November 1 and 2, 2010

Nov 1:

It’s the first day of November. Its 7:43 am. It’s also our first real frost. The ice crusts the grass and the world is diamond white for now.

Tomorrow is Election Day, which will end the candidate bickering, mud slinging commercials, and the wasted signage that litters the roadways. All the promises go with the trash. The day after we will wake up to find that nothing has changed. The war will still drag on. We’ll still have the same taxes. Unemployment will remain. But those guys will still have jobs….

Last night I went late to check on the chickens and to close up the coop. I never take a light. I want the darkness because I like to stop along the fence line, look up, and wonder at the stars and the moon…
While out there I check on the horses too. Last night Louie wasn’t in his stall, but outside in his paddock. In the dark he was an even darker form, lying down with his legs tucked underneath him. Restful breathes couched drawn out, melancholy snores…Louie was sound asleep, just he and the night and the stars and his dreams….

Down the road there used to be a farm and the farmers sold their produce along their highway frontage. When the township changed the zoning from rural use to residential/ commercial, the land became much more valuable and the farmers sold and retired. Soon mc mansions dotted the back fields while a business and then two suddenly fronted the highway. There is one field still fallow but yesterday a developer put up a sign looking for tenets…I imagine it will not be fallow too much longer.
With all this, our food chain just got longer…every time a local farm goes to development we have to reach further away for our food and also more to the processed kind. Our connection to the land gets bulldozed away along with the topsoil.

Nov 2:

This morning, like every morning, I walked out into the morning darkness to feed the horses before I headed to my real job…Like always, Patrick was waiting at the fence for me. He must wander out of his stall when he sees the house lights come on. The lights must say that “its time for breakfast so I’ll wait here for my hay”. Anyway, I always stop and let him lick my hand, which is his way of saying good morning – if I walk past without offering my hand to his tongue, he grumbles at the snub. I know that no one should ever put their hand to a horse’s mouth, but Patrick is a bit different – unlike Louie and Zip, Patrick doesn’t think that fingers are carrots….he just likes that touch, that connect. He waits for it every day, and I am realizing that this ritual is becoming just as meaningful to me as it is for him…