Tag: family

Fifty trips around the sun

~ Crystal Sands ~ 4 Comments

Yesterday was my birthday, but I learned from a dear astrologer friend that my actual birthday, according to official trips around the sun from the moment I was born was May 8 at 7:12 PM Eastern Time. This helped me not take yesterday so personally because I had the worst birthday I can remember. It was so bad, by last night, when I was blowing at the candles on the birthday cake that Ron, Ronan, and I made together throughout the day, I was afraid I was going to catch my hair on fire!

Thankfully, I didn’t. I lived and am here to live and love another day. I had hoped to write something profound and beautiful in the blog for my birthday. Something hopeful in dark times. Something about the perspective I have gained after fifty years of living on this planet amongst people, the other animals, the trees, the bees, and so on. But I could only just kind of hang on for dear life and try to get through.

And, somehow, right now, maybe that’s all some of us can do.

I won’t go into details, but the day started with Ron being a bear, me being mad that he was being a bear on my birthday, and then it ended with me injuring myself pretty significantly with the mixer while I tried to make the frosting for my own birthday cake. Along the way, there were strange encounters, bad news about one of my jobs, Boudica actually got outside of our fence when our neighbor accidentally didn’t close the gate, and I spoke to my father for the first time in a year. His life has fallen completely apart in the last few months, and my heart breaks for him, even though we are not close at all.

I’m so glad my birthday is over. There were bright spots. I got to have lunch with my wonderful daughter, and Ron and Ronan and Boudica (Boudica sings) all sang happy birthday to me late at night with a beautiful homemade cake with strawberry frosting, but mostly, I was feeling pretty worried about safety by the end of the day. I kept dropping things, falling, and, of course, the big injury with the mixer. Thankfully, no bones were broken, and I ended the day with only a broken heart.

Ultimately, the day felt like a good lesson for me. Times can be really tough and maybe a little scary, but we have to keep trying, keep hoping, and keep loving those around us.

Oh, and I have a turkey update! Somehow, 17 of the 19 hatched. They are magnificent, so beautiful, and so difficult. The bad news is that the news about my job cut means we can’t keep all of them, but I reached out to the smartest, kindest chicken lady I know. She and her husband are going to take some baby turkeys. I deliver them tomorrow, and I am so excited to see her farm.

Perseverance–and Happy Thanksgiving

~ Crystal Sands ~ 2 Comments

I had decided not to do a super fancy dinner for Thanksgiving but that I was going to make everyone in our family their favorite pie. I am a pretty good pie maker. My family raves. The neighbors talk. One time, when I met my neighbor’s sister, she said, “Oh my gosh! You’re the amazing pie lady!”

I have been cooking from scratch for so long now that I pride myself in being able to know what is going to happen as I put ingredients together. I know how to adjust even a new recipe to make it better, and I have been growing more confident in my cooking skills.

Yesterday, I had a busy day with work. I am working on some sports articles for my local newspaper, and I am not much of a sports person. The research has been intensive, but the articles are about girls basketball, which I adore. I grew up playing basketball, and I learned so much about myself as a person thanks to that sport. Anyway, I have been on the phone with girls’ varsity basketball coaches all over the state of Maine the last two days. I thought I could handle it though. I’m a good pie maker. I could finish my interviews during the day and make five pies in about four hours in the evening, I thought.

Oh, my arrogance! I decided to try a new recipe for butter pie crust that I had read about earlier in the year but hadn’t tried. I was also making key lime pies for my daughter’s partner and my teenage son. Fruit pies are my specialty, but I can usually make a pretty good key lime pie. The issue is that both of my customers do not want graham cracker crust, so I have to find a pie crust recipe that is “just right” for key lime pies.

It turns out that my new recipe wasn’t right at all.

I was in the middle of getting the blueberry filling ready when my timer went off for the key lime pie crusts, which have to be baked before the key lime filling goes in. They both collapsed! I was in a kind of shock for so long that I just stared. Then I swore. A lot. Then I cried.

Ron said surely they could be fixed, and he tried so hard to unroll them. Then he said, “well, just put the filling on top of them. It will be a unique key lime pie.”

But the Virgo rising in me would not allow it. I collected my humbled self and went online to find a better recipe for key lime pie crusts. I had to dig deep, as my old recipe was lost, but I found one.

And so I started again.

At 1:30 in the morning last night (or this morning, depending upon how you look at it), I finished those pies after seven hours of leaning over the counter. My back was on fire. I stretched before bed. Ron was already asleep. He had tried to stay up with me but gave up about midnight.

Friends, I am happy to report that the pies are beautiful! They will be beautiful gifts for my family. I want them to forget their troubles and the worries of the world for just a little bit when they taste a beautiful pie, their favorite, made with so much love just for them.

I hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving. I am sending love and good energy. The holiday is problematic for sure, but I am not going to think about that right now. Right now, I am just going to think about how much I love my family and how lucky I am to have the ingredients, the skills, and the perseverance to make five beautiful pies–two key lime, two blueberry, and a pumpkin pie for Ron. That middle blueberry pie is for my daughter, and it’s so perfect. I can’t wait for her to see it!

Farm Chores in Times of COVID

~ Crystal Sands ~ 3 Comments

Last week, I took a test and confirmed that I have COVID. Our whole family has had COVID, and it has not been easy for sure. We made it four years without catching it. I have both an autoimmune disorder and asthma, and my mom ended up getting long COVID, so I really didn’t want any part of it. Still, after a while, it just seemed we couldn’t ask our teenage son to keep masking when no one else was. I mean, I don’t mind being strange, but it’s hard to ask your kid to be strange for you. Plus, we were vaccinated, so we decided to just take our chances. Thankfully, we are doing okay overall, but every time I think I am doing better, I go right back down. I am a bit down today because this morning was another setback. I woke up this morning worse than I have been in a couple of days. Nevertheless, I got up and did my farm chores.

And that has been the biggest challenge during all of this–the farm chores. Last week, there were a couple of days I could barely move, but I drug myself out of bed every morning and hauled those buckets of water and carried the bag of feed and did my part–all in extremely slow motion. I noticed one morning that it had taken us two hours to do what we normally do in one. In some ways, I don’t even know how we did it, but you always find strength you didn’t know you had when you have no choice, right?

The whole thing has been a reality check for my life though. My full-time work doesn’t allow for sick days really, so I had to keep working. It was really hard to concentrate. We live thousands of miles from family, and our isolation has never felt more significant. I’m questioning a lot of things.

Still, I am so proud of us because we are making it. Ron has been sicker than I have ever seen him, but he just never stopped. Some mornings, I was moving so slowly on my part of the chores that he would grab the buckets from my hands and finish my chores too after he had finished his own. Some evenings, when he just couldn’t get up, I carried in the feed and water and closed up the chickens and ducks by myself. We took turns when we could and never stopped trying. We took care of each other. I realized that we are pretty self reliant–not completely, of course, but quite a bit.

All of the animals are doing just fine, except for poor Bairre and Boudica. We have not been able to take them on their long walks, and they are both more than a little depressed. Oh, and the chicken coop really, really needs a cleaning, but thankfully, the snow and ice have all melted, allowing the chickens to have full run of their giant fenced yard, which means they are not spending too much time in the coop anyway. Just for sleeping. And I’m pretty sure that, tomorrow, Ron and I will be well enough to clean it out–at least Ron will be able to, and I’ll do my best to help. Ron is noticeably better today.

Cooking has been brutal though. I managed to cook homemade pizza on Thursday, but that’s the last successful thing we have eaten. Ron won’t do take out, so he’s been trying to cook after I gave up on Friday. It has not been pretty. We all just look at the food, laugh and cry a little, and do our best to eat it because we know our bodies need it. We can’t taste much anyway, but somehow, I can still taste “bad.” I am about to have to try to make some bread, so we can eat sandwiches of sorts for a few days. Wish me luck!

I realized during all this that I cannot even imagine being a full-time farmer and getting really sick. What do you do? Who do you call? There are no sick days. Hopefully, all of the full-time farmers I know have a good a support system. I can see it’s needed.

On a side note, since the snow and ice have melted, we started putting Luna outside for a little bit in a separate fenced area. Yesterday, I put the two mean ducks in the fenced area and let her have some time with the rest of the flock. Hopefully, we will get her integrated gradually, but I don’t know if she wants to be. This morning, she acted so tired that I just let her stay in the house and listen to music. She seems so content right now. What in the world are we going to do with her?

Pick a Card

~ Crystal Sands ~ 1 Comment

After an intense year in 2023, I was looking for ways to calm my mind and rest my body. Over the holidays, Ron suggested playing cards and asked if I wanted to learn how to play Gin Rummy. I said I did, and I am so glad. I love it so much. Gin Rummy has that perfect combination of luck and skill that make a game fun for me.

If a game is all skill, I’ll never win around here. Ron and Ronan (our son) are both incredibly competitive, like family game nights are not very possible kind of competitive, so if there is a skill to be learned and some kind of “win” at the end, both of them will master said skill and then make it so no one (and by no one, I mean me but probably any other human as well) will want to play with them.

Thankfully, I can win sometimes at Gin Rummy. I have pretty good luck, and I’ll take it.

Every morning and often at night for the past month, I find Ron, especially after morning chores, and hold up the cards as if to ask if he’ll play again, and he almost always obliges. It has been especially fun some evenings to allow our son to play online with his friends while Ron and I sit by the fire, play cards, and listen to classical music. The best is when we listen to videos of our son playing cello.

The other night it hit me pretty hard. Soon, our boy is going to be gone, and our lives are going to be so different. Our son’s plan is to attend a conservatory for cello, and I do believe that’s likely to happen for him. I have wondered: What will I do with myself when I am not being a full-time mom? I have been a full-time mom for nearly 27 years. What do I do next?

It will be just me and Ron and our cards and the fire and videos of our boy on his cello. When this hit me, I started to cry thinking about the youngest leaving the nest, but then Ron said something funny, and I remembered how very much I love this man, this amazing human I get to know, and I realized I’m going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.

I’ve often worried about our son taking the music with him when he goes, but we will have recordings that I will treasure for the whole of my life, and I’m sure he’ll just keep making more. In the meantime, I’m thinking some about what I want to do with the rest of my life when I am not a full-time mom anymore.

I don’t know what I’ll do, but it definitely involves Ron, cards, music, farm animals, and, hopefully, calm.

And, hopefully, I’ll keep my good luck.

photo credit: Laine Cooper, Unsplash

Plot Twist: A Luna Update

~ Crystal Sands ~ 5 Comments

I was all very much prepared to write a blog post this week about my success with Luna. It has been one month since the “incident” with Bairre when he accidentally stepped on her, and her leg has healed quite well. It is still a little off, and she still has a bit of a limp. However, she gets around very well. It really barely slows her down.

Because Luna was reluctant to eat in the house early on, as soon as she was able, I would let her spend time outside with her people, little bits at a time. It helped get her appetite going, and with her leg wrapped up, she could hang with her flock for at least a couple of hours each day. I was amazed that no one was aggressive to her when she would go back outside for visits. I was so grateful because flock aggression is a real issue with our ducks.

This week, Luna was doing so well and the temperatures were warm enough that I decided to leave her outside all day one day. In the evening, I went to check on her, and she didn’t want to come in. I let her spend the night with her people, and in the morning, I scooped her up, gave her a soak in the tub for about an hour, wrapped her leg, and let her go back outside. This seemed to be working so well for a couple of days until one afternoon I was outside with the chickens and heard a terrible commotion from the ducks. I wish I could have run, but there was so much ice on the ground that it took me a bit to get to the ducks. I found a terrible situation. Luna was at the bottom of a pile, and four of the ducks were absolutely abusing her–like severely. Only Ferdinand and Anna Maria weren’t involved.

I ran to her, but she didn’t want to come to me. She took off, so I yelled at the ducks to knock off this nonsense and realized I had better start keeping a very close eye on Luna, though I thought I already was. For the rest of that day and another one, I checked on her about 20 times each day. It was steady. I didn’t see anything else, but yesterday morning, she was acting really strange. I found her away from the flock, and when I went to check on her, it seemed like she wanted me, which was a surprise. I told her I would be right back. I came inside to run a bath for her and went right back to get her. When I put her in the tub, I saw blood on her bill.

I couldn’t figure out what had happened, but after she was in the tub for a bit and her bill was cleaned, I could see the small cracks near the top, where her head meets the bill. I was devastated! I couldn’t believe the other ducks had done this much damage to her, and I couldn’t believe we were here.

A duck’s bill is far more sensitive that you might think. A duck’s bill has highly-sensitive nerves. I have seen the ducks out hunting at night with their bills to the ground. It’s really fantastic to see. Obviously, seeing Luna with a damaged bill was a big worry.

Her bill not only has some small cracks, there is a tiny missing chip from the outer area. I researched about what to do, so I treated her with antibiotic spray to prevent infection. I then had a talk with Ron about what this might mean.

There is a chance Luna may never be able to go back with her people. I found out later from our teenage son that he had to break up an attack on Luna the afternoon before I saw her injury, and he forgot to tell me about it. I told him to please, please tell me when things like that happen.

With these attacks in mind, at the very least, Luna is going to be in the house until spring. I hope we will be able to put her back with her flock, but she is going to have to heal a long time and is going to have to get used to the house right now. Hopefully, we will be able to integrate her back into the flock, but if she gets beat up again, the damage to her bill could be even greater. I don’t know how well it’s going to heal. I don’t know how sturdy a bill will get to be after an injury. I have been trying to research online to get more information, but I really don’t know a lot yet.

All I know for now is that we have to take care of that bill, and Luna is now walking around the house, making herself fairly at home. She’s walking so well now that she won’t stand for sitting her her little nest very much, so she marches those little webbed feet across our wood floors in the cutest manner you could imagine.

The cranberries are my favorite…

~ Crystal Sands ~ 1 Comment

Day 199 of 365

It was a good day, though I was a little sick with some kind of terrible allergies this morning. Benadryl saved the day, and I was able to finish out the cooking; still, I was most thankful today we decided to have a small feast, much smaller than usual. It turned out that I especially needed an easy day.

We had decided earlier this month that we would have a simple Thanksgiving with the goal have a meal consisting only of food from our little farm. We mostly did it, but the accessaries included ingredients from the store. I made pumpkin pies and a key lime pie. We had neither pumpkins nor limes on the farm this year, though I am consulting with Ron about the possibility of having my very own pumpkin patch this coming year. We just don’t know where to put it, but there has to be a place for pumpkins.

I made two pumpkin pies today–one for Ron and one for our neighbor. When I was talking to my neighbor yesterday, she said she made homemade pies to donate to a fundraiser and was too tired to make more pies for Thanksgiving for herself and husband, so they were having store-bought pies themselves. That’s my neighbor. She’s so kind and always sacrificing her wants and needs for others, so I decided to make an extra homemade pie for her since store-bought pies seem sad to me. They are just not the same. I hope it was good. I am a pretty good pie maker, and people will rave about my berry pies because I love berries deeply and know how to honor them in pie. But I do not like pumpkin pie (it’s a texture thing for me), so I worry I don’t make good pumpkin pies. I can’t taste test.

It was a lovely dinner, and it was made even more lovely by the fact that Ron grew almost everything. I forgot the one other exception was the cranberry sauce. I made it homemade, but the cranberries came from the store. They were local though, and I adore fresh cranberries and the sauce. The color is so vibrant and beautiful!

The limes definitely were not local, but they were such a treat. My son, who doesn’t like pie at all, actually really liked it. That made my mom’s heart happy.

It was a cozy, somewhat restful Thanksgiving. I think it will be a while before I make a big, fancy dinner again. Today was too nice. In fact, it was one of my favorite Thanksgivings. I hope yours was lovely as well!