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.