The human farm

My maternal grandfather had a farm. I would spend my summer vacations on his farm and had first hand-sightings of squirrels and a few skinny cows. 

Not much animal was raised on my grandfather's farm, but a lot of fruits were. Prime among the fruits were an orchard filled with juicy mangoes.

I feel like going back in that time and space and keeping a record of the farm's ecology. But unfortunately the farm life was laughed at as unsophisticated back in my childhood days in India.

In today's America, especially urbane America, it's hip to be associated with the farm life, so I regret having missed a chance to be part of the farm life, while I was physically living on a farm.

I have to make do with reading about farm life that others have experienced, and in this Verlyn Klinkenborg is my favorite.

Klinkenborg writes occasionally in the NYT about the animals he raises and allows to roam free on his farm in upstate New York.

I remember what he wrote about his chicken once:

On fair days, I've been letting the chicken have the run of the farm. I come out of the house, and the birds are waiting at the chicken-yard fence like pelihoners in some Russian novel, but with boundless optimism instead of resignation and despair [...] Chicken live in a monocular world, looking at things, one eye at a time [...] What is likeable is the purposefulness of their behavior [...] A hen raking backward through winter's dult is a professional at work. Scratch, scratch, look around for predators and what have we here? A foraging chicken feeds itself by finding surprises everywhere. The world seems perfectly adjusted to their expectations, which is to say that they take the world just as it is.

Oh the joys of having writers write about the particularities of animals, like the chickens' monocular vision, the pigeons' peripheral one and somebody like Annie Dillard comes along to observe the weasel's ahistorical tendencies of living life by the instinct.

Isn't it fun to see farm life mediated by the human eyes?