In the spring, the grass grows, and that’s when the young animals are born – giving them the best chance of survival. For us that means kidding and lambing, baby goats to tend and feed, new milkers to be milked – incredibly busy!
Summer for us is all about the hay – cutting it, making it, turning it, baling it, getting it into the shed and stacked. The hay is what feeds our animals all year round, and a failure to get the hay in is a blow that cuts at the very heart of the farm. The hay is the top priority, and all hands are expected to turn out at a moment’s notice to get it in if it looks like rain. We’ve worked well into the night at times, struggling to get the bales stacked under shelter before they’re ruined by the constantly threatening damp.
Autumn is about harvest and preparing for the winter – battening down the hatches, preparing the barns for winter storms, cutting up and stacking the firewood that we’ll depend on when it’s freezing and slashing with icy rain.
And the winter? Then, we’re quiet. Dormant – like the trees and the grass outside. We light the wood burner and settle in for that ‘long winter’s nap’. There are the holidays to enjoy and food to eat, friends to catch up with – the people we lost track of during the frantic rush of spring and summer. We go walking in the woodlands and cut evergreens and holly for the Christmas display.
And then there’s the delicious time where I find myself now. Preparing for the New Year. The Christmas decorations have come down and been packed away, leaving dusty expanses of mantel, shelf, windowsill. And I find myself seized by the urge to clean, throw away, dust, discard. Freshen. Lighten. Make new choices.
This, I guess, is what they mean by spring cleaning. But for me, the impulse strikes now, when everything outside is slow and cold. More of a ‘New Year’s cleaning’.
There’s a pulse to biological life – living things move in and out, like a breath. The period of activity is followed by a period of inactivity. A heart beats in its two-part rhythm. Lungs expand and contract. The sun rises and sets. Animals are born and die.
One of the things I remember about living in the city was the absence of any sort of pulse. Because you could go on all night and all year round, people did. There was more of a straight line right across – 24 hours! Open all night! Work harder and faster! – rather than the rising and falling sine curve of a natural pulse.
But preparing for the New Year is gathering in before launching out again into the spring, a resting and repairing, a looking around to see what needs fixing and changing for the year ahead. What needs a lick of paint? Do the kitchen worktops need fixing? Replacing?
Mine do. I want to paint them a cream colour, I think, and light sage green – the colour of new grass. Rich’s operation has been scheduled and postponed yet again – we’re looking for ways to keep ourselves from going mad with the up-and-down cycle of disappointment and dread… redecorating the kitchen seems as good a way as any!
2 January 2013
Unbelievably, there’s yet another newspaper story about us! This one in the Cambrian News. ‘Family’s Passion Reaps Rewards: A couple from Brynhoffnant who bought some goats to use their milk to help cure their son of eczema and asthma have turned their passion into an award-winning small business.’
The business is booming on the back of all this lovely publicity – the phones are ringing and the orders are pouring in. We’re still making a loss, but not as much of one! It seems as if this could actually work, if we can just catch a break, and stop getting hammered with disaster. Now if we could just get Rich’s operation scheduled, done, dusted and behind us. The dread and anticipation hangs over us like a black cloud, dimming the pleasure of even the most exciting news.
24 February 2013
Rich had his second operation on Friday. After waiting for such a long time, in the end things moved very rapidly, the days sliding like beads down a string. The operation was moved forward by five days, so it came quite abruptly.
I drove him to hospital on Thursday, and stayed with him while he got settled in. We’d packed a bag for him at home, with tracksuit bottoms, Crocs to wear in the hospital halls and clean T-shirts. All hopeful items, because we knew he wouldn’t be wearing anything but a hospital gown for a long, long time.
I had to leave, finally, to go home and do the milking. I bit my lip and found my eyes welling with tears as I walked quickly down the long hall, heading back to the car park. I hate leaving him in there on his own.
Friday came, and Rich texted me to say he was going in first thing. I finished the morning milking and headed to the hospital again – one hour and 25 minutes it takes, door to door. By now, our second time around, I know the route exactly. I set my laptop up in the hospital café, phoned the head nurse and gave her my mobile number, bought a coffee and waited. And waited.
It was nearly six hours later when I gave up any hope of them calling me. I walked back up to the ward. He was in recovery, they said, and I couldn’t go in. I knew where recovery was, though, from the last time, and I walked there and knocked on the door.
I could see Rich on the table, very pale but awake, and waved at him past the orderly’s shoulder. The orderly took pity on me, 20 minutes later, and smuggled me into the recovery room, where I heard the story from the nurse of Rich coming out of sedation thrashing wildly, maddened with pain because they’d put the epidural in the wrong place. He was dopey and groggy – which was only to be expected.
Next day, when I went in, it was to hear that he’d had an unbelievably bad night – his intestine had stopped working, stopped making its rhythmic contractions of peristalsis, and, as a result, he vomited, straining the new wound that stripes down his front, from his breast bone to his pubic bone.
No infection, no fever, no sepsis, the perky blonde nurse told me. They X-rayed him and everything was fine.
Everything except his intestine, which – insulted and manhandled – had sulkily gone to sleep and now refused to move. It should ‘wake up’ tomorrow, they said. Or perhaps the next day. In the meantime, they’d put a tube down his nose to drain his stomach.
I stared at her, trying to take it in.
She smiled reassuringly and said, ‘It will wake up.’
I hope so.
It occurs to me that there isn’t a lot we can do about the body if the body refuses to cooperate. You can’t make it do anything. You can only create the conditions in which it could possibly happen – and then hope that it does.
Rich’s insides, lying still when they need to be moving and pulsing. There’s no alternative to that. You can’t live, if your intestine refuses to move.
He wasn’t pale, oddly – his face was pink, a better colour than it has been for a long time. We didn’t talk much – I just held his hand.
27 February 2013
Nearly a week now, and Rich’s insides are still lying unmoving, inert. The day before when I went in he was a little brighter – yesterday, he frightened me. So tired, he seemed to have just given up. I wanted to tell him to fight, but I couldn’t, he just seemed so weary.
I came home and phoned his brother, frantic with worry: ‘We have to get him into a private room. He hasn’t eaten or slept in a week, and the man next to him screams and cries and gibbers non-stop. It’s like hell. We have to get him out of there.’
We talked, worrying it round in circles. What could we do? I resolved to try to throw money at the problem – maybe it would help?
Monday on the way to the hospital my front tyre dissolved in a rush of canvas. When I called the roadside assistance company, and they took me to the garage, it emerged that both front tyres were completely bald. Had I driven another two minutes onto the motorway, the tyres might have caused a fatal crash, exploding when I was going at top speed.
I never check the tyres, it’s always Rich’s job. But of course Rich isn’t here. What’s the lesson here, I wondered? Is it that I have to do everything myself again, like when I was a single mom? I felt angry that Rich had sent me out onto the roads in a
car that was dangerous. But of course I couldn’t be angry at him, lying there defeated and – it seems – so close to death himself.
That night, I lay in bed with my eyes stinging, staring at the ceiling. Still wondering. What’s the lesson here? Is there one? If there were a lesson, what would it be?
Not ‘What if’ said a voice in my head. ‘What is.’ I didn’t crash. I could have, and I might have. But I didn’t.
Suffering is mental. I can see that. I learned that during my nine-and-a-half-hour marathon to get to the hospital and home, by way of two new tyres. Each part, in itself, was okay.
Sitting in the hospital coffee shop waiting for the breakdown company to arrive. Driving. At least I was warm and dry. Even finally reaching the hospital after six and a half hours on the road, to be told that I’d have to wait another half-hour because visiting time hadn’t yet begun. I could stand propped up in the hall; it wasn’t so bad. The suffering is only bad when you start to let it stack up. The experience of each moment – moment to moment – is not so bad.
And another gift of this hard time – freedom from fear. I’m no longer afraid of hospitals, of tyres blowing out, of strangers screaming in the night, of my husband lying near death and me unable to help. I’ve seen all these things, and I can handle them. I’m still here. Freedom from fear. The final gift of going all the way down to the bottom.
When it was time to leave today, I suddenly felt as if Rich might simply drift away while I was gone.
‘Look at me,’ I said. ‘I want you to promise me that when I come back tomorrow, you’ll still be here.’
He looked quite shifty and wouldn’t quite meet my eyes.
‘I can’t promise that,’ he said.
‘You promise,’ I insisted. ‘You look into my eyes and promise me.’
In the end, he promised. Later, he told me this: he dreamed that night that he’d been in a train crash. And in the dream, it seemed imperative that he get away from the train. There was a bright white light. In real life, apparently, he got up and pulled all his drips out, and started wandering across the ward. The nurse came to get him – in real life, or in his dream? Hard to tell – and said to him, ‘Where are you going?’
‘You’re the one who works here; you’re supposed to know where I’m going,’ he replied.
‘You need to make up your mind where you want to go,’ she said.
‘I promised,’ he said. ‘I’d better go back.’
And she helped him back into bed. When he told me this story, I had the strangest feeling that if we looked around the ward for that nurse, we wouldn’t find her.
28 February 2013
Finally, good news today! After more than a week, the surgeon got Rich’s intestine moving again – apparently by reaching his hand through the incision and down into Rich’s insides, right there on the hospital bed in the ward. The head nurse told me that he’s better, that he’s moving back towards life.
Thank God. Thank God.
3 March 2013
I’ve just worked out why it matters to keep things cleaned up. I’ve always known that I should. Obviously it’s good to be tidy, and so on. But I always did it with a certain amount of resentment, as if I was completing a chore for the approval of someone who’d look over my shoulder. And if I was too busy, or too tired, then I didn’t bother, and the mess would mount up.
This morning I woke at 6 a.m., got up and started cleaning the bedroom.
Our bedroom is the last room of the house to receive any attention. When I moved in with my two children, we had to make room for all of us. So I thought it should be my gift to Rich’s girls that they would get all-new grown-up bedrooms that they could design themselves. I brought home stacks of magazines, and they flipped through and picked out the colours and ideas that they liked. Then they each got a budget, and we went shopping for carpets, paint, blinds, furniture.
Ceris chose a dramatic scarlet wall, with black trimmings and white carpet. Elly went for a wooden floor, apple-green wall and a cityscape in her room. I thought both the results were gorgeous, and the excitement of the decorating carried us through what might have been a sticky period of new people and children intruding on their dad’s turf, time and attention.
My two got their own rooms, as well. Benji’s has each wall painted a different shade of tractor colour. Joli’s has photographs on the ceiling, a squashy leather couch and gold walls. But our room – Rich’s and mine – still has the dingy brown carpet and tattered heavy brown curtains that were there when I moved in. And, I suspect, when he moved in 15 years ago, along with his parents, his two girls and his first wife! It’s filled with heavy antique wooden furniture, too ponderous to move easily to clean.
But it has a stunning view of the sea, and we’ve been so happy there that fresh paint and carpet seems the least of our concerns. The children have their rooms; the kitchen has been tidied, and there’s new furniture in the lounge. But we’ve been so busy in the past five years, getting settled into the house, getting married, getting the goats going, setting up a business, that we fall into bed, into each other’s arms, exhausted at the end of each day, barn clothes dropped in a dusty pile.
Decorating has just never been high on the list. Or cleaning, for that matter, aside from general hygiene and laundry in, laundry out. But this morning I woke up and started clearing surfaces, emptying trash, dusting. I could suddenly see that the problem with clutter is that it gives the illusion of permanence. It gives ‘STUFF’ the upper hand.
Really, it’s not the stuff that’s in control. It’s not the material things that matter – it’s the idea. If I have the idea of cleanliness, the matter falls into line. The stuff follows along obediently. Stuff – matter – makes a good servant but a poor master. And if I let everything get cluttered and dusty, I feel so bowed down by the weight of it that I buy into the illusion that it’s solid.
And of course, it isn’t.
That’s the secret key that I’ve worked out during this most horrific of all weeks. When Rich lay in his hospital bed with his intestine inert, hovering between life and death; when my tyres ruptured on the way to the hospital; when the water system packed in and we had to drag buckets of water to each goat; when Benji had chicken pox and then a stomach virus and had to be picked up from school immediately as an emergency.
Rhys called me ‘Calamity Jane’ – a tag I categorically deny. I may have had lesson after lesson stacked up this week, but here’s what I learned:
Light can be both wave and particle – and so can we. I actually think that awareness, or consciousness, is the mechanism that turns waves into particles. It’s waves until it hits our consciousness. And then we translate the energy into particles – or stuff. Like play dough being squeezed through a shaped tube, it comes out in whatever shape you give it.
Reality isn’t actually dense. And things aren’t as solid as they appear. We know this, because the scientists tell us so. The wooden table that looks so solid – or the clutter on the dresser – is really just vibrating particles, with space in between. The weight of matter is an illusion.
It’s a convincing illusion, to be sure. And letting things get cluttered and dirty – letting the stuff take over – makes the illusion even more convincing.
But really, reality is more like Jaron Lanier’s original virtual reality game than I knew. Our brains are the controller – we project our beliefs onto the outside world, and they come into being. A good reason to be very careful about what beliefs you’re carrying around – because you’re constantly bringing them into being.
5 March 2013
Rich is coming home today! He’s been in hospital for nine days – this is the tenth. Thinking back on it, I realize that we almost lost him.
There was that long, long time when he was vacant – when his eyes weren’t his eyes, when he was staring straight ahead, conscious but not present. When his insides were inert, still, not moving. When I wanted to urge him to fight, to come back to me – but there was
no-one to urge.
It was almost like he was a mist, in the shape of a man. In any case, he’s come back to me – to us – now. Grumpy, tired, demanding jelly babies and beer, but himself. Thank God for that. A man, not just a mist in the shape of a man.
And I’ve learned… what have I learned? I think it’s about created suffering. My father told me something about a bear. If you throw a flaming log at a bear, it’ll clutch the burning wood to its own chest. That’s because clutching is a bear’s defence mechanism – that’s how it kills things. And it can’t do anything else, even if that natural response is harming it. We’re like that. We’re like a bear, clutching the burning log to ourselves. There’s suffering, sure, but we create more suffering than we need to, by focusing on the ‘what if’ instead of the ‘what is’.
Rich is coming home, and I could be spending all my time panicking about what happens if he has an emergency once he gets here, worrying about how long it’ll take him to recover, fretting about how I’ll manage to run the farm on my own during the long months of his convalescence.
But all of that is ‘what if’. Instead of ‘what is’.
So, what is?
I’m back in my kitchen – my beautiful apple-green kitchen, with its long view of the sea and the hills and the trees on the other side of the valley. Outside, the goats wait for me, their breaths misting in the cold morning air, fragrant with clean straw and hay, warm silky flanks and goat’s milk waiting to hit the churns in steaming streams. Healing lotions and potions to make. Family to love. Work to do. The farm itself, surrounding me like a pair of arms. These are the things I cling to, the things that keep me strong. And I need to be strong.
Secrets from Chuckling Goat Page 18