With apologies to my sister Beth, lover of horses and all things horse-y.

If you enjoy this post, head on over to my other blog, Foolery, for some old barn photos. Hurry, though; I don't think the barn can stand much longer.

The horses are back.

Last year my dad leased barn and corral space to a guy who boards Canadian Standard Bred brood mares for the winter. A new group of pregnant mares arrived the other day, about 25 in all. They have access to pasture right now, but Chas has already started feeding them hay.

Once a day Chas takes the girls and walks over to the dairy, through the idle and deteriorating barns out to the west pastures and hay barns. Sunday I went with them in the late afternoon and took my camera.

Here's the hay . . .

. . . and here's some more . . .

. . . and here's a cut bale to load by the armload into the back of the pickup.

The pickup. Ah, that's a good place to set my camera and sunglasses while I'm throwing hay, except that Chas locked it. Chas? Why did you lock the pickup? Can I have the keys?

The keys. Here they are . . .

. . . and there they stayed. Usually Chas loads the flakes into the pickup, then drives out into the pasture while the girls kick and throw the flakes onto the ground. No truck, *sigh*.

Chas monkey-climbed to the top of one stack and threw down three bales to the waiting horses below. The girls and I stayed on the ground, hauling armloads of hay to the front of the barn. 3 1/2 bales makes a pretty big stack of flakes.

The horses were getting pretty hungry by this time. They're extremely nasty to each other, and a lot of kicking and snarling was going on. It did make things interesting walking the hay out to them, one armload at a time. I finally made the girls stay in the barn because I was sure they would get kicked.

See any ears flattened back? There were a lot of hungry, pregnant, bitchy horses with bad attitudes that afternoon.

There were some terribly curious and jealous cows just across the fence as well.

Everyone calmed down and it was time for us to go home to our own dinner.

We watched out for meadow muffins, too. There are so many after only a week that it was hard not to step in them.

There. My requisite horse post for the year. Now I can get back to cows and chickens.

I heard the noise and was standing at the sliding glass door before I was fully awake. Children? Cat fight? No -- wait, I know this sound -- CHICKENS!

(Photo stolen from MyPetChicken.com, a great source for all things chicken)

Our little pullets, in their coop at the edge of the yard, were cackling to beat the band, at precisely the moment that the sun burst over the Sierras and turned my bedroom orange. Humph, just chickens, I thought, and then I was alarmed again. Why are they cackling? Gosh they're loud -- are they out? Is there a coyote in the yard?!

"Mama, Mama!"

My thoughts were interrupted as Smedley burst into the room. We talked right over each other.

"Honey, I think --"

"The chickens are making --"

"-- the chickens are out!"

"-- a LOT of noise!"

Oh.

"Would you put on your --"

"I'm gonna go out and --"

"-- shoes and check --"

"-- see why they're clucking!"

"-- on them?"

Oh. Okay, thanks.

A few minutes later Smedley was back, breathless. "They're all in their pen, Mama! They're fine."

"No coyote then?"

"I didn't see anything," she said. "They're just having a big ol' conversation, that's all!"

Smedley tends to see the world in terms of talking and not talking.

"Were there any eggs?"

"No, I didn't see any eggs."

"Well, Grandpa built them nesting boxes, which is probably where the eggs would be* . . . did you look in there?"

"No -- be right back!"

And away she raced for a second look. A minute later she was back with the report. "No eggs in the nesting boxes, Mama!" she barked.

"Well, thank you, Smed, for checking," I answered. I hadn't thought about a possible egg supply just yet; weren't these pullets just babies the other day? But no, they seem to be almost fully-grown hens, almost ready to pop out an egg a day. And MAN are they loud! It's been a long time since we had chickens, and I'd forgotten what a ruckus they make. No wonder cities have No-Chicken Ordinances. Just wait until the ladies actually lay eggs; the pre-dawn cacophony will be a daily alarm. These had better be some awe-inspiring eggs we're sponsoring.

I hope Chas didn't get the industrial-sized eggs-o-plenty at Costco today.

(Photo stolen from these guys)

*Not necessarily; chickens sometimes lay their eggs on the ground or on ledges until they get the hang of their nesting boxes. At least, MY childhood chickens sometimes made those idiotic choices. Chickens are not known to be MENSA candidates.

(Posted concurrently at my other blog, Foolery)

(Originally posted on February 3, 2009 at my other blog, Foolery)

I grew up on a dairy; that is well- (shorthand for "overly-") documented. Dad loves cows, and continues to collect them.

My sister is a horse fanatic.

My brothers and I raised chickens.

With 70 acres of land, lots of barn and corral space, and a father extremely knowledgeable in all things bovine, not one of us ever raised a steer for 4-H or FFA (an activity which, let's face it, is really a license to print money come sale time) or any other market animal. Why not? Were we idiots? Well, I'll come back to that question.

We didn't raise livestock because 4-H and FFA animals don't get to ride home in the truck with you after the fair. No sirree; they go on to places like Bob's Big Boy, Kibbles & Bits and, heaven forbid, Taco Bell, to become Extreme Value Meals.

Poor Fluffy.

But chickens have a Get Out of Abattoir Free card. They have return tickets from the fair. So my brothers and I raised ornamental bantam (miniature) chickens, and gave them names like Cluck, Brewster, and Fluffy. Poor Fluffy. (Pet names have never been a LaGrone family strong suit.)

But do you know what it takes for Fluffy to bring home the blue ribbon? Well, I'm gonna tell you. As much as I remember, anyway.

First, the chicken must be healthy, and healthy looking. No scaly leg (a condition I battle myself in these dry, dry months); you've got to grease up the chicken's legs. (At least we didn't have to wax them.) If I remember right we used Vaseline on their legs, combs, and wattles, which made them look plump, shiny and very rosy.

If you're gonna enter that bird in the fair you'll need to dust it regularly for mites and other nasty bugs. My brother Mantel Man usually was in charge of dusting with Malathion, which is why he still walks funny to this day.

But you're not done. Beaks must be kept trimmed, so we used nail clippers. This is every bit as tricky as it sounds with a feisty bantie rooster, or even a hen. So to calm the chicken you've got to cradle it on one hand, with the wings held down with your thumb and pinkie finger. If you do this right, it's very easy to invert the chicken with one hand -- that is, hold it upside down -- while you trim its beak and talons (claws, fangs, nails -- whatever they're called). This is apparently calming to a Bird of Very Little Brain, and it's fairly easy to groom them once they're calm.

And, for the pièce de résistance, you must bathe your chicken, especially if it's white.

I'm not kidding.

In the utility sink. Yes, bathe. Go on, you're wasting time. Chop chop.

Have your sink full enough to partially submerge the chicken but not so full that you can't find Fluffy in the bubbles. Water should be the same temperature you'd use for a baby. A very gentle shampoo is best, but if your chicken is white, get a shampoo with bluing in it, like you might use on a (drop-kick dog) white poodle.

before

after

See what a difference (PhotoShop) bluing makes? In theory?

The chicken may try to get away, so have the door closed. But don't worry -- they can fly only a little bit. Did I mention you should clip their wings first? Oh, sorry. You should have done that.

Rinsing the chicken may actually be more challenging than lathering it, but you'll get the hang of it. Plus, that bird won't have much fight left after it's flown around the laundry room a few times and smacked the window.

Lightly towel dry the chicken. You'll probably want to use the one-hand-upside-down method as described above. Then get the blow drier from the -- what? You didn't have your blow drier out and plugged in already? Well, that was a mistake, because now you have to carry your wringing-wet bird through the house to your bathroom to retrieve the drier. Please don't use the hot or high settings, or your

will get all

and you don't need that. Gently blow dry your chicken. It could help to have some soulless European house music thumping in the background. I know that's how the big-time hair dressers do it.

Those are the basics for getting your chicken ready for the fair. Next time, Judging Day Etiquette: How Not to Be a Backstage Mother. Thank you for your time. Also? We are idiots, very likely.

(Photo stolen from these guys)

This is Annie Bidwell, or, if you'd like to be formal about it, Annie Kennedy Bidwell. Around Northern California she is most famous for the following things:

~ Generously donating about ten square miles of land to the city of Chico, for a municipal park (now known, of course, as Bidwell Park)
~ Knowing a lot of influential people of her day, including three U.S. presidents, John Muir, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony
~ Being a teetotaler, and casting a long, alcohol-free shadow upon the land she donated to her town (much to the chagrin of some golfers at Bidwell Golf Course)
~ Having a really big pink house

(Photo stolen from these guys)

But there's one story about Annie Bidwell that you don't know. It's a tiny story, admittedly; most of my family have forgotten it. But I remember it, because the first time I heard the story, it made Annie Bidwell a real person to me. My own tiny link to history.

My grandfather, Frank LaGrone, was born in 1903. When he was about seven, he and his little sister Stella were on the lawn of Annie Bidwell's mansion, for some reason. They had probably been playing in Big Chico Creek, or over at Children's Park (just across the creek from the mansion, and also a Bidwell endowment). They peeked into the carriage house to see the dusty and forlorn horse-drawn carriages, decaying in the dark after the advent of the automobile.

And as they were investigating the carriage house, Annie Bidwell herself appeared. What did the great lady do? Shoo away the tiny trespassers? Scold them for snooping?

She gave them cookies.

Annie Kennedy Bidwell (1838 - 1918)

Henry Frank LaGrone (1903 - 1990)

This is a member of my dad's cat collection. (It used to be my mom's cat collection, but Dad felt she was neglecting them by feeding them only twice a day.) This is Pinkie.

He's window shopping with his neighbors, the bird collection: zebra finches, parakeets, and red rumped parakeets, or some name like that. The bird collection is continuously fed.

As far back as I can remember my dad has raised birds. There were always chickens, but not necessarily the kind you think of when you think of a farm or dairy (big layers like Plymouth Rocks, White Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds); Dad preferred the fancy bantam chickens.

(Photo stolen from this site)

He also raised white doves and fancy pigeons, the above-mentioned finches and parakeets, as well as love birds and cockateels. Dad has always planned and built all of his chicken coops and aviaries himself, which he has at least painted to match the house, or I think Mom would kill him.

I recently sat down with my dad, armed with a note pad and pen to get the fine details of one of his childhood stories. As often happens with Dad, the story began in English and ended in Swahili, so to speak; we covered a lot of ground and the rabbit trails were many and far-flung. But I learned something I thought was significant, and I'd like to share it with you.

When Dad was 14 his family moved to Hawaii for two years for my grandfather's government job. Since this is the larger story I'm working on I'll save that for another day; the move home is what caught my ear as Dad related his story. They had to move to Oahu (1948) and back (1950) by ship since commercial air travel was in its infancy, and remote Hawaii may as well have been the North Pole in those days. The government paid for everything, including moving their furniture. The only hang-up of their plans was the ship's policy about not transporting live fish in fish tanks, so 16-year-old David, my future dad, made arrangements with someone on a cargo ship to transport his new pet fish home to San Francisco, where David would go to pick them up later.

But David was able to take his parakeets onto the Lurline for the voyage home to Berkeley, in their cage, in the family's quarters.

I thought about that for a minute. "You had parakeets back then, Dad?" I asked him.

"Yeah," he answered. "I bought them for a quarter apiece in Honolulu, and raised them while we lived there."

"Had you ever seen parakeets before you moved to Hawaii?" I asked.

"Well . . . I guess not," Dad answered, a little impatient with this line of questioning, since we were really supposed to be talking about traveling on the cruise ship Lurline.

"And how about the tropical fish? Did people have tropical fish in Berkeley in those days?"

"No, I'd never seen a salt water tank before. This isn't important --"

"So you were probably the only person in your neighborhood to have tropical birds and fish. I would imagine your friends must have been fascinated by them. How did you keep them once you got them home?"

"Well, we had had a Victory Garden during the war, just like everyone else, and that included chickens. The chicken coop was empty, of course, when we moved back to Berkeley, so my dad helped me convert it to an aviary for the parakeets. I kept the fish tank on an old metal patio table in the corner of my bedroom. I must have gotten some kind of heater for it."

"Did you meet anyone else who raised tropical fish or birds?"

"Well, there was a guy in Alameda that the pet store people told me about. I used to go out to see him, and I bought some more birds from him. I started raising the birds and selling them to a high-end pet store in San Francisco. Every time I had birds to sell, my dad would take a cage of them on his lap for the bus ride into San Francisco where he worked, then at lunch he'd take them to the pet store and sell them for me. I got four dollars for each bird. I made $500 the first year, which was a good month's salary in those days, and $200 the second year. It started my college fund. But people don't want to know about this stuff!"

Maybe they don't, but maybe they do. In any case, I now have a better understanding of the origins of the menagerie that was always present in some combination, throughout my childhood and up to the present. I'm just thrilled to death that there were no snakes in Hawaii.

No finches, parakeets, or cats were harmed for this post.

Put aside what you may think you know about California weather; if you live in the California's Great Central Valley, including where I live in the northern part, you know that late fall through winter is Fog Season.

This is how I imagine London fog:

(Photo stolen from Homemade on Flickr)

This is the romantic version of fog, in a Bronte sisters sort of world:

(Photo stolen from vp_bsu on Flickr)

This is what fog looks like around here, and we call it tule (TOO-lee) fog:

(Photo stolen from Tony Dunn Photography -- a very talented local photographer who is SO worth checking out)

Honestly, though, when the tule fog is at its worst, it looks more like this:

and few people are apt to get their cameras out on such days, since it's pretty much pointless. Out in the country there are no streetlights, few houses to guide you as you creep down the dark roads, and even fewer passing cars. And there could be animals on the road -- dogs, cats, skunks, possums, heaven forbid cows. Satellite imagery shows you what we're dealing with, and it's no fun to drive in, especially on the freeways down near Fresno:

(Image stolen from these guys)

But I'm here to talk about splat fog. What? You say you've never heard of splat fog? Well, that's because my best friend Cheryl and I named it. It looks a little like this:

(Photo stolen from these guys)

. . . or this:

(Photo stolen from VillaRhapsody on Flickr)

. . . and it rides the earth's surface at about eye level. Cheryl and I call it splat fog.

When we were newly-legal drivers, Cheryl (who lived a couple of miles north of me) gave me a ride home one winter evening. As we turned down my road (known to those of us who live there as ground zero for fog) we could see bands of fog hanging above the road ahead of us. As we drove through it, the fog seemed to splat on the windshield, then slide unctuously up and over the roof of the car. It was like driving under a thick wool blanket, and we grimaced each time a band of the stuff "hit" the window, so solid did it look. We were giggling like kindergarteners, until we got halfway down the road and the splat fog mysteriously ended. "One more time!" one of us hollered, and Cheryl threw the car into reverse and backed up the road to do it again. We did it several more times, actually, backing up each time. I have no idea why backing up was the thing to do -- it was a very long way in reverse with only back-up lights to guide her -- but when you're 16 anything is possible, and all things are sensible.

While I have seen splat fog many times since that time, it's never been as spectacular as it was that night, and I have never again experienced it quite that way. I guess that's part of the magic of youth, and of charging through the world with your best friend.

(Photo stolen from Sarathine on Flickr)

Had a little drama yesterday that ended in tears. Not mine (this time), although I did consider it. Maybe I'll cry later (probably).

Headed over to feed Mom and Dad's cats, fish and cows Saturday morning before breakfast. On a working cattle ranch, "before breakfast" would be two hours before the sun comes up, but on The Pushing Water Ranch that's about 8:30. The girls and I were all bundled up, they in unmatched bright pink and green socks and such, I in my hideous old tweed coat and ridiculous warm hat and muffler. Yes, I said muffler. I know this isn't Antarctica but I am a weenie and I get COLD.

As we walked down the road toward the hay barn I saw a cow out on the road. Crud. A little black steer sneaked into Dad's east pasture several months ago, a fugitive from some other rancho, and he has figured out how to get in and out of the pasture at will, to eat the tender new green grass just outside the confines of his pasture fence. Dad's on vacation and he'll deal with it when he gets back, but in the meantime -- at least until the steer's true owners get off their hineys and come get him -- the little guy has a sweet deal, and his little game hasn't been a problem.

(It wasn't this little guy, but the culprit looks just like him.)

Until this morning. Apparently he brought some friends to the banquet this morning, and one of them, a large white-faced Hereford cow, was lumbering down the middle of the road toward the girls and me as we headed off to feed hay. I calmly pushed her back toward the weak spot in the fence through which I knew she'd made her breakout. As I did so, however, I noticed a few other cows way down the fenceline, grazing outside the fence -- FIVE others, to be exact. And just at that moment an old Ford Bronco came barreling up the road and pulled over. A woman I've never seen before jumped out of her car and almost sprinted toward me. She was lean and sinewy, and she bore the weather-lined face of a capable rancher type; probably a horse woman, I decided.

"THOSE YOUR COWS?" she hollered.

"Sort of," I waffled.

"WELL, YOU'RE GONNA NEED TO GET THEM BACK IN THE PASTURE, OR THEY'LL GET OUT ON THE MAIN ROAD, AND THEN THAT'LL BE BAD. LAW SUIT OR SOMETHIN'." These sentences came at me like machine gun fire. I'm thinking, Cows're out, lady -- it isn't an international incident. But okay, she's being helpful, and she thinks I'm totally new here. I mentally inventoried my appearance: silly hat and matching muffler, hideous coat, sweat pants, white tennis shoes. Two little girls with me dressed in pink, orange and purple. Yup, she thinks I'm new here.

"YA GOT A HUSBAND?" Whoa. What exactly does THAT mean?

"Uh, yeah . . . he'll be home about 2:30. But these aren't our cows; they're my dad's, and he's on vacation --"

"WELL, YOU SHOULD TELL THAT GUY TO GET HIS HORSE AND ROUND THEM UP. NO WAY YOU'RE GONNA GET THEM IN WITHOUT A HORSE." That guy? My husband? Or did she mean my dad -- the one who's not here -- and did she think he has a horse? I could have spent a long time giggling to myself over the visual image of either my husband or my father trying to herd cattle on a horse, but there was no time. This woman had probably been up since 4:00 drinking black coffee and fuming, and she was in a huge hurry, apparently.

"Yeah, I'll have to do that," I answered without irony. As nice and helpful as she truly was I just wanted her to go away, because I really didn't feel like explaining to her how grown people who raised cattle could actually do so without the company of horses. Or why I wasn't freaked out that the cows were out. I guess I'm a bit too Type B, or philosophical, or maybe I just have my head in the sand, but years of practical experience with cows getting out has taught me that they usually don't stray far from the herd. They want a taste of freedom, but more than that they want green grass. And they'll need water after they have their grass, so they usually stick pretty close to the water troughs.

So after a few more manic pronouncements this good samaritan jumped into her vehicle and drove on up the road. I decided to go feed the cows while I figured out my next move, so back we went in the direction of the hay barn.

As I walked I saw the Bronco screech to a halt way up the road by our neighbor Brian's house. Hmmmmm, I wonder what she's doing now? I thought. Maybe warning Brian that his lawn looks a little dry? From a quarter mile away I saw the woman jump out of her vehicle and BOLT into Brian's field and out of range of my sight. Weird. But I had cows to feed, so I turned down the driveway toward the hay barn.

Halfway down the driveway I heard a car approaching, and I turned to see the Bronco backing down the road -- backing a quarter mile? Really? -- so with a heavy heart I trudged back out to the road to see what else this crazed woman had identified as a potential threat to society. She launched herself from the car.

"YOUR NEIGHBOR UP THERE IS ON HIS HORSE, AND I TOLD HIM YOU'VE GOT COWS OUT. HE'S COMING DOWN TO HELP YOU."

"Oh, thank you! That was nice -- thanks for doing that!" I shouted.

"NO PROBLEM!" the woman yelled, and lunged for her vehicle and drove away. Wow. What would she be like on steroids? I wondered.

Sure enough, in a couple of minutes my neighbor Brian came down the road riding his horse. His girlfriend followed in her SUV. Brian rounded up the cows, and the three of us easily pushed them through the gate. We then took a look at the sagging fence section that the sneaky steer had used as his private exit. We shored it up in a half-as -- er, um, we jerry-rigged it with some old boards and tree limbs.

We walked back to the road where my daughters were supposed to be waiting for us; they weren't there. When Brian had pushed the cows toward us (his girlfriend and I waited near the gate to turn the cows in -- close enough to be able to head them off should they bolt, but far enough back to give the cows some breathing room and make them think it was their idea to go through the gate), my girls had actually started screaming as they saw cows running toward them. The cows were far enough away that the girls could potentially have confused them with stampeding dachshunds. "Really?" I said to myself as my daughters, the country girls, screamed at cows who were no threat to them whatsoever. "Is that how you think you act around cows?" So I had made my kids walk up the road to stand well out of the way of the murderous cows, and then the grown-ups set to work putting the escapees back in their pasture. But when we cow herders returned to the road, my daughters weren't there.

I stood in the road for a few minutes talking with my neighbors; Smedley and Sparky came sidling up. They were carrying their biggest stuffed animals, and Smedley had been crying. "What's the matter, honey?" I asked as Smedley burst into tears and approached me to be hugged. Turns out she was sure that something had happened to me when I didn't come back right away, because she couldn't see me. She took her four-year-old sister and unlocked Grandma's house, went in and fed the fish and the cats. Wow, responsibility through her tears -- I'm impressed. Then the girls ran home to our house and packed a couple of favorite stuffed animals, since Smedley was sure they were now orphans and would have to move away.

Upon hearing the word "orphans," Brian threw his head back and laughed. I, however, didn't even blink. I'm used to the drama.

"Honey," I reminded Smedley, "Did you think that Daddy wasn't coming back, too? He's just at work, you know." But Smedley must have had an answer for that, because after fetching the stuffed animals she had dragged Sparky over to another neighbor lady's house to tell her the sad tale. When the neighbor offered to call Daddy at work, Smedley must have felt her drama slipping out of her grasp, and opted instead to "go out looking for Mama." Sparky remained unfazed by the whole spectacle. She happily ran around with her teddy bear while Smedley planned their lives as wards of the state, probably homeless.

Our lives are a perfect hybrid of "Green Acres" and "The Edge of Night." Note to self: teach girls not to scream around cows (or dogs or horses or . . .)

She looks guilty, doesn't she?

(With much appreciation to my brother Mantel Man for his editing skills, and for his encyclopaedic memory. Thanksthz!)

Read any children's book that mentions rural living and you will learn that a man who has a cow, a goat, a pig, a horse, and a handful of assorted fowl, is a farmer. This oversimplified definition ought to stay in childhood, but, unfortunately, it sticks, and follows people into adulthood. "Oh, you and Chas are farmers!" people say, upon learning that we live in the country, on a ranch, with (until last week) no access to broadband. This couldn't be farther from the truth.

(Photo stolen from these guys)

Farmers grow things; Chas and I do not. Oh, I have teased a geranium into submission on my kitchen windowsill, and I have created the first tropical bonsai plant known to man -- and those are just my successes. You should see the hardy plants I have killed! And Chas is no better. Looking out my window in the twilight one morning recently, I noticed that the lawn is largely dead. Sigh. Nope, definitely not farmers.

Even my "animal husbandry" father was not necessarily a farmer. He did farm for several years in the 70s, and I think he did a good job. By farming he achieved a somewhat vertically-integrated dairy operation, and if you thought a 24/7, 365-day-a-year dairy was an involved pursuit, try adding farming on top of that -- living at the mercy of weather and time on a grand scale.

When a farmer has hay down (hay that's been cut and is lying in neat little rows to dry before it's pressed into bales and bound with twine), black clouds on the horizon are scarier than the Boogeyman. Hay that gets rained on mildews or molds, and if there is too much moisture it can't be baled, or the forces of heat, moisture and pressure inside the bale will combine, combust, and burn your barn down.

(Photo stolen from Michellepio124 on Flickr)

If you've ever wanted to feel the grandeur of Nature, to be inspired by Her power, don't go to Yosemite -- just cut your hay and leave it down to dry until a summer thunderstorm threatens. THAT'S Nature's unassailable power -- and that's a farmer's real fear.

Vignettes of Dad's farming period play in my mind, in the grainy golden Kodachrome colors common to both 1970s photography and to hot summer evenings. Dad rented some acreage a few miles to the east of us; 200 acres, which, in a burst of ingenuity, we dubbed "The 200." Dad would grow corn from summer into fall, and alfalfa or oats from our mild winter through spring.

My brothers and I had two connections to the farming operation. First, when it was time to plant the corn seed, Dad would take two of us to The 200 to help him mark out the field.

Mom had bought several packs of white paper lunch sacks, and these were our responsibility out in the field. We'd walk with Dad along the long edge of the fields, following the irrigation ditch that delivered the water down the rows, and carrying the white lunch bags. We'd fill the bags with large dry dirt clods, both to weigh the bags down and to make them stand upright, and then we'd set each one on the spot Dad had indicated. The bags, white against the turned dark soil, could be seen all the way across the field; they provided visual markers to the guy who would, a few days hence, drive a tractor across the field pulling a special plow. Tractor Guy would drive straight from each white bag at one end of the field to its counterpart at the other end, and the plow would create a long berm of piled dirt. The parallel berms would be spaced at regular intervals across the field to match the spacing of openings (the "checks") in the irrigation ditch. So, we kids weren't just stuffing dirt clods into lunch bags; we were creating order. AND stuffing dirt clods into lunch bags. It was hot, dusty work, and, being the little weasels we were, we mostly hated it. Well, I did anyway.

(Photo stolen from silent encore on Flickr)

The second connection my brothers and I had to The 200 and all of its charms was silage. If this word is unfamiliar, let me explain. Silage is like a big chopped green salad which is aged and fermented and then fed to cows, who like it more than I like ice cream, and that's saying something. Dad mostly made corn silage. The corn was mowed down and sucked into a powerful machine (called a "chopper," probably by the same clever person who dreamed up the name "The 200") which chopped the stalks into a fairly fine mulch. This mulch was blown into the back of a specially-designed silage truck. When the truck was full, the chopper would cut power, and the truck would drive off, back to the dairy to dump its load at the silage pit. And that's where my brothers and I would come in: we'd ride with the silage trucks, at least once a day, until all the corn was chopped. We'd stand beside the road, the truck would stop for us, we'd climb into the cab (usually one kid per truck), and ride to the field for the slow and tedious filling of the truck. Then we'd ride back to the dairy, watch the truck dump its load at the silage pit, and that was that. Thrilling, right? Well, it was -- to scruffy farm kids like us. We couldn't wait for silage season.

(Photos stolen from thejesse on Flickr)

Some day I may tell you about packing the silage with huge tractors, to press as much air as possible from the pile so that the fermentation didn't become a conflagration.

Nahhhhh, I won't.

(Photos stolen from thejesse on Flickr)

I will tell you, however, about how we teased my baby brother Bocci for years after the farming years had come and gone: 6-year-old Bocci would eagerly climb aboard the silage truck, and within about three miles every time Bocci was sound asleep in the cab. Drooling. Bocci was so famous for napping that once one of the hard-bitten truck drivers actually brought a camera with him to capture the moment. He had to climb up onto the cab of his White Freightliner to get the shot, but he got it, and somewhere in Mom's cedar chest is a picture of Bocci drooling all over his striped little boy shirt.

Lovingly preserved in 1970s grainy golden late afternoon Kodachrome, of course.

(Photo stolen from this guy)

One of the great joys in life is introducing your children to everybody you've ever known, especially if you are related to them. "This is your first cousin twice removed -- no, wait, THREE TIMES removed. What was I thinking?" Nuggets of information like that have pretty much NO impact on kids, while the phrase "glows in the dark" can set them all adither.

Twice in the last week I have had the pleasure of informing my glow-in-the-dark daughters that they were related to pretty much every person in the room. The first time was at a family baby shower for the newest member of our extended family, baby Caydance, and every person in the room was family. "Really? Everybody?" asked Smedley.

"Yup," I said, then launched into an explanation of related "by marriage," and watched her eyeballs glaze over. "Uh, never mind," I relented, "You're related to everybody in the room."

Saturday marked the second family get-together in a week. My cousin Mike lives two miles away, and he and his wife Chris hosted a pheasant hunt at their ranch this weekend. Once upon a time it all happened at our house, on our ranch, but over the years our indigenous pheasant population thinned out and made the hunt somewhat bleak. With no birds to bag, a pheasant hunt became just an excuse to get a bunch of guys and labradors together, running around, drinking beer and having the time of their lives. Well, I'm not sure that the labradors drank any beer (but I'm not sure they didn't).

Not that these hunters aren't serious, mind you, or that they don't know their way around a gun, because they are, and they do. The men from that half of my family are born with an inclination to bring home the proverbial bacon, to hunt for food the way our ancestors used to. The beer is kind of a side benefit.

The branch of my family from which my genes surely originated would be the Wuss Strain, we of the less virile group -- the Clan of the Grocery Store. Hunting just doesn't happen among my dad's people, other than one long ago, very unfortunate turkey hunt, which shall remain unmentioned. My brothers were both drawn to the romance of the hunt, but it didn't really stick. I'm afraid we are Safeway people, to the core.

That doesn't stop me from enjoying a good pheasant hunt, however. A good pheasant hunt always includes lots of chips and salsa, homemade cookies, barrel-smoked meats, beer and wine. Any birds actually meeting their demise in the spectacle are cleaned and plucked and put on ice, while we all sit down to a dinner of smoked beef. Family members engage in the oral tradition of storytelling (which is pretty much Creative B.S.ing). This can last for hours.

This weekend the weather was picture postcard perfect -- warm and dry, with strong sunshine and no wind. The hunters were not hugely successful, but no one cared. The conversation was good, the mood high . . . great company, tasty vittles -- really, how could anything improve on the day?

Well, I suppose the pheasants could have glowed in the dark . . .