After work on Friday I headed straight for my aunt and uncle’s farm in New Jersey. Each time I travel there, I see more former farmland get carved up for new housing. Like we really need all that. I met my aunt Gert in Woodstown, a small town in Salem county, noted for its distinctive Victorian architecture. We made a quick stop at the Acme to pick up a few items. Acme here is a supermarket chain rather than the fictional mail-order supplier of Wile E. Coyote. Well, mainly I picked up stuff, so I wouldn’t be coming empty handed. If my uncle was still mobile, I’d offer to take them out to dinner. But he had a hip replacement last year and his rehabilitation is going very slowly. He’s in his 70s and was already greatly hampered by a stroke he suffered almost 30 years ago. Presently he’s confined to the first floor of the house and gets around with the aid of a walker. My aunt now has to do most of the chores by herself. Animals in her care include ducks, chickens, geese, peacocks, sheep, pygmy goats, two dogs, and a cat. She’s also boarding four of her daughter’s horses, but she comes over to look after them. On Saturday morning a couple of neighbor’s kids visited to help out with cleaning stalls and weeding the garden. That’s one of the best things about South Jersey’s farming community…they’re there for each other when help is needed. There’s usually something they can offer each other in exchange. For example, they have a large field for growing hay. Uncle Bill is no longer able to cut and bale hay himself. So he allows a neighbor to do it for him and they get to keep a portion of the hay in return. This works out because Bill and Gert’s herd is much smaller now than it was 15 years ago. They no longer need that much hay.

The best part of the farm is seeing the animals. Currently they have two bottle-fed baby pygmy goats which love attention. The geese are very ornery this time of year because it’s egg-laying season. They lay eggs and guard them fiercely but they’re too dumb to actually sit on them and so they almost never hatch. Their two dogs are fun. The older one is friendly and likes to kiss and be petted. But she’s very overweight and doesn’t run around much any more. The younger one, on the other hand, is skittish and barks at all strangers. But she warms up to you also once she gets to know you. Finally there’s Kitty. She’s over 10 years old, has cataracts in one eye and has been sneezing her whole life. She must have hay fever…the farm is definitely the wrong place for her. But she doesn’t get too many human visitors and enjoys their presence. Kitty likes being petted and will even follow you a bit if you beckon her to.

After church on Sunday, I went to the Franklin Institute to see Body Worlds. [link] The whole exhibit took me just over an hour and a half to get through. It starts innocuously enough. The ramp which leads to the entrance is lined with a bunch of fun facts about bodies like the number of muscles it takes to make a smile and the miles of blood vessels the body contains. Instead of shocking newcomers with a dissected body right off the bat, they begin gradually immersing visitors with items such as skulls, hands, and feet in display cases. Then they get into the more hard core stuff. The bodies with the skin removed look a bit unreal, yet they are too authentic to be fabrications. If you’ve been to a funeral and seen an embalmed body, you know how they look stiff and somewhat different from what they did when they were alive. It’s pretty much the same difference here, except we’re seeing the bodies inside as well as out. Some bodies given athletic poses to emphasize the muscles, bones, and how they balance all that weight. Others are cut in various ways to show in detail specific body systems. I never knew, for instance, that our nerves look like nothing but white strings. Except when dye is used to highlight something such as the circulatory system, I believe the color of everything shown is genuine. In short, our muscles, bones, and organs are basically the color you’ve seen in your medical textbooks. It was all very fascinating, yet somber and eerie too. I wonder if indeed ALL they plastinates gave written consent to be displayed this way. Presumably consent was obtained from the parents of the dead children on display. One of the most striking poses was the Vascular Family. A special polymer was injected into the circulatory system and then the flesh and bones were removed with caustic chemicals. The result? A man, a woman, and a child sitting on “dad’s” shoulders giving a thumbs up. Except it was nothing but blood vessels. And for those who need to know, yes, penises and testicles were left in place. It's true...the left ball is always larger and lower hanging than the right one.

We also got to see several organs laid side by side to compare healthy and diseased tissue. It is beyond me how anybody who smokes could see those blackened lungs and not quit on the spot! Yet my semi-amorous coworker is one of those people. There are plenty of things worse than being single…being with a smoker is one of them. After Body Worlds I went and visited some permanent exhibits which I have known and loved since childhood, including the giant walk through heart and the Baldwin 60000, an experimental steam locomotive which was donated to the Institute just after it opened. The heart must have shrunk…I don’t remember having to duck under the aorta before.