The Physical World

The soul straddles time and the infinite. The soul resides in that untoned flap of upper arm. The soul, your soul, if you believe you have one, exists with all the other souls that have ever and will ever exist. The soul is immeasurable and also changeable. Your soul lives in rain and snails and tree roots. The soul frolics as a rat under straw. The soul dozes like a lowercase l. The soul is yellow, no, red, no, it's the color of that feeling you get when you peel back several layers of wallpaper and find you are holding a handful of palimpsest. The soul, your soul, found mine in all the noise of the world, all the static and yawping, and like two magnetic tricky dogs we snapped together. Even though you don't believe in souls, I sure like yours, and how it insists on the scientific, the known, the physical. The soul is theory. The soul is hypothesis. The soul is part dendrite and mitosis and the bedroom light switch. The soul loves its body and doesn't want to leave it, but when it does please leave a window open or cut a hole in the ceiling, because the soul is not all magic (that word it digests), and is given to clumsiness. This soul isn't a professional soul. It's new in its oldness.

Backstage

Don’t worry, spiders,

I keep house

    casually. 

                - Issa

Yesterday, while eating a quick lunch of ramen soup "shooshed up" with garden vegetables and a dash of chili oil, a gentle knock came to the kitchen door. Helen looked at me, and we shared a mild panic. "Who is that?" Dan stood up and opened the door a crack, and partway up the steps stood two women. "We're here to pick up an order of cinnamon buns."

Dan laughed and said, "Ah! How did you get past my camera alerts? We usually get a notice when someone is here." He abandoned his soup, thrust feet into boots and was out the door helping them in no time. Lunch is almost always, without fail, interrupted by a customer.

Helen and I stayed to slurp up noodles. It was rainy, and we'd already been out in it a number of times, getting thwacked in the face by the sodden mulberry, or slipping in duck goo. It was unseasonably chilly. The soup was just right.

"How did they even find their way to the kitchen entrance?" I wondered. Helen posited that they walked through the barn. We'd left the door open to the path, which means they went through the disaster of a prop room, where art supplies and theatre props are piled. Then they had to walk up the mangled path, where jutting bricks make a challenge even for the surest of feet. The fig and mulberry meet to combine a low soggy arch on rainy days, which if you aren't paying attention, will lick you in the face and leave your hair all combed with leafy bits. They worked through obstacles to get to our porch.

What was the prize for making it all that way? They saw all our coffee cans filled with rotting scraps for the compost heap, a muddy array of boots and shoes, an entire closet of plaid coats, pants, and rain gear hanging on hooks, a filthy rag dangling on the banister to dry (not working well on this day). Then, a few surprised faces sitting around a kitchen table.

While we are used to visitors to the farm stand and the barn theatre, we are not accustomed to people knocking on our kitchen door. I felt exposed.

All the coffee cans filled with banana peels and eggshells, loose boards, undusted surfaces, were seen by the audience. Not to mention the cast of maladroit insects we're too lazy to kick out.

 

 

People Who Come and Go

J.  disrupted my quiet, careful ways of making sure I wasn't noticed in college. She made sure I didn't disappear into the background. Then our life paths forked. I got married, had a child, divorced. Then she married (I missed the wedding because our house was being flea bombed), we shared a few phone calls, and then that was it. Poof.

J. was the student who showed up to the three hour art history survey course wearing a hat she made out of aluminum foil. A slinky ferret, her beloved pet, often accompanied her to class in the pocket of an oversized coat. She had comments and questions after everything the professor said. Her hand was always up in the air, or not, and she was just blurting her ideas out. I was simultaneously in awe of her and fearful, so we became friends. She probably reached out to me first, since I was really using up all my free brain cycles in my efforts at avoidance.

Soon we were seen campus-wide: the movie theatre in town, the diner with the airplane in it, combing the shelves of a thrift store, flopping around on the trampoline in her parent's backyard. That was the first time I ever experienced a trampoline for any extended period of time, and I remember well the feeling that I was still bouncing on it after landing on solid ground.

Then there was the time we went out to a bar that was tended by a guy she was interested in, and she decided on the way we should try on a couple of bad English accents for the evening. We renamed ourselves. I was Audrey. I forget the name she took for the evening. The rest of the night I spent with a cramped stomach, feeling like I was lying to everyone around me, and when I attracted the attention of a local barfly who was well over twice my age, I felt so sick I had to hide in the bathroom. Of course we had to stay until closing so J. could have time with the bartender.  The barfly lingered, hoping he'd take me home. We wriggled out of that by getting into the bartender's car with his friend, and off we went on a unscheduled, unplanned double date. The other guy was mine, I guess.

They took us on a long, nightmarish adventure drive through "haunted woods," where my cramped stomach turned into the shakes. The narrative had something to do with a murder. Did we know these two guys, at all? No. They could be the murderers. I remember putting my head in J's lap in the backseat while she stroked my hair told me it would all be ok. I was still a child.

That night ended in a diner. I'm alive now to write this. I had an omelette. I was very careful about accepting last minute invitations to bars from J. from then on. In fact, I think that was my last visit to a bar for a very long time.

She got us kicked out of a Rite-Aid when she spent time pretending to steal. She held the best parties by inviting everyone, even people she didn't know. We made a whirlwind trip to the beach with two guys (one she was interested in after the Renaissance Fair visited campus) where we had no money (of course) and ended up waking in a restaurant parking lot in my car with the windows all steamed up. I was not romantically interested in the guy I was blindly paired with, but she was in the backseat with her guy all night. I was relieved to have a breakfast of pancakes and drive home. Our dates wore capes everywhere and juggled. We went out once more together, for a hike in the woods, and I was dazzled by the juggling skills of, what was his Faire name ... Poncho? Boon? Sir Dudley?

Being around J. was disorienting and exhilarating. She was fearless, and taught me not to fear so much, to not panic at every new experience, but approach with it wonder. She also taught me the value of personal boundaries.

Then she disappeared from my life, leaving me wondering if I taught her anything, or if just our time together in that part of our lives was gift enough. I hope it was.

Black Vulture

Guess who has been up on the barn roof three days in a row? A Black Vulture. He looks a bit like he's been taking classes in Commedia dell'arte. Nice mask, friend.

Uh, friend? Maybe not. My ducks are out and about. The first day, I shook my fist at him, and off he flew. The second day, the same, and this morning, he was back, waiting for the thermals to start, or keeping an eye on the dead racoon at the edge of our road.  I felt like a jerk when I realized I shook my fist at the clean-up crew. He's eating a natural predator of my ducks.

So I guess he's just going to do this work until there's nothing left to be done. This morning when we came inside after feeding goats and letting out the ducks I said to Dan, "Three days in a row. Kind of an ugly omen, don't you think?" And he did my favorite thing ever, he made the vulture speak:

"No one ever shakes their fist at the garbage man! I'm not the harbinger of death! Death came first ..."

The first laugh of the morning, hearing the complaint of the Black Vulture, misunderstood supervisor of roadkill, and hopeful player of Coviello.

What Lives There

The shed is home to a metal bouquet of tools,
hungry shovels, rakes of all stripes,
a carpenter bee snugged deep in a beam.
A nail holds the poultry waterer,
from another dangles a rag, red bucket,
a misanthropic hula hoop. Empty feed bags
(too good to throw away), sag in a corner
and complain with a coterie of fenceposts.
The shelf is a smattering of goat treats,
an opened bag of generic cheerios,
animal crackers, and the saltine box
where you found a field mouse
rustling around in a blissful panic.
The floor is rotted, just another task
we say “tomorrow” to, and from behind
a tub of sweet feed, the upside down
Mona Lisa smile of the scythe sneers
her editorial work — the instrument
made to cut out all we don’t want
from the living.

As Easy as Herding a Duck

"How do you herd a duck?" is a Google search string I've typed recently, and of course, I found a helpful video on YouTube. What we've learned in the past two weeks as we take the ducks to and from their tractor, is that when frightened, ducks will play-doh themselves through small spaces, get stuck in concrete blocks, huddle in brambles, and veer off under stairwells then shoot out the bottom openings like "Vend-O-Duck."

We've also learned that they have personal kinespheres, just like people do, and once you learn their comfortable space bubble, you can use their flock instincts, and some cooked corn, to get them to go where you want them to (mostly). This morning we had our first real success, getting them out of the brooder in the greenhouse, and outside to the pyramid without any real snags. This is the first morning they are out there early, rather than later, and with any luck, we'll get them into their coop tonight.

A couple of weeks before lockdowns and social distancing began, eight ducklings arrived at our local post office and I got a call from the postmaster, Fran, to come "pick up your box full of chirps." We've been fortunate for the past two months to be preoccupied with ducklings. We were not prepared for the constant stream of care required, or the endless questioning over brooder light wattage, how to build a secure coop, or what kind of grit is needed for their digestion. But I am glad we've had the vast opportunities for creative problem solving while we've been sheltering in place. It's kept our minds and bodies busy.

I've annoyed countless friends with texts of duck pics (for the record, you really need to proofread your text messages when mentioning ducks). I've hounded my friend Howard, the Animal Whisperer, for advice and guidance.

Ducks grow fast. They are messy. They outgrew everything within a few weeks, and we lost two of them (Moonlight and The Undertoad). They've spent the past few weeks growing in a brooder made out of a livestock waterer, in a corner of the warm greenhouse.

We began to build a coop with supplies picked up, and later had delivered, the chicken wire and two by fours piling up outside our house. We researched, and planned, and neither of us has carpentry skills or any particular spatial genius. We ended up with what I call "Patchy Milatchy," or "The Duck Bunker," or "The Quack Shack."

The whole build was a "it's a learning experience!" of problems overcome with ah-ha solutions. One I applied yesterday. A couple of screws were poking out of the walk-up side of the ramp, so at Dan's suggestion, I grabbed a couple of wine corks and screwed them on. Ingenious.

The coop has to be weasel proof, and it is, we hope. It is so tightly built, that when the wood swells during rainy weather, the door is difficult to shut. It's do-able, and then locked down with two sliding hasps.

We also built a "duck tractor," a moveable safe haven for them to be in while we're not out on the property with them. It's a pyramid, because that was the easiest to build with the materials we had, and also Dan's idea.

I'm not sure what would be out there for them if I was left to my own devices to build something. I found myself outside this week on a sunny day, snagged in a curl of poultry netting, with a handful of those jabby fenceposts at my feet, trying to envision a duck run with the materials we had left over. I gave up. So for now, the ducks will move from their coop to the tractor, or out onto the pond.

My next search string for Google is, "How do you get ducks to come in from swimming on the pond?"

Panic Corner in the Language Center

There’s a part of the language center in my brain that I imagine as a large filing cabinet — one of the metal ones with drawers that stick. Tucked inside dog-eared folders are the words I never use, but which pop up like song lyrics. I spent an entire day wondering where spanghew came from and why I was thinking of it, and it never got used in anything I wrote or said. It was just my mantra for the day. Ah, but here it is now, sparkling in its obscurity, begging for you to look up its definition.

My sister and I share a general abhorrence for any food that is slimy in texture. At a restaurant together, with a set meal, we were served a dish that is similar to potato, which gets blended into a viscous soup. It is served over rice. The entire time I was in Japan I was careful not to offend anyone, but I was pretty sure I was not going to like this dish, and didn’t want to leave any untouched. As Naomi served it up for everyone, I said, “sukoshi,” and made a little gesture with my thumb and index finger to indicate “small.” She understood and spooned out a tiny bit.

Sukoshi is the word for “a little bit” in Japanese that I learned 20 years ago when I studied some “get around words” for my first trip to Japan.  Like most of what I used that trip, which included "Otearai wa doko desu ka?”, the word was relegated to that filing cabinet. When I needed it most, in that critical moment of being served a food I might not finish, there it was, like a superhero in a bright red cape.

I probably could have finished the dish. The entire meal was delicious. Oishii. That’s a word I’ll use often.

Yesterday I decided I’d like to have prints made of the photos I took on our trip. I uploaded them all to Google Drive, thinking that would connect to the drugstore’s photo center kiosk. It did not. Google Photos was available, that celestial super-cloud of data I never think about, or I could use Facebook, Instagram, or connect my phone directly to the kiosk with my power cord. Who takes their power cord with them everywhere? I went to another drug store, which had no photo center. Then I ended up at the store of the Living Dead: Wal-Mart.

I thought I’d just breeze through the aisles of zoned-out shoppers by taking the superhighway lane in the middle of the store, straight to the back. My goal was electronics, where the photo kiosks were. A young man at a booth chirped, “Ma’am, may I ask you a quick question?” and I replied, “Nope, I’m on the run.”

“On the run?” From what, exactly? I have never used that phrase before, but the panic center, the part that hates dealing with nonsense, called it up and without thinking, spanghewed it out of my mouth. It worked. The guy backed off whatever his sales pitch was. I didn’t have to talk with anyone who called me “Ma’am.” I wouldn’t feel obligated to buy The Thing I Didn’t Need or Want.

When you’re in a pinch, facing an awkward social situation, the words may just come to you,  unbidden. These are the words you didn’t know you knew, the ones waiting inside untouched folders, the ones whose definitions might need to be researched, but oh, they’ll do the trick as you make your great escape.