Husbandry

A slice of my thoughts and life. As usual this includes animal death.

I awake to the slow rising music of Ayla Nereo. I’ve set my phone beneath my sleeping loft so that to get to it I have to descend and stand shivering and awake out of bed. That’s the theory. Here, now, I lie in bed slipping in and out of dream, following the threads of the song as she sings about “tender breath keepers” - naming each tree by name. The song loops but cuts out as the alarm decides I’m not getting up, ending on the word “Husband.”

Now, half awake in silence, I ponder the word. I’ve never had much attachment to marriage. My parents weren’t married until I was ten, and then only for taxes. People are forever joking about the ways commitment kills a relationship. Wife I know to just mean more or less “woman” - but husband - strikes me now as perhaps holding more. 

I finally crawl out of bed to discover that it’s Tuesday. An off day - and my alarm was leftover from the day before. I look up longingly at my bed - but I am, as hoped, shivering and awake. I slip on yesterday’s camo and today’s wool, and butt-scooch my way onto the ladder that stands in place of stairs.

 
A little of the bleariness fades as I step into my kitchen. I come in and lean over my masonry heater, Calcifer, soaking in the heat of warm soapstone. My kitchen feels more lived in than upstairs, clothes hanging drying on hooks, wool scattered across my counter next to a newly arrived package, wood in cardboard boxes stacked against rows of spices. It smells like cedar smoke and clay paint and burnt toast. I feel more alive stepping into it.

Beo, my cat, rises from her spot among the wool to purr around my ankles until I scoop her into my arms, absorbing her resonant body heat too. When I’m arrived in this moment, I set her down to kneel and crumple paper into the firebox. When it comes time to light, I ignore my adequate matches and the lighter in my pocket for a ferro rod, spraying sparks onto char until it glows to ember, and then scooping it into a nest of sawdust.

I blow smoke into my eyes for a good minute before the stubborn thing bursts to fire, which I transfer to the stove. I set tea to boil, and head outside to wrestle my chicken tractor into its new position, doing battle with blackberries - and then inviting the birds in their mad rush to their cage for the day, scattering grain as close to the roots as I can so they’ll do more damage there.

Animal Husbandry is the one word I know with Husband in it - and I like that word. To husband animals feels like keeping them safe, caring for them and letting them grow well. I wonder now if “band” relates somehow - to “bind.” To be bound. It seems likely.

I come inside again and glance at my table. There was a package left at the end of my driveway last night that I grabbed in the dark on my way home. It’s squishy and has to be my new T-shirts come way quicker than expected. I ignore it for now and grab an onion, chopping it mechanically and adding it to the cast iron on the now hot stovetop. I add the last of the lard leftover from Daisy - a sick pig I autopsied, who’s fat I rendered not expecting to eat it - until smelling the pig fat I decided it couldn’t be that bad. I go outside and harvest nettle, dandelion, and blackberry shoots and supplement with some kale that’s going yellow in my box. Deer ribs come out of the freezer and straight into the pan.

Then I sit, scrolling social media for a bit and stirring occasionally. Food ready, I dish it up and sit at my table, sipping nettle tea and gnawing bones. Calcifer crackles contentedly behind me.

Husband is indeed related to bind - my phone tells me. It comes from “Bheue” - which means simply “to be” - a wife is a woman, a husband exists. Being becomes building, bower, and bondage - the double standard of existence - prison or paradise depending on how you view the building you shelter in. Husband, as a verb, adds the aspect of making ready.

Food finished, I stoke the fire and put on an Audiobook - Neil Gaiman’s Anansi boys - and begin carding wool. I’ve recently become addicted to wool carding. The immediate dopamine release of turning fiber fluffy in a few quick movements is more stimulating than video games - possibly more than cocaine - I wouldn’t know. I have a hard time stopping once I’ve started, and the fire languishes as the pile of fluff in front of me grows.

This sheep has been an adventure. It belonged to a neighbor who invited me to the slaughter. Immediately after I arrived, they pulled the sheep out and killed them - a pistol to the back of the head. The sheep fell, writhing on the ground as the men stood around, saying how it always makes them feel like their aim is off when the sheep keep moving. I cringed - it’s not the way I would ever kill a sheep - but it also didn’t feel like my place to interpose.

Sheep dead, we hung them, and I started in on one - and each of the two other men got a sheep to skin. Five minutes later, when I was halfway down a leg - skin clean of meat and moving with practiced skill - and they were still struggling with the top few inches - they started to ask questions. I taught them how to skin well - and ended up with two of the three sheep skins - exactly as I had hoped.

Home - I tried to wash them. Hot water and lanolin soap in my largest pot - the one I can fit small people in - and as soon as the sheepskin went in, the water went so black my fingers vanished at their point of entry. Three more times went exactly the same. I finally decided they needed a river.

Twenty-four hours in Chimacum creek - weighed down by rocks - and there was still color coming out of the wool. I washed them for another half hour, freezing bare feet in the February water, until they ran clean.

But of course they’d been wet on and off for a week by then, and one of them started slipping wool. I threw it in barktan to save it, but the wool still fell out. I gathered the wool and put it inside. The hide I scraped to make it turn to leather faster. But I left it out on my beam overnight and awoke to find that dogs, a large one and a small one by the tracks, had come and ripped the hide to shreds.

Now I card the wool - the one remaining piece of this wild adventure. The pile of fluffy wool grows ever higher in front of me. My fingers feel soft with lanolin - and when I’m not in my audiobook, imagining tigers and spiders - I’m dreaming about a felted shirt.

I finally break away from carding, almost an hour later. The fire is almost out and I gently kindle it back to life. Butter goes into the cast iron now, and seedy bread for toast. Not trusting myself to card wool and toast bread I busy myself with other things. I fill the berkey with rainwater, and bring in another load of firewood. I open my T-shirts.

Opening the bag, I find that the squishy thing inside is not T-shirts - but a dead opossum. I begin to giggle. Delighted. I move the wool, lay a towel down on the table, grab my second sharpest knife, rescue my almost burnt toast, and smell across its body. Finding no rot I massage the skin away from the body. Opossums skin quick. The guts go to the chickens and the rest go into a pot on Calcifer. I was just wondering what to have for dinner.

My life has been full of opossums and sheep. From the opossum we found dragging herself along the side of the road - my first mercy killing. She’d barred her teeth at me between pretending to be dead - but there was no fury in her, only fear and in the end relief - maybe even gratitude to be in hands that know how to kill well.

There is a little opossum that I cornered in my chicken coop. It sat there and let me pet it, bright eyes in the light. Later it stole some of my venison left on the back porch - hid it under a metal shelf and only revealed itself by the constant clanking of its head bonking as it ate. I wasn’t angry, only amused at the little bumbling thing as it vanished under my porch.

Other people have been calling me in to help them kill their sheep - done my way with a knife to the neck. Bleeding the animal out, you watch them grow calmer, so that when they come to the movements all dead things make, it feels like they’re running to the afterlife they’ve accepted, not twitching on the ground unknowing.

Both animals are so docile - I am in awe of their ability to walk through the world with so much trust, and as I work the dead, I wonder if they trusted in that too. Are opossums and sheep held by some benevolent Oppossheep god who guides their bodies in black plastic bags to the hands of those who appreciate them? Could I too be guided if I could walk with that much trust and gratitude?

The rest of the day is spent homesteading. I collect eggs, chop wood, take out the compost, replace a breaker in my solar system. I practice my hand-drill. I get sucked into wool carding for another hour and a half. I make up a fantastic song, sing it as I work, and forget it five minutes later. As the smell of stewing opossum grows stronger, I’m back at the cutting board chopping onions again. Tomorrow at work the children will ask, as they always ask - what’s in my lunch, so I’m sure to add a few unusual things I can use as teaching moments. I search out purple dead-nettle from the yard and bring out dried lobster mushrooms harvested last year.

“Here you are, Pan,” I say out loud as I cook. “You live in the pinnacle of human imagination. People are building artificial intelligence that transcends human thought. We’ve harnessed lightning to our will. You can fly anywhere in the world. There are bombs that could end everything. All the information on the planet is at your fingertips - and what are you doing?”

“I am making Opossum soup.” I answer. “Then I’m going to card wool.”

“And is that really enough?” I ask myself. “Is this the life you want?”

“Yes,” I say. As I do every day.

I’ve watched people eaten up by the problems of the world. By the desire to step out onto the world stage. I’ve seen the way their nervous systems overload - cynicism blossoming from burnout.

My problems are good problems. They’re on a scale my body knows how to deal with. My life is a slow tending of itself. By making my life more difficult in all the ways I have, I’ve actually made my life easier.

“I am husbanding my life.” I say out loud. I am building the bower that binds me. I am tending my being. I am making ready. One day I will husband a wife. Someday I will husband my children. Right now I husband my body, my homestead, my animals, my relationship with death and the skills I cultivate. I husband my ability to hold partnership by cultivating the gratitude that can husband the emotions where love grows.

And that - that is enough.