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When I am a farmer . . .

DH and I are at an impasse . . . one day, I would like to move to the country and have a tiny little farm. He’s lived in the country, and has no interest in going back.

So every once in a while, I happen to hear the organic gardener on NPR, or stumble across an article about farming while browsing through The Nation, and I dream.

I think that I would like to have a couple apple trees, and chickens under them to eat the bugs that plague apples, and for eggs, ofcourse. And one of the mini-cows Amelie has talked about, for milk. And ’cause I think cows can be pretty cute. I’m thinking I would have to go vegetarian, because I don’t think I could kill my pets. Which means I would have to extend my list of edible veggies– although already I could find uses for carrots, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, broccoli . . . so naturally, I would have a cellar, where I could store root veggies in sand and have them all winter, and into spring. Speaking of the house, I would really like a fireplace and a couple easy chairs in the kitchen– I think it would be a nice place to knit. And on the topic of knitting, I would have to have some sheep.

Ideally all of this would happen while Big Kid was young enough to really enjoy it. At the very least, maybe this will be the year that I actually use the compoast we’ve been making and try to garden.

Meanwhile, back in reality, my favorite aunt is very sick. Well, actually she seems just ducky– but under the surface . . . she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of december, and last weekend she had a heart attack (the prepubescent cardiac resident said it was the perfect heart attack, though– she took an aspirin and got to the ER before it actually happened) and while in the hospital after the heart attack, they let her diabetes get out of control . . . but because of the heart attack, her chemo and radiation have been postponed a couple weeks, and then we found out that after the chemo and radiation, they want her to have a hysterectomy because the cells in the lining of her uterus look funny . . .

And all I keep thinking is, “This is train wreck. Her body has become a train wreck.”

But were you to go over for dinner, you would never guess any of this. She doesn’t seem sick, and her sense of humor is fully intact. In fact, right after I rescued her from the hospital we stopped at the grocery store to fill her prescriptions and this little old lady, maybe an inch shorter than my 5′2 aunt, asked her to reach and get some organic fruit off a tall shelf. And she’s stretching and I’m wondering if she’s gonna pull out the cardiac catherter they inserted through her thigh, and the little old lady never guessed that her helper had had a heart attack less then 72 hours before.

Later, Big Kid and I were deciding to spend the night with her, and around 7pm she says, “You don’t feel obligated to make sure I wake up in the morning, do you?”

I said no. But I was lying. And she knew it. And that was okay.