10/14/2024
A few of you have texted and messaged about our farm and if we made it through ok. We so far have been extremely blessed. Even through a sweltering summer that made our bucks infertile, the eye of hurricane Milton went right over us and everyone is shaken but alive and fed and well.
Others locally have not been so lucky. And hit after hit can make anyone weary. This rescue is hurting and weary. If you are able please donate to them. Anything helps. Even $5 to help buy ice to keep things cool. Every penny is a sprinkle of hope that we all will get through all of this.
I can NOT complain. I do my best not to. But we need financial help right away. We came through the very frightening storm with only minor damage and a lot of clean up. We have wonderful and caring volunteers whose job is made impossible by lack of electricity and water and yet they still come. We have real life friends, not just people you see on TV or the internet, who have lost everything. We have a generator and again, selfless people to come help us make it run. We get impossibly lucky to get a Home Depot manager who is also a farmer running his own generator to water his cattle rather than power his home who allows us an exchange when their policy says otherwise. We have food and a way to prepare it even though trash day sees our cans impossibly full with the contents of our fridge and the farm fridge. We have all (you too!) been trucking along doing the best we can trying to help as many animals and people as possible with no space and few resources. But now we are at a full stop. We are simply out of money. Chelsea won’t want me to tell you this. She hates asking for money and yet that has become 90% of her job at the rescue. We have spent what little we had saved after a slow, hot, and dismal summer on the generator, expensive power cords to make to run, the well company, an electrician, the well company again, the tractor repair. None of this is fun or sexy but it’s the only way we’ve been able to get through these last 5 days. All essential to keep the animals alive. Right up until even that is not enough. I am completely gutted by the loss of Trout, my favorite kitten who we have been diligently feeding every 2-3 hours. A kitten who we took on our tiny vacation. A kitten who just last night escaped her room and came marching out with the big cats thinking she would eat biggie food from a biggie bowl with them. Seemingly gone between 4:30 am and 7 am for no reason other than kittens are hard and fragile. And I’m still keeping it sort of together until I realize that I don’t have one single picture of her to post in her memory here. Not one. We e been too busy keeping everyone else going. So here is her friend/sister Millie on vacation in the Jeep. Better times. And if you see me today and I cry, it’s just that today is a very hard day to be a kitten mom. Goodbye Trout. Mama loved you very much. - Claudia
If you can donate in her memory or just because, we desperately need the help. So many people do and it feels awful to ask…
PayPal - [email protected]
Venmo -
CashApp - $firstladiesfarm
Credit - firstladiesfarm.com
Checks by good old mail.
