Vic Socotra

04 October 2009

Down on the Farm

(October at Brandy Station)

I'm down at the farm, and the coffee is not bad. It was a marvelous drive in the Bluesmobile down here, feeling the congestion of the city fall away. Early casualties of the season, the first leaves, danced across the road and the sun did not beat down, it embraced.

Football games fading in and out on the radio. A different conference, no emotion at all. Very pleasant to feel so detached.

I stopped at the country store for some provisions. They are trying to make a go of organic food and fresh baked goods. They take Sunday of, and there was only a last loaf of unsliced white bread left.

I took it, and a slab of rich cheddar cheese. At the farm, there were chores to do, unloading the car, looking hopefully for the feral cats, finding the tools for the various jobs to be done.

I slept last night on the bed I assembled yesterday afternoon. It was the fifteenth or twentieth scientific experiment conducted to prove, conclusively, that I do not have the innate skills of an hourly worker in Sechuan Province.

It was as successful as the previous ones.

Around nine-thirty I was able to haul the mattress overhead, only hitting the overhead fan once seriously, to place it on the bed-slats.

I could not have done this with a conventional California King mattress with box spring, of course. This is one of those space-age foam things that seemed, at the time, to make more sense than dragging the dead fixed weight of the conventional sleeping system from the truck along the gravel path to the front door, through the Great Room and up the narrow hall way to what passes for the master bedroom upstairs.

It was a remarkable night's sleep filled with dreams and the sounds of the country. A train in the middle distance, horn blaring at Winston crossing. Big dogs were concerned with something in the distance down the road.

The cawing of crows as the light grayed with pre-dawn.

There is no alarm clock down here, at least not yet, and I drifted with the sound.

Sun starting to flood the room, I reluctantly rose and wandered downstairs. Standing on the back deck you see what I saw below. I was not quick enough to catch the other residents of the farm.

Three big turkeys- quick, alert- wandered across the property this morning with coffee. My coffee, not theirs. A large rodent, groundhog, maybe a woodchuck, inside the fence, burrowing at something.

I told him to move along, and he looked up with concern in his brown eyes, and then vanished around the garage with remarkable swiftness.

Heckle and Jeckle, the feral cats, remained gone ovenight. They have apparently decamped. Perhaps they are not as confident of my continued periodic presence as I am and have sought more regular compensation elsewhere.

No deer on the property that I could observe. It is start of bow season this weekend, they tell me.

The animals must know.

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