Last Friday was a big day of birth and of death and new sights for me.

A new calf was born--wobbly-kneed and big-eyed, it was about the size of a black labrador retriever. When Juvencio and I approached it slowly, it was lying in a patch of tall grass, its mother separated by a fairly large expanse of green. But with us there, the mom came over to shield it, and it stood up on its silly soft bowlegs and shyly looked at us from behind the mother. I call it "it" because I can't remember if it is a girl or boy...but now I am thinking girl.

  ...Of a gopher. 

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 Farming is different in the rain. On the one hand, it is easier to pull out weeds with roots the size of wrists because the soil is loosened and moist. After attacking rows of chinese broccoli, onions, squash and lettuce, I know how much anger to put into each heave. For chickweed--"the devil" as Lyn calls it--which is relatively thin-stemmed and sprawling, like a net that covers everything but avoids rooting too deeply in one place, it takes relatively little-strength, but a lot of entangling. Usually it is machete-d.

 After a back-breaking day yesterday knee-bent and weeding an endless onion row for hours on end at La Finquita del Buho, I spent today at the first farm I ever really knew, that of my grandfather. My Dad grew up outside Corvallis, and part of my romantic fascination with farm life is rooted in his stories of nursing lambs by bottle in the kitchen, and his terrors of being chased by spitting geese.

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I am not a farmer yet. But, beneath a bright blue sky, I am picking up a few tricks. My first day was on Friday, and I arrived around 8:30am to the sound of a crying child, chickens chattering, and dogs at my car door. La Finquita del Buho is absolutely bursting right now, trees heavy with new green leaves, flowers in thick bursts of colors. I followed the crying to the back of the big red barn, where a goat was being milked by Lyn, its head in a wooden entrapment, distracted by a handful of grain. Turkey chicks the size of fists waddled around a cage to our left.

The rest of my day there is a blur of ever-warming sunshine, sweaty, flushed cheeks, and my wide-eyed desire to pick up everything I could. I learned how to pasteurize milk (it's all just hot water, cold water) and I transplanted tomato seedlings that smelled like summer and I planted a few sprawling rows of lettuce and bok choy (lagging in comparison to Lyn working across from me) and seeded a few rows of carrots and radishes and cilantro and beets, and I learned how to set up the irrigation drip-system with help from Juvencio, from cutting the plastic tubing and attaching it to stretching it back and forth along the beds. I learned that you should always water greenhouse plants early in the morning, and that weeding tomatoes is just scooping up the soil surrounding them to get at the weed roots and than re-tossing it around the plant, salad style. I also fell in love with a handful of pigs, bristle-backed and curly-tailed, they greeted me at the fence whenever I walked by. Happy bacon.

Saturday I arrived in the yawning pink dawn around 5:50am to the Beaverton farmer's market, first helping to unload the truck of seedlings and flowers that Lyn sells with her friend Polly, than assembling them in the stand, sticking labels into the plants to mark them for customers, hanging the sign, organizing the overstocked extra plants. By the time the bell rang at 8am announcing customer sales, our booth was swept clean, and ripe with the smells of new plant growth, from zinnias to green beans to rosemary plants. I worked at the cash register with Lyn and Juvencio's adorable 4th grade daughter Luna, and we created a gardening board game while Polly and Lyn helped customers find what they needed. Plants are charged differently whether they are annual or perennial, but after a few hours I'd identified the balance and could often stumble my way through 3($2.75) (six-pack seedlings) + 2($2.25) (annual). I have always loved the farmer's market, and being behind the stands, the band playing, energy and food and people everywhere, I was enthralled.

The pictures are assorted from my phone, nothing too fancy, but snippets of this life...

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