While mucking out the goat shed, and peeling the fence out of its deep blanket of ice and snow today I thought:
The purpose of clowning is to make others feel. Like a good poem, clowning shows us what connects us as humans, what makes us human. That includes sadness, anger, boredom, belligerence, fear, weariness, humor, joy, lightness, disgust, judgement ...
The wind is pushing us through March's runcible early days, thrashing our hair, frisking the chimes, knocking the branches from dead trees. It is waking us up out of a long winter sluggery.
Helen and I spent a jovial afternoon pushing a wheelbarrow full of moldy, decaying fruit through the snow to the Rot Spot, an area of ground we are filling in and enriching with compost. In the fall I chucked pumpkins there, our neighbors dumped their chicken coop compost into it, we buried a dead and quite frozen feral cat nearby a couple months ago, the giant sunflowers we harvested in the fall were piled on, and ecetera. It's an area of ground making swift work of what is shared there. The earth is quiet and efficient.
We had to share pushing the wheelbarrow, each of us taking one handle and forging ahead, avoiding (not quite) frozen footprints from previous walks. There were many near misses of toppling over, sending our icky fruit basket rolling onto the snow. We made it, laughing the whole way.
While out there, in the lower fields, we tackled the mess of dried out cosmos, and plants yielded easily from the soft ground. It was good timing. I was hot in my three sweaters, and robot gloves. Hints of summer, memories of flop sweat while weeding, played through my mind.
Our neighbors toy goat was on the outside of her fence. I told Dan to text her. Their goats are the tiny, demure version of our big, meaty dunderheads. They sound like dog toys, and are about half the size of Boer goats. Pygmys, I think? The sweet escapee was happy to just be on the other side of the fence, and didn't wander at all.
After several trips to the Rot Spot with the cosmos plants, we pushed the wheelbarrow back up the hill together, and went inside for tea and seaweed.
Then it was time to move the goats from the barn to the outside paddock, which required a good hour or more with rearranging the fence while being whipped in the face with thorny underbrush. We made the mistake of leaving the stanchion inside the paddock, so while the fence was charged and all was well, they figured out they could leap from the stanchion over the fence, clearing it without shock.
When I went outside to put the ducks in for the night, the goats were at the duck run, and then they followed me to the kitchen porch where I called for Dan's help.
Later, I read a poem by Edward Lear aloud to Helen, who was working on memorizing Latin plant names. I'd never read this poem before, and I really love the playfulness, the nonsense words that make some sense, and the rhyme and meter. The title. "The Jumblies," made me think of the day we'd had, and how many of my days now seem like I'm riding a sieve out to sea.
Yesterday morning before getting dressed I decided to clean out the duck run, since the thaw of snow was revealing an archeological treasure of sludge-filled containers. The coop needed some fresh shavings, too. I was trying to beat a forecast of rain. A bright green front loomed on the radar.
I refreshed the coop with shavings, then dug into the mess exposed by the thaw. I keep the duck feeder on top of a snow shovel head. It works as a tray to keep the feed from getting all over the ground. This needed cleaning, and there was a second feeder, a red plastic one, from the early days of the new ducks being introduced to the group. I'd forgotten about an egg carton filled with corn, which resurfaced. The water container needed a cleaning. Ducks are adorable, but very messy creatures.
The sludge filled items I carried over to the compost heap in the kitchen garden, where I began to scrape the fetid gunk off with the end of a leek. I'm never prepared with a tool, even though I know I'm doing this work, so I just use whatever is handy from the heap. The uppermost layer of the compost heap right now is an array of onions and deflated, moldy oranges, useless tools for scraping, so the leek was a sign of good fortune. I began the work of cleaning the shovel head, and the plastic feeder, as the propane delivery guy was parked on the road, blocking the lane.
A sporty car from the 90s, something white and sleek with tinted windows, pulled up behind the truck, and paused there with a full view of my plaid-clad, scrunchie ponytailed, pajama-pantsed self, holding a leek in one hand, and a broken shovel head in the other. I waved with the leek end.
Littleface, seeing an opportunity to add to the show since he had an audience on both sides of the paddock, leapt from the barn stall. He sailed through the split in the tree, and caught his leg on a poison ivy vine, which trailed behind him like a fuzzy shooting star (good goat!). Not one for curtain calls, he walked a few steps on the rock pile and munched on a thorny rose.
An applause of quacks issued from the pond.
Two feet of lingering snow has left us with challenges to overcome, problems to solve. No door to the barn opens easily, as each one is banked up with snow. Icy sheets periodically hang off the barn roof, then slide off (thankfully none on our heads), to bury what path we've shoveled out, and unfortunately, the shovel as well. We have one shovel, still. We didn't solve that problem yet.
The snow dampens sound and obliterates detail. The first few days of it are magical and playful, everything a new, sparkling whiteness. A celestial landscape. I marveled over the path of animals on our property, all their prints revealed, or one feather gentled on top of the crust of snow, something I'd never notice without the blankness.
It's been cold for days and none of it has melted. One day it melted a bit, then refroze, and turned the landscape into a torturous board game for middle-agers: Luge of Potential Broken Bones, Slopes of Trudge, Overhang of Conked Noggin, Ice Shard of Bruised Shins, Icicle Fangs of Avoidance, Rocky, Frozen Underworld of Nope-That-Fencpost-Won't-Go-In.
The goats are in a new paddock against the barn, about the size of a one car garage, with a tree in the center. The door to their stall is open and they can come and go freely, but they don't. They are restless in their new winter space, thankless. Imagine! After all the work we put into it the other day, sledgehammering fence posts into rocky, frozen ground, carrying 16 foot cattle fence sections across the tundra, and zip-tying those sections to posts while ornery goats prodded our butts. The nerve.
They are sensitive creatures. This is the first they've experienced snow in their lifetimes. They live for detail. Bright foliage to munch is the unmuffled, unmuted life they love. We've been taking them for walks and in some places the snow comes up almost to their bellies. They find a nibble of chocolate vine here and there, and get to sniff the hoofprints of deer, but it's not the spring or summer or fall landscape on which they thrive.
Spring, you're on mute. Please turn your mic on.
This week we had the heaviest snowfall in several years, with two feet spreading out over the land like a weighted blanket. It was lovely, ah, a fire in the fireplace, soup burbling on the stove. But wait, the water buckets are frozen, I can't get to the paddock easily, the duck run roof is sagging ...
We made a trip out the day before the storm to pick up a few needed groceries, and livestock feed. Dan fixed the problem of the icy water buckets with the purchase of a heated bucket and a long extension cord we could run from the barn.
But we forgot an extra shovel, and found ourselves taking turns with the one shovel we have for snow, digging our way out to the cars, around the house, to the duck run and pond, and I finally made my way to the goat paddock.
Littleface and Brick watched as I shoveled my way towards them. They stood at the edge of the electric fencing, chewing their cuds like two men at a gas station might stand around with their coffees, observing the customers at the pumps. I imagined them thinking the phrase "humans and their constant toil," as I took breaks.
When I arrived, I took some time to play with them, since the day and a half of snowfall kept us from our usual playtime. We trudged to the rock by the road and the Rainbow Tomatoes sign, and they hopped up to get petted, pushed into my chest with their stubborn heads for a hug, and hopped off sideways like springy circus artists.
The snow buried the ground lines of the fencing. The battery was brought inside to recharge, but to no avail. The goats wanted to play, and now that I had a cleared path to the house for them, and there was no working fence to stop them, my afternoon went like this:
Rinse and repeat, three times. I never did have the tea. The kettle just kept brewing. But when dusk arrived, they appeared to be over the escape acts.
The next morning, yesterday, as I went through the usual rounds of breaking the ice on the pond for the ducks, I was joined by the goats, who had no reason to stay inside their useless toy fence.
They followed me to the kitchen porch where they lingered, expecting to be let in for some scones, cocking their heads with curiosity as the windchimes were frisked by a breeze. It was charming, but we had a problem. That fence does not work in the winter.
Solutions were tossed around. I missed an important meeting with a mentor, and hastily texted her my wild excuse with a photo of a goat at the kitchen door.
By the afternoon, both goats were in the side stall of the barn, the one with three windows they could easily break through, a thin wall they could easily break through, and probably a skunk living underneath. (This morning the air is awfully fragrant.)
I've never seen Dan look so wild-eyed as after the last round of getting those goats into their new place for the next few days while we wait for a fence tester.
What do we think we're doing here? Poison ivy - goats - bad fence - elephants next? I don't know what's next. Probably building a permanent paddock space for the winter months.
One shovel. Two tired backs. Several chuckling neighbors.
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