Greenstorm's Journal

I've always known that birth comes only out of death
Rebirth
After dark times.
So much of my life has
Felt like
Been
Dying. So many moments
I walked into death
And out the other side
Into what lay beyond. New.
Newly born.

Never before have I asked,
If I'm on a machine
Bring my dog to me to kiss me one last time
And turn it
off.

Never before have I asked,
Let my stuffed animal,
The only object which has stayed all my life,
Let her be with me at the
end.

There's no immediacy
Not the pain I always walked into
Born young and young again
Just the obscuring swirl
Of muddied waters
That drop their silt so far out at sea
I may never see them clear.

( It's beginning to settle out. )

What lies ahead I have no way of knowing, Tom Petty says on repeat this whole time. Except I do: uncharted waters, but I know I can steer.

Tucker, my local partner, has bought a condo in Vancouver and is moving there in spring. Both my regular-ish partners will then live 1000km away. I'll be looking around for folks closer but that'll be a bit of a reach. Longer term stuff is not decided but.

My good friend Kelsey is coming to stay from the 2nd to the 12th (unrelatedly!). We can talk for hours and she's super awesome. We're both in kind of rough spaces right now. I'm so looking forward to seeing her. By the end of her visit I suspect I'll have a better perspective on things.

The flooding/destruction of all reasonable (<12 hour drive) connections to he south means that Josh's visit will be delayed till next week, which is probably for the best. It'll overlap with Kelsey's visit a little and that's ok.

Feed prices have risen from $170/bag to $210 and is no longer local due to a bad crop year. I will be doing a very substantial herd reduction both for $ and for my mental health, I need to be able to handle being pretty sad for awhile without being overloaded with animal chores.

I think my chimney is leaking air a little where it enters the stove, that or the gasket around the glass door is finally going. Stove is still workable but is accumulating soot around the glass and I suspect in the chimney faster than it should.

Duck and goose abattoir date is Dec 17th. I need to look into flying the meat down to customers and what that will cost.

Today I've been puttering around the house, clearing places for green tomatoes to live for the next month as they ripen. I have roughly 10 dairy crates filled about 3/4 full each from roughly 100' of row or just under. I'll be able to pick out what ripens and make it into sauce or dehydrate it as necessary.

The tomato seeds I've been saving have all gone into envelopes except the last batch that's drying. I have a set of tomatoes waiting to be de-seeded for when the seed fermentation containers come out of the dishwasher. Then the flesh will go into a spaghetti sauce with some homemade italian sausage.

I've been chopping hot peppers and putting them into a 2L jar to ferment myself some hot sauce. I'm excited about that; last year I fermented some carrots, hot peppers, and garlic together and they were delicious but got kahm yeast. This year I need to sort out how not to make that happen.

As I work I've been listening to a podcast: You're Wrong About has several episodes on the DC snipers. Now, I had never heard of the DC snipers and I had no preconceptions for them to destroy, but. There was an older dude and a younger dude, and the older dude was abusive to his wife in ways that were chillingly familiar. The younger dude was abused by his mom in ways that... Look. My dad is not a serial killer to my knowledge. My mom got out and has a pretty good life now. My life is better than I have any reasonable expectation for it to be, given everything. But I still have so much resonance and familiarity hearing the patterns of how these two serial killers interacted with their families than I can ever have hearing about normal folks and what that looks like.

And the podcast hosts don't-- I don't think they grew up this way. They can logic their way into understanding why, for instance, you would never have an emotional reaction to a situation before you see the emotional reactions of the people around you and crafted your own to support theirs. They can logic their way into learned helplessness, the way that what seems to be a way out is always only a momentary glimpse at what other people get but you can never have, and the way that it's always just a bigger trap to teach you never to get your hopes up. They seem to understand that being criticized in a million tiny ways and then having anger directed at you for the wrong response to the criticism is so much more pervasive than any one story of the criticism can ever be. They can even logic their way into the feeling of knowing someone doesn't feel towards you how you want, and so letting your emotions drive in that scenario can force them to fake it and perpetuate the whole thing. I can see the patterns. They can see the patterns, as if they were looking into my own childhood. And they have empathy for it.

So listening to it is a lot but it's a kind of being seen or being acknowledged that I don't often experience. These things are real. I didn't make the whole thing up. And real, real harm can be done. Usually real harm has been done to these folks too, but that doesn't excuse or ameliorate the harm they carry on and do to others. Propagating that harm is the American Way: if you hurt someone enough they'll stop harming you, right? But that right there is the heart of abuse.

Anyhow, these stories give me a lot to think about this morning. I'm sad that the world contains these stories. I wish there were fewer people living out these stories now; I wish I could do something about it.

At the very least I can donate a couple kilos of soap to the transition house or something, I guess.

Alright. Well.

To start with, I had that obviously-overdue relationship talk with Tucker and we're... de-escalating is the trendy word right now but maybe disentangling some is more accurate? Long and short is that talking about thoughts and feelings and what happens during the day is something that I need a minimum of, say, ten units of and Tucker maxes out around two units of it. So when, a couple weeks ago, he said essentially "I don't know why you're telling me things that aren't a big deal and impact on the relationship" that was in fact kind of what he meant. He can tell me everything he wants to about his stuff and I'll feel like I don't know much about him; he get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff coming from me.

We like snuggling and sex and sleeping with each other and little domestic routines, though not all the time, and we'd like to retain some of that (details TBD). I like hearing about his life and will continue to, more on what the level that I consider a friendship rather than a partnership/life witness.

I'm not sure if it's possible to make big decisions with someone without a lot of knowledge of their interiority etc and without talking both logistics and feelings through in detail, so this probably maybe effectively takes a bunch of living situations off the table. It may also take regular contact off the table in the long term. Anyhow, life decisions like "where will I move?" and "how do I organize my retirement/financial arc" will maybe have some sort of conversation before events but I can't see the relationship as a major influence.

We're going to more-or-less continue how things have been as long as we're both in Fort, because support is good. After that? Who knows.

I can gather my energy and set off to seek the confidante and emotional support I've needed over the last couple years and never quite got. If I land with A&E I'll be closer to dating prospects -- this town is too small to date unconventionally in, and I am unconventional -- and can see where that goes. Distance isn't really a good way for me to get this need met. If Tucker lands with us then I can keep seeing him for domestic companionship as time and energy permit and that will be lovely.

Either way, I need to stop feeling unseen and unsupported and left out, and he needs to stop feeling like he's falling short. It's funny, he has a relationship history that incudes fairly serious noncommunication of thoughts and feelings and I can see how I was the rebound from that, just turn the dial from zero to eleven.

We still love each other, of course. It was a good talk and it feels like we're on the same page.

It hurts sometimes and aches sometimes and is gently hopeful like the barest flutter of breeze under a butterfly's wing sometimes. He's gone for two weeks to the east coast to visit another partner and do a game thing. It's a reset period.

I'm glad to have Josh right now, who after so many years really welcomes and listens to me in this specific way. If that were more embodied I'd probably be fine. He's so far away, though. I really want someone I can pull out into the yard sometimes and point excitedly at things and they'll share that excitement too, in person, not just a couple times a year.

It's a tall order, I guess, but meeting people and getting to know them can be fun in any case.

So that's the relationship.

Oh, and Josh is supposed to be driving up next week but there may be fire issues and he won't fly during covid. It'll be super disappointing if he doesn't make it up.

I think I mentioned the house-hunt with A&E is moving a little faster now. That's fun, and we're getting into a more confident communication space as we navigate through it -- what are our communication roles, how do we acknowledge each other's input, how are decisions made?

I had surgery a week ago for a lump, actually three lumps, on my side right under the ribs. The doctor put in three V-shaped stitches and told me to keep a dressing on it for the first couple days. Within the last few days it's been a little more painful and it blistered up weird, and today the stitches were to come out.

Turns out I wasn't supposed to be lifting more than 5lbs, really, for the last week and the next week. I carry a couple hundred pounds of feed etc a day, minimum. I wasn't supposed to bend and twist in ways that put weight on it. I was basically jungle-gymming through the bush a bunch on Friday. The wound is healing nicely on the outside, it's just a little incision scar, but the stitches had pulled through a little and the inside is a bit sore. I'm supposed to be in the bush tomorrow, which I guess I can cancel though it seems awfully last-minute, and when I told them there was no way I could comply with the lifting thing they said to be careful and take it easy a bunch.

I was going to get so much work in the bush done this week. Argh. We'll see what happens. I'll make the call about tomorrow later on; the summer student going with me can help with some data entry for the data she helped gather if not. That will maybe be helpful for her. We lose most of the summer students at the end of this week, which is not super great for getting everything done.

The province continues to be super on fire. We had really significant winds for maybe a day and a half and while it cooled down up here (down to 6C at night, eek!) it stayed hot down where the fires are and they just ran. It's so dangerous to fight fires in those circumstances and BC's priority is to avoid loss of life. Flat out we don't trade lives for saving property. Some folks aren't happy with that and stay behind trying to save their own properties, which puts everyone in a dangerous situation.

Folks have been double and in some cases triple evacuated now: they got evacuated, went somewhere, that place got evacuated, they went to the next place. It's especially brutal with animals. Some folks had evacuation plans but the places they planned to go were being evacuated. Some of the major highways have been shutting down on and off and honestly there aren't so many routes out of the interior. If you have any interest, BC wildfire has a webpage with a map of the fire perimeters and evacuation alerts (could be evacuated any time) and orders (must leave Right Now) and it's a sight to behold. I feel inescapably, unrelentingly lucky right now.

The fire hasn't taken over the biggest interior cities at this point and probably won't but it's nibbled at suburbs of many of them and many smaller towns have been evacuated. The air is clear up here but depending on the wind down there they get what I remember: midnight-deep smoke during daytime which turns streetlights on, cinders falling from the sky, and that brainstem unease which activates flight.

Meanwhile on the farm I was given eight cayuga ducks. They are beautiful, and I have some cayugas already, but they are unfortunately half ducks and half drakes. That is way too intense a m/f ratio for ducks. I also have three new piglets out of Black Chunk who really still needs a new name. They're good big healthy little ones, she's feeding them well. I don't see ravens around but there are a lot of crows and I'm keeping a concerned eye.

For tomatoes, Taiga and Rozovaya Bella ripened in the last few days. Something ate some of roz, luckily taiga ripens greenish so nothing noticed to take a chunk out of it. I think they're both keepers for next year.

And... that is a lot, so we'll leave it there for now. I'm several hours late for lunch.

One of the hardest thing about the pandemic has been how folks who'd previously been in the "bad social structures lead to bad outcomes for individuals" folks have turned into "these individuals are evil people choosing to hurt us all and should be hurt in turn" and "I did the thing, so everyone else should be able to".

I get that folks are scared and hurt and lashing out.

I also find it disheartening. It feels like more folks were following dogma rather than actually believing principles of social organization.

For the last couple weeks I've felt crying well up around the edges of things. It never comes when it really should: when there's time and space for me to be sad, when there's something for it to attach to. It would come with a throwaway line in a movie but not at the intense lines. It would come when I'm busy doing something else.

I remember this. My grief has hidden from me this way before. It would wait on the bus, until I was in public and on display, and show itself when I couldn't give it proper space and respect. It would wait in the grocery store.

And then, when I'm alone and home safe, there would be nothing. Hours before bed, I'd had dinner, and when I looked for it, it was nowhere to be found. It's a game of hide and seek until whatever is in me that needs to process this is ready.

I can almost never grieve when I can't write. I can feel my sadness without words, I can hold it and endure it, but I can't make meaning out of it and then move past it. Humans are meaning-makers. In this, it seems, I'm human.

This morning the mud was frozen again, thank goodness, and the pigs could walk on top of it. I fed them pumpkins chopped up with an axe and I fed them grain. I gave the geese and chickens grain and water, and I broke the film of ice on the pig water. While I did this all I thought about trust and the imperfect nature of the world -- which maybe I don't believe in? -- and what we owe each other as humans. I turned up the wood stove a little. I second-guessed myself a lot.

I wrote.

I was made by the world to only allow myself to have emotions when my position was unassailable. If I was hurt I needed a reason that could be argued and won against all comers. If I was happy I hid it so it couldn't be taken from me by someone with a good reason. Spoiler alert, it's never possible to justify feelings in that way. To borrow someone's metaphor it's like trying to justify the weather. Feelings exist. Needs exist, even. We can choose to ignore them or acknowledge them, they exist all the same. We can work a long time at their roots and help them grow in one direction or another but when we cut them down and pour concrete over them they will eventually come up through.

The world still asks me to justify my emotions, every time.

What a tangle of metaphors that is.

They say the way to handle feelings is to hold them, to sit with them, to give them room to live out their whole cycle of germination, growth, flowering. Give them space; when they give you space back is enough time to make decisions. It's such a skill. Skills are gained by grinding low-level encounters for experience and then applying that experience to survive larger encounters.

My grief came out this morning. After I wrote I cried, I was present in my emotions, and when I was done I felt the urge to stand up, tidy the plant stand, and put the seeds of my microgreens in the ground. I felt like maybe things could grow again. Maybe I'm always poison, maybe I'm not, but I've grown things before.

This has no point. I'm sitting here with the cat touching my leg with one outstretched paw. My fingers are achy with cold. The laptop is balanced on one thigh. I wanted to record, in my mental health log, that today I cried and I felt a little freer afterwards. It is done. Time for my own breakfast and maybe to follow up that freedom by planting some seeds.

Okay. Well. There's more to the Aux saga but it ends well for him.

So Aux broke back into the field with the other pigs the first time I got him out.

He's smart and a fast learner, so the second time it was much harder to get the bucket over his head and walk him out backwards past the electric, but I got it done. We alternated bucket moments where he went in the wrong direction with ear and belly scratches so he didn't seem to be holding it against me.

So I got him out, though I didn't get Friendly out at the same time. Then I walked around to the woodshed and when he saw me on the driveway he came running towards me, probably because the day before we'd given him apples and treats. So I put the grain in the door to the woodshed and he went right in.

Sounds good, right?

The woodshed is actually a big solid building with a sliding barn door and a gravel floor. The sliding door is normally held closed by a piece of rebar sliding through a loop on the door and a loop on the building. The door opens into a lean-to greenhouse that has its own door, functioning essentially like an airlock.

So when Aux went into the woodshed there was plenty of food in there but no water. I closed the door behind him, got some water, and heard him trying to get out: he would stand up fully to look out the window, nose the door up hard, try to dig, all sorts of things. So I closed the greenhouse door behind me when I went in and sure enough, despite my efforts to keep him in he forced his way into the greenhouse. I put the water in his bowl in the woodshed and got him (reluctantly) back in there and closed the door up before I opened the greenhouse and left.

Well, he was still trying to get out real hard. I added reinforcing screws to the door, to the part of the wall that held the latch, and I was pretty sure he'd be able to get through the door somehow by the time someone came for him. Also he'd spilled his water trying to get out. So I went in one more time with a piece of roofing tin with the goal of putting it on the inside of the door so he couldn't push at it so hard. Again I went in, closed the greenhouse door behind me.

Well, this time when I opened the door I was trying extra hard to keep him in the woodshed but it wasn't happening. I barely got the door unlocked when I'm fully in the air, the sliding door is wrenched sideways, and he's out in the greenhouse. And just like he'd been pushing at the inside of the woodshed he was pushing at the inside of the greenhouse which was not meant to hold pigs. I'd put plywood along the walls in prep -- pigs tend to push where there's light -- but things were just not going as I'd hoped. And at this point he'd learned not to go back into the woodshed.

At one point -- I'm pretty ashamed of this -- I rapped him on the snout with the piece of rebar in my hand because he was pushing through the polycarbonate window of the greenhouse. He completely didn't respond to that. Mostly I put my body between him and anywhere he wanted to go, mostly he respected that, and finally he put his nose back in the woodshed and I pushed him in/closed the door/got the latch wired shut with eight or so loops of wire.

At several points over that evening and the next day I tossed eggs and apples over the woodshed wall into his space to give him something to do. I also squirted water into the water dish through a crack in the wall-- I wasn't going to open it again!

In the end I got the trailer backed right up to the door of the greenhouse and he walked right into it, then I got him delivered no problem.

I still feel bad about the whole thing. Anytime an animal is causing an issue with handling, it's a failure of the handler to properly set up and incentivize the animal. Aux wanted out of there because he wanted to be with his family, he'd never been alone before, and he was scared and worried. And I couldn't even figure out a way to go in and give him belly rubs in the evening, let alone keep him in there with someone. And to hit an animal in an attempt to control them-- that's not how it's done.

I'm still not entirely sure what to do about something like that next time: if he's going to keep breaking back into the main pen I'm not sure how I'd get him used to loading or going into the woodshed without the whole herd going in. I could probably get him used to going out through that point in the fence and getting a snack in the woodshed over time, maybe.

On the other hand, it was pretty easy catching the piglets; feeding them in their carriers makes them basically self-loading. And I am not planning to be selling adult pigs off the farm anymore, this was just a way of getting two more breeding herds going in the area with Ossabaw genetics so the breed doesn't get lost.

Well, that's the last-but-one of my firstborn piglets. I'm glad he's off to a good home.