To date, in writing these posts Stephanie and I have for the most part confined ourselves to the happy, even idyllic, side of life as hobby farmers in Northwest Wisconsin.
However, in the name of journalistic integrity, sometimes the reader needs to know the full story.
As I sat at my desk writing the other day -- yesterday, I believe -- Stephanie came in with a sad gait and an expression suggesting something was amiss. The last I'd seen her just a few hours earlier she was still basking in the delight that accompanies the arrival of a batch of new baby chicks. These chicks, 50 cornish cross, are perhaps the cutest of all neo-natal farm life we have yet encountered. So the delight bordered on euphoria.
You probably know where this is headed...
"I don't like death," she announced.
"Neither do I," I added, happy to have established unanimity on so elemental a human subject.
"One of our chicks -- the one with the funny butt -- is going to die. And, I don't want to find it..."
"Hmmmm. I suppose I don't want to find it either."
"In fact, I don't much like being a farmer today," she added before leaving to go back to her desk.
...On the farm, death is quite truly a part of life. I'm not talking about the sort of death that our sadistic culture is obsessed with, namely Halo and the Poltergeist. No, I'm talking about the simple and terrible fact that all creatures die.
The sickly chick with the mysterious protuberance was a tiny example of creaturely finitude and of the fact that life is not only finite, but fleeting. Our heartfelt dismay at the loss of so insignificant a creature as a three ounce baby chick displays the bird's significance and the fact that even so small a life is indeed precious.
Almost every religion and philosophy has concurred on this basic, anthropological fact: life is hard and often terrible and we all have a deep and abiding sense that it ought not be so. Indeed, the various rituals that have always accompanied death in every culture in human history point to the fact that dying is something quite unnatural.
Nevertheless, we all die.
We like to fixate on the death of the animals that provide us food, but I suppose that death constitutes a sort of photographic negative to the less often observed fact that the creature in question was alive. One of the things that I'm most grateful for in the opportunity to live at the farm is that I now understand what meat is and what it isn't. It isn't a product -- after all, it wasn't produced. It comes from a creature; a creature that was born, lived a short while, and died.
The vitality of a barnyard full of creatures provides a beautiful and lovely setting in which to live. Sadly, those creatures die; but their lives are all precious.
The sickly chick is gone, having lived a meager life of three days. But the tender care given it by my gentle wife was a unique gift not enjoyed by many animals in this world.
