Sylvia's Farm (19 page)

W
HAT CAN
you do since the arrival of the lamb Ally MacBeal? Can you write stories or drink coffee with her sitting nicely on your lap like Mary Queen of Spots or Gilliam MacDouglas's yet-to-be-named little girl? Can you go to the mailbox across the road all alone, enjoying a solitary stroll? Can you walk into your own living room for a civilized moment? Can you visit the new goat and her kids and sit on the bedding and hold one in your lap? Can you go to see if the chickens have resumed laying? No. Of course not.

For this formidable creature of substance, intelligence, personality, and no style has a mind of her own, considers herself an equal and will allow you to do none of the above, at least not without her. With Ally around you do exactly what she and only she wants. Now. This little sheep, for she has never been a lamb, has pushed her head into my hand for me to hold her face. She is too strong for me to keep on my lap, as she can fight her way off in a moment of pushing feet and butting head. She knows how to hit a doorknob to open it, squeeze her head between the doors of the carriage house to jam them open, and when she thinks I am leaving her, she will race down the road after a car that had been parked in my driveway. She doesn't know I don't know how to drive.

As I write, she had tried, over and over, to lift the table with her head and get me to pet her. She will drive me crazy. She is the delight of all visitors who cannot quite imagine how a sheep could be so
incredibly bright. Maybe it's chosen to live in the carriage house with the donkey, goats, and chickens. In a few days the cows will be there as well. When she can get in, she loves the house. My fax machine is still kept on the floor and she has managed to chew many pages from it.

I've chosen which of the lambs are to stay. And haven't named them yet. One or two are emotional decisions. There is a lamb that is simply pretty, with the prettiest fleece. She is very relaxed and lets herself be picked up. Some are daughters of mothers whose days are running out. It seems only right that they replace themselves; even the most splendid Ally MacBeal is the daughter of the redoubtable #17, one of the first ewes born here, who is a pure Dorset. Her mother is eight or nine years old. This sturdy, willful little creature is a worthy replacement. It is easy to think so as she has now put her head once more in my hand to have her face and neck petted. She can be nice. She really can. My favorites are more delicate and pretty. She won't ever grow up to be anything but a massive Dorset. No grace, no style. But a lot of brains. Her eyes close. She's still standing, head nestled in my hand. Everyone will love her. But she will never flock or be a sheep. And sometimes I shall feel that she has driven me quite out of my mind. Nonetheless, she shall remain here forever.

There are some combinations of animals that are a simple delight. It is hard to tell exactly why, and yet their enchantment is infectious. Giuseppe Nunzio Patrick MacGuire has spent a great deal of time in the carriage house this month past. Accompanying him is my band of roosters. They are an all-night playing band, indeed. One in particular favors Nunzio and loves to stand on the very edge of his stall, eye level, and crow his heart out to the donkey. He is my favorite rooster, cream, mustard, steel gray, and iridescent green. There was originally a pair of them. My heart broke when I found one dead, murdered, it would seem, by my cat at the time, the
original Prentice. Now there is a father-son combination that makes an increasingly splendid pair.

The three barn cats have decided that while field and brook are an endless source of interest, the carriage house is preferable to the barn. They have taken up in there somewhere, I'm not even certain of the exact spot. I had read in a fifteenth-century book that cats are best fed at eleven in the morning. They then take a brief afternoon nap and are relaxed for an evening's hunting expedition. Since none of my bags of grain show any signs of mice or rats having taken their eleven o'clock lunch from them, I suspect my marmalade duo, Prentice and Prescott, along with the gray-and-white Pierce, are doing what they were hired to do.

The carriage house chickens are looking winter weary while their out-of-doors counterparts have a sprightly eagerness to their demeanors that is a pleasure to behold. The roosters tend to cluster around the indoor chickens; however, I suspect it's because there is a lot of grain scattered about the floor. Two of the less beautiful shall be finding their way into my stew pot this weekend. The rest shall stay as long as they live.

The carriage house has become a farm on its own. Ally lives there, having made her own place in which to spend the night and take daytime naps in the hay. Three bottle lambs are doing better there than within the hustle of the barn and have created a nest beneath the stairs in hay that has fallen in between the cracks. Their nest is separated only by a paddock wall from the three kid goats and their mother. The bucks have learned to venture as far as the third step up on the staircase to the chicken coop. They are black and white, and black, and are more adorable than I would wish. They remind me of Colvin who, with his brother, was to have pulled a cart for me long before Nunzio was even a dream. The doe is the prettiest I have ever seen, all chocolate brown with a brilliant and soft coat.

Together Ally MacBeal and Mary Queen of Spots, Anabella Boxer and Lavinia Honeywell, Giuseppe Nunzio Patrick MacGuire, the rooster Zorro and his band, Prentice, Prescott, and Pierce plus the assorted chickens and as yet unnamed goats all have created, in the carriage house, a tiny farm all of its own on my bigger farm. The atmosphere is enchanting. It draws me throughout the day and several times a night. It has its own magic that simply captures the heart. And for that I am grateful in particular to the redoubtable Ally MacBeal.

T
HERE IS
a houseguest here at Greenleaf. She has been here for nearly two weeks. She kept house for herself and her family for sixty years. Until she came here. We now, in a manner of speaking, keep house for each other. She is more tolerant of me than I am of her, which is rather an amazing thing to me. She is here for a while because I am supposed to be the understanding one of the two of us. And she needs a lot of understanding. She is renowned for her housekeeping abilities, something for which I am not. “This room is a mess,” she shouted at me, staring at my unmade bed the other afternoon. Since the floor and windows were newly washed and each thing in the room had been dusted and polished to within an inch of its life in anticipation of her arrival and fear of her critical eye, I was crushed at the injustice of it. “It's my room,” was all I could reply as she kept saying, “Look at that bed, look at that bed. Oh, its your room, then it is okay, honey. We'll just shut the door.”

Were I only so absolutely tolerant when I find my dish towels all decoratively placed over the backs of my kitchen chairs, all but covering the newly washed and ironed pillowcases on all of the newly arranged little pillows. I was so proud of getting all of those pillows in order. And so I take the dish towels off and put them away, only to find them draped decoratively across the backs again. I concede. With reluctance, and certainly not with the tolerance that she has shown me in the incident of the unmade bed. I expected but did not receive a hard time about food. My cooking is European, but
country and mostly French. My guest's parents were from Italy. Tales of the days when ravioli was made and spread to dry all over the house reached my ears before I ever met her. She and her sisters and mother made them all day. In a time before pasta machines were in every department store.

And so I knew I'd have to try really hard to get the food right. I started with coffee, Maxwell House French Roast. That was an immediate success. Dark, with only a little milk, one sugar. “Mmm, this tastes like chocolate,” she said. I breathed a sigh of relief. An omelet was next. Neat. Nothing in it but a pinch of salt and a lot of butter. Light. Very fluffy. Very even. Golden brown. Pale gold. French. Not like the Italian frittatas with a toasty crust. “Wow” came after the first taste. I got an “okay” on a hamburger, something I really don't know how to make. But I haven't struck out. Not yet, at least. Even a desperate version of New England corn chowder passed muster. My potatoes had frozen. I had put them in a box of hay as an insulator, in the dining room. They never made it to the root cellar. When I went into the dining room and uncovered them, they were frozen rocks. All I had to use was corn, rice, bacon, onions, milk, and a lump of butter. Luck has been with me. She loved the chowder.

Making macaroni has been another story altogether. I knew I was on very dangerous waters with that one. She recognized the dough as I made it, beginner's luck, for the first time. And proceeded to tell me why I shouldn't make it. I continued anyway. I made very nice egg dough, oval in shape, put a cloth napkin over it, and set it to rest. All the while she lectured me on the simplicity, the thriftiness, the ease of simply buying a package of macaroni. “You can get enough in one box for three times,” she said. Again and again. “For thirty-nine cents.” She lifted the napkin and looked again at the dough. “Throw it in the garbage. It's disgusting,” she said. I ran it through the pasta machine. “Look, it's going all over the tablecloth. Throw it
in the garbage. It's too much work.” I sliced the dough and ran it through the machine six times. And then through the slicer again to the dismay of my houseguest.

Later, I made her supper. And made the macaroni for myself. I put her meal in front of her. And silently ate the homemade pasta smothered in butter and Parmesan cheese. I'd glance at her as I ate, my head down, seeing her glance back. “Want some?”

“No.”

“Ever make macaroni with your mother?”

“No.”

“Want to invite your granddaughter over and we'll make some?”

“She won't come.”

I've been reading Italian cookbooks to try to find some things to please her. One described the great pride the women of Bari took in their macaroni-making skills. That was where her mother was from. There were a number of recipes for ravioli. Today I asked her if she ever made ravioli with spinach and ricotta. “Only ricotta,” she said. This woman who never had made macaroni of any kind in her life. She had said. She took some spoons from the silverware drawer. “This one, half full, like that, of ricotta only,” she said. She who had no knowledge of making macaroni. “Then you eat it with a little Parmesan on the top. On Sundays.”

“Right. Shall we make some? I'll buy some ricotta.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“We'll invite your granddaughter.”

“Yes.”

“Where does this go?” She asks me. “I want to help. Where does this go?” How do I tell her, this woman in constant motion, pacing up and down my kitchen, that her eighty-year-old eyes are failing and the dishes aren't quite clean enough. “Put them on the table, I'll put them away, thank you,” has worked so far, but I won't get away
with that much longer. She may know because she has started to polish them dry, rubbing them with a dishcloth.

There are some things at which she is a wonder. Folding laundry is one of them. Slap, slap go the pillowcases in the air. An ancient sound. An absolutely female sound that women have been making when pulling clothes off of clotheslines or placed out to dry in the sun since the beginning of time. Slap. Slap. Then fold. And that one last motion, a pat, as each piece creates a pile.

One of my many Waterloos is the laundry pile. I'm great at washing. Great at drying. Terrible at folding and putting away. Now here is my guest. Most formidable as an attacker, par excellence, on piles of warm and dry miscellaneous tangled clothes. I never knew I had so much stuff. She even has gotten me to put those beautifully folded, nearly organized things away. In their place. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Who would have believed I'd ever change?

She walks around my kitchen speaking to inanimate objects as if they have a life. “You're in your place,” she says with great firmness. “Stay there.” How many times I have thought to the very same objects, how did you get here or there or elsewhere? How? Now I have my new friend to say, “Stay in place. Stay in place.” God bless you.

Every day she puts on eyebrow pencil and lipstick. Her hair is beautiful, with elegant waves. A startlingly brilliant white. She puts a little bit of Deb on it to keep it pretty. She puts out her clothes at night for the next day. I have a lot to learn. She looks in absolute amazement at my hair when I pull off my barn hat. “You don't care what your hair looks like?” she asks. The funny thing is, I'm often tempted to ask her if I can try a little of her Deb. And when I lend her my lipstick to try the color, I'm tempted to put some on myself as well.

She likes the sound of my name and says it often. “Sylvia, where are you?” When we are both in the same room but I am not in her line of vision.

“Here I am. I'm right here.” Two women in the kitchen.

T
HE HEN
had been given to me as a throwaway. She and her companion were the ugliest I had ever seen. Not being one to say no to a free animal of any kind, I took them. What their prior owners had neglected to mention was that they didn't lay eggs. One of the two died. Almost immediately. The other, a hideous creature, took off with one of my roosters and became the most free-range of free-range chickens ever to be seen on this farm. She'd manifest in the most unlikely of places, across the road, on a stone wall quite obscured by brush. Or near the white barn next door. Everywhere. Then she started to lay eggs. Blue ones. Immediately I began to admire her and even like her, but she didn't like me. At all. Especially as I began to take the eggs away from her. A good friend is an artist and loves to paint pictures of those tiny blue eggs. And so I had a special use for them.