For Charles - Two Years Later

American Tune
Lyrics and Music by Paul Simon

Many's the time I've been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and I've often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
Oh, but I'm all right, I'm all right
I'm just weary to my bones
Still, you don't expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home

And I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
or driven to its knees
but it's all right, it's all right
for we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
road we're traveling on
I wonder what's gone wrong
I can't help it, I wonder what's gone wrong

And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hours
and sing an American tune
Oh, and it's alright, it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest
That's all I'm trying to get some rest

BABY CHICKS!

To My Dear Friends Paula and Daphne

I was a poll watcher for the Obama campaign yesterday. I need to tell you that I was dearly hoping that Hillary would get the nomination, because I felt she most closely matched what was important to me. When she didn't, I brought my political head to the task of choosing a candidate and I treated this like any other election- I felt both candidates were fine men with well thought out platforms, but the choice of Sarah Palin as vp I felt lacked research and smacked of lazy thinking. That solidified my resolve to vote for Obama.

Sooooo, yesterday I got my ass out of bed at 530am, got all the animals taken care of and got to the township building at 715am. The line was already around the building.

I saw people I had never seen before. I saw a little boy choose an American Flag over a tootsie pop in a bowl of candy. We had more than 3/4s of our township voting before 2pm. I saw no fights, no political discussions - heated or otherwise - The only topic I heard discussed over and over was the question of funding for water resource clean up. I sat two feet from a Republican Committee woman I have known for twenty years - and she behaved for the first time as a professional and decent, fair minded, considerate human being. In fact, she admitted to several voters that I knew more about the water issue than she did, and she would go with my opinion.

Again, I am relating this to you in the hopes that you will understand the context of what I am trying to say. Not that this was about me. That's what I am saying. As the numbers of voters grew beyond anyone's expectations, the cloud in the air over our heads - the one with our different views and backgrounds, prejudices and affiliations, the elephant in the room no one was talking about, disappeared and the overwhelming energy was about HOW MANY people were voting. I moved into the actual polling place and counted heads for my party next to the Republican woman doing the same thing. We didn't know how people were voting, but each time someone came in, said their name, we would cross them off a many paged list and look at each other, stunned at how pages were filling up with orange highlighter lines. We counted off the names remaining - Look, Sue ONLY THREE PEOPLE on the B page have not voted!

We were doing this, because it provides the parties with an independent record, and also, in the past, if the turn out was really low, volunteers would start calling the lists, to see who needed a ride, who couldn't decide. At 3pm, both party committee people decided that there was no one to call! Sue had done this job for many years, in fact, as township secretary she knew most of our 1300 plus or minus voting citizens by sight. She would look down the line of waiting voters and say, Now, Shirley, those are the Tregos. The Hannums. The Shireys. The Paladinos. The Fuscos. Our highlighters would flick through the names on our lists, pages and pages. We laughed at each other trying to keep the alphabet straight, the pages from becoming messed up. I put my glasses aside, rolled up my sleeves and found myself muttering s,t,u, v, VAN HORN. When the registrar announced that one skinny white guy in work clothes, about twenty five years old, dirt on his boots, rushing in after work, was the 1000th person to vote, the room erupted into spontaneous applause. We had never ever had a thousand people vote in our district in any election. Sue told me she used to get excited when the number would hit 250. Carol, the Republican Committee woman, kept saying THIS is the way it should be! Every Election! Come back In April!

Dancing around, in and out of my ability to pay attention to him, was a young white man, in a suit jacket and jeans. Great hair. Great skin. Tall. A sparkling kid. the kind of kid that has a quality to him that you can't forget. He was wearing an Obama sticker on his jacket. Occasionally teasing the parents of his friends as they stood in line about their lack of lapel buttons. When he finally sat by me I said, Run for Congress. It's your world now. He said, maybe I will.

At 8pm, no one was in line. We shut the door. Our peak period was the forty minute line at 7am. There was a problem with one of our machines and the Republican Attorney and the Democratic Attorney bullied Voter's services into coming to our township building to count the vote manually, in front of the women who had collected them, rather than transport the votes down. No one wanted the slightest wiff of a taint on the ballot's credibility. Serious business. But all day long, no way of knowing just how this was all going to turn out.

I packed up my crock pot and headed home, exhausted, around 830pm. Let the dogs out. Took a shower. Got into my pjs. Sat on the sofa. Turned on the tv. That is when I had the shocking self realization that I had missed the whole point of the election.

My township has 1338 registered voters. Less than 2 percent of those voters are African American. Republicans outnumber Democrats three to one.

Numbers for West Nantmeal:
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTORS
(VOTE FOR NOT MORE THAN ) 1
BARACK OBAMA (DEM) . . . . . . . . 444 40.92
JOHN MCCAIN (REP). . . . . . . . . 628 57.88
RALPH NADER (IND). . . . . . . . . 5 .46
BOB BARR (LIB). . . . . . . . . . 4 .37
WRITE-IN. . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .37



Again: 1338 voters, give or take. 98 percent white. 75% Republican.

It is NOT about who won in this small township. It's about these numbers and the choices that they represent.

Eighteen months ago, I missed the fact that it was extremely important for my son to build a house for his family. I wanted to make things easy for everyone and pay a contractor and it was a painful and expensive lesson to learn that his need to provide was greater than his need for easy solutions. In a very similar fashion, I thought this election was about my issues with George Bush, and my simple vote.

I missed how important it was to you.

Please accept my apologies and know that my eyelids are pealed back. I am thrilled by your happiness and sense of pride. I feel blessed that in my small way, by voting and being a witness, I was able to contribute to your feeling of inclusion. I can not take any credit for starting out with this in mind, but I hope you know that my intentions were never to do harm.

As I watched the celebrations, I missed three people very much: One, my father from whom I learned that you judge people by what they do, not what they look like. He met his first person of color in the army, a long way from home in a situation where he was the minority and in charge. Nothing in his childhood growing up in Wernersville prepared him for this. He also taught me that minding your own business was more important than minding others. The other was my husband Charles, who didn't see color, he saw music and friends and memories of picking up the white girlfriend of his black friend - to help them bypass disapproving families.

The third person I missed was Gertrude. She was part of my household when I was growing up, part of a parade of black women who did domestic work in my neighborhood. I remember her as ageless and beautiful, wearing the first spectator pumps I ever saw, and enormous black plastic hoop earrings. She would come to our house to clean our bathrooms and windows because my mother was sick a lot, and she always gave me five minutes to clean up before she hit my room and ratted my messiness out to my mother. When she worked she wore a housedress and scuffies. She and my mother would sit for hours at the dining room table, eating the lunch of tuna sandwiches and cokes that my mother made, and I would eavesdrop while they talked about babies and men and life in general. I remember when Gertrude told my mother she was pregnant and my mother asked her when the baby was due. Gertrude said she would "jess git a feelin', I guess." and my mother and she counted back and giggled. Once, Gertrude was appalled that a neighbor lady had purchased a 'sexual sofa' and expected her to clean it. My mother cleared that misunderstanding up for her, too. Before getting on the bus to go home, or before my mother in later years drove her back to Chester, she would go in the powder room and put on her beautiful black and white dress, take the rag off her head and put in her big plastic earrings. She would touch up her red polish and blow on her nails. I know she did this because she would let me sit on the bathroom floor (scrubbed by her on hands and knees) and watch her. The appreciation I got for clothing and fashion is directly related to these bathroom moments.

Until we moved to West Chester when I was twelve, and I was enrolled in a school with a more diverse population, she was the only person of color I knew.

I was in high school when it occurred to me that someone must be taking care of Gertrude's house while she was taking care of us and I asked her about it. She said she had a Puerto Rican woman named Spic and Span at her house. I was a lot older when I realized that this was probably a joke. Although my mother kept paying her long after she could not work, and she came to my wedding, we lost track of her family after she died of complications of diabetes. Last night I hoped that among the crowds of happy celebrating people, her children and grandchildren were dancing in front of cameras.

So, Daphne and Paula, I want to give you both hugs. I am glad I was a witness to this fulfillment of a promise democracy made to you and your families. I am sorry this is just another situation where your guy has to come in and clean up some white guy's mess.

I love you madly!

Shirley

International Cyber Tag

I have been tagged by The Winds of Change!

the rules..
1. Link to the person or persons who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up

Six things about myself:
I was married at 20.
I was a mother at 21.
I was divorced at 23.
I was remarried at 24.
I was a grandmother at 39.
And again, at 45.
I was widowed at 54.

I think that reveals way tooo much!

Who I tagged!
Firefly Cottage

In Search of A Simple Life

My year in photographs

Ragged Roses

The Winds of Change

Waterlogged: life on a wooden ship

A Papaya Like Memory

The last time I saw a papaya, I was in my grandmother's garden, on my first day in Australia. I was looking over the Brisbane River, watching pelicans land. I was five and a half years old, had just spent three days on planes (this was prior to jet engines), I had crossed the international date line and I was missing my father and my cat - who were home in the states. So many strange, fragrant colorful things I was seeing for the first time: frangipani, poinsettas in a hedge as tall as the house, kookaburras, funny cars, palm trees, houses without heaters or frig's.

So when I was in Wegman's fruit section last Sunday (fighting off the usual anxiety attack that grocery stores evoke since Charles died) and in front of me was a huge green blob labeled PAPAYA, I had to buy it. I seemed to remember that they were a color other than green in that garden, and I don't remember them being so big, and it seemed unusually firm for a melony fruit. The grocery store anxiety attack usually takes on mindless flinging of crapedoodle into a cart, rushed careening down the aisles trying to remember what I need (toothpaste? dishwashing liquid?) and decisions involving food that won't look lonely when cooked in pans too big for dinner for one. So, I was pretty sure I didn't need a papaya, but it was big enough to not look silly, and of course, I could corner my grandchildren in the kitchen and tell them why the papaya was important to me while DIL and Son rolled their eyes. A family moment, in a fruit! What more could you ask for?

At home, I decided it needed a few days to ripen, and then got distracted by...well, going to New York, etc. So this morning, I gave it a feel-up, it was noticeably softer and had turned a spottled orange. I was going to slice that thing open and eat a MEMORY!

And take photos.

And blog it. Cause that is who I am now - a blogging, exotic fruit eating Sunday lounger!

Well, either I let this sucker ripen much too much OR when I was a kid my tastebuds were so bored by red delicious apples and the occasional strawberry, but it was a little disappointing.

Sort of like sweet, soft pumpkin. Not inspiring. Which left me with the feeling that memories, of fruit or otherwise, are probably best savored fresh and in your mind, rather than physically recreated on a cold kitchen counter thousands of miles and decades from the original moment. I think I will go scramble some eggs. I wonder if goats will eat papaya?

And the academy award goes to....

You can put a backpack ON a chicken, but

Naked Shrimp Caught On Tape!

And Sharks! and MONSTROUS FISH!!!!

(WARNING WARNING EXTREMELY PROUD AUNT ALERT!!! If you find Aunt-fawning and boasting offensive, please read no further)

My brilliant nephew Mike works for National Geographic building critter cams. If you go HERE you will be instantly transported to Belize, Mexico where he was on a team that built this wonderful continuous streaming camera that films actual goings -on at the Reef. Imagine! Right on your computer!!! Make sure while you are there you check out the other critter cam sites!!

PS: the cherry on the cake - I got the link from Mike's exceptional fiancee, Monika, who was at an international Nature Conservancy conference in Barcelona where National Geographic promoted Mike's site!!!

Oh, Oh, if you enjoy it, it wouldn't hurt to donate to National Geographic so they can keep doing this great work! Button on the site~

Dog Heaven

And then there are the orbs......

About the spirits in this house - people are always asking me if there are ghosts or spirits here, because of the age of the house. Statistically, if your house is more than thirty four years old, someone has died in it. So, since ours is hundreds of years old, and has sheltered dozens of families, it stands to reason that people have passed on here. We know definitely that babies were born here (although none of ours).

After Charles died, many many small electrical events were laid at his feet - light bulbs which blew over and over, the barn light suddenly coming on when no one was in the barn, etc. Once, Girlfriend Lynda and I were on the porch talking about him and the porch light over her head flashed on and off several times.

Years ago, a friend's mother said something "touched her' on the shoulder while she was looking out the window. She said it was a very 'real' experience, and she was alone in the house when it happened.

Often, items that are hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen are found on the counter in the morning. It's a nine and a half foot ceiling - I'm five feet. Even if I was sleepwalking, I couldn't get up there without a ladder, and since I don't put things away when I am awake, I am sure if I was asleep when I used it, that ladder would be left out in the morning. So I am saying, it's not me.

I once found my eldest grandson, then about four, sitting on the steps talking to the air. I said, who are you talking to, baby? He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, "the people in the bubbles" and pointed randomly in the air. That's sort of cute, right? Until you have virtually the same conversation with his little brother, six years later.

Anyway, one day this summer some ghostbusters just stopped by and asked about 'activity' in the house. They specifically asked about orbs. I got orbs. Oh yes.

These orbs show up every time I take photos. WIth any camera. They show up in pictures taken with my camera, in friend's cameras and movie cameras and video cameras. They show up in pictures in the barn, in the dining room, in the living room and the kitchen. For instance, the two photos above were taken seconds apart with the same camera, from a focal point only inches apart. There's that orb again - and if you look closely you can see a stylized sort of 'eye' in it.

Even with this going on, I have never felt scary here, whatever is here is fine with me and we get along. I have offered a tactical truce about behavior though - I just asked loudly that if things are to be moved, I just don't want to SEE them. Or I will get the priest. Anyone else with an old house have these experiences?

Like I was saying, about the daily weirdness...

This is Old Jack Russell, the one with the brain damage. He stuck his head in a popcorn bag that was left on the sofa and just walked around with it on his head for ten minutes. He wasn't hysterical, he wasn't afraid, he was just....wearing a popcorn bag.

Deer In The Headlights

Every morning I wake up, do some mental sorting out - usually along the lines of remembering that I am alone now in the house, thinking of things I have to do like grocery shop and work related duties.  Before I could not do this because the minute my eyes would fly open, my dogs would be awake and to prevent having to clean up accidents, I would have jump into some clothes of any description, find shoes, tear down the stairs, snap leashes on their necks and then open the door barely in time to keep Ms Manchester from piddling on the floor in the hallway.  About a year ago I started putting all three dogs into crates at night, not sharing my bed with them, and we have ALL been sleeping better.  I have time to get properly (if you count striped pj bottoms and a sweatshirt) dressed, control the stampede down the stairs and there have been LOTS fewer accidents.  

This morning was no different - a little sniffling about the alone situation, happy dogs excited about another day here in heaven, and out the door to greet the day.   It's been raining for days but this morning the grass was lush and green, the sky was bright and all and all, it was a good way to wake up.

Because of the construction, we (me and the dog-tourage) go out the front door - Big American Bull Dog on a pink leash, Little Manchester on a Blue Leash, Old Jack Russell NOT on a leash.  The control of the dogs on the leashes is a fanciful ballet of high kicks and slipped discs.  OJR can not be on a leash because of his terrible accident as a puppy when he was kicked by one of the horses and survived a head injury which left him with short term memory loss and small seizures.  Don't feel bad for him - he wakes up every day in this Dog Heaven and says to himself HEY WE HAVE A BARN!  and it's all gravy from there.  But he can not wear a leash because even if we put the thinnest gossamer thread of a leash on him, the minute we attach it to his collar he falls over.  We don't know why, but it's not funny any more so we just try to keep track of him.  The other two - well, they have bad habits which involve chasing livestock or attacking animals larger than themselves and need the control til  they get to the fenced dog play yard.

As I have said, this morning we leave the front door without incident (by the time you get to the bottom of this post you will be wondering WHY at that very minute I did not KNOW something was WRONG - having Three Very Active Noses working)  and head to the dog play yard.  The goats are in their adjacent play yard, and there is some fence jousting and threats and intimidation on both sides but it never goes anywhere.  Big Yellow Horse and Big Brown Horse give a glance and head for the pasture.  Eldest Grandson catches the bus before I usually get out and he lets the chickens out (again, you are going to wonder why HE didn't alert us).  The Ugly White Rooster is on top of the chicken house crowing.  An idyllic morning.  Picture Perfect.  Quiet.  

Daughter-In-Law comes out on the lawn with Youngest Grandson ready for the bus.  He does his chicken count, DIL and I exchange bleary good mornings and lean over the fence watching the dogs and the goats and the horses and the chickens, and in general, accessing the very good life that God has given us.  Once Jeremy is on the bus, we go back in THE FRONT (again, completely clueless as to what is around us) DOOR and sit on the sofa and start to wonder why the traffic is going past the house sooooo sllllooowwwly.

In fact, I remark on it. "Look, that car is going past the house realllllly sloooowly."

DIL says, "Of course it is.  Our house looks like crazy people live here - with all the construction, with the bucket truck stuck in the porch like a permanent fixture,  I am sure there are people for whom a highlight of any given weekday morning is checking out the latest crazy crap that is going on here blah blah blah.... " My attention is momentarily diverted to the TV where they have just announced that the average woman eats 450 extra calories between Friday evening and Sunday night.  450?  That's like ten calories an hour.  Big deal.  

I am pulled back into conversation with DIL when she says something about having to pick up a trumpet for Youngest Grandson.  I say I thought he played the violin.  She says NOW he wants to play the trumpet so she has to go to Reading to pick this trumpet up and she wants to know if I can go with her because she doesn't know where she is going.  

I say, use your GPS.  She says, well, somehow a penny got down the cigarette lighter thingie and shorted it out and she can't plug the GPS I gave her for her birthday in.

I said, I thought MY SON YOUR HUSBAND fixed that.  She says, He did.  But it happened again.  Sigh.  

I have a business appointment at 11am so I can't go to Reading to pick up a trumpet, but I suggest that she go to my car (parked next to the front door because it was raining so hard when I got home the day before I just pulled it up on the lawn), plug my GPS in, and then it will be charged and she can take it with her when she leaves.

Another car crawls by the front of the house.  

DIL says that is a great idea and goes out the front door.  I go to get a cuppa tea.  Seconds later, she is back in and says....

"I don't know how to say this.  Get your shoes on and come outside."

Through the window I can see another car slowing down and then speeding up,  and the driver shaking his head.

I say, "No."

She says, "Get your camera, get your shoes on and come outside."  She sees me hesitating and knows I am going to need to know something, anything, that will help me walk the twenty four feet from my kitchen to the front door and out, to see the thing that requires shoes and a camera.

She says, "There is a dead deer stuck under your car."

Well, now.  It's not a horse, it's not a dog.  Thank God it's not a child.  Not pleasant.  But not a tragedy.  (For those of you NOT from this area, deer are like rats with antlers, wandering around roadways, killing innocent drivers, causing untold millions of dollars worth of property damage, spreading lymes disease, ruining crops.  Our native deer are three times the size of the ones our forefathers found when they came to this country, because most of them are cornfed scavengers.) 

We walk out together and sure enough, there is a deer stuck under my car.  Not just any deer.  The BIGGEST, HUGEST, MALE DEER I have ever seen.  In perfect condition.  With one two three OH MY GOD seven points! (how you measure antlers) A spread of about eighteen inches.  She says, "This wasn't here when you parked last night, was it?"  Just the first of many questions I will be asked about this situation which will give me insight into what people think I am capable of.

No.  It was not there when I parked my car last night.  And, NO, even though the bedroom where I sleep is under thirty feet from this scene, I didn't hear anything.  And furthermore, doesn't she think I would have MENTIONED it?  

Best guess, someone ELSE hit the poor thing and it was thrown or projected off the roadway into my car.  And even though like most things in life there are no answers, and since neither of us are really sure what we are supposed to do at this moment, we wander around it, look at it from a lot of different angles, talk a lot of speculation and take a lot of pictures.  We make our best guesses regarding the bloating of the corpse and turgidity and the time of death (DIL practically grew up in a funeral parlor and I watch a lot of court tv so we both can make pretty educated hunches).  We look for drag or hoof prints in my soggy lawn.  We count those antler points.  We wonder WHY the dogs didn't react to several hundred pounds of fresh roadkill virtually beneath their noses.  And then we start making the phone calls and sending the pictures. 

DIL calls My Son, sends him a picture to prove she's not hallucinating, and he says he is on his way.  (As wife, she trumps mother when it comes to giving news) She calls her brother-in-law, Hunter/Gatherer and sends him a picture.  She calls her father, also Hunter/Gatherer.  He doesn't have a phone that will accept pictures, but he runs around his workplace finding someone who can get an email - because you just can't have this happen without sending pictures.  So we send him a picture.  All these Hunter/Gathers have been sitting in tree blinds freezing their asses off for years to bag a specimen like this, and I have one thrown on to my lawn.  The irony escapes no one.

I call my appointment and leave a long, confusing and absurdly neurotic message about deer and my car and I can't move it and not being able to put time constraints on this situation so I will have to call them later to reschedule.  Patient And Amused Male Business Partner calls coincidentally to discuss something entirely different and when I explain I can't move the car because of the dead deer stuck under it,  he says, "Well, it's already dead.  Just back up.  You can't really hurt it now." This makes me gag for about three minutes and he hangs up, saying he will call back later - I told him I would send him the pictures so he can understand the situation better.

And then my phone rings and it's Wonderful Neighborwoman.  She says, "Rodeo, Did you shoot that thing?"

I say, "Noooooo."  We have a very intense conversation about when she went by,  that  she thought I shot it or that I hit it, or that something'd it.   That maybe the Crazy Cat Lady next door put it there.  That makes us both laugh.    

Meanwhile DIL is arranging to have the deer taken away, which is something I haven't even thought of.  I tell her I want the antlers.  I want them mounted.  I explain that God gave me the deer and I want those antlers over my fireplace, right above my rifle (which I have never used to shoot anything) and I want to be able to point at them and tell the story over and over for years...

She says "You are not keeping that deer.  You know what will happen.  That head will just go in the freezer and never come out."

Meanwhile, My Son Her Husband arrives at the very second that a flatbed truck with an earthmover pulls off the road just feet from the deer.  A skinny young man in a John Deere (!) hat asks, Hey, can I have that deer?

My Son says Yes.  I say No.  

My Son says, you don't want that deer.  No one will take it away if they can't have the head.  And you know what will happen, that head will go in the freezer and never come out.

You leave a couple of animal bodies in the freezer for a couple of months and your family never lets you forget it.

I feel genuinely sad as my son and this stranger drag the deer out from under the car and put it on the flat bed.  The stranger is beyond excited.  That cheers me a little.  I hope he makes up a huge hunter's lie about how he got this magnificent beast's head.  

All the excitement is over and DIL and I adjourn to the kitchen table and are astounded at how two hours have past.  Not only past, but we know this is not how most people have spent their morning.  As My Son was leaving he shook his head and said, "You have to stop doing this.  Things like this keep happening.  Really."  He wasn't blaming us, but the thought was not lost on us.  We start trying to figure out why we have one domestic episode after another.  We worry about what will happen tomorrow.  DIL distances herself a little by reminding me that until she and My Son took what is now approaching custodial care of me, they lived a very tame life.  She swears months would go by without anything happening.  I need to come clean with you all and tell you that I don't put one TENTH of the daily, unusual, crazy, unpredictable, bizarre things that happen here down in writing because frankly a lot of the times I am embarrassed because if I did, it would speak to the out of control, random direction my life takes ninety percent of the time and no one would let me hug their children or pet their dogs for fear of some cosmic intervention that would wreck havoc on the innocents in proximity to me.   I say to DIL, "While everyone is laughing, I am thinking I need some kind of Chi-cleaning or something.  Like an exorcism."

She says, "We need a Priest."

I say, "I was thinking of something more like an asian spiritual monk, someone who would smudge smoke over me and waft away the evil spirits."

DIL says, "Oh, no Rodeo.  You need a Priest.  They scare the shit out of Demons.  You don't want some asian spiritual monk that just makes friends with it."

Well, something to think about it.  I think I have to think about what this all means.  I used to think in terms of animals as totems or messengers.  What does it mean when a deer crashes itself into your car when you aren't even in it?

Nellie's Preggers!

Concerned about our HUGE family Carbon Foot Print (we own one gas truck, one diesel truck, four cars, two golf carts, a tractor, a bucket truck, one dirt bike, one street bike, three four wheelers) Daughter In Law and I decided to get some goats to take care of an out of control weed problem.  Well, and also, someone offered us two FREE goats. Nellie, a Nubian/Alpine mix doe and Nate, who looks all Nubian and seems sort of slow, mentally.   After we upgraded fencing and bought goat appropriate accessories at the Farm Tractor Store, the free goats cost us about 1100.00.  My Son was impressed with the efficiency with which the goats tore into vines and weeds and brush and said, We Need A Dozen More!  (more power, more power, faster, faster, better, better - our family mantra) so DIL and I stopped at the farm around the corner and asked about borrowing their buck.  Three days later, a GORGEOUS young woman named Jen pulls into the driveway in a pick-up truck.  DIL  and I look at each other and say, What's that smell?

She opens the back of the truck and Hawk jumps to the ground, large and in charge!  Before his feet hit the driveway, he was armed and ready for action, and without even a lead, walked purposefully toward the goat pen and let Nellie know he was there to service her.  He did this by peeing in his mouth and checking his equipment.  I think I dated a guy like that once.

Nellie was coy at first, but Hawk was persistent and remarkably patient and charming.  The more charming he got, the worse he smelled.  There was some action going on, but it was sort of... confusing, which led to to comments like, Did he get her?  Why is she walking like that?  Does that mean he got her?  And, of course, don't touch him, you'll get pee on you!  Hawk was literally DRIPPING with goat essence.  Which smells a lot like a pair of 'lambskin' gloves I bought in an import shop once.  Or, like the most potent fatty greasy musky lanolin hand lotion.  Because no one was sure he got her, he stayed the night.

In the morning I got the dogs out and you could smell him from the front door.  DIL's eldest sister was already here, leaning over the fence because news of backyard sexual shenanigans travels fast in her family.  I said "good morning" and held my breath against the odor, and she said, He got her, right in front of me!

Gorgeous Jen mentioned when she came to pick Hawk up that he was for sale, but I think we got what we needed.  In five months we will have two or three or maybe one little baby goat.  I'll keep you posted! (PS:  this is the business end of Hawk, registered Nubian Stud Muffin)

Be Afraid. Very Afraid.

This is Youngest Grandson hunting barn rats from the bucket truck with a pellet gun.  We try to provide a rich and varied cultural life for our children.  He also plays the violin and loves chickens.