Farming in the "polar vortex": journal entries for the past few days

It's in the single digits below zero, and it looks like we've made it through the worst of the cold weather here at Kleinshire. Rosemary and I appreciate all the prayers and expressions of concern that we've received from folks asking how the animals are managing in the extreme weather. I thought I'd put together a little journal for the past four days. If you're curious what life on the farm in the "polar vortex" was like, feel free to read on.

Monday, January 28th, 

As expected, we awoke to eight to ten inches of new-fallen snow. This was actually very welcome news due to the coming frigid weather. Snow is an excellent insulator, and with several thousand dollars worth of garlic cloves planted out in the field, there's the real danger of winter kill from excessively cold temperatures. Obviously it's good to have snow to bank against animal houses and cover the septic system as well. And of course, it's beautiful. This is the way winter should look!

I head out to the barn with a warmed-up bottle of milk for our one little doeling who needs supplement, and I'm followed soon thereafter by Rosemary, who feeds the goats their grain ration and does the milking every morning. For me, there are bales of hay and buckets of water to haul down to the goat barn, and a horse and the chickens and guinea hens to care for as well. Cyprian will be out soon to check for eggs and feed Snowy, our yard dog, and Clement will take care of the cats. All the chores will take a little longer this morning due to the snow.

In the goat barn, though, Rosemary calls out to me. She's heard a distressed cry from the baby Nigerian dwarf goats, who are separated from their mothers at night as we approach weaning time. The little tri-color buckling is practically frozen and clearly in distress. Later we surmised that he had gotten into the livestock guardian dogs' dry food. Although the goats ordinarily left the dog food alone, we recently switched to a new brand, and we had discovered just a day earlier that the goats like the new brand. The buckling's rumen clearly wasn't working properly, and his body temperature wasn't keeping up with the sub-zero weather. So I quickly scooped him up and snuggled him into my jacket, bringing him up to the house. Over the next four hours, Cyprian, Clement, and Cletus all took shifts snuggling the buckling in a blanket and attempting to bring his body temperature back up to normal.

About lunchtime, the buckling was finally showing signs of life. His eyes had rolled back in his head when we brought him up; several times this morning when he stopped grinding his teeth, we thought for sure that he was a goner. Eventually, I took him from the boys and placed him, still wrapped in the towel, in a box, thinking that nature would take its course. Miracle of miracles, he was now calling out weakly. First we experimented with a bottle. Unfortunately he had become too weak to suck, and as a dam-raised baby he just wasn't enthusiastic about the whole concept of a bottle anyway. So we began the process of giving him droppers full of milk at regular intervals.

With Rosemary's help, I finally finished shoveling the driveway sometime in the afternoon. We live on a windy ridge-top, and the drift in front of the pole barn was chest-high on one side! Thankfully school was cancelled due to the snowfall, and I didn't have to commute to La Crosse for the "brick-and-mortar" classes that I would ordinarily be teaching on Mondays. This meant Rosemary and I could spend some time winterizing things. In addition to shoveling, I banked snow against the bucks' house and added extra bedding. Rosemary put down extra wood shavings in the chicken coop. Our regular pattern of chores followed. I upped the hay ration for the goats and the horse. It's important to keep fresh, clean water and plenty of hay in stock for the goats. They produce their own heat through their constant "rumination." I also started mixing shredded beets into Tarcy's grain ration. The extra sugar gives him a needed boost.

I headed down to the goat barn with another bottle of warmed milk for Sadie's doeling around 7 p.m. She drank it down greedily, as she always does. She's sorta my baby these days. It's not even below zero at this point, and everybody looks cozy and comfortable. The livestock guardian dogs, Lilly and Leche, absolutely love the snow. The cold weather is yet to come. Up in the house, the buckling is still very weak. We've transferred him to a tote with pine shavings and straw for bedding. Although he can stand, he still can't take a bottle. He's wheezy, and it's clear that he has caught pneumonia. He's definitely still touch-and-go.

Tuesday, January 29th

A new day begins at about 6:30 a.m., and it's the same pattern as usual. Although it's below zero, the

The dogs don't seem to mind!

cold weather hasn't really set in yet. The real challenge begins when the temperature fails to rise very much and then, with the cold front moving in, dips even lower in the evening.  So, the regular chores, the regular pattern, all through the evening. Actually, Rosemary's chores have gotten a little easier. After what happened with the buckling, we were extra-cautious with the Nigerian kids. We decided that for the next few days we'd leave the babies on their mothers all through the night. That meant a lot less milk for us. But if it keeps the babies vigorous, then so be it.

The little buckling is a fighter, but he still wasn't not perking up as much as we'd have liked. His eyes and nose were quite gummed up. Although he was hungry today, he would fight every dropperful of milk due to his congestion. Although brick-and-mortar school may be cancelled, my Tuesday online classes were still held as usual. So it was a busy day for me.

Today was also Cyprian's tenth birthday, and we made merry despite the impending weather. In the evening the weather definitely started to come in. It was already in the double-digits below zero by the time I brought the bottle out to Sadie's doeling. The wind was blowing steadily from the north, and the cold seemed to pass right through my jacket. The bucks seem to have rejected Wrangler, the youngest, who was sleeping  out in the elements, alongside the hayrack. I took him by the horns and pushed him into the bucks' shelter, along with Matthias and Tuff.

These boys don't always get along.

Rosemary and I stayed up late on Tuesday night. It was already more than 20 below zero by 11:30 p.m., and we wanted to make sure that the goats were well situated vis-à-vis the wind and elements. Sure enough, Tuff had again kicked Wrangler out of the shelter. So yet again, I took him by the horns and pushed him into the shelter. This time I stayed until all three bucks have settled down. As unpleasant as I'm sure it smells in that shelter, they needed each others' body heat to make it through the night.

In the goat barn, the mothers and does were all cuddled up at my mid-night check. The Nigerian mothers and babies are all in one huge heap. Most of the other goats are in their family units--mothers with their babies from both this year and last year all snuggled in. Out in the pasture, Tarcy was ignoring his shelter, as he always has, choosing instead to stand along the fence by his haynet. But his look said it all--Why did you bring me from toasty-warm North Carolina to this cold, godforsaken place?!?

Wednesday, January 30th

It was 29 degrees below zero when we awoke at 7 a.m. Actually, I was awake earlier, but who wants to go out before first light when it's that cold. Poor dairy farmers! The wood boiler, which I filled extra full the night before, did an admirable job keeping our old, drafty farmhouse warm, and the temperature inside was still 68 degrees. What a contrast with the outside temperature, however! Thankfully the bucks were all still snuggled in their shelter. My first task was to give Sadie's doeling her bottle. At first I was worried when she stopped drinking; it was only later that I realized the nipple wasn't functioning correctly in the extreme cold!

Lifetime achievement for Rosemary:
milking a goat in an uninsulated barn at 29 degrees below zero.
Lifetime achievement for me: having married Rosemary.

The goats in the barn were also snuggled in. Usually they're up immediately, clamoring for food. But this morning, they stayed put until there was real evidence that something was forthcoming. There was a little shivering, but nobody looked overly stressed, not even the little babies. Some of the goats had frosty coats and muzzles, but they were all acting normal. Somehow, Rosemary managed to milk Jaline, the full-sized Alpine who doesn't have any babies to nurse. Yes, the milk started to freeze as she trekked back up to the house!

Chores were otherwise fairly normal. I've learned to wear fairly loose work gloves so that I can curl my hands into fists whenever I'm not using my fingers. Two pairs of wool socks keep my feet warm enough to make it through 45 minutes' worth of chores. Being outside, the bucks' water pail always has a thick coating of ice that needs to be broken. Annoyingly, the does have taken to defecating into their water pail and then refusing to drink from it. So that's another five gallon bucket to haul down from the house. Since it's a lot of work connecting and disconnecting the hose in the milkhouse in the extreme cold, I've taken to hauling water from the freeze-proof faucet up at the house.

They are still giving us six eggs per day!

The guineas and the chickens have unheated rubber buckets of water that need to be changed out every day and then broken every few hours on a day like today. Despite the weather, the chickens are still giving us five or six eggs per day. I think that with a check every few hours, we managed to bring in a few unfrozen eggs today!

With school cancelled again today, I was able to keep a close eye on the animals. The buckling in the house was still drinking droppers full of milk rather than bottles under Rosemary's care. But he was not fighting it as much, and he was starting to nibble on hay. Mid-day, with the temperature crossing into the teens below zero, I headed out to the barnyard with two five-gallon buckets full of warm water, with several cups of molasses mixed into each. The sugar and warm-temperature water will give the goats an extra boost. Almost everybody is out in the sun, standing along the concrete block wall of the old barn. They look puzzled, though. It may be sunny out, but the sun just isn't warming along the wall the way it usually does. Only the dogs looked relaxed and happy, with Lilly rolling over for a belly rub as she always does. The goats rushed me once they discovered I had molasses water, and it was a tangle of horns and collars as I worked to ensure that everybody got a little. Even Tarcy sucked down a few gallons!

I did chores extra early on Wednesday, still in the sunlight. Again, it's the same old pattern, just a little (perhaps a lot?) colder than usual. The temperature never rose above 15 below zero, even in the afternoon sun. The goats got extra hay. I turned on the chickens' light. The faucet in the milkhouse, which drips slightly, had formed a "stalagmite," which I dislodged with a sledgehammer. Since the faucet is wrapped with heat-tape, I'm not overly worried about the faucet itself.

My cold-weather selfie.

Again, the same pattern in the evening; again, the same bone-chilling cold. The doeling got her bottle, and it was already more than 20 degrees below zero at 7 p.m.. Up in the house, the buckling was eating a little hay but still has a long way to go if he's going to recover. The bucks repeated their same annoying stunt in my late-night, 11 p.m. check. I paused for a few minutes as the the bucks figured things out. The silence in the extreme cold was very deep. Occasionally there was a sharp crack from the woods as the trees responded to the cold. But the wind had completely died down, and the air is completely still. Back at the house, the boiler was going strong, with the reaction chamber at over one thousand degrees and the water temperature above 180. My phone said it was 29 degrees below zero when I went to bed

Thursday, January 31st

This is supposedly the end of it. But it'll need to warm up first. It was 31 degrees below zero, and school was cancelled yet again. The boiler kept us warm through another chilly night. The chores were done, and the animals have all made it. More molasses, plenty of hay, plenty of water. Nobody's happy, though!

Molasses water treats!

*****

Really, there are a lot of folks, especially dairy farmers, whose extreme-weather experiences these past few days were a lot tougher than ours. But this was our experience these past few days. And it's not over yet. This weekend, the temperatures are forecast to reach upwards of 40 degrees above zero. Although this may sound great, the extreme warmth may bring problems of its own. We're concerned about animal health, for example, with all the temperature extremes. And who knows what the shifts will do to the garlic.

So, please say a prayer for your farmers!

Liturgy as Poetry

Recently my family and I again started attending attending the Traditional Latin Mass on Sundays. We're not newbies, exactly. We were registered parishioners at Mater Dei, the FSSP-run parish in Dallas, during my years of study at the University of Dallas. But as a family we've been away from the Latin Mass for years, finding a home at a liturgically conservative suburban parish during our time in Raleigh, and trying to find a home during our first year back in Wisconsin at the little country parish where, a little more than a decade ago, Rosemary and I were married.

Just today, as we assisted at a beautiful Missa Cantata for the Feast of the Epiphany, I was thinking about a conversation I had had with a parishioner at that little country parish. He was curious, of course, as to why we'd jump ship to drive twice as far to attend Mass somewhere else. A number of folks at the parish are probably disappointed to have lost another young family. Folks there are fighting the good fight against dwindling numbers, and at most services the pews are no more than a third full. Dairy is failing, and farmers are closing up shop. Young people are going off to college and then settling down to life in the nearby towns. A significant percentage of young people stop going to church after being confirmed. A disturbing number of their parents, in fact, don't even attend Mass, even if they insisted on bringing their children to CCD.

Back to that conversation. "It's banal," I explained about my perception of the Novus Ordo liturgy.

Initially I startled even myself with the bluntness of this comment, and I tried to walk it back. I am far from disparaging the parishioners who've poured themselves into that parish, or the pastor, who loves his priesthood and serves the people faithfully. And of course, Jesus is made fully present, body, blood, soul, and divinity, in both forms of the Mass. In fact, these are points I make when I teach an online sacraments class to high schoolers for a program that attracts students whose families attend both forms of the Roman Rite. When we cover the unit on the Mass, we study both forms, and my diplomatic modus operandi has always been, and rightly so, to point out what is essential to the Mass--the consecration, the prayer of thanksgiving, the consumption of the sacred species by the priest--and how these elements are present in each.

But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that banal--that is, lacking in originality or freshness, obvious, commonplace, hackneyed--although undiplomatic, is an accurate way to describe the perhaps rightly named ordinary form of the Holy Mass.

Another thread of my rumination is a conversation that I recently had with students in another class--a literature class. We had just finished reading Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," his magnificent first-person narrative of a sinner's flight from God "down the nights and down the days," "down the arches of the years," "down the labyrinthine ways," and "in the midst of tears."

We had just spent half an hour dissecting the admonition from the end of the poem, where the speaker has shifted to God, the "hound of heaven" who had pursued that sinner with "deliberate speed" and "majestic instancy": "Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me." Drave is an archaic past tense form of drive, or propel, so basically God is saying that, since God is love, the one who pushes God out of his life also pushes love out of his life.

Although my students aren't exactly complainers, it came out, as we worked through Thompson's archaisms, that there was a general frustration at the way the odd language obscured the meaning of the poem. Why does he say Thou dravest when he could simply have said, You drove? Why, for that matter, speak of bruits, or robes purpureal, or sun-starts, or azured daises? In a poetry class this is tantamount to a rebellion, for difficulty is one of the things that makes poetry poetry, rather than prose. My inclusion of the word basically up above when I described the meaning of the final line of Thompson's poem was intentional because, well, in the context of the experience of the poem, the line means far, far more.

In a sense my students understood that, at least partially. As is my wont, we had begun class with a reading of the poem, with students having to rely solely on what they could take in by careful listening. Only later would I hand out the printed copies. Comprehension, unsurprisingly, was not great. But almost universally, students spoke enthusiastically about the way the poem "flowed," about the overlaying of words upon words, and of a frantic flight and of the chase that they had dimly been able to perceive. There was a general feeling of immense drama in the flight and the chase. Some students caught more of the specifics, some caught far less; everybody, however, wanted to figure out what was going on in what they had just heard.

Why? Why did they want to know more? It was because they had a sense that their first listen had only permitted them to scratch the surface of the poem's great reservoir of meaning. There was more hidden below the surface, much, much more that was available only to those who made the effort to look up the archaic words, analyze the subtle changes in the refrains, dissect the metaphorical language, etc., etc.

Which brings me to yet another thread in my rumination. A priest-friend recently posted about his reading during a spiritual retreat. He had juxtaposed a comment from the liturgical reformers following the Second Vatican Council--that there was a desire to simplify the liturgy, and to make it more comprehensible to ordinary folks--with a statement from the Council of Trent--that there is nothing superfluous to the Holy Mass in the Roman Rite, that is, the form now called the extraordinary form.

When I teach the high school sacraments course, we look at the confiteor side-by-side as this prayer is recited in the ordinary and extraordinary forms. It's a great example of the attempt at simplification in the ordinary form. Not only are the mentions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Michael the Archangel, and Saints Peter and Paul removed in the new, revised version, it's also said only once. In the older form, on the other hand, first the priest recites the confiteor, and then the servers, who add ad te, Pater, as they speak their confiteor also to the priest.

Within this single prayer, therefore, it is clear that there are many things that have been stripped away. And of course, it's just a single prayer. Looking at the two forms of the Holy Mass side-by-side shows clearly that the Novus Ordo is dramatically stripped down, simplified, ... shorn of so many subtleties of language, of gesture, and of visual imagery.

In other words, to bring these threads of my ruminations together, it's like a poem turned into prose. Yes, yes: that's what the poem means. Yes, yes, Jesus Christ is made fully present in both forms. But anybody who has listened to a poem and been enchanted by the mystery of its flow of language, its rhythm, and the way it builds to a crescendo, knows there's so much more.

The prose explanation is all so ordinary, so humdrum, so lacking in originality and freshness.  ...So banal.

So, too, the ordinary form of the Mass.

I'm led to suspect that this is what the Council of Trent was getting at with its insistence that there is nothing superfluous to the Roman Rite. I also suspect that this is why so many young folks these days say they're bored with Mass at their Novus Ordo parihes and stop coming as soon as they're no longer forced to come. I also suspect that this is why so many of the other young folks who continue to go to church look for the most reverent liturgy they can find, in whatever form is readily available to them.

To borrow a line from Joshua, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. ...Mainly at the Traditional Latin Mass, that is. I pray that my own boys will work their way through any initial frustration with the extraordinary form just as my literature students work their way through great poems. It's all in Latin, it's too long, it's too complicated, it's archaic and outdated. No, not at all. Just as it is with good poetry, there's meaning at every level of understanding of the Holy Mass that will keep it always fresh, always new to the believer, captivating ordinary folks and great theologians alike. There's nothing superfluous to it at all.