A dear friend recently wrote me about
how “divine” my life sounded. I burst out laughing.
My life on most days consists in the
main of dealing with shit: stepping in it, observing it fall, trying
to get out of the way of it falling, cleaning it out of nesting boxes
with my bare hands, sweeping it up from goat barns and yards with my bare hands, raking it up around the land, soaking it in
water buckets, carrying it to a compost pile, dumping it in,
spreading it around, covering it well with lots of straw to insulate
it while it breaks down, and then cleaning said buckets. Three to
six months later I will return to that compost pile and dig up the
real black gold: perfect, natural nourishment for my soil.
On any given day I will deal with/clean
up/process at least two if not three kinds of animal shit. Goat and
chicken is daily; human, at the moment, is weekly; mouse, rat and
rabbit is far too often for my preference.
The down side of this is not actually
the shit, per se. Shit is just fertilizer that hasn't fulfilled its
potential yet. As a farmer, concerned both with the cleanliness of
our animals' homes and with nourishing our soil, I know that
regularly dealing with shit is not only part of the package but is
actually a diamond in the rough. That doesn't make it smell any
better. But the truth is, the olfactory downside of shit is not
shit, but urine. Urine is the stuff that really stinks, far, far,
far worse than poop, and the two unfortunately tend to go together.
Things you never knew you needed to know.
The upside of my life spent dealing
with shit is that the literal has, to some extent, replaced the
metaphoric. Literal shit might actually produce new life one day,
even food. The metaphoric kind...I've yet to figure out the purpose
of the metaphoric kind. If only my literal adventures in shit had
completely replaced my metaphoric adventures, my life might indeed
approach a kind of divinity.
Certainly there is divinity in taking
what is considered detritus, something hated, even feared, something
to be avoided at all costs, and caring for it just enough that it can
soon, in turn, produce new life. At the end of my work day, when my
clothes and pores and hair reek of goat poop, and for all our hard
work, the land still appears covered in little black marbles, it can
be challenging to see that divinity. “I'm a writer, damnit!” I
shout at no one in particular. “Not a farmer!”
The truth is I'm both, and some days, I
wish that weren't that case.
If I didn't live in a rural area, any physician examining
me would immediately refer me to the police as a victim of domestic
violence. The blue and purple bruises, the bloodied scrapes,
inexplicable scratches, the holes in my skin, the swelling, the
stings, the aches I wake with and can no longer identify. It is
accurate to call the cause domestic violence, though it's hardly the
kind usually associated with that phrase. The members of my family
beating up on me are caprine and avian and sometimes insectoid. My
husband is a sweetheart and a pacifist who would sooner cut off his
own arm than raise it against another person.
Most of the injuries come from
Buffy-the-Farmer-Slayer, our oldest rooster, and Red Wing, our alpha
dairy goat. Buffy follows in the tradition of Rocky, our first
rooster, who would challenge me about once a month, and then after I
caught him and held him for a while, either soothingly stroking him
or menacingly whispering “coq au vin” in what I think were his
ears, would leave me alone for a month. No such luck with Buffy.
Buffy and I go through the same ridiculous ritual almost every day.
I don't ever like to hurt our animals, but I will firmly—albeit
gently—kick Buffy away from me as we battle. I've also taken to
shouting at him in a deep voice, “NO! I'm ALPHA! Coq au vin!”
Unlike Rocky, Buffy doesn't speak
French, so he is consistently unimpressed with my attempts to
convince him his bad behavior will have adverse consequences to his
quality of life, not to mention shorten its duration. In addition to
Buffy, we have two other, younger roosters, who have not yet begun
attacking me. I suspect soon we will be offering a dear friend of
ours some winter dinners.
Red Wing's attacks are more difficult
to explain. Unlike her mother and aunt, Red was our first goat to
grow up with horns. Many dairy goat keepers will tell you this is a
mistake, that the short-term pain the baby goat endures through the
disbudding process is far preferable to the injuries horned goats can
inflict on one another and their human companions. But our goats
live in a very wild place, one wherein their horns may one day prove
their last line of defense against a predator. It's not much of a
defense, as we recently learned the hard way, but it is in our
opinion better than nothing.
Red's attacks can be explained a number
of ways: as the new Alpha female she may be trying to prove
dominance over me, the only other female member of “the herd” yet
to submit to her authority. It could be that she just wants
attention—the affectionate back rubs and shoulder massages I
usually reserve for her mother and aunt. Or it could be that she
wants to play in the manner common to goats, and many animals, which
is to say, through mock-combat designed to strengthen both parties.
I have no idea what her intentions are, despite more than two years
spent studying her. What I do know is that she can and does cause me
a lot of injury and pain with her horns when I'm able to stop her or
catch her; I do not want to think about the damage she would do to me
if I failed to stop her.
My husband is never attacked by Red
Wing or Buffy. To say that this is irritating is putting it mildly,
but there are a lot of reasons for this—not all of them sexist—so
I've learned to just roll with it. But there are days, or evenings,
like the other night, when I find myself shouting aloud, “why does
everything on this farm HATE ME?!?!?” It doesn't, they don't, of
course, and I know that. I just felt sorry for myself, and wanted
the universe to pat me on the shoulder and say, “I know, honey.
Sucks, doesn't it?”
I suspect a philosopher, or a
romantic—one who has never farmed—could easily and quite
poetically find the divinity in all of this. I have tendencies towards all three, but honestly, I'm struggling.
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