I don’t usually have much interaction with the anthroposophist (Rudolf Steiner devotées) communities which abound in this area. I like the people, usually, very much, but the dogma is too heavy for me. Camphill is a Steiner project that cares for developmentally disabled adults in a village setting, where they live and work side by side with normally-abled adults and their families. Its presence here (about 10 miles from my house) means that we often see the residents out and about, which I think is a great thing for my kids, and for me. (In California, I now realize, I almost never saw disabled adults, and rarely children. Where were they?)

Anyway, the people at Camphill tend an herb garden and make wonderful teas (really, tisanes) with lyrical names like Douceur de Fete (one of my favorites.) They also make the prosaically named Tea for Colds, which seems to actually help. So, with my head stuffed and snotty with a cold, I made myself a cuppa just now, using my newest (non-local) fave acqusition, my Tea Stick. (Pricey, but genius. If you drink loose leaf tea, get one.) And I poured the nearly-boiling water into my favorite new mug (one thing you may not know about me is that for years now, I’ve been searching for the perfect mug. It’s more challenging than you might think, but I think the search is over.) My mug was made by a potter/friend down the road who gave it to me in exchange for using my home as a location for a photo shoot for her new website. So my soothing tea was in my perfect mug, which soothes the palm of my hand in addition to holding my medicinal tea, and I thought: this is all from right.here. If I had a younger horse (and, let it be said, was a better rider) I could get to both of them in an afternoon. And that thought just made me so happy that I live in this random, odd, lovely place.

Meanwhile, last night I made a discovery that also has everything to do with where I live and what I do here, and it also made me shiver with quiet joy.

Mary Oliver is one of my favorite contemporary poets, but I only recently discovered this work of hers. To make it even better, I found it on a work of art made by my teachers and friends Karen Arp-Sandel and Suzy Banks Baum. If you live near me, check out their collaborate mail art show, Femail, at the Berkshire Art Kitchen.

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patcha few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorwayinto thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak

~ Mary Oliver

Fast Tube 2.2 by Casper

For the H–not so much. Last Tuesday was the first morning when I had a morning appointment that meant I had to leave him home alone to turn out the horses and deal with the morning chores, which are: giving the horses their grain; stocking the paddock with hay and full water buckets; haltering the horses and leading them out to the paddock; mucking out the stalls, removing manure and wet bedding and replacing it with fresh, clean bedding; and finally, putting hay and clean water in the stalls so that the evening chore will be simple: just haltering and leading them in, then turning over the buckets in the paddock and bringing them into the barn, ready for the next morning. Grooms and boy scouts may not have the same motto, but they should: be prepared, because routine is everything with horse care.

I’ve done most of this by myself, with some help in the evenings with stall prep and bringing them in, on days when the mornings didn’t have enough hours to complete the whole routine. But Tuesday was the H’s first time flying solo.

At about 10 a.m. Tuesday, I was sitting at our favorite coffee shop in Lenox, drinking tea and killing time between dropping off the short people and heading off to have my hair cut and my roots erased. It was a moment of blissful solitude–until the phone rang.

It was the H, breathless, and slightly panicked. Turns out–barn chores are hard work. Harder, I learned, if it’s 25 degrees outside, and you wear (strong) glasses, and your glasses fog, blinding you, so you try to take them off, but then you’re really blind, and can’t see the manure or mucking fork to save your life…and the wheelbarrow is heavy! And you have two whole wheelbarrow loads to haul out, just to clean the two stalls!

You can probably guess who pulled stall duty for the rest of the week.

Yesterday, we went down as a family (now a family of five, as my mother moved in with us yesterday, having come from L.A. to join us here) and everyone found a helpful rhythm: Dido and the H worked emptying and filling water buckets; my mom kept an eye on the kids, checked on the chickens and kept me company; the Babe, no surprise, turns out to be a highly-motivated little worker bee, and a mucking whiz. It was also 40 degrees, so it was practically steamy inside the barn, compared to last week’s horrible, frigid temperatures.

“Your glasses won’t fog today,” I said in an aside to the H. He busied himself with cutting the baling twine around some fresh hay. “Uh huh,” he answered, and marched right out of the barn.

Today, I tried again. Everything else was done. I handed him the high-tech muck fork (yes, there is such a thing) and lured him into the stall I had already half-cleaned. “Just try this one.”

“This one’s much easier. It’s lighter. It works better,” he said, referring to the miracle fork (aluminum; deeper basket for shaking the shavings off the manure; ergodynamically bent handle.) When in doubt, give the man a gadget.

We worked together and apart, in adjoining stalls. Dido avoided mucking (like father, like son?), but was eager to spread the fresh shavings in the cleaned stalls. The Babe felt cold, so my mom took her back up the house. “It’s nice working, just the three of us,” said my big boy.

Indeed. It was.

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.