We’re listening to the cows. I think they’re mother cows lowing to their babes. Larry says no, they’re “our” cows, not a mother among them. We don’t know, so it doesn’t matter.

“I wonder what happened to Susannah (the-Pioneer-Cow’s, to use her complete name, the source of milk and butter in my childhood) calves?” I say. “Dad used to kill them by hitting them on the forehead with a mallet. Of course, he never let us watch. I don’t think he ever wanted to answer any inconvenient questions about the need for Susannah to be ‘freshened’ to keep the milk coming. But I would think we would have wanted to play with any calves that showed up, and I can’t remember ever seeing one. No, but there’s that photo of Mary playing with a calf. Well, memory. Weird.”

“Jesus,” is all Larry can think to say. “Your childhood was sure different than mine.”

“We did get to watch him kill the chickens, though. Just whacked off their heads with a hatchet, watched them flap around headless. Then we got to help pluck them. Yuck! The smell of wet feathers? Probably okay because the topic of sex wouldn’t have come up. Not a rooster to be found.”

“Kind of hard to raise farm kids without the topic of sex coming up, I’d imagine.”

“Well, they did it. It wasn’t really a farm, though. We just lived in the country and had animals. No tractor or anything like that. We were so innocent, and I guess they wanted it that way.”

“My dog died,” Larry says. “That’s it for my childhood stories.”

We’re quiet for awhile. The deck has been laid on the foundation, so we decided to bring our chairs over and watch the sun go down:

It was a good day. We’d done some work in the orchard, and planned to spend the night in Corvallis, then play golf on a course in Monroe we’d heard about. And why, again, are we doing this?

The question came up when a group of my friends were having dinner on our deck in Portland. When we have this beautiful condo in Portland, why do I need anything more?

But I don’t think that’s the right question. It isn’t about more. It’s about finding home. And if Larry and I didn’t start with the same sense of what “home” is, see above, I think we are converging on that definition. But you’ll have to ask Larry his reasons.

The second answer is that, and here I’m speaking for myself again, I believe it’s important to do meaningful work in the days that stretch ahead, for however long. And I want that work to be something Larry and I do together. He already has meaningful work, managing the family finances, and play, golf. He does those things alone and with his friends. Sure, I play my banjo, and that’s fun, but it isn’t meaningful.

We donate money to causes we want to support, and that’s meaningful, but it isn’t work. So, the farm offers us a chance to work together in a place we both love.

There are huge challenges: the land is abused, overgrazed. The waterways have been degraded. But the property is in a conservation corridor, and we will have the help of Oregon Fish and Wildlife, NRCS, and other agencies yet to be identified.

Next Wednesday, we meet with Jarod Somebody from OF&W. The cows move off on July 10. We’re eager to get started! And not to alarm anyone, but Larry is collecting info on the different tractors he believes he’ll need.