When we let Red outside in the dog pen, he does not sit in the sun, as Frieda does, or sniff around for something disgusting to eat, as Lenore does. He goes to the gate at the sheep pasture, and he sits and waits for me to (hopefully) come in and do some herding work. Sometimes we do, and sometimes we don’t, but whenever I look out the window or come into the yard, Red is sitting at the gate, waiting, alert, patient and ready. Sometimes I say, hey Red, take some time off, go sit in the sun, chase a ball, roll around. Be a dog. He does not seem to hear me. Sometimes I think he is just trying to fool me, sitting at the gate as if we have an appointment to work. Sometimes it works, and he wears me down and we go in and do some work.
Is there anything more focused than a border collie waiting to work?
We found our tree right away. It cost $39 dollars, including a plastic netting to keep it tight so we could fit it into the SUV. We planned to cut the tree down ourselves, but that didn’t work out and a young man with a chainsaw came out and did it for us. I gave him $5 for his troubles and we stuffed the tree into the car and brought it home. I am excited about Christmas. Maria and I are spending it together, with the animals and on the farm. We are mulling having some sort of party for the New Year at the new farm but we haven’t quite figured it out. Maybe cook my newest dish – vegetarian Lasagna with past, cauliflower, chard, tofu, tomatoes, zucchini, squash, tomato sauce, ricotta cheese, fresh chopped garlic.
I am shocked how good it feels to eat well and I am surprised at how much I am enjoying the subtle flavors of vegetables cooked in different ways. My other evolving new dish is multi-grain vegetable pizza. I am getting to be a whiz at spinning the crust and sauteeing the vegetables separately. I cook the very thin crust for five minutes, then put the vegetables on (I spread olive oil with pesto and chopped garlic on the crust first with a brush) and then back the whole thing for 20 minutes.) I’m feeling the holiday spirit.
We talked in the morning of the awful news from Sandy Hook, and I knew it was not my place to add to all of the anguished words about it. There was nothing for me to say, always a strange place for a writer. Some things are beyond words, even though we are awash in them. Sometimes, silence is a powerful statement. In the afternoon, Maria and I headed to Western Massachusetts, and I was thinking on the way of the people and families in Sandy Hook and how they could not know a sweet afternoon like this for many months or years, if ever. Life if so precious, it is an awful thing to waste one day of it.
Every day, I tell myself to go forward. Every day I do, and will, as long as I can. It was a cool, crisp day. We went looking for a Christmas tree, among other things, and we stopped at some local places, but the trees were too large. We were looking for a small one to fit in the front corner of the living room. Maria and I often set out kind of aimlessly, and we have never been disappointed. We dawdle. The joy is being together, and it hardly matters where we are. I stopped to take some photos, but I was strangely shy about it and passed up some beautiful opportunities, I’m not sure why. I hate it when I do that. I tested my new Google Maps app for the Iphone 5 and it is swell.
We ended up in Williamstown, Mass., a beautiful Berkshires town, a school and museum town about an hour away. An easy ride through some beautiful country. The town was quiet, Williams College closed for the holidays. College towns are almost eerily peaceful on holiday. We walked around the town and found a Thai restaurant and some great food – dumplings, Rama Garden with peanut sauce.
We went to the Clark Museum. Most of the museum was closed off for massive renovation and addition work. There was no admission charge, so we wandered the open galleries looking at John Singer Sargent and Homer Winslow paintings and some others. It is just lovely to see great artist’s work. We drove back through Vermont and came across a Christmas tree farm and we walked out to find out tree. My family always celebrated Christmas and I love the holiday and the spirit that shines through. It is an affirmation for me. Our tree is about six feet tall and we got it home and put it in its stand, watered it and put some LED lights on it. More coming tomorrow. I’ll take a photo when it’s done. It can be seen from the road, which is nice.
The afternoon rolled perfectly, a healing counterpoint to the night before and the morning. It was a perfect afternoon, everything just fell into place. Life can be so hard, life can be so beautiful. We are expecting some strong winter weather this week and tomorrow we will get ready – feeders in the pole barn, extra water, lining up the hay, loading up the chicken coop, getting Minnie some food in the barn. We know the drill, it has been part of my life for 15 years.
Frieda’s life has taken many twists and turns – abandoned in the Adirondacks, adopted by Maria, brought to Bedlam Farm – but things have definitely brightened even more for her since we moved to the new Bedlam Farm. Frieda has brought an engineer’s planning to something she has always loved – the running off of trucks. At the old farm, there were very few trucks, and Frieda was usually off in a run behind the house. She would bark and lunge and run along the fence, but the sightlines were off and while she never gave up, she was frustrated.
If she could have designed a perfect environment to wait for trucks, chase trucks and run them off she would have chosen this farm, this fence, this road. The new dog run fronts on a busy state highway. At certain times of day all kinds of trucks come roaring by – milk trucks, logging trucks, delivery trucks, freight trucks. In just a few weeks, Frieda has perfected her system. She hears them coming a long way off, waits until they are almost here, and charges in full roar.
Then she sits quietly by the fence, out of sight, cautious, alert and waits until the next truck is just a few yards to the north or south. Then she barks, lunges and follows – I should say chases – the trucks away from the farmhouse. Frieda loves this new work and is quite wonderful at it. At the old farm, I used to yell at her to be quiet, but I have evolved, and now when she chases a truck off – there is no way to stop Frieda from doing her duty and chasing these smelly and loud beasts away from us – I congratulate her.”Good girl,” I say, “thanks for protecting us from those trucks.” Frieda’s melts with pleasure when I praise her, rushes over to me, leans against me for some rubs and hugs. She has found good work to do, and is reinforced for it constantly. She is a happy and busy dog.
Truck chasing will not ever be on TV, and people from Ireland and Scotland will not go home with oooh-aaah stories of the wonderful truck chasing dog they meet over in America, and the amazing things they are trained to do. And those intense people will never give out ribbons for one of the junkyard dog’s most time-honored work. But Frieda is every bit as much of a working dog as Red. She is just as serious and focused. And she has driven off hundreds of trucks in just the short time she has been here. She is clever – she bides her time. She is patient, she is not distracted. She is brave, even the biggest diesel does not deter her. And not a single truck has made it onto the farm to harm us since Frieda went to work. This is a great place for Frieda to be, and while I have been slow to honor and appreciate this work, I have caught up with myself.
It is a great training lesson, of course. Let dogs be dogs, within reason. Find what they love and use it. Before we chase trucks, I ask Frieda to lie down, sit and stay. Her reward is chasing trucks.
As Red loves to work sheep, as Lenore loves food and love, Frieda loves to chase trucks. She is quite wonderful at it.
