Here's To You

Animal Planet has nothing on the episodes I watch daily right outside my back fence. So far this morning I’ve binge watched Sneaky Sheep, Chicken Chatter, and Three More Little Piggies, the Sequel. I’m learning a lot from these episodes.

• ·         Piglets running across an open pasture are the cutest things I’ve ever seen.
• ·         If Bert jumped off the roof, Ernie would,too.
• ·         When the dinner bell rings, manners fly out the window. 
• ·         Now I know why Jesus compared people to sheep.

Every time I watch this channel, I am astonished by the way farm creatures treat each other. Take Sara and Esther, for example. I couldn’t keep them straight or even remember their names until this morning when Jules came out to the gate with breakfast for everyone and pointed out the differences between the two. Sara is lean and mean. She and her sister are both breeds without any sheepy fluff. They always look like they’ve recently been sheared, though Esther’s back is covered with a shallow layer of fleece, presumably to protect her fair skin. I think that’s why Sara is so grumpy—too many sunburns.

Once Jules pointed out the differences between the girls, it all made sense. Sara and Esther are Bible names given appropriately to the two sheepish sisters. For example, as soon as Jules sent a scoop full of alfalfa chunks sailing into the air over the double gate, mayhem exploded among the inhabitants on the other side like a Black Friday sale at the mall. It was everyone for themselves, especially Sara, the bossy one, behaving just like Abraham's wife. 

I’m telling you, she was out of control. Acting like she hadn’t eaten in a month, she butted into the front of the line, sending chickens flying and scrambling the little piglets. They weren’t any threat to her hungry belly. The poor little kids don’t even know how to chew alfalfa yet. Jules chided Sara's bad behavior, but after watching for a minute, she told her little flock, “I’ll be right back,” and headed off to do some other nice deed for them. Esther stood back from the free-for-all and waited patiently, looking like the exiled queen she's named for. But Sara? She pushed her nosy nose up to the gate and bellowed after Jules. Now, I don’t speak sheep, and I’ve noticed that Sara’s tone of voice is always one note, but if you ask me, she was pretty snippy there for a minute.

Self-centered. Animals only share as long as their mouths are full.

You know what else I was thinking about? Farm animals don’t have jobs. They don’t clean up after themselves. They don’t plant anything on purpose. If seeded food scraps make it through their digestive systems, you might find a volunteer tomato plant sprouting in the middle of the pasture, but believe me, all the credit goes to the tomato. After a journey like that, they deserve applause just for surviving.

The only job these critters have is one of my personal favorites. Eating. And they’re good at it. Their sole purpose is to eat and grow. That’s it. And sleep in between. I’ve been sitting here for over an hour watching the show and if they’re not sleeping, this cast of characters is eating. Grazing on grass, pecking at bugs, slurping from the watering trough, jumping up to grab leaves from low hanging branches, nursing on their mama. All they do is eat. It’s all they know how to do besides fight each other in order to eat more. And after all the energy they expend finding bugs or just the right blade of grass, they lie down to rest and digest. When they get up, the whole cycle begins again.

They’re not worried about the stock market. They don’t care who’s running the country. They never get annoyed by other drivers. They don't give a thought to what anyone thinks of them. They can’t even read. They never miss out on sleep. They’re not consumed by guilt. Spiritual questions don’t steal their joy. They feel safe in the pasture provided for them and live a life of contentment being themselves.

And eating.

Eating grass is their one and only job, which keeps the pasture looking mowed which saves the family from having to bring in a tractor which saves on gas and oil and sweat. That’s pretty much all they’re contributing to the economy here at the Brady farm. The only thing that will end up on our breakfast plates are donated eggs. No one is going to become a sausage link or a leg of lamb around here. These are beloved pets, at least to Jules, and as long as they do the one thing that comes naturally to them, they can live here without expectations or fear of failure.

So, this morning, as the credits roll on this adventure series and the chickens cozy up to the fence to see if I’m hiding any pellets in my pockets, I lean back in my chair and consider what I’ve learned by watching this scriptless documentary.

• ·         I make my life a lot harder than it should be.
• ·         I am sometimes my own worst enemy. I don’t even need another sheep to headbutt me—I can do it to myself.
• ·         It’s a waste of energy to wonder if people watch my every move or criticize how I live life.
• ·         I don’t have to work at anything to deserve the good things God gives me.
• ·         I only need to be the Eula that He created me to be. Not anyone else’s version, including my own.
• ·         If I eat and digest and absorb the good stuff, I might accidently leave something good behind.
• ·         All I really need to do is eat.

 

Time for a donut.

Re-wired

I’m not an electrician, but I can make the connection between throwing a switch and hearing the blender turn back on. I know there are red wires and yellow wires and white wires and maybe green wires, and if you mix up the colors when you hang up a fan, the house could blow up. I know I shouldn’t use a blow dryer in the bathtub because I read the warning on the label. (I don’t have a bathtub anyway, so I’m safe.) Here’s what I don’t understand. If my blow dryer won’t turn on in the master bathroom, why do I have to run down the hall to the guest bath and push that little reset button thingy? Shouldn’t it be in the same room where I keep my blow dryer?

And why do I have so many light switches in my new house? Why aren’t they labeled? Shouldn’t they be color coded, too, just like their inner wires so I’d know, for example, that the brown switch goes to the brown fan? That would make life easier. As it stands now, every time I think I’m turning on the living room light, the outside floodlights wake up my neighbors. But if I flipped every switch at once just to make sure the pendant lights came on, I’m pretty sure you’d be able to see my house from outer space.

It makes me wonder if my house was wired backwards. I’ve wondered the same thing about me lately.

Grief makes you feel like your brain has a short in it. It turns out that’s normal. I just discovered that the reason it takes so long to recover from the traumatic loss of someone who was your entire world is because we’re wired wrong. Well, not exactly wrong. Just, maybe, old school. Like when you buy a house called mid-century modern, but the entire electrical panel has to be replaced because the circuit breakers aren’t up to code and your house could self-combust. You can’t live in the twenty-first century with twentieth century technology. You need to be re-wired.

Sometimes I feel like a mid-century modern fire about to happen.

I have loved Rob McLeod since I was sixteen years old. This week I will turn sixty-four and I am still in love with him. Every aspect of my life has been wrapped up in “us” and “him.” That’s the way my brain has been wired for forty-eight years. He’s in my DNA. I catch myself saying and doing things that are the best imitation of Roby that you’ll find this side of heaven, and I’m not even trying. In fact, every time it happens it makes me cry. I didn’t know how much he and I were one until I became . . . one.

Now, I’m living a life I don’t recognize. Every detail of my life, with few exceptions, has changed. This isn’t always the case with loss, but it’s how it happened with me. The adjustments over the last fourteen months have been unbearable at times. They are constant reminders that the life I chose, the passion I pursued, the meaning life had for decades is all gone and will never be mine again. Every day, as I’m repeatedly startled by habits that don’t align with my circumstances, my brain screams out in self-defense, “I’m doing the best I can! I can’t adjust all at once!"

This is harder than it looks. My brain is working overtime, trying so hard to re-wire itself to how things are now that it’s sending up smoke signals. Grief sorts out the old from the new so you don’t get lost in your own driveway wondering what happened to the asphalt version you owned in the mountains and why you just saw a chicken cross the road here in the desert. Literally. It takes time. A lot of time. Which, to my relief, explains a lot.

Like the car wash.

It happened last month on a day so full of crazy that I was too embarrassed to talk about it right away. I’d worked on taxes by myself all weekend and, since I had a few minutes to spare before I dropped them off, decided I’d make a quick run through the car wash. I needed a minute to relax and wash away all the frustration of doing one more thing on my own that Rob and I always did together. Since there was no time to pamper myself after a stressful couple of days—getting a facial would have been nice—the next best thing was a car wash. The list of things I can’t control is so long now, it was empowering to focus on the one thing I could.

I could make my filthy truck sparkle again. So, I headed for the sit-in, drive through, take-a-nap-for-thirty-seconds car wash.

I like riding through the car wash. Settled comfortably in my captain’s chair with the a/c set to icicles, I close my eyes and pretend I’m in the middle of a massive thunderstorm. Desert rats are a little fixated on rain since it happens so rarely. I’m such a pluviophile they know me there by sight and just wave me through now. Well, also, I have that little membership sticker I bought.

It’s noisy going through a car wash. The roar of all that falling water is crazy loud, so when it amps up, I lean back against the headrest and, for the next half a minute, I’m transported. Slowly headed into the middle of a terrifying downpour, the pounding vibrations against my vehicle punctuate one sobering truth—there’s no turning back now. It’s better than a Disney ride. A cascade of soapy water coats the windows while a deluge of chaos swirls around me in a rain tunnel so epic it feels like I’m caught in the eye of a storm.

Only, I’m not actually supposed to get wet.

I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out sooner, what with all the gallons of water and soap they dump on you while you’re trapped inside that machine-filled cave. It’s just that the drip drip drips didn’t start until I reached the wind tunnel where all the water is supposed to blow off and away. Suddenly, all of it was blowing in—on me. Not a good feeling. Impossible, I told myself, as a splash on my face woke me up. Panicked, I grabbed at the sunroof's cover in a last ditch effort to save myself. The irony of my predicament was alarming. I was seated in a state-of-the-art vehicle equipped with so many safety features I don't even know what half of them are. But in a twist of fate, like a sailor in a submarine holding on for dear life to a screen door, the only thing lying between me and a flood of Noahic proportions was twelve inches of felt-covered plastic. This couldn’t be happening. But it was.

I drove through a car wash with the sunroof cracked open.

To let out the hot air.

Not to let in the car wash.

I could have sworn I closed that thing before I pulled out of my driveway but swearing to it didn’t change anything. As I hung on for dear life, the thought went through my head that if I opened the cover to look at the slider window above me, maybe I’d discover it was closed after all. I might have checked, too, except for the wave of water that poured onto my head and shirt at that moment, drenching me while the manic blowers tried to suck the cover out of my hands. Fine. Clearly, the sunroof was open. Clearly, I was an idiot. Clearly, my nearly new vehicle was about to be destroyed from the inside out. What do they call that in really good literature? Poetic justice? “Rebellious desert rat drowns inside her vehicle while pretending she’s in a rare rainstorm.”

I felt like that dad in “Twister”, trying to keep his grip on the handle of the storm cellar door, his family watching in horror as he’s lifted off his feet. With his body waving wildly in the air, he frantically cries out, “I.   Can’t.   Hold.   On!” just before the tornado sucks him out of the room. I had déjà vu just thinking about it. I knew I was in trouble. I figured it out just as my soggy bangs flattened and glued my eyelids shut. His nightmare was about to become my nightmare, right here in the Lucky Ducky Car Wash.

While the sunroof’s cover vibrated and jerked in my hands, I kept holding on, arms over my head in the claustrophobic space I shared with a steering wheel. I was determined not to give up the fight. Like radar lock, my only goal was to make it to the flashing “Exit” sign at the end of the conveyor belt without having the cover ripped from my hands. Maybe then I wouldn’t be sucked out of my Tahoe and washed down the drain into the sewer system. They never found that dad, you know. I was pretty sure if I went into the sewer system, nobody would even come looking for me. Gross.

There are a million thoughts that race through your mind when you think you’re about to die. Like, I can’t believe that stupid car wash attendant didn’t tell me I left the sunroof open. Or, one more thing to add to the list of Embarrassing Ways to Die. And, if I make it through this alive, will my insurance company replace my truck or is there an exclusion for Acts of Stupidity?

I did not die. I did not drown. The only casualties of the wind tunnel were my hair and shirt and possibly a very soggy angel taking the brunt of the ordeal. It’s the only explanation I have as to why even the dashboard remained dusty while every ounce of water was attracted to my body like it was a sponge. When I came home to change clothes, my daughter, Katy, took a load of towels out to try to soak up the floodwaters. There weren’t any. She looked as shocked as I was that even my truck had survived an ordeal like that.

I drove through a car wash with the sunroof open and the only fatality was my hairdo. The rest of me, as promised by Lucky Ducky, came out looking clean and shiny.

I dropped off my damp, smeared tax documents without explanation, comforted myself with a Peppermint Mocha from Starbucks, and drove around for a while until the sunroof cover dried out. There weren’t even any water spots in the headliner. It’s as though nothing ever happened.

Nothing, that is, except for a little more cerebral re-wiring. And a longed-for facial I thought I’d have to wait on. You know what they say about things like that, though.

Be careful what you wish for.

With thanks to Alvaro Tapie for the electrifying photo seen above. The original can be viewed at this link:

Tesla | society6.com/alvarotapia/Tesla_Print | Alvaro Tapia | Flickr

Three Little Pigs

 

Three little piggies inside the pen
And three on the outside where they look in,
Adventure awaits, but danger does, too,
What’s a mother to do with her curious zoo? 

I moved in last week. Finally. Despite an overzealous inspector who’s never used a hammer in his life, we finally jumped through enough hoops to satisfy even him and now I have a home of my own. It’s been a long year for all of us here on the mini-farm.

This house feels like home. It felt like home months ago as I stood in the center of what would become the great room, staring through open rafters at the blue sky above and breathing in the comforting space of a room outlined by bare studs. The “casita” was designed by us and built with me in mind, and even without drywall up yet, it fit me like a glove. Amazing. Rob and I built the first place we ever owned when we lived in Florida and the feeling was similar. This time, though, I was the one making all the decisions. So it means even more to me that I feel at home here when I’ve never lived alone before.

There are so many great things about my new location. Every huge window has a relaxing view of grazing animals, pastures guarded by mature shade trees, and clear skies punctuated by the graceful patterns of birds in flight. Sometimes, too, the not-so-graceful. There’s a downside to having sparkly clean windows—picture feathered face plants and bird concussions.

My daughter and her family have loaned me this location where I built my home. Technically, that makes it the Brady Guesthouse. Complicated, I know. Basically, it means I don’t have a separate address. Talk about living off the grid. I’m simply the house with the blue door. But it gives me the added benefit of enjoying a lot of gorgeous, established landscaping with none of the maintenance. Since Rob was always the gardener, too, nothing has changed there. In defense of my lazy self, though, I am learning to use a hose to water the flowers Katy planted for me. I can be taught.

Plus, there’s the extra joy of squeezy hugs from half of the grandbabies God has also loaned to me whenever our lives spill over onto one another here. Having family close by where I live on the east side of Dan and Katy’s expansive pasture makes all the difference as I learn to fly solo. The only thing that could make it better is if my son and his family were neighbors, too.

And also, there is always this longing—the impossible wish that there had never been a cause for all this change. The “why’s” persist, but we’re discovering how to live with those, too. You can’t ask much more from grief than learning how to carry it and keep going.

There’s a lot of serenity here, and I crave it, spending hours staring off into the distance as I regain my focus on life. Pastoral settings offer tranquility in spades. Up to a point. Two weeks ago, Maggie, my granddaughter Jules’ pig, gave birth to her first litter of piglets. Of the seven, six survived and quickly became the delight of the neighborhood. Word travels fast when babies show up, even the kind with curly tails. These six had names before they ever tasted breakfast. Keith, Bilbo, Scott, and Pepper. Bert and Ernie (who are identical twins, I’m told) complete the roll call. Maggie, exhausted yet instantly on 24/7 duty, had her hands full. Because, as Jules explained, “Ernie is naughty.”

Ten days into infancy and the black-haired little guy already has a reputation as a troublemaker.

There are sliders in the great room that lead to my back patio which is bordered by new fencing. They offer an expansive view of the Brady farm’s menagerie. Sitting on my sofa eating dinner a couple of nights ago, I watched Katy’s two sister-sheep graze in the emerald-green grass on the other side of the “no climb” fence. I love these crazy girls. They’re not fluffy, white cotton balls like their mothers were. They have a sleek profile and look a lot more comfortable sans the heavy sweaters most sheep wear.

Now that their bossy mothers have been sent away to greener pastures, Sarah and Esther are really letting down their hair. They head butt, chase each other across their finite meadow, send the chickens scurrying, climb the no-climb fence to pull down leafy tree branches, and pause mid-chew when something needs to be pondered. Or investigated.

Like three little piglets. On the outside of the pigpen. Free range ham in wooly sheep territory with no idea how to get back inside the pen like their frantic mother was telling them to. I watched with curiosity as Sarah and Esther suddenly sprinted across the pasture toward the runaways. I assumed it was the tantalizing smell of pork chops beckoning.

“This can’t be good,” I muttered, setting my dinner aside and grabbing my phone to call Katy.

My amazing Katy. She’s living the life I always wanted to live but I now realize is too exhausting for just about anyone to deal with. At this particular moment, she and the fam were away from home enjoying a well-deserved evening with good friends, not expecting a phone call from me telling them that three pounds of pork had escaped from the compound and were in danger of becoming mutton mush.

Katy sounded concerned on the other end of the phone. “I’ll grab Jules,” she said. “We’ll be right there.” Which was a good idea since, until recently, I’ve only ever dreamt of living on a mini-farm and don’t have any actual experience with stray critters other than wrangling a few ducks last year, arguing with a stubborn turkey, and praying a herd of chickens into their coop so I wouldn’t have to touch any of them. By the time we hung up, two of the escapees had found their way back to their mama, leaving one dark-haired fugitive to fend for himself on the outside. Isn’t that the way it always is? No loyalty among thieves.

Racing back and forth along the fence line, the youngster’s squeals did nothing except annoy the nosy sheep who turned tail to summit their nearby dirt hill. Maggie stomped her feet in the dusty pen, bellowing grunts at her terrified offspring, while I stood clear of the chaos and made sure the midget piggy didn’t disappear before Katy and Jules got there. As the little guy crashed for the tenth time into a trash barrel that blocked his way, I told him with all the sincerity I could muster, “Sorry, kid. I don’t hold pigs.” Meaning, I wasn’t going to rescue him. Honestly, I was sympathetic about his predicament, but this city girl picked up a chicken once and was shocked to learn it felt nothing like Col. Sanders’ version. I’m not doing that again.

Finally, the dark one bounced off the plastic barrel for the last time, saw his way back to the enclosure, and scurried inside to his mama who’d been holding dinner for him. She fell over onto her side like a fainting goat and was instantly attacked by all six of her hungry offspring. Tragedy averted.

Katy and Jules arrived with a couple of reinforcements, located the secret escape route of the little porkers, and sealed off the portals. That’s when Jules explained what happened. That the loose cannon was Ernie. And Ernie is naughty.

I listened, but now I wonder. It seems a little too simple, right?

I’d had a lot of time to think about it while I stood there avoiding piggy poo. Doesn’t Ernie have an identical twin brother? And weren’t there three piglets running around free until two of them ‘magically’ found their way back inside? It looks suspicious to me. If I can’t tell the little porksters apart and Jules wasn’t there to see how it all went down, then how do we know it was Ernie who caused all this mayhem? I’ve heard about the pranks twins pull. This one had all the ear markings of oinker shenanigans.

Maybe Ernie was the fall guy and Bert was the wise guy setting his twin brother up to look like the black sheep of the family. Stay with me here. He coaxes Ernie out of the enclosure and leaves him alone in the arena while he and his accomplice run home to watch the fun from the cheap seats. They come off looking like a couple of mama’s boys and suddenly everyone thinks Ernie is the brains of the outfit, when the whole thing was just a case of mistaken identity. It could happen. Poor, trusting little Ernie got thrown under the bus by a couple of greasy gangsters masquerading as his brothers.

The swine.

I never did like that Bert character. He’s too slick. If you ask me, he’s the naughty one.

With the pig pen reinforced, it looks like all the barnyard theatrics are over for now. But something keeps bothering me about the whole affair. Even if I’m right and Bert and his buddy took advantage of witless Ernie, all of them still found their way back to the dinner table without any help. So, what was the point of all that drama? I’ve been watching a lot of Hallmark Mystery movies lately, so I’ve got hours of experience noticing details that most people miss.

Let me pose this question to you. Who pulled the fire alarm that night, and why?

Right. It was those sister-sheep, Sarah and Esther. They knew I was watching them climb the no-climb fence when they weren’t supposed to. I had the goods on them. It was a diversion tactic, the way they raced across the pasture, fingering the little hams who were just having some laughs. And right when I called for backup, what do they do? Up and leave the scene of the crime. Know what finally clued me in as to who was really the mastermind? It was the pigs. Sheep don’t like pork chops. They like leaves.

And people say television isn’t educational. Tell that to Bert and Ernie. Sesame Street probably saved their bacon.