Old friends

It's Wednesday. I'm glad I've arranged to take Friday off this week. I'll be packing Crow and Hudson into the car after work on Thursday, and taking off for the farm. It can't come soon enough for me. I've had a very hard couple of weeks, for many reasons. Though I have dealt fairly well with the blows, they came fast and furiously, and I'm tired from dodging, darting, and dealing. I want to sit, to knit, to read, and to move among all my many old friends at the farm. Caring, sharing, touching my many friends - the many dogs, the cats, the horses, and donkeys, and cows, the very trees themselves - recharges and rejuvenates me in ways not available to me in my office. No matter how productive or rewarding my day at work may be, it never plugs me in to the things that truly matter the way time at the farm does.

Picture me there, with my good friend, Suzanne, surrounded by all my old friends, walking in the woods with Crow and Hudson, currying Joseph, the 34 year old Thoroughbred gelding, sharing those awful, orange-yellow circus peanut candies with the cows and the pigs. It's a wonder they don't start to glow in the dark!

As I walk up to the barn, I remember all the old friends who wait for me there; some are memories, warm and comforting; some still with us, with their bodies still youthful; all of them offering their own form of welcome and friendship.


There have been so many through the years, even though the barn itself is new, the aisles seem to echo with them. Jeremy, the black bull, whose bellow I could feel through my back as I lay on the earth that first Easter visit to the farm in 1998. Awake early, long before my husband and my friends, I had walked to the edge of the cow pasture and sat myself down on the dewy grass. After watching the cows peacefully grazing, I'd lain down next to the fence, watching the sky above, and the birds flying over, when I suddenly became aware that I could feel the cows' footfalls faintly in my body, the ground carrying the vibration, sharing it with me. Cool,I thought. But when Jeremy extended his neck and let out a deep bellow that echoed over the hills, and I realized I could actually feel this bellow transmitted through the earth, resonating through me, I was transported. Jeepers, the cranky paint, who might welcome you in one instant and take a swipe at you the next. Carson, grandma dog and matriarch, who slowly became my dear friend through the years, who honored me once with her trust when she chose to stay in my home while Suzanne went out, yet again, for another book signing. This was no small thing, for Carson to tell Suzanne to go on without her, and that she would be comfortable and safe, waiting at home with me and her grandkids.


And, perhaps most of all, Otter, mama to both Crow and Hudson, and then grandma dog, great-grandma dog, and even great great grandma before she chose to go, whose friendship came to mean so very much to me that I mourned her passing as deeply as I have ever mourned. Vali, and Grizzly, Banni and Chili, Bee, and so many more, too many to name, whose friendship once touched our lives so profoundly while they walked with us, whose spirits now blanket the farm with an abiding connection, caring, and love.


And every year, there is new life. Right now, one of the dogs is expecting a litter. Last year's calves are growing out, and new calves will come. Maybe this is why this place restores me like no other, because nowhere else that I spend time is the cycle of life so apparent, so steady, such an enveloping stream that lets me ship my oars and simply travel where life intends to take me.