Leaves Collected, Hog Butchering Complete, Christmas Tree Up and more!

Kali is home (and has been for just over a week)! And we are glad! Stay tuned for more from her trip. We were ready for the reverse "Kali exchange." Terah rocked our little Kali one last time and then sent her on her way with Alida, who wanted to make the trip with Grandma and Grandpa to pick up our big Kali.

We tried to hold off on as many fun and exciting seasonal things as we could for Kali's return, but it was not possible in every case. We did take advantage of some good weather days to wrap up our leaf collecting for the year. At some point there are diminishing returns and it's time to call it good enough. We have now done just that!

And just in time, as we had one of our biggest annual projects just around the corner: Hog butchering! Every year this is a taxing undertaking - emotionally, logistically, and physically. This year had the added component of this being the first time we were butchering pigs that had been born and lived every day of their lives here at Tangly Woods with us. This is how we want to do it, even if it is hard. My emotions go all over the place in the days leading up to butchering. As we went down to talk with the pigs and thank them for their lives and tell them that we would be butchering them, I felt so grateful that they were not scared of us. They flopped over immediately for their belly rubs, giving us contented grunts while we talked with them. On the one hand, it makes it harder to kill an animal that is so tame. On the other hand, I'm so glad that our pigs lived lives where they felt safe in their home and were trusting of us. It does strike me that it seems many are most comfortable eating the meat of animals that they haven't personally known, and sadly in many cases this also means animals who have been bred to be uncomfortable due to breeding them for what we want to eat the most of, have lived their lives scared of humans who mistreat them, and then experience fear and stress in their last moments. If I'm going to nourish my body with the abundance of products a hog provides for us, I want to know that that animal was well cared for and enjoyed a good life. These three "piglets" (yep, I called them "the piglets" until the very end) did indeed have a wonderful pig life and not a bad view either!

There hadn't been much "down time" leading up to the butchering, so it felt good to get up well before dawn the first morning and join Jason out by the fire. The scalding trough needs to get going early to be over 150 degrees when we have the first pig ready to go in. Jason and I drank our decaf coffee, fed the fire, and talked about how we were feeling about the day ahead. We had once again pulled out our Wendell and Tanya Berry book For the Hog Killing, 1979. This year the line of his poem that struck me the most was, "let this day begin again the change of hogs into people, not the other way around..." The day before during my weekly town trip, I was hearing stories on the news about how the few wealthiest nations of the world had bought up most of the contracts for all the promised COVID vaccines. It felt more like people turning into hogs rather than the other way around. 

I went through a lot of the steps in last year's hog butchering blog post so will not go into much detail this year. We keep refining our system, but the main things were unchanged this year from last (except we moved the large kettles off the concrete pad this year so the fires didn't crack it again). Each year we do it, I learn a little more and get my hands in more parts of it. 

And I'm not the only one learning more each year and getting more involved. Our kids are right in there with us, and the littlest is particularly excited about the ways in which a year's growth means she can do more things this time around!

The first day went seamlessly and I always feel such relief when the killing is over. And the first day is always a bit shorter and has less work for many hands. Day two is another story! 

The more hands the better when  the time comes to break down the halves and cut lard and prep chunks for sausage.

I got a lot of practice at skinning this year.

Last year Terah had her little chin poking over the table asking if she could cut lard. We told her we thought she needed to grow a little more but maybe next year. And now it is next year and she has her very own cutting board and some experience with sharp knives under her belt. She was ready!

It's always a satisfying moment when we can get the lard kettle going. 

With the ponhoss kettle and the lard kettles going, we can move on to sausage.

I had a good helper for sausage grinding too.

When the lard is really rolling, that is when it is time to put potatoes in the lard to deep fry. Then the tasting can begin - the tongues are the first things to try, then the potatoes and soon after that: ponhoss.

Terah was right in the action the whole day. 

It's nearing the end of the day when the sun is starting to set and we are filtering the lard and jarring it up and putting ponhoss in pans. 

By bedtime that night the fresh lard on the bottom shelf of the root cellar was beginning to solidify. By morning the golden liquid was solid and white!

But it's still not done at the end of day 2. There is plenty of clean up in the following days. And then arranging and rearranging freezers as we load them up with ponhoss, sausage, backbone, ribs, backstrap, and then after salt curing for 3 days, bacon. Our job was made easier by a very last minute purchase of a small used chest freezer from a friend to help us through this crunch time where we have just done chicken and hog butchering and we have lots of seeds to make their way through the deep freeze. As of this morning, we finished the last step in the process of organizing and packing away the bacons. Hog butchering 2020 is over.

Maybe some day I'll take the time to write more of my reflections about hog butchering, but once again I found those two days to be some of my favorite of the year. And this year the feelings were even deeper and also more accessible to me. I realized at the end of Sunday that I was tired to my bones and felt more alive and with more joy than I have for much of this year. I felt connected to some of the sources of my sustenance and a deep gratitude. There are times that raising pigs feels like too much. But they fit so very well into our systems here at Tangly Woods, we all like them (thank goodness Kali came around from her days of picketing with her "no pigs" homemade sign), they provide so many useful products, and they help keep me honest and uncomfortable and I am glad about all of that!

Now fast forward to today! The yearly jaunt around Tangly Woods to find a suitable Christmas tree. Some of us were a bit overdressed in sweatshirts and some of us a bit underdressed in sleeveless dresses. Either way, it was strange to put up a Christmas tree on such a warm day.

As always, the pickings seem slim but then we find one! But the process of looking is the most enjoyable part. I don't know when we last just took a stroll around the land together. Today it was the last spot we looked and we all agreed it was the best for 2020, with a few in the wings just needing a year or two more of care and growth. For the first time this year, while Kali climbed a neighboring tree, Alida cut down our Christmas tree! She was clearly proud as she drug it to the front walk for clean up and trimming before we brought it in to decorate. 

As I finish this up, Kali is playing Christmas carols on the piano. To stay with the Christmas theme, as soon as I post this the whole Tangly Woods' crew will gather to watch the American Shakespeare Center's A Christmas Carol. But before that, two quick newsflashes.

1. We are deep into seed testing for next year - sometimes a whole bunch of kinds at one time. All the girls have popcorn seed to test for next year. We are still making our way through the bushel baskets of Delicata squash. And now we are starting in on the PA Dutch squash. Yum!

2. Alida is not losing interest in the chickens! She loves them and they are pretty fond of her too. Following a family meeting months ago, the plan was for Alida to become more involved in the breeding and selection and care of the birds here at Tangly Woods. A big move in that direction happened this week as her two birds joined up with a larger flock in the arch coop and Alida is now the caregiver of those chickens. That coop involves Little Buddy pictured here - who seems to be the chicken that never grows. We all quite fond of them, but are a bit perplexed as to why they don't grow!

Learning To Do Hard Things

I (Jason) overheard Janelle's Mom saying to Alida, "...but thirty of them in a day? I don't think so!"

She was referring to the next day's (last Tuesday, Nov 24) butchering task, which Alida, our confirmed chicken aficionado, was probably telling her about. Truly I was apprehensive myself about the possibility of getting done before dark with how short the days have become. Several people had mentioned they might lend a hand, but one never knows exactly how that will turn out...things come up that take people away, and not all help is created equal! Also, if there is an opportunity to teach, I usually take the time. However, I was hopeful because Janelle's Dad and Tala were part of the volunteer crew, and they had both already proven themselves as Actually Helpful, with good sticktoitiveness.

When Alida and Terah started hanging around, I presumed I might get some plucking help, then off they would dash for more interesting activities. Alida came first, and while it took a moment to work up the courage to get her fingers immersed in wet feathers, once she acclimated she was off and running, and began challenging herself to get the whole bird plucked before I returned after getting the next one killed and draining. By the time she switched to helping with evisceration (something I did not expect out of her day), she was, with the exception of a few pinfeathers, sometimes succeeding! My day started to feel a little more spacious.

Tala was on hand at some point and stuck around as long as she could, and she and Alida zeroed in on the evisceration. I had taught this to Tala in September...this time she taught Alida. Magic! I didn't realize September was a "Train the Trainer" event (wink!). Alida's native curiosity has been focused on chickens recently, and I guess that extended to the interior. She's quick with her hands (and her mind), and seemed to pick up the gutting tasks with ease. Plus, her 9-year-old hands are just the right size! It was a lovely sight for this chicken-nerd dad. She was proud of herself, and I think that was proper.

Terah stuck to plucking, but with an age-appropriate gumption that matched her sister's. I laid a scalded chicken on the concrete for her to work on, and did she ever work on it! A few minutes and it was ready for a little adult touch-up, then evisceration. So I gave her another, and she made relatively short work of that one, too, creating a sizable mound of feathers. As she was busily flinging yet another handful onto the heap, she burst out, "This is like a feather festival!" Kids on a farm: my favorite Muse! We're not doing chicken butchering days at Tangly Woods anymore, folks. No, no. We are putting on Feather Festivals!

That evening I stashed all 31 birds (I added one to the count that morning) in my sister's extra fridge for aging, and planned to break down the carcasses on Friday. But I was under strict instructions not to forget to tell Alida and Terah when I was doing that because they wanted to HELP! This became slightly complicated when Friday rolled around and they were still at Em and Jonas's. I put it off by a day. Saturday came, and the kids had still not come home. Sunday, then, anyone? Five days is not too long for the aging of heritage poultry (aging tenderizes poultry and improves flavor), but I dearly hoped I would not have postponed the cutting-up day for the sake of eager helpers only to have them bop in once or twice but otherwise do their own thing.

I was not disappointed. Teaching Alida to break down a bird was pretty fun, she was great at it, and by the end we were switching for every other bird and there was nothing really for me to do on her turns but watch her work. Which was a pleasure to match Tuesday's! Terah, at 5, couldn't tackle a whole carcass, but when she asked about helping chunk up breast fillets from old laying hens that was going to be ground as sausage meat, I figured her veggie cutting skills developed this summer had earned her the chance to try if that's what she wanted. She did great, of course. I now feel confident that our younger kids, 9 and 5, could pull off breaking a chicken carcass down into usable pieces between the two of them without further guidance. Exclamation points. (!!!!!!!!!,!!!!!)

We finished the day out by grinding (Terah helped a lot with that) and spicing the sausage meat, then freezing it in 2 oz. patties. It was 27 1/2 pounds of it! That's 220 patties. We should have a lot of great breakfasts out of that. My bedtime snack at 11:00 was the 1.6 oz. leftover patty. It's never better than when perfectly fresh. Yes, it was a long day.

The next day we vacuum-sealed the frozen patties. Measuring and zipping off bags from the roll, heat sealing and filling, then vacuum/heat sealing the other end for a tidy freezer pack...what kid wouldn't want to be right in the middle of that, pushing all those meaningful buttons, initiating all those time-sensitive processes with variations in texture, temperature, shape, and color? Opportunities to get it wrong and fix the error, balanced by lots of times of getting it right. Building upon lessons learned from packaging the breast fillets and bone-in parts from the day before. These are kids on whom opportunities for education are not, or not always, wasted. Knowing how to learn: the most important lesson. And the rewards are natural when we reach into the freezer once per week or so for another round of nutritious, scrumptious sausage to fry up for brunch. The ends of the circle will close this spring when it's time to cuddle the freshly hatched fuzzballs of 2021. 

These kids know how to adore animals. They know what it means to treat them well. They can judge the health of the animals and they see us adjusting care as needed. They know what a merciful end to a farm animal's life looks like. They are sad but not afraid, and they know what to do with the body to make good use of it. And they are ready to do it all again. I feel gratitude for this, and a sense that something industrial culture has taken from most of us has been restored, at least for these precious few.

So: Thirty in a day? Alone, I would have been hard-pressed. With this good help, we did 31 with time to spare.

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On an unrelated note, readers might be intrigued to know that I recently attended (online) the annual meeting of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), which is "A Quaker Lobby in the Public Interest." Why should I, a non-Quaker, have done such a thing?

Years ago, a friend or relative (who shall remain nameless because I can't remember who it was), upon hearing us yearning for a political perspective that was principled and non-partisan, passed us some literature from FCNL. You know how reading something is sometimes like taking your first deep breath in a long time?

So we've been on their mailing list since about that time, and have now been supporting FCNL financially for a few years. This is partly simply a response to the merits of their work, which there are aplenty, and partly an outlet for the mandate we hear repeatedly from folks both here and around the world who are on the receiving end of some of the worst injustices our civilization produces, who when asked by privileged U.S. citizens, "What can we do to help?" so often respond with, "Use your voice as a citizen to get your country to change its policies!" FCNL fills that role week-in, week-out, and is also a scaffold for persons of good will who are ready to make that good will heard by the powerful. In other words, if you want to exercise your rights as a citizen to talk with your elected representatives about priorities you care about but you don't know where to start, get in touch with FCNL.

I've been toying with the idea of joining one of their lobby days for a few years, but the online format this year for their Annual Meeting made it more of an opportunity, so I took the plunge. Four days' worth of conference-style gathering with Friends made for what I've been calling a "sanity spa." Not that Friends don't have their issues with, for example, a legacy of White predominance in their ranks, but they are meaningfully working at their issues in their refreshingly plainspoken and practical way, and the preeminent impression I came away with was of a deeply intelligent, aware, and caring religious body with a functional moral compass. One could be forgiven for having taken that sort of creature for extinct. I really needed that contact.

The days culminated in a lobbying day in which I was a warm body on the line for most of two visits with aides for Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, then was one of two folks who met directly with Ben Cline. Our organized ask for the day was the cosponsoring and promotion of the "Justice in Policing Act." Not that I feel this law would solve all the issues with or history of policing, but it contains some definite improvements and for the circumstance I thought it reasonable to support that effort. I hoped dabbling in lobbying would a) help me discern whether it is something I am up for in an ongoing way, and b) give me the familiarity to pursue it further if I decided to. It succeeded on both counts.

The results:

A) Discernment: I don't enjoy lobbying especially. It is not energizing for me to meet with representatives to try to get laws passed, repealed, or what-have-you. But I see the value in it in the real world; I see that if the squeaky wheel is going to get the grease then it might be worth sometimes "squeaking out" for what I believe in even if I don't like to very much. I'm a big boy...I can do hard things! Clearly if I did it often I would soon lose my will to live, but I can do some of it if for no other reason than to carry out the wishes of the aforementioned friends who asked me to do exactly this.

B) Familiarity: It's not technically that hard, but having experts around lends confidence, and borrowing from their savvy about what to advocate for and when may catalyze important changes faster.

I was heartened to participate in a session in which the FCNL Theory of Change project was discussed. In that time it was clear that some folks there are thinking beyond pulling the available political levers in timely and wise ways, and considering how the culture itself, of which the representative government is purported to be a reflection (I think there are reasons to be dubious here), might be moved towards truth. This is where I started to really perk up, which was telling. To me, cultures are changed in a million ways, but relationships and the arts stand out to me as typical vectors. Right up my alley!

What encouraged me most from the time, however, is that this organization succeeds in genuinely embodying the Quaker value of heeding "that of God" in each person, while holding forth a high moral standard to the powerful. For FCNL, respecting the value of each individual is not a mealy-mouthed excuse to back off from saying what must be said. FCNL has a policy and habit of entering respectful dialogue with legislators and others in government, and highlighting more compassionate and equitable paths forward in a disciplined way. May I be infected with a good dose of this ethos!

Special family get together in the time of Covid

Alida: So we were quarantining for Kali to go to Pittsburgh and I was not really wanting to because I was not wanting to quarantine and I didn't want Kali to go to Pittsburgh. Emily and Jonas had also been quarantining for other family to come and then they didn't end up coming. So we figured out that we had both been quarantining and so we got together for Thanksgiving day, or what we thought was just for Thanksgiving day.

Terah: Well, then, we got together in Emily, Jonas and Ivy's house (no masks) so we got to hug too. And we got to do a sleepover. But it wasn't only one sleepover. It was a double sleepover. So, then, we got to play two (or three) days. So it was really fun and we got to play a lot. But some of that time me and Ivy sometimes didn't get along well so then we just worked it out and kept on playing. And, so, that's all I have to say.

Alida: Mommy, Daddy, Terah, Tala and I went on Thanksgiving Day. And then neither us or Emily, Jonas and Ivy wanted us to leave. So Mommy, Daddy and Tala went home but we stayed for a sleepover, what we thought was a sleepover. Turned out the next day we also didn't want to leave again and then we got on a phone call with mommy and it transpired that we stayed for a double sleepover. 

Terah: I felt a little nervous when we were in the house the first day because to be interacting normally with somebody, because I haven't for a long time and I was worried for Covid. So I was just scared. But I loved, I LOVED, and I thought it was funny when Ivy was my little shadow. I liked that we could have a little talk together at dinner because it was a very special thing (it was a little table we had to ourselves). It was really, really, really, really, really, really fun.

Alida: When we got there I was a little bit nervous but I easily got back into it. We were planning to invent "turkey ball" but that turned out to be inventing 2 games: Turkey Ball and Turkey Toss. Turkey Ball we invented that day and played it Thanskgiving Day. Turkey Toss we didn't end up completing until the next day. Turkey Ball we played by using furry balls, what looked like bunny tails, and hiding them in magnatile buildings. Then everybody who was playing would try to find them (there were two) and when they would find one they would show it to the score keeper and then go and re-hide it in another building. Turkey Toss, which we invented the next day, included two drawn turkeys and two people. You would use basically any ball and toss it back and forth trying to hit the other person's turkey. Whoever got to 5 first would win the first round. Then that person would go up to 6 and so on (to 10). When they were going to try to get 10 hits on the turkey, if they did they would win. If they didn't, the other person would go up and they would stay. 

Terah: Before Thanksgiving dinner, we hiked up the hill behind their house. I climbed on a hay bale with Ivy. For dinner there was turkey and mashed potatoes. After dinner Mommy and Daddy left and we had a sleepover. 

Alida: That night, Ivy came into Emily and Jonas' room crying and saying, "I waved at Terah but she didn't wave back," all teary. Although Terah was sleeping. When Emily told her that Terah was sleeping and no one waves back when they are sleeping, Ivy stopped crying and went right back to bed. I slept on the bed above Ivy and I slept pretty well. Terah slept on a mattress next to Ivy's bed. After the first sleepover, we went out and jumped on the trampolines, when spelunking in their basement, had 5-6 picnics, and that evening when it was dark did shadow puppets. The second night, as far as I know, went better. The next morning, we had banana pecan pancakes.  Both days we played toy restaurant. 

Terah: I felt sad to leave and I miss, miss, miss them. I missed my parents zero much. 

Alida: I was a little excited to see the chickens again. But I also missbeing there. I also was excited to say hi to Mommy, Daddy, Grandma, Grandpa and Tala again. It felt good to be there though (when asked for more she noted: It just felt fun basically, I don't have very complicated emotions about that). 

Janelle: As the stenographer for this post, I get the pleasure of the final word. I will just add that I cried when hugging Emily upon our arrival and I had the fanciest hairdo done at the in-house salon and that was accompanied by a foot rub and nap!!