Kissing Jokers

It’s 9pm now and still completely light out, dinner is over, and I wring the dishcloth one final time.  The hot water heater is on its last sparks and now offers either lukewarm water or scalding hot lava.  The plumber comes later this week.  I pour myself a cup of raspberry tea.  We’ve decided to play a hand or two with our 20-year-old cards.

I’m not a card shark, but I can shuffle.  I can make a bridge with the cards after I shuffle, and I’m almost always the dealer.  Our two decks of red Bicycle cards are so old they practically shuffle themselves.

We’re usually too exhausted to play cards in the summer, but this year His Majesty is here before his last year of college and we have been enjoying a game together more nights than not.  The game is Shanghai, a series of gin rummy games of sets and runs that my grandparents played and I’ve played my entire life.  His Majesty has also played his entire life — 22 years — and he knows all the idiosyncratic home-grown rules, but he can’t shuffle worth a dern.  He has huge hands.  A basketball and guitar playing dream come true, the Bearded One has long said.

But they’re awkward with a deck of cards.  He’s on the couch mindlessly practicing now.  Shuffling’s one of those things you just have to do a million times ’til you can do it in your sleep.

I stroll into the living room and observe for a brief moment or two.  His Majesty has been staining deck joists all week, and his fingernails show it.  During last night’s game, he told us about his recent dreams of needing to finish staining huge piles of lumber.

“What is the problem here?” I ponder out loud, as the cards in his large hands stick together and collapse.

“You’re watching,” says His Majesty, and grins.

“Let’s play,” I say.

The Bearded One is already at the kitchen table, working on jam labels.  Our oldest daughter is getting married on August 24 and I am making 200 jars of jam for guest gifts.  The labels are the Bearded One’s job.

His other wedding job is creating the cedar arch the happy couple will be married under, including the logistics of transport to and assembly in Seattle.

His Majesty places the cards in the middle of the round table and sits down in the rocker to my right, his usual seat.  I’m between two tired guys.

The Bearded One moves the label project onto the empty fourth chair and sips his Coke.  A jar of 24 wishbones is the only thing left on the table, our tribute to last year’s meat birds.

This year’s 60 Cornish Rock broiler chicks will be born tomorrow down in Oregon, and shipped to us two days later, on Thursday.  The brooder is ready, as is the entire meat bird pen.

The Bearded One is worn out, but is rousing himself for the sake of competition.

“Ninety nine percent of good shuffling,” I say, splitting the double deck, “is setting them up right.  It’s all positioning.”  I begin the shuffle and thank goodness, it works, each of the 104 cards falling into place.

“Make the bridge, make the bridge,” chants the Bearded One, and I oblige, cupping my hands so the arched cards fall down over each other into a neat stack.  The men applaud.

“What’s the game?” asks His Majesty.

“Three sets,” says the Bearded One, and I groan.  I hate three sets and the Bearded One knows it.  This is blatant flirting.

“Two runs,” says His Majesty, as he always says.

“Two sets and a run,” I say.  The men agree, as they must, and that’s that.  I deal 10 cards to each of us, snapping each card into place, and then give the Bearded One an additional card.  “And the Bearded One gets the discard,” I say, as we each fan out our cards.

Kissing jokers is an idiosyncratic rule descended from my grandfather, one of our many crazy rules, and I kiss the single joker I’m dealt.  The poor, joker-less Bearded One growls.  Literally.

Then His Majesty, who has always been lucky, smiles and kisses his wild card, too.  He’s got a good hand.  No poker face at all.  He’ll be shuffling in no time.

A Popcorn Ceiling

For five years we’ve seen and heard them almost daily.  Hansel is now 9, Gretel is 7, and Batman, who wasn’t yet born when they moved in, just turned 5.  They have a fort on the property line, gather the eggs for us some days, and love Ruby and Garfield.  We’ve had many good-byes this week.  We’ve exchanged gifts and made many promises to visit, but the fact remains — they’re moving and after today, I won’t hear them playing anymore.

So I transplant young cabbages, being very careful with the delicate roots, listen to distant moving van sounds, and think on the farmlet.  The change.  A part of the farmlet is leaving.  Can life here ever be as rich?

It’s late afternoon when Gretel and Batman come over to return one last egg carton, and have one last jump on the trampoline.  “I’ll come back when I’m nine!” says Gretel to the Bearded One and me.  “And I’m TEN!”  Batman pounces on the number and smiles wide as he jumps with his sister.

“Noooo, I will always be older than you,” says Gretel.

“You can come back when you’re 100,” says the Bearded One to Batman.

“A HUNDRED!” Batman shouts with glee.

“If we live that long,” Gretel says.

“You’ll be 103,” says the Bearded One, but Gretel is wicked smart.  “102!” she says.

“Oh, yeah,” says the Bearded One, as she bounces high above his head.

Time and space operate differently for the very young.  They transplant easier.  I am more traumatized by this move than either of these children.  The parents have promised to bring the kids by occasionally, for eggs and trampoline time.  Still, it’s their regular presence I’m already missing — the pleasant, entertaining kid sounds coming through the woods.  They’re like grandkids.

“We better get home,” says Gretel, and just like that Batman obeys and the two children scramble to the stump stairs the Bearded One made for them.  It’s time to say good-bye.

The Bearded One asks Gretel about the new house.  They call it the Harbor House.  Has she been there?  What does she think of it?

At first she appears at a loss, and I’m not sure if she’s been there or not.  What does she actually know about the new house?

The answer eludes her for the time it takes Batman to say good-bye to Ruby the dog.  “Bye bye Woobie,” he says, and I’m so charmed and moved that all I can do is examine my dirty fingernails.

Gretel has thought of something.  “The new house,” she says while looking distinctly baffled, “has a popcorn ceiling.”

What strange new world is this?

They race down the driveway and are gone.  Less than an hour later, their last car leaves and we wave to the entire family from the deck.

And then it’s quiet.  Their home is empty and is suddenly just a house.  I can feel the hole.

“What makes a house a home?” I ask the Bearded One, who stands at the kitchen sink eating a muffin.

“It’s the ‘OME’,” he says, with his best British accent, then pauses for dramatic effect as he paraphrases the answer — “Oh…ME.”

“Yes,” I smile all the way to my roots, “You.”

Not the Weaver

I am on my knees beside a half-wild 150-pound goat plucking the cashmere from his hide.  With my pronged comb, I coax the mix of fluff and strands, tugging the silky lengths, rolling it like cotton candy.  Eventually a clump pulls free, I admire it and tell Sage how gorgeous he is, then drop the exquisite puff into a 5-gallon bucket.

This is the preferred method for cashmere Pygoras, so as not to mix the shorter and courser guard hairs into the fine silvery cashmere.  Sage loves it.

And I love his musky smell, his curling lips, and his long straight beard.  I love his little bushy tail that gives away his feelings just like a dog’s, and I love his hooves, which are small, round pegs that trot and prance and are so strong they can grip the side of a mountain like pliers.

Sage points to an itchy spot on his back with his horn tip, and I stroke it with the comb.  The skin is dry but there are no lice at all, the scourge of goats.  We watch that closely.  Sage rolls his eyes with pleasure.

Pearl stands patiently with LaLa waiting her turn.  She is shedding a bit later than her brother Sage.  Her fleece is pure white, Sage’s is tan, and LaLa is black mohair.  His fleece is clumpier and more matted and doesn’t brush, so the Bearded One successfully introduced him to little scissors this week.

Goats are one of the most beautiful creatures on the planet, I think as I bury my hands in the now full, 5-gallon bucket of raw cashmere fleece.  Two weeks’ worth.

Then I stand, pick up the bucket, and trudge down the hill from the barn, past the hoophouse where cabbages and broccoli desperately cry out to be transplanted,

and up to the house where the next step looms.  Literally.  I want to learn to card and spin.  To use a loom.  I’m sure I do.  I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now.

I clean my boots with the hose and carry the bucket inside and upstairs to the work table where I have everything set up.  Here is the fleece.  Here are the carding brushes on this nice flowery tablecloth.  Here is the computer with a You Tube “How To Card Fleece” video ready to go.  And I am frozen.  I can’t do it.

Who is making me turn this fleece into yarn, anyway?  I look around and see no one.  The Bearded One is outside working on the roof of the meat bird pen.  Sixty Cornish Rock chicks — meat birds — will arrive at the post office in two weeks, and we are getting ready.  Or at least he is.

Then I have a deja vu moment.  I ran into this same wall last year, didn’t I?  I keep doing this to myself of my own free will, which is kind of insane.  I’m the same person I was last year, and I still don’t want to card and spin.  Maybe I really don’t have to.

I turn to the computer and close the video without ever having opened it.  And then I type an email to a Seattle spinner who expressed a lot of interest in the fleece a month ago, and who even offered to pay for some of it, especially Pearl’s.  But money is complicated and I’m not a fan.   Instead, I plead with her now to just take all of it.  I attach a picture of the fleece so she’ll know what she’s getting into.

Within a half hour she squeals with delight through cyber space, “EEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!  YES!  That would be lovely!  It looks wonderful, and I promise to give it TONS of love!  Thank you so much!  I’ll be sure to send updates on what I make with it!  I can’t wait to see what it wants to be!”

I read her response and I, too, squeal with joy, and I am happily stuffing the gigantic pile of fleece into a box to mail when the Bearded One comes in.

“It’s like an entire goat!” he says, smiling.

I need to explain.  “I literally set the table,” I say, gesturing upstairs.  “I’ve nurtured these goats all year and you’ve patiently trained them to be brushed.  I’m not lazy, but it’s time to card and spin and I keep putting it off.  You’ve seen me.”

He nods.  His eyes show that he is really laughing inside, but I don’t care.  I am at epiphany here.

“There is someone right for every task in the universe,” I say.  I look at the Bearded One, then point with my eyes to the itchy place on my back.  Scratch me.

“You are the Goat Grower,” he says.  “Not the Weaver.”

I laugh out loud with delight and relief — he knows me so dang well — and trot back to finish boxing up the fleece for Seattle.

Something in the Woods

Ruby is doing that growling thing again.  It’s not her normal grumble at all.  She’s all frizzed up as she stands on the deck with an aggressive posture.  She lifts her nose to sniff the air with a purpose.  Something is in the woods.  Something new.

All ten hens are screaming bloody murder at once.  They usually freeze and go silent.  This is different.

The goats are in the same alert place.  All three run in wild circles and stop on some cue to stare in the same direction for long seconds.  Pearl, the head goat, leaps up onto our concrete goat mountain and stamps her foot repeatedly.  Wait a second — has anyone seen the cat?  Where is Garfield?

MamaRed, an oversized and rusty-colored coyote we spot occasionally on the road, is always suspect, because she’s always around.  We worked on coyote-proofing the fencing for years because of the coyotes.  The cougar that killed a goat about a mile from here is heavy on our mind.  That’s been a couple of weeks ago.  We don’t really worry about the bears.

But it makes us wonder about Hansel, Gretel and Batman.  They’re out in the woods.

The kids are 9, 7 and 5-years-old, they have a fort in the forest between our neighboring houses and they like to spy on us.  We see their bright red shirts darting from bush to bush, and hear them giggling as they watch our 22-year-old son build a new back deck.  They know they are welcome on our trails.

“They’re just now getting into the woods and we’re moving,” their mom told me this week, when I told her about the mysterious noises around here and how Sage the goat had actually growled.  Then I stopped in my tracks.  “Moving?”

“At the end of the month.  To save money.  It’s not our first choice, believe me.”

I am stricken.  We love these kids.

The next day, Hansel and Gretel appear at our front door to return an egg carton.  They are here saying goodbye, or at least one of many goodbyes, and I get them all to myself since the Bearded One and His Majesty have gone to Home Depot for lumber and cement.

I give the kids another dozen eggs and a jar of jam.  Then we walk around to the deck building site and I show them where the former deck stairs gouged the 150-year-old cedar tree next to the house.  Gretel bends down and runs her hand gently along the scar.  She says they don’t know anyone in their new neighborhood.  Hansel says he goes to work on the new rental house with his dad, and Gretel says, ah, excuse me, she goes to the new house and works, too.

“Tell her what happened last night,” Gretel says excitedly.

“OH, BOY,” Hansel says and rolls his big brown eyes.  He tells how the whole family went to Godfather’s Pizza for dinner, and there was an old lady, maybe 70 years old, who had fallen on the floor with blood on her face!  They had come to her aid and called 911.

Gretel nods enthusiastically.  Then she tells me that before that they went to a ton of garage sales and got a 1000-piece Lego set.  Hansel even knows the price.  Ten dollars.  A very very very good deal.

Finally we talk about the fort and the woods.  They’ve heard the coyotes, and seen the deer and the owls.  But have I seen the bees???  ”I’ve been stung at the fort TWICE,” Gretel says grimly, lisping between her missing teeth.  “Want to see?”

She means see the fort, she says, and I squeee with happiness.  I have just been invited to see their inner sanctum.  The fort!

“I’ll follow you,” I say, and Gretel heads for the gate.  Hansel brought his bike, so he’ll ride around and meet us at the fort.

Gretel carries the eggs and jam and leads the way across our backyard, past the potato garden, and I open the gate for her.  She marches ahead of me up our trail, chatting away but I can’t really understand her.

Finally we turn off onto the fort trail and I see it.  A huge old stump.

Their sanctuary, complete with its own bee colony.  Gretel turns and smiles big, showing it off, but then they start to swarm.

Something in the woods, indeed.  Bees.

The Dogsology

Ruby starts a nervous rhythmic licking in her bed, which is right next to the couch where I read.  Lick lick lick lick lick, her tongue shoots out like a snake.  Air licks.  Very loud.  She’s a mostly deaf twelve-year-old Golden Retriever and she can’t help starting these tics.  But she can stop.  I just have to catch her eye.

It’s early and she’s nowhere near ready to get up.  She usually stays in bed until the tens, and then when I’m cooking and the Bearded One is reading the newspaper, she peeks out from her bed under the stairs and rises.  It’s the same most every day — a ritual.  Front paws extended, she stretches, then the back legs.  Then she shakes.  “It’s Miss Ruby!” sings out the Bearded One.

But that’s still hours away.  Now she’s in a sleepy trance that I hope I can break without getting up, dang it.  Lick lick lick…

“Ruby!” I whisper-hiss, because the Bearded One and His Majesty are still sleeping, and then I start waving.  I know she can’t hear, but I say her name anyway.  I wave wildly.  Sign language is the way in, but her eyes are getting a little cloudy lately and movement really helps get her attention.

Most every morning, after the Bearded One officially greets Ruby, she wags her tail vigorously (she adores the Bearded One) and walks over to the couch where I now sit, and where we congregate for the singing of the ritual morning song.

Good Morning to You!

Good Morning to You!

We’re all in our places

With sun-shiney faces

And this is the waaaaaaaayyy

Ruby starts a new day.

Ahhhhh — MEN.

 

Both the Bearded One and I were raised in Protestant Christian churches where we all sang a prayer song called the Doxology, so, of course, we call this morning ceremony the Dogsology.

We pet Ruby vigorously as we sing.  It’s a love fest.

Garfield recognizes a good thing when he sees it and wants in.  He’s usually back in bed by ten, but he gets up and comes running.  It’s very rewarding.

His Majesty, our 22-year-old son, he who is building a new back deck, likes to attend as well.  And this past weekend our daughter the nurse was here and she sang along and then said, “You guys are religious!”

The Bearded One and I both laughed at her word choice — we haven’t been any religion for decades and didn’t raise the kids in one.  We’re not religious, we’re just getting older, like Ruby, and appreciate a good ritual.

Ruby has finally spotted my wild waving and, in shock, has momentarily stopped licking.  We are almost there.

I point my index finger at her with authority.  “NO LICKING,” I whisper loudly.  I shake my finger and lead her to focus on my scowling face and register the seriousness of the issue.  I have her attention.  Now to connect it to the licking, or at least break the pattern.

She stares at me.  And licks.  I shake my finger.  She licks again.  And again.

Her huge ears are cocked up and she looks downright precious as she tries to figure it out.

I shake my finger and point at her tongue.  I scowl.  I send the message telepathically — NO LICKING.  YOU ARE DRIVING ME INSANE.

I love this dog.  She isn’t cuddly like her brother Jake was, but she is an endearing collector of gloves and shoes and chunks of wood, all of which she piles up in special spots around the back yard.  This week she carried one of the Bearded One’s flops out of the man cave den, back through the living room in plain sight of us in the kitchen, and out the screen door.  We were howling with laughter.

After dinner we found it near the sweet pea teepee, which I just fertilized with fish fertilizer, a smell that could rouse Jake from the grave to dig and roll in.  I’m sure Ruby noticed, but I’m equally sure she resisted the temptation.  She’s old and knows better.  Heck, she even knows she’s not allowed in any garden.  I’ll miss this when she’s gone and we have to train a new dog.

I hope that’s still a couple of years away.

The Chickens and the Fox

Our twenty-two-year-old son comes into the kitchen and asks if I’ve heard the story of the chickens and the fox.

“You mean a children’s book?” I ask.

He shakes his head no and laughs.  Apparently it’s a true farmlet tale.

I’m making a batch of muffins for His Majesty, the nickname he’s had since he was five and I switched husbands and the Bearded One first called him that.  Now he’s six feet tall, home for the summer, and designing and building us a new back deck.  His laughing is worth a lot.

“What fox?”  I stop working.  I think about how a cougar killed a goat a mile from here this week.  Maybe the unseasonal heat is stirring up all kinds of predators.  There’s never been a fox here that I know of, though.  Coyotes yes, but not the littler fox.

His Majesty smiles and tells it.

He’s out in the back deck area measuring steps and otherwise obsessing about stringers, joists and risers,

when he looks up and across the back yard lawn, beyond the smoldering hot hoophouse into the lower pasture.  At first he just sees hens pecking and scratching as usual.  A couple are molting and look scraggy, but that doesn’t account for the small red animal with a pointy snout and bushy tail.  He adjusts his eyes.  Can it be?

He waits and refocuses.  The critter is a long way away.  Plus it’s so unseasonably hot, it could be a mirage.  It got up to 88.

No.  It’s there.  It’s real.  There are clearly four legs.  It’s a fox!

He drops the measuring tape and races across the back of the house to the gate.  The Bearded One just helped him with a measurement, and must still be right around the corner.

“THERE’S A FOX IN THE LOWER PASTURE!” yells His Majesty.

The Bearded One instantly drops what he is doing and they silently sprint through the gate, past the sleeping dog and the stretching cat, past the pile of deck debris and wheelbarrow full of tools.  We’ve lost chickens to eagles and raccoons.  Coyotes are always hanging around.  Predators are a big deal on the farmlet.

The men breathe hard as they scan the pasture, searching for the fox.  The hens peck quietly in the sun, LaLa the goat scratches his tush on a stump, and all the serenity makes it pretty clear there was no fox in there just a few seconds ago.  The Bearded One suggests gently that perhaps there never was an actual fox.

I imagine the conversation unfolding in the same male octave with the same slow cadence as all their deck planning talk this week, lovely phrases wafting in through all the open windows and doors as they work together — “From here can you see this?” and “The bigger question is…” and “You could always do…”

His Majesty’s eyes twinkle.  He says he stared hard at the chickens again and again until the truth of what actually happened dawned on him.

“Two hens can line up,” he says, and gestures with each hand representing a chicken, “and look EXACTLY like one red, four-legged, bushy-tailed fox!  They were perfectly camouflaged!”

It’s the first Farmlet Fable, I think.  The moral?  There’s optical illusion and camouflage everywhere.  The title?  The Boy Who Cried Fox.

The Fights

“IS THAT BETTER?”

I’m leaning over the toilet in the downstairs bathroom trying to hear through the two-foot square window.  The Bearded One is outside on the ladder twenty feet up adjusting the TV antennae with a long extension pole.  The wind is blowing and we are shouting.  “HOW’S THAT?” he hollers.

“HANG ON!” I say and wedge myself out from the narrow space between the commode and the cabinet, holding the remote control in my left hand.  I have been trained once again in its use, the up-and-down CH arrow buttons, and the top, far right second-row-down button called DISPLAY.  My job is to check channels 9, 4, 13, and 51.2 trying for the highest DISPLAY numbers possible, or at least 20.  We’ve been at this for 15 minutes.  As soon as one channel comes in clear, some other one quits working.  I’m now at the end, the dreaded Channel 51.2.

This distills what it is to live rural.  In a valley.  In a forest.  There is no cable, and satellite dishes don’t work in the forest.  I’m not directly affected since I don’t watch TV and haven’t watched since the 1980s.  It makes me nervous.  Hits me like a strobe light.

The Bearded One loves it, though.  At least at night.  He wears earphones and the TV is here in the den, the man’s cave.  He and Ruby lie each night before the flashing bonfire of the vanities, flipping through the stations or watching a Netflix movie.  The kids got him Netflix for Christmas.  He also reads a lot in there.  I do other things.

But not now.  Now I point the remote at the little black box which sits on top of the slightly larger little black box on the cabinet just outside the bathroom beside the TV itself.

And the remote is as sluggish and unresponsive as ever.  Even as I point it inches from its mother ship, the action is about as effective as a crosswalk button.  Everything’s on delay.

I start my re-check with Channel 9, the PBS top priority.  A Cat in the Hat cartoon.  I check the signal.

“NINE IS TWENTY-TWO!” I shout.  The ladder outside creaks, and I hear, “NOW FOUR!”

My ultimate goal is Channel 51.2.  The fights.  Which I hate.  When I happen to walk into the den when they’re on, I feel assaulted.  Men beating each other up!  Butting heads like goats!  Pecking at each other like chickens!  How can it possibly be relaxing to watch?  He loves it.

I tangle with this irritating machine out of love, which, I remind myself, is accepting if not embracing of extreme differences.

Channel 4 is Doctor Oz talking with some 20-year-old woman about an anti-aging product.  Check signal.  Then to 13, a talk show of some sort, just like so many others on this weekday afternoon.  All of this takes time, and the fix won’t last long.  Every cloud coming in off the Pacific Ocean alters the result completely.  Some channels we get only in a hail storm.

“HELLLLLLOOOOOO!” shouts the Bearded One.

“JUST A SECOND!” I shout back.  Why doesn’t he understand how slow this sucker is? Perhaps because he has been stuck up high on a ladder for 15 or 20 minutes.

Finally I arrive at 51.2, and it’s a talk show, thankfully.  Or maybe a religious show, I can’t tell.  The signal is a barely acceptable 18, but the Bearded One is finished.

“DONE!” he calls, and I whoop and cheer.

When the Bearded One comes back inside, he is tired and his feet hurt from standing on the ladder.  He starts to run through the stations to see what he’s got.

“I’ll be upstairs on the computer,” I say.

“Emails?” the Bearded One asks.

“That and the kittens.”  There’s a live-streaming video I love to watch of 5-week-old kittens and their mama.  They’re being fostered for an animal shelter by a young woman in her home in Canada.  There are almost 800 of us followers now, it’s like an in-home reality show.  I can’t get enough of it.  When I checked them an hour ago, they were all sound asleep.

I hurry back upstairs.  Surely they’ll all be fighting like crazy by now.

The Goat Gig

He’s watching me.  I’m brushing Sage (He-Who-Reared-Up-At-Me-Again-This-Week) and the Bearded One keeps coming in and out of the barn, making sure Sage behaves.

I’m so new to this goat gig, I know nothing.  I accept the Bearded One’s protector personality and I accept the responsibility of monitoring my own cavalier-tending attitude toward capricious wild animals and I am uber-careful and will not keep brushing Sage after he turns and looks at me.  And in exchange the Bearded One will not mention getting rid of Sage again.

Earlier this week, I was brushing our biggest Pygora goat Sage in the upper pasture when he gave me the eyeball and body language that he didn’t like where I was brushing anymore, but I didn’t quit soon enough because he carefully backed up, then stood on his hind legs and challenged me to a whacking of horns.  It was affectionate and playful, despite the situation.

Still, among goats, that rearing up is a very short-term prelude to charging ahead and ramming something.  Other goats, barn walls, people.  They can do it way gently or way hard.  I yelled at him to get down, which he did, but the Bearded One saw the whole thing and said, “We might have to get rid of Sage.  Gotta put a stop to that.”

I agree that a solution must be found, but I also know that I was more in control of the situation than the Bearded One credits me for.  And I was untouched.  Still, in a love relationship you take care of yourself at least partly because of and for the other, and my other is concerned.  His own mother was rammed hard by her own billy-goat when she was 80.

He keeps checking on us.  At least that’s what it seems like he’s doing.  There he goes again.  Probably making a crate to transport Sage back to Vashon Island, I think.

I’m using the new tail-and-mane brush we bought at the feed store.  Sage’s creamy fleece floats above his thick brown guard hairs like foam, and my job is to brush it out so we don’t have to shear him.

Shearing would require buying or renting equipment and restraining the goats, or hiring someone to do it, and since the goats shed their fleece anyway, and since it’s still freezing some nights, we’ve elected to just brush it out.  Then wash it and maybe stuff pillows with it.  Or learn to card and spin.

We have a good bunch of it this year.  We started daily brushings when we saw them rubbing it off on the fencing.

I pull another inch-thick patty size chunk of Sage fleece from the brush tines and add it to the pile.  And continue brushing.  And pondering my relationship to the goats, how to embrace them without embracing them.

Both the Bearded One and I brush all three goats now, but Pearl is partial to the Bearded One.  Sage can’t stand to see Pearl being brushed — he can’t stand to see LaLa brushed either — he charges over and butts them out of the way.

So the Bearded One carries a walking stick with him when he brushes Pearl.  He’s never struck Sage with it, he just holds this 5-foot pole in one hand and Sage doesn’t approach.  “He respects the stick,” says the Bearded One.  Which amazes me, but it works.

Sage’s eyelashes are so lovely and long.  I think of him as my buddy and companion.

As I brush, I want to show affection to him like to a dog or cat.  Not kissing, though.  I haven’t kissed LaLa since I promised I wouldn’t — over a month now.  Sage turns and stares at me with his square pupils.  That’s enough, he’s saying.

I follow him out of the barn, carrying the pile of feather-soft fleece in a plastic bag to take to the house and clean.

And that’s when I see what the Bearded One’s been doing when I thought he was checking on me.

Setting up to pour concrete as a finishing cap on his latest goat toy, the four-ramped Goat Gig.  There’s not much chance of Sage leaving any time soon.

Doink

Batman rushes over to my kitchen counter with his two older homeschooled siblings, Hansel and Gretel, but his 5-year-old heart is not into looking at the grossness of the kefir grain globs, or even smelling the luscious cream cheese I made from it (He will melt later, though, when I give him some fresh kefir bread).  He twitches and dances in place, his mind outside on the trampoline, on the joy of jumping.

“This is Science,” says their mom happily.  They are here for a total of just twenty minutes — a blissful break from their routine — and then the piano teacher, a high school senior who comes to their house and charges $5 a lesson, will arrive at 3:30.

After about five minutes, I pronounce the kefir lesson officially over and the kids bolt for the door as if they were going to Disneyland itself.  Their mom and I slowly follow them out and stand together on the deck in the sun, and I try to take in the scene through their eyes.

The chickens and all three goats are down in the lower pasture enjoying the piles of flick weed we’ve thrown over the fence for them.  I’m brushing out Sage’s fleece in great gobs now, and saving it in a bag, but you couldn’t tell it from how fluffy he still is.

A mourning dove coos in the forest.  At first I think it’s an owl, but the sound is softer and less punctuated.  The Bearded One hears it now, too, from where he sits watching the kids jump.

All three kids jump at the same time, a first for Batman.  He’s always just been too small.  He is elated.  Empowered.  He whoops and hollers.  He just got the training wheels off his bike two weeks ago.

“MOM!”  Hansel sees us standing on the deck and runs over.  “You have GOT to come with us!  PLEASE!”  He’s headed toward the hoophouse.

The thermometer on the hoophouse reads an incredible 80F degrees on this 50F degree day.  The kids want to escort their teacher into a humid jungle she will never forget.  The heat will bake you! they say.  You can’t breathe!

Any sunshine at all magnifies the heat through the plastic.  I just watered this morning, so the humidity is intense.  Water drips like after a rainstorm.

“PLEASE!” the students beg, but their mom says she has to stay up on the deck and watch for the piano person.

The kids are entering the hoophouse now.  Hansel and Gretel run the length of it, but Batman stops at the door and dramatically clutches a hand to his mouth, indicating that the sheer intensity of the heat has fried his lungs.  He backs out, then steps back and waits a second to cool off.  He can’t wait to be overwhelmed again.

And then the young piano teacher drives by on her way up to their house.

Hansel’s lesson is first, but Gretel wants to go with him.  The two siblings race across the yard to the back gate and the secret forest trail to their house.

Batman instantly realizes that all the trampoline competition has just run off.  This has never happened before.  He swings into action.  “Can I jump ALONE?” he asks.

“Yes,” his mother says, “for a couple of minutes,” but he hears no time restraint.  He beelines for the trampoline and sings out, “Doink,” on each of the seven log steps.

And then he begins to jump.  Higher and higher.  He stops and skips around the perimeter, feels his weight in his legs.  He shouts Hee-Haw and shakes his booty and yells for us to watch this and watch this.  Finally he lays down flat on his back in the middle of the trampoline universe, looks up into the cedars, and sings out again, “I can do it.  I can do it.”

His mother smiles and wonders out loud if there is actual piano playing going on over at her house.  “Time to go!” she says and takes her kefir grains and the jar of cream cheese and her littlest student home through the front gate as he says he wants to stay for ten hours.

A good day at school.

Time to Come In

It’s 7:45pm and very dusky and the Bearded One went for a walk an hour ago, seems like.  We work later and later these spring days, but he’s usually in by now.

Our dinner, fish and rice, is out of the oven and I just put a kefir cheesecake in fifteen minutes ago.  The house is beginning to smell sweet and custardy. I fed Ruby a couple of hours ago.  She hardly goes on the evening walk with him anymore, staying put and pretending to sleep.  She’s 12.

I’m not a worrier, really.  The Bearded One is very careful.  He has survived in the Alaska bush.  We have safety protocols for our toothbrushes.  He can imagine the most outlandish possible catastrophes as only an experienced lawyer can.  So I’m not really worried, more just curious what has delayed him.

I step out onto the deck.  It takes a minute for my newly-bifocaled eyes to adjust to the dark as well as to the distance in the backyard.  It’s extra dark because of the new moon this week.  Venus is out, and I can’t read the temperature in the hoophouse any more.  I whistle.  Our standard “Where are you?” whistle.

It is immediately returned, and I turn to locate the Bearded One clear in the back corner of the yard by the apple tree.  His hands have been in his pockets, and he’s been looking up, studying, but now he steps back and waves.

“Comin’!” he shouts, shoves his hands back into his pockets and starts the trek in.  Past all the tender young vulnerable baby plants in the gardens.

Past the new no-dig potato garden – layers of newspaper, compost, minerals and straw — we put together late last week, and I’m hoping is free of last year’s scab.

Past the onion and garlic garden I planted just this afternoon, all just watered.  The ink is barely dry on the stakes identifying their date of birth.

When I was planting the little round onion sets, the Bearded One worked on the lower pasture goat toy, and we both listened from our side of the forest to the sheer intensity of the distant neighbor children — 5 years, 7 years, or 9 years of concentrated life — and their visiting friends whoop and scream.  An indignant 5-year-old voice, clearly reporting to an adult, rang out, “HE TRIED TO CUT OFF MY HEAD!”  The Bearded One and I looked at each other and both laughed.  We lost our heads years ago.

Now the Bearded One opens the hoophouse, which is full of inch-tall, cool weather seedlings — radishes, broccoli, turnips, cabbage, kale and fava beans.  Every day and evening he patrols for slugs.  This morning he removed one trailblazing slug on the inside, halfway up the plastic.  I lined the beds with Diatomaceous Earth, the fossil flour that theoretically they can’t cross without dying later on.

There’s a dark truth to spring, I think.  Young things everywhere are in jeopardy.  We try to protect them, but slugs get in.  And so do chickens.

The sweet pea teepee is still surrounded by a chicken wire fence initially installed to keep a temporary backyard chicken out of the slender, infant peas.  We adopted the young Amerucana Sweet Tart and for a month, while she healed from a dog wound, she roosted at one end of the hoophouse and had the run of the backyard.  It was quite idyllic.

Until she got through the hoophouse partition — I left it ajar — and scratched around in the seed beds, wiping out a section of turnips and broccoli.

That night we put her up in the coop with the nine other hens and she has integrated beautifully.

Now the sweet pea teepee chicken wire keeps Garfield out.

The Bearded One closes the hoophouse door and crosses the small lawn, which needs mowing again, but it rained all weekend.  It’s full-fledged dark when I open the deck gate and meet him.

“The apple tree,” I say, and smile.

“Every branch is in a different stage,” he says, serious and enchanted as a toddler.  “Some just barely budding, others goin’ gangbusters, leafin’ out.”

“Yep.”  I hug him, and hustle him safely inside.