Coop review, part 2
Submitted by Dick Wanner on Tue, 07/14/2009 - 8:07pm.
Chickens were a big part of Michael Perrry's rural fantasy, and the title of his latest book, Coop, proves he's not ashamed to note that there were a few side trips on the road to turning that fantasy into reality. Or, more accurately, the road to knowing that realities can only, at best, approximate fantasies.
When Perry started on the coop, for example, he had 13 chickens. By the time it was built, there were six. His favorite, and his six-year-old daughter's favorite, was Little Miss Shake-N-Bake. The hen had a bad case of tremors. She did survive to see the finished coop, but she had trouble, because of her condition, getting into it.
Perry, his wife Anneliese, and her daughter Amy, the six-year-old, from a previous marriage, share love, laughter, some tears, a lot of manual labor and a sense of wonder at the things that are happening on their 37-acre farm. They also share the at-home birth of Jane, a sister for Amy.
There's a lot of the romance of farming in the book, and much of the gentle humor that Perry is noted for. For example, a couple of feeder pigs nearly gain pet status before they become an anatomy lesson for Amy on their way to the freezer.
Here's one of the cute things the pigs did: Perry installed a nipple waterer in their rough-hewn pen. The pigs captured water in their mouths then dribbled it onto the dirt until they had formed a wallow. Smart, cute, playful they were, but they wound up chops, ham and bacon anyway.
Perry is a freelance writer who's on the road a lot for major magazines, book tours and speaking engagements. He muses late in the book about spending too much time away from his family, his home and his livestock. If you've lived on a farm for a while, much of what he writes about in Coop will be familiar. But through Perry's eyes, the familiar can wear a very fresh face.
And if he wants to give up the road to stay home and write books, I think he could make a go of it. As long as he keeps the freezer full.
The Depression was tough on Detroit. But you know what's even tougher? Now. That's according to Tracy Sutton's grandfather, a Detroiter and retired auto executive who is deeply troubled by the state of his city today. At 91, he thought he'd seen it all, but he never imagined this. Tracy Sutton is Lancaster Farming's regional editor and visited her grandfather over the Fourth of July holiday. She writes about her grandfather's feelings - and draws some interesting parallels to the state of agriculture now - in our current issue.
Cats are always good for a laugh. http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=3903091
