y'all come on go with us

You know that moment, when you're packing up your last things, standing in your empty not-your-house-anymore, and your friends come over to bid you goodbye? And you busily put the last things on the truck, chatting and trying not to say what you're all thinking, that although we say "Write us when you get there" and "Come see us sometime", what we're not saying is, "I'm aching inside because I know I'll never see you again?

I hate that moment.

Luckily for you and me, this is not that moment! I am moving. But only from this blog to a bigger, better one. And you can all come with me. Please come with me.

I'll write you when I get there.

http://motherbird.squarespace.com/

foresight

I approach parenting in a funny way, I think. Or, to be more exact, it approaches me, hits me over the head, and drags me away to make me cook it dinner. Part of the problem, I assume, is my idea of the way other mothers do things. I imagine that other mothers, as they get their daughters ready for their first ballet recitals, think about what they're doing. They think, "Oh, this is such a momentous occasion" as they spray tons of hairspray on her bun, they feel a twinge of sadness as they put makeup on her baby face for the first time, and they remember all the recitals they danced in as little girls. And these feelings come, a little at a time, over the several days and several events that precede a ballet recital.

But as I said, I approach it in a funny way. Did I consider "my baby" as I dressed her? Did I remember myself as I wrote her name on the waistband of her tutu? Nah. I was too busy running to Target at the last minute to get a card of bobby pins and the cheapest red lipstick I could find. Did I glance wistfully in the rearview mirror at my princess as I drove her to her first performance? No, I was lost and trying not to kill all of us on unfamiliar roads or turn up terribly late.

And, to be quite honest, I just wasn't paying attention. So that when I fell, breathless, into my seat in the theater, I hadn't thought a thing about what was going to happen. Everybody was on time and dressed (even if we did have to turn her tights around backward so nobody would see the milkshake stains on them) and my duty was done.

The lights went down, the curtains opened, and the music started. And all of it, all those little things that I should have felt and thought over the last few days, or over the months since I knew a recital was coming, hit me right between the eyes. I remembered, suddenly, the smell of ballet-shoe leather, the glitter of new costumes, the heart-in-the-throat feeling just before going onstage. I remembered the fear, the exhilaration, the waver and then the determination of standing in the blinding lights before hundreds of upturned faces. I thought about my baby, waiting in the wings, feeling all this, wearing her first makeup, her heart fluttering in her sequin-clad chest. And I thought, as I saw the little girls in their rainbow of tutus, arms held high, dancing like so many gossamer butterflies, about the difficult world that we will someday send these beautiful creatures into.

I did the only thing I could do. I burst into tears.

Thomas, sitting beside me, was distressed at my seemingly incongruent reaction to the performance. Try to explain these things to an eight-year-old boy. So I stuffed it all back in, rummaged through my purse to find something to wipe my eyes and nose on, found nothing but a diaper, and tried to connect my face to the diaper in a way that would fool the people next to me into thinking it was a handkerchief. Then I spent the next three hours battling the rising headache that I get when I ought to cry but don't.


That would be my daughter there in the front. Apparently tap is a serious business.

Then the whole thing was over, and I went to collect my little dancer. I heard her demand, through my now-splitting headache, where the other little girls got their flowers. She is, after all, still Katie. A bouquet of roses, some drugs, and a rotisserie chicken later, we were all happily on our way home.

This time I did glance in the mirror. The roses were dangling off her lap, her head lolled on her shoulder. And I smiled, mostly because the drugs had kicked in, but also because I was paying attention now.

must be a guy thing...

I came home the other day to find that Dad had put the little boys to sleep-


There they were, just bouncing around the pasture, dead asleep like that. Looks to me like a perfectly comfortable place to take a snooze. You?

peachtree street

I think I know how they choose the names for streets in cities. I figure the street-naming council gets together and writes down all the names that they think would sound nice and puts them on a list. Then they get a map, and a list, and blindfold the new guy, and go at it, just naming up all the streets. Which works fine, most of the time, unless, as seems to have happened in Atlanta, there was only one name on the list.

Today is the day before the tenth anniversary of my wedding. Which means today is the tenth anniversary of the Day Before the Wedding. Since that anniversary is so much more fun to remember, (than all the love and flowers and birdseed and blue drool of the actual wedding day) I will graciously relate that story here.

Jess and I were at my parents’ house, which is in a rural area two hours from Atlanta. We were going to be married in Atlanta. Simple enough? Since we didn’t want to drive the four hours over and over, we figured we’d hop on down to the Atl courthouse the day before the wedding and pick us up a wedding license, and be good to go. Oh, and since the blood tests that the local health department took weren’t going to be ready in time for the wedding, we’d also need to get a doc in the Atlanta area to do those.

Oh. And. By the way I had a cousin at the airport who would need to be picked up, by us, somewhere in the middle of all that. Still, not too hard: blood tests, marriage license, cousin, and then we’d meet our families at the Embassy Suites and cool our heels for the evening before tying the knot in the morning.

Due to a massive argument about whether we were actually going to GET married, en route to Atlanta, involving the stopping of the car and refusal to go onward until a resolution was reached, we were late reaching the doctor’s office. Late enough that he’d gone home to lunch. The receptionist said we could wait two hours and he’d be right back. Or we could go out to the Gwinnett County Health Center and get our blood tests done right away. Fine, we said, let’s do that. How do we get there?

Half an hour later we came screeching in to the Health Center parking lot and piled out. Now, pause a second here to consider. A couple of dewy-eyed, completely naïve kids from BYU walk into the Gwinnett County Health Center to be tested for a whole raft of nasty STDs before they can be married. Sounds like the beginning of a joke. Just saying.

So now, cotton balls taped to the inside of our elbows, running almost two hours late, we stand before the woman who gives you the all-clear and takes your money. She looked at our papers, shot one sidelong glance at me, another at him, and said, “You from North Carolina?” I nodded. “…and you from California?” Jess nodded. She knit her forehead. “And you getting married in Gawgia?” We both nodded.

“It’s the place to be,” Jess said, shrugging.

She was satisfied. “Well…” she said, in that tone that says, you’d better believe it is.

“How do we get to the Fulton County Courthouse?” Jess asked next. It was on this question that our quickly deteriorating day hung. And on its answer.

In my memory, I can see the woman, almost in slow motion, raise a finger and point west. “On Peach….tree….Street…..” she says, and in slow motion we nod, and turn toward the door.

Those of you know Atlanta are chuckling and shaking your heads. Did she actually say “Peachtree Street”? Or was it “Peachtree Industrial”? “Or “Peachtree Northwest?” All we heard was “Peachtree”, because we were both from places where each street got its own name.

The hours between the time we left the Health Center and five o’clock, when the courthouse was due to close for the weekend, are a horrible, streaky, tear-filled blur in my mind. We stopped at a gas station to get a map as soon as we realized we didn’t know our way around Atlanta. I sat in the passenger seat of my father’s car, trying to read the map as we lurched around corners and up narrow alleys, shouting instructions to my beloved who was disobeying them in an increasingly frantic fashion, and realizing with every lurch and U-turn that we hadn’t had lunch. And it was almost dinnertime.

Now, I don’t get hungry. Instead I get morose, sullen, spiteful, catty. If I were a murdering type, that’s when I’d do it, when there’s been no lunch and it’s almost dinnertime. It was 4:30. The trip that should have taken us half an hour had taken us nearly three.

This next turn should take us straight there, I said. THIS is Peachtree Street. It’s a one way street, he said. Which way? The wrong way. Down this street for ten minutes in the wrong direction. Why didn’t you follow my instructions? Why can’t you read a map? I can read it, why can’t you follow instructions? Because it’s a one way road, the map doesn’t say it’s a one way road….Besides, this isn’t Peachtree Street, it’s Peachtree Boulevard…and all the while he was beginning to shrink away from me toward the car door as he realized that in less than 24 hours, this was how it was going to be for the two of us…forever.

Infuriatingly enough, the last 15 minutes before 5 o’clock were spent actually in view of the courthouse, but going around and around on one way Peachtree Streets trying just to find a place to park and abandon the car and get in there before they locked us out and left us to explain to all our guests that due to our combined ineptitude the wedding would not be happening that day.

At long last we found ourselves (miraculously) on the street in front of the courthouse staring at one empty parking space. With a parking meter. I frantically scrabbled in the ashtrays of the car to find every dusty quarter I could salvage while he threw the car into park and sprinted for the door of the courthouse. I was standing at the parking meter, shoving quarters in as fast as I could go, when I looked up to see an old man chuckling at me. He was so completely like every caricature of a bum that I’d ever seen in my small-town life that I almost gaped to see him in reality-he had the baggy pants, gray stubbly beard, red eyes, and brown paper bag clutched in his hand. And he was laughing at me.

“Honey,” he said, “It’s the weekend! You don’t have to feed that thing on the weekend!” I stared at him in disbelief for exactly one-eighth of a second before tearing up the courthouse steps after Jess.

Inside the courthouse, everything was quiet air-conditioning and cool marble. I eschewed the elevator as being unbearably slow and took the stairs, two at a time. At the counter where marriage licenses are obtained, a large woman sat and regarded me imperturbably. Jess was nowhere to be seen.

“I…” I gasped to her, “I’m here to get a marriage license,” here I glanced uncertainly around, “but I don’t know where my fiancé is…”

She turned slowly to the man in the window next to hers. “You see a boy in here to get a marriage license?” she asked him. “Mmmhmmm? White boy?”

The white boy came around the corner just then, having gone down the elevator looking for me, and together we begged the woman to allow us to get married. She (and fortune) smiled on us, and we made what I believe must have been a speed record in marriage-license filling out.

We turned it in, the woman gave us the license, and we stood, grinning at each other and panting, in the foyer of the courthouse. Thank goodness, was all I could think. But the relief drained from my face when Jess said, “What about your cousin?”

Good grief. We were hours late picking up my cousin from the airport, it was rush hour in Atlanta, and we had no clue how to get to the airport. I considered, for a brief moment, walking away among the people on the sidewalk and disappearing forever from everyone I knew. Instead we threw ourselves on the mercy of the people working at the courthouse and told them about the uselessness of our map.

They pointed us toward the airport, and we were off again. By now I didn’t care about the wedding, or the cousin, or Jess, or anything but getting myself some food before I died. We pulled up at the curb at the airport and I leaped out, headed straight for the food court. The fastest thing I could get was an orange juice and a Danish, and I tore them both open and went striding into the terminal where my cousin was calling her mother in tears, chowing down like I was having a party and why wasn’t she having fun?

Somehow we made it back to the Embassy Suites where our families were waiting. Somehow I made it through dinner with all of them and managed to smile. Somehow, incredibly, the next day we still married each other. And now, ten years after the fact we look back, if not exactly with laughter, at least with a chuckle for a good story.

I believe, deep in my soul, that there's a special corner of hell for those who botch up this marriage thing really badly. A place where there is no lunch, no hope of dinner, a map drawn by a madman, and you're locked forever in a car with the person you're supposed to cherish as both of you come completely, repulsively unraveled. And every street is called "Peachtree."

“I swear I will NEVER live in Atlanta,” Jess growled under his breath as the airplane took off when it was all over. And we don’t. Not quite. I guess we haven't done anything bad enough yet.

hug me, momma

In the quiet, pre-dawn gloom of my bedroom, someone slips into the empty space beside me in my bed. I sleepily wonder for a second who it is, and then I hear a whispered, “Hug me, Momma.” Ah. Samuel. I put my arms around him, heft him over to me, and snuggle in with him, wondering about this little soul.

Samuel is the third of four children, the second boy of three. In the roiling, deafening circus that is our family life, I often receive such parenting coaching from him. There he’ll suddenly be at my knee when I’m busy cleaning, demanding, “Kiss me, Momma,” or “Pick me on your lap.” Or, heartbreakingly, “Say, ‘I love you, Sammy.’” Or, if that’s not enough, there’s always climbing onto the counter, or running to the road, or hanging off the back porch and calling my name to bring me running and paying attention to Sammy.

What is this, this desperate need to be loved? Is it his age, and he’s only just discovered that he’s separate from his parents and alone in his own body? Is it his position in our family, not the oldest, the baby, the only girl? I remember when I was a child, (fifth of nine, third girl of five) and my parents used to say to me, “But you are our only Erin.” I remember that going completely over my head, and me thinking something like, “Well, yeah, but that’s just because you didn’t name me the same thing as Meg.” What can something so metaphysical mean to a concrete thinker?

But now, decades later, I’m seeing the situation from the other side. This seems to happen a lot now that I’m a parent. Here’s poor Samuel, and I ache to reach out to him and make him understand this one thing-that he is my only Samuel. The only one of my children that has my brown eyes. The only one with curls. The one that comes to me at first light to snuggle in while the others still lie in their beds snoring.

How can I tell him that he was the bald baby that I had to remember to bring a hat to the park for, that his cries in the night because he has another earache have always torn me up and brought me running, that his smile and his laugh are, to me, like pure sunshine? How do I convey to him that he, independent of all other things and everyone else, is beautiful? How can I say to him, I know, I thought once that I was lost like you believe you are, but now that I see you struggling, I know that I was never unloved or alone?

But Sammy, at almost four years old, doesn’t understand these things. I’m sure that, until he loves a middle child like he is loved, he won’t completely understand. That’s the funny, frustrating way our world works. There’s not, just now, any way for me to explain all this to him. So I gather him up, when he demands it, and “Hug Sammy.” So that when he does start to understand, far in the distant future, when he does have that “OH!” moment, and turns back to look over his childhood for signs that we really did care, there I’ll be in his memory, saying “I love you, Sammy.”

gifts

“What did you get for your birthday?” It was always what we asked each other as kids, as though the gifts marking the celebration were the only way we could get a feel for an event we hadn’t seen. “Two ‘My Little Ponies’ and a Barbie doll” explained a lot about how a birthday went back then.

If someone had told me on my 20^th birthday what I’d get for my 30^th, I wonder what I would have done. Maybe rolled my eyes and hoped for something more exciting. Maybe not. I don’t know. It didn’t happen.

As I sit here, though, on the morning after my 30^th birthday, I wonder. In that moment before you blow out the candles, when you know you’ve got one birthday wish for the entire year, and it had better be good, and quick, because everybody’s waiting, how often is our only wish “more of the same”?

This is what I got for my birthday: A beautiful sunny day on which to clearly see my life and blessings as they really are. I sat alone in the garden and looked at my beautiful, sometimes slightly ramshackle house and listened to the laughter of a child being tickled by his father that drifted through the open window.

I thought of the years we’ve spent painting, laying floors, mowing the lawn, playing in the yard, growing a garden, raising a family. I thought of the things that we still have to do. A list longer than my arm that includes house projects, things we want to do with our children, things we want to do together, plans, dreams. And I thought of the quiet place where we live, with peaceful, shady woods and sunny pasture, a place where time himself seems to hold his breath and cup his hands around us while we carefully raise our children.

I thought of those children, those four tumbling, happy, surprising, exasperating, blindingly brilliant souls that have come to stay with us for a while, and all that I have learned, and have yet to learn, from them. I thought of my husband, of the quiet and gentle way that almost ten years have taught us to love each other. He gave me a gift card for my birthday, so that I could buy books. He gave me the last almost-ten years, learning that a gift card for books would be the perfect gift for me.

And I thought of the challenges that even this life brings, of those beautiful, unexpected things that force us to grow. Without lemon juice, lemonade would just be sugar water. It’s wonderful to have had enough challenges to know that whatever the current trouble may be, on the other side is a life that is as sunny, and even richer, than the one we’re living today.

My father, wandering across the country as usual, came to see me yesterday evening. My family, assembled a continent away at an Easter celebration, called to sing "Happy Birthday" over the phone. To love and be loved like this is as wonderful an experience as I have known.

Now, the morning after the day that marked the 31^st year of my journey here, it’s gray and raining. Another gift. Rain for my garden and a day I’ll have to spend inside with my family. And although it’s gray now, and yesterday’s birthday sun has gone, I can still see what I saw then. For my birthday I’ve been given a life I might have been jealous of if I had known about it ten years ago, a place, physically and otherwise, full of joy, hope, and peace.

eggs running out our ears

A couple of years ago we bought four chickens. They started laying eggs, and they were lovely eggs, and that was a great deal of fun. But then a dog killed one of them, and we only had three chickens, and three chickens lay about two eggs a day. There are six of us, and sometimes we just didn't have enough eggs.

So we decided to get some more chickens. Problem is, you can only order a minimum number of chickens, and it ain't 4.

Long story short, (hm...too late) now we have a lot of chickens, and therefore a lot of eggs. They are lovely, delicious, brown and green eggs, from chickens that get lots and lots of green plants to eat (thereby increasing the level of Omega-3s in their eggs) and live a happy life scratching around. Which seems to be the happiest thing they can possibly do. (Aren't you sorta glad you're not a chicken? I dunno, might be an easier life...)

At any rate, we can't eat all these. You want some? They're $2.50/dz, $3.50/18, and if you want to get these eggs on a regular basis, you can get a dozen a week for $10/month, or 18 a week for $14/month. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Okay, let me know.

~Erin~

Oh, and by the way. I only mean folks in my area. Sorry, Emily, I'm not mailing you any eggs.

vegetable plants

I got these plants, under lights, in my basement...

Vegetable plants. Honest.

But here's the thing. I have more vegetable plants than my garden needs this year. These will be ready riiight around April 15, which is as early as you (if you're in my area) should consider planting warm-weather vegetables. So. If you need any of the varieties that I have, let me know and I'll arrange to get them to you. They're $1 each, just to keep things simple. Here's what I've got and how many will be available:

All of these varieties can be seen and mused over at Johnny's Seeds.

Tomatoes
Pink Beauty 18
Gold Nugget 25
Sun Cherry 26
San Marzano 8
New Girl 14

Bell Peppers
Orion (green to red) 19
Sunray (green to yellow) 14

Basil
Italian Large Leaf 25

Let me know if any of you need any of these and I'll reserve them for you.

I hope you're having a lovely spring! Best of luck with your gardens.

~Erin~

worse than his bite

I can imagine why man would domesticate dogs. I imagine that, eons ago, man was a cold, hungry, frightened and lonely type of animal. His major concerns were, undoubtedly, staying warm, finding food, and sleeping in safety. I can imagine him watching the other animals to learn any of their tricks that would be useful to him. I bet he even thought, hey, if we could work together, we could get a lot more done than I can do alone, with my lack of fur and fangs and claws.

So, I can clearly see why, upon finding an untended den of helpless wolf cubs, some enterprising Early Man scooped one up and took it home and began the ages-long process of loving and breeding it into a domestic animal. A pet. Now the nights wouldn’t be quite so cold, hunting would be easier, other animals would keep their distance, and man had himself a friend. All this I can imagine and understand. In those days, a dog was truly an asset to the life of man.

But what I cannot imagine, what I spent ALL the wee hours of this morning trying to understand, is why on earth my next-door neighbors needed to obtain a full-grown, apparently full-blooded German Shepherd and chain him to a tree in their backyard. They aren’t using him for his furry body heat. They aren’t using him to hunt, since their hunting is done at the grocery store. Intruders onto their property would soon realize that any intruding they’d like to do is fine as long as they don’t go within the bare dirt circle the dog has worn around his anchoring tree.

All of this, of course, would be none of my business whatsoever, but for two things. First, about once every couple of weeks, the dog breaks loose, wiggles through a little hole in the fence between our properties and comes after my chickens. Not that he’s ever killed or eaten any of them.

This dog’s back is as high as my waist. But he comes bounding into our yard, rips a hole in the chicken coop, and then the poor, stupid, overbred animal stands there with his tongue lolling out because he doesn’t know what to do next. Over the ages, as some kind of cruel joke, we’ve bred out, at least of this dog, the knowledge of what to do with live food. I appreciate the restraint, to be sure, although I do resent having to fix the coop so often, but I shake my head in wonder at the pathos of the entire situation.

And the other point. Last night, for the first time this year, it was hot enough in our bedroom to want to open the window. Which, after kicking the blankets off and tossing for a while first, I did. I stood for a moment near the open window, feeling the cool breeze, listening to the spring frogs and the birds that were (inexplicably) singing at midnight, and went back to my bed.

And then the dog started to bark. Approximately, I would say, every three minutes or so from then until just before dawn, when it apparently got tired and went off to sleep. Of course, you’re wondering now why I didn’t just shut the window. But three minutes is juuust enough for you to slip away into sleep, to think that whatever the dog was barking at is surely gone now, to hear the chirping frogs, then to hear black nothing…and then the dog would bark again. And the bitter, bitter irony of this whole situation is, that they didn’t get a small dog, the kind that I imagine could fill people’s modern-day needs for dogs, whatever they may be, stress relief or companionship, perhaps. A beagle, or a basset hound would fit the bill nicely. No, they went out and got something large. Something LOUD.

And so I sit here this afternoon, watching the hours till bedtime, hazy in the head from lack of decent sleep, and in my mind is an endless loop of wondering, about Early Man, and wolves, and worthless, loud animals chained to backyard trees...

Maybe tonight I’ll turn on the fan.

the real us

No, we are not (yet) just like the flower farm people. Alas. But here's a great picture of the way things are around here...

Do you wonder what he's going to do with the chicken next?

when I grow up...

I want to be just like these people. What with the big blue barn, and endless flower fields, and barefoot children, and the hats, ahh...

footie pajamas

A wedding dress is lovely

for what it represents

of beauty, youth, and hope.

A christening gown, too,

holds new life and faith

in its lacy folds.

But give me

the open door

of a steamy bathroom,

wet footprints,

and footie pajamas.

With a long zipper

to pull up

past chubby thighs

and round potbelly

beneath a butter-soft,

newly washed chin.

Footie pajamas,

and the moment

when sweet wet curls

and pinkest cheeks

leap up

and go dancing away

to sleep.

up. running.

Finally and at last, the Children's Fashion Workshop is up and running. Click on the picture above to peruse the results of 5+ years of work, frustration, creativity, tears, and fun.

A special thanks to my sister Emily, my unfailing design director, and my husband Jess for tech support. And thanks to my model for (sometimes) smiling.

Okay. Go look!

-E-

passing into gray

I stood on the edge of the fields, where corn stubble formed parallel lines reaching to the tree-lined horizon. I pulled my peacoat tighter against the biting breeze, trying to stand on the balls of my feet so that my high heels wouldn’t sink into the sandy soil of what was once my grandparents’ farm. It was January, the fields were empty, and I stood dressed and ready for another funeral.

I saw myself, a careless child, running barefoot down the black soil between rows of corn or cotton in these same fields. I remembered afternoons spent stooped over in the backyard, trying to let cantaloupe or watermelon juice drip on the ground, really only caring about the warm, sweet taste of summer. Every corner of the place held a little memory for me, my grandmother’s fig trees, grandfather’s vegetable garden, the pecan trees planted decades ago by my uncles and my father.

I wondered, then, about the nature of a place. What, really, does a piece of land mean to us? When my grandparents brought their young family here 60 years ago and began to build a home, did they imagine how ingrained this property would become in the legends and the lives of their grandchildren?

Every summer as I grew up, we took a pilgrimage to the farm. There we spent a weekend or more playing with cousins, eating dinners out of massive pots of food, swatting gnats and getting grubby and happy. If we woke up early enough in the morning, we could help Grandaddy cut okra to take to the farmer’s market. If we went into the kitchen before dinner, Grandmamma would teach us how to roll out dumplings. Before long, a place like this becomes a part of a person’s soul.

As I grew older, my life with my family began to become my life with my husband, with my children, and finally my life with a family of my own. My trips to the farm became less frequent, and less filled with the cousins who by now were growing up as well. And soon, my trips to the farm became sudden, and urgent, and unexpected, but not really. My trips to the farm began to be mostly for funerals.

One by one, the people, the threads that bound me to the farm, were dying. My parents live far away now, my siblings and cousins scattered like dandelion seeds, like the cotton that scantily dots the gray fields after the harvesters have come. I know that we have lives of our own, homes and lands that will become the new legends in our families, but somewhere inside, in a part of myself that I don’t really understand, I ache for the loss of a touchstone of my history.

What need have I go to the farm now? What gathering will there be, now that the last link, my beautiful grandmother, has died? My children will not know this place, with its reaching cornfields, abundant garden, and the branches of the old pecan trees, like arms, always comforting, always sheltering us all. They will not see, except in stories, the flowerbeds my grandmother carefully tended, the grapevines and apple trees shaped by my grandfather’s hands. This place will pass, like an internet link you can no longer click on, into gray. Inactive. A quilt made by hands long dead, that we fold and place in the bottom of a cedar chest so we never ruin it.

I am assured that someone I know will keep the farm. That it will always be there for me to visit if I like. But why? There’s no way to go back. What I knew, what I loved, has gone.

I thought of all this as I stood between the cornfield and my grandfather’s vegetable garden, once beautiful and orderly, now filled with gently swaying weeds. My mother came up behind me, my children’s hands in hers. “It’s time to go,” she said, and I turned away from the fields to go to the last funeral before the farm passes into gray.