Up the Ladder

“There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.” George Eliot

Greetings Dear Ones!

So many people wrote to me last week to welcome me back I have not yet had time to respond to each personally yet—I will! But meanwhile, thank you for all the lovely love and support. It was so incredibly heartening and infinitely Warming!

The inner warmth is especially welcome as my shop has been without heat much of this week.  Wonderful Helpers have been in multiple times to try to fix, then replace, the valve on the ancient radiator but it was not much fun trying to sew with stiff fingers at the maximum temp of 53F and it was even worse for the poor bride who had to try on a sleeveless June wedding dress at 47F.  My breath was garlic-scented frost on her neck as I laced her into the corset back.

Today, with additional sleet and snow falling, I decided to work from home.  I brought back a few projects last night, “in case of weather,” which we are definitely having!

“When do we have a day without weather?” wonders my inner middle-schooler.  Yes, of course we have weather every day.  Every day, we look up at the sky and it is doing something.  But in Vermont, “in case of weather” means something quite specific, which we all respect.  Just because we are used to it, doesn’t mean we are anxious to get out there and slide our vehicles around like bumper cars on a ride called Mud & Tundra. No Amusement to be had there!

Personally, I love any excuse that allows me to linger over morning chores and sit and watch the silent feathers falling all around us.  The snow is silent but Gus, the biggest ox, is not.  He’s busy working his horns against the latch on the outside gate.
“Gus!” I yell, “QUIT!” he pauses and looks at me a moment, then returns to his annoying rattle battle with the metal. He is ruining both the peace and a perfectly good, working latch. He has broken similar latches twice.

“Gus!” I say with vexation, “WHAT are you doing?  This is NOT a toy! Do you even have a plan?”

He smiles sweetly. “I’m going to open this door and then I am going to go with Otie and take over the green land we found at our neighbor’s house last summer when you forgot to plug in the electric fence.”

“First of all, Gus, this is an exceedingly dumb idea. For one thing, that land is not ours.  You are not allowed to go there without express invitation or permission, which you will NEVER get. Secondly, that land you suppose is green is actually covered in ice, just like our land. The snow is everywhere.  There’s no food there.”

“But I was there…” he stammers, “I SAW it.  It came up to my knees and was so sweet and tasty. My gums were so green and happy by the time you found us and marched us home.

 “You don’t need to go anywhere,” I say, “All the food is HERE right upstairs in the loft.”

He gazes at the beams above in thought.

“I can’t get up there.  I can’t climb up the ladder with hooves… I need claws, like the cats.  They go up that ladder all the time.  They climb one side like a tree.  I don’t know how to climb a tree.  I only know how to knock them down when they are kind of dead in the forest.  I guess I need to become a cat. From now on, I choose to identify as Cat.”

“You can’t become a cat!” snorts the eldress sheep. “Don’t be ridiculous. You are an herbivore.  Just because you are the biggest and the strongest does not mean you can suddenly become a predator to get what you want.”

“I thought I could be anything I wanted to be!  Isn’t that what education is all about?  To be an OX is a form of bovine accreditation, is it not? Otherwise, I’d just be a steer. But I am clever.  I’ve been Taught Things. I’d like to climb that ladder and be a cat.”

“Let’s face it, Gus, you are a D minus ox at best,” says one of the bossier sheep, nodding my direction. “She meant well but you weren’t trained in the formal methods—you were homeschooled by a distracted “mother” who suffers heroically from ADHD.  You turned out to be very well-socialized and somewhat musical animal, if weak in the fundamentals of Maths and Science, but you are…um… Unique…as far as true oxen are concerned.”

“I’ve graduated to Cat,” insists Gus.  “Hey! Why are they allowed to be up there anyway, and we’re not?”

“Well,” says a smaller sheep, “They police the mice, who would try to steal or ruin our food. The mice are not part of our community.  They aren’t civilized.  To be civilized means we stay inside our borders and get food and health care and hoof care and safety, and in your case, a little bit of education, though I’m not sure what good it’s done you. Besides, the cats won’t eat the hay, they will only eat the mice.  If you got up there, you and the mice would eat it all, shit on the rest, and give us none.”

Gus smacks his lips and agrees. This is exactly his plan.

The sheep continues.

“Being on a farm is complex.  Some of us are free, but not as free as Wild Things.  We are all living together under the care and protection of our Person.  She is our leader, our teacher, our Farmer, our friend.  She organizes trade deals—using our raw materials like wool which she turns into hats and socks—to get us the food we cannot get for ourselves, like seaweed treats, and grain that comes in bags, and budgets it accordingly so that we all get our fair share and still can eat even when it is 9F degrees out and there’s not a blade of grass for months.  It’s the plus side of Domestication and good governance.  The downside is that we can’t just go anywhere we want and do anything we want.  It’s a social contract.

“Hey! I never signed this contract! What about Self Determination?” asks Gus. “What does it mean to define ourselves if we are not also able to RE-define ourselves at any moment? I would dearly LOVE to be a cat.  I’ve always thought I should be lap-sized. And I would be able to get up there with the hay.”

“If you were a cat, you would not WANT any hay,” insists the sheep. “You would eat MICE.”

Gus looks queasy at the thought. 

“I do NOT want to eat Mice,” he says firmly, shaking his head and making a “ppfth” noise with his large, rubbery lips.

“It’s OK to be frustrated with things the way they are,” says the sheep. “Being civilized as pretty boring.  Who wants to chew cud all the time and watch the snow fall for months on end? A cow being able to climb a ladder would be a vast amount of jolly good Entertainment, not to mention broken ladders, broken buckets, broken tools, broken backs, and broken cows.  It would be a spectacular catastrophe.  But the spectacle would only take minutes and recovery will take years that might prove painful and expensive.”

Gus sighs.

I serve him another flake of hay to distract him from the latch.  He gobbles it eagerly. Benevolent dictators such as myself understand that full bellies keep minds empty. When the jaws are busy, the rebels are not.

“We honor traditions on a farm,” says another knowledgeable sheep.  “We’ve learned what works and we like it that way.  We stay true to our values, even if we have to remind ourselves what those values are—especially when there are ripe apples all over the orchard floor and we’ve forgotten what tummy-aches feel like.”

“I am not into tradition,” says the impatient young Ox, barely four and a half years old.  “I’m a progressive.  I like change!  I love learning new things.  I can think of a thousand new things to try around here.  For instance, I’m pretty sure I could drive the tractor.  Remember when I nudged the lever and got the bucket to go up? That was very exciting indeed.”

“Who are we kidding,” says Otie, munching stolidly in his corner. “You pooped yourself and shot backwards like you’d been sprayed by a hose.  You thought the tractor was about to eat you!”

“You liked novelty well enough when I showed you how to escape by shimmying under the electric wire and going up that steep cliff at the back of the barn,” huffs Gus.

“Yep,” says Otie, “and thanks to you, I snapped off a piece of my toe on that cliff and then that guy had to come and put us into that chute that lifted us off the ground with hydraulics.  I got a plastic wedge put on my broken foot with epoxy and you enjoyed the “novelty” so much they had to hose down the entire machine before they could take it back on the road.”

“You’re right,” admits Gus.  “Going UP is not all it’s cracked up to be.  I think I want to stay down here and stay Grounded.  I guess I will continue to identify as “Ox.”

I pat him affectionately, reluctantly beginning my departure from this bucolic identity crisis.

“Gus, you just have to be your best Gus ever, that’s all.  I have a dog that identifies as a cat and cats that identify as dogs, and you and Otie are mostly big fat Labrador retrievers with horns, if you ask me. The more I know and love any individual, the less they identify as anything other than themselves to me.  I love how smart you and I love how stupid you are.  Just stay inside your borders!  We’ll all get along best if we remember who we are on both the inside and the outside and if we follow the rules of the Farm: Keep the Gates SHUT and the minds OPEN!

And Sew it is.   For hooves and hearts and pants and people, Let the Mending continue!!! Thank you, Dear Ones, for your Good Works and all you do to keep the tattered in stitches.

Yours aye,

Nancy