The Angel of the Killing Frost Comes By

Last night he descended on our hill, and with a touch of his icy blade felled the peppers and the eggplants and the nicotiana, and turned the unripe figs to frozen lumps.  I must remember to salvage the figs for the hens, who will appreciate them now that bugs and green grass are history.

 A couple of days earlier I had brought the two geraniums and the Meyer lemon into the house for the winter, and the five big lemons on the tiny tree are now slowly turning yellow next to a sunny window.

I also brought in the big pot of rosemary.  I forgot that I had given it a good watering the day before, and when I went to lift it it was so heavy that I almost dropped it.  But I have never yet dropped anything I've tried to lift, and once I've got something in my arms I am loath to call for help.  So I staggered and groaned and finally got the pot up the two steps into the sun porch where it will live until the spring.  And I thanked my lucky stars for my relatively short back, which has never "gone out" on me yet.  But in the future I must remember not to water the big pots before moving them.

It's time to wrap the Leyland cypresses in their burlap coats, to defend them not from the cold but from the deer.  Last winter, on the pretext that the wild apple crop had failed, the deer tiptoed right up to the house and munched on the evergreens.  This year has been great for apples--you can see piles of them littering the roadsides--but I'm not taking any chances.

I must also remember to put those plastic spiral trunk shields on the fruit trees before the rabbits start chewing on their bark.  And I have to figure out a way to protect the climbing roses against those same rabbits, though I can't see how I can wrap burlap around their thorny branches.  Maybe chicken wire?

Then it will all be done, except for setting up the bird feeder now that the bears have safely gone into their dens.  And then I too can finally--except for picking the chard and the kale, which continue to thumb their noses at the Frozen One--go into hibernation too.

Winter Lament, Continued

Let me know if you're getting tired of hearing about my victimization at the paws of non-hibernating creatures, but in the meantime, here's the latest.

Taking advantage of the time-honored January thaw, I went outside to take stock of the depredations and implement defensive measures.  My most depressing discovery:  the baby apricot that I  espaliered against the side of the house last spring is probably dead.  I had wrapped a spiral plastic protector around its skinny little trunk to keep the rabbit away, but I did this after the heavy snow of Christmas week, and I did not realize that with the milder temperatures the snow next to the house had melted.  This exposed a couple of inches of bare trunk between the protector and the earth, and the rabbit had chewed almost, but not quite, all the way around.  It had also started working on the lowest branches.  In the hope that that little bit of intact bark will enable the apricot to survive, my spouse built a wire cage around it.  We'll find out its fate in the spring.

That same rabbit has been making tunnels under the snow all over the chicken yard, which is covered in his poop.  I finally figured out what he's been after:  the long, twisted stems of kale that were left when the chickens ate all the leaves.  He's been systematically denuding them of their green outer layer, leaving only the yellow, fibrous insides.  (I am not a monster--I do not begrudge him the kale stems.)

Next,  I cut lengths of burlap and wrapped them around the deer-eaten cypresses, and the Master of the Knot secured them with old baling string.  Then I made another upsetting discovery:  not only have the deer been eating our cypresses, but they have also attacked the low-growing evergreen bushes that I planted in front of the house foundation. There was no way I could cover those earth-hugging bushes with burlap, so in a fit of pique I dumped a bucketful of woodstove ashes on them.  The ashes may repel the deer, or they may kill the bushes.  We'll find out in the spring.

The Seventh Squirrel has been caught and deported by the Master of the Trap, with a stroke of red paint on its tail so we can greet him by name when he returns.  The ermine remains elusive.  The Master of the T baited the trap with a freshly-caught (dead) mouse from our basement, and put a dab of peanut butter on his back to make him more attractive.  The next day the mouse was gone, but the trap was unsprung.  Everybody who hears about our ermine warns me of the impending murder of my hens if we don't catch him.

The birds are the only creatures with whom I'm not at war right now.  They go through a lot of seed and suet, and the ground beneath the feeder is covered in guano, but they haven't tried to kill anything yet.  Though who knows what they'll have gotten up to by spring....

My Carnivorous Childhood

I grew up on the Mediterranean diet--the real thing, not the kinder, gentler version popularized in the U.S. by a culinary and nutritional establishment compensating for decades of over-consumption of beef products.  In my Mediterranean diet, we ate animals twice a day.  (Here, I am counting eggs--which we typically ate for dinner--as animals, since my grandmother's hens ran with roosters, which meant the eggs were fertile.  Michelle B. and her legions will applaud me for this, I'm sure.)

Most of these animals appeared on my plate with many of their attributes intact:  fresh little sardines with eyes and heads and fins and tails;  whole baby octopuses, less than two inches long, swimming in my favorite soup;  squid, cut into rings but slathered in a magnificent black sauce made from their ink, which made the serving platter look like something from Goya's black period.  And the mussels, clams, crayfish and tiny lobsters that inhabited the Sunday paella, complete with the black, gray, ecru, or translucent shells in which they had lived.

That was just the first course, for which my mother shopped in Barcelona's fabulous fish markets.  It was my grandmother, from her farm in western Catalonia, who sent us the birds and beasts we consumed next.  My grandparents kept pigs--huge, pink, sausage-shaped beasts--and slaughtered  a couple every autumn.  I was never present at this ceremony, but I loved every ounce of the results:  rich, greasy serrano hams (today one of the most expensive foods in the world);  crisp little cubes of fatback that brought to life a serving of beans;  and garlands of sausages made by my grandmother's hands:  butifarra blanca, butifarra negra (blood pudding), xorisso....

My grandmother kept rabbits--cheap to feed, prolific, and a source of high-quality protein.  In the summer, I would watch her slaughter one in the courtyard of the farm house.  It was like a speeded-up film sequence:  grab rabbit by hind legs, stun with blow to head, cut off same.  Hang body from hook.  Cut circles around hocks, and somehow (my vision was hampered by my short stature) yank off skin in a single motion, like a glove.  Cut open abdomen, scoop out entrails, call cats to feast.

An hour later, a rabbit arm lay on my plate, reddish-brown and transmuted by a sauce made with mortar-chopped almonds.  Next to the arm lay a special treat for me, the single child among twelve adults:  two small bean-shaped organs, what my grandmother called the ouets, the little eggs.  Were they kidneys, testes, ovaries?  I never thought to ask.  Were they good?  I don't remember.

There were chickens, too, and for Christmas, a couple of capons instead of a turkey.  Not a part of these was wasted.  Breasts and thighs and legs were brought to the table, but while we ate them, the next day's soup was simmering on the stove, made up of chicken backs, and heads, and legs.  For some reason, the comb---la cresta--perhaps because of its decorative merits, was brought to the table.  And yes, served to me.  Can't remember how it tasted.

What else did we eat?  Very little beef.  No milk after age two.  Gallons of olive oil, entire braids of garlic, ovenfuls of crusty bread to soak up all that oil and all those sauces.  Seasonal vegetables in moderation.  Every month or so, there was a religious holiday with its own special dessert, which you always bought ready-made:  turrons at Christmas;  tortell for the January feast of the Epiphany;  crema catalana on St. Joseph's day, in March;  la mona de Pascua at Easter....Otherwise, it was fruit and nuts.

If she knew what I eat today, my grandmother would be mystified.  For some reason, I have become reluctant to eat anything that looks like an animal.  Anything remotely anatomically accurate, I'd rather do without:  chicken knees, turkey wishbones, the blood of a cow oozing off a steak.  Is this hypocrisy?  Does it mean I'm o.k. eating meat--say, "chicken tenders"--as long as it doesn't remind me of the death of a living being?  Do I think eating meat is immoral?

I want to make it clear that I don't think eating meat is morally wrong--or I would be a hypocrite for drinking milk and eating eggs, which condemn to death 99.9% of the males of the species.  I do think that consuming the meat (or the eggs, or the milk) of animals that have been kept in inhumane circumstances is immoral for those of us who have the resources to make other choices.

I don't know what's right--do you?  It's possible that some people's physiology makes it impossible for them to thrive without daily servings of meat.  On the other hand, other people's preferences/philosophies/aesthetics make it important for them to avoid animal products.  This is a uniquely contemporary debate:  never before have such choices been available in such abundance.

How do you feel about eating animals?

Winter Bunny

This is our resident bunny.  He (she?) lives a fraught existence, between the backyard where three dogs who would love to tear him to pieces occasionally roam, and the front field, the domain of the fox who has his (her?) den at the bottom of the hill.

In the daytime, when the birds are at the feeder in front of the house, he gleans their leftovers, impervious to the madly barking dogs behind the window.  And he knows that the fox won't dare come this close to the house in broad daylight.

At night, after the dogs have gone to bed, he roams the dog-saturated backyard, into which the fox never wanders, and eats...what?  Well, during our absence in December he chewed up the three glorious climbing roses that I had planted the summer before to cover the side of the chicken coop.  It will be a miracle if the roots survive under the snow.  I had never thought to fence off the bushes in the fall.

However, I did think to protect the trunks of the little apple trees by wrapping a spiral of thick plastic around them.  I had read that once a rabbit "rings" the trunk, the tree is done for.  But now that the snow is firm and packed a couple of feet deep, the rabbit has been stretching up on his hind feet and nibbling the bark off the lower branches.  I have dug deep wells in the snow around the tree, and am hoping that that will keep him away.

But I'm wondering what he'll think of next.  I feel about this bunny the way I feel about the fox who occasionally carries off one of my hens:  I hate what he does, but part of me roots for him, wishes him fortitude and perseverance, cleverness and luck enough to last out the winter.