There is not an animal on this farm who does not love and trust Maria, who does not respond to her gentleness and patience, and her very powerful gift for listening to them. Maria knows how to listen and how to love, as I know so well. Her spirit is generous and giving, and every animal on the farm – donkeys, dogs, barn cats and chickens – comes to see her once a day or more and speak with her.
They press themselves against her, come to her, listen to her songs and soothing words and give back their love and acceptance of her. How lucky I am to see this every day, how much I learn from it. It never fails to touch and nourish me.
Maria has no sense of this gift, never speaks of it or acknowledges it. But I see it every day and it suffuses this farm and the next with love and connection.
Sometimes I forget that life is a wheel, and it turns around and around, and nothing is new, and if you wait for it, life will come around to you, showing its many beautiful and awful sides. For more than a year, Izzy and I went to visit Warren and Helen Cardwell. Helen was dying and she loved Izzy dearly, as did her devoted husband Warren. I took a number of photographs of this very loving couple on my Hospice Journal and I was touched deeply by their devotion to one another, and by Warren’s unflagging devotion to Helen at the end of her life.
Helen and I also became friends, and we would argue well into our visits about the nature of dog’s souls and whether or not they went to heaven. Helen died several years ago and now Warren has his own issues to deal with at age 86. I visited Warren frequently after Helen’s death, then the visits fell off. I was going through my divorce, and to be honest, we had seen so much death it was hard for me to bear then.
Warren and I have stayed in touch. He calls me his “dear old friend,” an honored title. He called me yesterday with the greatest sorrow in his voice to tell me that his much loved dog Prince died last week at age 16. Price was a faithful companion to Warren through long and dark days, and I thought, no, now Warren is alone in that house.
Warren does not complain, he is gracious and grateful for his life, as always and filled with great stories and memories despite the obvious pain that he is in. On an impulse, I brought Red to see him, as he loved Izzy as much as Helen did. Warren is no longer able to drive or move around the house too far. But he looked great, cheerful and very alert.
Warren nearly melted at the sight of Red, who seemed to know precisely what to do. This remarkable dog, who had not even lived in a house in his life and is still learning to climb stairs, almost morphed into Izzy before my eyes. What a natural therapy dog he is. Warren was beaming at the sight of him.
Red looked Warren in the eye came over to him, connected to him, and you could see Warren’s spirits lift. He had the same biscuit tin from which he fed Izzy. Red put his head on Warren’s knees and held his gaze. I confess to being astonished, speechless perhaps. It was hard to understand what I was seeing, but we – Red and I – will be visiting Warren – a courageous and admirable man – regularly now and I will be sharing these visits with you, with Warren’s gracious permission, as always. I never stop wondering at the way dogs can enter your life and open you to new experience if you let them.
The Old Sheep get up in the night and graze in the cooler pasture. In the daytime, they cling to each other, huddle together, conserve their energy in the heat. They are getting used to me, letting me get closer to them. They are beautiful, touching in the gentle way in which they treat one another, something I have not seen before in sheep. They are opening my eyes to another side of these animals, who also talk to us if we listen.
They are telling me this: accept your life, this is all there is. Do not waste it on anger and pity and loss and fear.
We are getting closer to owning the New Bedlam Farm and with it, Rocky, the blind 34-year-old Appaloosa who led us there. Closing is scheduled for Thursday or Friday. We won’t move until we sell our current home, but we are very excited to own this wonderful place. Rocky will be inside the barn in a special enclosure, and this 1840 year old farmhouse, and the spirit of Florence Walrath will open up a whole new chapter for us.
I can’t say I want to be owning two properties at once, but I know there is a buyer out there for this wonderful place and he or she will find it soon. This morning the Walrath family was clearing out the house and attic and they had a tag sale. I bought the photograph of Florence on one of her horses.
It is great fun to watch Red on his spectacular outruns – I love watching his glorious outbursts of joy. But the truth is, I’m not an Irish farmer or a herding trialer. The tasks that are important to me are the simple ones – get the sheep, hold them at the gate, keep them out of the barn, get them out of the barn, get them into the pen for the vet, get them into the barn for safety or medicine. These are not uplifting perhaps, but they are much more important to me, and Red does them efficiently and with great skill and intelligence. Red is a very bright creature, and he figures tasks out in much the same way Rose did.
The great border collies, I believe, are not only well trained but intuitive. They help their bumbling humans along. That was Rose. This is Red. Perhaps because Karen Thompson trained Red, he is almost astonishingly in tune with me. So I shot a video showing one of the simplest but most elemental tasks: get the sheep, bring them to me. A border collie always wants to keep the sheep between himself and the herder, and will always drive them to the herder if he knows what he is doing. Come and see.
