I went to the farm to pick up 2 dozen eggs from Silka.  She’s an eastern European woman who looks like she’s good with animals.  She happens to be on the same food train that I just got on —  also wanting to feed her daughter real food, she invested in some chickens — now she has more eggs than she knows what to do with.  The eggs she gave me came in all different shades of brown and cream.  They came in different sizes too.  Some small ones, and some really big ones.  A part of me was afraid that a chick might come out an egg as I cracked it over the frying pan for my morning breakfast.  So far, so good — no chicks.  How do you separate the chick eggs from the breakfast eggs anyway?!?  Someone, please explain this…

We also got our first delivery of fresh milk, bread and butter.  The large South Mountain Creamery truck stopped in front of our home fully arrayed in black + white cow spots — surely leaving the neighbors wondering.  The milk, which came in glass bottles, tasted a tad bit creamier than regular grocery store milk.  The bread, rough — the way I like it, was filled with nuts, seeds, and grains — delicious!  And the butter tasted real — not like that I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter junk.

It was also Dhara’s first time at a farm.  She watched curiously as the farm animals sauntered this way and that.  She had a nice time as her grandma explained everything in detail.  Along the way, we met a little boy named Patrick, who I’d like to pretend is Dickon Sowerby from The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  “Dickon is, in some sense, the spirit of Missel Moor.  His eyes are described as looking like “pieces of moorland sky,” and he smells of “heather and grass and leaves…as if he were made of them.”  When the reader first encounters him, he is sitting beneath a tree charming animals with the music of his wooden pipe.”

Patrick may not have been charming animals with the music of his wooden pipe when we first met him, but he easily could be doing just that.  He lives in a stone house just beyond the farm and entertains himself by befriending visitors and introducing them to the farm animals.  Did I mention that it’s not even his farm?