Stories
Stellar Storyteller
I felt it even when I still lived wild, one flash of a kitten among many. The old barn tunneled the wind until the barks let loose by the German Shepherds who lived there echoed poundingly against my ears. Nonetheless, I felt it. Tucked into a corner of the haystack, I purred to myself.
Their love called to me, and mine to them. One day when I was a few months old, and snow piled up against the side of the barn, I let myself be caught. The woman who owned the Shepherds put some tuna in a cat carrier with me and left me on the porch to wait. It might have been a few hours, or a couple minutes. It didn’t matter how long, because I already knew.
Two youngish women and a medium-sized dog drove off with me in their beat-up little truck. I sang out in my loudest voice the whole short ride to their new home, and mine, in a place we all called Freedom.
Just days after I got there, one woman, called Corrie, deathly sick, was rushed in to the hospital. A whole month, she was gone. The other woman, sidney, would come home at night and light the fire, where I huddled close against her legs, and purred to keep her heart strong.
Finally Corrie returned home, though she was bony and weak. I pretended to be afraid, and then let her coax me slowly toward her with fingers wiggling, making mouse-like scratching noises under the comforter on her bed. My ear twitched, my eyes focused absolutely on the hidden movement. Then I pounced—
And so we leaped into our lives together. Through many changes, we have paused to focus and then taken our leaps. Like a big storm cloud gathering into gray, I will bring together these stories of our family and let them rain gently onto your land. May they grow bright sunflowers so you can share their seeds with the birds and bring many songs into your lives.
Mighty Mares Make It Work
When sid walks out to feed in the gray dawn, she always says, “Mornin’ Glory.”
That’s the big mare’s whole name, actually, which means more like Flower Power, because she’s sure no delicate blossom. Atop two thousand pounds of horsepower, her perky ears flicker back and forth, listening to all the voices of the morning.
Amber, Glory’s partner and teammate, nickers softly and nods her head in encouragement as sid gathers together the oat hay for llamas, donkeys and the two Suffolk Punch mares.
All Suffolk draft horses are sorrel or chestnut-colored, in some shade of reddish brown. In the whole world, only 2000 are registered, which qualifies Suffolk horses as “critical” under the watchful eyes of the farm animal diversity experts. This breed was developed in England by farmers who needed hardy horses who could thrive in tough places—which means they are not only strong, but also gentle, not prone to wasting energy on nervousness. Suffolks stand closer to the ground than many work horses that weigh the same—the pulling they do works at a more efficient angle that way.
In the U.S., only about 200 Suffolk Punch horses can be found on farms today. So when Corrie and her friend Ryan decided they wanted to farm with a few, they had to look at a ranch many hours’ drive away in a beautiful valley just north of Yellowstone Park. The B-Bar Ranch is conserving the bloodlines and the working nature of these horses. It is a place where mares and foals nuzzle in grassy meadows, and herds of older colts and fillies romp together through the old cottonwoods. Ryan decided on one of the colts, a proud young man named Clark after the early explorer of the American West.
Corrie and sid were watching the team who pulled the wagon, however. As the visitors toured the fields of horses and saw the restored ranch buildings, the team of mares was quietly showing their stuff. Some of their colts galloped with the older youngsters, but the ranch manager explained that both Amber and Glory could no longer carry babies. He used them instead to pull the wagons of visitors or even to groom cross-country ski trails in the winter.
With just the softest of spoken instructions, the mares would turn left or right, stop even in the middle of a steep hill, or prance into a pretty trot to cover the distance back to the barn. Corrie and sid had no doubt that these girls were coming home to Fool’s Gold Farm.
Around here, having babies is not a girls’ only way to be creative. Amber and Glory have created a farm!
They pull a plow to turn the fields for planting, and the pull harrows to keep the fields tidy and soft. They pull a manure spreader with rich compost in it to feed the soil so it can feed the garden plants. They can pull a sharp mower blade to cut their own sweet hay. They even have a snow blade so they can keep the driveway clear when winter slows down farm work.
Amber’s warm whinny lights up the mornings as the sun turns her coat into glossy pumpkin color. Glory’s hoofbeats drum up the day’s business as she loosens up with a bold lope across the pasture. Without them, Fool’s Gold would not be a Farm.
Damo’s Day is Night
She loves to roll on her back, legs in the air. So it really should come as no surprise that she does things backwards in other ways too.
She loves to rub up along a person’s shins, her tail swinging through the air as if leading a college choir. Her enthusiastic curving and curling has earned her the nickname ‘Swishy’. She even loves strangers, a seriously un-catlike trait, and will swish around their ankles as well.
But if anyone, even her beloved Corrie, reaches down to scratch her ears, she ducks. If someone thinks he or she might rub a hand along Damo’s back, she makes them feel like they are torturing her. She cringes as if she’s being beaten, sinking from beneath the softest hand.
Just to confuse a person though, on occasion Damo loves being scratched, hard, with two hands at the same time, roughing her hair until it stands upright with electricity.
That first winter we noticed that she purred but she never talked or sang, at least not to me or to our people. She talked, as she sat at the base of the spruce trees, only to the birds who chattered far overhead, ignoring her urgent words.
We called her the Buddha-cat, because no matter how hard I tried to teach her to hunt mice, she simply could not be brought to harm another creature. She might follow them through the house, and jump into the air if they ran too close to her pretty white toes. But hunt them? No, thanks, she said.
House cats, of course, are famously not impressed with water, especially near the bathtub. We get perfectly clean without the bathtub, I have to say. Damo, however, sat for hours by the drip from the bathtub faucet, watching. Even touching. She held out a paw and swiped it through the water, as if she thought she was putting her hand through a wall or something.
In Freedom, where we lived too close to the road, no cats were allowed out after dark. Sid would call the cats in for dinner by ringing a spoon against the side of a bowl. Damo played a game of squeezing out the door past sid’s legs and then trotting around the pasture just out of reach, her tail held high. The night would rise up from the ground, getting darker and darker, until finally Damo would turn around and come back to sid, grinning under her long white whiskers.
The day came when finally we had saved up enough to buy the farm! We were all so excited when we heard we’d have lots of fields to play in and be back far from the road with its too-fast pickups and snow plows. It sounded fabulous. Packing everything up was chaotic, and the house was full of boxes we played hide and seek in. Then the boxes were gone, the bed and the couch were gone, the houseplants were gone. It made us nervous.
We were lured into the cat carrier and our lives suddenly became a big scary unknown. It was April, and still snowing, and when we arrived at the farm, we discovered the only house was a camp trailer, with no heat or lights. Damo and I hid out under the covers for days. We listened to strange dogs barking. We heard the school bus drive by on the road, and it did sound pretty far away. We heard the familiar song of our own donkeys who had moved months before.
Then, on a night when the snow had changed to rain and then stopped altogether, Damo went to the camper door and started a loud meowing. I didn’t know what to think. At first, neither did sid. Finally a big smile lit on her face, and she stepped over to open the door. Damo peered out into the soggy field, and tested the air, whiskers twitching. She leaned out, then farther, until her feet were on the stairs and she bounced out into the darkness.
Sid followed her out, and the other cats moved in and out of their field of vision. Damo stepped high through last year’s wet grass. She walked with purpose. She marked out a circle a little ways down the field from the camper. You could see her footsteps in the faint gray light of the snow. When she got back to where she started, she curled around sid’s legs and purred, quite happy with herself.
Then the moon slipped out from behind the scattering clouds, and the night was lit up. Sid smiled. “Damo, you’ve found the best place on the whole land for our new cabin. Like planting by moonlight, isn’t it?”
CATitivities:
The moon moves backwards, or opposite to the sun, in several ways. It is most visible at night, of course, instead of the sun’s favorite daytime. It also is farthest north in the sky in the winter, when the sun is farthest south. Winter solstice is when the sun is at its southernmost—low in the sky–and the moon at its most northerly—high in the sky. Summer solstice is the opposite, with the sun high overhead to the north in the sky and the moon low on the southern horizon.
The full moon occurs when the sun goes down in the west just as the moon is rising in the east.
At your home, you can mark the spot where you see the sunrise and the moonrise at summer and winter solstices. Some people lined up large rocks around a circle to mark off the seasons. Spring equinox, when the day and night are the same length of time, is a good time to think about preparing for planting. You might want to mark this solar event with rocks as well, so that when the sun rises above the equinox rocks each spring, you can start some seeds indoors, or maybe start measuring off the rows in your garden.
You can teach yourself to predict how long it will be until the next full moon by guessing how many nights until the moon will rise just at the horizon. Remember it takes about 14 days from when you first see a sliver of moon in the west just at sundown until it has grown to its silvery roundness and hangs over the eastern mountains when the sun disappears.
