The Garden, Chickens and the Kids

Where we live most gardens are done or mostly done.  We stuck a fork in our patch in the ground, but for the eggplant, a week ago.  Pulled up stakes and harvested the last of the carrots.  Rubbed dry dirt off orange roots on a hot day.

Good kitchen garden this year but I've never viewed it as important, just fun.  Now, of course, food costs more and it cannot be assumed to be safe.  Did I mention fresh eggs?

Between the backyard garden; our laying hens; some local farms pushing out well-raised meat, fruit and vegetables; and a thriving farm market community, it is now possible -- at least here in northern Vermont -- to supply ourselves with a healthy portion of what we eat through the year.  By April, true, I will be pretty much sick of parsnips, but overall there is enough of interest to feast on.  We are in hearty and interesting meals all winter long.

The laying hens are all proud now because of the bad egg scare chasing the nation.  The kids sell what we don't eat, teaching them enterprise if not economics (I am certain my input costs exceed the output value, making the farm more soviet than all-American).  We do sell a lot of eggs.  Who can turn down two smiling kids selling fresh eggs?  So far no one.

We also buy meat-bird futures from a good friend and neighbor.  Any day now we'll get a call and will collect twenty frozen local treats.  We buy as well local lamb and a share of a cow out of Montpelier -- grazing today but in our freezer tomorrow.  We are raising a brood of omnivores and they are comfortable with their food being produced locally.

Our son learned the difference between livestock and pets when he was about 4 years old.  He was arguing with me one cold winter afternoon.  I was reading the paper after loading a massive roasting hen into the over.  I had spackled the bird with olive oil, sea salt, crushed pepper, cumin, and fennel seed.  I stuffed her with lemons.  She was cooking away in a hot hot oven as I sat, warm, before the wood stove, in the cuddle chair by the window.

Cal walked in.  "Dad," he said.  "My chickens are my pets."

"No they're not."

"They are."

We vollied back and forth and then I dropped the paper to the side and he plopped into my lap.  (How the chair got its name.)  "Here's the difference," I said.  "Look in the oven."

He turned his head and stared.  I could see him thinking.

"What's in it?"

"A chicken," he said.

"That's the difference."

"Oh," he said, and that was that.

I am looking forward to our beef cow coming.  This grass-fed, organically fed and lovingly pampered bovine (at least until judgment day) will taste great.

That's the bottom line, really.  I wish I could say I am focusing on local because I want to save the planet.  I want to live in a community with lots of people working and living good lives in rural communities surrounded by working lands and supplying us with great food.  If, as a side-dish, meeting these goals happens to save the planet and our food supply I will not complain.


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

The Crowd, The Game, The Surprise -- Radio

Here is my second broadcast -- sorry, podcast -- again courtesy of WDEV Radio Vermont; all you need to do is click on the headline, which will take you to another website, which will allow you to download my podcast and then listen to it.  I would like to know what you think -- both content and mechanics of getting the content.

You will want to open the link in a new window -- so you don't leave this blog -- and then download the file.  Mine opened right away when it downloaded and it started to play.  I'd prefer the file to sit in a player so it just broadcasts when clicked on.

I'll keep working on easier ways to make the audio files available, including turning this into my own private BBC Radio4 (it and locally owned and operated WDEV are the best radio stations on the globe (and maybe KCRW, too)).  Any ideas or comments leading me to make the audio files easier to use will be much appreciated.

I think I will like radio.  I'll keep you posted.

Thanks,

Rocchio

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

Summer's Close -- Radio

Here is my first podcast, courtesy of WDEV Radio Vermont, where I am now a commentator.  Let me know if this works and let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Rocchio


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

Summer's Close

The calendar says there are four weeks left to summer but the rituals and customs of life say summer is closing. 

We picked our boy up from camp this past Sunday – big embraces, long looks to note the growth and scrapes and wisdoms picked up through new experiences.  First time having one of the wee ones out of the nest.  Two weeks, at that.  All to the good, the camp was awesome and the reports back all positive.  He looks great, if not a bit older, bigger.  It is a start of a process, which will be as hard as it is rewarding.  A passage like a season, but with more sting.

It is time to pick up supplies and clothes to make both kids shiny and presentable for the first day of school.  Talking with school age children in town is all about which teacher and what grade and who is in who’s class.  Good thing about it is landing a good teacher is like looking for weeds in a garden.  Easy.  Schools are all shined up too.

Fall gardens are starting and summer crops are mostly done.  If the weather holds we will have arugula and other greens for more than a month.  Trucks full of firewood and heating oil are starting to hog our roads.  And thankfully summer road projects are winding down.  Traffic control workers on construction sites – the most bored people in America – will soon hang up the yellow vest and lean the stop/slow sign against the work shed.

In Vermont we have the odd experience of a political primary in August, which is like hosting a football championship in July.  It’s hard enough to care about politics in September – it’s just not right to care about an election in August.  Another sign summer is done.

I voted early and am glad (at least for me) the election is over.  First, it will be good to know the main contenders in the fall madness.  Second, I will not miss the dozens of e-mails a day from people pretending to be writing to me but really just sending out virus-mail to advertise candidates.  I miss bumper-stickers.  Finally, I am looking forward to the end of lawn signs for a while.  We can’t make them illegal but candidates could agree not to plant them.  The candidates should hold a summit and agree to pull the signs:  they are ugly, ineffective and annoying.

I am not going to predict winners.  In a way I don’t care who wins, either the primary or the general election in November; I only care what they do.  As we head into fall I hope we get sense and reason, not bile and edge-issues, from whomever wins.  Wouldn’t it be great to have the vicious politics of the past ten years fall away with the leaves?  The problems we face can’t be managed to advantage for a candidate or party – they need to be managed for positive results for the nation.

Fortunately, we’ve had more important – or at least more interesting – things to focus on this summer than who will take the reins and try to get us out of the fiscal, policy and economic mess we are in.  Summer here is marked by events, as it is probably in most towns, and from the antique car show to the balloon-fest to the music festival the town has moved seamlessly from one crowd of enthusiasts to another. 

The balloon people come first and this year the weather cooperated.  We did not have a dawn landing on our barn, but we did see the sight and grace of hot-air balloons drifting across the sky. 

The antique car people walk through town with pride while their prize cars form a line up and down town.  Nothing makes me want a 1936 Packard Convertible Coupe more than seeing a mint condition forest green model parked, top down, on a crystal clear summer day.  (Okay, I honestly don’t know whether it was a 1936.  Or a Packard.  I think it was a coupe and am pretty sure that color is forest green. It was a convertible.  It’s interesting how we all claim more knowledge about cars when people who really know drive them into town.)  There is the Lamoille County Field Days -- rusted carnival rides, terrific livestock competitions, tractor and ox pulls and barrel racing.  All washed down with greasy food and milk.  We have too a summer music festival.  Ravello look out.

Summer is not all closed down.  A month or more of baseball; the chance to sneak away to the beach on warm September days; more gardening at least if the weather holds and chances for long weekend bike rides and hikes.  But the big markers are behind us and the early signs of fall are in front. 

I’ll be splitting and stacking firewood, breaking out the alarm clock and polishing the kids up for first day of school.  Not a bad way to mark the passage of a season.

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

Clouds In Motion: Summer In Full Swing

Summer is in full swing; clouds are wistful, not threatening.  Kids are burnt brown and live like the lost boys.

Driving dirt roads yesterday came upon these clouds in motion.  Snapped the picture through the windshield with iPhone, kept going, needed to get to camp, couldn't stop.


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

The Crowd, The Game, The Surprise

I knew about the surprise trip to see the Sox at Fenway Park.  My little girl had told me as only a seven year old can:

“Dad,” she whispered.  “Can I tell you a secret??”

“Well, shouldn’t you keep it quiet?”

“But!  Will you promise not to tell anyone else?”

“Sure.”

“We’re taking you to see the Red Sox for your birthday!”

I did not point out the thrill of this secret was pretty much gone once she told me.

The kids were not done.  “Just wait, Dad.  You’ll be so excited when you get in the park!”  Hmmm. 

A hot night.  Ninety-four degrees and no breeze at game time.  Humidity 1,000 percent.  Lester was terrible; we settled in for an anemic game; a rare loss on the Red Sox’s roll.  But the kids stayed on the edge of their seats!  “Just wait, Dad!”

And then, there it was.  Middle of the fourth inning.  Big scoreboard in Center Field.  In the lights:  “Happy Birthday David Rocchio; Love Callum and Antonia” 

All spelled right.  Kids jumping up and down. 

Other than the kids and an embarrassed grin from my wife, that was that.  The scoreboard went on to the next thing.  None of the beer swilling fans to our left or right, north or south, offered a ripple of recognition. 

I think the kids expected the crowd to stand and cheer – and I guess I hesitated for a second – my Ted Williams moment.  Did not happen.

I started watching the scoreboard.  I saw an anniversary announced.  Another birthday; this one for twins.  They’d been going up all during the game; I had not noticed.  Except for localized bursts each announcement was met with, well, nothing.

The thirty-seven-thousand-nine-hundred-and-four souls at Fenway Park that night were not interested in my – or anyone’s – personal milestones.

The Crowd.  Of course each one of us sitting in that park had stories.  Including the birthdays and anniversaries blaring from the scoreboard, but also bigger personal stories: a new job, a lost job; a graduation, an engagement; a big move, a deadline; a loss, a gain of this kind or that.  Every one of us could have turned to the person to the left or the right and talked for hours.  Each story would be different, but we’d all be in the same ballpark.

The refreshing thing was to The Crowd the only interesting people in the little bandbox (to borrow a phrase) were those who could throw a baseball ninety miles per hour, hit a baseball traveling ninety miles per hour or catch a ball so hit. 

Maybe that’s really why we go there:  we all have stories but none of us can hit Bard or Buchholz.  The game gets us out of ourselves.  We get to put life aside and pull for the extraordinary.

Comfort in a crowd, my kids excited beyond belief, life put in perspective.  Maybe Sox tickets are not too expensive after all. 

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

Late Summer Marks A Turn

Already there is a red-leafed maple tree.  Some of the swamp maples behind our house are turning their canopies into that funky shade of brown and yellow.  Some high hills are showing shades of red.

Our short summers even in the best of years are only one hundred days wire-to-wire.  One frost ends and it seems we wake up a day later and the next frost is here.

I try every year to grow eggplant.  We start them as early as is possible in cold frames; I weed and lay down compost and nurture the plants along; I get a beautiful purple blossom.  And then, wham.   A killing frost lays itself down in my garden.  No eggplant.

After that first frost in fall the sun stops coming and then the leaves change their colors and drop to the ground.

Although I usually don’t notice the change of season until too late, I have noticed this early August the sun does not climb so high in the sky.  The mornings are darker longer; sunlight is softer and the sharpness of the heat of the hottest days is dulled a bit.  Evenings come sooner, which is a big loss.  The long summer nights are perishable and going.

Pretty soon the woods will be gray and the ground covered with a thick mat of organic fodder.  The lawn will brown up and die.  The air will smell not of hay fever and dust but of wood smoke and rotting leaves.

The coming of fall is predictable to a degree and mostly the same each year.  The differences are in the details – the pace of the foliage and its brightness, the times of the last blooms.  Seasons matter here – they are sharply different.  They give a good tool to measure time.  They provide ready analogies to life.  They give us stuff to do.  

What I now need to do is get the wood in and pre-buy my heating oil, pay attention to the eggplant and be prepared to cover them, and make sure to savor hikes in our forests while the canopy remains mostly green.

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

I Need The Eggs: Trials and Life With Backyard Chickens

We've had laying hens for years now.  It started as whimsy: A woman I worked with, Helen, started to raise chickens and goats and rabbits to make extra money for herself and her little girls.  She was a strong woman.  She was raising these girls on her own and did not make a lot of money.  Her life seemed chaotic but terrific too.  The selling of livestock -- sort of a small animal for hobbyist operation -- seemed illogical and a bit nutty, which I loved, and so I bought some hens.  I admired her simply for taking the plunge.  

I do not farm and had no reason to buy the birds but for friendship. I do have a big barn and a nice big yard and field, but that's no excuse for coming home with a box full of small chickens, two galvanized pails, heat lamps, feed, feeding troughs, watering troughs and hay.  My wife, Jackie, refrained from comment (she is English).  She simply walked away.  For eight or more years now she has ignored the flock.  

The life cycle of a chicken is simple: chick, peeper, pullet (or cockerel), hen (or rooster), supper (or soup). My friend sold me Bantam peepers.

Peepers are small, not many weeks old. They peep, obviously, and school like fish as they run around their quarters in the barn. Bantam's fly more than larger chicken breeds and Bantam peepers roost as high as they can, tucking as tightly as possible against the ceiling of a coop. Our coop at the time sat in a corner of a cavernous second story of our old barn.  Peepers crowd together and sit on each other.  They know they are alone in the world and find great comfort in piling on top of each other, huddling, hugging.

Our barn, I’m told, dates from the 1840s. Its clapboards are worn and gray, its windows long blown-out. It has three tall stories with a cavernous middle, and it is now mostly vacant. The posts sit in the ground and there is no floor, just dirt.  The elements flood in.  It will cave in one day if I don't work to stop it.  But that's a different story.

Anyway, the second floor, at least a corner of it, was a perfect place for a large, warm coop. The size of most living rooms, that second story coop held roosts and nooks and crannies and was full of light and air. 

I've since moved the coop to the first floor.  The barn is getting too old to have us walking around the second floor.  Falling through the barn floor while hauling fifty pound bags of feed is not my idea of a good way to go.

During the day we let the birds out.  They are free to roam, and scratch their way over our lawn and the wilderness and brambles around the house.  They all but graze, like a herd of feathered, winged sheep.  But each night they return to their roost, secure from the world. One could set a clock to their commitment to being home as day turns toward night. If they could think about it (which they don’t), I believe they’d like the barn and the coop.

Watching the birds grow is always fun. Our son Callum, then just small, would stand stark still for minutes – hours to a wee one – and watch the flock peep and eat and scratch the floor. To watch Callum watch the birds, to see him stand so still for so long, was a wonder in its own right.  

Some developments we didn’t expect. Roosters. Two of them. Spurs on their legs and wattles under their chins. They had tall feathers called sickles that rise from their main tails, creating a sense of height and strength that is all bluff. With strong lungs, they crowed at all hours of the night and morning – not just at dawn, shattering a poultry myth.


My learning about raising poultry began that first fall, when one of the birds hurt its leg and developed a limp, raising a fundamental farm question: To meat or to mend? Ambivalence can be bad for a bird.

I called a vet who I know. 


“I’ve got a bird with a bad leg. Should I bring it in or just kill it?”

Silence for a minute on the phone.

“Dave, it’s a chicken.”

Agonizing still, I bundled up the bird early one morning and gently put it in a cat carrier. I drove it to a farm close by. I grew up in a town that was mostly farms, and I knew that a vet’s opinion was one thing but a farmer’s opinion was different. A young farmhand stepped from the barn as I walked up, and I asked what he would do.

“Is it getting food and water where it is?” he asked. It was. “Don’t do a thing,” he said. 
“Wait and see.” He looked at me and paused. “It’s a chicken.”

The bird recovered and  towered over the others.  He was no bantam. A proud Colombian Wyandotte.  And she turned out to be a he, one of the boys, certainly high in the pecking order, by all appearances happy to be alive. Of course, no one needs two roosters and we should have killed one but we didn't, even though we eat chicken at least once a week. So he stayed, taking up space and feed and crowing through the night.


That first flock of five hens and two roosters lasted a few years. They waited each morning for us to open the coop door, and then flew down from the second floor of the barn to scratch at the dirt and bits of left over snow below. Sometimes they would be in the driveway when I drove home from work, scattering like mice when I pulled in. 


We have covered many generations since that first flock.  We do not raise bantams any more -- the kids wanted to be able to collect and sell big brown eggs -- and usually have five to ten ladies and one boy to keep the flock going.  We've lost birds to fox, raccoon, fisher and dog.  


And until writing this, I never really thought about why I am raising chickens. The simple goal of keeping the group watered during a cold winter adds an hour to each day. The feed is expensive. Cleaning the coop is not, to say the least, fun. Given the time and effort, the way I figure it, we’re paying about three dollars an egg to keep these birds. There’s plenty to think about without them, balancing family and work and friends.


There is something simple and direct about raising chickens that makes it worthwhile. We give them a clean, well-lit space, room to roam, food and water. They give us a handful of eggs, with thick, hard, calcium-rich shells the color of a dusty barn floor.  I had the joy of watching my little boy and then his sister, when they were still very young, cup pale blue Bantam eggs in their tiny hands. Now, about five generations of chickens later, they have learned a bit about life and death and caring for things through the birds.


Woody Allen tells a joke to end one of his films, 'Annie Hall.' A man visits a psychiatrist. His wife thinks she’s a chicken. The doctor tells the man to bring her in, offering to help. The man says, “That’s the problem, Doctor. I need the eggs.”


Raising chickens might make no sense, but that could be the point. Whatever happens in the house or at work or in the world, there’s still the need to feed and water the birds and muck out the coop. And I need the eggs.


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

Of Milestones and Birthdays

My turning fifty is rolling in like a menacing ocean fog.  A thick, obscuring, cold sea fog.  It is a false marker but here it is nonetheless.

I call it a false marker because rarely is anything different one day to another or one year to another; it is all usually much more subtle than that and to treat an otherwise ordinary day as an acute angle misses the whole point of the journey.  There are few days in a life when the change is sharp or dramatic and therefore worthy of specific note.

It is fair to measure some specific days – deaths, births, marriage, divorce, discovering a new love, graduations, moving days, winning an event at the Olympics, fighting a battle in a war – where real change provides a true marker or divide.  Whether tragic or bliss, crushing or soaring, the days which slam us are deserving of all the respect, attention and care we can muster.  Birthdays are odd because, to borrow from William Least Heat Moon, they are just the end of another lap around the sun.  Each lap is fun to celebrate but that is all.  Except by coincidence, nothing really changes on those days. 

When we see people all of the time – family, close friends, co-workers – it is all but impossible to notice physical change.  When we see each other only occasionally obviously people are traveling an arch.  In young people the growth can be astounding.  Like a field of corn in July, the change over two weeks can shock almost.  As we get older the changes are less.  More time must pass to see anything meaningfully different.  We note the round numbers then, to quote my daughter, ‘just because,' which is silly but real in a cultural sense: Yea! We are teens; Cool. We’re in our twenties; Oh God, we are thirty; Oh hell, we are forty.  Well, here comes another one.

To mark fifty as a milestone means the number is what?  Pretty?  Organized?  Half?  Half of what?  It is not half a life given life could (and likely will) end well before 100.  It is the end of any vague notion of youth but that too is purely external, physical.  We are who we are inside our own skin.  I am in most ways the same boy I was at nine or ten or twenty.

I have done a lot, or at least lived a lot.  Hopefully that means something.  So how to mark it?  I’d like to define for myself the meaning of turning fifty, rather than leave it to the greeting card industry.  To take such a stand could well be an act of delusion, but it is at least a stand against a relentless tide, making it worthy if not noble.

Here is one thing it means:  I have accumulated things: memories, good and bad; experiences, good and bad; people, pains, oddities, quirks, recipes, habits, books, albums (photo and record), dislikes, likes, ailments, fears, confidences, worries, perspective, clothes, weight, furniture.  So many things piled up in the attic of my existence.  There is no yard sale, barn fire, bulldozer, government action or natural disaster capable of carrying away most of these accumulations.  They are stuck to me worse than glue.  This is of course good and bad but it is mostly just true.

Having said that, some accumulations we can let go.  Fifty is a good time to rent a dumpster and spend two days hauling stuff out of the attic and having it rolled away.  I am not being metaphorical.  Literally, I am saying rent a dumpster and clean the attic.  The rest we cannot, maybe should not, might not want to discard.  Personal decision that, what to discard if you could, but not worth a lot of time given how little we can do to shake off the past.

Turning fifty is an excuse -- a command? -- to do many things:  Learn to play an instrument (or relearn one given up as a kid).  Talk intelligently.  Listen.  No, really listen.  Enjoy sitting.  Exercise.  Coach.  Read everything.  Mentor.  

Do this one.  Wisdom might be creeping in.  Spread it.  It is fertilizer, which is not an insult.  Fertilizer makes things grow.  

Fifty also means there are things we should not do: Fifty is a good age to stop pretending we are still in college.

                   There are a million ways to mark the false marker of completing fifty laps around our sun.  Finding them is like finding weeds in a garden.  Here are a few more.  They can apply really to the successful completion of any lap, and to the extent they are born of accumulated wisdom; I hope they might pull you in a bit:

·      Buy a book full of completely and utterly blank pages and fill them. 

·      Ignore obsequious and condescending people.

·      Don’t be obsequious.

·      Don’t be condescending.

·      Do what you want.

·      Know what you want.

·      Do what you want even if you don’t know what you want.

·      Sometimes doing what you want is not the right thing to do; defer.

·      Be kind and thoughtful with children.

·      Don’t treat children like children.

·      Be ready for failure, sadness, dismay.

·      Work hard.

·      Take your time.

·      Know there is nothing anyone can do to make things turn out well.

·      Things only turn out well if you make them turn out well.

·      At the end of the day, nothing turns out well; we live on a planet blessed with a state of entropy so it is not really worth fighting the constant, irreversible, inevitable and relentless decay of everything around us.

·      Fight entropy.

·      Travel.

·      Cook.

·      Spend time with people you love.

·      Nurture and cherish friendships based on love, appreciation and understanding.

·      Be tolerant.

·      Take risks.

·      Be careful.

·      Think.

·      Trust your instincts.

·      Trust your intuition.

·      Let life accumulate.

Knowing turning fifty is not an acute angle, my plan for the day is to go see the Red Sox with my family (same thing I did at forty, actually) and eat a hot dog.  A lack of judgment, a risk, another accumulation in an already cluttered life.

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

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.