Look at this chicken:
I sat looking at her the other morning, and she seemed to blink her eyes from time to time, but the feathery part around her eyes never moved. And yet, it still seemed as if she was blinking.
I looked up chicken blinking on the internet. Chickens have nictitating membranes! Nictitating membranes are translucent eyelids that move horizontally across the eyeball, providing protection and moisture. Cats have nictitating membranes. Many fish, amphibians, and birds have them. Primates rarely have them, although that weird pink thing in the corner of our eyes is believed by many scientists to be the vestige of a nictitating membrane.
You know who else has nictitating membranes? Spock! Remember, in Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan, we believe that Spock has been blinded? But it turns out his nictitating membranes saved his vision? I’m going out and making the Vulcan hand gesture to our chickens. I’m going to wish them, “Live long and prosper”.
Oh, one more photo before we leave the chickens behind. These new chickens are so well socialized. This one just hopped onto my lap!
In the goat realm of our farm, Leroy is getting buckier with every passing day. He lives in a pen with a wether named Roger. My first chore of the day is to take Leroy and Roger a bucket of oats. I love this job. Roger sees me when I leave the house, and talks to me the entire time I’m walking back to their pen. He says, “Baa,” like all the female goats. Leroy doesn’t speak much any more, but when he does, he says, “Buh!” Real staccato. Not a long, dragged out syllable like Roger and the girls. “Buh!” As if someone had startled him. Or, as if he’s issuing a challenge.
Is this why male goats are called bucks? I googled it. The word “buck” is well over a thousand years old, and pretty much the same in a bunch of different languages. Bok in German, bukkr in Old Norse. But, what I stumbled onto while exploring the word buck was an explanation of why we refer to US dollars as bucks.
Apparently, in the 1700s, buckskins were used as currency in our country. We have a record, in 1748, of a Dutch trader recording the price of a cask of whiskey as “five bucks”. Scholars believe that meant five buckskins. Around the beginning of the 1800s, a buckskin and a dollar were about equal in value. Who knew?
Meanwhile, in our ultra-hot New Mexican summer, I have been missing the song of the cicadas. I grew up in the midwest where these bizarre insects were part of the fabric of every summer, singing for weeks every year. One day last week, I heard cicadas. It seemed they only lasted one day. What kind of cicada lasts one day?
There are seven types of cicadas in New Mexico. There are more than three thousand types of cicadas in the world. When you find something that looks like this, it is only the shell that one has left behind. (This one is on the gate of the milkers’ pen).
This week we got green chili.
Green chili is something New Mexicans are obsessed with. It can only be grown in the micro-climate of the Hatch Valley. And, when people write about Hatch Green Chili, they spell it “chile”. Which I can hardly bring myself to do. (Spell-check is determined to prevent that, as well).
You have to make an appointment to buy a bag of green chile. You go to the stand where it’s roasted and sold. They sell you a bag weighing over thirty pounds. It's full of blazing hot chile, fresh from the roaster, and you run home with it. You fill your kitchen sink with ice, plop the enormous bag of chiles on top of the ice, and then pour a second bag of ice directly onto the chiles. And then you stand at the sink, peeling, seeding, and packing the chiles into smaller freezer bags for the next two hours.
The Hatch Valley was once a flood plane for the Rio Grande, and that has left it full of nutrients that make these chiles unique and flavorful. Also, the wildly fluctuating temperatures here affect the chiles in a good way. Most of the people who grow Hatch Green Chile are descendants of Joseph Franzoy, the first man to grow chiles commercially in the Hatch Valley.
There has been an ad playing on the radio here in New Mexico about the coronavirus. It says, “Wash your hands like you just peeled a bag of chile.” Until I spent two hours peeling and packing chile, I didn’t know what that meant. Apparently everyone in New Mexico knows. Even the McDonalds in New Mexico offer green chili cheeseburgers.
The last thing for this week is soap. Look!
It’s a far cry from my first pathetic batch! I’ve developed several really nice types of soap, including anise, orange, and lavender. My niece, Kat, is coming down here to help me put up a web-site to sell our soap. All this soap is made from the milk of our good goats. Thanks, Mothra! Thanks, Lulou! (And thanks, also, to Phoebe, Rain, and Delta - all of whom contributed to these soaps and then moved elsewhere).