She's gone country...

Today was a lovely day, and we spent much of it outside working on some of our many projects in the yard. Today was primarily devoted to the chickens, while tomorrow will be spent planting and weeding. I "helped" as much as I could, considering my condition. My main contributions were holding a board while my husband drilled (we were adding some roosts to our chicken-coop), filling the chickens' water, and distributing some not-human-but-definitely-chicken-worthy watermelon I found in the back of the fridge. As I wandered around the yard with Aleida, I had the pleasure of watching her pick up a garden hose and pretend to water some of the new trees in our young orchard. Picking up on something Dave said earlier, she said, "Happy trees!" She then tromped over to an anthill and watched the ants with her 2-year-old fascination and said, "Ants happy, too!" I love that. I don't so much love that a bit later she started screaming because one of these happy ants had crawled up her pant leg and bitten her on her upper thigh. But still...she probably learned a valuable lesson that my numerous warnings about anthills had failed to teach her. Now, when I tell her, "They will bite," she will know exactly what I mean.

When we moved to Greeley, CO last summer, we decided that if we were going to live in a cow-town, we wanted to feel like we lived in a cow-town. We bought a house out in the country with about 4 acres of land. Our field abuts a cattle farm where cattle often graze freely. Aleida has taken to going to the window and looking out, often saying, "The cows are out!" Really, it is quite picturesque. Out a different window, I can see a house with a couple of horses (and I need to make friends with these neighbors!). We are contributing to the bucolic scene by planting a vegetable garden, starting a fruit orchard and raising chickens. We converted an old shed into a chicken coop. We have a little chicken door so the chickens can wander down a ramp and peck around outside on nice days. I don't think this qualifies them as "free-range" chickens, but they are certainly cage free. We asked for all females, but apparently, young chicks are extremely hard to sex, even for experts. Consequently, I'm pretty certain we have not one but two roosters in the bunch. I've heard that they will most likely fight it out, possibly to the death or at least demasculization of one of them. I'm allowing myself the fantasy that our two roosters will be an exception to the rule and live in harmony as two male leaders. They can each have 3 hens to themselves as it is...

Anyway, the point is, my family is going country. And though I know Greeley isn't the cultural hub of Colorado, and though as a whole might I prefer the offerings of Denver, the energy of Ft. Collins and the politics of Portland, I am really loving country life. And I love that my daughter(s) will have space to roam and get in touch with nature and land. I love that by the time she goes to kindergarten, Aleida will know first hand where an egg comes from. She will know what a broccoli plant looks like (something I didn't know til I went to a "u-pick-it" farm in Portland when I was 30 years old). I love that she can wander to the back of our field and come face to face with a dairy cow. I love that our milk is delivered and our honey is made from beehives less than half an hour away. I love that we can judge the seasons by the stages of the fields at a real farm just down the street. I love that when Aleida sees a flower (even a dead one or a weed) she will bend over to smell it and mutter, "mmmm...." I love that she's been aggressively pecked in the leg by a chicken and responded by saying, "So funny!"

Maybe I don't love the bug bites or the fact that my dogs have been sprayed by a skunk twice in the last two months or the amount of flies we'll have in our house in July or the strong cow-poop-scented breezes that waft through regularly, but there is much more to love than not. And when I get nostalgic for the city or a more progressive town, I just remember how my car was broken into multiple times, and how we thought our neighbors down the street were running a crack house, or how I could see what my next-door neighbor was doing in her kitchen and eye-contact through our close windows made me feel awkward. No place is perfect, after all. But every place will teach you something and help mold you into a unique person with your own set of knowledge and skills. I'm glad that my skills and my daughters' will include growing vegetables from seeds, gathering our hens' eggs, and knowing better than to stomp on an anthill.