Category: Animals

She Throws Up Her Hands

The grass these days stays wet enough for frogs to migrate from the water into the fields. I pull on tall rubber boots to move the sheep to new, deep pasture. Right now they live in a sheep tractor of our invention, a pen on wooden skids, which we pull forward every few hours. The ewes move towards the front and start snatching mouthfuls as fresh grass appears under their feet. They are safe and content.

It seems tedious, moving the sheep so often, but I relish the job. Here is one thing I can do. Among all the ways I fumble through tough parenting or veterinary cases or marriage moments or attempts at being a strong and kind citizen in discouraging times, here is one easy win.

I walk out into the dew-soaked field, while Rhubarb and Parsnip bleat their greetings. The ewes are small and fuzzy since I sheared them two weeks ago, and they lean their shoulders into my scratching fingers. I lift the water bucket over their fence panel. Taking one dog leash in each hand—each leash snapped to one bottom corner of the pen—I set my feet walking backwards. There. I have made two someones completely happy.

As I walk down towards the house, a frog darts between grass tufts. Aha! I think. Now I can make two more happy someones when I show this frog to the kids. I bend and grab. Three times, missing. This frog zigzags fast. On a fourth try, my wet hands trap the frog from front and behind, and I lift her in my palm. She is stunning—bright green with glistening dark spots.

As I raise my hand cupped over her, I see that she is flattening her body against my skin. Then, she flings both front legs over her head, palms up. I see fear. This gesture is universal—don’t hurt me. It is an instinctive plea. My heart lurches as I realize that this frog is at my mercy, and seems—at some level—to know it.

“Oh no I’m sorry it’s okay you’re okay. I’m so sorry.”

All thought of showing the kids vanishes as I lower the frog back onto the ground, where she crouches. Arms over her head, her toes splayed to shield her eyes.

For one moment, I could be the cop with the gun, the ICE agent taking away a child, the young man pinning a younger woman. Is this too big a leap? Power and empathy affect our actions in ways that translate across many moments, many opportunities for mercy.

As I back away, the frog places her front toes on the ground and launches into the grass, immediately invisible. She stays with me, though. I look up ‘green frog with spots’ and decide she is a northern leopard frog. I can find no image of a frog cowering under its hands, except the one burned in my brain.

Every time I move the sheep, I look for the leopard frog. Maybe I have a strange urge to apologize again. To replace my image of the frightened frog with a calm image, maybe a photo of her poised under a grass tuft. I don’t really need to see her. I am just learning to observe the beauty of other lives without messing with them.

 

In Which the Sheep Get Naked

This photo of me is evidence against a picture being worth a thousand words. In this photo, I appear relaxed and competent. In control. I am none of those. Within ninety seconds of this photo, the photographer has to drop the camera and rescue me, as I realize that my arms are too short to reach the hind end of the wiggling sheep. So this photo simply creates a debt requiring nearly a thousand words to correct it.

It is almost true that the shearing begins with me looking skillful and the ewe looking docile. I am prepared. I have watched a man shear a sheep at Plumpton College, East Sussex, UK, gentle in both his British accent and his handling techniques. He shears the sheep in less than five minutes. By my seventh viewing, I am standing beside my computer, pantomiming his movements, learning the choreography I need to perform by this evening. When the cat wanders over, I set her on her rump, tuck her right foreleg behind mine, and shear her brisket with imaginary clippers.

I arrange things in the barn. Plug in the clippers. Oil them. Flip the switch. They are much louder and heavier than they looked on the video. To get the feel, I lift my pant leg and run them up my shin. They buzz on my skin. Fiddling with the angle, I trim my winter-long leg hairs.

When Andrew gets home, I am ready. We wrangle a reluctant Rhubarb from the pen. I inform Andrew that I will hold her and shear her, as this approach will give me the best access for efficiency.

“Then what will I do?”

“Take pictures,” I say.

All I need is to get Rhubarb alongside my legs, facing my right. Then, while I turn her nose towards her side with my right hand, I lean over her, reach my left hand under her belly for her right hind leg, and…I cannot reach her leg. The year’s worth of wool makes her too rotund to get my arms around her in any direction. I grunt around on the mess of woolly sheep for a minute, then Andrew helps. When Rhubarb leans quietly against my legs, Andrew hands me the clippers. He stands back and takes the photo.

My arms feel too short and weak. My back seizes within minutes. I nick her skin, once when she wiggles and once when she doesn’t. Trying to protect her skin, I shear off the pad of my left ring fingertip, run down to the house, drip blood across the kitchen floor, get woozy in the bathroom while Stella cries because she wants to see it before I bandage it, reassure her with my head between my knees, bandage it, and run back to keep shearing before I lose my nerve because there is our sheep with a third of her fleece dangling from her, waiting on her rump in Andrew’s arms.

None of my memorized choreography works for me. I realize that a smallish woman with large sheep cannot expect to work the same moves as a large man with a smallish sheep and untold hours of experience. Kneeling beside Rhubarb, I talk us through it. “You’ll feel so much better afterwards. Just a little more, then this wool will be gone. You will be just you.” Ha, I think. Ewe.

After an undisclosable amount of time in the menacing clipper drone, we all three stand, panting. Rhubarb—naked—rejoins Parsnip, who now looks enormous. My adrenaline dissolves, and I could fall asleep in our late supper of leftover spaghetti. Parsnip will wait until tomorrow.

The next day, I find another tutorial—How to Shear a Sheep in 20 Steps—similarly impossible looking, but better matching my ergonomic realities. We handle Parsnip more smoothly, despite her more feisty behavior. The shears balance better in my hand. I swear only once, at a single nick on her leg, and sustain no injuries myself. In half the previous time, Parsnip is nibbling hay while Rhubarb sniffs her in disbelief.

Watching them, I feel that disbelief too. We did it. The photo is not a complete deception; it is worth something. It is a reminder for me. The story is always more messy than a single frame can describe. Our thousand words are more complicated and compelling, more engaging and relatable, than one glance at someone’s life. It is always worth listening.

Note: This is the wool of one sheep. One.

 

Snow and the Painted Ladies

Thirty-nine inches of snow fell one day in March, towering into drifts along our house and over the fence. Inside, I had gone dormant, curled into smallness and slowing myself protectively. The blizzard, though, dragged me outside. Wind blew the snow into our eyebrows. Crusts froze on our hats and shoulders, but shoveling warmed us. It felt good to have something to fling ourselves against, together.

We started by the road and worked our way towards the well-buried cars. One foot after breakfast. One foot after lunch. Another foot late afternoon. Always revisiting the pile left by plows along the road. Each time we lifted the snow higher at the edges. In that blizzard, and the next few snows, adventure leavened the work.

March ended, though, with snow on the ground, less like a lamb and more like a dead fish. April’s snows have been a series of small betrayals, echoing my experiences in the past several months. Quiet months. I have been quietly resting and working.

At work yesterday, I euthanized eight animals. I took one dog’s shiny black face in my hands before I pushed the syringe. She released her head to me. My thumbs stroked her ears. Good dog. Sweet baby.

When someone is dead, they are dead. The excruciating effort of finding life after death is for the living, not the dead. Easter brings one of my favorite seasons because the old stories seem fresh; there is awakening and unfolding. Even the large snow patches do not stop water from rushing down the ditches. Buds fatten on grey branches. The hens and ducks race around outside again, pecking and dabbling. My legs exalt in striding between the barns unhindered.

Once last spring, I followed a hen to her hidden nest in the barn. As she crooned and postured, I spent twenty minutes with my camera focused on her butt fluff, waiting to capture the shiny wet egg escaping her body. I am that kind of optimist. But she decided to wait for more privacy to reveal her daily miracle.

This morning I am tending the improbable butterflies. A gift. Over thirty painted ladies, emerged from their chrysalides. Many of them sit folded. They seem too still. I refresh the cotton balls in honey water and move them to a warmer spot. I watch the painted ladies open and close and stagger over each other to find sweetness, uncoil a proboscis. I wonder if they will die the moment we release them, or fly off in subtle, fragile glory—allowing us our illusions.

More likely, they will do neither. They will remain—motionless in the cold spring—poised at the edge of death and life. And we will continue to wonder.

 

 

Flight Distance

Sunlight soaks my old red sweatshirt, melting me into the sofa. One degree outside, but I close my eyes and could be back on Andros Island, Bahamas. Minus the biting insects. Minus the salty breeze and bathing suit that spent the week damp, never out of the water long enough to dry.

We flew over one-thousand miles South to the Bahamas for Gascho family Christmas. Distancing ourselves from cold for a few days. For the last leg, a six-seater, 1976 Piper lifted us to Andros Island, with Sam in the co-pilot seat.

Fresh Creek—a briny estuary—surrounded the yellow rental house with its blue spiral staircase up to our bedroom. Fish schooled under the house. Shells littered the sandy bottom, visible through crystal water. A rope swing lured the kids to kayak to the nearby mangrove.

Surrounded by heat, I remembered that I have never outgrown flopping around in water. At every chance, I swam. The salt water held me so I could roll onto my back and loosen my muscles and float. I swam from the deck into the creek, from the beach into the ocean. With the kids and alone. In blue holes hundreds of feet deep. Over coral reefs near the surface.

Out on the reefs, a snorkel and mask made the surface disappear. Electric blue fish slipped behind purple fans of coral. Triangular angel fish wove among snub-nosed parrot fish. A big-eyed squirrelfish peeked comically from below brain coral, which looks like it sounds. I swam towards a three-foot long, torpedo-shaped fish. Close enough to see prominent teeth. My mind said, “big” and “silver” and “predator.” I swam just close enough to align our bodies, for size. Not close enough that it cared. Not close enough to chase it away.

Everyone has a flight distance. Move within that invisible boundary, and they will move away, regardless of your intention. The flight response—and the distance that provokes it—is instinctual. And learned.

As I swam up to the boat, our guide joined me and said, “I was watching your face with that barracuda.”

“That big guy?” My mind had not actually said, “Barracuda.”

“Yep. I was waiting for your eyes to get big, but your face stayed relaxed. If your arms had gone all stiff and your eye wide, I knew we had problems. But you were calm.”

I was calm because I was underwater, being held. Maybe I would have been wiser to name and recognize the possible threat. Or maybe I was safer not naming it. My own fear playing through my mind and body would have been more dangerous than the rarely aggressive barracuda. Our flight distance is instinctual and learned.

The last morning on Andros, I woke in the grey light. Put on my suit. Slipped into a cool, choppy Fresh Creek. Swam across to the southwest edge of mangroves and waited for sunrise. The pink-gold clouds welcomed me—illuminated, cumulus. I was ready to leave for our farm and Upstate New York’s below-zero temperatures, where the snow will hold me until spring.

Home now, we plunge into frozen water powder, backstroking angels on the ground. Sunlight on snow refracts into Bahamas-worthy colors. There are ripples and waves. Sleds are our kayaks. At noon, I need sunglasses to hike our hill—a great dune of snow—and the evening blues of sky and snow echo the Caribbean.

 

Grass on my Pajamas

Something about using our giant weed eater makes me feel competent. It is easy to use, really. I do not even need to wield it with my arms, since it rides on a harness-belt thing. I am sporting a safety-first helmet with attached face shield and ear covers. My right index finger holds the safety trigger while my thumb revs the motor. Grass flies, flecking my thin flannel pants. I am in my pajamas.

I am moving our sheep to fresh pasture. Rhubarb and Parsnip, our two ewes, announced their disdain for the current pasture by escaping and nearly joining the kids in the car on their way to school. Unable to secure the sheep long enough to change into jeans, I am wearing my softest clothes. The weed eater zips a line though tall grass for the electronet fence. I move the white netting, then drag their little shelter, freshen the water, rattle some grain to entice them inside. All this before coffee.

Later, folding laundry after coffee, I notice that my socks say Darn Tough, which seems reassuring. I am glad to have these on hand. There is no promise of each next day being the same as this one, with problems I can solve.

In the evening, I scoop chicken feed into a bucket, but on my way to feed the hens, I am arrested by the ducks. Their gabbling and waddling captivates me—holds me captive—for fifteen minutes, which I do not regret, against the orange-for-now trees and dry cornstalks.

The ducks never let me touch them, but the hens relish a good scratch. They croon and sidle up to me, then hunker down, lifting their shoulders and tapping their feet. It is their receiving-a-rooster posture, so I know it is not a display of specific affection for me. But I pretend it is.

After chores, after supper, Stella and I return outside in time for waves of wild geese to pass over our heads. Hundreds of geese fill us with their brassy calls, coming across our field, our house, towards our neighbor’s large pond and sloped field, where they will cover the ground tonight. Among the raucous noise, Stella is yelling, “Over there! On that side! So much geese. So so much!” Then only four geese fly quiet and close overhead. We echo their silence and hear the rhythmic squeak of their wings.

This one day does not make much of a story. There is no real plot, just characters and—when all goes well—mostly repetition of other days. Tomorrow morning, the kids will resist crawling out of bed. The animals will need to be fed. Some days, though, carry too many stories, and I need those Darn Tough socks.

Today I have the grass on my pajamas, the hen feathers under my fingers, my six-year-old’s arms spread to the sky in rapture—so much.