Spring Babies

Every year at this time I am overwhelmed with desire for animal babies.  I miss the goat kids that used to make the place come alive with their hopping and jumping and general delight at having landed on this amazing planet.  I long for a little donkey, one with big eyes and long soft ears and tiny hooves that I could take on walks and perhaps, when it was grown, even ride side-saddle like the little old black-clad women I used to see on the roads near my grandparents' farm in Catalonia.

Failing a donkey, I would love a couple of geese.  I am perilously close to getting a couple of goslings, the kind that would grow low-slung, bulldog-like bodies with gray backs, white bellies and bright orange beaks.  To me, a goose waddling and honking in the yard is the very essence of country living.  What holds me back?  The lack of a pond and of adequate fencing, and the mountains of poop that a pair of geese would produce.

Short of a goose, I could get more hens.  I was at the feed store picking up grain last week and there they were, the year's shipment of day-old chicks, cheeping and running around under the heat lamps.  What kept me from scooping up a half dozen and taking them home?  Only my near fanatical belief that a peaceful, healthy flock is a small flock, and that I owe it to my hens to keep their numbers low.

So I've become resigned to the thought of no new babies at the place this year.  But that's not quite right. There is new life here after all. 

As if to reward me for my restraint the potted lemon tree has just presented me with eight little  lemons.  This is the tree that, as you may recall, I had so much trouble shaping and acclimating           ( http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/2013/02/shape.html).  I was surprised and grateful when it suddenly covered itself in blooms, then dismayed when most of them dropped off.  But I became a dedicated pollinator (I was going to write "husband") to the remaining few.

Every morning after breakfast I would pick up an old watercolor brush and tickle the innards of each flower, hoping that I was doing it right.  The petals eventually dried and fell off, and I kept peering at the base of the pistils, looking for the slightest swelling that would tell me that I had succeeded as a bee.

After days of looking in vain, I decided to enjoy my lemon tree for its foliage and abandon all thoughts of a crop.  Then suddenly yesterday there they were: deep green and less than a quarter-inch long, but definitely lemons, my own little lemons in whose procreation I had played an active part. 

I feel such a fatherly kind of pride in every one of them, that I'm not sure I'll ever bring myself to make them into lemonade.

All Is Calm, All Is Bright

Ever wonder what those words mean? They mean that the Baby Jesus has finally fallen asleep! The minute a baby falls asleep, calm and brightness descend upon the world.

My life is calm and bright right now because Bisou is asleep in her crate, and in the barn the baby goats, their bellies full of milk, are curled around each other like yin/yang symbols. The big goats are chewing their cud and the little field mice are gleaning the remains of the grain. The chickens are asleep in their coop. The rain is pouring outside, and the big dogs are snoozing on the rug. This is my favorite time to be awake.

Cutest Of All Spring Babies

At this time of year in Vermont, every time you leave the house you see animal infants: little white lambs on the big meadow by the river; red or black-and-white calves on every farmyard; geese, ducks and wild turkeys stopping traffic with their retinues of adorable, fuzzy goslings, ducklings and poults (o.k., poults are not adorable). And I won't bore you with yet another description of the brain-melting cuteness of baby goats.

The little phoebes who just left the nest in our front porch were irresistible at the point when, fully feathered but not yet able to fly, they overflowed the nest like an out-of-control souffle. Last week I planted tomatoes in the company of a very young and naïve chipping sparrow, complete with its little orange cap, who kept fluttering among the vegetables and making vague “feed me” motions before finally disappearing under the broccoli.

But the hands-down winner in the 2009 spring baby cuteness contest is a painted turtle that I found on the ground a couple of days ago while pruning lilacs. It was the descendant of the painted turtles that, contrary to what is supposed to be their habit, move away from the pond in the woods and up the hill to cruise our yard and driveway. Where Wolfie finds them and, as I've explained before, crunches through their shell and eats them.

It's a good thing I saw the turtlet before Wolfie did, because he would have swallowed it like a vitamin pill. The turtle was the size of a quarter, its carapace a polished reddish black. Its orange underside was decorated with a symmetrical black design in the center, like a shield. Around the edges of its top shell, near the rear, there was a thin line of bright-red piping.

I set it on the palm of my hand and it sat totally inert, like a flat river stone or an exotic nut, the way its mother had taught it to. But then, encouraged by the warmth, a front leg with tiny claws appeared, followed by another leg, and by a clever-looking head with shiny pin-prick eyes and thin red stripes, the same shade as the piping on the shell, running along its neck.

Everything--the shell, the legs, the little tail, the head-- looked as if it had just been lacquered. Everything about it was new and bright and optimistic.

It took all my will power not to put the baby turtle in a box and give it a leaf of lettuce.

Instead, whispering endearments into its ear I carried it way off into the field and hid it in the tall grass, and kept Wolfie out of there the rest of the day.