The Minnesota Farm Woman

The CDC recently made an announcement that it was all right to dress up your chickens for Halloween. That was a real news flash for me, as I didn’t even know that there were costumes for chickens. In keeping with their tax-funded goal of disease prevention, the CDC also cautioned Americans not to kiss their chickens and to wash their hands after handling them. Another surprisingly strange American pastime is goat yoga. Now, I can hardly hold a yoga pose by myself and would certainly fall over if a goat was climbing on my back while I was doing the cat-cow pose. Apparently, it is helping small farmers make a little extra money, and although I probably won’t participate, I’m all for helping out small farms, so I won’t make fun of anyone but myself. Some farmers are also making extra money by charging city folk to cuddle with their cows. It is not exactly cow yoga, but is supposed to help them get back to nature and relieve stress, at least according to the internet, so it must be true. I don’t claim to have a real farm, but if anyone wants to get back to nature and help out a Farm Woman, I will only charge a small fee for you to cuddle with my chickens. You are more than welcome to relieve stress and save gym fees by raking dirty straw and hauling in 40 pound sacks of feed. My chickens will not be dressed in costumes and won’t be hard to recognize because they are the only chickens in the county who don’t lay eggs. Unfortunately, I am the only Farm Woman in the county who has to purchase both 40 pound sacks of chicken feed and eggs. You may cuddle or practice yoga with the chickens, but please don’t kiss them on the lips. Whatever you decide to do, don’t forget to wash your hands!

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You know how it is. In the late summer and fall, we stock up for winter. People have been doing it for generations, but I sometimes wonder if I once lived another life during the Great Depression. I canned and froze green beans. I picked spaghetti squash from the garden. There are only three, but since HE won’t touch it, there are plenty of meals there, because they are the biggest I’ve ever seen. I shredded, drained, and froze many bags of zucchini for soups and baking. HE won’t touch that, either, but what he doesn’t know can’t hurt anything, right? I bought a quarter beef, raised by a local farmer. I cleaned my three small freezers, stacking it neatly in the space I had upstairs and in the small deep freeze in the basement. I was gifted many packages of venison, which we love, so I found room for that. I peeled, cored, and sliced apples for winter crisps, frozen in zipper bags. I bid on two halves of a pig at a silent auction, and won them both. I picked up the pig at the local butcher’s last week, all 202 pounds of him. As I lugged the boxes in, I started to panic. How in the HECK was I going to fit 202 pounds of meat into my limited amount of freezer space? How was I going to pack it so that when HE reaches in the freezer to take out his favorite ice cream, it all won’t come tumbling down like a house of cards? Ingenuity, I tell you. Farm Woman ingenuity, organization, and a few naughty words thrown in for good measure. (That happened when I dropped a package of frozen pork chops on my foot.) I managed, through creative stacking, to get everything in except for half a ham. Fifteen pounds worth of half a ham, to be exact. Guess what we are having for Sunday dinner, and it’s not even a holiday? We will probably have ham for leftovers Monday and Tuesday as well, and perhaps even ground ham for lunchtime sandwiches. Whether sliced or ground, leftover ham freezes well. I’d like to freeze the leftovers, but unfortunately, there’s no more room.

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HE and I drove to the big city for an appointment, and I was surprised that he wanted to stop somewhere to buy shoes. Be still my heart! I eagerly offered a suggestion as to where to stop, anticipating that I would do a little shoe shopping myself. Did I need shoes? The answer to that question is that I ALWAYS need shoes, and since I was born to parents who both had big feet, I am blessed to be a size eleven, so can’t buy them just anywhere. This particular store often carries a few size elevens in styles and colors that weren’t too awful. Those of us with big feet don’t want to stand out in the crowd with garish colors or styles. I quickly browsed, looking for black, low-heeled, air-cushioned insoles, and size eleven. I found a pair and quickly tried them on. Perfect. Now to look around some more…but HE was done. Done in four minutes, and ready to check out. NOBODY is done shoe shopping in four minutes, except HIM. Did he even try them on? Did he look at his feet in the special foot mirror that sits low to the ground? Front, back, and side views? Did he wonder if they would fit with all his socks, or just the heavier socks? Does he perhaps need some new socks, too? Did he check to see if they come in other colors? Did they make his feet look too big? Did he ask a friend or even a random person in the shoe aisle what they thought? Sigh. Men are so simple. I gathered up my size elevens and followed him out the door.

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