Birth.Death.Dinner.

05.05.11

12.17.12

Tonight the first winter snow is falling and I feel like I am finally a farmer.  I understand  the full cycle of life in all its wonder and horror.  I feel inside what those old-man-farmers of my childhood looked like.  Dirty, wrinkled and weathered - they told their stories in the way they lived and less in what they had to say.

 

Tonight I watched my own hands as I carefully rinsed the tongue of the cow I watched be born 19 ½ months ago and felt such a strange mix when I remembered Joe licking my hands each morning when I came out to feed him.  Sometimes when I would fill the cow tank, I would stand and watch him as he would spend an hour trying to lick the waterfall coming out of the hose, never tiring in his chase.  It always made me laugh. His tongue , now ripped from his body, seemed so dense and hardly the wispy and crafty part it once was, and I wasn’t even sure what I would do with it.  I knew I would have to eat it, and I’ve filed it away with “some Mexican stew recipe…”

Earlier today, as I watched the clock tick away the minutes until our butcher arrived, I felt like I might have a heart attack.  I guess that is what panic feels like racing through the body without any true fight-or-flight event to put it in motion.  The anticipation had my head spinning – and discombobulated.   As much as I have intellectualized the process since deciding to raise a pet to eat, there’s no amount of hypothetical killing that prepares the heart for what it will feel.  I liken it to what non-parents think it takes to be a parent.  No clue.

Around noon today, Joe began bellaring his “I’m hungry, feed me” call.  It is usually annoying and demanding and I always talk back to him with things like “I know! I know!  You’re starving!  For cryin’ out loud, I just fed you!  Hang on!  I’ll be there in a minute!”  And then when I race out to feed him, he chows down, like a toddler devouring cookies.  Today, however, I felt lonesome when I heard his ritualistic cry.  When I grabbed  a ½ bale of hay (which I knew he would never manage to eat before dying) I tried to get it to him as fast as possible so he could be full on in his orgasmic-munch before he knew what was to happen.  And he was.  The riffle-shot rang out only as he lifted his head with a mouth full of hay.  He fell to his death before he could even open his mouth.  I hope I die that way. 

Well, I hope I never die.

Tonight, after I had washed all bits of the scent of death off of me, I went out to the barn to see Dolly.  She was standing, in the dark of night, looking across the fence, to an empty place where Joe had fallen.  She couldn’t see the bare spot in the darkness but she lowed for him.  I had tried to shield her – even put up sheets of plywood and stood in front of her as she poked her head around the fence – but she knew.  Why wouldn’t she?  It was her child.  So I leaned into her, and she into me.  I thanked her for feeding me, for caring for our family.   Then she followed me back to her bed and I rubbed a homemade tincture into her swollen teats to prepare her for milking that should come within the week as her 2^ndcalf is due any day.

We cleared out a space in our barn for Joe’s skin.  The space has been jammed with all sorts of random boxes and crap for a year but now it’s a bit of a sanctuary.   His 10 foot by 8 foot skin  - minus his head as it seemed too creepy – looks much larger than I imaged it would be.  It took Dan and I all day to first figure out what the hell we were doing – preparing to tan Joe’s hide – and then actually doing it.  Every muscle in my body is sore, even though I’m sure I only needed my forearm strength.  As I used a hatchet to scrape and cut, I kept thinking about my own body and my own skin.  And my family’s body and skin.  And wondering if I was an animal conditioned for survival or a murderer who loved grilled flesh.  I was careful and thorough, so as to not be wasteful.  Are killers careful when they dress their prey? 

I am spent and thankful and totally creeped-out and calm all at the same time.

01.17.13