A Tumultuous Week at Red Earth Farm

When the cowboy poet comes to visit.

It has been a beautiful week here on the farm. Our friend the cowboy poet came to visit, and it felt as if we were actors on a stage. All around us the stagehands had painted wildflowers across the sandhills, and we walked about remembering our lines.

Janisse: How many head of cattle do you run, Sean?

Sean: Three hundred. How about y’all?

Janisse: Seven. We’re getting out of the cow business.

Sean: It can consume you.

Distant Hills

Seven of the last ten years our friend has read on stage at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, and he’s invited to go out to Elko, Nevada for the next one, late January. They’ll pay him to stand up in his big Stetson hat and read his poems about bulls and barbed-wire and barefoot cowhands.

Sean Sexton runs a family ranch called Treasure Hammock near Vero Beach, Florida. He gets up at 4 in the morning to write poetry, because by daybreak he has to get busy moving cows or riding fence. He has to worry about drought and disease and dipping.

Spending time with a farmer is different than spending time with anybody else. Sean looks out at a pasture and says, “Look at that Bermuda grass” as if it is the most beautiful thing in the world. “Y’all make hay or buy it?”

I understand that talk, not like Sean does, but I speak the language of a world where AI doesn’t mean “artificial intelligence.” And I loved hanging out with a poet. One day we were talking about somebody—I forget who—and Sean described her as “astraddle a tenuous fence.”

Invitation

I invited a few friends over for a little fireside poetry reading while Sean was in town. Three of our close friends are strict vegans, and two or three more are vegetarians. Normally I wouldn’t censor a writer, but in no uncertain terms I forbade Sean to read anything that had to do with eating meat.

We told our friends that we’d cook supper—vegan minestrone soup. I chopped onions and garlic and carrots and celery and tomatoes, and I sautéed all that with basil and oregano. I went out to the garden and gathered bell peppers and collards, and I sautéed them. I tossed in canned tomatoes and chickpeas.

The entire time I was chopping Sean was paging through his poetry collections trying to find something vegetarian to read. He kept asking me about this heifer poem or that heifer poem. “No way,” I’d say. Although Sean is too much of a gentleman to protest, I could tell that he wasn’t happy.

But something happened later that settled the matter, a tiny thing of great significance.

The Junkyard

Early afternoon I wanted to run over to my childhood home and show Sean the junkyard where I grew up, and he wanted to go see it—even if it didn’t have cows—so I turned off the soup pot, and it was somewhere in this window of time that I made my big culinary mistake.

When we got to the junkyard, we went in to visit with my mom. My brother was there, and my mom and my brother both fell in love with Sean. Pretty soon Sean was talking about the book Car by Harry Crews where a guy eats a car. “He cut it up in little pieces,” Sean said, “and ate the entire thing. He even ate the tires.”

My brother was still thinking about the biscuits and gravy my mom made for dinner, and he was too full to be thinking about eating a Mustang or a Jaguar.

Tour

After a while we rambled out onto the junkyard, and I showed Sean the Metropolitan Nash I want to restore when I have an extra $50K to blow. The car has a tree growing into its front bumper and it’s buried in pine needles. “I’d rather restore it than eat it,” I said. When we left the junkyard I showed Sean my grandmother’s farmhouse, where I wrote Wild Card Quilt, and then the cemetery where my maternal ancestors are buried.

That’s why we were late getting home, and I had to rush to get supper ready for the poetry audience. They began to arrive, and things were hopping, and fifteen minutes before supper I realized I needed to warm the soup.

My Problem

Everyone was too polite to say a word, so I never would have known anything was wrong until I tasted the soup. I was the last person to dip a bowl. I finally sat down at the long table full of handsome people, stage all set, eager for a bowl of warm minestrone on a cool fall evening. With the first taste I understood that I had a problem.

Although the soup was warm, it was not actually cooked. All the vegetables were crunchy.

“Oh, no,” I said aloud. “I forgot to cook the soup.”

People are so damned nice. They were saying things like “I love it like this” or “I never would have known if you hadn’t said anything” or “I want another bowl-full.”

I really am going through a wonderful transformation. There was a time in my life when I would have jumped up and done something—anything—to feed my friends something worth eating. But I’m done with shame. I kinda didn’t even care. I thought it was kinda funny.

“Well, let’s just say it’s minestrone salad, not minestrone soup,” I said.

Fireside

After supper we moved outside to the fire pit. Dark had fallen, and I had to rig up a lamp for Sean to read. The dog Asa was circling like a buzzard. He would stay with one person until they quit petting him, then he would move on to the next. We were just a big old petting zoo for Asa.

The cowboy poet read some cat poetry, then he ended with a fabulous poem about the butterfly house at Fairchild Gardens. Out in the bluegrass the cows were happily grazing in the dusk. The big curtains slide shut.

Larvae

I could end the story there, except for one strange and wonderful event. One of our vegan friends—a close friend we dearly love—brought a 5-pound box of Medjool dates. She pulled me off to the side. “I ordered these dates,” she told me. “And when I opened the box, a moth flew out. I was thinking you could give them to your hog.”

The dates looked perfect, arranged like crinkly milk chocolates in their heavy box. Medjools are delicacies and not cheap either.

“A moth flew out of the box?”

“Yep,” she said.

“And you are thinking that perhaps there are larvae in the dates.”

“Exactly,” she said.

I was so proud of my friend in that moment. I love people who live their beliefs. A life in the gray just makes no sense.

And when I told Sean about the larvae in the dates, the matter was settled. He was happy being a cat poet and a dang good one.

---

Lesson Learned from Living the Above Story

For heaven’s sake, taste your dishes as you are cooking them or, at the very least, before you serve.

---

Phenology

On Oct. 10 I saw the first kestrel of the season. S/he was sitting on a line on Rickety Bridge Road. That was a Tuesday, and by Thursday I counted four on that same road. This week I noticed that harriers have arrived. They are hunting madly and wildly over the farm fields. The fall wildflowers are winding down. Red maples are turning orange and maroon in the wetlands. This fall far fewer sulfur butterflies are bouncing along the roadways than in the past—the reduction in numbers is very concerning and I won’t rest until Roundup is banned. Imagine a world where Roundup is legal and marijuana is not. (And don’t assume I smoke weed just because I say that. I don’t.) Think of it—a plant medicine is illegal and a cancer-causing, pollinator-killing herbicide is sold by the gallon at every hardware store in the country. Argggggh.

A few squirts of glyphosate and all this astral frenzy would be gone.

---

Farm Report

The garden is looking grand. I’ll send you pictures soon. Collards are ready, as well as nasturtium blooms for salads. The first lettuce leaves and radishes will soon be big enough to eat.

Our two Satsuma trees near the house are loaded with oranges, and every day the fruit is less green and more orange. I’ve eaten my first kumquat of the season.

I moved the horses into the pecan pasture one afternoon while Sean was here. Lakota, one of the quarterhorses, found an opening in the fence, and he was nowhere to be found when evening feed-up arrived. My husband, Raven, had to go in search of him in the dark and finally found him out in the pasture with the mule and cows. So some fence-fixing is in order at Red Earth.

Some evenings now the deer graze the pastures as if they were part of the operation. We really have to do something about them.

Flowering ginger is flowering, and the Louis Phillippe roses are so numerous that sprays of them crash face-first to the ground.

Raven wants another dog so badly that he has been visiting rescues in surrounding towns. I have given him the green light—if a dog companion is so important to my husband’s happiness that he will visit three dog rescues in one day, then fine. Get another dog. This week Raven found a pup online that is everything he wants in a dog. It’s on a farm, not at a pound. Therefore, it’s probable that Asa’s loneliness will be ending soon, as early as tomorrow, I’m guessing.

---

Some Folks Ride Cows

---

Good Stuff Here at the Terrain.org Online Auction

Sean takes his coffee on the back deck, looking out at the pasture. You can tell that Asa is addicted to love.

P.S.

Minestrone for Complete Idiots

Cook the beans.

• 1/2 cup uncooked chickpeas (2 cups cooked)

• 6 cups water

• 2 bay leaves

Now start chopping & sauteing.

• 1/4 cup olive oil

• 2 onions, diced

• 5 cloves of garlic, minced

• 2 tsp salt

• 1 stalk celery, minced

• 1 carrot, diced

• 1 small zucchini or 1 cup eggplant, diced

• 1 tsp dried oregano

• 1 tsp dried basil

• 1 green peppers, diced

Then add

• water

• 2 cups tomato puree

• 1/2 cup dried pasta (any kind)

• 1-2 tomatoes, diced

Whatever you do, don’t cook it. Just sprinkle on chopped parsley and serve.