As soon as we got home, Maria went out to check the trails in the far pasture and Red set out on an outrun around the sheep. It felt like home to me. I decided that black and white is the way for me to go photographing the snow, it seems to capture the starkness and feeling of it.
The snow has covered our pasture and for the first time all year, the animals can’t graze. They looked both fat and happy and we saw the trails the sheep and donkeys had made to the outer pasture where they can get to some shrubs and small trees. Farm animals graze much of the day, whether they are hungry or not, many farmers will not offer hay as long as the ground is visible. Red was, of course, happy to be back on the job.
The chickens have not laid any eggs since daylight savings time, when the days got shorter, but we put in a small heat lamp in the roost that is on a time, we were surprised to find an egg waiting for us when we got back. I have to say there are few things as delicious as a fresh farm egg, it is hard to buy a grocery store egg after eating one. We are glad they are laying again. There is little that is as useless as a chicken that does not lay eggs.
We got home this afternoon, and I was glad to be in upstate New York again after our Thanksgiving in Vermont. As beautiful as Vermont farms are, they don’t seem quite real to me, and many of them are not, they are New Yorker’s notions of what beautiful farms should be like. In New York, farms look like real farms, we stopped to check out this goat outside of his roomy private residence by the road. We knew were close to home.
We skipped the Black Friday shopping spree – 140 million Americans went shopping on Thanksgiving, according to retail polls and surveys, this holiday has changed for good, for better or worse. We started out in the storm a bit edgy, we have returned mellow, the animals are good and look great, we are already plotting to see a movie over the weekend. Beyond that, more reading. I have not been able to read much since my surgery in July, that seems to be changing, and I am so grateful for that, I polished off the new C.B. McKenzie mystery today and am pondering some novels.
