Well, farm might be a strong word at this point. But over the course of many years we’re getting there. We’ve gradually been working toward a place that is at least partially sustainable for itself and our family of four. We have dreams of multiple large vegetable beds. An orchard. A stocked and ecologically balanced pond. Milk goats. A lovely English-country-style barn right here in Southeast Texas. You get the idea. The fulfillment of these dreams has not gone at the fast pace that I would’ve liked. Instead, it’s been more like Village Creek in summer. That canoe just moseys along and you can paddle if you like but there’s really just one sustainable pace: slow.
We’ve made progress though, in the 16 years we’ve lived here, on a little 5-acre slice of Southeast Texas heaven. Thanks to my crazy-talented-with-tools husband, we’ve got a garden shed with a chicken yard. A little green house complete with a covered potting table on the back. A fenced vegetable garden with a pretty little gate. And we finally built a storage building to house all of the farm accoutrements. So. . . Progress, right? But in the totally random fashion that is uniquely my own, I decided about three years ago that things would go much faster if our farm had a name. It suddenly and inexplicably became hugely important to label all this quirk that is ours with a suitable epithet. I guess I figured it would give us legitimacy and a standard to work toward, but after literally (3) years of debating various names for our farm, we still didn’t have one we could agree on. So I recently resorted to all-knowing Google. I literally Googled how to name your farm. AND THERE ARE ACTUALLY ARTICLES OUT THERE ON HOW TO DO IT! Who knew??!! Anyway, the one that was the most helpful suggested naming it after special features of the farm. Ok. Well, the two things that stood out to me the most were that we live on a bend in the road (which has resulted in dozens of little adventures. . . But that’s for another day) and that we have copious amounts of dogs. Like, A LOT of dogs. And funnily, most of them don’t even belong to us. They have homes. but they like to pass through and hang a while, like little hobos, sometimes for a couple of hours, sometimes for days.
So let’s see. . . there are only three full-time dogs. There’s Hairy Potter, a labradoodle who’s 15 years old, slightly deaf and blind, and horribly arthritic, but he’s still the best farm dog we have. He keeps hawks from landing on the property, kills possums, chases off skunks and armadillos, and barks at strangers.
Then there’s Chubs, the result of an illicit affair between my neighbor’s high-dollar boxer and one of the local cow dogs. His name doesn’t suit at all because he’s naturally skinny. . . Like people have tried to “rescue” him out of my yard skinny. I kid you not, one of my neighbors had to stop someone from luring him into her car, and then had a time of it convincing her that he’s actually spoiled rotten and most definitely NOT hungry.
And finally, there’s Duke the Dick, who was inherited from a family with a new baby where he couldn’t handle the competition. Duke is. . . Well, a dick. He’s jealous and kind of a bully about it. He growls when anyone gets too near the food bowl, pushes away anyone, dog or human who is getting more attention than he is, and hoarks down literally any type of food just to keep any other dog from getting it (he ate a piece of raw onion the other day to keep Chubs from having it). He’s a mini golden doodle.
The part-timers are Sadie and Tuck, two yellow Labrador retrievers that belong to my parents. They live on an RV pad on our property when they aren’t running the roads. Tuck is nearly the perfect canine. He’s sweet, obedient, and loyal. And he retrieves. Until he doesn’t want to retrieve anymore. And then he calmly watches as you retrieve the thrown object for him. It’s genius, really.
Sadie is a bag full of cats, and her various psychoses could fill a book. Her most annoying one is her obsessive need to carry something in her mouth. Constantly. She finds shoes, socks, clean laundry from the couch, dish towels from the oven door, toys. . . And when she can’t find something to carry around she plucks at your clothes trying to get a mouthful and leaves purplish pinch marks in her wake. Then there’s her eating disorder. The day God was handing out the “stop eating because I’m gonna barf if I don’t” buttons Sadie was sadly absent. My parents had to get her a special dog bowl to keep her from inhaling her food, and my dogs have to go from grazing all day to scheduled feedings when she’s around. She still gets pretty tubby when she’s here, though, because she eats the pig food that falls out of his stall. As I said. . . Eating disorder.
But even when Sadie and Tuck are on the road there are assorted neighborhood dogs that visit our five acres. There’s Stoney, who is Chubs’ brother, and who is responsible for the Great Chicken Massacre of 2016. Annie June, who hates Sadie with a passion and has kicked her ass so many times she’s been banned from our property when Sadie is here. Earl, who was named after the UPS delivery guy and who currently is sporting a cast on his front leg with which he whacks other dogs and people from whom he wants pats. There’s Wally, who lives across the street and who I feel kind of sorry for, because he’s kind of obnoxious and the other dogs don’t like him. There’s Muppet, a shitzu who constantly escapes and whose owner, Ms. Sherri, chases her around our front yard in a golf cart. And lastly there’s Skit, who technically belongs to some folks at the other end of the road, but who roams so much that now he’s community property.
So, yeah, lots of dogs, a bend in the road, and badda-bing, you get Five Dog Bend Farm. The place where the puppy party never ends and the farm dreams are gradually coming true.
Five Dog Bend 