Dark, Cold and Snowy in New York

Wanted to collect my thoughts before I get to work. Saturday mornings on the farm are wonderful. I forget the alarm clock and let my internal one wake me up. Today it was 5:30. I made coffee and played with my trailer cats before coming out to the barn. Since I don't hear anyone screaming for their bottle yet I am going to sneak a few minutes at the keyboard. I have to get a Premier milk bucket with nipples. I can leave it hanging for the lambs while I am at work. Funny how I forget that it takes a few days for things to come after I order them. Tonya slept in the barn with the sheep last night. Matt went out to check on her and she had bedded herself down with the flock. I am worried about those bad joints in the damp air but Matt said to leave her. Today is St. Patrick's Day. I used to go to the parade in NYC and just loved watching all the banners go by, displaying a particular area's patron saint. It was ethnic overload and such a happy time...but NYC is 250 miles away Matt says...and I can bearly leave the farm for 8 hours to work everyday. Matt is Irish, as he grew up in Newark where every block had it's ethnic identity cleary defined and was proud of it. I grew up in a rural area - yes, in the 1950's and 60's 35 miles from Manhattan was still rural - and just thought of myself as American with a grandfather who talked funny. We sang Happy Birthday in Swedish and ate a lot of fish, meatballs and funny crisp bread at Christmas, and drove to Brooklyn a lot, but I didn't think too much of it until later. My Finnish grandmother took me on a very expansive six week trip to Denmark, Sweden and Finland, where I didn't hear English spoken the whole time, and where I got my first kiss from a Finnish pig farmer named Matti Sarkiyarvi. He was absolutely gorgeous and 25 years old!!! I was 13!!! We didn't make much conversation, though, and I was anxious to get back to the States to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium. What a great cultural experience that was, but totally wasted on me at the time. Now I wish I had listened to more personal stories about the old country. Like the time my Opa and his teenage friends hauled a nasty neighbor's wagon up into a tree and left it there. Or when they peed on his windows so it would freeze and stay there. I am trying to find out more about theire lives now but the Scandies are all dead...too late for first person history! I know they were all farmers and when they got to this country they wanted nothing to do with farming and settled in Brooklyn. They became craftsmen and domestics and liked living in the city. I listened to some folks at work talking about their party/drinking plans this weekend. Matt says if you want to celebrate the life of St. Patrick you should go to church not the bar. After all, he did bring Christianity to Ireland, and probably wasn't a drinker.