Birthing Season, Lambs, a goat and a Young boy

Farming is no picnic in the hay...especially during the birthing season. The babies seem to have all the fun. Adults, both human and animal, stay worn out.

Ewes in Waiting

Around the time of spring break each year, lambs begin to arrive on James' Young's hill. He raises sheep on his farm, helps his parents, Kenneth and Mary, with calves, and has completely taken over the care of our goats at A Point of View. James says, "I enjoy the little ones."

This year, one of the ewes rejected the third of her triplets and James began bottle-feeding, a charity necessary for its survival.

Mother with triplets. Can you guess which one she rejected?

When we moved to Grassy Creek, James Young (son of Kenneth and Mary who live at the end of Young Road in Young Hollow) was a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His brother Aaron was a sophomore. The Young family was quick to welcome us to their neighborhood. Kenneth is a local mail carrier and Mary drives a school bus and works in the cafeteria at the middle school. They used to have a self-sufficient farm complete with a dairy, but now that the sons are grown and getting close to retirement, they don't do everything, but still grow the best of everything including dahlias and blueberries for "come and pick your own," and raise cattle and chickens.

Mary and Kenneth Young and James in the background
The Youngs of Young Road

After graduating in 2001 with a degree in Finance, James returned to Ashe County as loan officer in a local bank. He is a quiet and humble guy from a hard-working family and he valued the rural life. So many of his contemporaries left the county for an education never to return because they found the jobs they wanted somewhere else. James considers himself lucky to have both a good professional job and the local farming lifesyle.

James helping his parents, Mary and Kenneth, tag and worm this year's new calves

Healthy thriving calves with numerical tags

James bought a home just over the ridge from Young Road and married Nicole Roberts in 2010. She enjoys the rural life enough to make the daily commute to Boone where she is Early Intervention Supervisor for Childrens' Developmental Services. In September of 2011, they became the youngest Young parents in Grassy Creek when son Samuel was born.

James, Nicole and Samuel with border collie puppie, Dixie

Samuel is almost eight months old now. He may be the next innovative Young farmer of America.

Samuel

Nothing else compares with having your own son, but James continues to work hard at animal husbandry, learning all he can when not working at the bank or helping Niki or caring for Samuel. He makes raising farm animals look easy.

More and more lambs every day!

This year, James bought a billy to put with our herd of female goats to see if he could also raise baby goats.

Billy the Dad

So far, we have one new baby goat.

Nanny and Kid Rocky (No, I'm not naming them!)

Initially, and before James began caring for our goats, we named them, all 22 of them. We were told right off that we needed animals on our the steepest hills for the purpose of mowing and preventing the hills from growing up in weeds. Goats love poison ivy and the low brush that grows up fast and makes the land impenetrable. We soon learned that when you name them, though, they become pets.

One year, I took three goats, each on separate occasions to the veterinarian in Sparta in the back of my car because I was not able to convince the doctors to come here. One died of a rare brain parasite after bouts of seizures. The other two died of diseases that were never identified. Another goat disappeared, perhaps stolen. One was killed by dogs; another broke her neck on a fence post running from a dog. Over the years, we got down to 17 before the lead goat, Silas, died in winter. That was the end to naming goats.

We sold half of our remaining goats and had only 8 until James brought in a billy for mating. Now we are increasing in number again, one at a time. Nothing is cuter than a baby goat. Maybe there will be goat cheese one day!!

Wait Mom, I'm hungry!

I think goats are the cutest. Don't you? Well, sometimes there's an exceptionally sweet-looking calf, and the lambs are soft and squeezable.

What do you think? Which baby is the cutest?

(It's a trick question. Samuel is by far the cutest!)

How We Began

When we bought the land in Ashe County we needed to find the people who would be our friends and neighbors.

There were five homes on Young Road in what they call Young Hollow. Kenneth and Mary are at the end of that road and Granny Young nearby. Some of the homes belong to Walters who are related to both the Young family and the Waddell family (who we bought from.) Pauline Walters was our closest neighbor and her sons, Johnny, Eddie and Larry, and a daughter JoAnn (Phillips) were nearby. All were eager to help us settle in and learn about the fauna and flora and would help with anything we asked.

The natural surroundings had such appeal even in winter. I couldn't wait to see what the dried flowers would be in summer. The first tree to bloom in March was a Serviceberry along with hordes of narcissus that someone had planted behind the old spring house.

The lack of light pollution provided the gift of  stars, constellations, and galaxies. The wind raged as if to do its own spring-cleaning. Rains were followed by wisps of clouds rising from the valleys like misty spirits. Deer were dark in winter, and the squirrels came back and back to their stored hickory nuts and busied themselves with making nests signaling that winter would eventually wear itself out.

Initially, we thought we would develop things slowly. I hoped to renovate buildings already here that could be turned into a suitable place for writing. We started cleaning out the old granary and he 1940's farmhouse which would have to be torn down. It had been damaged by animals and weather after a large tree fell on one side, opening it to the elements.

Traylor wanted to start building right away so we would have a house to sleep in when we were here, but the first thing we needed was a farm road to provide access to all aspects of the land. There was the low land with the grassy stream and a tobacco field, the open bowl, several wooded acres and a wide highland hayfield. Getting from one area to another took too long on foot for walking to be efficient, so Traylor bought a truck.

We met with land movers and decided to cut into the slope of the hill nearest Young Road to keep from building the road through the old tobacco field which we reserved for crops like the pumpkins that would grow there in years to come. We wanted to follow the old farm road and cow paths and then curve around the rim of the bowl to the highland hay field for access.

We first decided that the house site would be on a flat spot in the wooded area overlooking Young and Sussex, behind a few trees so it would be private and unseen from the road. This would change radically before we started building, but we added a dog tail of  gravel road down to that site between stands of mountain laurel and rhododendron. And, Traylor had an idea for a water-feature. He wanted to turn the lowest, boggy vale into a pond.

We entrusted the pond and the road to the only man we found who had created a pond from scratch before.  He was so excited about working on a tractor without a shirt that we should have worried more about his concern for the land. He was like a boy playing in the dirt and like an adolescent, spent an unnatural amount of time looking at himself in the side mirror of his truck preening his growing beard. What became clear was that he loved playing with our dirt and getting paid. We felt that we were responsible for taking care of the land and sharing it with others as stewards, but we were not there while he did the initial grading, and when I saw the first scathing cut, I cried. There was no going back.

And, we learned not to rush the local workers. Mountain time is a real phenomenon and a pushy "flatlander" is never appreciated by the locals. In March, folks are just starting to come out, women still quilting near the fireplace and men anticipating the next snow. March was hardest to take. It just seemed like winter would never end. Here a bloom, there a bloom, some gradual greening, but we were told not to plant because there would be another frost, maybe even a hard freeze. Just wait, they said, so we waited. The last week of March is...the...longest, still waiting for spring. Come on, April, you tease!

Feels Like Home to Me

You ask us how we found this place and I tell you it was listed in the Second Hand News, but you still wonder how we  knew it was ours. You wonder what drew us, what spoke to us. Life changes in a moment, with a single thought, an idea, and sometimes a feeling. Familiar is a good feeling and it just happened, trust me. No one saw it coming.

In its prime, what we now call A Point of View was a self-sufficient farm.

My grandparents on both sides were Alabama dirt farmers, and I remember my aunt telling me about the Harris family farm in Tallapoosa County where her grandparents lived. They too were self-sufficient. The diagram she drew looked like the map of a small town.

They worked many acres of land and lived in a centrally-located house with a wrap-around porch. Alongside the house, they planted vegetables for the table and grew rows of fruit trees and berry bushes. Also close to the house, there was a well, a bell-tower and an outdoor privy. Further back, they got eggs from a chicken house, raised pigs in a pen and cured meats in a smoke house. The mule lived in a fenced area with his own barn next to sprawling fields of cotton.

Conveniently located across the road from the house was a fenced cow barn with milking stalls. Beyond it, cows roamed the pastures. Just down the road ,a car barn housed Grandpa John's new Model A Ford next to another barn for a prized and well-cared-for wagon. Behind that was a blacksmithing house and fields of corn and sugar cane. Syrup making was an celebrated annual event. The mule moved a turn-style that extracted juice from sugar cane, sorghum and millet which was then cooked down to syrup.

I don't remember that farm in its heyday. My grandparents got a farm of their own when they married, and then they moved to town (Opelika, AL) soon after my dad was born and opened Harris's Grocery. But I do remember the Saturday I got to travel back to the country with my grandparents for a hog killing. While I've repressed any memories of an actual killing, I remember the pot-bellied stove and making lye soap out of fat. I also recall the taste of biscuits with fresh butter melting under a drizzle of cane syrup. 

My mother's family (Barnes) even a generation later managed to be self-sufficient as farmers and grew cotton  as a cash crop. I remember eating pomegranates under the kitchen window  and my grandmother's pound cake at the table. She made clothes for 8 children of which my mother was the last.

Traylor's family (Traillour in France) was more diverse, but not much. His family had more ministers, bankers and Kings (James of Scotland,) than farmers, although there were Parks and Bakers. Maybe he was meant to direct things and people, and thus-no surprise-ended up in Human Resources with one foot in Grassy Creek and the other reluctant to leave the city.

And what about those Scotch-Irish and English immigrants who settled the Highlands of North Carolina? They were our ancestors. A John Harris arrived from Leith, Scotland in 1685, and Renfro which means "flowing brook," traces back to the Renfrews of Renfrewshire, Scotland. We both have roots in England, Ireland, Wales and a smattering from parts of western Europe.

We live off Sussex Road near the Youngs (Scottish) on a farm that was long owned by the Waddells (Scottish) with a flowing brook and rolling hills. Still, we are less than a day's drive from the coast.  Couldn't we be somewhere in the past in the British Isles?

And maybe it's also natural to love Spain. Over 5000 years BC, the mountain people of the central Iberian peninsula (Basque country) migrated to what is now the British Isles. Those early wandering people remained a genetically unaltered race because there was little outside influence. Even after the Celtic expansion, there was little genetic change in the Scotch-Irish people, while the Iberian peninsula itself was under constant, sometimes radical change. (see www.worldology.com/Europe)

Finally, out of farming comes a love of food, fresh food, processed only as needed to make it safe or to survive the winter. What I remember about both of my grandmothers is what and how they fed us. We ate with them on Sundays, and Sunday dinners in the South have always been more than the average meal, but to me the dining room table was the altar in the home. We prayed there and we were nourished there.

So there it is. I've come to believe in genetic memory. It just feels right to be here. The rolling hills, animals grazing, gardens and forests, neighborly folks around us raising chickens and blueberries and making apple cider, sewing and digging in the earth.

We work hard, play hard, and eat well-close to the earth. Feels like home to me.

Grassy Creek, North Carolina, USA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEcv5uPbYsU

link to a YouTube slide show of the Isle of Harris, Scotland