We’re stable as Chris cooks a mean dinner in the next room and Phil comes in, soaked, from the Irish rain. The wolfhounds take up about half the kitchen space, but that’s how it goes around here. Milo, the small table of his head, pushes me, waiting to be scratched, and it feels like someone is pushing me bodily out of the way; then I see the happy, drooling dogface.
We milk goats twice a day by machine, after we hand-milk a bit to check color and consistency. As we come in, most of them stand up on the doors of their pens, their long ears flopping down and looking like shoulder-length hair as they ask: Food! We walk greyhounds, feed pigs. Fred the horse is my favorite, though, a big, lumbering horse that makes me amazed that such powerful animals can be so gentle.
We’re blessed to be here, both in learning to use our gas-fed caravan whose stove we have to start with a lighter; with the goats whom I now know by name and can milk on our own; the Irish countryside stretching green, punctuated by upraised ditches, cottages, herds of cows and sheep, and the roaring, cliffside sea. We work hard here, more than we’re asked to, and Phil and Chris take us to the shore, framed with infinity and rocky shores.
How good it is, but currently unpoetic it is for me to be stable. I look forward to the day I have a family and will slow down some, but for now I have more countries to see, more poems to read, and more wood-burning stoves to write in front of.
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