spring sprang sprung

It's amazing how much everything has grown, how these guys:

Could so quickly turn into these guys:

Or how the roses could suddenly be in full bloom and the lilac that seemed like it was recently so fragrantly abundant is all of a sudden wilting away.

a wrist, a finger

My heart melted a little bit today when Pancho jokingly told me he's secretly planning the amputation of one of my fingers. He says if my wrist was an excuse for me to stay then surely a finger will do just as well. As the days left before Ireland dwindle, my heart strings are getting pulled in multiple directions. I want to, I need to, go to Ireland. But I also can't bear to go. Oh!

Edna

My right hand has sort of become the center of my life. Just enter our kitchen and you'll see my whole home-therapy station, complete with a pot of beans, scar cream, hand lotion, heat pad, cold compress, and exercise manual.

In the end it's just a classic case of "you never realize how much you use it until you don't have it". Thankfully I have little pain but I'm still always conscious about it and my eyes can't stop looking at the T shaped scar that's dotted with little stitch marks. It's like having a loose tooth in your mouth that your tongue can't stop playing with.

Every day I do therapy five times a day and at least ten people ask me how my hand is. That probably already adds up to at least a few hours of totally wrist-focused behavior per day. Then on top of that, twice a week I go see my therapist and we talk about my wrist for an hour straight. Tendons this, nerves that, etc, etc, etc. It completely fascinates me. Rawley says I was the happiest post-surgery patient he's ever seen and therefore thinks I should be a doctor. (We shall see about that).

But in all honesty, my injury has brought me almost as much good as bad. I look forward to going to therapy so I can see the progress I've made, the new exercises I'll have to do, the other patients that will be there and most of all to see my therapist. I'm starting to build a good relationship with her and we love talking with each other. Among other things we talk mostly about my work, the wonders of the Capay Valley, and all the discoveries her eight-month old is making. We talk about the pesticides that fill the central valley and how she's worried for her baby having to ingest them, but how at the same time all the organic food is so expensive. I can't wait to bring her a fresh basket of organic strawberries next week.

You never know what can happen when you just bake a cake

Love is definitely in the air. I see the cows licking each other every day as I milk, and even the cats seem to be grooming each other more frequently. On Saturday there's going to be a wedding too! There are shotgun shells lying in the yard to prove it. (The bachelor party was held here last weekend and all they did was shoot clay pigeons for seven hours.) We even butchered two lambs for the feast.

Unfortunately, I forgot all about this tiny detail Tuesday night as I walked into the cooler to get a cup of flour for a cake I was making. The sun having just set, I walked through the stretching shadows over to the crew kitchen with my bowl to fill up two cups of flour. To my surprise I opened the door to find two hanging carcasses dripping blood onto a parchment paper-covered floor. I jumped backwards in fright and almost dropped my bowl as I stood shaking, looking at the pink fleshy bodies hanging upside-down. But it only took a few seconds for my complete shock to turn into curiosity. I remember having passed by the same two sheep in the morning on my way to milk and now here they hung in front of me. What a transformation. Never had I seen an entire lamb like this, each muscle defined and sculpted across the body in different sections. It suddenly seemed so huge!

(agri)culture

Chyca's obsession with Winnie the Pooh started as a little girl. She loved everything Pooh so much that her adoration soon filled up her bedroom with stuffed Pooh bears, Pooh cups, Pooh boxes, Pooh everything. At night when she slept in her sea of Poohs she dreamt of going to the US where she would work enough to buy a life-sized Pooh bear for herself so that she could sleep next to it. But when the time finally came and she arrived in the US, her gigantic Pooh bear was nowhere to be found. She looked and looked but they simply didn't sell life-sized Pooh bears. Crestfallen but still determined, she continued on with her obsession and collected even more Pooh accessories than before.

Now years later, still toting her subtle Pooh bag, she describes this infatuation as a a thing of the past. She confesses that her fetish has subsided but she knows she will always love the idea of the chubby, carefree, happy-go-lucky bear that is Winnie.

I swear, being on this farm I have learned just as much about agriculture as I have about culture.

Warming and Swarming

Exhaustion. Today was the first day of real heat. And by real heat I don't mean the soft relaxing sun that comes at the beginning of spring, I mean heat that you can no longer enjoy. Bending over picking spinach, tokyo turnips, lettuce, sugar snap peas or whatever else it might be, the sun beats down relentlessly on your back, slowly covering your body in a thick layer of pure salt. Starting as early as nine in the morning, the intensity keeps climbing and doesn't stop until around 3 in the afternoon.

Bent over for a number of hours doing some flower transplanting, I was starting to feel like I was at my breaking point when all of a sudden I began to hear a loud and unfamiliar noise. It was like a thousand vibrations and suddenly the air seemed to come to life. My eyes finally left the crumbly dry soil I had been staring at since 11am and I looked up to see the huge swarm of bees that out of nowhere began to fill the air around us. Stuck in their cloud, we watched as they zoomed around in a frenzy, darting and swooping around. We imagined the queen bee somewhere amongst them but they turned circles around us and left us spinning before we could even begin to look more closely. After a few minutes, the swarm finally moved further away and we resumed work until we eventually forgot about them.

Hours later on our afternoon break, I lay down in the shade of one of the large walnut trees to escape the sun. I lay back to enjoy the breeze that was now starting to trickle in and at that moment I noticed one of the tree branches had an extra fuzzy mass covering it. I squealed and pointed upwards so that Rawley and Catalina could see where our new friends had chosen to live. Catalina was not so thrilled by the fact that they had chosen a spot so close to her work place but Rawley and I promised each other we will come back to visit often.