All we did last year
Winter hours are the time for tranquilizing thoughts to be born. I need the world's doors to shut some so that my creative power can come out and whirl itself around, but I don’t find myself quite immersed in the murmurings yet. I think that is because a little voice keeps telling me to acknowledge some of the work done this past year. The gentler part of myself (that grows the more I mother our kiddo) says to take a moment and be proud of all we did last year.
We raised, packed and hand delivered over 1000+ boxes to a couple hundred families in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California - that is somewhere around 50,000lbs of pasture-raised farm-killed meat.
We didn’t exactly pay ourselves, but we made the very first payments on the ranch, we bought a backhoe and a tractor, we bought a gigantic freezer to store and organize the thousands of lbs of pork, beef, duck, chicken and lamb. We worked our hineys off (although mine remains stubbornly attached) and with strength, stamina, literal physical leverage, ingenuity, and painful yet eventual moments of release, we pulled it all together. We learned we raise chickens too well, that sheep have answers, and duck fat is food for the gods. We still like looking at each other a good majority of the time, we are a damn good team which includes us learning to actively love one another, and we are a little closer to learning there is no such thing as being caught up.
We learned we have outrageously generous and beautiful friends, colleagues, neighbors and customers ready to help and participate around every corner. We underestimated just how good it would feel to feed this many people directly, even though that is what we set out to do. To start with learning someone's name or connecting with a childhood friend, followed by handing them their first/second/third/fourth order (and by that time knowing their smile and something about their life) along with getting regular notes, letters, wine, books, art and more from the families we are feeding really does close the loop. All the beating hearts of the fields and thundering hooves of the soil we take for food moves clearly from life to life, that’s something.