In round two, Lulu and Fanny moved away from Red, but Simon launched a stare-down that would have rattled me. He got right into Red’s face and lowered his nose. I noticed his ears were not down – a sign of an impending donkey charge – but he seemed clearly to be trying to psyche Red out, to get him to back down. What a curious confrontation between these two strong-willed creatures. Simon is a tough cookie, and border collies are no match for donkeys. But Red never loses focus, he just conveys poise and authority, and it was Simon who broke off the stare down.
Red has a huge heart in many ways. I might say he is all heart.
When you get right down to it, herding livestock takes heart as well as instinct, and Red put on quite a show of focus and dedication today. We were out herding the sheep and suddenly the donkeys came into the pasture and arrayed themselves in a straight line right in front of Red. They reminded me of defenders on a football field and their mission seemed to be to keep Red away from the sheep, who were hiding behind the donkeys in the field.
I got a bit concerned and inched closer – a border collie is no match for three determined donkeys, Simon leading the defense. Red never took his eyes off of the sheep, never moved. After a few minutes, I told him to “come bye” and he went clockwise around the sheep and moved them into the other pasture. The donkeys just watched. Red’s poise and stillness convey great authority, and they blinked. He didn’t. Red just doesn’t allow himself to be deterred.
When the farrier comes, we put all three donkeys into the Pole Barn Ben built – Todd Mason put in the gates that open in and out. We lure them in with grain. Donkeys are wicked smart and they sense any intention to trap them. We put the grain down and we have pre-closed all gates but one. As they eat the grain, Maria distracts them and I go out and get between them and the gate. Lulu, as always, spotted the ruse and broke for the gate but I was ready for her. In this photo, Eadon on the left is trimming Lulu, Ken Norman in the middle is trimming Fanny’s hooves. Maria is helping hold Lulu with a halter, Fanny loves Ken and holds still for him, and Simon is done. He was good, bucking only a little bit. When I am there, he does what he is told, I’m not sure why.
The donkeys put up a bit of a fuss but they are used to Ken, whose pockets are filled with small cookies and who speaks to the donkeys in a calm and affectionate tone. The process takes about thirty minutes. In addition to doing the hooves, Ken checks out the donkeys for weight and general health. He says the donkeys look great, just the right weight, their coats look good. He was especially pleased with Simon’s legs. They are still twisted but he is walking much more solidly on the ground. He looks better than he has ever looked, Ken says, and he is somewhat responsible for that. Ken worked on Simon the night he was taken from the farm where he was dying, and his memories of Simon’s condition are chilling.
Yesterday, I wrote on the blog about my decision to clean our greasy oven which almost caught fire from grease and oil that accumulated during my enthusiastic cooking escapades. This is a task I have always left to house cleaners or to spouses. It never occurred to me to do it, I was never asked, I had no idea how it was done.
I do all of the shopping and cooking now, and I love it. So I can’t walk away from a dirty stove. When we noticed the grease Maria offered to clean it, and it occurred to me that I had never cleaned an oven, even though I had lived around them my whole life and I am the one who clogged it up (I bought a nice fire extinguisher also). Men sometimes seal themselves off from their own lives – I did – and I am working to change that. Maria, normally a chore obsessive was thrilled to turn this job over to me. I wanted to report on how it turned out.
I am mostly done. There is some caked stuff along the sides so I have one more round to go, but it is nearly ready and Maria is impressed. I am startled. It is a dirty job, but I can’t say it was that unpleasant, surely not when compared to barn-mucking in mud and ice. I went to Ace Hardware and we went over several options. I used Easy Off (no fumes, a bit more expensive but worth it during the winter when you can’t really air out the room). I bought a soft brush and some heavy duty towel paper. They want to know how it went. I’m not sure they really do, but they seemed to want to know and I appreciate that. I probably don’t want to be walking around town telling people about my oven cleaning experience.
There are several options. One is a warm cleaning, where you turn the stove on, then cool down, apply cleaner and wipe it off. One is a two-hour cold cleaning – spray and leave it for two hours, and the third is the overnight option: spray and leave it all night to really sink in. I opted for the last two. In the afternoon I sprayed the grease spots heavily, and then after dinner, I took a metal spatula (I never needed the brush) the paper towels and a spoon and went to work. I gather the grease into piles and then reached in – the toughest part are the angles around the heating element, taking care not to harm it. I put the glop and soiled towels into a garbage bag I opened and hung next to the stove. Nasty drips.
I thoroughly scraped off the grease – some of it was caked – with the spatula a good tool because it is low and flat and you can get under the elements. It would be easy to damage the elements. This morning I did more wiping and scraping. I have one more light spraying to do – some stuff on the sides and we will be able to use the stove by tonight. The Easy Off is powerful and the scraping did not take that long. It was simpler than I expected, easier than I had been warned about. Chores are struggle stories, but they are also more than that. They are the small tasks that comprise our lives. I am learning to respect them and not to speak poorly of them.
Some of the best advice I ever got in my life was from the Rev. Billy Graham, with whom I traveled when I was a reporter doing a profile of him. Don’t squawk about the price of gas or food, he said, and don’t speak poorly of chores. If you do, you will spend a lot of your life in misery and anger because the cost of things always rises, and life consists of many chores and they are never done. I am very proud to say that since that evening, I have never complained about the price of things. I have spared myself a lot of pointless anger and frustration. He might have added taxes.
It is fascinating to me that I never did this oven cleaning before. Gender is a complex subject, and men live their whole lives without being included in much of it, or wanting to know things. Now, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I can handle the whole process of food and eating- shopping, being mindful of choice and cost, eating in a healthy way, cooking, and now keeping the oven clean. From beginning to end. Took me awhile. Chores are important, I have learned, because it is so easy for people, especially men, to become detached from their own surroundings, to become such a stranger to their own lives that there is no choice but to hire people to live our lives.
Oven cleaning is not a woman’s work, at least not to me. Moving to the new farm and running out of money was a boon in that regard. I had no choice but to understand how things worked, and so I began to learn. If I had a lot of money, it wouldn’t have happened. I want to be able to be responsible for myself and because chores make that happen, they are not unpleasant. And about time.
Flo was probably living in the woodshed before Maria and I moved in in October, and kept herself out of sight for several months. In late December she showed herself to Maria, and the two of them began communicating a bit. It is a foolish animal thta doesn’t cozy up to Maria. But Maria rarely saw her. Just after Christmas, Flo started appearing in the studio windows where Maria was working, looking up at her. Maria and I both saw here moving across the sheep pasture, running under the front porch. We just assumed she was somebody else’s cat or that she was coming and going. Then, early in January, Maria left her some food and after that she began to emerge.
Red came up to sniff her and she swatted him on the nose. Lenore also. Frieda barked and lunged at her across the fence but Flo just hissed at her. After she put the dogs in here place, she started working on me. When my daughter Emma was her, Flo sat on the porch in her lap for an hour.
Now, we realize her lair has been up in the woodshed rafters the whole time. We put a bed up there, some hay and blankets. Now, when I come in for firewood I call her name and she appears from up in the roof and climbs down onto the logs for some attention. She will come out and sit by the back porch. Sometimes she hangs out with Minnie, but rarely. The woodshed is a great lair for a barn cat, it is dry and sheltered and enclosed. We flirted with letting her in the basement during the bitter cold, she was not in any way interested. Our guess is that she was once somebody’s cat. We know that Florence fed her from time to time. She’s found her home now.
