I’ve been meaning to get back to writing on a regular basis. Am I lazy? Maybe. There’s also the old, who cares?
I follow a lot of different accounts on Instagram. I watch the videos, most of them with the narrator in them and I think to myself – never – I’d rather people didn’t see me. Except for my job, I’ve become so reclusive. I’m just an ugly, fat old lady.
But whatever.
A post from four years ago, back when I was writing regularly under the title, my view from the milk stool, which could almost have been written today. It reads:
“My view from the milk stool is on food and climate change. It’s going to be hot. Stupid hot for the next week or longer. Raising food in excessively hot temperatures is tough. Factor in drought and it’s all but impossible. It frightens me greatly to see how the weather is getting across the world. If you’re growing a backyard garden, it’s easy to just throw up your hands and say you’re not going to deal with the heat, lack of rain and bugs anymore and just let it all die. Imagine if you were dependent upon what you grew.
Food wasn’t terribly important to me growing up, although being the oldest of five children with a working mother I was frequently tasked with cooking meals. I never learned to cook, I just did it.
My relationship with food changed when I moved into Boston proper. I lived in the North End of Boston and would shop for what I was going to cook on my way home from work. Interestingly, in a very indirect way, this led to my ability to process rabbits.
One day while walking home, I saw live rabbits being unloaded at an Italian butcher that I frequented. I peaked in and saw how the butcher hung the rabbits, quickly slit their throats and skinned them. I was appalled and amazed.
I tracked down that rabbit breeder and arranged to purchase dispatched rabbits from him that I took home, skinned and gutted on my kitchen floor, ground up and fed to my cats. This was back in the late 1990s. To this day, I still feed my dogs and cats a raw meat diet.
When I moved to North Carolina in 2002, I found another breeder of rabbits and purchased their culls in the same manner. I didn’t eat rabbit myself until 2011 when we started raising them.
Imagine the trepidation I felt when I put that first rabbit that I raised and processed on the grill. I didn’t kill it. For the first few years, I had my significant other kill them for me. I used to have to get him up early so he could dispatch all the rabbits I was going to process before he went to work.
Using a captive bolt pistol, I’m reasonably comfortable killing the rabbits on my own now. As long as I do it correctly, it’s a quick death. Of course I thank them for giving me their lives before I do it.
I tell people, they have only one bad day in their lives here. Early this spring, I got a bit stupid with breeding rabbits and now have four pens of rabbits (approximately six in a pen) that need to be processed in a week or so. We’ll be eating rabbit every day of the week for a while. That’s okay. Hopefully we’ll be able to sell some to offset the cost of raising them.
As Patience Gray said in “Honey from a Weed,” “once we lose touch with the spendthrift aspect of nature’s provisions epitomized in the raising of a crop, we are in danger of losing touch with life itself.” Unfortunately, in this day and age of industrialized food, we’ve all but lost touch with food and our agrarian past. Perhaps we should reconsider the wisdom of a land-based economy before it’s too late.
The photo is of American Chinchilla rabbits, a heritage breed that we raise. They are truly magnificent creatures and I’m blessed to have them.”
Not too long after I wrote this post, I made the decision to sell out of rabbits. I sold them all, equipment too, to a local couple. I was blessed to be able to get some of that original stock back earlier this year. We’re keeping the operation very, very scaled back from what it was four years ago when I had four pens of rabbits ready to be processed. Today I have just two with a total of nine rabbits. They’re slated to be put in the freezer the end of July.
I’m so glad to have rabbits back. I’ve so enjoyed the process every morning of going into the garden and picking stuff – be it herbs, bolted greens, weeds, grass growing in the aisles and most recently, the cover crop we planted.
The cover crop is helping the soil, feeding pollinators, birds, the rabbits and goats. It’s also filling our (Wally, my husband and I) souls with its beauty and the sense of accomplishment of having planted it.
Every morning there’s a sense of accomplishment of having got something important done. This morning, it was planting out the cucumbers and squash I started inside, harvesting three pots of bolted greens for the rabbits, cleaning out one rabbit pen which will end up back in the garden to feed the soil and keep moisture in. Everything is coming full circle.
So I’ve written. Let’s see if I can keep up with it.
Until later …
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