Two reunions

It’s the time of year that lends itself to reunions: not necessarily the official, capital “R” kind with college classes or multi-generational families that take place in late spring on campuses or midsummer at lake houses, but the unofficial reunions in which holidays or other homecomings bring us together with familiar faces from our past.

I was part of two such gatherings in the past week, though only in retrospect did I see similarities between the two events. One was a yearly party for high school friends. The other was an afternoon when it happened to fall upon me to feed the livestock at my parents’ farm.

I’ve hosted a pre-Thanksgiving gathering for classmates from high school for the past four years or so. The group that gathers isn’t a defined clique, like those at the center of so many novels. This isn’t about four women who were bridesmaids at each other’s weddings or lived together in New York apartments after college graduation. It’s just a general invitation that goes out over social media every fall encouraging anyone from our class – or the class ahead of us, or the class behind us, or really anyone at all who ever knew any of us during high school – to get together.

Sometimes only my closest friends show up; other years, alumni join us whom I barely knew during our Concord Academy days. But it always works out. There are the obligatory “Wasn’t it you who” and “Remember that class trip when we,” but by the time the evening ends, we’ve always gone so much deeper than that: into what matters most to us now. Our careers, whether successful or foundering; our marriages or lack thereof, our children or the choices we’ve made not to have children; our travels; our joys and disappointments.

The other reunion took place in ankle-deep mud, and was meaningful in a very different way. For about three years, it was my daily responsibility to feed the sheep and cows at my parents’ farm. The routine began after I almost simultaneously lost my job and adopted a dog; with the kids off at school in the morning, I was free, and spending time in the barnyard was a great way for the dog to get some exercise. My farmhand duties continued until my father took on a business partner in his farming enterprise three years ago and I was no longer needed. By then I was ready for a break from the daily slog out to the haybarn.

But this weekend, with my parents and their business partner all out of town for the holiday, it fell on me once again to care for the animals. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the task, but the minute I climbed over the fence and dropped into the mud in front of the barn, I became aware of how happy I was to be back there. The cows looked at me with eager hungry eyes, just as they used to. The sheep had the same benign gaze they always had. Retrieving the haybales and throwing them into the feeder was the same energizing stretch-and-lift workout I remembered from nearly a half-decade ago.

It was good to be back amidst the farm animals, and it was good to be back amidst my high school friends, and I hope neither group will be offended by the comparison. The point is that returning to old friends, be they agile (if increasingly middle-aged) two-legged humans or shaggy milling cattle, is rewarding. It reminds us of who we were, thirty years ago or just three years ago, and it reassures us that we can return. Familiarity is comforting, whether it comes in human or bovine form. At the party and in the barnyard, I was happy to be back amidst familiar faces.

Breakfast on the house

One of them sings loudly. One doesn’t like to talk at all. One wants only water. One deliberately initiates a scuffle even though there’s plenty for everyone.

It’s a typical winter weekday morning: one on which between the hours of 6:30 and 8:30 a.m., I’ll feed four different meals to three different species in three different locations. In all, it’s 15 mouths to feed; or, put another way, 56 legs all making their way over to see what I’ve got to offer them for their morning repast.

Not all at once, of course. My 13-year-old eats first, fresh out of the shower and cheerful even though first light has yet to dawn. He takes one look at the thermometer, which hovers around the 10-degree mark, and begins to sing loudly: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a song he learned from watching the movie “Elf” twenty or thirty times last summer, when it was most definitely not cold outside. Today it is, though, and as I listen to him do his best cabaret act while buttering an English muffin, I wonder where the stereotype of sullen teenagers slow to waken on a winter morning comes from. I may be wishing he’d go back to bed, but he’s clearly ready to face the day.

As he assembles his backpack for school, I make a quick stop in the laundry room to toss a scoop of kibble into the dog’s empty dish. I notice her water bowl is empty too and would prefer not to think how long that has been the case for; it continues to be a mystery of domestic life that in four years, I have never once known anyone in my family except for me to fill the dog’s water bowl, and yet at least twice a year I go out of town for two days or more, leaving the rest of the family behind, and when I return the dog is always still alive. Somehow it gets done by someone else if I’m not around, but most definitely not when I am. Another truism of motherhood.

After feeding the dog, I head upstairs to wake my very drowsy 9-year-old, who does not like to be roused one bit. The only thing that cheers her up in the morning is a somewhat maddening game of her own invention in which she answers my question about what she’d like for breakfast by forming letters with her fingers and expecting me to guess what breakfast food the initials represent. On a good day she flashes me an easy one: “O” for oatmeal; “B” for bagel. Other days it’s not so easy, and I waste six or seven minutes trying to figure out that “L” stands for “lightly buttered toast” or “M” represents “medium-sized bowl of Special K.” She always seems disappointed when she has to provide verbal clues for me; I’m just glad to be one step closer to getting everyone fed and out the door.

A cacophony of mooing greets me an hour later as I drive down the lane to the barnyard, where 12 cows divided into three groups based on weaning, breeding, and general compatibility are waiting to be fed. The adult cows point their faces skyward and let loose with their loudest moos; the calves stand in front of the gate and then skittishly leap to the side as I reach out to pat them.

The cows eat in their usual inexplicable pattern: although I throw five hay bales down from the hay loft for one sub-herd of seven animals, all seven of them cluster around the same single bale, shouldering each other out of the way while four other bales sit nearby, unnoticed. Two more bales go over one fence to a group of three cows; and the last group of two gets just one bale to share.

And then I’m done: everyone whose breakfast I’m responsible for has eaten. I still need to go running and then write some articles, but it all seems easy and relaxed after everyone has been fed. The kids are off at school; the dog is waiting to go running with me; the cows are chewing away, as they’ll do for the next several hours before they make their way through all the bales.

I’ve often said the reason I like feeding the cows is that it’s so easy and yet so satisfying. It requires so little judgment or analysis, just strength. And yet the results are so tangible: I’m faced with a herd of content, well-fed animals whose noisy clamor has ended. I suppose that's true of the other creatures as well. The rest of my day might be more challenging: writing compelling text, offering intelligent conversation, solving various problems. True, it sometimes seems like feeding hungry beings is my primary role in life, but at the same time, feeding is easy. And for now, feeding is done.

Creative cow-tending

Despite visual evidence and pastoral sonnets to the contrary, life in the barnyard is in fact never dull.

As I wrote about recently, the herd has grown. And for a while, it looked like my cow-feeding responsibilities would end as a result. Twelve animals, ranging in size from medium to extra-large, just seemed like too many for me to deal with every morning.

But then they were divided by fences into smaller groups, which made it a little less intimidating, and it turned out that I didn’t want to give up barnyard duty after all. So once again, since the beginning of last month, I’ve been out feeding the cows every morning before my daily run.

The feeding season started out well. This week has been challenging, though. I thought I’d developed a foolproof system, one that would work even with a sub-herd of six bovines following me as I trek through the mud to the barn. Adhering to the successful method I developed last winter, I climb up the outside ladder to the loft and throw down some haybales, which is supposed to divert the animals sufficiently that I can then slip in and out of the front of the barn without anyone following me as I pull out a few more bales.

But we have a new animal named Gretchen who is very large and a little bit pushy. Well, maybe that’s unfair. Pushy is a relative term, and when you’re Gretchen’s size, simply ever-so-slightly-leaning, or standing with the slightest bit of sideways motion, can make you seem pushy to someone less than one-tenth your weight. Anyway, Gretchen is clearly a grass-is-always-greener type of girl – quite literally, in this case. She dives in eagerly enough as I toss bales down from the loft, but somehow by the time I slog my way through the mud around to the front of the barn, she’s always right behind me, certain that whatever bales I’m about to pull out for the other herd are inherently superior to those that she was offered.

Other cows, assuming a creature who is both larger than they are and more interestingly colored (black and white as opposed to their uniform red coats) must know something they don’t, follow suit, and before I know it, I’m hemmed into the lower level of the barn, unable to push the gate back open because they are all standing too close to it. So I throw out some more bales, but because they are all in my way, the bales more or less bounce off their sides and land on the ground, directly in front of the barn door. So the cows stand there and eat, and I still can’t get out.

Yesterday I solved the problem by climbing over the barn gate rather than opening it, sliding into the few inches between Gretchen and the side of the barn, and slithering my way to freedom. This is a bad idea in any conditions, given that the space between a large animal and a wall is not where you most want to find yourself; and an even worse idea given the current mud conditions in the barnyard, where getting anywhere quickly – or, in this case, out of anywhere quickly – could present a problem to boots that can’t lift out of the ooze.

Today I solved it more creatively. When Gretchen and a few of her compatriots stood directly in front of the barn, I placed hay bales on their broad backs and let them roll off the other side. The animals turned toward the hay once it fell, and I made my escape.

It’s not a great solution, but in the barnyard, as in life, circumstances are ever changing. Within the next few weeks, the current configuration of animals is likely to change – some will be moved for breeding; others for weaning – and it will be less complicated when there isn’t such a high concentration of critters in any one place. The mud will turn to frozen ground, and that will make general navigation of the terrain easier as well. Moreover, Gretchen might wise up to the fact that there’s no difference between the bales I’m throwing down from the loft and those I’m trying to hoist out of the lower level, and then maybe she’ll eat contentedly near the loft and leave me to pass in and out of the front of the barn unobstructed.

Between the three, that last possibility is the one I’m least inclined to bet on. But it could happen. The grass may be always greener, but the hay is always….hay-colored. Maybe the animals will realize that. And if not, I’ll just keep finding new and creative ways to vault over them. Necessity is the mother of invention, and somehow, if need be, I’ll come up with a bovine circumnavigator of some kind before the winter ends.

Feeding season again

It’s a mid-fall seasonal ritual: the resumption of livestock feeding.

From May through October, the cows graze. That makes life easier for the rest of us. I see them as I drive by or run alongside their pastures, but I don’t interact with them much. They graze and mingle in the fields; I focus on human pursuits.

But for the other six months of the year, I spend time with them daily. I head out to the barn in the morning and they follow me right up to the gate. I climb the ladder to the hayloft and they stand below, watching me. I shoulder my way among them to move a bale or cut the twine around the hay and they subtly shove back, reminding me that my shoving is no match for their shoving. Or even their gentlest nudging, for that matter.

I’ve been doing the cows’ daily feeding on my parents’ farm for the past three years, not out of obligation but because I was outdoors on the earlier side of the morning anyway, letting the dog run around and then going running myself, and it just made sense to take on this responsibility since I was right there already.

But for the past several months, I thought my job with the animals was over. The logistics of farm life have changed over the course of the year; now there is a significantly greater number of animals in the herd, and also more farmhands involved, so I was told there was no need for me to continue.

But rituals, like habits and water, have a way of carving their own paths. I had thought the herd had become too large in number for me to navigate my way around comfortably, but then for husbandry purposes they were separated into small groups in three different pastures. And it turned out I was still the first one out in the barnyard in the morning, letting the dog play and getting ready for my daily run. So once again, it just made sense for me to climb up to the hayloft and throw down some bales while I was out there anyway.

And even though it seemed like giving up this duty might not be such a bad change when I contemplated it a few months ago – surely that extra ten or fifteen minutes every morning that I’d save from not entering the barnyard would come in handy – now that I’m back into the feeding routine, I’m so glad I didn’t have to give it up after all.

I love the way the animals watch me walking toward the barn, the way they low in anticipation of their morning meal, the way they mill and shuffle and edge each other around as they wait for me to make my slow way to the hay supply. I like the way they lower their big faces into the bales once I finally deliver on my promise, and the way they ignore me as I make my way between them once they’re eating.

It’s not an affectionate personal relationship like the one I have with my dog…or my kids. I just like being around them. It’s been part of my day during the cold-weather seasons for the past three years. I know they don’t particularly care who shows up in the barnyard at eight o’clock each morning. My company doesn’t mean anything different to them than any other human’s. But their company means something to me. It’s a tradition, and I’m happy that once again this November, the bovines and I are spending time together.

End of the barnyard "semester"

It was a little like the feeling on the last day of the school year when you’re not graduating. I knew I’d be back, and I suspected nothing would be radically different when I returned. At the same time, like finishing a grade, it was the end of a phase, so I couldn’t help feeling a little bit reflective.

Specifically, yesterday was the last day of cow-feeding for the season. From now until mid-October, the animals will rely on grazing. I’ve pulled out the very last bale of hay; the barn is empty, and as I did my usual triple-check of the barn gates after feeding to be sure I’d secured everything, I had to laugh to myself: it wouldn’t really matter if the animals did get into the barn, at this point; there’s nothing in it for them to eat anyway.

Just as I used to do on the last day of school, I tried to think back to what had happened this past feeding season that was particularly memorable. There was the growing calf Rain’s uncanny ability to slip in and out of the sheep’s gate, a space that by all appearances he was too big for, and so we left it open when it was time to separate him from his mother for weaning. But every time we separated them, we found him back with her by the next morning. He’s the Houdini of the barnyard, able to will his way through an opening that appears to us to be much too small for his fast-growing frame. Finally we learned to leave the sheep gate closed so that he’d stay where he was supposed to be.

I thought back to the morning in late November when I went out to the barnyard and couldn’t find Hank, the 2,000-pound bull. That’s a lot of animal to be hiding, but when the other animals showed up to be fed, he did not. I drove to the house to share the problem with my parents; we all looked for him and speculated on what could have happened. A bull-napping incident? A fence break? Had he blundered into the pond? All sounded so improbable to us. It wasn’t until after we’d alerted the local police to the problem that we found him stuck (but not too badly stuck) in a chute behind the barn. Emergency averted; we coaxed him back out of the chute, and all was well in the barnyard again.

From that time on, I never again had the experience of animals not showing up at feeding time until last month, when I arrived at the barn one morning and none of them was in sight. The sound of mooing drew me eventually out toward the brook; then three of the four animals emerged from the woods and headed toward the hay bales I’d just put out. The fourth was tending to a newborn calf who then had to be coaxed up from the brook and onto higher, drier land. The calf is three weeks old now, strong and healthy.

This winter was memorable in the barnyard for the same reason it was memorable everywhere else: feet upon feet of snow. I remembered the days I slogged off the plowed driveway and through the untouched drifts to get to the barn in snow that was much higher than my knees. The worst thing to happen in terms of animal care this winter wasn’t the snow, though; it was the day the pump stopped working. My parents were out of town on vacation, and I was at a loss for what the problem was and what to do about it. The cows had already drunk most of the water in the trough by the time I discovered that no water would flow out of the pump, so I took the snow shovel and dumped as much snow as I could into the trough. It didn’t work as well as I expected, though; after a good fifteen minutes of shoveling snow into the trough, the water level had only risen a few inches. At that point I remembered that grade-school rule of meteorology: one foot of snow equals one inch of water. Filling the trough with snow as a means to keeping the cows watered was going to be almost impossible. Instead, I focused on what the problem with the pump might be and noticed that a bit of ice had built up around it. I chipped it away, cleared the accumulated snow out from around the pipes, and waited a few hours; the next time I tried, water flowed easily from the pump.

Also I’d learned at least one very valuable lesson. One day a month or two ago, my father and I tried to separate the cows and bulls. We put hay bales where we wanted the two cows; they followed us amicably into the enclosure, and we closed the gate while they munched away at their breakfast. But when I went briefly back into the cows’ pen I was taken by surprise when Gracie shoved her way right past me to get back to the bulls. Once she had food, I assumed she’d lose interest in being with the bulls. Without giving too much contemplation to what that says about me, I’ll simply admit here that I learned an important lesson about working with large animals that day.

Over the next few months, the cows will eat all the grass they want; we’ll hope the summer doesn’t become as dry as last year did. We’ll mow and cut hay, and then bale it and refill the barn for next winter. Come October, I’ll be back in the barnyard feeding the animals every morning again.

So it’s like the end of a school year. Lots happened – relatively speaking, of course; I acknowledge that these are cows, and nothing much happens even at the most adventurous of times – some of it good and some of it not so good, all of it enlightening. Spending time with this amiable herd every morning at feeding time has been a pleasure. I’ll come back in the fall a little more experienced in animal care, ready, I hope, for a new season of bovine adventures.

Spring calf

When I arrived at the barnyard yesterday morning, no cows greeted me. In fact, there were no cows as far as the eye could see.

This was mysterious. Like most animals, the cows and bulls invariably show up at feeding time. They haven’t been wandering far recently anyway – when it’s not grazing season, they’re not very motivated to stray far from the barn even though they have plenty of pasture to explore – and I couldn’t remember ever reaching the barn at feeding time with not a single one of them in sight.

I walked a little ways toward the woods in one direction, then a little ways toward the woods in the other direction, puzzled. I stopped to think for a moment, and then I heard mooing from the woods to the east of the pasture. Reassured, I opened the barn gate and pulled out the usual three bales that this particular herd goes through daily at this time of year. I could see them ambling slowly out of the grove of trees, and I could tell it wasn’t the easiest crossing for them. The ground was boggy between the edge of the woods and the pasture. First Rain wandered out, stumbled a little, headed toward the hay bales I’d put out. Then Gracie, a large cow walking sturdily. Then Hank, slow as ever.

No sign of Daisy, which clarified the situation somewhat. My father had asked me just the day before if I’d noticed any signs that she was ready to deliver. I hadn’t, but signs aren’t generally that easy to come by, and I had almost forgotten that she was due this month. She’s calved before without any trouble, so we weren’t concerned, just curious when this year’s calf would arrive.

I headed out in the same direction from which the cows had emerged. Soon I saw Daisy next to the brook, her head down to the ground, and right near her head was a damp dark brown heap of a calf. I could see the calf tossing its head, so that alleviated two concerns already: the delivery was over and the calf was moving.

It seemed to me that Daisy wasn’t too happy about the calf being so close to the brook, almost in the water, and the bank where they stood was steep. As I watched, I could see the calf was having trouble scrambling up the bank to flatter, drier terrain. But within a few minutes, the calf was on its feet and managed to take the few steps that removed it safely from the steep part of the bank.

It looked like a very very small calf to me, but my father arrived just about then – I had called when I saw Daisy to let him know about the birth – and he said it looked like a normal calf to him. The placenta hadn’t yet appeared, so we didn’t have that job to take care of yet. (Suffice to say that I’m always happy when calves are born on one of the three days each week that our local transfer station is open. And suffice to say that I sincerely hope no one from our DPW is reading my blog.)

Just like all the other cows I’ve seen after delivery, Daisy knew what she was doing. She licked the calf’s rumpled fur and nudged it back to its feet. We could safely assume it would soon be nursing. With my mother’s help, I fetched a bale of hay and brought it out to Daisy so that she and the calf wouldn’t have to cross the same boggy terrain the other cows did to get to the barn.

Yesterday was a mild, clear, dry day. Heavy rain is predicted for later today. I always feel bad for the calves that are born during wet weather, but it seems to happen often, and they pull through. This one will grow quickly, as they all do, and will soon seem like any other member of the herd. I’m glad I was able to see it in its first few minutes. I hope it’s glad to be here.

The everyday-ness of feeding cows

Heading back from feeding the cows yesterday morning, I found myself musing. Why do I enjoy this so much? Why is it so satisfying, day after day? Why do I find no particular relief in having a couple days off from the duty, as I did last weekend when I went up to Maine leaving my husband and son with the barnyard chores? Why do I never accept my father’s offer to take a turn with cow-feeding, a job he did on his own here for more than two decades before I offered to take it on a couple of years ago?

It’s hard for me to explain why this job is so satisfying. Unlike dogs waiting to be fed, the cows don’t greet me with ecstatic displays of welcome; they just swing their big heads around to watch me enter the barnyard. Our dog jumps irrepressibly with excitement when we offer her the simplest gesture of affection; the cows and bulls, on the other hand, seem almost patronizing as they submit to a scratch between the ears when I walk amongst them, but they certainly don’t seek out my attention. They just wait stolidly for their bales of hay to be tossed down from the loft or pulled out from the back of the barn, and then they wander eventually over to the water trough to see that I’ve topped it off for them.

But leaving the barnyard always gives me a sense of accomplishment different from anything else I do during the day. Not a bigger sense of accomplishment, necessarily, but in some ways a more unequivocal one. And I suppose that’s because the job is physically demanding but also easy. I haul a few bales, turn some valves on the pump, take off my gloves to manipulate the chain closure to the gate, reach and stretch my arms and legs to climb up and down the hayloft ladder; but really it’s all easy. Very little can go wrong; it’s unlikely that on any given day I’ll find any of these simple processes impossible to execute.

So perhaps the satisfaction comes from that combination: knowing I’ve worked hard physically, but also knowing it’s more or less a sure thing that I’ll complete my task in the course of fifteen or twenty minutes. And when I’m done, I’ve filled that most primal of needs: provided food and water to fill an animal’s stomach. What could be easier, and yet what could feel more critical at the time it’s being executed?

Curious about how something so routine could continue to be pleasing, day after day, I resorted to the question I often pose to myself these days: WWHDTS, or What Would Henry David Thoreau Say? In his journal from 1841, I found this quote: “Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it.”

Is feeding the cows every morning the routine against which I brace myself as I draw on my boots to advance through the rest of the day? I like that image, the idea that the sturdy everyday-ness of this task fortifies me for whatever follows. Perhaps that’s the answer: I’m fortifying myself as I fortify the cows: them with hay and water; me with the routine of caring for them. Maybe they don’t show the overt enthusiasm of dogs at my arrival, but I know they wait for me every morning, and I know their day becomes better when I appear. And it might be that that’s enough.

Closing the barn door behind the...

I headed out yesterday morning before church to feed the cows and sheep, as I do every morning. The ground in the barnyard was muddy, but I was prepared for that.

What I was not prepared for was the sight that met me as I approached the barn. I quickly realized that the barnyard event I’ve always dreaded had come to pass: the cows were not standing in front of the hay barn, as they usually do once the sun is up and they know I’ll be coming out soon to feed them, but rather inside the hay barn.

This is the kind of scene I have anxiety dreams about. You know how some people turn back from their door three or four times before they leave the house to be sure they’ve turned off the coffee pot or the oven? That’s how I am about latching the barn gate. I check and re-check it before I leave the barnyard after each morning’s feeding, because I’m so apprehensive that I’ll leave it open and the cows will discover the open entrance into the haybarn. And then, I’ve always wondered, how on earth would I get them back out?

Well, yesterday I had the chance to find out. The good part was that it didn’t have to do with me or the kids leaving the gate open. It wasn’t our carelessness that caused the problem; it was the animals’ brute strength. They’d simply prodded the gate with their heads until the hinge broke away from the wall.

At the same time, this wasn’t altogether good, because it meant that even if I could get the animals back out into the pasture, there was still no gate to keep them from reentering the barn.

But at the initial moment, that wasn’t my problem; simply moving them was. Unlike farmers of old, I bring my cell phone out to the barn with me every day for just this kind of situation. I called the house; my sister, who is visiting for the weekend, said she would be right out to help me.

And then I had a surprise. Maybe the cows had been in the barn for hours and had eaten their fill by then, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t that hard to get them to move. Four of them were in the barn when I arrived; two I managed to simply push on out. Then I saw that the gate they’d knocked over was flat on the barn floor and one of them was standing with her legs intertwined in the gate rails; when I tried to pick up and move the gate, it discombobulated her enough that she moved her hooves and eventually clomped on out of the barn.

Which left the fourth, Gracie, who I knew from prior experience was likely to be difficult. She’s ornery by nature anyway, the one who has been known to wait until I’m in the rare tight spot during feeding time and then push me nonchalantly against the wall. “Move, Gracie, just move,” I said, pushing against her. She looked at me, unimpressed, and stood her ground.

But just then my sister drove up. Startled by the sound of the truck so close by, Gracie craned her neck around to see what was going on, took a step forward – and then I had momentum on my side. One push, using the detached gate itself as a nice flat tool against her big furry side, and she was out as well. My sister and my father took on the job of fixing the gate, and soon everything was back to normal.

This doesn’t exactly quell my anxiety about what happens if the cows again find their way into the haybarn. I have no reason to think it would be quite so easy to get them out next time. And it’s possible by the time I found them yesterday they were sated; it might have been harder if I’d arrived earlier and they cared more about stuffing themselves. Curiously, the enormous bull, Hank, was one of only two animals who was not in the barn when I arrived, even though he’s nearly twice as big, heavy and strong as the rest of the animals. I don’t know whether he’d had his share earlier or just wasn’t interested.

Still, knowing it’s possible to get out of this situation with a happy outcome is reassuring. I don’t know that it would all go the same way again, but maybe I can worry a little less about it. For now, the hinges are reinforced and the cows are full. And I’ll just keep double-checking the latch before I leave the barnyard.

When dinner has a name: Raising kids on a farm

"What’s for dinner tonight?" Tim asked me at breakfast yesterday, as he does every morning.

“Something Grandma made for us,” I answered vaguely, not because I didn’t know but because I was trying to do four other things at the same time: reach a glass down from the shelf for Holly, feed the dog, listen to a voicemail, put away a bag of bagels.

“But what did Grandma make for us?” Tim persisted.

“I don’t know, something she served a couple of weeks ago and then froze the leftovers for us. Shredded beef of some kind.”

“Pulled Freddy!” Tim exclaimed, delighted. “I had that at their house last week!”

“Yay!” Holly chimed in. “Pulled Freddy was delicious!”

My kids can’t be the only children raised on a cattle farm who call dinner by name, but I tend to think they’re in the minority. Fern Arable they are not, that’s for sure. Unlike the wistful and ingenuous heroine of Charlotte’s Web, they’ve never gone to bat to save an animal’s life. Quite the opposite: their attitude is that they’d rather eat a friend than a stranger.

And all the cows on my parents’ farm next door to our house are their friends. My kids or their cousins generally grant themselves the job of naming each new calf. Pre-grandchildren, my parents didn’t name the animals. Like many farmers, they preferred not to distinguish with personal names animals that would eventually go to the slaughterhouse.

But that policy is long gone. My kids and their cousins name each animal and refer to each animal by that name not only throughout the critter’s lifetime but throughout its culinary existence as well. “Jake is in the freezer!” they announce, or “Let’s serve Maggie for the Memorial Day cookout.” I had to smile recently as I read about a popular dish from the 1950s called Steak Diane; that recipe is believed to have been named after Diana, goddess of the hunt, but in my household every steak has a name.

Dinner guests sometimes catch me hushing my children when they use proper names at the dinner table. “Pass me another slice of Jennifer,” they’ll say. I always try to put a quick end to that. “You mean roast beef, Tim.” He smiles innocently at me, confident that he, unlike the dinner guest, can picture this entree when it stood on four legs grazing.

Living on a farm has brought me nothing but pleasure; I subscribe to the belief of many small-farm operators that we ensure our cows have a healthy, happy, free-ranging life for as long as they live and are eventually slaughtered under the most humane conditions possible. Still, I used to find it a bit disturbing that my kids were so sanguine about the history of their protein. I thought often of E.B. White’s Fern Arable, fighting for the life of her pet pig, and wondered if my kids lacked a basic humanity gene.

But now I see it differently. My kids love the animals. They walk among the cows in the pasture and witness the birth of calves. And they love them all over again as part of the food chain. In reality, their perspective isn’t macabre as much as it is holistic. Their friends think of hamburgers as patties from the supermarket freezer; my kids know the life cycle of a hamburger almost from conception.

Does this make them inhumane? I don’t think so. As it happens, I’m a vegetarian and have been since college. It wasn’t for idealistic reasons related to farm practices; it was for nutritional reasons. In some ways, I don’t understand why anyone consumes animals. But at least my kids do it with a high level of awareness. They know where food comes from and how it is raised. They name it and pet it and choose to eat it anyway. And they do it all with respect for the life the animal lived – and the pulled beef barbeque with which they ended up at dinner last night.

A cow in need is a friend indeed

Staying up all night with a fussy baby is a timeless element of parenting in that nearly all parents go through it, but it’s also usually a phase of limited duration. And although a friend of mine once wrote an essay about how she misses being up at 2 AM in a rocker looking out at the moon, I didn’t believe her. It’s been over six or seven years since I was up at night with a fussy baby, and I still frequently wake in the morning grateful for an uninterrupted night of sleep.

So I wasn’t very happy to wake shortly after midnight last night to hear a bellowing cow. Steady, repeated, high-volume mooing went on for the next three hours. Occasionally there would be a break, and I’d fall asleep, and then it would inevitably start up again. MOO! … MOO! … MOO!

Even with middle-of-the-night drowsiness, it wasn’t hard for me to make an educated guess about what had happened. I can’t actually tell the half-dozen cows on our farm apart by their voices, but Gracie is the only one with a new calf and I did recognize this sound: the bellowing moo of a cow calling to her calf. So I knew that either the baby bull born last weekend was stuck somewhere and couldn’t get free, or had wandered off to someplace Gracie did not want him to be, or something worse had befallen him and he was dead or incapacitated. I certainly hoped the latter wasn’t the case – we do have a lot of coyotes around this summer, but I’ve never heard of a coyote attacking a calf – but the reality is that in the dark of night, there’s just not a lot to do about it. So Rick and I tried to sleep.

When dawn broke, Rick headed out to investigate. I heard a few more bellowing moos and then silence. Wonderful sweet silence. I fell asleep at last and slept until eight.

Rick told the kids and me at breakfast that as soon as he stepped outside, Gracie stopped mooing and walked toward him. Then she started mooing again as if urging him to follow her, which he did. Gracie brought him to the gate separating the two pastures, from where Rick could see that the calf had slipped through the sheep’s gate to spend the night among the bulls.

Rick crossed into the bulls’ pasture, made his way behind the small calf, and coaxed him back through the sheep’s gate. “And then Gracie went like this: ‘Mmmm. Mmmm.’” Rick told us. Not a bellowing moo like before; a murmur of thanks.

Though he tends to be unsentimental about the animals, I could tell Rick was pleased on a number of levels. He’d solved the problem; Gracie’s appreciation was obvious and almost human; and even Gracie’s reaction when he first stepped outside was gratifying: she approached him with apparent relief, as if she knew he could help her. That kind of trust, whether it comes from friends, animals or children, is always a good feeling.

My kids sometimes tease me at how delighted I always am when anyone asks me for directions. Of course, with the advent of GPS, it happens less and less, but since we live on a main road and often walk along it, we do get a fair number of requests for navigational help. And it just feels good to set people on their way. On a different order of magnitude, at church we all sign up to deliver casseroles when someone has had surgery or has lost a family member, and this summer I was part of a large group of women who took turns sending daily greeting cards to a member of our circle who was dealing with an illness.

Helping feels good: it’s that simple. Whether we’re helping a friend, a neighbor, a stranger or a cow, it’s gratifying to meet someone else’s need. Explaining why may be complicated, but sensing the truth of it isn’t. Rick could even see it in Gracie’s big bovine eyes.

A healthy calf and a job to do

Gracie is not our favorite cow on my parents’ farm. She is more stand-offish than the other animals and can occasionally be a little bit ornery, whereas all the others tend to be gentle and sweet. Still, she’s been part of the herd for several years now, and her personality has grown on us. Like the high-maintenance friend you know you’ll stay loyal to despite the challenges of getting along with her, we wouldn’t want all the cows to be like her, but to some extent we enjoy her distinguishing irascibility.

Gracie happens to have another distinction: she’s the only cow who has had difficulty calving. Her first calf drowned in the brook shortly after birth, though we don’t know the circumstances. And Gracie’s second calf was even more problematic; it was the first time in twenty years of my parents’ cattle operation that we’ve had to provide hands-on help with a delivery. Essentially, my husband Rick ended up performing high-powered midwife duties that time, and without going into too much graphic detail, suffice to say that he was the one to do it because he has the strongest biceps among those of us living on the farm.

So Gracie has been unlucky twice, and yet as my father – chief farmer here – pointed out, she was unlucky in two entirely different ways, so when calving season loomed this summer, he assured us there was no reason to think she’d have trouble a third time. Circumstances beyond anyone’s control made it impossible for Dad to be here as her due date approached, though, so with Rick, Mom and me left holding the proverbial bag, we couldn’t help worrying.

And yet luck was on our side – and hers – this time. Midmorning on Saturday I was on the phone with my mother (they live next door, but she and I still spend plenty of time on the phone) and realized that I could barely hear Mom’s voice because of the clamor of mooing – more like bellowing – from the barnyard. So after I hung up, Rick and I put on our boots and headed out to investigate. The cows have many acres among which to roam, but following the sound of the bellowing brought us straight to Gracie, who was standing behind the barn with a small, damp, rumpled brown calf at her feet.

A little poking around assured us it was a perfect delivery. Gracie looked strong and well; the calf rose quickly to stand, which often doesn’t happen until quite a bit more time has gone by, and he started rooting at his mother’s udder. Rick toweled off the calf and treated the umbilical cord with iodine; my mother and I fetched Gracie a bale of hay (the cows graze at this time of year, but we decided to make things easy for her in those first few postpartum hours) and took some photos.

As with human babies, there’s never any promise that a newborn calf is going to thrive. But there’s not much we can do to improve their odds once they’ve arrived; if the mother cow gets through the birth successfully, we’ve done just about all we can. So we felt relieved and triumphant, but one concern remained; Gracie hadn’t yet delivered the placenta, which would need to be buried. Moreover, both Rick and my mother needed to go out for several hours, so that issue was left in my dubiously capable hands.

In my hands figuratively and literally, as it turned out. Rick suggested before he left that I head back out to the barnyard in another hour to check on the situation. My mother’s advice was to bring a trash bag. So I ate lunch (yes, really), read the paper, and then somewhat warily found gloves, a shovel and a trash bag and headed back out to the barnyard.

Mission accomplished on Gracie’s part, I discovered. The placenta was out, all right. I wasn’t absolutely certain I’d recognize it. I’d never dealt with this part of calving before. Moreover, I’d never set eyes on a placenta of any kind – including those of my two children. I have friends who do the whole tree-planting thing, but in my case, my interest in what had come out during childbirth began and ended with my actual children; I was content to hold and touch them, without feeling any need to interface with the by-products. But when I went out to the pasture, there was Gracie, there was the new calf, there were a couple of the other cows playing doting auntie, and there was…well, the placenta, obviously. I identified it by process of elimination, no pun intended.

It was too heavy for the shovel, but using the trash bag, I was able to wrap it up and cart it off to an appropriate disposal site, and my work was done. This particular aspect of farming wasn’t on my so-called bucket list, but seeing Gracie have a successful delivery was something I’d hoped for throughout the past several weeks. Back at the house, I washed my hands as visions of cigars and champagne corks danced in my head, though with the summer-long drought we’ve been experiencing, cigars would have been the last thing anyone would want near the barn.

The next day, it started to rain. We named the new bull Rain, in gratitude for the drought-ending precipitation and his healthy arrival. I’ll never forget my first placenta disposal experience. It was a good week for me not to have scrimped and bought generic trash bags. If the Hefty Cinch-Sak manufacturers want a testimonial, I’d be more than happy to provide one. They’ll have to synthesize an illustration themselves, though; I left the camera in the kitchen. The picture in my mind’s eye is more than enough for me.

Into every life, some rain must fall (and soon, we hope)

When I went outside last night just before bedtime to look at the sky, I could see flashes of lightning just beyond the tree line. I could hear muted thunder and a gentle patter of rain.

“Please rain harder,” I thought as I looked at the sky. “And please rain for a lot of hours.”

The contiguous weeks of unusually hot weather we’ve had this summer are causing the ground to dry out. The grass around us is turning yellow and even brown. Since we live on a farm, the problem of drought is meaningful on more than just an intellectual level to us. If rain doesn’t fall in significant amounts soon, the cows will run out of sufficient grazing land and we’ll have to start feeding them hay. Most years – every year I can remember of the ten we’ve lived here on my parents' farm, in fact – the cows have eaten nothing but freshly growing grass from late May through October; we feed bales out of the barn throughout the winter and early to mid-spring. Resorting to hay feedings this summer means running the risk of running short on hay stores by winter.

So despite the increasing commotion of thunder and lightning as the storm moved closer last night, it was the soft patter of rain that caught my attention. I didn’t want to hear a soft patter; I wanted to hear a downpour. I wanted to picture the dark fields becoming soaked through.

The words “Into every life some rain must fall” floated through my mind as I stood on the front porch, but then I remembered that those words are typically invoked as a negative statement, or a consolation; the rain is a metaphor for undesirable circumstances. Saying it last night felt more like I was trying to convince myself: Rain will fall soon; it always does around here. At that moment the expression seemed so misguided. Why should the metaphor of rain falling into every life be used as a negative image? The ground needs some rain. The trees, the grass, the pond life, the forest animals: every living thing around us could benefit from some rain right now.

Imagining the steady rainfall I wished to hear drenching the pastures, causing new green grass to rise up which in turn would nourish the grazing animals, I started thinking about other forces in our lives that have this positive effect of rain, presences that fall into our lives to nourish and strengthen and help us to grow. Into every life some rain must fall. Seen in that positive context, there are so many ways in which rain falls into our lives. I thought about the presence of friends by phone or email or in person when I’m feeling isolated. The encouraging phone calls from my agent over the past couple of weeks, assuring me that my work-in-progress would live and thrive. Unexpected work opportunities falling on my desk recently to end a dry period of not drawing in new clients. The surgeon with whom family members just met who reassured them that he had plenty of experience and reason for optimism regarding problems like the one about which they consulted him. Even the kids’ report cards last month were like nourishing rain, soothing the anxiety I sometimes feel about their school performance.

Into every life some rain must fall. Let’s hope so: our very existence depends upon it. Let’s hope plenty of rain falls soon to feed our pastures and our animals, and let’s be grateful for the rain that falls regularly on our spirits. Not the kind of rain that ruins a picnic or a ballgame: the kind of rain that does what rain is really intended for: cooling, soothing, hydrating, life-giving rain.

Worry, worry, worry

"Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow. It only saps today of its joy." Leo F. Buscaglia

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, I woke, anxiety-ridden, and lay in bed detailing to myself my worries. I was worried about the fact that I needed to get to church early to prepare for a small presentation I was giving, and I was worried that I would forget the materials I needed for the presentation (the written text I planned to read, plus my laptop to take notes during the discussion that would follow). I was worried it would be too hard to get up on time due to the hour of sleep lost to daylight savings. I was worried about the forecasted rain and whether we’d have problems with flooding. I was worried about how I would fit in my imperative daily run if the flooding was bad, and I was worried that the forecasted high winds would cause a tree to fall on me while I ran.

As I slept, I could hear the wind and rain; I woke worrying about how my mother’s flight home from London was going to be able to land the following night in such bad weather. I was worried that my daughter would dawdle throughout the morning and be late getting to her friend’s birthday party, and probably arrive in a cranky mood for having been rushed.

When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.” Winston Churchill

And then Monday I woke even earlier with even more worries. This despite the fact that as far as I knew, everything I had worried about before dawn on Sunday had worked out. I’d arrived at church on time and the presentation had gone great, as had the discussion afterwards. Holly had been good about getting ready for the party and had enjoyed it greatly once she was there. I’d fit in my run before the heavy rains started, and the forecasted heavy winds never arrived. When I’d gone to bed on Sunday night, my mother’s flight was still scheduled for an on-time arrival, though I didn’t know for sure that she’d landed.

Still, it seemed that by 4:40 AM on Monday, I had a whole new set of worries waking me. The flooding had indeed begun as predicted on Sunday, and our driveway was starting to wash out. I wasn’t sure how I’d get the kids to the bus stop if it was impassable by daybreak. I was afraid when daylight came I’d discover that the whole farm was under water. I didn’t know how I’d feed the cows if the barnyard was flooded; I wasn’t even sure the sheep would survive a flood. I worried and worried and worried.

Worry is like a rocking chair--it gives you something to do but it doesn't get you anywhere.” Unknown

Meditation and other prescribed mind-calming measures don’t work for me at times like this. Instead, I arose from bed even though it was an hour earlier than I usually get up and tried to write out possible solutions to everything that was concerning me. Our house is built on a slab; even if the fields were flooded, the area around the house always stays dry, and I knew I didn’t really have to worry about that from the perspective of flooding. The woman who owns the sheep had been here the evening before; surely she had taken some kind of precautions if she thought they might be in danger. Getting the kids out to the road if we couldn’t get through in the car would just require leaving a lot of extra time, and if Holly balked too severely at walking in the flooded driveway, I could pull her in the wagon. My father, who’s the real farmer here – I just help with morning feedings – would surely know what to do if the barnyard was flooded. And there was no point, two hours before sunrise, in worrying about what I would see when the sun came up. I wrote all of this out and tried to let it go. I reminded myself that most of the time, getting up early is one of the best ways to counter worry: there’s quite a lot you can fix or prevent simply by having extra time to deal with it.

There is nothing that wastes the body like worry, and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever” Mahatma Gandhi

And most of it turned out all right, except that when daylight broke I discovered the barnyard situation was even worse than I imagined: the entire pasture west of our driveway was under a foot of water. Rick headed out to work and called me to say the driveway had indeed washed away during the night and I shouldn’t even try to get the kids to school; it just wasn’t safe. So there went that worry. I called my father to express my concerns about feeding the animals, and he said he’d take care of it. One less burden on my shoulders. I saw for myself that the house and the land around it were still dry and not in any threat from the continuing rainfall at all.

I tried again to tell myself how unproductive worry is. My mom called a little later in the morning and said she’d safely arrived home from London and that dad had managed with the animals and they were all safe and well, even the sheep. Things were turning out okay.

Worry is such a bad use of time. Listing your problems and figuring out how to cope with them is such a better idea. Getting up early to solve things is often the best strategy of all. Simple guidelines to remember at fretful times like this. It’s not always that easy. But it’s a start.

Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.” Arthur Somers Roche

The cows are by the pond -- is that a sign of spring?

Throughout most of the winter, the cows stay close to the hay barn. Although they have free range over several acres of pastures and woods, they tend to huddle in the cold weather, moving little from the spot where I set their haybales every morning.

This doesn't seem surprising to me. I always assumed it was because they conserve energy and retain heat by staying put, and because they are not particularly comfortable slogging through snow drifts, not to mention the fact that when the fields are frozen or snow-covered, there’s nothing for them to graze on, so why bother to move away from the spot where they are fed, even once they’ve finished eating for the day?

So I was a little bit thrilled to look out the window yesterday afternoon and see that all six of them had crossed over two pastures to mill around by the pond, where they often graze in the summer. It made me think that although the temperatures rose no higher than the mid-30’s and wet snow fell for much of the morning, the cows might be detecting a tinge of spring.

I myself certainly wasn’t. When I went out running midmorning, I was wearing as many layers over my head, neck and torso as I do in January. But I was encouraged to think maybe the cows sensed something I didn’t. It is early March, after all. Spring should be on the way, at least fairly soon. Tim announced a few days ago that he’d seen Canada geese in the sky, which he considers the first sign of spring.

Still, if I woke from a six-month sleep today and didn’t have a calendar, I’m not sure I would have been able to identify this as early March. So I’m curious to know if the cows really were reacting to something in the air, or in their bovine limbic systems, or in their memories. Because not only is it reassuring to think that spring hovers somewhere close ahead, but it’s also appealing to imagine that animals feel changes in the seasons even if we don’t.

I’m a little ashamed of how out of touch with the weather I can be. It’s true that running a mile or more every single day puts me in closer and more constant proximity to the weather than I ever used to be. As I’ve written about before, the fact that I'm outside for at least those ten minutes every day means I always have some idea about how cold or warm it is and whether any precipitation is falling.

But at the same time, I check my computer every morning to see what the temperature is, and sometimes before I go out to feed the cows I check on the digital thermometer connected to our household heating system. Even though we have a traditional mercury thermometer on the porch, I somehow feel more assured if I see the numeric version on my computer screen or on the thermostat, which I realize makes no sense at all, especially as at that point I am seconds from going out into the weather myself.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote in The Age of Missing Information about the peculiar and disturbing fact that in the 20th century, Americans developed the ability to turn on the Weather Channel and check the forecast anywhere in the world but have lost the ability to hold a finger in the air and determine which direction the wind is blowing from, not to mention determine from that information what kind of weather is likely on the way. Similarly, I consult the table in the newspaper every day to see what time sunrise and sunset is, having lost the ability my ancestors presumably had to keep track of the solar cycles by, well, looking at the sky.

So I’m left to wonder if the cows detect spring in the air – maybe even temperatures in the 40’s by this weekend? – or whether they were just tired of standing by the barn and chose to alleviate their cabin fever by taking a ramble over to the pond. And I feel sheepish, no pun intended, about the fact that I check my computer screen for the temperature and the newspaper for the forecast before I go outside, rather than feeling the breeze and smelling the air and watching the sky to obtain information. It all makes me wonder what else the cows might know that I don’t.

Or if maybe they don’t have any special animal sense at all of when spring is coming, but just saw a break in the precipitation and used it to go for a stroll to the pond, rather than worrying about when the next forecasted snowfall would begin.

January farm scene

Midwinter is a breathtakingly beautiful time of year here. This week, a thick snow cover lies over the ground; the tree branches are bare. Today the sun is beaming out of a milky blue sky, and the trees and fence posts throw crisp shadows onto the snow cover.

December, even after snow falls, often has a muddier cast. Because the temperatures are warmer then, the snow that falls often partially melts on a ground that is not entirely frozen to begin with. But now, in the coldest part of the year, no mud mars the sparkling whiteness. The fields shimmer with gently rolling curves of snow; the pond is indistinguishable from the surrounding pasture other than being flatter. The dog runs across it, looking confused by her new ease of access through the woods where once a large body of water lay.

When I go out in the mornings now to feed the cows, I find them standing shoulder to shoulder by the barn waiting for me. Their spirits apparently rise as hay bales tumble from the loft; they butt each other out of the way to get their heads into the bales even though there’s enough for everyone, not just in the general sense but quite specifically: I feed out six bales for six animals. Nonetheless, for reasons I can’t understand, they clump together, preferring to shove each other around over one or two bales than to spread out a little and eat solo. It’s tempting to anthropomorphize and assume they prefer the conviviality of breaking bread (or hay) together, but that seems so counterintuitive based on what we know about animal nature that I can’t believe it’s that simple. The sheep, meanwhile, trot out of their enclosure when I open the gate and find four or five untouched bales in their path; since this is four or five times more than they normally eat, this has to be pleasing to them.

What strikes me most at this time of year, even more than the beauty of a pristine blanket of snow or the sharp gray branches and evergreen needles against the blue sky outside my home office window, is the light at the end of the afternoon. Just two weeks past the winter Solstice, I know the days aren’t growing substantially longer yet, but the light appears different to me than it did a month ago. Late November and December afternoon light has such a grayish muddy look, like the ground, as if the early sunset means the afternoon never opens up entirely to daylight. At this time of year, perhaps because of the sparkling white snow cover or perhaps because of something more celestial, the late-afternoon light looks brighter to me, even just before sunset.

Whatever the reason, it feels like a promise of milder days and longer afternoons ahead, but there’s no rush. Right now we are in the coldest and most frozen time of year, and that has its own beauty, a winter luminescence of snow and ice and blue sky. When I go running midmorning these days, I frequently see the brilliant red feathers of cardinals in the trees, or the bright blue of a blue jay flying by. The colors are sharp, the cold bracing, the air clear, and the winter breathtakingly lovely, and so right now there’s no hurry for spring.

Recipe for a bucolic morning: Cows, sheep, dogs, hay

I fell into the daily habit of taking care of the barnyard animals in a circuitous way.

The barnyard and its inhabitants are primarily the domain of my parents, who live next door to us. And for the first few years we lived here, I didn’t have much involvement. I occasionally helped out for an hour or two during haying season or stepped in for backup herding duty when my parents needed to move the animals around and wanted an extra person to stand at one of the gates, but for the most part it wasn’t really my arena. There aren’t all that many jobs to do on a daily basis – let the sheep out of their pen in the morning; feed the cows a couple of bales of hay from the barn if it’s not grazing season – but my parents covered those responsibilities themselves, and when they were away, Rick usually took over.

But fourteen months ago we adopted our dog, Belle, and I started taking her out for a walk first thing every morning. Since we were passing near the sheep’s enclosure, it made sense to stop and let them out. As October came to an end, I noticed the cows, previously out grazing in the pastures while Belle and I took our walk, were congregating near the barn every morning. I asked my father if it was time to start “feeding out,” meaning giving the cows hay bales rather than leaving them to fend for themselves in the field. He conceded that it probably was about that time, and I said that since I was out with the dog -- and now the sheep -- anyway, I’d take on that responsibility as well.

More than a year later, I have to say it’s become one of my favorite times of day, those ten or fifteen minutes I spend with the animals in the barnyard. First I put on the heavy padded coveralls my parents gave me to wear in the barn; then I grab my pocketknife, my work gloves, and – if I am to be perfectly honest here – my cell phone, just in case I fall out of the hayloft or get trampled. Yes, I know that traditional farm hands don’t carry cell phones, but I’m on a tight schedule in the morning, needing to hurry home and get the kids off to school, so I figure it’s for the best to be able to call for help if I ever need it, which I never have.

Belle gallops across the field toward the barn, her energy high after a good night’s sleep and her exhilaration at being outdoors and free almost palpable. The cows see me coming and meet me along the way, expecting to have their curly dark-red heads scratched and then plodding along after me as I make my way to the barn. The sheep bleat as they hear us coming.

Once in the barnyard, it’s an easy job. I climb the ladder to the hayloft and toss down a couple of bales to get the animals below out of my way; then I descend and enter through the front of the barn to pull out a couple more bales for them. I use my pocketknife to snip the twine around the bales, which makes me feel like a Boy Scout. I scatter the hay a little so the animals don’t all cluster in one place.

Then I scan the barnyard and pasture until I locate Belle, who camouflages beautifully with the brownish-gray of the trees and dirt. She is usually either burrowing her face in cow manure, drinking from the brook or chasing squirrels in the thicker grass. Once assured that she’s not too close to the sheep pen – every few months she gets an inexplicable urge to chase them -- I let the six sheep out. Unlike the cows, they don’t particularly want my attention; they trot goofily past me, hurrying toward the hay to get their share before the cows finish it.

That’s all there is to it, and as my father reminds me frequently, there’s no reason I have to do it every day; he’d be more than happy to share the job with me or take it over once again for himself. But I love getting out with the animals early every morning. The heavy lifting as I move the hay bales and the climb up to the loft make me feel strong and well-exerted even though it’s brief and not that arduous. Seeing Belle get in some fast running and vigorous playing before my work day begins is satisfying too. And so is the benign appreciation of the animals. They’re a peaceful bunch, placid, never pushy (or if they are pushy, it’s to each other, not to me). Unlike dogs, they don’t go wild at feeding time. Unlike my kids, they don’t have opinions about what they do or don’t want. They just stand there waiting for hay, and when they get it, they eat it. Job done.

It might be an overstatement to say this is the best part of my day, but it’s definitely up there among the most satisfying. And it’s definitely a contender for easiest part of my day. I release the sheep, feed the cows, let the dog run and everyone is happy. How simple the animals can make life seem.

All creatures great and small (shouldn't be my responsibility)

Like a lot of women my age, I spend too much time feeling like World Hostess: it’s my responsibility to make sure everyone – everyone! – is happy, warm enough, cool enough, well-fed, comfortable, safe and entertained. For some of us it’s just in our nature, I’m afraid: feel like the world is your front parlor and it’s always your responsibility to ensure everyone’s comfort level.

And I’m okay with that, having lived with it for four decades. I’m used to taking responsibility for everyone who steps into my home: my children, their friends, my husband, his friends, our parents, our kids’ friends’ parents, our parents’ friends’ kids. Plus the neighbors, census takers, carpet cleaners and the UPS man. If they cross our threshold – no, our property line – I want to be sure they know they’re in good hands.

But recently I’ve been struggling with the question of where to draw the line when the animal kingdom is concerned. I’ve started taking responsibility for the personal safety of every creature on our acreage, and since we live on a farm surrounded by forests, that’s a very large number of beating hearts.

Almost a year ago, following an article I wrote on the pet-matching website petfinder.com, we adopted a stray dog from a shelter. She’s a terrific pet but she occasionally chases the five sheep who live here. Occasionally is the key word. She’ll saunter past them for months, uninterested, and then one day she’ll bolt straight toward them. I honestly believe she just wants to have some fun and experience the thrill of the chase. But I can’t expect the sheep to know that; they seem terrified when she bolts toward them, and they ignore my plaintive instructions: “Just don’t run, and she won’t chase you.” They bleat, disperse, and tear haphazardly across the fields. She never catches them; that’s not the point for her. She just wants to have some fun. But they don’t know that, and I consider it my responsibility to protect them from the experience of being sporadically terrorized.

Fortunately, the cows are large enough that they intimidate the dog, but whenever a calf is born, I stay vigilant until it becomes steady on its feet. The dog sometimes sniffs around them, curious, and usually a bellow from the mother cow is enough to warn her off, but when they’re first born the calves have such spindly little legs, and I want to make sure they never have to use those legs prematurely to run away.

And then there are the chickens. Unlike the sheep and cows, they’re not ours; they belong to the next-door neighbors. But chickens don’t know from property lines; they free-range their way onto our lawn on an almost daily basis. And I have no problem with this, except that if I see them I won’t let the dog out because, despite my hopeful question to my neighbor about whether chickens perhaps can fly, it turns out they can’t. Not even under extreme duress. So I check for chickens before letting the dog out, but every now and then there’s one or two in the corner of the yard that I don’t spot, and wild chasing ensues. Fortunately, the dog hasn’t yet caught a chicken, but I find it a little tiring to worry about them so much.

Deer populate the woods surrounding the farm, and venture often into the fields and across the driveway. In the morning, my son and I ride our bikes together the nearly half-mile down our dirt road out to the main road, where he either catches the bus or continues by bike to school. It’s not uncommon to see deer leaping across the driveway. The dog has given chase a couple of times and not yet caught one, but again, it’s not something I want to see happen, not in general and especially not with the kids around. So as my son and I ride down the driveway in the morning, I try to make train whistle noises to scare them away, which embarrasses him to no end. “Do you really think the deer know what a train sounds like?” he asked me this morning. “I don’t care if they know what a train sounds like; I just want to sound like something they wouldn’t want to be near,” I told him.

Today I drew a line in the sand, though. I opened the door, saw a flicker and a scurry, and the dog was off in a blur chasing a chipmunk that had bee foraging in the corner of the garage. As she dashed to the edge of the yard near a grove of tall oak trees, I shrugged. “Chipmunks and squirrels are officially on their own,” I announced to no one.

I can be a good host, but not to everything. Let’s say mammals over five pounds are my responsibility, plus domestic fowl. I’m happy to serve food and beverages to our human visitors and make sure the dog stays away from the non-human ones as much as I am able, but every host deserves a break once in a while. From now on, I’m turning over the care of birds (other than chickens), reptiles and small woodland creatures to a higher power.