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One hot August day, a middle-aged Greek man strides through the farmers’ market, sees our sandwich board, and stops to read it again. “Makaria Farm!” he announces, and comes over to my table.

He says: “How is it that everywhere there is Hopping Rabbit Farm and Singing Bird Farm, and here you have Makaria Farm?” He is mispronouncing “makaria” but he’s Greek and it’s a Greek word, so it’s probably us who have been mispronouncing it for two generations. Awkward.

I explain that Brock’s parents found “makaria” in the Bible, where it translated to “blessed:” perfectly suitable for their organic farm. When we bought our own land in 2007, we considered the name partly because we already had the signage. Google confirmed the name was right for us when it revealed “makaria” meant not just “blessed,” but “blessed death”: we were ending our city life for a new, happier life.

I ask my Greek friend what “makaria” means to him, and he explains that it’s the meal served after a funeral in Greece. There’s a set menu. It’s tasty. I look at the fresh vegetables piled high on our market tables, and am awed by coincidence.

Agriculture requires death

Some folks might find a farm name so closely associated with death to be a bit freaky, but in fact we’re just being honest: a farm requires death.

You can’t grow healthy, nutritious vegetables without feeding the soil dead plant and/or animal fertilizers, like compost and fishmeal.

Chickens hatch out at 50-50 males and females: every flock of layer hens (i.e. females) equates to male chicks or roosters being killed because they’re superfluous. When you raise pigs or cows for meat, the slaughterhouse is a necessary stage in the process.

Even though Brock and I have (so far) avoided livestock, we still share our land with wild rabbits, birds of all kinds, frogs, snakes, deer, worms and a universe of insects.

Death is an everyday occurrence, from killing worms when tilling the soil to setting out rat traps in the shed. Part of a farmer’s job – of working outdoors and imposing artificial order on a natural ecosystem – involves being able to handle death emotionally, spiritually and logistically.

Death is a part of life

In the years since we fled our Victoria condo for Makaria Farm, death has come in many forms to our ten acres. These passings have helped me realize that death is an inevitable, natural part of life – which, at least for me, makes death a little less scary. Here’s a recount to honour the dead:

The chickens

Three of our black layer hens are raccooned sometime after dark. We find the coop door open, the feathers trailing outside to inside-out chickens, limp red combs, and stiff chicken feet. We are left with two anxious survivors: one in the apple tree, one huddled in the darkest nesting box. I lean in to pet her spine and she winces, chicken wings up in defense.

Forty-eight hours later and the treed survivor has taught the other hen to launch herself over the netted run walls. I catch them scratching at the horse manure compost pile, pecking at red wigglers as if they’re popcorn. Worm genocide.

The deer

Some asshole races down our rural road and collides with a deer. We’ve all built fences around our farm fields and the deer wander as refugees. Deer down, the driver accelerates and makes his getaway to the Trans-Canada.

Witnesses include my brother, Joe, and a balding farmer in his pickup. The deer paws at the pavement with bloody hooves.

Joe gets a rusty axe from the shed and stands above Bambi. But he buys his steak at Walmart so says to the old man: “You’re probably better at this than me.” The man takes the axe and swings with confidence.

They lift the deer corpse into the truck bed and the farmer drives away.

The swan

The snow melts except for a puddle of white by the front fence. I wander out to investigate and see the black beak. I scream, then holler to Brock that there’s a dead trumpeter swan in our yard.

Internet research says if we move the body ten feet over the fence and beside the road it’ll become someone else’s problem. Alternatively, dead birds should be disposed of into the garbage for biweekly roadside pick-up. I doubt they meant a trumpeter swan, but whatever.

I can’t bear to touch the corpse so Brock struggles solo to fit the thirty pound bird into a garbage bag: the long, loose neck flops to the side.

The bunny

We’re walking out to the field to harvest and something cat-sized is caught in the fence netting. It scrambles as we move closer. I suspect a raccoon but nightmares sometimes come true and it’s a wild rabbit, smaller and tawnier than my now-deceased house rabbit of nine years.

I remember Peter’s silky white nose and ask Kim, one of our pickers, to put her hand over the bunny’s eyes so it doesn’t panic as much from seeing us. There’s not much we can do about dulling our human scent. The other women are dumb with concern so I play paramedic and ask one to get the old bunny carrier from the shed and pad it with hay. Another runs to the house for a pair of scissors.

Kim holds the rabbit to dull the jostling as I carve through netting with my Swiss army knife. The netting has cut into the bunny’s legs and side: there is blood and flesh. I doubt a wild rabbit will survive these wounds.

Luckily, rabbits can die of fear and this one succumbs just before I cut it free. Kim unwraps the netting from stiff limbs and places the body in the carrier. We walk back to the house to wash our hands. I tell Kim that we will bury the rabbit, but it’s peak harvest season and we’re too busy to dig in hard soil so the body goes to the dump later that day.

(A moment of silence for all the dead, from the tilled worms to the birds caught by the feral neighbourhood cats to the curious garter snakes decapitated by the mower.)

Yes, with its tiramisu layers of meaning “makaria” is exactly the right name for our farm.

It is the death of an old life and the beginning of a new life. It is good food borne from healthy, “blessed” soil, fed by our compost.

It is a feast to celebrate the natural cycle of death and life, because other living things will always have to die for us to live.

“Makaria” is all these things, and we’re proud to continue the family tradition of mispronouncing it.

Originally published in The Winnipeg Review on April 9, 2012.

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How a feminist became a farm wife

I invented the iPod. I was walking past an antique store and saw a jukebox, and thought: “how amazing, to own a personal jukebox – you could have all your favourite music in it. If only it were portable, so you could take it with you around town.” And then I realized: the iPod. It was 2005 – the iPod had been launched four years earlier.

Once we started our farm Brock and I began to (re)invent all kinds of things. We planted our fruit trees in aesthetically-pleasing locations. When they died from lack of watering, we decided it made sense to plant in rows for easier irrigation – or “orcharding” as this strategy is commonly known. We mourned our rusting tools and exposed equipment, and concluded that what we needed was a very, very large shed. Oh … that’s called a “barn.”

And then I invented the farm wife.

First: some context. At university I read feminist theory and chose the courses that studied women’s writing. I use birth control, work full-time and use the word “wench” subversively. At twenty-five I chose a partner who considered me a partner, and we’ve lived together for six years. Whoever is done work first makes dinner and gets a head start on housework. This arrangement balanced out quite well when we lived in the city. Then we bought ten acres of land.

When Brock and I started our farm in 2007, we began it as equal partners, quite literally – the business is registered as a 50/50 partnership. We built our temporary home together, installed a fence together, and wandered the farmers’ markets hand-in-hand, scouting out best practices.

The one summer I spent working alongside Brock as a farmer looked like this: we worked until dark, then stumbled wearily indoors, stomachs aching with hunger. We fantasized about having a personal chef who would transform our vegetables into decadent, satisfying meals. Too often we settled for delivery pizza and nachos. Our bodies and home were filthy with dirt, but there was no time to clean.

I wondered, exhausted, how on earth other farmers managed to feed themselves and vacuum their floors in the hectic summer months.

Even more importantly, I did not like farm work. Farming is hard, physical labour, requiring a series of routine tasks: till until it’s all tilled, plant for months, weed for months, then harvest until you discover oversized zucchinis in your nightmares. Then keep harvesting until frost euthanizes most of your crops and you weep with relief.

There are gorgeous moments of happiness and peace and satisfaction sprinkled throughout the process, and although I enjoy sharing those moments with Brock, I learned I am not a farmer. I much prefer to make my living staring at a computer screen all day, drinking tea and looking up words in the dictionary.

Eventually we sorted ourselves out and Brock reveled in full-time farming while I worked my day job wearing kitten heels in an office. Brock worked thirteen-hour days in peak summer, seven days a week: I was home by six pm, with statutory holidays and weekends off.

But I felt a little guilty drinking crantinis and reading in the hammock while Brock sweated in the fields. After my experience working on the farm I understood the hunger that comes from non-stop, physical work, and the importance of “making hay while the sun shines” – Brock could not spare time to cook meals. So I took on the challenge of making our dinners using the food Brock was growing.

I fell in love with our farm again once I started “grocery shopping” in our fields with a big bowl and a knife. I pull fresh garlic, snap off a head of broccoli, cut some Swiss chard leaves with their neon, multi-coloured stems, pull a few plants’ worth of new potatoes, and spend some quality time in the strawberry patch tasting the different varieties. During my grocery shop I track down Brock, usually on his tractor or picking vegetables, to give him a kiss and an ETA on dinner.

Our summers have worked this way for four years.

At first I was self-conscious about this arrangement, because I never wanted to be a woman who worked full-time, then made dinner while her husband lolled on the couch, seven days a week. When I mentioned to my girlfriends that I came home from the office and made dinner every night, I felt I also had to explain how hard Brock worked, or assure them that he did his share in the off-season.

I still carried the baggage of my urban perspective, from university and living in the city, that sees no reason for dividing labour: in the city, men and women can do pretty much everything equally well, from writing briefing notes to making lasagna.

But on a farm there is a natural division of work, depending on your inclination and ability. Someone needs to work the fields, and someone needs to keep the home running. On our farm, Brock likes to do the physical work and has the strength and endurance to do it. I love feeding us zero-mile meals and perfecting my crunchy pickle recipe.

I’m a natural farm wife. I’ve had a passion for learning practical skills since I was eighteen, when I learned to quilt. If we had stayed in the city I would be making soap on our balcony and buying flats of organic strawberries to boil into jam. Instead, I learned to can because of necessity: I came home to a tub of beets and Brock said, “Do you want these? Or should I compost them?” So I Googled a sweet pickled beet recipe and we stayed up until 11 p.m. listening to jars “ping.”

Our farm lifestyle depends on both of us: Brock can’t work if he doesn’t eat, and I can’t have a seven-acre garden if he doesn’t grow it. I suspect that our great-great-grandparents’ farming families understood this synergy, and valued the farm wife just as much as the farmer. The problems came once society began to restrict the individual’s right to choose their role, and women who weren’t interested in making pickles were told that was their job.

I’m a feminist farm wife, and that’s not an oxymoron. I am contributing to our farm life in the way I choose, which is what feminism fought for. I don’t have to make pies and can salsa – I get to.

Just like I “invented” the iPod by following the logic behind it, I am discovering why “the farm wife” makes sense, and is a role worthy of respect. Every time Brock thanks me gratefully for a meal before racing back to the fields, or apologizes for not doing more to keep the house clean in the summer, he reminds me that we are partners.

And in the winter, when Brock works normal-people hours indoors, drinking coffee and planning his next season, he also keeps the house tidy, makes dinner and does laundry. One day, when I came home from work, he took my bags at the door and handed me a martini.

I can be a farm wife to a man like that.

Originally published in The Winnipeg Review on February 21, 2012.

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Heather McLeod

Category Archives: Writing

Death and the Farm