Feather
Last year I asked my long time friend Natalie to come and visit me on the farm. I didn't warn her about what that might look like, or that planting and growing season was upon us. Here's what my talented, published author, and dear friend had to say about her experience on the farm.
When I was 25, I used to dream about working on a farm, growing my own food, and tending to animals.
A series of life choices gave me absolutely no time or means to invest in this dream until the year 2022, when I was turning close to 60 years old and finally had a car that was paid off and gas money to take me to the farm.
My friend Rachael and her husband had purchased one and after one breakfast in Austin at the beginning of the year, invited me to come try out the experience and get my feet wet.
In May, I drove away from Austin and embarked on one of the most scenic and green journeys I have ever experienced, and when I arrived at the farm we dove right in, talking about Rachael’s vision for the place, what she had done already, what she still longed to achieve, and how I might assist her.
After coming through New Orleans, I turned left and headed through “Sweet Home Alabama”, then through Carolina and Tennessee, and finally onto a one lane road in the middle of nowhere in Virginia with no phone signal and only my GPS to guide me. I made it to the farm after a detour to a rock shop I had always wanted to see. So, I had a new bell in the car and some pretty sparkly crystals along for the ride.
The farm has 14 chickens, 4 ducks, 8 guineas, two goats, and Jake the dog, who loves to run after any animal, be it large or small. He is particularly obsessed with rabbits, who graze on the lawn right out the front door of the house.
Rachael had researched which animals consumed ticks and purchased them, housed them, and fed them on a regular basis. Goats don’t eat ticks, but chickens, ducks, and guineas do, so I had my first experience with guineas, who up to this point I had only heard of in folklore and never even seen a picture. They are funny looking feathered creatures with beautiful patterns that look like painted rocks, and their necks are long and scraggly. On top of their heads there is a white section that makes them look like they are wearing bird shit, and their voices are repetitive and loud. They are not known to be very intelligent, but they can sure eat ticks. Having no ticks on one’s body is an asset, as Virginia is full of them in that very old humid forest canopy. It is so green and alive there it takes awhile to adjust. We used essential oils to ward off the insects but even so, sometimes we’d find a tick or two. Even after a shower or bath we’d all find ourselves feeling around for bugs on a regular basis.
The farm has designated chores, and I was going to farm-sit after the third week for a few days, so I was intent on learning exactly how to do each task while my friends were gone so that upon their return everyone would still be alive.
The guineas are the least work, as all you must do is release them in the morning from their house and put them back in there at the end of the day, right at sunset. Mostly they will follow you if you have some feed in a little vessel and a bucket of water for their refill, but the last week I was there, I felt like I was in some kind of guinea rebellion. There were 8 of them, and one had recently broken from the group to go nest by the stream that ran across the front of the property. We could hear her, but she would not come back to be with the others at night, and she was perched in thick foliage, so not easy for us or potential predators to find. The subsequent pecking order was disturbed, and there was one main mean guinea who attacked anyone who tried to get into the guinea house.
One afternoon as I was trying to get them all to go into their house, one of them somehow ended up in the large garden behind a metal fence. I tried to chase her out, and Rachael eventually came over and tried as well. Instead of going through the gate and magically ending up free on the other side, this little dumbass would first look at her fellow feathered friends about halfway through the garden at the fence, then head toward the open gate, take a hard left, and sail right back into the middle of the garden again.
It kind of reminded me of a person who is avoiding therapy. The door is open, the opportunity is available, but the pull of the habits of the mind keeps creating and recreating the same track, so no freedom is to be had.
After several attempts to guide the little creature toward the gate, Rachael blessed her for the night and hoped for the best. The next morning, the bird was still running around inside the garden, still looking at her companions on the other side of the fence. It was fascinating. A group of guineas is called a confusion.
Guineas have wings, but they don’t always use them.
I began to have nightly troubles getting everyone to go into the guinea cage at dusk. Even if I left the gate open, the ones left on the outside of it would run around the cage repeatedly and not go through, leaving me also running around the cage multiple times talking to them and pleading for them to go inside. One afternoon after I had already emptied the water bucket, one guinea was running round and round the cage with the open door. I fantasized that I trapped her under the bucket and tossed her in with the others, but the bucket was the wrong size, and that little bird really did get my goat. In the next moment I also noted that I seemed to have far more compassion for a group of little birds than I ever did for a human being. The birds’ lot was already cast, something that is not so easy to see in a person. Finally, everyone went inside, after the sun had seared us all for the last time.
It starts to get quite hot in Virginia during the second week of June. The long winters and cool springs are blessings, but when the summer comes, it is sweltering, and I remembered this from another trip I had taken to Virginia 19 years previously. Sunset is particularly sweltering, as the sun makes one last pass and burns whatever it hasn’t burned out of you during the day in this time of dusk. It’s brutal, and there is no escaping it.
It was time to put the guineas away, and 5 of them had followed me into their house, but two of them were running around the outside of the large garden fence, grabbing at one another, tearing at each other’s feathers, and holding on like it was going to be a fight to the death. I guess the spare guinea who ran off had seriously disturbed the pecking order, as the two birds I was watching would not let go of one another. They would also not stop running as fast as they could around the garden. Every time they saw me, they’d turn and take off in the other direction, sometimes stopping to grab one another and go round and round in circles, gripping onto each other’s feathers or necks. They did this for a long time. It was like a guinea Kentucky Derby, and they seemed to never tire.
I was getting tired and exasperated, and Rachael called me from where she was working in the barn to see if I needed help, and I responded that I did. Her presence created a break in the free space the birds had to run around, and they ended up in a kind of sandwich between Rachael and myself until finally we managed to coax them into their house, which is made of wire fencing, a gate that locks, and another metal piece that is clipped onto the cage to keep predators out of there.
The two remaining birds looked quite tattered as they entered the guinea cage, but the sun was going down, and we didn’t notice the extent of the damage until the next morning.
The next morning when we opened the cage, one of the birds that had been in the life-lock marathon had far fewer feathers than the other birds, most notable when all the birds but her flew over the stream and she could only lift herself high enough to hit the embankment and fall before she made it to the other side. One of her remaining feathers stood straight up from the back of her body, like she was wearing a costume for Halloween.
I decided to call her “Feather,” and I watched her throughout the day to see how her progress was going. She seemed to be ostracized by the others, and I could totally relate, having experienced that myself for a great deal of my life. There is no mastery to be had when you are injured and merely look hilarious to everyone around you, but I was banking on Feather to make it.
It’s funny in life, when you are surrounded by people who seem to have more feathers than you do and who also know how to use them and fly. And you find yourself moderately wounded with one of your feathers sticking up, so no one has the wherewithal to take you seriously. Poor Feather would run across the pasture with her feather sticking up, and it was hard to know whether it would be better for her to lose the feather or to just wear it that way for a while until time took its course.
The raw power of nature is evident at the farm, making you hyper aware of the cycles and tides, of the brutality of it all, with its birth, death, and rebirth. Humans don’t even deserve to witness such majesty, as they try to dominate the landscape instead of listening to it.
Feather keeps going, even though every living creature has a predator. She has one, too. She’s not fast enough at this point to defend herself.
Feather is my last memory of the farm and the creature upon whom I’m most likely to bank my faith: Despite her inability to keep up with the others, her feather sticks up as she runs across the grass, like a determined little announcement that says “Note me. I’m still here. I still function. I’m not dead. I can’t quite fly, yet I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m alive!”
By: Natalie Flowers