Day: April 24, 2012

Izzy had a good day today. I got up early and he and I took a short walk in the woods. He ate well, slept by my computer. He joined Maria in her Studio Barn for awhile and then curled up in his favorite spot behind a chair and slept, and is sleeping now. He was alert and moving around. We had an evening walk too. It was nice.

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Jeanine called me this morning. I remember her so well, and she called me to ask about Izzy. We saw her in Warren County, during a hospice visit. She was exhausted when I first met her. Her seven-year-old son Jimmy was lying on a couch in her living room, dying from a brain tumor. The social worker said she had not slept in weeks, sitting by her son’s side. She was a single mom, the father was not around. She was gaunt, her eyes hollow, swollen from crying. Day and night, she sat by Jimmy’s side, exhausted, and all she could say to me when I came – the social worker warned me about this –  was “I’m not doing enough, I’m not doing enough.” I wanted to shake her and ask her what she could possibly be doing that she wasn’t, but hospice training forbids that. You are there to listen, not alter reality.

Izzy came into the room with his intuitive eye and settled on the boy, who was sleeping, but who opened his eyes, looked at Izzy and made contact, smiled. Izzy came to the foot of the bed, looked at me, and I nodded and he jumped up onto the bed and began to move slowly along the boy’s side. Jimmy’s head was covered in bandages and he could not see clearly. He isn’t sleeping, said Jeanine, he isn’t resting. Izzy nuzzled his head under Jimmy’s outstretched hand and the child smiled, and said something I could not hear. In a few minutes, he was asleep. Jeanine was surprised, pleased, and she sat down in her big chair and her eyes closed and soon, she was asleep also. The only sound in the room was the oxygen pump gasping and thumping. It was the sound I most remember from hospice work with Izzy.

And so this is what happened. Once or twice a week Izzy and I came to the house and he would get up in bed next to Jimmy and Jeanine would have the only sleep she ever allowed herself to take, and if you did not think about it, it was the most peaceful and touching thing in the world to see. After awhile, she would explain, “if Izzy is here, I can rest.” Once in awhile, Jimmy spoke to Izzy and called out his name. One day we came to the house and there was no answer, and we understood what that meant, it was the worst part of being a hospice volunteer, when you showed up and nobody was home. Izzy and I came back to the farmhouse and Izzy barely moved for days. Somehow, he always knew.

Maria and I are very pleased to offer the much anticipated six-card notecard series – “The Fox And The Chickens”, capturing in photos and text the oldest story – the fox, the farmer, and the chickens as we lived it here on Bedlam Farm. I think this is the best that I have come using my photography to tell the kind of story I would only have told in words a short time ago. The photos show Meg peering in at Fran on Simon’s back, Fran and Simon, the ring of security the donkeys tried to provide hiding Meg, Fran coming alive to sniff the flowers, and our remarkable surprise, the baby foxes cavorting up on the hill. You can see these cards and purchase them on Maria’s website. Maria now has Paypal, so it easier to buy them if people wish.

Because there are six instead of the usual five – this was quite a story – the notecards are $20 plus shipping. Many people asked if they could buy photos of this little farm drama, but this seemed to us the cheapest and most efficient way to offer them. I will sign each card. There is text on each of the cards, and this is a step forward for the notecard idea.  I think the cards can work as a narrative story, not just separate cards. This is one of the oldest stories in the world, and it drew us in deeply for a few weeks.  Lots of little miracles, surprises, emotions. It is jarring to have an animal in your care eaten.

We were attached to Fran and Meg, and expected Meg to be the survivor. She wasn’t. The fox is as clever as his/her reputation. In the end, she was too clever for us. We thought the fox den was way out in the woods, but it is just up the hill from the farmhouse, the last place we would look, and the first place we discovered three kits, playing in the sun. The fox wins this round, all around. And nobody got shot. Our revenge, not that the foxes care, is that the fox babies make for a great and happy surprise ending to this up-and-down story. You can see each individual card at fullmoonfiberart.com.

For us, the most emotional part of the story was deciding to keep Fran alive and help her heal from her awful wounds. Maria was unfailingly patient and devoted to Fran, and she can’t fly or flap her wings yet, but is out pecking bugs all day with the other hens, another nice ending to this story. There is a limited number of these card packs. We hope you enjoy them. A good use of photographs, I think. And it does help to keep the photography (which will remain free) going, and thanks in advance for that. They are on sale.

You can make too much of metaphors, but railroad tracks have always provoked a strong response for me. People go places on trains. They get away, set out on adventures, sail off into the distance. They suggest freedom to me. The idea of freedom has changed for me in the last few years. I used to think it meant political freedom, and that is important, but I can’t bear to pay attention to politics any longer, as there is nothing there for me.

For me, the idea of freedom has become more personal, a different and contemporary kind of bill of rights. Freedom from fear. Freedom from medications and tests. Freedom from suffocating notions about aging. Freedom from drama, regret, self-pity. Freedom from warnings, anger, confrontation. Freedom from other people’s ideas about what I need to live, how much money I must have, what constitutes security. Freedom from banks and inhuman corporations. I do not wish to be a slave to these new ideas about life, because if you follow them, you cannot be free, or head off down those tracks.

When I see the sun glinting on those tracks, I pull over and take a deep breath and renew my own vows to be free. To use the life I have well. I’d love to be a patriot in that kind of nation.

This farm lays itself out for the photographer. I decided to tilt the photo a bit don’t know why. You can feel the thunderstorm approaching, just off to the right.

Today seems to be lessons day. I am going to Manchester, Vt. this afternoon to get my weekly photography lesson from Christine Glade, a photographer who is showing me how to control my camera, understand light, think more about my photos. She thinks I have some promise and she says if I don’t do my shutter speed before the lesson, we will do it in class. I have always had this same relationship with teachers, and I am working to transcend it. We get each other, I think. I love the lessons, and am learning a lot. After that, I’m picking up the “Chicken, Fox and Farmer” notecards but Maria might put off selling them for a few days, or maybe not. You can check her  website.

Other great news. Tomorrow, the legendary photographer George Forss, whose work is shown and sold by the Park Slope Gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y. (I have bought one of his photographs and am going to New York on May 7 to pick it up and bring it home) is coming to the farm  and we are going to go out together and do some landscape shooting. George has an art gallery in Cambridge, N.Y. His black-and-white New York City urban landscapes are astonishing, and I am so excited to be riding around with him and watching and learning from him. Digital photography is very different from the work he has done – much of the paper and equipment he uses is becoming unavailable. Digital photography is so different – George has made his own cameras and used different kinds of optics in his work. He does not use autofocus.

Lessons come in many different forms, too. Life is as sad as you want to make it. Or as happy. I just had no idea that Izzy was sick.