Welcome to the
Signs of Summer "SOS" Blog:
SOS week 1
Greetings Dear Friends,
Today the first week of Signs of Summer ( SOS ) is complete. We all survived and thrived. At the end of each day we gather and in turn reflect on the best event of the day. Today everyone answered, “Today was the best thing that happened today! It was a great day! “
Indeed it was— a day full of jovial camaraderie and work well done. The early part of week one had its rough parts—In fact I wondered at times why I was spending July in Nebraska rather than in New Zealand and why with a bunch of unruly and ungrateful teenagers rather than my beloved husband John. I know for a fact the campers shared these resentments. But in the end the delightful moments outweighed the strained ones.— we just needed to sort ourselves a bit to get there.
The farm folks have made us very welcome and the campers delight in their efforts to Learn and use ASL. Lunch is our main meal and many lunch times we gather round the long table in our outside eating area exchanging signs and joking and savoring the moments together. Our normal day begins with 5:30 a.m. cow milking. The cows are beautiful with their elegant horns reaching toward the heavens. Their calves are darling and fairly tame to pet. Two of us help with milking while the others make breakfast. The hired farmer, Matt, is very patient with our attempts to battle the medusa like milking equipment amidst kicking cow legs. Following a light breakfast we can usually get an early start on the day’s work. Our weather has been in the high 90s so weeding long rows of field carrots or harvesting garlic scapes or romaine or kohlrabi or cucumbers is best done before noon or after 4 p.m. This makes our days long.
The middles of the days we spend at the lake splashing and kayaking in the glorious cool silent water interwoven with small schools of carp and bass and topped with the white puff ball seeds of the giant twisting cottonwoods which line the shore. In the evenings the breeze often rises and whispers through the tree tops chasing out the day’s heat. Occasionally boiling clouds pile up tinged with sunset color and spewing lightning followed by deep lingering drum rolls of thunder.
Yarrow, the farmers’ son began a continuing story one day at lunch about friends on a journey. We all wait for his descriptions of their next adventure at every opportunity— table-side, fireside or otherwise. The campers stop in rapture at the mention of the characters Snake, Toad, Horsefly and Chordy. Often mid- task one will break into a grin recalling an event from the tale.
This morning Beth rushed out to our eating and meeting area to tell us we must come in to see —the kohlrabi seeds the campers had sown were sprouting. It was wonderful to see their reciprocal excitement as they peered at the tiny sprouts like proud parents staring through the nursery window. Nathan brought up a newborn calf this morning and we all marched out to it and gathered round to admire its innocent face and wobbly attempts at nursing. Another is due any day. The chickens are laying 3-4 dozen eggs a daily. The flowers are blooming in a close stand of brilliant red hollyhock, purple mallow and sunny orange calendula. The last two often grace our salads. The mulberry trees are plentiful and loaded with a second succulent berry crop. Everything on the farm is growing.
And now that we have ourselves better sorted and begin to build friendships and settle into a routine, and have the basic beginning rudiments of weeding, sowing and harvesting under our belts, we will move on to the next week full of castrating bull calves, making granola, our first formal ASL class, farmers market, exploring Scottsbluff monument, garlic braiding...and of course more weeding.
Thank you for helping us get here. The magic is already beginning to happen.
Warm regards,
Patricia B Gans MD Director Trillium Deaf Program
SOS Midway
My last pair of socks is dirty and full of stickers. The brim of my sun hat is smudged with sweat and dirt. My other clothes are stained but clean since I use them to swim in the river every afternoon and hang them to dry on a tree branch tent side for use the next day. I have a thousand mosquito bites and a respectable sunburn. Why am I so happy?
We have been working hard and falling into bed tired. Last night I tried to write but kept startling myself awake from sleep mid sentence. Then my IPad also died as though in conspiracy. But this morning is Sunday and it is cool and the wind has been coming in roaring gusts all night like a mischievous child dashing across the playground to take up the hands of a friend in a raucous twirling dervish dance. Shadows from trees and shrubs amidst which our tent is snuggled swish and swirl excitedly against our cloth walls inviting us to join the fun. But we are sleeping in, snug in our wall to wall bedroom resting after a week well done.
The farmers market was quiet yesterday being inconveniently booked over by the Oregon Trail Days parade —part of a big three day celebration in the neighboring town. The kids had been all week in their free time braiding the dried soft neck garlic they themselves had harvested. They created decorative/useable ten packs tied with orange and yellow baling twine and a yellow farm business card. The result was beautiful and satisfying but they sold only three due to the low attendance. It’s quite a lesson for us to be so close to the food growing and harvesting and cleaning and sorting and packing it all up for market just to see folks walk by looking at a carrot like it was cut of wood rather than Gods gift of miraculously packaged sunshine and water and earth. Even here in farm country people don’t seem to eat fresh or know how to relate to real food. So we protected it diligently from the sun for three hours on display and packed it all up again and Beth took it back home.
Today we will join Matt going to Church followed by lunch at the taco truck and a visit to the local zoo. Then we’ve the calf to check. She impaled herself on something out at pasture. She was born about the time we also arrived on the farm. Nathan made her a beautiful room in his basement with light and breezes from two windows and clean grass hay on the floor to keep her out of the flies. The kids watched me clean her wound yesterday and loved on her sympathetically and watched Nathan give her a bottle of milk he had milked from her mother. Her name is Sarsaparilla. This morning we will take her to visit Mom and nurse but she will need to spend the hot days in her little retreat to keep the wound clean.
Life on the farm continues rolling on, real, hard, beautiful and full, demanding more than it is possible to give, giving more than it is possible to reciprocate...
We are a team...mostly. All is well.
Signs of Summer “SOS” Final Chapter
Fall is creeping round the corners in Nebraska already. The waist high grasses are heading out and turning from green to gold. The days are breezier and cooler around the edges. We’ve enjoyed spectacular thunder storms and tornado watches the last few days with grey clouds piling up in ominous mountains which ultimately degrade into cascading deluges of rain and gusty winds.
All the vegetables are ripening like a time lapse video, so fast that the cucumbers, zucchini and green beans must be picked daily err they expand into giant proportions. Our cold room overflows with goodness. Yesterday we shredded forty pounds of vegetables for sauerkraut to put away for winter and that made not even a noticeable dent in the supply. At the farmers market we are selling organic fresh picked zucchini at twenty for five dollars just to keep from being overrun by them.
We have settled into a rhythm on the farm of work and play, contemplation and sharing. Visual communication amongst all the farm community members has improved to the point of messages conveyed in a subtle glance or gesture even from distant ends of our long dining table. Basic sign language interwoven with mime and gesture has become a new normal and our mealtimes conversations often revolve around signed humor or confirmation, reiteration or introduction of signs for topics encountered that day.
Thoughts of school and returning home also sneak into our days. With them excitement for things to be and sorrow for things ending intermingle in a confusing but rich changing tide of emotions. Our affection for one another has grown strong leaving behind testing and annoying and soaking now in a golden glow of last moments.
In the midst of all this another tv crew visited attempting to capture on film in a three part series this farm internship for Deaf youth. How do we explain what is actually happening here? Meanwhile the kids continue to pack too many “must dos” into too few remaining days. We have had our last ASL class and our last farmers market. We have trimmed our last shallot. We made ice cream for the last time — chocolate chip chocolate coconut with milk we coaxed from the cows ourselves and maple syrup coaxed from the trees by a friend—and sighed and smiled and ate all together in a mad feeding frenzy from the churn. We have two days remaining on the farm. Truly we have shared something beautiful. We laugh and roll our eyes and sometimes someone has to hide in their hood or turn away to hide some tears. We know it to be precious.
As we sat on overturned buckets in the old barn surrounded by a sea of drying garlic we had harvested, we chatted in sign easily while snipping the dry tops from pallets of shallots and sorting the bulbs by size into net bags. It was easily our fifteenth hour on this task, pleasant and social but at the same time daunting and seemingly interminable as the huge pile stubbornly refused to appreciably diminish in its grandeur. Looking up at our working group I realized that in the months ahead filled with the business of school and austerity of winter there would arrive a day when each of us would remember this moment and long for it and smile pensively. “Yes!” agreed one camper. “And I will text you all when that happens. A group text!” Yes we have shared something special.
Tonight I could see my breath under the full red moon and crisp deep starry sky. I stood alone and pondered the layers of meaning this month has held and how it will continue to work into all of our lives long into the future in ways we cannot presently comprehend or foresee. It has been but a moment in the grand scheme of life— but it has been a moment to remember.
