Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove, Of golden sands, and crystal brooks, With silken lines, and silver hooks.

(John Donne)

I’d tell you what I did last night, but then I’d have to kill you. Let’s just say I needed a gut-bomb this morning, we had too much fun, but we got a lot of issues sorted out.

Relationships are odd things. We cultivate relationships and talk about how important they are, but we have no ideas (or too many ideas) on how to have healthy relationships. We lie to one another and withhold things. But what about honesty? And sharing our thoughts and feelings with someone as they occur to us, to work through them together? (Am I being too progressive?) I mean, who says we can’t have a variety of relationships to meet all of our physical, mental, and spiritual needs? And who says that instead of soul mates we can’t have soul friends? Isn’t that the role that certain animals play in our lives? They meet a need, in a different way than humans do, and you can care about so many different animals, but that doesn’t mean you love another one less. They meet different needs, the same as different friends do.

I like having friends, especially guy friends. I like hanging out and learning what they do, trucks and tractors as opposed to clothes and shopping. Of course, I know a lot of cool girls too. But most girls don’t farm and work like a guy. I enjoy the camaraderie that comes with hanging out with other agriculturalists. I enjoy that organic understanding.

My grandmother said something quite profound the other day. We were talking about relationships and she said that when you no longer put your heart into it, then you might as well give it up. That wisdom seems to follow into the camaraderie I talked about before too. If you don’t care about the same things, maybe its time to reexamine.

My dad says that people come in and out of your life for a reason. And you have to learn to be aware of them and what they have to teach you. In the last year, I’ve learned a lot about who I am and where I want to go in life and the types of people I want to surround myself with. I just hope that I can bring as much pleasure to the people who put up with me as they bring to me.

Sorry for being so doomy today. I’ll try to be better tomorrow. And to my drinking buddy (if reading the blog) xoxo ~Ax

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony. (Jane Austen)

It’s raining.

Just the sound of rain drops falling outside makes my toes curl with ecstasy. We needed rain so badly, but I do feel bad for some of the neighbors who cut hay the other day. But the garden and our alfalfa needed moisture badly.

Speaking of my garden, I’ve got little, baby plants! Little, baby pea plants and little lettuces. They are all so cute! I can’t believe I haven’t killed anything yet. I’m not exactly known for my green thumb, after all. I can kill a cactus as soon as look at it. I’m pretty good with grass though and dandelions. Those I can grow like there’s no tomorrow.

Didn’t get any pages yesterday. Barely even a writing prompt. The trip to Toledo and back just wiped me out. Five hours on the freeway will do that I guess. Just makes me really glad I don’t live around a big city and have to drive in that shit everyday. I know there are a lot of advantages to living around larger cities, but I grew up in northern Michigan. Traffic up there meant an Amish buggy and an oncoming car. Ann Arbor freeways are insane to me.

So we got Gram to Toledo fine and she’s all geeked to spend time with my little cousins, who I guess aren’t so little anymore. It’s like my Dad says, you can always gauge time better by other people’s kids and it makes you realize how old you’re getting. On one little cousin was born shortly after my grandpa died and it doesn’t seem like that long ago, but the kid’s in grade school now. It just doesn’t seem right. Oh well. What can ya do?

Well, the rain’s stopped (sadly) so I’m gonna go and try to find something to do, even if it’s wrong.

Great acts are made up of small deeds. (Lao Tzu)

A slooooowwww start for me this morning. Too many beers with the guys last night. And no one around to make me eat. (I’m starting to sound like Taylor.) But it was a good time. Got the lawn mowed and some valuable info about firearms from the guys (Dad and Bruce).

So yeah.

I’m leaving here in a few hours to take Gram to Toledo to meet my uncle. She and my cousin have their birthdays within days of each other, so they’re going to celebrate them this weekend. It’ll do Gram good to get away for a few days.

Just a heads-up: I’m putting together an e-newsletter that will be available to members-only at the group page. If anyone has anything in particular they’d like to see in the ‘letter (or title ideas!) please respond to this post and let me know! I don’t promise to use your ideas, but I do promise to consider it.

All right, well I’ve been staring at this page for the last few minutes and can’t think of anything else that’s interesting right now. So I’m gonna wrap this up. Have a great day.

New group page

Make sure you loyal blog readers check out and join my new groups page here: http://groups.google.com/group/barclay-farms-and-lit.

Respect Thy Elders (even when they shit in your car)

I should enter “caretaker for the elderly” under my job description. Aside from the cows, horses, sheep, and dogs, we have a subgroup of the elderly here at Barclay Farms.

The first is Max, a (best we can figure) 17-year-old Rottweiler-lab-chow mix who is plagued by arthritis, acute hearing loss, and the occasional seizure. He’s also terrified of thunderstorms and sudden movements (mostly because he can’t move out of the way quickly and has had too many people drop things on him). He responds very well to hand-signals, when he chooses to pay attention to you, and he salivates prodigiously for pizza (his favorite thing). Lately, he’s been loosing control of his sphincter (namely because, we figure, he can’t feel it). So it’s very dangerous to walk around our living room and kitchen barefoot and in the dark. Luckily the pellets are still relatively hard.

Then there’s Iris. Her rear end is still in as good a working order as her front, albeit she moves with the creaks and groans of a barn falling down. Slowly. The (again, approximately) 25-year-old Belgian/Appaloosa cross mare, is completely blind in one eye and just sees shadows with the other. Her hearing is great and she still bumps her way happily around the farm, even more happily when the old girl comes into heat and the proud-cut gelding, Argo, gets a chance to think he’s really something (although there’s not much he can do when she’s “winking” at him.)

Next, my old cow, Essential, has been much better of late since we got her feet trimmed. Her back feet grow like elf-shoes (at least the ones in the old Santa Clause movies) and her back bows around weird, paying the price for her bad wheels. She’s the kind of cow who knows what she wants and how to get it. Most my herd goes back to either Essential or her half-sister, Party Girl, who is (sadly) no longer with us. She may be the last cow to the feed trough, but the other cows and calves know they’re access is denied when she finally shows up!

And last on our list of old things to take care of (without starting on the haying equipment) is my wonderful and beautiful grandmother. 85-years-old and not even crazy yet. She may think she needs to paint the flagpole and bury the old buildings, but, hey, I better watch it, because one day I’m going to come up with even better ideas yet!

So let’s hear to for the glories of old age and a round of applause for their caretakers, who just shake their heads and love them anyway. And whoops, I got more pellets to clean up.

An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.

--Buddha

It’s a good day at Barclay Farms today. Dad’s hard at work on putting the wood burner to bed for the year and I got edits on Taylor going my way. YEY! After days of moaning over the next section, it really wasn’t that bad. I moved operations to the kitchen and copped a positive attitude and viola! Editing block is broken.

Victor Hugo is killing me. He keeps going off on these tangents about architecture and other things of little interest. They took out the best sections for the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, I tell you what.

I reread some Patricia Briggs novels this weekend, Dragon Bones and Dragon Blood. I just needed to get out of my own work for awhile, I think, so she and Stanley Coren’s Why Does My Dog Act That Way? helped me enormously. I finished a book of “150 poems you need to know” and started the Bhagavad Gita, Stephen Mitchell’s translation. So far, it’s pretty cool. Eastern religions and ideas have started seeping into my Western education, oh my! Ideas of yoga and the Tao. I also started Horses and the Mystical Path, so it’s all geared toward the second book and Taylor’s exploration of what it means to be what she is.

Well, speaking of Taylor, I've had my snack break (peanut butter sammy and milk) and I'd better get back to her before she takes off again for parts unknown. I think she took Memorial Day and went to the beach or some shit. :)

Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction. --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Sooooo true. And I'm figuring that out the older I get and the more I farm. (Long story.)

I took the weekend off without really meaning to. But, since the last week went so up and down, I figured it wouldn’t hurt anything. Besides, I got to grease equipment with Dad and mortar a window. I mean, how fun is that? We would have put up cross-members on the fence, but Dad got called away on a job. He could be doing the fence by himself or still drinking beer with the guys for all I know. Just wish I had some guys to drink beer with. (Sigh.)

It’s been way too windy here the last few weeks. Like crazy-windy. Its beating the hell out of the tomato and pepper plants we got in the garden last night. The garden’s doing well other than that, though, so that’s an improvement. I mean, I haven’t killed anything yet and we’ve had seeds in a week and plants in for, oh, twenty hours.

***
That was the blog I wrote before Dad called and we went horseback riding. He rode his bay horse, Argo, the gassiest horse on earth, which is a change. Usually he takes Rio, his sorrel. I took my white colt (still a colt at six years old, the kind of personality that will always be a colt), which is a change from my usual paint gelding, Sonny. So Argo and the white colt were an interesting combination, since Argo’s the queen bi-atch and the colt is… well, the colt.

Wow. This “Two-and-a-half-Men” is making me really hungry.

Anyway.

So Dad’s home again tomorrow and hopefully we can get another ride in and some more work around the farm. I’d like to catch up on my writing and finish cleaning the living room. Ya know, when they say spring cleaning, you shouldn’t leave the cleaning all year until spring. It gets really dusty. (Joke.)