Bowling for Pigs

I’ve always considered myself a smart woman. My intelligence might be slightly above average. I graduated high school twenty-third out of five hundred eighty-nine. I wasn’t headed to MIT in the fall like the first twenty-two, but I led the parade of future blue-collar workers. I’m not bragging here. I just think that whatever life throws my way, eventually I’ll be up to the challenge

So, why am I so inept when it comes to taking care of farm animals?

After all, I raised my own kids and lots of people think that’s like being a zookeeper. In addition, I’ve owned three rescue dogs, one hamster, a love bird, some Japanese fighting fish, and I was stepmom to my son’s tarantula. I got skills. I got brains. I got hutzpah.

What I might be lacking is some common sense.

For six days this month, all the inmates at the Brady Rehabilitation Ranch were subjected to my inexperience as a farmhand. Again. Katy and Dan and the fam took off for their cabin to escape the heat and left me in charge of all the critters—six chickens, including two so reclusive I didn’t know they existed, one mama pig with six piglets, and two bossy sistersheep. They took their dog with them to the mountains so there’d be at least one survivor when they got home, and the desert tortoise was left to his own devices.

Lord, have mercy.

It was a circus from the get-go, right after twelve-year-old Jules, aka The Animal Whisperer, entrusted me with the schedule and ratios for feeding the flock, followed immediately by Katy’s whispered summary, “Just try to keep them alive,” and the telltale sound of their Suburban fleeing imminent disaster in a cloud of diesel fumes.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms I am not. I don’t even compare to Ma Kettle. I’m more like Gilligan if The Minnow had run aground in a chicken coop. Feathers flying everywhere, poultry running for their lives, splintered wood covered in chicken doo doo. When I’m in charge of the henhouse, it’s one big . . . poop show.

It could drive a good Skipper to drink.

Case in point. “Toss a few alfalfa pellets over there to distract the sheep,” Jules instructed me, pointing to right field, “and then fill the entire scoop with more pellets and dump them into Maggie’s dish, there,” she continued, pointing down at about six o’clock on the other side of the pasture gate, “then . . . toss a quarter of a scoop of chicken scratch that way," she finished, gesturing toward the pitcher’s mound. This was gonna be a lot of math. And geometry. The pitcher’s mound looked pretty far away to me, and my arthritic throwing arm isn’t what it used to be. I wasn’t sure I could do much more than bunt the stuff.

Sure enough, it was a fiasco. I shook up that game plan every way I could imagine, but the sistersheep always raced in from the outfield, drop kicking the chickens in their mad scramble for a few dozen alfalfa pellets, followed by knocking the piglets on their kiesters. And it hurts my heart to say this in public, but Maggie’s mothering instincts are nothing to write home about. She was just as selfish at the dinner table as everybody else and left her little piglets out in left field to fend for themselves. One night while I was entertaining neighbors at my house, I spotted the sistersheep headbutting those poor little piglets over a few pieces of alfalfa in the pasture. The dark-haired youngsters rolled across the fairway with so much momentum they looked like bowling balls flying down a green alley. I jumped up from my chair, muttering forgivable things, ready to give those wooly bullies a piece of my mind, when one of my visitors stopped me midstride.

“Ummmmm,” he began, as his wife looked at me with alarm. “Ya gotta let the animals work it out for themselves.” I’m pretty sure that’s the same thing Napoleon said at Waterloo, but I sat down anyway and played another domino. What the heck, I thought. I fed them like Jules asked me to and kept them alive like Katy suggested. Nobody told me to break up fights. What else can you expect from a city girl?

My guests headed home soon after and I began to clean up the kitchen. Tossing some food scraps and a couple of cracked eggs into a large bowl, I found a pint of moldy strawberries in the fridge, too, and decided to throw everything over my patio fence out to the animals. Not that they deserved any treats, but it saved space in my trash can. The eggs had barely splattered on the ground when all hell broke loose. It was like they knew I was coming, and they were waiting for me. Creepy. The chickens, racing on skinny legs and looking like their arms were tied behind their backs, ran like drunken sailors across the pasture, headed straight for disappointment. I’m pretty sure chickens don’t eat eggs. By the time I’d lobbed red pepper remnants and onion skins over the no-climb fencing, the roly poly piglets arrived with both the sistersheep hot on their tails. Maggie pulled up the rear.

I guess nothing excites a bunch of freeloaders more than rotten food.

I had the porch light on, but the rest of the pasture was in pitch darkness. I’d given them all my scraps except for the strawberries. Since the whole pint was ruined, I thought it’d be less messy if I simply held the plastic clamshell upside down over the fence and let gravity empty it out. But gravity took the whole thing out of my hands and the entire container with its contents landed at the feet of a crazed crowd. Holy.Moly. Now I know where the inspiration for that painting of stacked farm animals came from—it was a feeding frenzy on the south side of somebody else’s pasture. A riot broke out on the other side of my patio fence as the inmates mutinied there over a bunch of gnarly berries. Now Maggie was headbutting her own piglets who rolled between the feet of the sheep like a bunch of croquet balls through wooly wickets. The chickens staged a counterattack, pecking everything in sight including sheep feet, and no one seemed to notice that they’d devoured all of those stupid strawberries and were now fighting over an empty, plastic clamshell.

All I could think of was Katy’s last words to me. “Just try to keep them alive.” I didn’t know if chickens can chew plastic and stay alive. Or if sheep eat trash like goats do, or if pigs are the equivalent of grazing garbage cans, but if any jagged piece of that container made it into their digestive tracts, I was pretty sure Jules was gonna fire me.

“Geeze Louise,” I muttered in frustration, quickly reviewing my options.  I’d have to walk all the way down to the double gates, open that tight chain in the dark, then double back up the pasture in the pitch blackness, make my way through a herd of filthy animals to retrieve a defiled clam shell covered in pig snot and chicken slobber if I couldn’t figure this out. Gross. Double gross. There was no way I was gonna put my life at risk like that. I was not going to die trampled to death by pigs in a field of chicken poop. I had my dignity, after all.

My mind racing, I ran into the house and retrieved the only thing I could think of—my handy dandy grabber from Amazon. If I hurried, maybe I could stab it through the mesh opening in the fence, grab the edge of the clamshell, and lift it up above the animals’ heads and over the fence to safety. But by the time I returned, they’d wrestled the filthy thing out of my reach. Back to the house I ran. This time, I seized my long-handled broom and hurried outside with it. The criminals were still struggling with the empty strawberry container, slowly edging it further and further away from my fence.

With seconds to spare, I shoved the handle of the broom through the open mesh, pinned the clamshell to the ground and held on for dear life. It was like hanging on to a slab of meat in a river boiling with pirhanas as the wild animals fought for control of the desecrated plastic. But I had more to lose than they did if I didn’t regain control of this situation—I’d have to explain why the animals died of PVC poisoning to the Bradys when they got home. Finally, after a tense couple of seconds, Maggie lost interest and she and her dizzy brood all wandered off, the chickens got distracted by random bug vibrations, and the snooty sistersheep gave me a bleat of contempt and disappeared. I didn’t care. I scooched the container back toward my fence, retrieved it with the grabbers, and brought the clamshell over for the win.

It was disgusting. All I had to show for my expertise and amazing courage was a snot-covered clam shell painted muddy brown with animal drool and dirt. And a filthy grabber that I once used to pull clean clothes out of the washing machine. I wasn’t even sure it could be salvaged after the way I’d humiliated it. Probably I’d just have to burn it at the stake.

Holding the plastic hostage at arm’s length, I scooped the broom up off the patio, and cradled the sacrificial grabber under my arm while I headed back inside. I shoved the clamshell deep inside the garbage can and washed my hands. Repeatedly.

Those pigs. I used to think a lot of Maggie, but she had really let me down this time. Drying my hands on a towel, I leaned back against the counter, exhausted and disheartened. I didn’t know when I’d ever been so disillusioned by a pig before.

Staring off into space, I blew out a breath.

“I’m so disappointed in Maggie,” I said, choking out the words. "I'm not sure I’ll ever enjoy eating sausage again.”

With thanks to Bill Harrison for permission to use his hilarious photo seen above. The original can be viewed at this link: I went bowling - everyone was impressed | I thought this was… | Flickr

Becoming Human

I never knew.

I never knew the depth of the pain of losing someone you adore. Grief was a casual visitor in my life, never allowed past the front door, always kept at arm’s length. I knew Grief in other settings, whenever Life handed out failure, disappointment, unkindness, or rejection. But compared to how well I know Grief now, he was no more than background noise in a room filled with other ambiguous voices.

Now Grief has his own room and overflows every trash can in my house with used Kleenex. He’s a sloppy guest.

I didn’t know the complexity of my own humanity until Rob died. How I hate reading those words, Rob died. Here are more that I hate reading—when Rob died, part of me died, too. That makes some people recoil, wanting to rush to the bleeding wound and apply a tourniquet. But tourniquets kill, did you know that? Rob told me that once. You apply pressure. You don’t shut off the flow of blood to other healthy cells or they’ll die, too.

Grief is the pressure. Tourniquets shut down emotions.

I knew I was born a human, but somewhere along the way, as I spent literally years homesteading a pew, I adopted an Us and Them philosophy. I’m not proud of this. It’s humbling to even write that here and certainly it will offend some. It offends me, too. I lived a secluded life surrounded by people of the same faith as mine, secure in my salvation, unsure of how to share it or even interact with Them. I hoped that as I drove to and from my pew throughout the week that my good example would rub off and the curious would follow me and discover their own pew.

I even thought that knowing God as intimately as I did would keep me insulated from suffering. I had my own versions of sorrow, of course, consigned to the ups and downs of marriage, child rearing, family dynamics, financial pressures, and conflicts with others. This seemed to me to be enough suffering to qualify me as having lived a human life on planet earth. I was sure God agreed. I learned it from my pew.

I thought being human was bad. After all, Jesus came to save us from our sins and give us a new life. I became born again—raised to walk in newness of life, as the pastor said when he lifted my soggy self from the baptismal waters. I was a new creation. The old was gone, the new had come.

See where the confusion came from? What I forgot, and maybe what wasn’t emphasized to that audience of pews, is that Jesus came in the flesh. He set aside His deity and became human. A man of sorrows. Tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. He came to be a suffering servant. To be human is to experience suffering.

In my defense, because I’ve lived my entire life trying to protect myself when no one else would, I’ve always sought safety. It was my number one priority. I fell in love with Rob because he made me feel safe. He was the most patient person I’d ever met, and I felt safe in his love for me until the end of his life. And then I didn’t feel safe anymore. I felt lost. Abandoned. Confused. Angry. Alone. Shocked. Misunderstood. All the things, all at once, over and over and over again.

I didn’t know who I was anymore. Was I still his wife? Was I still a McLeod now that my connection to his identity was gone? This week I found out Target canceled my Redcard, even though I applied for it on my own, because they learned that Rob died. Even they believe I am nothing without my husband here. It’s not just the relics of a misogynistic society that keep me feeling untethered. It is the literal truth that Rob and I were one, just as God said we would be.

I lost half of me the morning Rob died, and the other half of me is still on life support.

This is grief. This is suffering. This is how people live in loss, but most of the time have no way of telling you what it looks like or how it feels. But on the other side of the pew, in a world of turmoil and hatred, jealousy and greed, innocent people pay the price for being human and they know what it means to suffer. Rob knew that. He saw it firsthand. He spent his life in a career field that set him smack in the middle of other people’s worst nightmares. He rarely told me about any of it. He didn’t want me to worry. He wanted me to feel safe.

Now I live in my own nightmare. I wish he was here to comfort me.

Maybe you’re wondering what the point is. I understand. I’m searching for the right words at your expense. I believed Rob and I would live to the end of both our very old lives together, kick off at the same time because I wanted it that way, and arrive in heaven hand in hand. And if that didn’t work out, I was sure I’d go first because Rob was healthier than me and I didn’t want to suffer his loss. I am absolutely stunned that I have been left here without him.

That’s what I wanted to say. The ongoing hurt of loving and missing my love and my life is unlike any pain I have ever before experienced. Believing, and constantly being told by other pew warmers, that God would have to heal Rob if I believed it hard enough created a slough of confusion in my life that no one should ever have to endure. It wasn’t true. It made this loss harder. God is not a genie. And I am not above being human.

I was not immune to the suffering of my humanity simply because I was good at warming a pew. Or because I have belonged to Jesus since I was nine years old. Or because I have tried to let Jesus live through me. Stayed as far away from danger as I could get. Loved my family and friends. All the things. “In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus said. No matter how hard you try to avoid it. He didn’t mince words much. I didn’t want to believe it could happen to me, becoming a widow. But it did.

There’s no shame in being human. Now I know how it feels.

 

 ^“I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, that you shall weep and grieve . . . You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy . . . Take courage. I have overcome the world for you.”

 John 16:20, 33 Amplified

I Know

 

I basked in you;

I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)
​
― Franz Wright, Walking to Martha's Vineyard

 

 

I know dead people. And you are not dead.

 

The dead people I know look like the living, but the flame is gone from their hollow, disillusioned eyes.

Even as you lay on your deathbed, gaunt, weak, your hair grown out, face unshaven,

So long was your personal care relegated to a dusty drawer somewhere

That I barely recognized the man I’d kissed goodbye only four weeks earlier,

Still, sunken though they were, your searching eyes found me.

You were still there, and you knew me.

Though dying, your strong spirit lived on.

I know dead people. And you are not dead.

 

I knew your hand.

The one I held for hours while I sat in that hospital room chair, reaching beneath the metal bars that kept you from me until they said I could come say goodbye.

And I took your hand in mine, the way you took mine at that long ago altar.

The one I’d placed a turquoise wedding band on all those years ago.

That one.

I stroked that hand where it lay alongside your broken body, interlaced my fingers with yours for the last time,

Doing what I had to do.

I had to let you go. It’s what you asked for.

It’s not what I asked for.

Now and then the faintest squeeze spoke your love to me in the stillness where your voice went silent.

You were not dead, though your body lay dying.

I know dead people. And you are not dead.

 

Your last breath carried you away from me. From all of us. I wasn’t there, ill as I remained.

They tell me when the dying are ready to leave,

They often wait until a loved one steps away.

Like I did.

Even in your last breath, you were thinking of me.

I was thinking of you.

I still am.

Waiting.

Alert to the feel of your spirit near mine,

The gentle touch of your love on my heart,

Leaving ripples like a breeze on the water.

Only your body died.

You live on.

I know dead people.

And you are not dead.

Megan Devine, author of the book on grief, "It's Okay That You're Not Okay", sends writing prompts to the alumni of her writing courses on dealing with grief. This is the result of my response to one of her prompts.

Taking Back the Land

Uprooted, against its will, without explanation. It used to be a vibrant lawn, nurtured by expansive sunlight, generously watered by irrigation. Until the backhoe came, killing every healthy blade, piling it all in a heap at the edge of the fencing, and leaving it there with the typical sign, “Free Dirt.”

They had no choice. Change was coming. Change had already arrived.

Heavy trucks rolled across the dusty remains, adding insult to injury. Then, like the aftermath of an uncoordinated parade, hundreds of footprints packed down the unruly dirt. Soon, expansive windows in a new house—whose build was the cause for all this demolition—stared out blankly at a wide expanse of brown nothingness.

So much for curb appeal.

It looked as though nothing would ever grow there again. She could relate to the injury suffered by the land, its only crime being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She pondered replacing the yard with a carpet of fake grass to bring color back again, but quickly ditched the idea. It seemed like the equivalent of stretching a giant green Band-Aid over the wound. How about xeriscape? She could just swap out a luxurious lawn for a mass of heavy, unimaginative gravel. Or maybe a fence would hide the annihilation. That wouldn’t change the view from the inside, though. The earth was damaged. There was no getting around this bare fact. She saw it every time she sat at the desk and looked outside at the Desolation of Smaug. 

This was her fault. In an organic way, it felt like her life.

What this injury called for made her let out a long, deep sigh. The inevitable answer to all of life’s dilemmas. As boring as the brown earth outside her window.

Time.

It was going to take some time. And patience. She'd just have to wait. Day after day, week after week. it was like watching . . . grass grow.

“It’ll come back, Mom,” her gifted gardener assured her. “See the edge of the irrigation flow?”  A dark outline from the previous day’s flooding marked the boundaries of a someday front yard. “Just as soon as it starts getting hot, the Bermuda will take over. It always does.”

Just as soon as it gets hot. So weird. When she stood outside in summer, she thought she'd self-combust. When Bermuda feels the heat, it resurrects. Slowly creeping along, the determined seeds hidden in the bulldozed dirt would germinate—die—only to come back to life again. The march of green was unstoppable, a showy display of survival in catastrophe's void.

Six weeks later as she sat at her desk and stared once more through the huge window, she realized with surprise that her daughter had been right. No longer did the front yard resemble the moon’s surface. As summer did what summer does, the Bermuda responded like an army. Outfitted in green fatigues, the troops spread out across two-thirds of the once barren landscape, determined to take back stolen territory. It had already encircled another survivor—an Ash tree once diseased and cut down, its stump exploded now with dozens of healthy shoots, each vying to replace the life that once was.

The life that once was.

An annihilated tree in the throes of rebirth. A devastated lawn reclaiming its identity. A shattered heart watching in fascination from her front row seat at the window, waiting for hope to restore her soul. 

You can’t stop life. The landscape may change, but immortal seeds remain - there beneath the surface, anxious to be revealed and get back to the business of living. You will live again, too, she bravely reminds herself. Let your tears soften the grains of grief. The life within will surface and take over. It always does.  

She knows the rest.  

It’s just going to take some time.

With thanks to SoulRider.222 for permission to use the terrific photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: green shadow army | 3/13/10. Canon Rebel XTi. Canon EF-S. Ca… | Flickr