Flying Cows and Fruit Sized Hail

The other day I had a chance to catch up with an old friend.  She had asked to come by and I suggested we meet at the house instead of the office; the days had been very hot but the weather was cooling down; the back yard seemed a better place to talk after years of not being in touch.  We sat and talked about all that happens in life and work. 

As we sat it clouded up some – a welcome relief – and then it started to sprinkle.  We came in when the sprinkle turned to rain.  I had a conference call at three, which I did from the house.  A little before four o’clock I turned on the lights in the kitchen.  The sky was getting pretty dark.  I heard lightning, so as I wrapped up the call I ran around the house unplugging computers, routers, radios.

            The kids got home from camp and ran into the house as the rain really started to fall.  Excited about the storm, they dashed upstairs to get a good view of the show.  And then it started to hail.

On Weddings and True Love

I went to a wedding on a mowed field high on a hill.  It was terrifically hot and humid but the sun was bright and there was a breeze.  As the wedding ceremony moved through its stages, thunder rolled in the distance, but it sounded more like accompaniment, not a threat.

What is it about weddings?  Why do we love them and mostly not want to miss them?  And even the ones we want to miss but don't, arriving grumpy and late and tired and covered in travel dirt, what is it about them which can make us happy by the time of 'I do'?

Short Story: The Brothers

I was working one time with a man from Lyndon, Vermont.  He was an older guy, with a big belly and a slow, steady voice.  He struck me as someone who'd worked outside a lot of his life and was not so sad to be in an office for a while.  He was easy to talk to.  He met my eye and did not compete in conversation; he just talked with me and listened as much as he said.  Rare trait, I believe.


Lyndon is a town in Northeastern Vermont -- the Northeast Kingdom, it's called.  It is a small town in an out of the way place.  I'd never met anyone from Lyndon, although I like the town very much. We were talking about the town and I told him how much I liked it.  



I told him I had fond memories of Lyndon because I ski jumped and ski raced in high school.  Trips to Lyndon were an experience.  It was far; had a steep and difficult race hill; was cold; and mostly because it had an old wooden trellis jump, a rickety, leaning, frightening WWII era monster.  It was a right of passage to jump on that old beast.  He knew the jump well and told me about about an incident he’d experienced as a young kid, a long time before I ever saw the jump.  He'd remembered it his whole life.  


I asked him if I could take his experience and turn it into a short story.  He said yes.  Here it is.  

* * * * *

A Bastille Day Story

Summer 1991, mid-June night: 

A friend and I sit on my porch on a warm summer night.  We are drinking cold beer and eating warm tortillas full of beans and spicy rice.  It is a perfect night.  But I need to leave.  A promise to go to a barbeque fulfilled.  The barbeque, hosted by a dear college friend, Leslee, could not be blown off.  At the barbeque after a bit I sat in the kitchen and had a long, comfortable and intelligent talk with a super woman named Robin.  I’d never met her before; at the end of the night I figured I’d never see her again.  And it is not what you think.

Children And Baseball

Today I dropped my son off at baseball camp.  The camp is run by the 'Montpelier Mountaineers,' central Vermont's contribution to summer college-league baseball.  I stay and watch as dozens of kids swarm the grandstands to meet the players -- their coaches -- and start a week of practicing the hardest game there is.  They are excited and ready to go.  


I wrote a column about coaching little league some years ago, back when my boy was a wee one, and post it here for those who love watching kids grow up, love baseball, love coaching or just love the idea of a warm night in a small town, sitting by the edge of a field along a river watching ball:

Apollo Is Dead

            Apollo is dead.  It happened late, under a fat moon, on the first hot night of this young summer.  But I get ahead of myself.

            Our friend Brian had two roosters.  We had eight hens and no rooster.  That cool spring day a year ago the kids and I visited Brian and toured his chicken stockade.  The kids fixated on the young Barred Rock rooster; big and ugly even then but for the beautiful speckled gray and white feathers.  He had a long, thick neck leading to a squawking annoying voice.  The kids wrestled the homely beast to the ground.  We had our rooster.

The name, Apollo, was not my idea.  At first I didn’t get it.  Now I get it.  Roosters are known to crow with the dawn (which is true, but not the whole story and more about that later) hence he was named by our mythologically-mad son after the Sun God. 

Introducing a new bird to an old flock is never easy and the hens did not take to Apollo when he first joined us.  He was meek and shy, the girls confident and bold.  They nearly pecked him to death.  He could not sleep in the coop; instead roosting high in the old milking-parlor, climbing onto the worn wooden stanchions, sitting with his back to the laying hens.

When young Apollo did not crow, he trumpeted poorly, like a sick swan, pulling the noise up through his fat goose neck.  He kept his distance from the girls, ate a lot, trumpeted a lot and acted the awkward growing boy.  We liked him then, the way you can like even a young ferret.  And then he learned to crow.

It is commonly believed roosters’ crow to welcome the dawn.  They do, but it is not because they are welcoming the dawn.  It is because they crow all of the time, which means the crowing sometimes coincides with the dawn.  Roosters worthy of the name simply strut and crow and demand attention at all hours, in all situations and with no grace.  Apollo, a true cockerel, did not merely crow in the dawn, he crowed in the noon, the sunset, the moon, the darkest hours of the night, a grain stealing mouse.  He crowed in pretty much every single happening at our little red house. 

We grew used to the sound, and claimed in fact to like it, and now we miss it, but we miss it the way people living under the glide path at Heathrow missed the jets when the volcanoes’ blew: not a lot and not really.  After he learned to crow, he learned to rooster.

To be a rooster is to be surly, strutting, unpredictable, unbearable.  Apollo became a young man.  As a pre-teen, Apollo was shy and quiet.  As a juvenile he would literally sneak up and bite your ankles.  He once walked up behind me in the garden (he was so big and came so fast I thought it was the dog).  Before I turned around he jumped me from behind and got me good.  Unfortunately for the rooster I was using a hoe at the time.  He was a hooligan – attack for attack sake.  No rhyme or reason.

Everyone with backyard chickens has a rooster tale.  The need to go into the coop armed with an old aluminum garbage lid and a stick, like a boy playing knight with a sword and shield; the small shed used for solitary confinement when visitors come by; the rooster who attacks the dog so much the dog stops going outside; the rooster who drives the children away.

We reached the point with Apollo where we did not call him our rooster, we called him our roaster.  We looked up recipes for coq a vin, literally ‘rooster in wine,’ which demands the use of an old, cranky bird.  The kids walked through the back yard carrying sticks.

And then we had a first hot summer’s night.  Jackie asked if anyone had locked the door to the chicken coop, I said I’d go and then forgot.  We got the kids to bed, opened all the windows against the heat, and turned on fans as though it were August.  All was peaceful late in the night; a breeze blew strong and a full moon cast a cool light.   And then came death.

What woke me was that awful trumpeting, but this time it was firm, not wobbly.  Trumpeting and then violent squawking and then what is the closest a chicken can come to a curdling scream.  I ran to the mud room and grabbed a flash light and the only fire-arm in the house, my son’s lever-action Red-Ryder bb gun.  I was out the door and around to the back in a flash, weapon and light at the ready.  By the edge of the hay field was a fisher, pushing Apollo into the ground, and before I could fire off one pea from that tiny gun he was gone.

I ran to check on the coop and all was fine.  The ladies were on their perches, clucking like mad hens but not dead or bloodied or gone.  I tracked the thin trail of barred rock feathers across the lawn to the edge of the field.  I pieced together a likely scenario.

The fisher came in through the open coop door.  Apollo sensed the fisher and let out that first trumpet, to signal the alarm.  He leapt down to come between the fisher and the flock.  Chickens are night blind, so Apollo’s leap was eyes wide shut; he was shouting (in chicken) all the time.  Only flashes of moonlight guiding his mad rush at the fisher, wings spread, hackles up, chicken claws aimed at the predator’s beady eyes.  The fisher and the bird fought a mighty battle. 

I imagine the final scene: Apollo fighting off the grip of the fisher’s powerful jaw, turning to the flock and saying – in Chicken – “Don’t.  Follow.  Me.  Don’t.  Yell.  Out.  Stay safe.”  A pause in the fighting, a moment of tension so thick the air crackled, and Apollo’s last words:  “I love you.”  The jaws close on the bird’s neck.  Apollo is dead.

I told the kids about the adventure in the morning.  “Oh, he was so beautiful,” “oh, he was our rooster,” and “oh, I’ll really miss him.” 

‘Give it a rest,’ I said.  ‘You chased him with a stick and we called him the roaster.’  The kids became indignant.  Our little girl summed it up: 

“Dad!” she shouted.  “He defended his ladies!  He died noble!  I loved him!”  I can only aspire to such an epitaph.

(c) 2010 David Rocchio

a little background

It might help to have a little background.

We live in a red house on a small road in Northern Vermont.  We have lived in the house since before kids.  It is an old, small Cape -- 1840's.  A farm house.  Just next to it is a beat up barn settling in the dirt.  It was a farm until 1978 when 'Cedric' -- I don't know his last name -- sold the house to a man named Bump, who moved the house and put it on a funky foundation.  Bump sold the house, and then a few years later another family bought it, and then along came we.  We lived in it for a year before we took title.  It is humble and sweet.

It is Beatrix Potter; all angles and clapboard and wildly unmanaged perennials with chickens running all around. (You'll read about them from time to time.)  There are mice and bigger pests, including variously a skunk under the porch, porcupine, red squirrel, a fisher (you'll read about him too).  In addition to the chickens we have a dog, Dexter.  We had a rabbit years ago who just showed up one day.  (And yes, I'll write about the rabbit.  In fact, over time, you'll read more about most everyone and everything mentioned in this post.)

To the front, to the east, the house is separated from the road by a big lawn.  The lawn is peppered with old apple trees and lilac and swamp maples.  Between the lawn and the road is 'the wilderness.'  It is some 100 feet of old berry bushes and grasses and brush as well as thick young hardwoods.  The birds love it and once Jackie saw a bear bolt from the wilderness across the meadow to the river.

To the west and south we are wrapped by hay field and beyond the hay field we are bounded by another scrubby forest and finally a hard stop at our stream.  After all this time I still do not know its name.  We swim in the stream and over the years have cut wide, cool paths through the forest to a few deep swimming holes.

To the north we have our only nearby neighbors, are blessed with nearby neighbors, and never want them to leave.  They too have a hay field -- bigger -- and so behind both of our houses is meadow, then woods, then river.  The boundary between our two lands is guarded not - it is to neighbors what Canada is to America.

The barn is trouble.  It is settled to the point of one day falling.  It is long and old and gorgeous.  The carrying beams are a foot thick and sixty feet long.  The narrow barn clapboards are worn a deep gray and peeling off the barn like skin off a snake.  The tin roof is rusted perfectly.

When the local paper, the Stowe Reporter, asked me to write a column, about nine years ago, they asked me what I wanted to call it.  I thought of our house, stained red with white trim, and  Red House Report was the first thing to come to my head.  I didn't have to think about what to call the column.  It just is.

Thinking about it, it makes great sense.  I write -- report -- about what I see right in front of me.  I do most of the writing sat in the kitchen of our small old house.  There you go.

When I started the column our son was still a baby, eighteen months old at most.  He's now eleven and soon to head to middle school.  Back then it was 'we three.'  Now we are four and the dog.  We are busting out.  I've never been more comfortable.

So:  For the past nine years or so I've written stories about living here, based in our little red house, and what happens at the house, in the town, all around.  I love writing the column; it's habit now.  Over the next year I am going to write more and put it all up here -- some will be from the paper and some won't; some will be essays, some fiction; some will be written, some visual -- moving and still -- and some voice.  Why do I do it?  I believe it is the life right in front of us that matters most but we notice least.  I'm good at writing down what I see and bringing light to it.  It's fun.  I'm up early.  Who knows.  In any event, see what you think, say what you think, and enjoy the posts.

Now, for being patient, a story about Cedric, as told to me by my old neighbor Gaylord:

* * * * *

Cedric, the last man to farm from our little red house, was a bit of a character and somewhat reclusive but kind (I only can aspire).  He farmed vegetables and chicken and had some milk cows.  The house was all clutter -- including a dining room set never taken out of the boxes it came in.  The chickens were allowed in the house.  The upstairs, where some roosted, was knee deep in chicken manure.  The kitchen was full of newspapers.  You get the idea.

One day Cedric's neighbor, Gaylord, came by to visit and walked into the kitchen, which smelled to high heaven of skunk.  The smell made Gaylord's eyes water.

"Cedric," Gaylord asked, "what happened?  Did a skunk get under the house?"  Gaylord could barely breath.

"No," said Cedric.  "It got in the kitchen."

"How'd you get it out?"

"Well," Cedric said, as though it should be obvious, "I shot it."

It seems Cedric saw the skunk come into his kitchen so he shot it right there under the kitchen table with a .22 pistol.  On a warm night I think I can still smell it.

David Rocchio works, writes and lives in Stowe, Vermont.  (c) 2010 David Rocchio

Summer and Son

I wrote a longer version of this in 2007, when my son was six.  I've tweaked it today.  Maybe by posting this I can bring the rains:

A thunderhead climbs over a distant mountain. It is just after the Fourth of July in the North and the humidity has been bearing down on us like hot soup.  It’s been a week of this; the weather makes work hard, bugs bold, grass grow, sleep hide.  The thunderhead signals the end of the heat.  My son and I watch it from behind the house. The cloud stands thousands of feet above everything: us, the house, the fields, the mountain. Its top flattens into a monstrous anvil. The storm dwarfs the mountain and comes closer visibly.  It is faster than a tide, exciting; we will wait for it to arrive.

My little boy is thrilled by these storms. They pass over the landscape and change everything while they are here. During one storm we sat out on the covered porch and let the rain cool us and we listened to the pounding fist-sized droplets of water and the bounding thunder. Today my son and I lie in the grass behind the house, his head across my belly, me leaning back on my arms.

The storm is closer now. The hot air is stirring a bit and the birds are quiet. My son and I can no longer see all of the cloud; its crown is out of sight, its belly is a dark blue and black and gray. My son is excited and worried. It is a big storm. We move to the covered porch, he cradles in my arms and we just sit.  I am daydreaming, he is chatting about nothing and everything at once. 

The storm is now approaching, shuddering the ground with rolls of thunder, pushing languid, thick air out of its way. We watch the thick, quick flashes of light eagerly and begin a count. "One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three, Mississippi ..." We time the roars of thunder, establishing the pace of the storm. Soon it will be on us directly.

We pull the chairs to the edge of the porch. The world goes deeply dark. We listen to individual raindrops strike leaves, the roof, the ground. The wind picks up. And now the rain comes in sheets. We are electric.  We are observant.  We are thrilled.

As we sit facing east, watching the storm roil everything around us, from behind us, from the west, the sun drops below the cloud line, casting a dry light into the storm. The torrent of rain turns into a strobe of individual drops of water. It is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.  It is magical.  And now a rainbow the size of the sky arches across the horizon along the ridge across our valley.

My son's eyes widen. A magnificent grin splays across his face. He leans forward out of the chair.

Ah.  Summer.

(c) 2010 David Rocchio

Home-Made Food: A Farmer's Tale

A 32-ounce, white plastic yogurt container featuring an old-fashioned drawing of a jersey cow is a staple in our refrigerator.  On the container under the cow is written “Jersey Milk, Organic Whole Yogurt.”  Also on the container are a few facts:  The yogurt is made right on the farm in Westfield, Vermont.  It is the Butterwork’s Dairy, not far from our house.  The farm is self-sufficient and organic, growing everything the cows eat.  And the cows eat well: grains and alfalfa, corn and oats and barley.  The herd is closed.  This means the cows are all from the herd.  No outsiders.

The yogurt these cows make is so good it could become the Ben and Jerry’s of yogurt.  Right on the package, though, the family writes “we want to remain a small one-farm operation.”  A successful, organic, closed herd, single farm, family run dairy with the stated goal of not becoming too big.  I had to visit this farm.

I parked my car near the barn just beyond an abandoned old split-windshield truck.  Jersey calves roamed about in the tall grass hemming in the old red Ford.  I meandered around the farm and found Jack Lazor in a small, crowded room near a loading dock.  Backed up to the dock sat a used-up white refrigerator truck, hand lettered with the name of the farm.  Stacks of yogurt containers sat in boxes on pallets to be loaded into the big white beast.

After Jack apologized for being tired, “I was haying until midnight last night,” we walked together to a field, where it was time to stake out new pasture for the milk cows.  We talked as we walked.  Jack and Anne Lazor met in the early 70’s.  Jack was farming at Old Sturbridge Village, where he was practicing some of what he had studied in college – agricultural history.  Jack graduated from college in 1972 and was not interested in the political ragings around him.  He was interested in a deceptively simple question – how did the original colonists feed themselves? – and the ‘back to the land’ movement.  These interests turned into a life.

We walked into a field of grass.  Jack described what was growing under my feet, a mix of five or six different grasses and clovers, and we began to pull thin fiberglass fence posts from the ground.  As I pulled the posts, Jack twirled the electric fence wire onto its spool and poured a tsunami of knowledge over me: land management; treatment for sick cows without use of antibiotics; how to grow grain corn and strip the kernels from the husks; impact on the milk of different feeds; new grasses now growing on certain fields; organic composting; milling grain; using wind to make electricity; the goal of a steam plant, among other topics.  We finished moving the posts and stringing wire to create a new area for the cows to graze.

“I move the cows every twelve hours, so they eat all of the grass in an area and don’t just pick and choose, leaving a monoculture of weeds behind.  They eat and fertilize an area, and then we move them a bit and they do the same again.  The grasses grow up again behind the cows and the fields remain complex and healthy.” 

Behind us two work horses grazed.  A tall tower hosted the wind mill.  The barn, granary and milk shed spread out near the field.  Trucks and tractors were tossed around the landscape. 

Jack and Anne began farming their land over twenty-five years ago.  The idea of making great yogurt wasn’t a careful plan.  The original small herd made too much milk; the kitchen became a laboratory, and the products made sold briskly at markets nearby.  The farm grew, well, organically.

We finished staking the field and Jack struggled with his new cell phone and called the barn: “send the cows.”  The cows walked past us to the pasture, knowing what to do and where to go.  I could see the personality in each lady as she waddled by.  Jack had a comment for each cow.  The herd closed in 1981, so each member of this herd was born and raised right here on the farm.  When the milkers were all in, we stopped talking.  The only sounds were cows eating grass and church bells in the distance.  Not bad sounds to work around.

We toured the rest of the operation.  I saw where the herd spends its winter, a large modern shed with a train-barn fabric roof, letting in a sky’s amount of light.  We walked to the house for lunch.  The house is not reached by a road.  It is reached by a path from the barn.  A garden and more fields dominate the view. 

Inside the house papers and notes and reports and whatnot are piled high; a true farm house.  Jack offered me some bread and butter – all ingredients from the farm – and I could not help but ask for more.  The butter was a deep yellow and sweet as pie.  “How do you make it?” I asked.  “Put cream in a jug and shake it,” Jack replied.  He told me someone who buys their butter once called to ask what went in it to make it yellow.  ‘You’d have to ask the cows,’ was the answer.

Anne joined us and we ate, interrupted by orders coming in over the phone, scribbled on scraps of paper to be brought to the barn.  Everything we ate, except some olive oil for our salad, the Lazor’s made on the farm.  Anne guesses they make eighty-five percent of what they eat.  Jack walked me back to the barn, where we talked to the people loading the truck.  Someone joked about the radio – it was tuned to a Quebec station – and I asked if it was a good station.  “It’s the only one, so I guess so” was the reply.

Jack told me their number one selling product is the fat-free Jersey milk yogurt, which made me laugh.  Jersey cows are known for their cream.  If you take away the fat, it’s not really the cows that distinguish the yogurt.  My theory is people are trying to buy something other than yogurt in that 32-ounce container.




David Rocchio works, writes and lives in Stowe, Vermont.  (c) 2010 David Rocchio  This post started its life as a column in The Stowe Reporter.