The Home-Work My Son Loves

My fourteen-year-old son hates homework. It’s not the work per se. During school hours, Jordan is happy to learn and will lecture at length on fine points of modern history or the properties of an equilateral triangle. Give him the same assignments at home, however, and he perceives them as an intrusion of his time and space. An injustice.

Home, he reasons, is for other kinds of work. Home is for milking his cow, Daisy, and planting potatoes. It is for chopping down a tree with an ax whose handle he carved, and then using Bright and Blaze, his team of young steer, trained to a yoke he shaped and shaved, to pull the log into the barn, where he and his sisters will hack it into firewood. Home is for churning cream he skims, from milk he squeezed, into butter and ice cream (though not both at once).

While school is for schoolwork, home is for home-work.
*
The question of education is in the news, running alongside concerns about the United States’ ability to sustain its place in the evolving global economy. We are familiar with the refrain: innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship will secure us jobs. Schools must teach the next generation these essential survival skills.

So far so good. The next question, of course, is how? Can you even teach creativity? The oxymoron is evident. Some deny that it is possible. But what does it take to be a creative, innovative entrepreneur?

For one, it takes the perspective required to see a problem as a problem in the first place, independent of what others think. It takes the passion of wanting to do it better. It takes the patience to wait for ideas to come and mature, and the persistence to brook the resistance new ways inevitably elicit.

In short, if we want to nurture creative problem-solvers, we need to help kids develop an intrinsic desire to unfold what they have to give in making the world a better place to be.

Did I say it would be easy?
*
I recently read NutureShock, a book about parenting practices that unmasks our common sense ideas as not so sensible after all. One chapter focuses on theories about how to develop the “executive functions” of the prefrontal cortex that aid us in planning for the future, carrying out strategies, and harnessing our impulses to them. These executive functions are almost always described as a top-down kind of self-control: mind over body. Until recently, the road to such skills has been paved with training that focuses primarily on the intellect.

However, as NutureShock relates, the balance is shifting, for researchers are discovering more effective means of developing these skills. Project-based, case-driven, collaborative learning opportunities are being proposed in which students design, carry out, and even assess their own work. When students learn what they need in order to solve a problem, they know that what they are learning matters. They know why. They care, and so invest more of themselves in learning.

In the preschool years, such learning is called imaginative play. Ask a four-year-old to sit still and you may get thirty seconds. Tell him that he is a dragon guarding a precious jewel and you might get four minutes. Involve a jewel thief, a dragon family who loves the jewel, and the magic rainbow it opens, and he may sit for twenty.

The same logic works for a twenty-year-old. Put her in a life-like situation, and see how learning disciplines improve. Why? Those so-called executive functions are fueled and funded by our emotional, sensory selves. It’s not so mind over body after all.

If our aim, then, is to nurture passionate, patient, persistent problem-solvers, the plot thickens: how do we teach our kids to play?
*
I am learning with Leif again. Master of rolling that he has become, he no longer needs to pull his knees to his chest to initiate the move. He simply twists his torso, belly button first, and rolls to the side, hauling his legs behind him. He learned this torso twist because the leg-lifting, jack-knife move he practiced so many times arranged his body in this pattern, pulling it into his sensory awareness as a possibility. He learned it, he perfected it. Now, this corkscrew is his move of choice as soon as you lie him down, for example, when attempting to change his clothes or a diaper.

Once on his belly, however, he finds himself again at the horizon of his abilities. Stuck. He tries arching his back and lifting his arms and legs off the floor, waving and kicking, while making the sound of a strangled cat.

Then, after several moments of ear-scratching screech, he resorts to that same knees-up pattern of movement that taught him how to roll in the first place: he pulls his knobby knees up under his body. Lo and behold he finds his toes. They connect with the floor. Executing his usual downward push, something unusual happens: he finds himself launched forward in space, at the edge of his blanket, forehead to the floor. Wow!

What’s happening? Faced with a new challenge (belly down), Leif mobilizes a pattern of sensation and response he already knows how to make (knees up). When he does, the familiar pattern takes a different shape in relation to gravity and weight (toes connect). He learns about him self and his world based on what happens when he makes it (face to floor). The pattern evolves (a bit more up). He repeats the experiment again and again, playing with the possibilities, and hones in on those patterns of movement that unfold his potential to move some more (he's almost crawling!). The movement Leif is making is his making him.

While the spinal movements Leif is making are basic to human health--at the core of yoga, dance, and other physical disciplines, overlooked to our detriment in our sedentary lives--what's even more important about Leif's adventures is the process he is engaging. He's playing in the most fundamental way we humans can: discovering and creating the patterns of sensation and response that make him who he is. He is not just moving, he is exploring and unfolding his potential to make new moves. He is playing at his own horizons and doing so because it is fun. He is participating in the rhythms of his bodily becoming.
*
To survive in this century, we are going to need to learn to make new moves in relation to the most basic elements of our ongoing existence--food, water, air, earth, and its human and animal creatures. We need to be able to play--to envision, plan, and carry out scenarios that anticipate the impacts of our actions on the health and well being of the earth in us and around us. What are we creating?

We might think that once we learn the basics of rolling, sitting, crawling and walking, it is time to restrict the focus of learning to our intellects. However, for our thinking to remain free, flexible, and responsive to our time, we need exercises that challenge our intellects as well as bodily practices that call our attention to how our movements are making us. To respond to the challenges we face, we have to care. We have to know why it matters to our bodily lives, and to do either, we need to move in ways that bring our senses to life.

It’s our home-work.
*
Bright and Blaze may not know it. They are not just pulling a log. They are pulling into existence a passionate, patient, persistent problem-solver.

Yoking, Yearning & Yoga

Kyra is drawing explosive, volcano flower sunbursts.

Jessica is plotting plant patches for her garden.

Kai wants to ride one of the puffy white clouds that dangle in the blue.

And Jordan is training his bull calves.

As I move through the postures of my yoga routine, the thought forms: it’s all yoga. Yoga: the Sanskrit word for “union,” and a root form of our “yoke,” means to join or connect, to form a bond. In yoga, a practitioner breathes into bodily shapes that draw our sensory selves into the present, so we can unite with ourselves, unite with what is. In all these activities too, these kids are joining and connecting, creating the relationships that will support them in unfolding what they have to give.

Isn’t this what life is about?
*
It is not easy to form a yoke.

In order to train his bull calves, Jordan first had to make one: a crossbar pierced by two semi-circle bows that would embrace the calves’ heads. Choosing a slice of birch, he carved a curvy bracket with his draw knife, drilled four holes, and began a regime of linseed oil application. A yogurt container stuffed with an old rag lives by our sink.

Then for the bows, he needed a special kind of hard but bendable wood. After a couple of scouting trips around the farm, he found the perfect shagbark hickory tree—big enough that he needed help felling it. After he and Geoff lopped off the limbs and dragged it back home, Jordan split the log into sixteenths and took out the heart to make two four foot lengths of one-inch chunk. It was hard. Would the wood bend?

We devised an apparatus for the top of our wood stove: on top of a water-filled spaghetti pot with vented lid, we placed with an upside down funnel, on which sat a PVC joint holding a five foot length of PVC piping. It looked like the stove had sprouted rabbit ears. Into the pipe went the bow. After a steamy soak, Jordan took out the wood, held the ends, and bended it like licorice around his knee. One bow bowed, the other quickly followed. Minutes later the bows were as hard again as the wood they were. After drilling some more holes and gathering the proper pins, Jordan’s yoke was ready to go yoking.

At first, the bull calves weren’t so sure about the yoke, but they liked the attention, the nose and neck scratches, and the walks around the yard. By now they seem quite comfortable, pleased to play this pulling game for a few minutes every day. Jordan guides them around the yard with his stick yelling “Gee!” to go right, and “Haw!” to head left. Then he says “Whoa!” and stands in front of them to block their way, his stick a wall. Good thing they are only calves.

The smile on his face when he came in today says it all: “Oh they were so good today!”

Kai agrees.


*
A yoke is the piece of wood, carved and shaped.

A yoke of oxen is what the calves will become when they pull as one.

To yoke is to join or connect these independent powers in the service of a common goal—becoming one force for action.

The questions arise: What kinds of yokes are we creating for ourselves? With what or whom are we joining? What kind of relationships do we want to create?

What are we yearning to do?

These kids seem to know.

The Meaning of Weaning

To wean: to withhold mother’s milk from; to detach from that to which one is accustomed or devoted

From Old English & Germanic roots (wen-): to desire, to strive for; to hope, expect, imagine; to win; a pleasure

From the Latin (ven-): love, as in Venus, the Goddess of Love; or in Old Norse, Venr, a god of fertility
*
We have weaned the bull calves. Now nearing three months, they are old enough and able enough to chew, swallow, rechew, and swallow again the grains and grasses that will support their next increments of growth.

The weaning went smoothly. The calves didn’t seem to mind. Every feeding for several days in a row, Jordan and Jessica would give each calf his same half gallon of liquid, warm and white, while slowly lowering the milk to water ratio until no milk remained. Meanwhile, the calves were tempted round the clock with sweet molasses covered baby grain and plenty of tasty hay.

One good weaning enables another. With the calves weaned, we are once again in the milk, and nearly weaned ourselves from the dairy aisle at the grocery store. We no longer need to purchase milk, cream, ice cream, yogurt, butter, or ricotta cheese. We have our own—or at least, the raw materials with which to make what we need.

Weaning is good for us, no question.

But what about for the calves? Is weaning good for them too? Are we depriving them of what they most desire—the glorious elixir of a mother’s milk?

I am not into deprivation. I nursed three of my children to age three. Then there was a time when it was time, for both of us. I know too that mother cow when the time is ripe will turn her tail on a growing calf and nudge its nose away. But still, would it be better to delay the (pain of the) inevitable?

Researching the roots of the word “to wean” pushed my thinking along. It is easy to think of weaning as “withholding,” or as “detaching from something desired.” Whole fields of psychology have been built on the task of curing our primordial wounds, often rendered as a loss of the mother.

Yet the nub of the word itself comes from Old English, Germanic, and Latin words meaning “desire,” “hope,” “strive for,” and even “love.” Is this a contradiction?

I think again. Perhaps weaning is not about denying our desire as much as it is about enabling our desire to evolve in line with our growing selves.

There is wisdom in desire. I have been writing about it for months, OK years. Part of that wisdom, as I suggest, lies in the fluidity of desire. Desire moves—it moves us, it is itself a movement towards what we believe will grant us the pleasure we seek. At the same time, this movement is not arbitrary. There is a rhythm to it. As we move towards what we desire, we learn whether or not we were right. We create patterns of sensation and response to guide us in the future.

In other words, as we get the nourishment we need to grow, what we need to grow changes in line with the growth our nourishment has enabled.

So what does that have to do with weaning? As desire evolves, what we want changes. Desires we have had in the past fall away. No deprivation about it. No forced detachment. We simply don’t want what we once did. We wean.

Take the bulls. They don’t seem to miss the milk at all. They just started eating more grain, with its belly-filling bounty, and chewing more crunchy hay, with its long-lasting, teeth-resisting flavor. Weaning means having the opportunity to enjoy the qualities of these foods—foods that the calves need to stimulate their own capacity to transform food to energy to muscle and bone.

Here on the farm we have weaned ourselves from aspects of contemporary culture that once seemed indispensable—and not only Ben & Jerry’s. We don’t play video games or eat fast foods. We rarely visit a restaurant or a movie theater. We don’t have a television. It is not that we are trying to deprive ourselves of things to which we were attached. Rather, the desire for these things has fallen away as other activities have emerged for us as more desirable, more enabling, and simply put, possible here in a way they never were when we lived in the suburbs.

Like raising a pair of bulls as oxen! Only here has it become possible, desirable, and even easy. The kids are finding in themselves a conviction they never had to wean themselves of technologies that harm the earth, so as to make more of what they love about this place for everyone.

To wean: to find our freedom and align ourselves with the ever-evolving wisdom in our desires.

The Blanket Business

It snowed just in time. The earth and her plants are tucked and snug under a blanket of soft white. Others of us are shivering in our boots. Forecasters predict that the temperature tonight will plunge to 20 below. Mother Nature’s limbo: How low can you go?

Here in the house, we will be toasty, thanks to a cheering wood stove, back-up oil burner, and stacks of blankets. But what about the animals? Those barns are mere windbreakers at best. All the heat those creatures will have is heat they make by themselves and for themselves with the food and water we provide. Will they be warm enough?

I am not worried about the chickens. Their downy fluff is what a body wants. The cats will curl into faceless furballs, wedged in the cracks between bales of hay. Nor am I worried about the three Jersey cows. They don’t even seem to notice the weather, stalking through snow in fingers-deep fur-coat fashion. I want to crawl in too. Which leaves Marvin and the baby bulls. Will they be OK?

I’ve been having long blanket discussions with the kids.

Jessica usually precipitates hers. “Mom, do you think I should put a blanket on Marvin?” She knows that I know what the Vet told us both: A healthy horse with a good winter coat and good nutrition should be fine in winter weather. Put a blanket on him and he will lose his own. Horses are that sensitive.

Still, when the thermometer drops to such abysmal depths, Jessica and I have come up with a compromise. Put on a blanket if it will be below 10 degrees at night. Take it off during the day if it’s sunny. We made it up, but even so, it seems just right for us. Jessica and I leave Marvin his coat until the cold starts making us feel uncomfortable. We need the blanket. Who knows what Marvin thinks. He seems warm enough, and furry too.

As we work out our plan, I recognize a parenting paradox with which I am quite familiar. We want those in our care to have the challenge and exposure they need to test their mettle, grow strong, and unfold what they have to give. But we also want to protect them from storms that might prove too overwhelming, with the opposite effects. In search of that perfect balance, we take the best information we have, and then guess and check. We make it up and feel our way through. Fingers crossed.

Jordan and I have worked out a different scenario for the baby bulls. Of course, the bulls came with their very own calf blankets (see New Arrivals!), but that was four weeks ago. They have grown; the bulls are bursting their buckles. Besides, Jordan wants his oxen-to-be to emit thick and winter-proof coats. He doesn’t want to coddle them with blankets.

I have some doubts. “Aren’t they too young to face that cold all by themselves?” Jordan doesn’t think so. He tells me a story.

“Mom, every morning when I bring them milk, they are eager and energetic, raring to go and not shivering at all.” I am moved a bit.

“But tonight will be very, very cold,” I offer.

“Well,” he explains, “they need each other! Mom, when I put on their blankets the other night, Bright got out of his; but Blaze was still in his blanket and Bright couldn’t curl up with him. So Bright was cold. If the calves have their blankets on, they can’t keep each other warm!”

He’s got me now. The calves will be warmer without their blankets. Brilliant, just brilliant. And just what I needed to hear. Why?

Jordan found it. A perfect solution to the paradox of parenting.

He found another logic. It is never just a choice between blankets or cold, protection or exposure. Risks are real. But in the face of undeniable risks, the greatest protection lies in the relationships we create to meet them. It all works when we respond to risks by creating the relationships that enable us to experience them as strengthening. The exposure makes growing the relationships necessary, desirable, and even possible. It is what we have been doing since moving here to the farm.

Jordan and I are no longer at odds over what will be best for the calves. We never were. We want the same thing: their health, his happiness. We now share a vision for how that can happen.

As he goes to bed, I am thinking about the calves, and I can tell that he is too. “I gave them lots of extra bedding and hay,” he says.

“Good.” I reply

“The digestion of dry hay generates heat,” he continues. “It will help make them warm.” And so I learn, every day. I smile and give him a hug. So our calves will spend the night eating and snuggling to stay warm. Things could be worse.

Bottle to Bucket

We have been having a lovely holiday week here at the farm. For Christmas, Santa brought a huge new wheel barrow filled with tools: a pitchfork and manure shovel, a feed bucket for Marvin and a water bucket for the chickens, and a new 75 foot section of hose. We even had our periodic thaw to help us with water transport!

Then there are the calves. A few days ago, Jordan walks into the house at the end of chore time, obviously frustrated. "I am beginning to question Blaze's intelligence," he quips.

I stop and listen. "Why?"

"Well, he refuses to drink from a bucket! I even tied him up and put the bucket right in front of him, and he just stands there--obviously hungry--and moos." Jordan sighs. "He won't drink from the bucket unless I put my fingers in there so he can suck on them." I now see Jordan's dripping hand. Meanwhile, Bright happily slurps his quotient of Daisy milk from a bucket without a fuss.

So what is with Blaze?

I have some sympathy for the little creature. It is not the easiest transition to make. A calf is born wanting to suck, head up, preferably on some soft and resilient oblong protrusion that hangs from the sky and dispenses sweet warmth. The sucking motion in this tipped-up position is beneficial. It stimulates the salivary glands and aids digestion; exercises head and neck muscles; and connects the calf with a source of heat and protection: mom. I imagine Blaze asking: So what's this puddle in pail?

I think back to what I have written in What a Body Knows (and sketched on April 1 in this blog): nurture and nourish are forever entwined. Perhaps it is no different for cattle. It is not merely milk that Blaze wants. He wants to suck. He wants to nuzzle. He wants his mom.

"I don't think it is a problem to feed him on a bottle for a while," I suggest.

"But it isn't convenient," Jordan replies. "It is hard to hold the bottle for Blaze while giving the bucket to Bright. It would be so much easier if he just drank from a bucket!" I recognize this logic all too well. Parenting by convenience. Oh how I know! Still, I also know that a calf, like a child, is a force of nature. If you oppose it, even if you win, you lose. Jordan knows too.

I remind him. "Well, you know from riding--when you want to stop a horse, what do you do? You don't sit back and yank on the reins. You tug and release, tug and release, tug and release. Try that with Blaze. If he rejects the bucket, give him the bottle for a feeding or two, then give him the bucket again. Give him a little time to get used to the idea." Jordan nods.

*
Meanwhile, I am still wrestling with calf care issues of my own--related to the kids and their ability to work together (see Dec 17). I am still seeing faces that pout and hearing voices that complain of being left out.

The Family Council I described in the last post had been highly successful as far as it went. We had worked out a framework for a different way of thinking: our calf-caring team. We had staged a shift to a more harmonious way of being. Yet feeling that shift and making it happen was proving another matter.

In our councils, the format is simple. Each person has a chance to speak. More than that, each person has a chance to be heard by the very persons who are provoking concern. In that hearing, I guide the listeners to mirror the speakers--restate what the person said, don't respond, just say it again, let them know that you really get what they are saying. It is a basic relationship tool for enhancing communication. And it works. You can see the tension melt from young shoulders who feel finally released, finally heard.

But hearing only goes so far. A shift towards resolution needs to occur, and it does when persons involved recognize that they share a common desire. In this case, it was obvious to the kids. They each wanted the calves; they wanted the calves to be healthy and happy and well tended; they wanted to be the ones to help. In the end, after everyone shared and was heard, the kids could see, even without my prodding, that they all wanted the same thing: to be recognized by the others as an important, necessary, and effective member of the calf-caring team.

It wasn't quite enough. I too had to tug and release. Tug and release. I had to give the kids time to get used to the idea. To feel it. To live it. So we kept talking.

As the week progressed, we realized more: it has to do with trust. Building trust. Blaze has to learn to trust Jordan. The kids have to learn to trust one another--really trust each other to want what they say they want. Let it sink in. So we work on that trust. Tug and release. Letting it be real.
*
A couple of days later, Jordan and Jessica come in together at the end of chores, smiling broadly. "Blaze did it!" Jordan announces.

"He drank from the bucket!" Jessica adds.

"Perhaps he is intelligent after all," Jordan grins. I never had any doubts.

"These calves are teaching me patience," Jordan adds with a triumphant sigh.

Me too.



Happy New Year to All!

New Arrivals!

Friday night the storm is raging--wind-rain-snow all at once. When we wake on Saturday, so does the golden sun, streaming through ice covered tree branches, dancing across dazzled white lawns, and illuminating a wafer thin full moon, hovering just above the horizon. It is beyond beautiful. And cold. It is the day we are to pick up our baby bulls.

It takes us half an hour to de-ice the car--scraping and melting and scraping frozen sheets from its surfaces. Thank goodness it isn't a plane. Geoff crawls through the side doors to jimmy open the front ones. Finally the windows are clear and Geoff and Jordan are on their way. The rest of us stay behind to finish the pen preparations—washing grain and water buckets, and fluffing up bedding hay.

An hour later, the car drives up, as if it were an ordinary day. This time, however, the car is carrying cattle. The two rows of back seats are down and covered with blankets. And there are our bulls, of the Milking Shorthorn breed, cruising in casual comfort. Jordan has named them Bright and Blaze—two names, easy and related, and not to be confused with the handful of verbal commands they will have to learn to become a team of oxen.

Will I know which is which?

I peek in the front door. It is obvious. Blaze, the smaller of the two, is standing up, his red head gently bumping the ceiling. His brown eyes are fixed on me. Who are you? he asks. His face is flecked with white (or premature gray?) and marked with a large white cyclone splotch. Jordan reports Blaze rode on all fours the whole trip, lurching back and forth, surfing the winding roads of rural NY.

Curled up behind him towards the back is the slightly larger and redder bull Jordan has named Bright. He does not look so happy. He reminds me of Ferdinand. Each one has on a calf coat—somewhat like the ones you see on small dogs but larger—fastened around his front and back legs.

My first impression: oh they are so cute!

We open the trunk door and Jordan wraps his arms around Blaze, who has stepped over Bright to get to the door first. Jordan makes it a few steps before Blaze wriggles away, landing on his back in the snow, legs sticking in all directions, Jordan’s arms still around his neck. The two of them freeze there for an instant, wondering what comes next, before Blaze flips himself over and peeks curiously into the barn. Geoff carries Bright, and soon the two of them are nosing around their new home. Spacious! Cold! Nice view! And all these small people!

Blaze scampers about, running in crazy circles, kicking up his hind legs. He buzzes and hums with energy. Bright mopes in the corner and coughs slightly. I feel a grip of maternal worry. Already? They haven’t even been here five minutes!

So what are we going to do with these fine furry beasts?
Feed them. Steer them. Train them.

The feeding is introducing an element of competition to our otherwise overly abundant milk flow. The bulls drink cow milk, of course. They are only babies—4 and 5 weeks old. And the cow milk we have to give them is Daisy’s. We have been milking a little more than a gallon at each milking, twice a day. Each calf needs to drink a half-gallon, morning and night.

You can do the math. We are scraping the bucket! Still, we have a plan. We are feeding Daisy more grain and hay over the next few weeks to boost her flow, and then in another month or so, we will wean the calves to grain and hay themselves. At this morning’s milking, Jordan squeezed out nearly two gallons. Thank you, Daisy! Then in March, Precious is due to give birth and we will be milking two cows! So we are consoling ourselves. It is only a temporary hardship.

As for steering, it turns out that the best time to do so is right before puberty, which occurs around six months. Before then, the male hormones the bulls produce are actually helpful, fueling healthy growth. Only with puberty does testosterone turn testy. We will be sure to call the Vet in three months. Before then, the bulls will be bulls.

As for training, it has already begun, though it is not clear who is training whom. Ostensibly, humans train cattle, the first step being to shower them with affection--a resource we have in ample supply. In fact, figuring out how to allocate all that attention has been our first challenge. Each of the children wants to be with the calves, caring for the calves, feeding the calves, leading the calves, and not one of them wants to be left out. Each one of them is also convinced that the others want to leave him or her out. So one child slips out to the barn to give the calves a secretive pat, and the others howl with the injustice of it all.

It is a high quality problem, really, and one whose value I appreciate. How are the kids supposed to know already how to work together to take care of baby bulls?

When similar issues arose last spring with our horse, Marvin, I quickly figured out that I could respond with acute and exasperated frustration—my heart wretched and my face blue—or I could embrace the moment as an opportunity to learn. Let’s work together on working together!

We gather in a Family Council. Forty-five minutes of concentrated chat time later, we are on our way—each child knowing that he or she is an essential member of a calf-caring team, with Jordan as our captain. Each one appreciating the others as enabling him or her to have bulls at all.

Last night Jessica comes in from the barn after giving Marvin some hay. "Did you pat the calves?" I ask. "No," she replies, "I didn’t want Jordan to feel left out." I smile. OK, so we still have some small adjustments to make. I reply, "Jessica, if you are out there, it is fine to pat the calves. They need all the love we can give them."

So who is training whom?

Once again, the farm is making its family.
(See "Forward to the Farm," Oct 15)

Wanting Oxen

Jordan wants oxen—a team of oxen. Which means two. We have known of this desire for the past several months, beginning in June or so.

At first his pleas were intermittent, somewhat serious, somewhat exploratory. We nodded in assent, agreeing with how useful they would be—at some far and distant time. But then his pleas grew more frequent and impassioned. His head would dip with the intensity of the emotion.

Where his desire came from, we have no idea. It wasn’t that he saw a team of oxen at work and wanted to do the same. None of his friends or our friends work with oxen. There was no particular book or video that he sparked his attention. Nonetheless, the idea grabbed him, and refused to let go. All Jordan knows is that he must own them, raise them, train them and use them to do farm work. He wants a form of farm power that does not pollute the environment like a tractor does. He wants to perfect an older method, one with a greater connection to the land. But there is something else too—more primal. It is as if his life, and the life he wants to lead, depends upon it.

In August, Jordan decided to make a yoke for the oxen he hoped to have. He hiked up into our land, scouting for the right kind of wood. He chose a piece of red pine—the best option he could find—and began hewing it with a hatchet—the best tool we had. Discovering that the wood was rotten in one place, he went in search of another prime piece. After achieving the rough shape of the yoke, he wanted a drawknife to finish it off. We ordered one over the web, paid for with money he had saved.

As his October birthday approached, his request was singular and unequivocal. Oxen for my birthday. That is all he wanted. I gave him a book—one about training oxen—thinking that some more information might grant the project a more realistic hue. The gift had the opposite effect. He read the book cover to cover, honing his desire with every turn of the page. He wanted two bull calves, of the same breed, born less than a month apart. Maybe Devons (the traditional American breed), or Milking Shorthorns. Jerseys would be OK too, though Devons and Jerseys are a bit harder to train than the Shorthorns: they have a higher “tractability” score. He needed to make another yoke.

It was becoming clear. This was no whim. Feeling the inevitability, I finally responded to yet another ox-chat by saying: “Call your 4H leader. Ask.” He did. A month went by.

A week ago, we received a call from another 4H member, Katie. Katie raises Milking Shorthorns. “May I speak with Jordan?” she asked. I handed over the phone and watched Jordan’s face open into a radiant beam of light. He put down the phone.

“She has two bull calves, born a week apart. She will give them to me when the weather warms a bit, and she’ll tell me more at the next 4H meeting.” He was stunned. Deeply quiet.

Watching him, hearing the news, an unexpected joy released in me. (Where did that come from?) I was delighted! Happy too. Jordan would have his oxen! Kyra and Jessica were leaping and cavorting, happy for their brother, happy for themselves. They set about making yokes for some toy bulls we have in our plastic animal collection.

Two more big bovines?! I rationalize my excitement. First of all, Jordan would be taking care of them. Not me. Besides, they're easier to keep than cows—they don’t need to be milked. They can live in the barn with our other cattle. All we need to do is enlarge our fenced pasture, as we have wanted to do since we moved here. Our hill is in need of grazers. And if Jordan really can get his team working, think of what he could do! Logs from the forest. Furrows in the ground. This might just work.

Besides, he will be in good company. People all around the world still use oxen to farm, especially in areas where the terrain is too hilly for tractors, or the fuel and service sources too rare. Oxen are hearty, disease resistant, and carry their own coats. Throughout time, they have served as symbols of virility and fertility.

On the other hand, it seems crazy. With Precious, our Jersey heifer, due to give birth in March, we stand to double our herd in a few months—from three to six. At least. Where does this end? Should I worry?

I decide not to. For one thing has always been true: our kids enable us. Geoff and I moved here in pursuit of our dreams, but the kids pushed us every step of the way in pursuit of their dreams. We wanted a rural place to think and create; they wanted animals. And now, pursuing their dreams, they are helping us in ours. I know it.

Geoff and I were the ones talking about living a closer connection to the natural world. Jordan is doing it.