I am feeling particular grateful lately for the absence of pain, for moments of grace, for friends and family and love and joy. So I’m making stuff. That image above is the first piece of mail art I’ve ever made, or mailed. I sent it to my friend Suzi, a fellow student in my collage class who inspires me every week with her persistence, her creativity, her freedom. It’s a bit literal for me, something I tend to avoid, but I thought Suzi would like it, and it’s a powerful theme for our class, for her recent art exhibit with our teacher, and, let’s face it, for pretty much every woman I know. So if being on the nose makes me a hack, so be it.  I made another piece tonight to send to a friend who’s in a hard place. I realized that as much as like making stuff for me, I don’t know what to do with it when it’s done. Making something to release into the wild is much, much more fun. I think there might be a project brewing. Stay tuned.

On the surface, nothing in particular is wrong, exactly; the H is overdue on a script and tortured as a result, but that’s kind of normal, unfortunately (meaning, he goes through some version of “late and miserable” on every project–it’s all a matter of degree. This one is somewhat extreme, but it’s not exacty a surprise.)

It’s February, which is torture everywhere but Hawaii or SoCal, but it’s actually been beautiful here. Yes, cold, of course, but loads of really stunning sunny days, which keeps the SAD at bay and forces me to pay more attention to just how beautiful it is where I live. (I’ve noticed that nearly two years into my experiment in exurban living, I’ve become somewhat inured to the extreme beauty that surrounds me. I’m trying to remember to pay attention, to remember how astonished I was when I first arrived here– every glimpse more extraordinary than the next. It’s not the landscape that’s changed, it’s me, and I’m trying to return to the state of awe I experienced two years ago.)

I think my malaise (and it’s a mild one) started with the Great Chicken Death of ’09. A few weeks ago, unfortunately just before a bitter cold snap, I made the (stupid) decision to try to integrate some of our youngest chickens with the older ones. The results weren’t pretty, and between the weather and the territorial and pissed off older birds, there was a lot of death in the barn. I’ve seen and handled a lot of dead birds in the last two years, with surprising (to me) equanimity, but this last go-round was the hardest, by far. With no fanfare, it cured me of my desire to raise more birds than I need to provide our little family with eggs–Dido’s plans for an egg stand will have to be put on hold until I can figure out a way to do a bit better at poultry husbandry.

And, of course, there’s the impending arrival of Dacos, our horse-to-be. (He’s obviously already a horse. The “to be” part refers to “our”.)  He moves in to the barn at the end of the month; his stall is nearly ready, and if all goes according to plan, our fences will, quite literally, be mended next week so that all our paddocks will be usable for the first time since we’ve lived here. I also learned, just today, how to operate the water fountain that serves the second barn and far paddocks. Something about that tiny and yet critiacl bit of knowledge made me feel like I am–we are–finally embracing fully what this life is–horses, fields, manual labor–and maybe that’s what’s muffled my voice a bit.

What is that voice if it is fully HERE, in this crazy rural life that I never knew I wanted? I got back in touch with a–well, there’s no way to say it really but to say a former–friend who knew me well several years ago. She said that what she’d heard about my life now sounded exactly like what I said I’d wanted maybe fifteen years ago when we first became friends. I don’t remember that at all; I don’t ever remember voicing a desire for the life I lead now. Which is not to say that I didn’t want it: but I don’t think I knew that I did–I don’t think I knew that, really, until many months into living it.

I tried to move the babies last week, into the stall that houses the oldest birds, who promptly attacked and traumatized the one tiny newbie I introduced. So much for that. I took the poor trembling babe back to the giant cardboard box she’s been sharing with her sisters, and decided to delay. But the little girls were getting crazed from lack of space, so I decided to see how they’d fare with the other group. They cackled in protest, and promptly followed me out of the new stall, but they’re gentled enough by frequent handling as chicks to catch easily, and so I rounded them all up, returned them to the stall, and bribed everyone with more feed than usual. I also moved in the youngsters’ heatlamp, thinking it better not to give them two shocks to their systems (cold air and strange, hostile creatures) at once.

Before I moved the birds, I’d started worrying about the heatlamp over their box in the old stall. It seemed stable, the cord draped over sawhorses and the back of the lamp clamped to a sturdy piece of wood, but at night before bed, I found myself starting to look out at the barn once, twice, three times (hello, OCD??) to make sure it wasn’t burning. Then I had a dream which, among other things, included the local volunteer fire department arriving at a barn which, though not mine, was mine in the dream. (As it turned out, the firemen were really there to deal with the dream-lions who had invaded the farm, not a fire, but I digress. Dreams will do that to you.) When I moved the hens, I moved the lamp, too, and hung it over the steel waterer, hoping to (forgive me) kill two birds with one stone: warmth for the water, and the birds.

Yesterday, I took a leisurely walk down to the barn (or as leisurely as a walk through foot-deep snow can be), walking along the edge of the woods that border our property, searching for bear tracks that Dido and the H assured me they’d seen during their Sunday hike. I saw lots of tracks: human, deer, dog–but nothing that struck me as ursine. I noticed, as I neared the location of the rumored sighting, just uphill from our barn, an odd, sweet odor in the air, like tobacco smoke. Was there someone in the woods? Hunting season is long over, so that seemed unlikely. Perhaps the plumbers who’d been out in the morning to fix the barn’s frozen pipes, and who I’m pretty sure are smokers, had foolishly smoked in the barn, or outside near the enormous manure pile? They’d know better, I was sure. As I neared the barn, the scent grew stronger and sweeter, lovely wood smoke on the air. I shoved open the barn door and entered. The horses were out in the paddocks, but the chickens always hear me coming and start to cackle, cluck and shriek for food.

I wanted to check the transplants first, so I opened their stall door. Then I saw it: the heatlamp had fallen to the stall floor,but stayed lit, and was gently smoking the hay and shavings that lie eight inches deep on the ground. I was able to drench the area with buckets of water and shovel out the still steaming ash, but not without horrible visions of what might have been. The chickens were unperturbed. They pecked at the charred shavings and gave me dirty looks when I dumped out their waterer to quench the smolder.