To Life

Living on the farm makes me realize just what fun it is to be around animals. Some people say it's nice to have a friend that doesn't talk back but I'm not convinced that animals don't.

This morning I woke to my cat, Judah, poking at my head with his paw. This isn't just any poke, it's his special patented Judah Poke. It starts with his paw on my head, but then it just lingers there while he gently inserts his claws into my skull. Just enough to be prickly and hair-raising but not enough to actually hurt. This is not my favorite way to wake up, but I have to say it's effective.

I don't try to fight for long, I roll over and open the door so he can go out. Instead he lays back down on the bed. "What is it you want, stupid cat?!" I don't know (though I have a good idea) and he doesn't say, so I lay back down. Minutes later, Tirzah, the brilliant but slightly crazy sheep dog wanders through the door that I didn't close and whines expressively. I'm almost sure she was saying something about how Ellen and Nathan both abandoned her and she was so glad I was there to rescue her.

I nicely say something about how crazy and annoying she is and how awful Ellen and Nathan are and I can just see the little brain working behind her eyes. "Oh, good. She likes me right now which means that she wants me to jump on her bed." "Don't even think about it" I warn, even though I know the thinking part is too late. She removes her exploratory paw from my bed while her eyes lose their pitiful appeal so fast it was like watching a mask drop; they returned to their usual conniving look. The situation is almost as plain as if she had opened her mouth and said, "Hm, my method just needs a little more tweaking before she'll do anything I want."

During this time, Aidenne has heard a happy voice from the other room so she comes to try her luck at being allowed on my bed. She isn't quite as tactful as Tirzah so she gets two paws on the bed before reluctantly retreating in lieu of my threatening explosion. I finally get up, just to find that all that whining from Tirzah about Ellen leaving her was bosh anyways. Ellen is sitting right there.

After I have my coffee, and get past the jolting overly sweet last gulp where my sugar apparently sat, Ellen and I go to rearrange the cows. This seems to be a favorite farm pastime. It always reminds me of a life size sliding puzzle, where all the pieces are alive. First we bring the whole herd up to the house, then between the two of us we cut out the ones Ellen says aren't supposed to be in the herd, then we chase herd 1 back to where they came from and put newly created herd 2 in their pasture. At least, that's how it's supposed to work.

Instead, one of the cows that were supposed to be cut into herd 2 wasn't with the herd at all. So, we go on a hike to find out if she's dead. After we encompass the two pastures that she was supposed to be in and figure out that the white hump we think is her is just another sheep, we see her, yet another pasture over, all by herself, munching on grass. We don't know for sure how she got in there but we do find that if she is under only a little bit of pressure, instead of going through the gate we opened for her, she is quite capable of jumping the electric fence.

We all mosey on back to the rest of the herd, encourage her to walk through herd 1 to arrive in herd 2 and then help them all go back to their appropriate pastures. Cow arranging completed. I didn't even tell you about the moment I almost got stuck between two saucy mares fighting over two buckets of alfalfa pellets, or the bull that we left on the wrong side of the electric fence he broke through, or coming so close to losing my boot in knee deep mud. I also got to scratch my obnoxious horse, who liked it so much that he looked pleased in spite of himself.

The point is that I love it that my horse is obnoxious, the mares are saucy, the cow is unpredictable, the bull is happier on the other side of the fence, Aidenne has no tact, Tirzah is crazy and smart, and what Judah really wanted this morning was just my attention. I absolutely love the fact that they are alive.

After I scratched Scoshi (my obnoxious horse) I put my head against him for a second to feel Life itself. I feel the warmth of his blood moving, the softness of his fuzzy winter coat, and I can hear his heart and feel his lungs rising and falling, and after a second his skin twitches like I am an overgrown fly he wants to get rid of.

I love it that when it comes right down to it, genius scientists really don't know anything more about what life is than I do. I love it that I can't create it, that I can sometimes preserve it, and I can always marvel at it. Life really and truly is magic.

I know that bad things happen, really bad and pretty often. Just focusing on animals, they eat each other, maim each other, get run over, get sick, get caught in fences, drown, starve, and everything dies in the end. I still maintain that the truly amazing thing is not that life includes pain and ends in death, but that it ever begins or survives in the first place.

Life is stunningly right.

One thing about farming, the animals keep getting hungry, again. Thankfully, on a grass farm, most of the animals only need a fresh pasture every now and then. Except for the pigs. Pigs eat grass but they can't live on it, so our pigs receive a home mixed grain feed that includes milo, oats, sunflower seeds, wheat, and barley.

Ellen and I went to brave the weather and keep our fat pigs from starvation. Not that it was pouring rain, but in this area, if it has looked like rain in the past week then you probably have boot swallowing mud up to your knees. When feeding the pigs, rain, shine or mud, you must understand that you will come back filthy. I don't know how it happens, it just does.

First we had to grind the feed which is the nice part of feeding. There is the risk of developing some lung problems due to breathing large amounts of ground grain. We have to grind the grain because pigs are not known for chewing their food properly and so it tends to come out exactly the way it went in, with no nutritional benefit to the pig.

After grinding the feed, we load it into five gallon buckets and cart it in wheelbarrows to the appropriate pastures. We currently have five separate pig pastures, the big pigs which holds the sows and barrows ready for slaughter, the medium pigs (between 50 and 100lbs), Louie's pen (our young boar), the little pigs (just weaned) who are more often in the wrong pen then their own pen, and Levi's pen.

Of all of these, the medium pigs and the big pigs are the worst because of sheer number. Our pigs are harmless . . . as huge, muscular, animals who have no manners usually are. In other words, they aren't out to kill you but you might feel like it if you see 20 or so 100+ pound animals charging you to get their head in the bucket first. So, we went to feed the medium pigs.

I went in first when the pigs are all still convinced that they are on the verge of death by starvation. Aidenne (a Labrador Retriever) is our pig herder, which means she sometimes makes enough noise in the right direction to momentarily sidetrack the pigs from the humans with the buckets. She helped keep the pigs away from me some. Unfortunately, the opening to a gate is usually the most muddy part of the whole pasture and this one was no exception. The wheelbarrow got momentarily stuck.

As I was leaning into it to keep it moving, my boot got stuck without my foot. So there I am in 8 inches of mud, pushing off my left foot, leaning into a wheelbarrow, with my right foot out of the boot and my knee in the mud. Thankfully, about the time my foot came out of the boot the wheelbarrow moved so that not everything was stuck at once.

Whew! I am now inside the gate. I retrieve my boot and put my foot back into it mud and all. Then, before I can really get going again, there is a complication arising from the melee around me. One of the pigs tried to go under the wheelbarrow, but instead of going between the legs and the wheel, it went inside the U shaped legs.

It didn't fit, and it didn't like it. If it had the good sense to back out everything might still have been okay. But honestly, when have you heard of a starving, stuck pig having good sense? Nope, it barged through with much squealing. In spite of my attempts to hold it upright while the pig worked out it's own salvation, the wheelbarrow dumped.

Now I have one boot full of mud, a crazily barking dog who still thinks she's helping, a tipped wheelbarrow, 20 hungry pigs swarming me, and 15 gallons of pig food being trampled in the mud. Ah, well. That was only the beginning of the day.

So, after that we mostly fed the pigs uneventfully. We managed to feed the big pigs with the tractor and not get it stuck. Although, seeing a tractor sway and slip in the mud is a little unnerving. While we were feeding the big pigs, we noticed that one of their water troughs had somehow been drug to the middle of their mud hole.

Pigs must have mud holes in the summer, because they don't sweat and they will overheat if they don't have mud to cool off in. The Big Pigs' mud hole is maybe 20 yards roundish and about 2 feet deep all the way across. The rain hasn't made it any prettier.

Now we had a choice, we could wade out into 2 feet of thick mud and wrestle a metal, slimy, heavy water trough out of it, or we could wait for the mud to solidify over the next few months and leave the half submerged water trough to become a permanent part of the landscape. Ellen decided we had better go get it now.

In she wades. The mud on the edges is only about a foot deep so that her boots are still useful. It's not long before one boot fills with mud and the water trough is only starting to break the suction. At this point, Ellen ditches the boots and goes back in with just her socks on. She says it's pretty cold. She rocks and wobbles and wrestles the trough to the side where I finally come in useful. We haul it out.

Ah, the joys of an East Texas winter.

On October 3rd Sue and I went on an adventure. We had been invited to participate in the Indian Summer Days event hosted by Hopkins County Museum and Heritage Park. I brought Rowena (my spinning wheel) and Sue came along to look cute. During the day people from Sulphur Springs wandered around enjoying the good weather and seeing sights from history.

Sue and I were a big attraction for people under the age of 12. I thought that I would be spinning for people to watch, but it turned out to be much more fun to let the kids try it themselves. After they spun their own wool thread I cut it off for them to keep as a bracelet. It always amazes me how far a little kindness and patience will go. I offered to let the parents try spinning but they were not as brave as their children. Kudos to the 4 adults who were willing to try something new.

Sue did not enjoy the day as much as I did, she resented being brought from home and treated like an animal. She had her own little pen and she spent the morning pacing it and complaining. I tried to lead her out once but she disliked the lead rope even more than the pen. So far, I hadn't let any children in with her because I wasn't sure how she'd take it.

When I was trying to calm her down about 8 children flocked over and I allowed them to come in. Almost immediately, Sue calmed down, laid down and almost fell asleep. Apparently there is nothing more relaxing than a lot of over excited little kids in a very small area.

The other highlight of Sue's day were the two dogs that visited her. One of them would have willingly chased her and probably tasted her, while the other was only mildly interested. Sue was beside herself with delight until their owners dragged them away. Some pygmy goats visited her but she was too snobby to notice them.

When we returned home, Mandie our guard dog and Sue's most constant companion, actually seemed glad to see Sue return. Sue was rather upset at being in a pen in the back of the truck and when we drove up Mandie immediately climbed up on the tailgate to see what was wrong and say hi. I was always under the impression that Sue adopted Mandie and Mandie tried not to acknowledge Sue's existence. I guess Mandie is sweeter than she likes to let on.