Jumping Jack and Happy Hens

I’m heading to Georgia to be with Holly and Don while Don has surgery for liver cancer, and then on to visit another dear friend from my ten years living in Atlanta, Roger. Then it’s off to Columbus, Georgia to attend a retreat with my new-mother-days neighbor, Gayle. So, I made the rounds to collect veggies and deliver cooked samples before my departure. We hadn’t picked Jack’s okra or peppers for several days, and I didn’t want Jack’s labors to go to waste. I really am a sucker for fresh okra.

I arrived at Jack’s house to find a solar collector aimed at the morning sun in front of his porch. Jack’s marine battery, that powered his television before the digital conversion made it impossible for a lot of mountain folk to receive anything other than satellite television, was hooked up to the solar collector. He had borrowed Cotton’s solar collection panel to give it a try running an electric light bulb. He likes the extra light so much that he and his cousin are considering buying their own solar set-up. What’s next -- a word processor to replace his manual typewriter? I think we’re in danger of Jack jumping over the twentieth century into the twenty-first.

We sat in the cool autumn breeze on his porch and talked about the trip Richard and I took with Charlie and Deborah to Oak Ridge. This led to a discussion of our hopes for the future of solar and wind power. Jack allowed that he’s not averse to accepting modern-day technologies; he simply wants the benefits to outweigh the costs – to the environment and to his way of life. We then walked to the garden up the road.

After collecting okra, we walked back down the road to his kitchen garden on the side of his house. As we collected the peppers, and a couple of ears of Silver Queen corn, Jack told me how he keeps his garden soil healthy by composting all his organic waste. I was intrigued by his telling of how some old-time farmers used to allow their brush piles to decompose on their fields, mowing around them as they rotted. I wonder if this is where the custom of raking leaves originated.

After lunch, Richard and I went to Mamie’s to help her clean her hen house. Both Jack and Mamie use a small amount of commercial fertilizer because they don’t create enough animal and yard waste to substitute for it. Jack has only one horse to clean up after, and Mamie’s several dozen chickens aren’t exactly a commercial egg-laying operation. But they do poop, so Richard and I decided to collect their offerings and transfer them to our garden plot for feeding next year’s crops.

Richard’s lack of immune system because of his heart transplant dictates that he’s not allowed to breathe in a chicken house. Not breathing could seriously inhibit his ability to shovel shit. (Excuse my being crude, but sometimes there is no substitute for the perfect word.) For this type of task, we purchased a super-high-efficiency face mask. With Richard looking and sounding like a cheap knock-off of Darth Vader and me in my honest-to-goodness cowboy boots, we entered the laying house.

Mamie and I were the bucket brigade. Mamie positioned empty buckets for Richard to fill, while I transported the full containers to Richard’s trailer. Richard positioned the trailer near the garden and took empty buckets from me while he, quite literally, took a breather. I walked over all of the played-out parts of our garden, sifting the poop over the soil. I also found out why cowboy boots are called shit-kickers; the pointy toe is a great way to break up clods of you-know-what. Next time Mamie’s son Junior tills (or is it plowing?), the manure will be incorporated into the dirt. We finished the yearly hen house cleaning in less than two hours. I think a farm family originated the saying, “Many hands make light work.”

Who knew that cleaning a chicken house would be another “homecoming” for Richard? He says that, when he was a kid, his family egg layer breeding operations supplied six hundred trucks – that’s about three thousand tons – of chicken poop to North Brookfield, Massachusetts farmers per year. He waxed ecstatic about how nice and dry and easy to handle Mamie’s chicken poop was compared to the poop he shoveled as a child. And he looked like a proud papa that had just finished painting the nursery as he surveyed the chickens fluffing the newly laid straw litter in the newly cleaned hen house.

Mamie insisted on paying us for our labors. I tried declining payment on the basis that I had read in Budget Travel about farms charging one thousand dollars a week to teach “campers” how to farm by using them as hired help. When that didn’t work, I explained that if she taught at an agricultural college, they’d pay her probably fifty thousand dollars a year-- And we weren’t paying her anything for her knowledge. Mamie laughed and started our payment with four dozen of her good, brown yard eggs.