Sunday, Sept 6, 2026
Walked out this morning with fog beginning to rise, the sun a milk white eye, stunning blue pushing the clouds to the side. Walked out with glistening, delicate spider webs spun in the weeds, weeds that have been particularly beautiful this summer, especially since the redwing blackbirds and killdeer are gone. Could it be the owl living in the neighbor’s barn, and the red tail hawk I see sitting on an electric pole by our neighbor’s pasture that drove them off? While putting up hay, yesterday our neighbor showed us pictures, those wide yellow eyes, those wide pools of darkness.
He’d come over to help us put up a wagon load of hay. Bruce doesn’t usually like to ask for help but he saw Terry drive by.  I was grateful.  Before he got here, I hauled on those bales, tumbled together in the hay wagon. My arms and legs ached like they do and the words, “I’m too old for this” rumbled through my mind. I pulled one out of the pile, and other forty-pound bales tumble down. Any several could knock me off the wagon. Before he arrived, Bruce ran down the ladder to put hay on the conveyor and ran back up again.
Terry traded places and tossed the bales off the wagon. I placed them on the conveyor. This was hay we had to buy because the last cutting had been rained on. We’d only had to do this one other time, when we lost 500 bales, as a front moved from Minnesota to Northern Illinois faster than we could bale.
Even so my arms and legs and breath whispered this is too much. But on the other side of the fence, Mrs. Horse needs hay. Mrs. Horse comes by for hay cubes and company, her eyes bedroom eyes. We hitch her and drive around the field, where time blessedly expands, and we are slow looking at the sky, occasional jets, and roadside weeds. Did I tell you this year, the roadside weeds have been particularly beautiful?
I walk by the delicate purple of smooth blue aster, the shouting wild perennial sunflowers, shy white frost aster, the common evening primrose and biennial bee blossom. These plants feed pollinators. We’ve been seeing butterflies gathering. And the other day a small swarm of dragonflies darted over the drying corn.
Martin Shaw’s Sunday morning story was about St. Ciaran, whose bell, given to him by St. Patrick, rang at the very place he was supposed to set up a monastery. It was dank, swamp ground, not appealing at all. Have you ever smelled a swamp? Earth and rotting water and slurpy creatures. Ciaran had the gift many saints have—being able to communicate with wild animals. Shaw spoke:
Such different beasts, such different intelligences, but each made that spark of contact with the vastness of Ciaran and knew this was a place of peace. Some essential, quick connection that they recognized as truth – like flesh, or nuts and berries, or cool clean water is truth.
The Dreaming Bell drew animals not humans as the first brothers of Ciaran’s wild monastery. It took Ciaran to dark, dank haunts. You’d need a sparky mind like his to stay dry there. And the animals taught him too, their temperaments’ energies he would learn to negotiate. Later, when humans started to arrive, it was this first apprenticing with his animal brothers that would show him quite how to approach them, strange and holy lad that he was. Sometimes animals were easier, and distinctly less hungry, than men.1
I wondered if that taming made work because animals dependent on humans need feed and water and shelter. Did these animals lose their ability to survive on their own, to let God tend them as scripture says? I wonder if there was a time when humans were saintlike and animals wandered in, choosing their people, offering themselves in service to us.
I think about my creatures who call for my attention–Mrs. Horse calling me to come out, Omalola and Aiden each needing my focus, just me. Kalizoo, crawling into my lap when I read Morning Prayer and Smudgie climbing over my bedside table to watch over us from the top of the dog crate. Even Tyger, the feral barn cat pathetically cries, in the way cats do, because he wants us to leave, so he can eat. These animals call me to attention, to my body, when I’m off thinking about trouble.
After a bout of loneliness, post Tessie’s death, Mrs Horse and dogs are bringing me to other people, so I don’t forget how to talk–a once-a-month lunch with women my age, tougher than me, working their farms and riding horses out on the trails. They were the ones who brought me to Aiden. The dogs have brought me back to my work as a writer, and classes that allow us to sit with each other and chat in between practicing.
I learned how to teach my students, by looking for the things they did right. I learned how to stay with the difficult, the young, the wild, how my perceptions shaped my relationship with Mrs. Horse, and how changing those perceptions changed everything. I learned how to ride through fear, the ground and Tessie’s back holding me. I learned that horses and dogs understand our words. I learned to breathe. Aiden has been teaching me about my short temper and reminding me that speaking to what he does right works better than what he does wrong. Omalola watches, wants me to remember she was here before Aiden, that I am her person. And the barn itself is a refuge of old wood and sparrows.
Decluttering has become a madness. Sometimes it rises up and I want clear the house of stuff, while I have my wits and my health. I’ve whirled through my house, pulling books, sending them out the door, only to wish I’d kept this one or that one. I took stuff to a recent tack sale and sold a couple Breyer horses and a Mylar bit. I took old eyeglasses to Walmart for re-use. I took the picture I based the cover of my book to Salvation army because I found a picture I like better for that wall. Maybe doing this pulled out the rock that will let the whole project slide serious sending stuff out the door. Maybe not. Â
Someday the jig will be up—our bodies will wear out or die and I feel the urgency to get ahead of it. Even my dreams are full of packing up, trying to fit stuff in a limited space. Several friends have moved. I empathize too closely, thinking this should be us.
I even wonder about placing Mrs. Horse in a home where she’ll be worked, where because the guilt of not doing much more than brushing her in the morning and throwing hay can burn like failure. When I think that, I walk out and see a tear running down her eye. She is happy here, but happiest when I give her hay cubes and scratch her back. She is a neighbor that needs tending and time. Those bedroom eyes, when she comes in the barn for currying and hay cubes and company. Bruce said when selling her first came up, because she was too much, you can’t take it back if you let her go. At that time, he said don’t do it, because it had been a grinding hard school year. And my vet says why not keep her, she’s happy, you can afford to feed her. And I settle down in his words.
But the farm is inching towards being too much. This week Bruce pulled the big heavy ladder and climbed to the gutters to clear them of leaves. The power went out last night, though thankfully our basement didn’t flood when the sump pump went quiet. This winter Bruce will take out the tractor to push snow back, open to the wind and the snow.
Where will we go? We don’t know. Taxes, energy costs would rise. (We have geothermal.) Homeowners associations don’t sell themselves as good neighbors. We have no family to settle nearby. Maybe by then, these questions will be moot.
I wonder if Ciaran’s animals missed him when the humans arrived. Did they wander back to the wilderness, or stay curled up outside the monastery walls, hoping for him to glance their way, drop his hands to stroke their backs, scratch their ears.
The neighbor’s cows are crying for their babies. We heard their calls coming up from the valley last night . We heard them this morning. I couldn’t help but think about Rachel weeping for her children. It’s likely those calves have gone to be fattened and later slaughtered.
The sunlight dances on the soybeans, the leaves like tiny waves catching the light. They are changing color, now mottled with green and yellow. Soon the leaves will fall, leaving beans withered and dried for harvest.
Work Cited
1 Martin Shaw. St. Ciaran in the Hotel Lobby. https://martinshaw.substack.com/p/st-ciaran-in-the-hotel-lobby
