Le Vacanze: Part II.2

[Am now back from Sicily, it was GREAT, will get to that eventually, once I catch up on winter break.]

Where was I?  Oh right, wwoofing...

So, my first morning on the farm, I was working on whitewashing a wall when Stefano poked his head in on his way by and mentioned that he'd forgotten to feed the the pigs up on the hill and would I mind doing that while he was out running errands?  Sure, I said.  We'd done the same feeding the night before, so I knew where everything was and how to call the free-range pigs (CHO! CHO! CHO!) and all that.  So off went Stefano to run errands and off went I to collect a bucket of favini and tromp on up the hill.  There are two groups of pigs "up the hill".  One is the pair penned in because they were eating lambs.  Now, you would think that a pair of pigs in a (stationary) enclosure would be difficult to misplace.  And we'd BEEN to the pen the evening before, and I thought I knew more or less where it was.  But I couldn't find it.  I found the sheep pen, and systematically checked all the various forks in the paths, without any luck.  Bear in mind that these paths are steep and rocky, and I was lugging along a heavy bucket.  Also it was raining.  Not hard, but enough to soak through my not-quite-waterproof windbreaker and make the rocky bits slippery.  Eventually, feeling silly, I hiked back down to the house (with the bucket) and found Dona, who called Stefano for me so I could ask him where the pigpen was.  He gave me directions (it turned out I was going in the completely wrong direction--I should have turned right at the driveway, not left), and I hiked back up the hill, located the pen, and fed the pigs!

Triumph, right?  And the next part should be easy, I thought, because all I had to do was stand in a convenient location and shout until the other pigs arrived.  Which I did.  Only the other pigs didn't arrive.  I did manage to call all 11 sheep and the dog (who is nearly deaf)--the sheep are only supposed to come to the sheep call (Billybillybillybillybee!), but they didn't seem to realize that.  I saw them coming and scrambled up to the top of the small slope behind me.  I'm not sure what I was thinking--the sheep, of course, scrambled right up after me, and crowded around expectantly.  I wrestled the bucket away from the ewe who'd just shoved her head into it, waded through sheep and scrambled back down the hill, trying to put as much distance as possible between me and them before they got themselves turned around and back to the road, and took another path up into the woods.  When I thought I was far enough away to shout again without immediately attracting hoards of sheep, I set down the bucket and tried again.  After about five minutes of bellowing "CHO! CHO! CHO!" in my farmstand advertising voice (thank you, Shani!), two pigs (to my great relief) finally appeared out of the trees.  The others, I thought, shouldn't be far behind, so I shouted some more.  That was when Shalom turned up, looking concerned and curious.  Still no sign of the other 13 pigs, though, not even when I followed Shalom further up the path and shouted some more from a different spot.  No luck.  I had a moment of Disney-esque inspiration (or desperation, take your pick) and tried to get Shalom to lead me to the pigs, but all he did was trot along ahead of me in whatever direction I decided to go in, and it was going on at least an hour since I first agreed to feed the pigs, so I decided that the rest of them could just fend for themselves (Pigs are a lot more intelligent and aggressive than sheep, and thus wolves and getting lost were not as much of an issue.  I hoped.) until dinner time, and tromped back down to my whitewashing, trailed by a cheerful Shalom.

I spent a lot of time whitewashing that week, since the weather was cold and rainy outdoors.  I had always imagined whitewashing to be a very satisfying project (granted, my entire prior knowledge of whitewashing was limited to the first paragraph of Wind in the Willows)--but whitewash is not anything like white paint.  It is white chalk stirred up in water, so that when you paint it on the wall, it looks like nothing but water, until it dries, at which point it is (theoretically) opaque.  Something was odd about this one wall I was working on, however (the others were fine and looked white enough after two or three coats), because I went over the darn thing FIVE TIMES (and this was not a small wall) and it still had smudgy spots.  At which point Stefano mentioned casually that there was going to be a large bookcase in front of it anyway, so it didn't really matter if it wasn't completely homogeneous.   I wished he'd mentioned that after the third or fourth time around, instead of suggesting that I try painting with side-to-side strokes instead of up-and-down strokes.

Not that I really minded white-washing--it was what needed doing, and I was happy to do it.  I was also frequently accompanied by Gina, a small, talkative black kitten who was forever climbing up on my knees or the step stool or attacking the paintbrush and somehow managed (barely) to not fall into the bucket of whitewash, and/or Shalom, who liked to fall asleep on the newspaper I had covering the floor, and thought that my trying to move them out from under him so I could paint a different section of wall was an EXCELLENT game. But whitewashing did get a little old by the end of the week, and I was glad that there were other things to do also.

On Wednesday evening Stefano and I went to go find the cows.  They had disappeared a few days before, and he thought they'd probably gone wandered off to the next farm over (that's where they usually wander off to, apparently).  Dona drove us over there (5-10 minutes down the mountain, over 5 minutes or so, 5-10 minutes back up the mountain again), and dropped us off.  Sure enough, there were the cows.  We chatted briefly with the neighbor farmer, who didn't actually mind having them there and joked about how his grass was clearly superior to Stefano's grass, and then we herded the cows back home.  This involved a good half hour (45 minute?) hike through the woods, and the cows were not particularly eager to go home. 

It was definitely a two person job, so I had an active role in alternately encouraging them along from behind (while Stefano went ahead to make sure they turned the right direction at the next fork) and cutting off into the woods to head them off whenever they ambled off the path.  At one point I suddenly realized that I was standing downhill of a large, heavy animal with horns (both genders have them with this breed), about to try to convince her to change her mind and go back uphill; but I squashed that thought, and tried to project "I am in charge here. Turn around." rather than "ack!" and, after a moment, she turned around and went back up the hill.  A little while later I looked up from cow tails and noticed the spectacular view, and it occurred to me that there I was, hiking through the mountains of Tuscany with four cows and a Italian farmer.  Had someone asked me a year ago where I would be right then, I can promise you I would never have come up with that.  It was pretty amazing.

The cows were confined to the barn and the pen outside the barn for the next couple of days.  Towards the end of the week I asked Stefano if he was ever going to let them out again or not (yes, he was).  Did he think they would wander back over to the neighbor's farm?  Probably, he agreed.  But then what would he do?  Well, he said, he would go and get them again.

At one point Dona suggested either selling the cows to the neighbor or butchering them, and Stefano made non-committal noises.  I get the sense that he has a soft spot for these cows.

This post is already long enough (too long, actually), so I'll end here for now.