For Whom The Taco Bell Tolls

March 11, 2021 ~ sanebishop ~ 33 Comments

A long time ago, John Donne, a hoity-toity English chap, wrote the famous line “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Then Hemingway stole “for whom the bell tolls” for the title of a novel about a man who falls madly in love with a communist guerilla, blows up a bridge, and dies (all in three days). Then Metallica stole that phrase for a song title, which aptly describes the song’s melodic virtues–imagine inserting your head in a bell and letting someone toll away. Then a misfit farmer, piddling around in quarantine, used it for the title of a blog post.

That is the provenance of “for whom the bell tolls” as I know it. I’m sure others have used it, and I’m not sure why Taco Bell hasn’t–can’t you imagine the little chihuahua in a Hemingway-esque beret saying, “Yo quiero Taco Bell. The bell tolls for thee.”?

But the point here is it all started with Donne. He wrote it because he was gravely sick and thought the local Quasimodo was hankering to ring his funeral bells. Turns out, Donne lived. And then the next year, the plague happened, and he lived again. Before his near-death experiences, Donne was mostly known for writing rather raunchy poetry by Elizabethan standards. Then afterwards, he got down to brass tasks and started writing serious heady stuff at a prodigious rate.

Usually, I wholeheartedly embrace Donne’s advice, which is often modernized as “ask not for whom the bell tolls.” I pride myself on the don’t ask, don’t tell relationship I’ve cultivated with the Grim Reaper. But when I first got diagnosed with Covid, I had a moment of weakness and wondered if the Reaper was sharpening his scythe for me.

In hindsight, my Covid case was nothing close to a near-death experience, but I didn’t know that going in. At the onset was likely the nearest to death my mind has wandered since the time I clung to a twenty foot extension ladder, a swarm overhead. But the fact is Donne was right: asking is pointless. Our bell is tolling no matter what.

So hopefully something good will come from my days spent in quarantine introspection. Maybe I’ll get down to brass tacks and start writing serious heady stuff at a prodigious rate. Or maybe I’ll be a better dad and husband, call my parents and brother more, and quit being so cynical about the motivations of farm animals.

But my first goal is to be more grateful. Thus, I’d like to thank everybody who reads this blog and comments from time to time. I started The Misfit Farmer a little over a year ago and committed to post once a week as a way to get more disciplined with writing. I had always enjoyed Gene Logsdon’s blog, The Contrary Farmer, and admired how he posted once a week without fail for years. He died in 2018, but his blog is still archived for anyone who wants to go back and read his posts, which are full of a lot of farming and life wisdom.

I can’t say this blog is full of wisdom, but I am grateful for the merry little band of misfit bloggers that I’ve met through it (let’s face it, if you blog in 2021, you’re a bonafide misfit, too).

So thanks again everybody! Next week, I’ll be back to regularly-scheduled nonsense.

When Covid Comes to the Farm

March 4, 2021March 4, 2021 ~ sanebishop ~ 49 Comments

Well, just my luck. Two days before I was set to get my first vaccine shot, I started feeling sore. I was hoping it was just soreness from pruning our thirty-two apple trees (yes, I know I’m about a month late pruning, but, in my defense, just a month behind is pretty good for me). Then I started getting a weird sensation in my head. I described it to my wife, and she said I had a headache. “Strange,” I thought — I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten a headache in my life, and most of those involved blunt-force impacts of some sort.

A few hours later, I noticed a cold sensation shudder through my body while my arm hairs straightened like a porcupine. Usually, this happens when my wife’s dead ancestors who still inhabit our farmhouse decide to scare the bejesus out of me. But this happened without the prodding of disembodied voices or footless footsteps. I told my wife about this sensation, which she diagnosed as chills, and in a matter of seconds she was bearing down on me with a thermometer. “Open up,” she said.

“99.9” I read a few seconds later, at which point she banished me to the far room and I’ve hardly seen her since. I’ve only ventured out to go get the rapid Covid test, which was supposed to take thirty minutes to pronounce my verdict but instead came back positive in half that time.

Since then, Natalie’s been living on the other side of the house, taking care of Thomas. Occasionally she reads this blog, so I’d just like to tell her I’m okay and to thank her for leaving food and Gatorade outside my door. We’ve got the baby monitor set up in my room so she can monitor my status remotely, but I’m pretty sure she’s not listening anymore. I think after she heard me listening to Jerry Clower on YouTube, she unplugged it on her end.

So far, I’ve been really lucky and my symptoms are mild, as evidenced by the fact that I can write this nonsense. I will say it’s interesting what you turn to for comfort when sick. I haven’t thought about Jerry Clower in years, but as I was lying in bed I thought wouldn’t it be nice to listen to Jerry Clower again. For those who don’t know “Jay-ree” Clower is, he is the man who could make my dad belly-laugh while driving me to school in the morning. My dad is good-natured, but he’s not the jovial knee-slapping type, so to hear him laugh out loud was an odd occurrence. When it happened, usually Jerry Clower cassette tapes or Patrick McManus books were the cause of that phenomenon. I suppose since I’ve got most of the McManus books memorized, I turn to Clower when sick.

All kidding aside, though, I would like to thank my wife for taking care of Thomas, putting up with sick me and regular me, and not banishing me to the barn. I’ll owe you when I get out of quarantine. And for everyone else, be careful out there. I can attest to the fact that Covid is still around, and even the mild symptoms aren’t much fun.

3 Reasons to Dwell in the Boonies during Covid Times

April 16, 2020June 9, 2020 ~ sanebishop ~ 5 Comments

Reason 1: You can go outside without fear of reprisal by the law. In fact, last week I got a visit from the law, blue lights flashing, actually requesting my presence outdoors, not deterring it–the reason being the cows were in the front yard eating shrubbery. The deputies spotted them and thought they looked out of place. Little did they know, I’ve pretty much got the cows trained to go straight for the shrubbery when I forget to close a gate. But the deputies were very nice, although Officer Beam needs to work on studying the cow wrangling section of the police manual, particularly the part about de-escalating the situation and not running wildly and flapping at bovines.

Reason 2: You can go outside in your underwear. Who needs pants when you’re holding a microwavable tray of scalding-hot bacon grease. One of my Covid-19 quarantine resolutions is to eat more bacon at breakfast. Of course, eating more bacon means I have to clean the bacon tray more often. I’ve found the fastest way to do this is to dump the grease before it cools and congeals and rinse the tray. I used to do this process in the sink before my wife caught on when the sink clogged up. Now, after negotiations with her, I’m contractually obligated to dump the grease outside and rinse the tray with a water hose, but I held my ground on wearing pants before breakfast.

Reason 3: Rural looters aren’t the smartest. I mean, if I was a beginning criminal, I wouldn’t pick an area that has more firepower stocked up than a semi-developed country. A few days ago, a local teenager decided he would spend his extra leisure time in quarantine by practicing thievery. He decided to steal a neighbor’s lawn mower at midnight. His getaway plan was to ride the lawn mower down the road. A rock solid plan, except for the fact that the owner heard him crank up and had plenty of time to handpick a weapon from his arsenal for just such an occasion. He picked such a high-powered piece that the gunshot was heard across the countryside, downed a satellite, and produced the desired effect of scaring the boy senseless and sending him fleeing into the woods. Nobody knows for sure who the boy was, but obviously he wasn’t very bright if he was stealing a run-off-the-mill riding mower instead of a zero-turn.

Our calves–always the on lookout for escape.

Spring Cleaning in Covid Times

April 9, 2020June 9, 2020 ~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

Maybe you’ve heard the theory that opposites attract. Scientists have supposedly proved this theory by magnets, demonstrating that invisible negative and positive ions inside polarized metal bars attract one another, but who really knows? It could be magic causing all this metallic amour, specifically a love potion or Harry Potter spell or something.

So to provide a more tangible example that opposites attract, I’ll posit the following relationship that certainly can’t be explained by a mere love potion–the relationship between my wife and I. Indeed, nothing but a primordial attraction of opposites could bind together a microcleaner and a macrocleaner for a spring cleaning day during Covid-19 times.

Natalie, my wife and microcleaner, set her sights on a small space, a three-foot by four-foot nook, known locally as the only original closet in our house. Back in 1887, when our house was built, extra storage space was out of vogue. In fact, extra space in general was frowned upon, which is why my wife’s ancestors, a family of twelve, once lived happily in our three bedroom house (perhaps the liquor still down in the woods contributed somewhat to the happiness, but mostly, I think, it was the cozy space).

By the end of the day, my wife had the closet immaculately organized with shelf spaces labeled for designated things. However, to accomplish the feat of cleaning, she had to disasterize the area outside of the closet. She pulled everything out that I had stuffed in there over the last year, completely negating a year’s worth of my macrocleaning efforts.

As a lifelong macrocleaner, I’ve perfected the art of stuffing random things into closets, drawers, and under beds to give a room the overall appearance of order. Last week, for instance, I found a lost quarter-inch wrench that I stuffed into my sock drawer many months ago.

Anyway, it was my job to put away all the stuff that my wife had pulled out of the closet– stuff that, in her opinion, didn’t belong there. Thankfully, my wife’s ancestor’s believed in outbuildings, so I divvied up the stuff to appropriate outbuildings and made it disappear. So, after a day of cleaning in Covid times, we had one extremely clean closet and many cluttered outbuildings.

Cluttered outbuildings

Swarm Catching vs. Coronavirus Catching

April 2, 2020May 6, 2020 ~ sanebishop ~ 7 Comments

Sometimes life, like swarm season, comes at you fast. I caught my first swarm of the year on March 23rd. I got the swarm call right before a department head conference call concerning our county’s response to the coronavirus. As the head of our local Soil and Water Conservation District, a county department of two, I’m required to attend these meetings. To be honest, it’s not my favorite job responsibility, and I feel a little out of place with the county higher-ups who wear neckties and shiny shoes. For instance, once having spent too long providing technical assistance (official government term for chatting) at a dairy farm, I made it to the county department head meeting just in the nick of time, right before the county manager gave some important update, the details of which I currently don’t remember. Mostly, I remember the sight of the Register of Deeds and Library Director sniffing inquisitively, and the smell of cow manure wafting from my boot. But I digress.

On March 23rd, about ten minutes before a county department head teleconference (in lieu of a physical meeting because of coronavirus), Lowry, my wife’s poppaw and my next-door neighbor, called me and said one of my hives had swarmed–“a biggun in the crotch of an apple tree.” Admittedly, my swarm control previsions had been little to none this spring. The bees had been on the back burner, as my wife and I are expecting a baby, our first after nine years of marriage. According to my wife, I now have other priorities than beekeeping, like insulating walls of our old farmhouse to make sure our offspring has comfortable environs outside the womb. At the rate I’m going, I figure our child will be thirty-four by the time I finish this task.

Before Lowry’s call, I hadn’t thought much about the possibility of catching a swarm this early. Seemingly, all my brain could focus on was the possibility of catching coronavirus. But after Lowry’s excited dispatch, worries of catching coronavirus suddenly evaporated. The great philosopher Patrick McManus had his own theory for this phenomenon, a theory which he called the “worry-box” and summed up as follows:

“I have this theory that people possess a certain capacity for worry, no more, no less. It’s as though a person has a little psychic box that he feels compelled to keep filled with worries. When one worry disappears from the box, he immediately replaces it with another worry, so the box is always full. He is never short of worries. If a new crop of worries comes in, the person sorts through the box for lesser worries and kicks them out, until he has enough room for the new worries. The lesser worries just lie around on the floor, until there’s room in the box for them again, and then they’re put back in.” (From The Good Samaritan Strikes Again)

Swarm catching had suddenly returned to prominence as the main worry in my worry box, displacing coronavirus-catching for the time being.

Of course, everybody who keeps bees knows that swarm calls always come at the worst time possible. For instance, there’s an old story that circulates about a beekeeper who got a swarm call an hour before his only daughter’s wedding. After weighing his options, the father made the only rational decision a beekeeper in his situation could. Since he didn’t have time to run home for his beekeeping stuff, he borrowed his daughter’s wedding veil.

Like that father, I solved my swarm dilemma with similar aplomb. I stuck in my earbuds, dialed into the teleconference on my cell phone, and hightailed it home to recapture my AWOL bees. I suppose many of us have recently learned the advantages of teleconferences–you can attend meetings in pajamas (or while swarm catching), plus the smell of manure doesn’t waft through the phone.

In any event, I’m happy to report that I did catch that swarm, a “biggun” as Lowry would say, and that for a while, even though I was dialed into a coronavirus teleconference, my mind was on something completely unrelated to COVID-19.