Peter Rabbit, RIP

I am admittedly not the morning person I used to be.  Or the morning person my husband has become.  My response to dawn is generally an unintelligible grunt.  So early this morning, when Andy popped into the house, said something about a rabbit and ran back out again, it all registered in my fogged brain as a mumble and rustle.  Nothing jolts you out of sleep quite like the sound of a gunshot, especially when the gun is fired just outside your open bedroom window.

Peter Rabbit has been raiding our garden for some time now, enjoying the radishes and kale and pepper plants with abandon.  Generally, when we spot him, he quickly dives for cover under the large pine tree in our neighbor’s yard.  This morning, he must have been really enjoying his breakfast, because he had not moved when Andy came back out with the .22.  And until that thing went off, neither had I.

Matter-of-factly, Andy glided back into the house and put the .22 away.  So, I ask the next two obvious questions:  “Did you get him” (Of course I did!  Right between the eyes!)  and “Are you going to field dress him before work” (Um, OK).  So I quickly put on my glasses, got my hair out of my eyes and, still bleary eyed, searched the Internet for “How to field dress a rabbit” while fetching a cutting board.

Out onto the back deck we go with the most basic of tools:  a gutting knife, a cutting board and a smart phone.  I begin talking him through the skinning process approaching this whole thing as stoically as possible.  “This is food”, “Everybody used to prep their own meat like this” “Shaye Elliott does it.  I can too.”, etc.  But as Andy is nearing the end of the skinning process, which has taken all of about 3 minutes, my chest tightens, my skin begins to prickle, and the deck begins to spin beneath my feet.  Right about this moment, Andy asks “what’s next”, and based on my response from reading my smart phone, asks for a cleaver.  So I lurch into the house and fumble a cleaver out of the bottom of the knife box, somehow avoiding a nasty cut from the unsheathed knives on top of the cleaver.  I hand him a cleaver through the back door, then fall back inside in the nearest chair as the room spins around me.  Field dressing fail #1:  the nauseated wife.

About 30 seconds later, Andy comes in to announce field dressing fail #2.  I had initially handed him a tempered glass cutting board, which is now in a thousand pieces on the back porch.  Fail #2:  glass cutting boards and cleavers.  Fortunately, that was the only glass cutting board we owned, so that’s not likely to happen again.

What had been a light sprinkle has by now turned into a steady rain as I sweep as much glass as I can off the back deck.  So there will be no roasted rabbit tonight, or rabbit stew.  But the garden is a little safer today, in spite of our failure to fully realize the blessing of wild rabbit.

Web-Mistress

Welcome!

Greetings!  Thanks for stumbling across my little online homestead.  In 2014, my wife, the Web-Mistress, decided that our .1 acres in an upscale Indiana subdivision did not offer enough yard for our growing boys.  Wisely, I agreed to put our house on the market and we were blessed to both sell it and find two acres and a lovely fixer upper in a sleepy little bedroom community in central Indiana.  With the extra space came the ability to pursue a homestead where we are trying to grow chickens, a garden, and some kids (the first two being to feed the third).

This is my attempt to chronicle our adventures and connect with you as we discover what some country living is all about.  There will be some exceptional experiential learning, some failure, and most of all a good time.  So stick around and see what happens.