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So today was a chicken slaughter day and it was fine. This is 7/12 for the year so we’ve officially passed the halfway mark.

The two young male interns have both left to go back to school. They’ve been replaced by a young woman who has deferred her freshman year of college due to concerns about the handling of the pandemic. The two boys were rather rowdy, and she’s quiet, so far, but we’re glad not to be too short-handed, so.

We had a farm alumna come back for processing– the first Assistant Livestock Manager, who left two years ago or so– moved to Boston– she’s working now as an inspector for an organic certification agency, and she had a farm on her schedule nearbyish, so she scheduled the inspection for a Monday afternoon before slaughter day so she could come camp out in a tent and help us while being isolated.

Farmkid is delighted to see her; she worked here for two years when Farmkid was like, hmm, two to fourish? culminating in Farmkid getting to be the flower girl in her wedding? so it was pretty epic as early friendships go in Farmkid’s mind, and she’s always so excited to see this woman, who I guess can just be Farm Alumna for this post’s purposes. She was super good about her mask, too. We’re currently in three different isolation circles– FA, who has been isolated in a tiny circle of just herself and her husband in Boston, so she’s certainly not exposed, then the general circle of the farm, which is a large and irregular circle including me and my Dude, who is visiting presently, and then the third circle is the new farm apprentice and the last of the previous group of farm apprentices who just went on vacation; they’ve decided to co-isolate together, as the old apprentice was just on a plane and so ought to be quarantining, and the new apprentice who came from out of state and so ought to be quarantining and it’s just easier if they consider themselves a self-contained unit.

Anyway it’s a lot of mask-wearing and logistics but as long as we can eat lunch outside it’s not horribly difficult.

But the punchline of this post, okay, I promise it’s funny. It’s not that funny. Whatever it’s funny.

Mm last bit of background– we had three apprentices this year but along with them they hired a new Assistant Livestock Manager. He is an adorable young man of like, 23 or 24, very cute, slight of stature, a bit, hmm, I intend this to be a sort of neutral descriptor, but swishy– he’s a Texan who came to a small liberal arts college in central NY state to major in poetry? He’s rather interested in fashion? He likes to speak with exuberant gestures? Also he’s gay like in real life, but– he’s like, cartoony-gay on purpose in his mannerisms, he’s also quite experienced at farm living and very practical and also he writes poetry. So like, he contains multitudes. Anyway he’s a fantastic character and I could not possibly create a character in fiction as entertaining as he is in real life. (After we were done with chicken processing he went home and showered and changed and then came back for pizza night, as is customary, and he showed up in these fantastic white denim overall shorts with rolled cuffs, and actually pulled off the look flawlessly.)

Anyway.

So, Farm Alumna (and former Assistant Livestock Manager herself, as it happens) has been all toured around the farm and seen all the various improvements we’ve made since she left– she’d been by in November so generally she’s up on all the new stuff, but there’s been some additional new things.

The last thing she hadn’t seen that was new was that we got a really big long sturdy stainless-steel table to use out in the kill room, replacing two smaller tables of similar design. She worked in the evisceration room so she hadn’t seen the new table until we were cleaning up and it got moved into the hallway. She turned and saw it there, just as the new Assistant Livestock Manager was walking past it.

“Oh my,” she said admiringly, “look at this big boy!”

The new ALM paused, a little taken aback, then said “why thank you,” flexed, and kept walking.