Chickens love hay. They sit on the hay bales, lay eggs on them, cluck and gossip there. We moved a hay bale out behind the farmhouse to cover the ground near where the frost free water line goes from the basement to the barn. In last year’s awful winter, the line froze. We put the bale on to keep it warmer, although that doesn’t appear to be a problem this year.
The chickens have discovered the hay bale, and in the sun, they love to perch on it and gaze at the world. Chickens always look very serious and officious to me, I imagine they are talking about Donald Trump and the sometimes hateful things that come out of his mouth. Or maybe that thing on the top of his head, which is said to nest baby raccoons.
A farm is an eco-system really. Soon, this farm will change. We’ll have a cow grazing in the pasture this summer, and in May, a half dozen purple guinea hens. The landscape will change once again, but the chickens are a sweet and enduring part of it all.
I am proud and happy to welcome to the world a compelling new blog, the Bejosh Farm Journal, the new voice and testimony of Ed and Carol Gulley, for more than 40 years the owners of Bejosh Farm, a small dairy farm in White Creek, N.Y.
Carol and Ed are very good friends of Maria and I, they have been married a long time and their love and commitment to their life is touching and inspiring.
Their lives are hard, and they lives are good, filled with riches – family, grandkids, friends, cows, dogs, chickens. And art. Ed is an artist, he calls his work “junk art,” but it is more than that, it is genuine folk art, original and distinctive and inventive. He is a story-teller as well, he has great stories to tell and will be telling them almost every day.
Ed’s fingers and hands are numb from so many years of farm work and milking, so Carol will be inputting his thoughts and stories onto their new blog, and adding ideas and thoughts of her own.
Ed’s first piece is classic, it is about the cowpies that drop from his cows and how the farmer may see them very differently than the passerby. Ed wants to write about the real life on a real farm, he feels the voices of the farmer have been lost in the new economy, and in the disconnection between most people in America from farms, the natural world and the animal world.
The Gulleys are passionate animal lovers, Sadie the goat follows them around like a dog, they work brutish hours in every kind of weather. Like all real farms, Bejosh is littered with tractors, parts, tools and the detritus of farm life. Real farmers do not every throw anything away, they eventually use and re-use everything.
Ed is a student in my writing class, and I didn’t have to suggest a blog more than once to him. The Gulleys got to work on it. This meant buying a computer for the first time, and a smartphone for Carol. I’m so excited about this blog, the Gulleys have a trove of ideas and stories, the artist in Ed is screaming to come out, and they have an infectious warmth and humor about them.
He has been a farmer for a long time, and is thinking ahead, eager to do more of his art and share his life experiences and thoughts with the world. I was joking with him last night, that his amazing farm with its many animals will give me a good run for my money. Competition is good. I loved Ed and his honesty and passion for life.
We are celebrating Saturday night at Bejosh, they are bringing in some pizza from their favorite restaurant. Carol and Ed are not tech-savvy, I imagine there will be some bumps and grinds before their blog is where they want it to be, but it is up and running with Ed’s first story on it. I think this is a voice that the world needs to hear and will want to hear.
I admire the Gulley’s very much. I met Carol on a treadmill in cardiac rehab, we became friends right away.
When you speng some time with them, you get a sense of one of the things that makes America great. I feel sometimes that we have forgotten the small family farm, no longer considered efficient in the global economy. Ed will do something about that.
