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I was rushing around to get to the airport and my ring flew off outside. It bounced off the icy, frozen-goose-poop-studded driveway with a surprisingly loud clang. The truck was running, had been warming up. I'd just fed the baby pigs and was going to grab stuff and go, to be on time.
Now I was looking for a gold ring in a varying field of sparkly cratered tan-through-brown in varying textures.
The last several days had been a lot.
It's been so cold, and cold with no snow insulation. We have maybe 8" on the ground, if that, which means that the cold drives right in. I've been working hard and more or less constantly to make sure everyone is ok, which means running a lot of water and food and straw; with no snow to insulate the outside of animal houses, straw inside is the best bet. But the straw clogs up with poop and needs to be refreshed every day or two, the pile of straw in the animal houses climbs higher (great for the garden, all layered with manure, but too much and I run out of headroom) and then every piece of clothing I own has prickly stabby awns and slivers of straw in it but I need to wear clothing all the time because it's cold. Water goes out a couple times a day from inside, which is fine, but then it freezes in the containers and needs to be removed either with a lot of brute force stomping if I'm extra strong or by being carried into the house and set by the stove until the ice plug loosens enough to slide out.
My insulated gloves are MIA, or at least, I seem to have the right hand from several pairs. I sewed myself fingerless polar fleece gloves which lets me carry the coldest things in my palms and leaves my fingers free to open feed bags, but the first couple days especially it takes my hands a long time to rebuild the circulation they need to function in weather like this. My fingers go numb, I finish what I'm doing and go in, I warm up, I go back out, rinse, repeat. Several days into it my hands maintain warmth much better. The skin on my face goes numb too, but I've figured out some sort of system with two tubes of polar fleece that keeps my breath from freezing on cloth but covers my cheeks.
Nothing behaves. Water acts like wax poured from a lit candle: it forms that film first, then solidifies. A good bucket of water can stay mostly thawed for an hour or two, but a little spill instantly makes a spot that will be slick all winter, and a spill in the wrong place can weld a door closed or wedge it open. I spend a surprising amount of time walking around with a hammer knocking ice out of inconvenient spaces. Plastic snaps. Thank goodness my staple gun is a plain mechanical object; once I warm it up inside so it doesn't burn my hands with cold, I can take it out and staple old feedbags to the inside of the bird houses to block draughts and provide insulation. Starting the truck, even with a battery blanket and block heater, sounded like the end of the world for awhile.
The cats, trapped inside, are bored. They form new relationship with each other, trying to entice each other into playing but too irritable to respond reasonably so they squabble and zip through the house at full speed with tufts of each other's fur in their mouths.
The plastic of the special, insulated, triple-layer dog door has gone hard which means that when Thea comes in and out every three minutes to check in here, the door doesn't shut properly and the temperature in here drops, sometimes as much as 5 degrees in 3 minutes. It takes the stove awhile to recover that.
The stove, meanwhile, has a stupendous chimney and so its heat output fluctuates with the outside temperature and the wind and goodness knows what else. I carefully swing the cycle around so I can go into the airport for six hours without the house getting too cold, but the flight is cancelled and I have to set an alarm for 1 and then nope, 2am to refresh the wood so we stay warm enough in here since I'm not up already driving home at that time.
The floor is covered in fragments of bark, and straw. I can sweep it three times a day or not, it makes o difference. The patio doors in my cathedral-ceilinged livingroom leak air like a sieve and I haven't had the wherewithal to move furniture to put window wrap on them. I close the curtains but the draught still comes through and the floor in there feels like ice.
So when the ring that symbolizes my commitment to whatever part of this is meaningful slips off my finger and I can't see it in the field of goose poop in first glance, and I have an appointment that symbolizes the outside world that wants me to give up on this, I wonder if it's a sign. Do I leave the ring wherever it is (still can't see it) and come home and write a post offering all the outdoor animals to someone and just-- go? Create a life where the weather doesn't dictate my actions, even if it continues to inform my choices?
I decided to leave the ring there but I kept standing there, looking, anyhow. This is a symbol that this is enough, I thought, I'm leaving. But. I kept looking for the ring. Eventually I spotted it: gold, the colour of shiny goose poop, in piles of frozen shiny goose poop.
It turns out that was the morning after the coldest night. It was supposed to get colder the next night and it never did. At 9pm I took water out in buckets, watching the animals drink by headlamp, and fluffed up straw. My hands were acclimatizing and I didn't need to come in and warm up, they felt fine. At bedtime none of the animals was shivering, always a good sign. The forecast wind never appeared and in the dead calm it felt almost warm.
They say tonight is the last of the hard nights for awhile, or at least, the last of the deathly cold ones. The next forecast is for snow and, somehow, freezing rain which is of course any ran that lands on a ground that has been seared by -35C for days. Several daily runs with water will be replaced by trying to start the snowblower and trying not to knock the blades loose on towers of frozen goose poop. Carrying so much straw will be replaced by several days of butchering and then carrying much less straw.
I took water and straw out tonight again. No one was shivering. We got through last night, which wasn't as bad as expected. We got through the night before that, which was way worse. We got through several nights previous to that where the cold built and settled like a malevolent beast. Somehow the pigs were trotting around and even the tiny, densely-furred little ones were roughousing as I fluffed the straw for them, and the adults got down to business grabbing mouthfulls of it and pawing it to fluff it up by my side. They drank two buckets of water and grunted interestedly and went to bed. The chickens fluffed up perfectly round on their perches (2x4s turned on their wide sides, so they can perch without frostbiting their toes) with little frost spots where heat could make it through those feathers. The ducks tried to climb into their bowl of water. The muscovies were alert under their lamp and not shivering and were walking fine-- if somonee is going to get frostbite it will be them and I've lost some over the years to frozen feet. Their cushion of straw seemed to be working though.
Now the dogs are both burrowed into straw in their chosen locations. The cats are strewn across the woodstove room as the embers burn down and down until there's enough room for me to load up a night's worth of wood. Everyone is nestled in their beds. A thousand scratchy shards of straw poke through my pants, needling at my legs; upstairs I have piles of fabric that, maybe, won't hold straw if it's sewn into new pants. My ring gleams once more on my finger. In eight or nine hours the worst of this one bit will be over, and the next bit will begin.
Now I was looking for a gold ring in a varying field of sparkly cratered tan-through-brown in varying textures.
The last several days had been a lot.
It's been so cold, and cold with no snow insulation. We have maybe 8" on the ground, if that, which means that the cold drives right in. I've been working hard and more or less constantly to make sure everyone is ok, which means running a lot of water and food and straw; with no snow to insulate the outside of animal houses, straw inside is the best bet. But the straw clogs up with poop and needs to be refreshed every day or two, the pile of straw in the animal houses climbs higher (great for the garden, all layered with manure, but too much and I run out of headroom) and then every piece of clothing I own has prickly stabby awns and slivers of straw in it but I need to wear clothing all the time because it's cold. Water goes out a couple times a day from inside, which is fine, but then it freezes in the containers and needs to be removed either with a lot of brute force stomping if I'm extra strong or by being carried into the house and set by the stove until the ice plug loosens enough to slide out.
My insulated gloves are MIA, or at least, I seem to have the right hand from several pairs. I sewed myself fingerless polar fleece gloves which lets me carry the coldest things in my palms and leaves my fingers free to open feed bags, but the first couple days especially it takes my hands a long time to rebuild the circulation they need to function in weather like this. My fingers go numb, I finish what I'm doing and go in, I warm up, I go back out, rinse, repeat. Several days into it my hands maintain warmth much better. The skin on my face goes numb too, but I've figured out some sort of system with two tubes of polar fleece that keeps my breath from freezing on cloth but covers my cheeks.
Nothing behaves. Water acts like wax poured from a lit candle: it forms that film first, then solidifies. A good bucket of water can stay mostly thawed for an hour or two, but a little spill instantly makes a spot that will be slick all winter, and a spill in the wrong place can weld a door closed or wedge it open. I spend a surprising amount of time walking around with a hammer knocking ice out of inconvenient spaces. Plastic snaps. Thank goodness my staple gun is a plain mechanical object; once I warm it up inside so it doesn't burn my hands with cold, I can take it out and staple old feedbags to the inside of the bird houses to block draughts and provide insulation. Starting the truck, even with a battery blanket and block heater, sounded like the end of the world for awhile.
The cats, trapped inside, are bored. They form new relationship with each other, trying to entice each other into playing but too irritable to respond reasonably so they squabble and zip through the house at full speed with tufts of each other's fur in their mouths.
The plastic of the special, insulated, triple-layer dog door has gone hard which means that when Thea comes in and out every three minutes to check in here, the door doesn't shut properly and the temperature in here drops, sometimes as much as 5 degrees in 3 minutes. It takes the stove awhile to recover that.
The stove, meanwhile, has a stupendous chimney and so its heat output fluctuates with the outside temperature and the wind and goodness knows what else. I carefully swing the cycle around so I can go into the airport for six hours without the house getting too cold, but the flight is cancelled and I have to set an alarm for 1 and then nope, 2am to refresh the wood so we stay warm enough in here since I'm not up already driving home at that time.
The floor is covered in fragments of bark, and straw. I can sweep it three times a day or not, it makes o difference. The patio doors in my cathedral-ceilinged livingroom leak air like a sieve and I haven't had the wherewithal to move furniture to put window wrap on them. I close the curtains but the draught still comes through and the floor in there feels like ice.
So when the ring that symbolizes my commitment to whatever part of this is meaningful slips off my finger and I can't see it in the field of goose poop in first glance, and I have an appointment that symbolizes the outside world that wants me to give up on this, I wonder if it's a sign. Do I leave the ring wherever it is (still can't see it) and come home and write a post offering all the outdoor animals to someone and just-- go? Create a life where the weather doesn't dictate my actions, even if it continues to inform my choices?
I decided to leave the ring there but I kept standing there, looking, anyhow. This is a symbol that this is enough, I thought, I'm leaving. But. I kept looking for the ring. Eventually I spotted it: gold, the colour of shiny goose poop, in piles of frozen shiny goose poop.
It turns out that was the morning after the coldest night. It was supposed to get colder the next night and it never did. At 9pm I took water out in buckets, watching the animals drink by headlamp, and fluffed up straw. My hands were acclimatizing and I didn't need to come in and warm up, they felt fine. At bedtime none of the animals was shivering, always a good sign. The forecast wind never appeared and in the dead calm it felt almost warm.
They say tonight is the last of the hard nights for awhile, or at least, the last of the deathly cold ones. The next forecast is for snow and, somehow, freezing rain which is of course any ran that lands on a ground that has been seared by -35C for days. Several daily runs with water will be replaced by trying to start the snowblower and trying not to knock the blades loose on towers of frozen goose poop. Carrying so much straw will be replaced by several days of butchering and then carrying much less straw.
I took water and straw out tonight again. No one was shivering. We got through last night, which wasn't as bad as expected. We got through the night before that, which was way worse. We got through several nights previous to that where the cold built and settled like a malevolent beast. Somehow the pigs were trotting around and even the tiny, densely-furred little ones were roughousing as I fluffed the straw for them, and the adults got down to business grabbing mouthfulls of it and pawing it to fluff it up by my side. They drank two buckets of water and grunted interestedly and went to bed. The chickens fluffed up perfectly round on their perches (2x4s turned on their wide sides, so they can perch without frostbiting their toes) with little frost spots where heat could make it through those feathers. The ducks tried to climb into their bowl of water. The muscovies were alert under their lamp and not shivering and were walking fine-- if somonee is going to get frostbite it will be them and I've lost some over the years to frozen feet. Their cushion of straw seemed to be working though.
Now the dogs are both burrowed into straw in their chosen locations. The cats are strewn across the woodstove room as the embers burn down and down until there's enough room for me to load up a night's worth of wood. Everyone is nestled in their beds. A thousand scratchy shards of straw poke through my pants, needling at my legs; upstairs I have piles of fabric that, maybe, won't hold straw if it's sewn into new pants. My ring gleams once more on my finger. In eight or nine hours the worst of this one bit will be over, and the next bit will begin.
