My Final Farm

Never more than a dozen hens for eggs, and two does for milk. A vegetable patch big enough for everything except potatoes and corn. Some apple trees, a plum, a pear, and half a dozen blueberry bushes. Given what else I was dealing with, my forays into micro-farming were insane, but at least I kept one principle firmly in mind: small is beautiful.

My adult life is marked by three separate ventures into self-sufficiency, all of them harking back to the  farm that kept my teenage mother and her family alive and fed during the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. When she wasn't plunging into creeks in the middle of the night to escape from bombardments, my teenage mother drank goat's milk and ate home-grown rabbits and pigeons and chickens and eggs and grapes and almonds and olives and cabbages and kale. Meanwhile, in their elegant Barcelona apartment my father's family quietly starved for the three years the war lasted, filling their stomachs with water from the faucet every night so they could sleep.

I was born five years after the end of the bombs and the hunger, carrying in my DNA the conviction that when times got bad you could grow your own food and survive, or live an urban life and starve.

My husband and I bought our first house from an older Austrian woman who had probably had some of the same fear-and-hunger experiences as my parents, and had filled her acre and a half with an ambitious vegetable garden, 25 fruit trees, a berry patch, a chicken house. I, who had never grown so much as a tomato in my life, plunged into self-sufficiency like a nun into her vows. That was farm #1.

It was succeeded by #2, after I had to give up my career following a diagnosis of CFS. I was in survival mode and thought, well, everything is going to hell in a hand basket, the least I can do is try to grow some food.

Farm #3, my best-loved, was in Vermont, where we moved when my husband retired. Besides the usual goats and chickens and vegetable beds and apple trees  there were for-real woods where I could gather ramps in spring, and fields where the nearby farmer harvested for-real hay. I used to stand in the front field watching my goats gobble dandelions and think, am I really here? Is this really mine?

But farming even on a micro scale and CFS don't age well together, and one day I threw my hands up and declared that it was time to be realistic and responsible and move to a retirement community on the shores of Lake Champlain. Still in Vermont, still beautiful, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, a farm.

I now live in a small cottage with all mod cons and never have to worry about dinner, which is served in the community center up the hill. But this hasn't extinguished my farming drive. My tiny enclosed porch has become farm #4, my final farm.

In it, on sunny afternoons, I sit with my dog Bisou and the cat Telemann. In a Japanese-style tub beside me Yin and Yang, the goldfish, lead seemingly contented lives, protected from Telemann by an electrified scat-mat. Pots of houseplants, the successors to my vegetable gardens, surround me: geraniums prompted into bloom by the light reflected off the snow, an ancient jade plant almost too heavy for me to lift, a Christmas cactus that my cat loves to chew. And, because I haven't given up on my dreams of self-sufficiency, a Meyer lemon tree and a Calamondin orange that gives enough fruit to make marmalade in case of an emergency.

Just outside the window are my substitute chickens.  Nuthatches, titmice, chickadees, finches gold-, purple-, and house-, and woodpeckers large and small eat the seeds and suet and drink at the four-season bird bath. Beneath the feeders, obese squirrels squabble over spilled seeds, and at sacred moments clever Reynard, my red fox, trots past on his slender black-stockinged feet.

Of Mites And Mange

This is the story of how Bisou, Wolfie and I got mange.

It began in the golden month of September, when the skies were blue for days on end and the leaves were turning and the goldenrod and the ragweed were wafting pollen into the atmosphere in unprecedented amounts.  I noticed that Bisou was scratching quite a bit, and shedding red-gold hairs in unprecedented amounts.  Wolfie was scratching too, and shedding copiously--but then Wolfie's always shedding.

At about this time my doctor put me on Gabapentin for a back problem, and after a couple of days I noticed some red itchy spots on my skin.  "Hives!"  I said to myself.  "I must be allergic to Gabapentin."  And I stopped taking it.

Bisou's scratching was starting to drive us all crazy, so I took her to Vet #1.  "I've never seen so many itchy dogs as I have this fall," he said.  "Bisou is suffering from environmental allergies.  Here, give her some of this prednisone."

Although the prednisone made the itch go away, I worried about its effects of Bisou's innards.  But the minute I stopped the prednisone, the itch came back.  My dog savvy friends recommended over-the-counter benadryl, so I tried that.  It worked well, except that it caused Bisou to retain urine, a common side effect.  So I stopped the benadryl and the itch resumed.  Fortunately Wolfie, who by now was also itching a lot, was able to tolerate the benadryl.

Meanwhile, despite  stopping the Gabapentin, my red spots continued to multiply, but I was so focused on the dogs' problem that I didn't pay too much attention to my own relentless itching.  I was especially worried about Bisou, who was looking thin and raggedy, her once lovely coat reduced to tatters.
Then, one night, I saw that the edges of her left ear were completely hairless and, worst of all, the skin seemed to be flaking off.  At eight the next morning, Bisou and I were at the office of Vet #2.  "It's been an itchy season, all right," he said, "but I'll take a skin scraping just to make sure."  He came back from the lab with a triumphant grin.  "Good news!" he said, waving the slide in the air.  "Bisou's got mange!"

"It really is good news," he said, as I recoiled in horror.  "Mange is a lot easier to treat than allergies."  He recommended a complicated course of Ivermectin for both Bisou and Wolfie. ("If she has mange, he has mange," he said.)  When I asked how this disaster could have befallen my dogs, he explained that all it took was for Bisou to rub against a plant that a fox with mange had previously touched.  There is a big red fox that travels frequently through our neighborhood.  Could he, I wondered, be the culprit?

After giving the dogs their first dose of medication, I looked up sarcoptic mange online.  This is what I found.  Mange is caused by a mite, sarcoptes scabiei.  There are several varieties of sarcoptes mites, each with a preference for a different primary host, on which it reproduces.  Sarcoptes scabiei var. canis causes mange in dogs. We humans have our own mite,  sarcoptes scabiei var. hominis, which is contracted through human-to-human contact.
I scrolled through the websites and scratched my head.  Could it be that what I had was not hives, but mange?   The dog-mange mites, I learned, can crawl onto humans and bite.  However, they will not reproduce on human skin.  Thus, the sites stated, in humans the infestation is self-limiting--that is, the mites bite but eventually die.

Soon, thanks to the Ivermectin, the dogs stopped itching.  I spent my life vacuuming frantically and washing dog towels and bedding in hot water to prevent re-infestation.   And scratching.  It was odd that, as the dogs were getting better, I was getting so much worse.

"You should go to the doctor," my spouse--who, miraculously, was not itching--advised.  "There really is no need," I replied between scratches.  "In humans the condition is self-limiting.  I just have to wait for my mites to die a natural death."

Days passed.  I was covered in bites and scratching all night.  "If I go to the doctor, he'll just give me steroids," I told my husband as I raked my fingernails over the backs of  my knees.  "Remember, the condition is self-limiting in humans!"

Finally, after a month of itching, I acknowledged that, for some reason, my mange was not self-limiting.  I went to the health center, displayed my bite-speckled abdomen, and walked out five seconds later with two prescriptions for permethrin cream, one for myself and, just to make sure, one for my symptom-free husband.

The instructions were to rub the greasy cream into every inch of our bodies, from the earlobes to the toes, at bedtime, then twelve hours later take a shower and wash bedsheets, mattress cover, bed skirt and every stitch of clothing we had worn over the preceding two days in hot water.  And vacuum everything.

It was exhausting, but it worked.  My mites died and I stopped itching almost immediately.  Vet #2, who is versed in Chinese medicine, gave me a bottle of Four Marvels powder to help Bisou's coat, and it has grown back marvelously, a deeper, richer red than ever.  But neither the vet nor the doctor was able to explain how I managed to get dog mange, and why the mites prospered on my skin.

A couple of mornings ago Bisou burst into high-pitched barks.  I looked out and there was the neighborhood fox, ambling through our yard on his elegant narrow legs.  He was wearing his full winter fur, thick and red and healthy-looking.  I have always loved foxes.  But as I watched him disappear into the bushes, I found myself scratching my neck.

Speaking Of Foxes...

In yesterday's post I wrote about the fox that lives at the bottom of the front field and occasionally steals one of our chickens.  Here is a clay sculpture I made recently, inspired by our fox.  I have titled it, with heavy irony, "Guardian."