the business
Jun. 20th, 2020 02:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2V0rQ2A
it’s been a hectic day around here, i washed five baskets of eggs and made the world’s most elaborate lunch apparently, i thought it’d be easy but i spent like, all fucking morning on it. (Chicken and egg salad, and homemade sourdough pitas, and none of it was particularly time consuming and yet it took for goddamned ever. Somehow cooking for nine, four of whom eat like, well, young twentysomethings working hard physical-labor jobs, is A Lot.)
It was also hot as fuck.
In the afternoon we also arranged flowers, which is still sort of a small thing this time of year but soon will be the Huge Fucking Deal it usually is. Everything’s behind because it’s so dry, but we’re getting there.
And mom and dad came over with my nephews and niece, my oldest sister’s kids, who I only ever see a couple of times per year. I spent an hour sitting in the creek watching them catch crayfish and play with swim goggles, and then I sat at the kitchen table demonstrating to the boys (who are ten and twelve) how a serger works. Mom gave me a huge box of old fabric scraps and I’d washed them and hung them to dry, and the 10-year-old went and got them off the line for me and brought them to me so I could keep crazy quilting. I just sort of impulsively sewed straight edges together wherever I found them, somewhat at the boys’ prompting of fabric choices, and then sewed those to some other things, and then some others, and after a while we had a probably twelve-inch-wide swath that was maybe forty inches long, pretty square, of a riotous mass of semi-color-coordinated things. The thing about that box of scraps, though, is that some of those scraps had sort of violently catapulted me back in time– there’s a shirt Dad used to wear, which I hadn’t realized was homemade but here’s the extra fabric from it, white with yellow, brown, orange, and blue thin stripes across it, Very Extremely 1982. “I liked that shirt,” Dad said. “This is the ugliest fabric ever!” the boys crowed. “I think it looks fine,” Mom said, frowning. “It’s very, uh, vintage,” I said diplomatically.
Meanwhile, BIL has been largely absent, because It’s Hayin’ Season, Oh Boy, and he’s got to get the hay cut and raked and tetted, and then the farmer who works the fields about three miles away will drive over with his baler and bale it for him, for a fairly nominal fee. Because balers are like fifty grand and this farm cannot support that particular investment. Haying season is the worst, incidentally, because all of the specialized equipment fucking sucks, but also because you have to do it on the hottest days of the year, and it’s exhausting and grueling and fucking shitty to do, and also it’s fairly dangerous. Sister mostly survives by not thinking about it too hard. This year, at least, BIL is using a tractor that has a seatbelt and roll cage, neither of which the old tractor had.
But to make things even worse, BIL got a call from someone at the farmer’s market that another vendor had had a bad farming accident and was in the hospital.
(no gore or details behind the cut, just cut for length)
All he knew was that it was bad, and he also knew that the other vendor, who runs a vegetable stand at the farmer’s market but whose business also has a lot of livestock, is basically a sole proprietor– there’s a family member who helps at the market, but she’s not in great health, she can’t lift heavy weights and really doesn’t do any of the actual farming.
So he called the family member, and said listen, I heard there was an accident, i don’t know anything, but I know you guys are going to need some help so let me know what I can do.
The long and short of it is, they’ll be able to get food and water to the critters through the weekend (and it’s going to be over 90 here, which we don’t get a ton of so it’s not like the animals are used to it), but on Monday they have some poultry going to the local slaughterhouse, and part of the deal was that the injured farmer was going to come and help with the processing because the slaughterhouse is short-handed.
(Who knew: in the pandemic, nobody wants to work at a slaughterhouse. The thing is, it’s not like the Tyson plant. It’s on a comparable scale to ours, smaller even. But nobody wants to work there, even though a quarter of the state is unemployed. Weird how that works. If my unemployment won’t come through I should just go up there and work for him, LOL.)
And the farmer, well– she’s in stable condition, she’ll be able to walk and get around and all, but she’s, well, pretty profoundly injured, so she won’t be back on her tractor anytime soon. And she does all that work alone, I remember once she was joking but not really about putting her tractor in the lowest creep gear and walking behind it to do a two-man job alone. (You can technically do this, but it’s incredibly dangerous. So… I mean. Yeah.)
So BIL is sending one of his employees up to help with the slaughtering on Monday, and also has found another guy he’s hired in the past for help with poultry slaughtering and is planning to pay him for the day out of his own pocket. Hopefully they can just get the birds and go to the slaughterhouse, but they might have to actually go out in the fields and catch them themselves; they’re prepared to do it and know how. And he called the slaughterhouse up there (they’re the next county up; we’re the only poultry slaughterhouse in this county, and he’s the only one in that county), and the guy hadn’t heard yet– they hadn’t thought to call him yet about it. He immediately said “oh my god they’ve got cattle too, can they get water to them?” and BIL said, “I don’t know about the long run. I’d call them on Monday.”
Farmsister is super terribly upset about it, not just because this is a friend and colleague– I mean, she is, it’s a small community, she’s a grump but Farmkid loves her dog and she’s a decent person and sweet if you know her– but also because oh god, it’s a reminder of how dangerous and lonely this business is.
It’s long after dark now and the fireflies are out and BIL isn’t home from haying. He was probably driving the other farmer home so he could leave his baler and tractor here overnight and come back to it tomorrow afternoon after the farmer’s market, and once he was there they were probably talking about the one who’s in the hospital and what’s to be done for her, but. I’m less worried because he brought the tractor back and went back out in the truck. But it’s still nerve-wracking.
But it’s not something that should be done alone, there’s a community. Maybe we can’t save her farm, and maybe the vegetables will have to die in the field, but at least the livestock won’t die of thirst for want of willing hands, in the interim.
It’s ten o’clock and I just heard the door, so either we’re getting home invadered or BIL just got back.
(Wake-up time on Saturdays for the farmer’s market is 5:30 am.)
[hey if you’re local there’s probably enough information here to identify everyone; please don’t gossip about it though, she’s such a private person she’d surely be upset to have even this much detail spread around about it about her injury and so on, but oh my gosh i just really needed to write about it. it’s so upsetting! I know, the pronoun is a huge identifier but even just redacting a pronoun would be equally obvious given how overwhelmingly male the local farms are, and I couldn’t bear to misgender her.]
[also hey if you’re local and looking for a job i know a slaughterhouse that’s hiring, lol.]
it’s been a hectic day around here, i washed five baskets of eggs and made the world’s most elaborate lunch apparently, i thought it’d be easy but i spent like, all fucking morning on it. (Chicken and egg salad, and homemade sourdough pitas, and none of it was particularly time consuming and yet it took for goddamned ever. Somehow cooking for nine, four of whom eat like, well, young twentysomethings working hard physical-labor jobs, is A Lot.)
It was also hot as fuck.
In the afternoon we also arranged flowers, which is still sort of a small thing this time of year but soon will be the Huge Fucking Deal it usually is. Everything’s behind because it’s so dry, but we’re getting there.
And mom and dad came over with my nephews and niece, my oldest sister’s kids, who I only ever see a couple of times per year. I spent an hour sitting in the creek watching them catch crayfish and play with swim goggles, and then I sat at the kitchen table demonstrating to the boys (who are ten and twelve) how a serger works. Mom gave me a huge box of old fabric scraps and I’d washed them and hung them to dry, and the 10-year-old went and got them off the line for me and brought them to me so I could keep crazy quilting. I just sort of impulsively sewed straight edges together wherever I found them, somewhat at the boys’ prompting of fabric choices, and then sewed those to some other things, and then some others, and after a while we had a probably twelve-inch-wide swath that was maybe forty inches long, pretty square, of a riotous mass of semi-color-coordinated things. The thing about that box of scraps, though, is that some of those scraps had sort of violently catapulted me back in time– there’s a shirt Dad used to wear, which I hadn’t realized was homemade but here’s the extra fabric from it, white with yellow, brown, orange, and blue thin stripes across it, Very Extremely 1982. “I liked that shirt,” Dad said. “This is the ugliest fabric ever!” the boys crowed. “I think it looks fine,” Mom said, frowning. “It’s very, uh, vintage,” I said diplomatically.
Meanwhile, BIL has been largely absent, because It’s Hayin’ Season, Oh Boy, and he’s got to get the hay cut and raked and tetted, and then the farmer who works the fields about three miles away will drive over with his baler and bale it for him, for a fairly nominal fee. Because balers are like fifty grand and this farm cannot support that particular investment. Haying season is the worst, incidentally, because all of the specialized equipment fucking sucks, but also because you have to do it on the hottest days of the year, and it’s exhausting and grueling and fucking shitty to do, and also it’s fairly dangerous. Sister mostly survives by not thinking about it too hard. This year, at least, BIL is using a tractor that has a seatbelt and roll cage, neither of which the old tractor had.
But to make things even worse, BIL got a call from someone at the farmer’s market that another vendor had had a bad farming accident and was in the hospital.
(no gore or details behind the cut, just cut for length)
All he knew was that it was bad, and he also knew that the other vendor, who runs a vegetable stand at the farmer’s market but whose business also has a lot of livestock, is basically a sole proprietor– there’s a family member who helps at the market, but she’s not in great health, she can’t lift heavy weights and really doesn’t do any of the actual farming.
So he called the family member, and said listen, I heard there was an accident, i don’t know anything, but I know you guys are going to need some help so let me know what I can do.
The long and short of it is, they’ll be able to get food and water to the critters through the weekend (and it’s going to be over 90 here, which we don’t get a ton of so it’s not like the animals are used to it), but on Monday they have some poultry going to the local slaughterhouse, and part of the deal was that the injured farmer was going to come and help with the processing because the slaughterhouse is short-handed.
(Who knew: in the pandemic, nobody wants to work at a slaughterhouse. The thing is, it’s not like the Tyson plant. It’s on a comparable scale to ours, smaller even. But nobody wants to work there, even though a quarter of the state is unemployed. Weird how that works. If my unemployment won’t come through I should just go up there and work for him, LOL.)
And the farmer, well– she’s in stable condition, she’ll be able to walk and get around and all, but she’s, well, pretty profoundly injured, so she won’t be back on her tractor anytime soon. And she does all that work alone, I remember once she was joking but not really about putting her tractor in the lowest creep gear and walking behind it to do a two-man job alone. (You can technically do this, but it’s incredibly dangerous. So… I mean. Yeah.)
So BIL is sending one of his employees up to help with the slaughtering on Monday, and also has found another guy he’s hired in the past for help with poultry slaughtering and is planning to pay him for the day out of his own pocket. Hopefully they can just get the birds and go to the slaughterhouse, but they might have to actually go out in the fields and catch them themselves; they’re prepared to do it and know how. And he called the slaughterhouse up there (they’re the next county up; we’re the only poultry slaughterhouse in this county, and he’s the only one in that county), and the guy hadn’t heard yet– they hadn’t thought to call him yet about it. He immediately said “oh my god they’ve got cattle too, can they get water to them?” and BIL said, “I don’t know about the long run. I’d call them on Monday.”
Farmsister is super terribly upset about it, not just because this is a friend and colleague– I mean, she is, it’s a small community, she’s a grump but Farmkid loves her dog and she’s a decent person and sweet if you know her– but also because oh god, it’s a reminder of how dangerous and lonely this business is.
It’s long after dark now and the fireflies are out and BIL isn’t home from haying. He was probably driving the other farmer home so he could leave his baler and tractor here overnight and come back to it tomorrow afternoon after the farmer’s market, and once he was there they were probably talking about the one who’s in the hospital and what’s to be done for her, but. I’m less worried because he brought the tractor back and went back out in the truck. But it’s still nerve-wracking.
But it’s not something that should be done alone, there’s a community. Maybe we can’t save her farm, and maybe the vegetables will have to die in the field, but at least the livestock won’t die of thirst for want of willing hands, in the interim.
It’s ten o’clock and I just heard the door, so either we’re getting home invadered or BIL just got back.
(Wake-up time on Saturdays for the farmer’s market is 5:30 am.)
[hey if you’re local there’s probably enough information here to identify everyone; please don’t gossip about it though, she’s such a private person she’d surely be upset to have even this much detail spread around about it about her injury and so on, but oh my gosh i just really needed to write about it. it’s so upsetting! I know, the pronoun is a huge identifier but even just redacting a pronoun would be equally obvious given how overwhelmingly male the local farms are, and I couldn’t bear to misgender her.]
[also hey if you’re local and looking for a job i know a slaughterhouse that’s hiring, lol.]
no subject
Date: 2020-06-20 03:14 am (UTC)"a reminder of how dangerous and lonely this business is" -- so true!