Mike and I had one of those glorious Asheville Saturdays yesterday. We took Jake to Plow Day at Warren Wilson College, a small school just outside of town with — as the Plow Day moniker would suggest — a working farm.
Yes, one year of living here, and I consider Plow Day at Warren Wilson College the height of family-friendly entertainment. And I say that with an honest lack of snarkiness or sarcasm.
Clearing still-late-summer skies greeted us as we hiked past the chickens living as chickens ought to, with a spacious hen-house equipped with easy access to a grub-filled yard and a positively stunning rooster, resplendent in his glinting green tail feathers and magnificent wattle. “Cluck, cluck,” Jake remarked. “Cog-a-oo-l-oo!”
We continued past haphazardly collapsed stacks of slumbering pigs, apparently not the early risers who had curiously monitored our approach when we visited them one August morning with our out-of-town friend Kali. (”Let’s go visit pigs!” we must have said that Sunday morning. I’m sure she responded most enthusiastically.)
And then we saw them: teams of horses and mules of various equine ethnicities hitched to rustic-looking plows. I wondered if there have been any advances in horse-drawn plows in the past few decades, and, if so, whether there was a picturesque-ness requirement for the locals entering their teams in the College’s plow day. As the farm is run entirely with natural methods and subsistence farming, it didn’t seem unreasonable that they would ban an approach that might be more efficient but less quaint-American-pastoral than the one we were witnessing.
There didn’t seem to be much organization to the plowing. Teams entered and exited the field, plowed where they wished, and appeared beholden to no bosses. A large dog loped across the path of some stolid plowers without any sign of awareness that she might think twice about her choices. An eight-week-old brindled Catahoula puppy gave me and Jake a snuffle before tugging at his leash in a failed bid to join the bigger dog out on the field.
Contrary to our experience last month, Jake was not distressed by the horses. Instead, he identified them eagerly and repeatedly — “Hoh-se! Hoh-se!” — as if merely naming them was as satisfying as examining them up close.
It all seemed so idyllic that I didn’t think twice about allowing him to plop down in the middle of a field usually occupied by livestock to watch the bluegrass band performing atop the flatbed of an old pick-up truck or to make non-threatening attempts to climb the poles supporting one of the barbecue tents with a new three-year-old friend. Nor, to my eternal Bad Mother shame, did I consider the possibility that there could be anything the least bit dangerous about offering my toddler son cider pressed on an old-fashioned press with great enthusiasm by barefoot college students using unwashed apples gathered from the nearby orchard.
“I hope they don’t let the pigs in the apple orchard,” Mike said, with a tad too much restraint to truly catch my attention.
“It’s a farm! They don’t let the pigs in the apple orchard!” I replied with remarkable certainty for someone who knows not the first thing about farming, pigs, or — despite a few October visits to pick-your-own-applies orchards — picking apples. As if to prove my point, I sent a good swig of my own cup of cider to Jake’s still-gestating sibling.
Maybe Mike was right. Or maybe it had more to do with the fact that Jake ingested most of his cider by the questionable method of sticking a dirt- (and possibly horse manure-) covered hand into the cup and transferring the few drops that didn’t slide down his arms and drip off the ends of his elbows into his mouth. But whatever did it, the results were not good.
At 5:45 that evening, Jake was in fine form, riding a stroller home from a romp in the park with me and babbling about his excitement to see Daddy back at home. At 6:00 Mike was asking me if he had seemed okay at the park. At 6:15, his temperature was beginning its climb to the 103-degree range where it hovered for the rest of the night.
All of which I am, as a mother, equipped to deal with. Liquids, infant Tylenol, cuddles, banishing Mike to the daybed in the office so I can sleep next to my sick boy are all standard modes of operation around here. I even maintained a remarkable state of calm when I awoke to my boy placing a puddle of vomit underneath his face and alarmingly close to mine.
It was a few minutes later when he began screaming inconsolably for his Daddy! that my confidence in my motherliness began to falter.
Continue reading ‘Shouldn’t My Sick Child Be Crying for His Mommy?’
