The first day

It was a big cock.
Huge.
Right in front of me.
I wondered if I should avert my eyes.
Would that make him more aggressive?

He puffed out his chest and raised his black feathered wings to protect his brood. You do not mess with a rooster with egg-laying, chick-hatching, sleek feathered red headed hens clucking about in the pen behind him. Even if you're simply trying to get them fed and watered.
No sir, he doesn't care about that old "biting the hand that feeds you" maxim.

I picture drumsticks and scrambled eggs for a moment as I hand my fellow farmer a stick for defense and a bucket of grain for our assigned duty to nourish the chickens and ducks and goats scattered throughout pens and hoop houses around the farm.

I want to get back to the vegetables.
Not that I don't like animals. I don't love them as babies but I don't always picture them simply as decorations for my dinner plate. I just like vegetables better. I always think of them as edible decorations for my dinner (and lunch) plate and don't feel bad about it. Sure you have to feed and water and nourish them too, but the return is far greater than the input in my salad-obsessed opinion.

Down on my bare knees, boots filling with mulched hardwood, fingernails ragged and dirty. I drop two kernels of dried corn into chiseled holes (no really, we used a chisel). One white bean into parallel rows between the three rows of corn kernels. No squash in this bed to complete the companion planting trifecta, but there are blossoming zucchini nearby to cheer the seedlings on.

I snap prickly cucumbers off their stems and pile them high in the wheelbarrow then later stack a few of them with their squashy mates on the passenger seat of my car for the drive home. The freeways feel superfluous compared to the mulched rows, the parking lots much dirtier than the dust in the creases of my knuckles from the pens.

My first day of interning at an organic sustainable scrappy little start up farm in San Diego was full of sun, seeds, and the constant chatter of free range critters. Of cooling ocean breezes and the scent of wet mud and basil. Towering sunflowers bowing to dry earth and nightshade flowers trumpeting poisonous beauty from crawling vines.

My fingers aren't yet calloused and dirty enough.
My veggie basket not yet filled.
I want more.

Even if I do have to deal with cocks.