Dec 8
Well, the frost has lost its novelty, but the bone-hard freeze lingers on…and on. The barn chores take twice the time they normally do, because of the pails of water that have to be hauled from the house out to each stall – a shoulder-wrenching job. Today I thought with envy of the wooden yokes I’ve seen in the museums that fit over your shoulders, so that you can dangle a bucket from each end, without having to bear the weight on your arms. I finally really understand what they’re for. And I want one. Maybe Rich could make me one…
The sheep in the top field need bales of hay taken out to them (a wheelbarrow job for me – Rich can just sling one up on his shoulder) and the goats are looking wistful in their stalls, missing their galloping, leaping romps down the long goat hill into the woods. But it’s too cold for them, and they wouldn’t be able to eat enough of the frozen grass stubble to make up the calories they would burn off. No, better that they stay inside in the warm barn and eat the hay from the summer. And incubate the baby goat kids they’re carrying…
Taking each bale of hay from the neat stack in the hay barn and parceling it out into the hay racks gives me the same feeling as when I open a jar of homemade blackberry jam, bottled in the summer and opened in the depths of winter. With that first waft of sweet fragrance that escapes from the jar, it’s as if all the days of late summer, the slanting golden light, the harvest and fresh tomatoes and days on the beach, Rich bare-chested, swinging his tractor in wide arcs across the field, the fetes and fairs and stallions galloping down the high street of Cardigan – they all come rushing out, preserved in the jam, like amber.
And the hay is the same. We watched it grow through the spring – fed it with the muck of last years’ lambs – checked it every day anxiously as the purple heads of the wild herbs came to just the right point of goodness. Waited for the rare patch of three-days-worth of sun to coincide with the ripeness of the hay. Rich cut it on the tractor and baled it, and we all labored with the hot sun beating down on our backs, slinging the bales up onto the tractor. And all those memories, that time and effort, the stamp of this place, is in every bale that I pull down and cut open and distribute to the goats. They eat it and their muck will go back out onto the fields, to grow the hay of next year. A commonplace phenomenon, and one that is taken entirely for granted in this part of the world. But I never get tired of feeling around the edges of this experience, and marveling at it.
You know, it’s strange, but I was just thinking today as I tried futilely to tidy the barn without any running water…I’ve been on the radio speaking to a million listeners, and I’ve written award-winning stories for the newspaper. I’ve been on television, and have written a novel, been photographed for a poster, and been picked up in a limo to give a speech. But I always felt that I wasn’t doing quite what I was meant to do.
I tried to fix it. I looked for causes to support and ways to make a difference in the world, thinking that might help. I tried different topics and formats and ideas on my show, thinking that I just hadn’t yet found my voice. I kept waiting to climb just that one little notch higher on the career ladder, so that I would finally slot into place – into my place, that I was designed to fill. If I was filling the function I was born to fill, I reckoned, that nagging sense of being slightly out of place would go away.
There is a portrait of me, painted by an artist friend of my parents, when I was twelve years old. The portrait has a particularly penetrating, level gaze, and when it hung over my fireplace in California, I would often shudder and turn away from it. “What have you done with my life?” the picture would seem to ask accusingly. And I didn’t have an answer – not really.
But here, for the first time, as I struggled to chip dirty frozen straw out of the wheelbarrow with a shovel, to make room for another load of dirty straw, I realized – I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time any more. I don’t feel like I’m spinning my wheels. I am finally, in fact, doing what I was always meant to do. I could face that portrait of my twelve-year-old self now, and she would understand. She would approve. She might even smile.
Funny, isn’t it? Who knew…