Living in a hundred year old ranch house, with outbuildings that are nearly as old, means there is always something that needs fixed, and almost everything used to look better.
I don’t mind this. In fact, I kind of like it. It takes the pressure off. I am an accidental housekeeper, meaning, I usually start a job, like making tea, and then the water boils out of the teapot because I’ve forgotten it, and suddenly, I am washing the kitchen floor. As long as I can continue to cultivate my own absentmindedness, the house should stay relatively clean.
Really though, most days it would be very embarrassing if someone dropped in unexpectedly. I like to think there is a threshold that I don’t drop below, but that is pure fantasy.
On more than one occasion I’ve realized it was a completely different season the last time I scrubbed the bathroom floor (I don’t make tea in there, you see). I am fortunate to live with a man who says his mother taught him to scrub the floor the same as mine did, so if it’s not scrubbed, it’s his fault too.
And the other day when I was lamenting how helpless I sometimes feel in the face of all the ranch work I am too weak or too inexperienced to do, he noted that I’m not a hired hand.
Still, I like to contribute, and when I look down and realize the white tile is now a shade more similar to brown, I feel I’m not pulling my weight. (As a side note: who ever thought white tile was a good idea? For those young people getting ready to decorate their first homes, be warned, it is NOT, unless you enjoy the feeling of failure.)
All this is a strange way to start an column that is actually about the exact opposite idea. The epiphany I am about to describe came as I prepared to host nearly every member of my immediate family, at overlapping intervals, extending over a several week period.
Now my family members, as a group, are neither hardcore neat freaks, nor particularly judgemental, but my mom is a self-proclaimed germaphobe, and there are several others who suffer from allergies.
Since most ranches would essentially be an excellent place to send an allergy sufferer/germaphobe if you wanted to torture them, I set about preparing to host my family by seeing if there wasn’t someone else that could do it.
Just kidding, I only let myself have that little fantasy for about a day. But, it is true that as the arrival date of the first batch of visitors approached, I began to worry we were all going to regret the venture.
Then yesterday morning I was in the barn trying to feed an orphaned calf who can’t decide if he belongs in this world or the next. He is skin and bones, stinks of scours, has crusty, dirty blisters on his nose and lips, and when I feed him, the milk and saliva that run out of his mouth combine into a sticky, muddy paste. It’s gross and it’s frustrating.
So there I stood, covered in muddy milk paste, wrestling with a calf who wanted nothing to do with the whole affair.
“Half a bottle, most of it on me, will have to be good enough for now,” I thought, and took myself inside. I’ll admit I also thought — and it wasn’t the first time — “If you are going to die, just get it over with already!”
Believe it or not, I wanted this. To me this is the real deal: it is the messiness of corporeal life, and it is also the heady window between heaven and earth.
On a ranch, we watch babies being birthed, we watch them grow, we watch them die, sometimes, even when we’ve worked hard to heal them. Ironically, many of these little ones are born to be food.
All of our care and labor ends in their slaughter, and then people we never meet eat them. It’s a heavy thought. As is, of course, a reminder that everything born will become food eventually. Which is why I also think it is beautiful, important and humbling work.
My family, like me, is full of city folk. I’d be surprised if any of them have ever been closer to a cow than the ones they might drive by while zipping down the interstate. They know where hamburger comes from … the grocery store.
So, the adults may not want to feed the baby calf, but I hope that my nieces and nephew will. A lot of modern, human life tries to look cleaner than it really is, and I think that is dangerous. It’s good to remember our roots are in the soil and the muck.
Some people say God is in the details, but I believe you can find God in the dirt, where all things begin and end.
When the guests arrive, the bathroom floor will be freshly mopped, but I am guessing that white tile won’t stay white long.
We’ll go to the barn and see the baby broiler chicks, the roly-poly mama cat-to-be, the bum calves and lambs. Then we’ll track all that back to the house, the kids running in to tell their mom and dad and grandma what they saw, the old dogs following them through the screen door, nobody bothering to wipe their feet. And I am okay with that.
It’s all part of the messy glory of life beside a Little Pasture on the Prairie.
