Nothing of note today at the farm.
The day started cloudy, but in the afternoon, the clouds broke after 2 days of rain for the sanctuary’s June Jamboree. The main white tent is still up, but nothing is under it. The poles look like bones. Bales of straw used for seating are stacked on the porch of the med center to dry. The farm meanders back to normal.
I go to clean the white bird coop, which is written on today’s list with “ew!” next to it.
All the birds clear out except Hannah and Gingersnap, who dig through every pile I sweep together, as chickens do, looking for bugs or bits of seed. You learn to pick up piles right away before a bird scatters them. To chickens, a pile of dirty shavings is a treasure chest waiting to be scratched open with their feet, and they see no reason to wait.
When I’m done with the white bird coop, I take the hoof cleaning box—a pink plastic bin with a syringe, a hoof pick and two kinds of hoof heal—into the pig barn, hoping to treat Lodo and Stubby’s cracked hooves. But Stubby is submerged in the mud pond and Lodo is laying so close to Louie I can’t manouever my way to his feet.
So I put the pink bin back and take a brush out to Orion the goat. He’s lost weight and stands off from the others, not grazing. The clover in the goat field has flowered with all the rain, white scattered among yellow and purple and green that the sunlight turns lime around the edges.
I brush Orion and flakes of skin drift off his back and chest. I feel the bones of his ribs and spine. When I stop, he turns his head to look back at me. The sun is hot now and I kneel next to him in the clover.
Lil Jay had flaking skin too, back when he was sick and staying in the med center. But he recovered and his coat is lush and thick. I try to remember what we gave him—flaxseed oil?—but I can’t. There are so many treatments given and even more discussed. I read online about black oil sunflower seeds being good for a goat’s coat, but I need to do more research.
Dawnell opens the gate to the pig feeding area and it’s time to get their dinner. She fills a bowl for Pete as I come in. Dawnell lures Patsy and Judy into the isolation pen with a couple pieces of bread. They’re on a diet, though they don’t know it. Except Patsy might—she shies away from going in. “She’s afraid of Andy,” I call to Dawnell. Andy is on a diet in the iso pen too, but he’s the alpha male and bullies Patsy and Judy, who are bullies themselves, whenever they can be.
I call Patsy and Judy The Troublemakers, but this morning I thanked them and the other pigs for being so patient during the whole of June Jamboree. “You did an amazing job of representing,” I tell them and they lay in the straw, not moving.
June Jamboree has been two days of inviting the outside in. Of introductions between people and pigs and all of the rest of the residents. People touching the rubbery heads of turkeys and hearing the story of how Felix lost his leg or how the Hampshire pigs got here from a planned BBQ in Colorado and how Louise lost the tip of her ear to frostbite when she was alone and frozen to the ground on a sheep farm or how Albie was found sick in a graveyard in Brooklyn.
We tell the stories with words and the animals tell the endings without them. The outside comes in to the sanctuary and hands touch pig bellies for the first time. The words are changed when kids are there. “Market weight” is my euphemism for slaughter. There’s a new traveling slaughterhouse for family farms upstate that advertises itself as “harvesting” animals. But we all know what we mean.
June Jamboree is people coming to visit. Here are our hearts on display, sleeping in straw, dirt on their snouts. Here is Cromwell with his ears pinned back the way he always does when he sleeps. Here they are, our hearts, grazing in the field by the red sculpture, with flaking skin that needs to be brushed, with an amputated leg, standing under the mountain and chewing cud, or pecking the metal trim of the med center because it sounds like a metal trough or running with the red birds to the gate when someone approaches, in hopes of a mash.
We tell their stories because those are the facts and the facts are usually ugly, especially next to the breathing beings in front of us. But the facts you can quote and cite and tell. When what we mean to say is, can you see what’s here, feel what I feel, what I know to be true and have so few words for, just how it felt that time I laid against Dylan in the winter in the barn or felt Patsy the sheep’s nose on mine or held Victor’s head to my heart as he took his last breath, Victor of the magnificent horns and the insatiable love of treats and the way he’d look you right in the eye as if everything in the world was laid out as a banquet for both of you.
There is too much to tell and no words anyway, so I say, “Do you want to rub a pig’s belly” and invite people in and hold open the gate from outside to in for another introduction of child’s hand to a 900-pound pig named Stubby. Stubby of the thousand days of cleaning his hoof and watching him eat or sleep or limp to dinner or lay in mud the way pigs do, blurring the lines between animal and earth, between mud and flesh, between in and out.
I start the story, but Stubby tells it.
And today, when the white tent has shrunk to empty bones and the bouncy castle is deflated rubber on the lawn and the outsiders have gone back out, the story is still unfolding itself and the tellers are telling, even in the middle of eating, with their snouts snuffling through mashed up carrots and green beans and lettuce. And we’re here to listen and on a few days, now and then, to fumble toward a translation.
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