Brushing Gertie

During a break one day, I go out to the goat field with a brush to see Gertie. Even though she’s always been shy and stand-offish, she’s started to like getting brushed. She comes up to me now when she sees that I’ve got the brush. I start to feel what it is to be honored by those who know more than you. It’s like having a deer come up to you in the forest and place its head against your heart in the middle of all of the trees. The deer knows the names of the trees, each one, and you don’t and it’s like the door opening to a magic world that you felt was there or you hoped but you weren’t sure. The colors all become brighter or you see them for the first time. And the secrets of the kingdom are revealed by the ones who know them already, who hold the key that we can’t seem to find or almost never.

I come to Gertie in the field with a brush to say I will give what I can, I will be still as much as I can, I will listen as much as I can. And maybe here on this field with the breeze blowing and the bugs buzzing just like any normal summer mid-afternoon in the bright flat light of the sun, everything changes because one goat sees you and begins to walk over to you in an ordinary field on an ordinary day. Words can leave then or stand to the side. For a moment, it’s a place of legend and a place that’s still just ordinary.

But Gertie knows what I sometimes guess at or sometimes get a glimpse of so I sit on the ground and she lowers her nose to the brush and for a time it’s just her and me and the universe flowing around us because we are the same even if I know that I am the one with the brush and she is the one with the flaky skin and the black hair and the udders that are still swollen because years ago she gave birth and humans did whatever they did with her babies and she has come through trials and travails and stories that almost ended badly and near-misses and death-defying leaps of chance to find herself here. And in my own way, so have I, in my own human way.

All of the stars and the planets have aligned for us to meet in this field on this patch of clover with the fragrant white flowers and the hot sun and the roosters crowing in the background and my shirt stained with Swat from smearing it on Andy the steer’s belly to keep the flies away and bits of tomato and melon from the pigs’ dinner of produce. But nothing has killed me yet, not the aloneness of being human and it’s to my thirsty heart that Gertie walks across a hot field and lowers her head to me, out of all the billions of souls in the universe, to me and she says we are exactly the same, brusher and brushee and nothing has to keep us separate from love.