Alone in Freezing Drizzle

After school Monday morning, the older boys and Joe got dressed in warm clothes, and we went out to help Phil. (Abraham, after a week of fever, is still not feeling sprightly, so he stayed behind.) The boys were going to help Phil pull T-posts—Isaiah proudly demonstrated that he can now haul around the T-post puller, no light tool—but when Phil tried to pull a T-post, the ground was too frozen around the post to budge it. Phil even sat on the bar, but no luck.

So the boys helped Phil string new line, and clip old barbed wire. I mainly took down barbed wire. What a nasty, nasty piece of work that is. The first two lines we rolled primly on the spinning jenny, but then Phil needed that for the high tensile wire, so I wrapped it gingerly and messily around a fiberglass pole. The barbs catch in the mittens, and hang up on each other: I've been reading about WWI recently, and the miles of barbed wire along the Western Front, and it horrifies me. Besides the men who died, caught in the nasty stuff: after the war, who had the unpleasant job of cleaning that stuff up?!

Phil completed the first 200 feet or so fence, all five lines. He has a long ways to go.

Today he took down the fence along the road by our apple orchard. Despite the freezing drizzle, he was set to string wire on the next section, when he had a horrible realization.

If you let go of the end of several thousand feet of high tensile wire, it will spring back and bury itself into the hundreds of coils, and any attempt to unwind the wire results in a huge mess.

So Phil spent his afternoon, not just alone in freezing drizzle, but he spent it doing hours of mind-numbing work, trying to loosen an enormous knot. No progress, just a little knowledge gained. (And I had the foolish temerity to question whether he could have just set the wire aside and started with a new batch. Now that he knows he needs to hang onto the edge, he could have plowed ahead, and the messy wire mess could have been left for another day, or, dare I say it, brought to the dump. Some questions are better left unsaid.)

I think one of the things I've noticed lately is that we're not communicating as well as we normally do. I remember when my parents started their business, they had little disagreements almost every day, about best shipping methods, or how to sort books, or what kind of discounts, or employee questions. It was a rough time. And I suppose we're dealing with similar things now: a lot of new information, new tasks, new direction, and about almost all, we have different ideas of how to do things. It leads to friction.

I, for one, don't like friction much.

I spent some of today mixing up two types of sausage. The abattoir ground the meat of one of the pigs so we can season it ourselves. I made a garlic wine sausage (with garlic and coriander from our garden), and a breakfast sausage. Flavor was very good, but I was a bit disappointed: it was really, really greasy. I'm not used to spooning grease off the meat I prepare. (When we made sausage from the pigs we butchered ourselves, we didn't add extra fat. Sometimes I would cook our own sausage in lard to keep it from sticking, so clearly our sausage wasn't fatty enough. But I wasn't wasting any of the precious grease, and I fear the abattoir sausage will have extra grease that might go to waste.)