint, and hit the mark. Writing Gram’s took three years. And if you’ll permit me, I’ll end with it.

E.Laine 

1.
Gram traced a lane from her house to the barn
Twice a day. Curious, I measured it once
When the snow was thick and skimmed with ice:
Sixty weighted sweating scoops sufficed enough
For her slight strides and feet to plow the bluff 
That’d formed overnight and over years and
up to the height of her marrowless hips: 
Got so that way from ten thousand such trips. 

Leaving the warmth of my wife and our bed,
I'd dress and then out to catch the barn lights 
overhead and get the dog fed and wait
For Grandma's mucks to trudge close past the gate.
She'd stomp the snow from each boot, and the cold,
Before greeting me with a morning hello.

2.
For the first year, I watched and hauled buckets
And emptied woven feed bags and drug hay
And leaned like a broom against the door jamb,
Rubbing a rut in the curve of a mug
Or nipping a dram from a dripping glass
As our words passed over the Hamby machine 
From which I’d strain milk into jars and then
Clean round with a brush, then clean round again.

When spring came round I learned to milk by hand
For kids weaned from their moms and bound to us.
Gram taught me how to measure milk in pounds
And how to raise the garden from the dead, 
And why square bales were better than the rounds.
I listened in, and followed where she led.

3.
It took us three full years of dancing fits
Before I quitted stepping on her toes.
We only learned one simple wordless waltz
Set to the music her husband’d composed
And drummed with his feet as he hummed from
Barn to barn with a pipe jammed in his mouth
And forty pounds of water in each hand.
I still feel more like a piece of the band,

Though the does have learned to skip when I command.
“Come on, girls; let’s go.” That was Gram’s one verse.
And when I pitch it like she did, just so,
Standing at the fence where I rehearse,
They lift their conic ears up from the grass
And muster rank and file and doe by doe.

4.
She died around ten on my wife's birthday–
One sleep before my second son turned three,
Surrounded by a crowd of sterile coats
And not her sons or their wives, and not me.

5.
I give her ghost twice daily grief for that,
Expecting me to somehow know this dance
And dying without warning me she would.
I woke like always and did the morning chores,
But she died indoors, so I never got the chance
to say goodbye.

6.
The nurse who led us to the morgue was shy
And said she needed time to ready things.
And warned us too that Gram looked beautiful.
But she was dull and puffy blue, and though
We leaned in close and rubbed and kissed her hands 
And forehead: pretending doesn’t suit the dead.

7.
The day we buried her was cold and plain.
The waning winter sun peeked long around
And lit dried flowers resting pressed to stones.
While Father drenched the ground with holy drops 
And his cassock's hem and musty black cope's train,
My children strained to whisper as they stared
And asked about the hole and piles of rocks

8.
And how their gram could fit into the box.
I stood and watched but only cried wind tears
Like an apprentice with dust in the air.
My cousin doffed his hat and placed the urn
With care and dad's free hand below the freeze,
While the breeze pushed off the final rites and prayers.
Gram always said “I love you,” without the “I”–
Which I’ll add when I greet her after I die.