diary of a farmwife:
of sofa cushions, stems and snippin' it in the bud
by galen r. brandt

I welcome change, I really do. I embrace it, clasp it to my ever-expanding bosom, appreciate it for its very constancy.

I just hate it when it happens–especially to me. Move one saltshaker in my collection and you might as well have rearranged my kidneys. Yes, I’m delighted to see you, and sure, it’s great you were in the neighborhood and just dropped in (at my husband’s invitation) but WHY DIDN’T YOU CALL FIRST and I will too straighten the sofa cushions you so carelessly disturbed by sitting on the sofa and leaning against them and I will do it the second you get up to go to the bathroom, even though I know you’re going to come right back and lean on them again. Just be glad I didn’t try to straighten them while you were leaning on them. Not that I’m compulsive or anything. Cup of Tension-Tamer tea, anyone?

Truth is, I married my husband and moved to the farm (among many other reasons) precisely because I knew I had a little problem with change and all it implies, and my husband, I realized the second we met, is the most insanely generative force in the universe. He breathes new projects, new possibilities, new points of view the way other people breathe air. Which means things change because of and around him at blinding warp speed without let-up, and I can either get with the program or scream myself hoarse trying to slow down the pace to something I can withstand (I was going to say “manage” but that would be laughable). I figured I’d learn to swing with things (“go with the flow” as we say here in Santa Cruz) and become a happy, carefree farmwife, or the effort would kill me. Either way, it would be character-building.

After all, who wants to live in a static universe? Ok, I do – but I shouldn’t and can’t. What if the trees refused to drop their leaves in fall? What if the turnips refused to grow in spring? (Fine by me, but some people like turnips.) Point is, Nature is Change. Who am I to go against Nature? Why, I, too, am Nature! Thus I, too, am Change! Om #$@%*!&^%# shanti!!

Enough two-bit philosophy. What works in theory can slam you in practice. And I had no idea how right I was about this nature is change business–especially on the farm. For what I failed to realize when I packed my city mouse shoes (which I’ve never worn since) and high-tailed it into the redwoods is that what my husband doesn’t change around here, Nature does. Second by second. Without telling me. Or warning me. Or asking my permission. Or begging my forgiveness. Nothing theoretical about it–just a whole lotta non-stop you-asked-for-it-even-if-you-were-too-dumb-to-realize-it-hang-on-to-your-wheelbarrow-reality. Forget about taming my husband. A control freak don’t stand a chance against Big Mama Nature.

How was I to know? I went straight from college to New York City and spent two decades there in a tiny brownstone apartment (and for a few years, a large musicians’ loft with a rehearsal studio in the middle of it, but that’s another lifetime and another story). Twenty years of garbage trucks splintering god knows what at 3 A.M. under my window and neighbors doing god knows what the rest of the time over my head and down the hall. Nerves stripped from sensory assaults and bunions bulging from ill-advised shoes, it was time for, well, a change.

So I married the farmer and moved to the funky hippiedom of the Santa Cruz Mountain redwoods. Ah, Nature, serene and peaceful. Ah, the farmwife’s life, dictated ever so gently by the sweetly predictable changes in the seasons. A life you read about in books, where every April 1st the daffodils spring up and you pick your first sprightly bouquet and place it on the kitchen table smack in the center of that patch of sunlight that comes through the spotless front window... and every Saturday night you have a “Saturday supper” of roast something, nestled in whatever vegetables you’ve so cleverly canned the previous September 1st, using the same canning jars your mother and grandmother and great-grandmother used…

Yeah, right. For one thing, nobody in my family ever canned anything, ever. For another, the second you turn your back, those sprightly daffodils that sprang up so predictably over the last two weeks and just this morning unfolded their lemony petals to the sun so that when you looked out the window and saw them and breathed in deeply and said to yourself, Yes, spring! Just like they promised!, those same daffodils, by the time you’ve gone to get the clipping shears which you swear you left in a place where your husband could not find them and move them to a place where you now cannot find them, have been eaten. Gone. Every one. Sucked underground by gophers, nibbled above ground by deer, or rabbits, or slugs, trampled flat by visiting flocks of wild turkeys or, I kid you not, the neighbors’ peacocks (which leave deposits to let you know they’ve been there in case you were wondering). Which is why we now have fences, and underwiring, and gopher cages, and cats to stalk turkeys and peacocks, and a general sense that it’s Us against Nature so a single look out the window at daffodils waving in the breeze is all we’re gonna get and we’d better develop a taste for stalks and stems in our table centerpiece.

That’s okay. I can adjust. I can handle this. I wanted change–I got it.

There’s just one tiny hitch.

I married a little late in life. The minute there was the slightest chance I was actually learning to adapt to undone dishes in the sink and my husband’s daily new business venture and piles of stuff that IS NOT MINE and an endless stream of visitors invited and uninvited and cat hair and cat throw up and floods of ants and black widow spider invasions and hurricane force winds and window-shattering rainstorms and mudslides and the ever-present threat of earthquakes and the hourly shifting dominance patterns of three potbellied pigs and overrun gardens and gopher tunnels so big you fall in and sudden travel plans and the general uproar of family farmlife–just what IS the fine line between life-affirming change and apocalyptic chaos?—I had my first hot flash.

If you’ve been there and lived, you know there’s a reason they call it The Change. Out went sanity and in came back fat. Back fat! And I don’t mean on pork ribs, I mean on me. Rages for no reason. Senseless panic attacks. Sitting on the aforementioned sofa on a sweetly sunny afternoon leaning ever so slightly against my cushions and gazing fondly at my clever arrangement of tulip stalks, I’d become convinced in an instant, beyond all doubt or logic, that all was doomed, starting with me… and that someone, somewhere, probably someone I was married to, had to die.
Now.

Ah, hormones. How DID my husband survive. I guess he did a lot of hiding, but my memory has largely gone, so I really can’t remember.
And I’m not the only hapless hormonal victim around here. Take the case of poor Theodore the pig. Little did he know when we adopted him five years ago that his manly days were numbered. Talk about change.

How did we get pigs in the first place, you ask? I was away, visiting my mother. My husband was contemplating the waist-high weeds in the outdoor barn pens when our neighbor Bob stopped by. Bob is a handy guy, so my husband mentioned The Weed Problem. Sure enough, Bob had a solution. “Got the perfect gardening tool at home!” said Bob. “Be right back!”

Ten minutes later he backed his old blue pick-up into our driveway, stopped in front of the barn pens, attached a ramp to the back of the truck… and down the ramp and into the pens walked two pot-bellied pigs. “Best weed-eaters you ever saw,” said Bob. “They’re yours if you want ‘em.”

It’s not every girl who comes home from a trip to mother to find two pot-bellied pigs grazing in her yard. They did indeed eat all the weeds, and very quickly at that. Within days, the pens were reduced to a fine, hard, dusty dirt surface, and the pigs were noticeably more pot-bellied than they had been on arrival.

Especially Mama, who now dwarfed her husband Theo, who while small for a pig, was not exactly small himself. A phone call to Bob confirmed our suspicions– yes, Mama was pregnant, but according to Bob, not very. Turned out Bob was both right and so wrong.

Shortly thereafter, husband and I left on a long-planned business trip to Europe. Two days before our return, we got an email from the wonderful neighbor girl who had volunteered to watch over our mom-to-be: “You have five little piggies!” Next day, another email: “Sorry. You have three piggies.” By the time we burst through the barn door the following evening, we had two piggies, one obviously very sick. Despite my emergency round-the-clock feedings through an eyedropper, teeny Piglet died two days later.

Which left Sir Francis Bacon Piglet, who is quite alive to this day, thank you very much, and whom my husband and I adore, despite her vicious and greedy nature which, while clearly a survival strategy (we are not at all certain she didn’t murder her littermates in the first days of their miserable, blighted lives), is not exactly an attactive personality feature.

Several more phone calls to Bob and the whole story poured out. It seems Mama and Theo had produced multiple litters under Bob’s care, and in every case, not a piglet survived past two days. Bob tried endlessly to separate the mating couple–fences, locked doors, barriers of all stripes–but Theo and his Urges were not to be denied. Sooner than you could say “Please pass the bacon,” Mama would be pregnant again. One day, after one too many rounds of dead piglets, Bob’s wife put her foot down and told Bob in no uncertain terms to get rid of those pigs and soon and she didn’t care how… which just happened to be the day my husband was looking for a weed-eating garden tool.

One round of dead piglets was enough for me. A quick Internet search (what DID we do before Google?) led me to Kathleen, a pig breeding expert in Texas. Yup, you got a problem all right, said Kathleen. It’s just not good for Mama to keep having all those dead piglets–puts a strain on her system (her system? what about MY system?), to say nothing of what it does to the piglets. Clearly a Bad Breeding Pair. Got to separate ‘em.

So we separated ‘em. Theo lost his mind, ramming his hopped-up little body into walls, fences, barn doors. A Pig Alone was not the answer.
More calls to Kathleen. Can’t separate ‘em? Put ‘em back together–but nix the results (“Snip ‘em in the bud!” said Kathleen).

Thing is, you can’t spay an adult female pig, because she’s got so many blood vessels leading to and from her uterus that to try is to risk her bleeding to death mid-operation. Definitely a bad option. Which left Theo. Poor, unsuspecting Theo.
A few days later, the travelling mom-and-pop team that is Mt. Madonna Veterinary Service arrived in their all-in-one van to do the deed. It just happened to be the day my mother and stepdad arrived for their Annual Visit To The Farm. My mother, entranced by all things medical, watched transfixed as the vets corralled Theo, knocked him out, and separated him from his two bits of manhood. My stepfather was somewhat less enthralled. “You’re going to do WHAT to that pig?” he said, sinking into the nearest chair and crossing his legs.

Theo survived his ordeal just fine, but he was–and is–a changed pig. Oh, he still has urges all right–at least I think he does. These days he visits them on his daughter, but that, too, is another story.

And one I’m sure you’re dying to hear. But please excuse me. I must go straighten my sofa cushions.

Galen R. Brandt is a writer and musician who survives with her husband, two cats, and three confused pigs on a tiny farm amidst the Nature of the Santa Cruz Mountains. She did NOT change her name when she got married.