The Racket on the Farm

There is no getting any rest on the farm for the city girl. My niece Erin, who has come to visit, has dark circles under her eyes and yawns more than any normal American sixteen-year-old kid has a right to. And it’s not because she’s used to the clamor of the city—horns honking, bottles breaking, laughter and tinny music coming from the alley, and this is dead quiet. Too quiet. That’s not it at all. In fact, it’s just the opposite. She claims Spot the Donkey hee-haws in the middle of the night and wakes her up. I hear nothing. She said a wild animal of some sort, something very big and ferocious, perhaps a grizzly bear, or even Bigfoot himself, woke her up after Spot was done with his shenanigans. Then The Big Stupid, who recently found his voice and whose bark is deep and full-bodied like what would come from a very large breed such as a St. Bernard (we don’t know what he is, adopted from the pound, he’s like a potluck supper), spotted deer encroaching on my garden on the side of the garage and he ran from window to window barking at them. I imagine he was thinking, “Hmm, this bark comes in handy,” amazed at himself. I went down to pee and let him out. He can’t catch the deer but he’s good at scaring them away.

After that commotion was over, Erin said the cows were mooing. I didn’t hear that either. I’m not saying the girl is lying. But she’s got one set of ears on her.

After the cows, when she finally drifted back to sleep, she had a dream her cell phone was ringing and it was on vibrate. She jumped up and nearly hit her head on the shutter next to the bed. Turns out it wasn’t the phone at all but the rare king bee buzzing against the screen, dive-bombing it, trying to bust through. (In truth, there is no such thing as a rare king bee, as far as I know, but there’s a humongous bee around here, about as big as a man’s big toe, that we felt we were within our rights renaming, considering no one will know and we have no idea what kind of bee he really is. But he’s a monster.)

Throughout the night, the frogs croaked like this was the bayou and the resident whippoorwill called from somewhere in the black trees on the edge of the horses’ field. These noises I know were happening because I hear them myself all the time. Not only the frogs and the whippoorwill, but crickets and an owl. Erin said it’s worse than living over a tavern that does karaoke on Friday nights and has brawls in the gravel parking lot when last call is over—all the noises around here. I’m pooh-poohing that. You can’t compare the lonely sound of the whippoorwill! whippoorwill! whippoorwill! to a drunk guy singing “Taking Care of Business.”

When the first light came and I was on the porch having my morning coffee, I heard the neighbor’s rooster. That’s my favorite farm sound, a rooster cockadoodledooing. In the background, there was a cacophony of assorted bird songs, tweeting and twittering and whistling, starting their day, looking for worms and rotten cherries that dropped from the trees—easy pickin’s. Apparently, some of these birds hang out by Erin’s window and flutter against the glass up top. Flap. Flap. Flap. Maybe they’re building a nest up there, in the eaves or on the sill, I don’t know.

Included in the morning songs of the birds was a hummingbird, about the size of the rare king bee. He was like a miniature engine zooming around the purple flowers on my hostas. Not long after, Eldon came around on his tractor. He tipped his straw hat when he went by. Then Kurt’s alarm went off. That’s a whole racket in itself. That clock rings incessantly and shatters all peace and quiet within a two-acre radius for a good half hour every morning. I have to go up there myself and hit the snooze button at least twice and shake him and lie and say it’s later than it is and we’re all getting a headache from the ringing so please get up, before he will finally struggle out of the sheets and shut it off. Sometimes he curses. He’s been known to stomp. There have been occasions where I was outside with some service provider, the blacksmith for instance, and he’d look up and ask, “What’s that ringing?”

“Oh, that’s Kurt’s alarm clock. He’ll get it sooner or later.” Then I pretend I don’t hear it. And the blacksmith goes along with it and keeps right on nailing like he doesn’t hear it either.

But if you’re sleeping in the room right next door, or trying to, it’s no use.

Right around that time, MoJo the Siamese cat, known for being vocal, starts meowing. He wants in. He wants out. He wants in. I think he meows mainly to hear his own voice because it doesn’t matter what you give him; he’ll find something else to meow about. Sometimes he rubs up against the dog who innocently leans down and sniffs him. Then all hell breaks loose. “Don’t touch me!” He hisses and whacks the dog. The Big Stupid yelps and runs around in circles, skids across the floor, tail clamped to his butt, while MoJo screams at him, occasionally reaches out for another swat, and the dog goes faster, his nails clicking on the floor, until he crashes into the sink or rolls under the table knocking a chair over. In other words, the fur is flying and the sun is barely up.

Add to that the physical labor this city girl has been doing, chores she’s not used to—picking up manure, weeding the garden, sweeping the barn, carrying buckets of water…and this kid is pooped. Therefore she has been partaking in the afternoon nap, of which I myself am an aficionado of. She gets in maybe an hour on the couch before the afternoon thunderstorms start and it sounds like we are being bombed.

Some Life

Yesterday Kurt’s guy came to fix the siding that had blown off the house in the last storm and put up the gutters. These are things that Kurt has the expertise to do himself, but with working all the time, he couldn’t get to it and so he sent Randy over.

Randy and his helper were here for about five hours. When they arrived, I was sitting out on the front porch smoking cigarettes and talking to my girlfriend on the phone. Since I’m a loud talker, I believe he heard my entire conversation. I think he heard about how big mine and Kurt’s feet are, my opinion on the chances of Kelly having clodhoppers like us and the emotional damage inflicted upon me when my mother made me wear huge black oxfords with my red-plaid school uniform even though all the other girls were wearing loafers and how they made my feet look even bigger especially since my legs were like bean poles. I knew I looked bad, but now that I’m thinking about it, I probably looked like Betty Spaghetty. I’m sure Randy heard all this.

And I know he heard me complain about the stray hair I found on a certain part of my body that I never noticed before because my eyesight is going and I’m still buying the Wal-Mart glasses. But then I got out the magnifying mirror and discovered a whole array of horrors that no decent person should ever have any idea he has. It’s not right. (That’s the bright side of losing your eyesight as you get older—you are blissfully unaware of the wrinkles, hair, suspicious discolorations and humungous pores that you’ve acquired since the last time you had time to examine yourself in a magnifying mirror, back before you started having kids and got horses.)

And he surely heard the juicy story, and perhaps even stopped to listen, about how Helen Chitwood allows ducks to live in her house since she kicked the husband out and maybe she’s a lesbian, not that I have anything against lesbians, but maybe she is one because she and her BFF have taken to shaving the back of their heads Rosie O’Donnell-style and there’s never any men around. They are out there in Helen’s yard in suits and masks like Hazmat people doing something with the bees. There’s a sign by the mailbox that says, “Honey 4 Sale,” and the BFF always answers the door when you knock to get some.

At any rate, Randy the Handyman heard all of this as he was hammering and sawing on the side of the house. He got a good earful all right. Then I went out back and got the pony. It must have been a wonderful sight. It was a beautiful, sunny day, just perfect for messing with horses. There I was in my long blond hair and cool cowboy boots with the metal tips on the toes. There was the pony in his black-and-white patches looking like a circus pony he’s so pretty. But pretty is as pretty does so I threw him in the round pen. I sent him around and made him turn and change gaits so that he knew I was the boss and he better respect me. Then I hopped on him and rode him all around the hay field where he had acted up the day before. This time he was an angel. A little workout will do wonders.

After I got done fooling around with the pony, I went in the house and ate lunch. Then I stuck my head out the door and asked Randy if he needed anything because I was going to take a little nap. Later when I was reviewing my day, I imagined that this guy must be thinking, “That chick has some life.” He was probably thinking that I live the life of leisure, gossiping and playing with my horses, taking a snooze when I feel like it. And I have to admit that I do have some life. However, I also realized that I just make it look easy. These are all the things that Randy did not see:

I got up at 5:15 and threw a load of laundry in while I read as many e-mails as I could and had a cup of coffee. Then I got Kelly up and going. I fed her, brushed the knots out of her hair while she screamed and accused me of child abuse or at the least, of being a mean mother. I fed the dog and cat, climbed upstairs to hit the snooze button on Kurt’s alarm three times because it was giving me a headache, shook him twice and told him it was fifteen minutes later than it really was. Then I weeded the flowerbed in the front of the house while we waited for the school bus to come.

After Kelly was off, I fed the horses and picked up three wheelbarrows full of horse manure. I straightened up the barn, swept the aisle and filled water barrels. I moved some bales of hay from the back of the hayshed to the front. I emptied out the buckets under the leaky skylights. I fixed some wire on a fence. I fed the barn cat and picked up a half digested wild animal she regurgitated. I pushed the dually wheelbarrow with a flat tire down to the manure pile to dump because it was filled with rotting weeds and rainwater and I couldn’t stand looking at it anymore getting deeper and deeper. (The air compressor is in the house and too heavy for me to bring outside and the bike pump is mysteriously missing. So I pushed it with the flat.)

After I was done with the barn chores, I moved the pile of lumber that was in front of the barn that Kurt was now finished with and that had been sitting there, rotting, (more rotting) in the way, since last summer. I put on my gloves and loaded it all up into the bed of the pick-up truck. Some of it was too heavy to lift so I had to get one end up on the gate and then push it up the rest of the way. Then I backed up as close as I could get to the side of the garage where I unloaded it with all the other junk lumber he doesn’t know he has and where it will continue rotting until my nagging kicks in.

I cleaned the house from top to bottom including sweeping and washing floors and vacuuming. I folded Kurt’s gym clothes and put them on the shelf where he packs his gym bag. I wrote out some bills. I took the garbage cans to the Dumpster. I went to the post office. I made phone calls to the insurance company, the dentist’s office and the school. I wrote, including a piece for someone’s website. I made supper. I helped Kelly with her homework. I kissed one boo-boo and made two threats. I carried firewood in the house and filled the wood box. I cleaned out the ashes in the woodstove and carried the ashcan and a bucket of water out to the gully where I dumped the ashes and poured the water on top. It sizzled even though the fire had been out for two days. I got kindling while I was out there. I cleaned up all the leftover pieces of wood and plastic gutters that Randy left behind. I swept the front porch. I picked up two buckets of dog poop. Then I helped Kelly saddle up her horse and I watched her. I got inspired and decided to work with Kurt’s horse. Which now we’re getting into the fun part again. But you see what I am saying. I only make it look easy.