Monday, September 29, 2008

Farming

Last week I cut up livestock organs for dog treats. There was a cow tongue, and the tastebuds felt like braille under my fingers. "Grass is good," it said, "but corn is better." That tongue had seen so many blades of grass, so many clumps of clover. It had called out to the rest of the herd, waited for a response. And now it sits in a dehydrator, waiting to be suitable enough for a dog to eat.

Today we decided the fates of sheep. We herded them through a series of gates into smaller and smaller pens. Eventually they crowded into a chute, where we checked the small ones for parasites and chose which ewes, marked with yellow ear tags, were big enough to breed. Lisa sprayed the big ones with blue spray paint to be mixed in with another herd in a few weeks. "You want to be sprayed," she told them when they jumped with the shock of blue on their faces. "Don't you know that?"

The orange ear tags are foster replacement lambs, and the black ones are castrated males, both groups just waiting to grow big enough. After de-worming they ran out of the chute into a different paddock, and immediately forgot the stress.

"They're not the same," Bruce and Lisa tell us. "They don't have life goals or aspirations. They breathe, they eat, they poop. They don't think about yesterday or tomorrow or whether or not they'll be here next spring, they just live."

In one pasture are all the old ewes, the ones past their lambing prime. There's one old ewe who gave them triplets, which isn't rare but usually ends with twins, but this one kept them all alive and strong. "She'll stay here when the rest of them go," Lisa said. "We figured after something like that, well she deserved it."

Today, tomorrow, the next day, that old ewe will probably breathe, eat, and poop. She will never know she did anything spectacular, and will probably never notice that her life ended up differently than anyone else's. She will never appreciate the opportunity they gave her, never use it to better her life. She'll just live.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Prompt: The first time Harry saw Susan...

The first time Harry saw Susan she was running out into the street after her dog, which Harry had just mauled with his car.
"Susan?" he said, getting out of the car. "Susan Jake, class of '89?"
Susan stared at him, incredulous. "Unless the next words out of your mouth are, 'Remember me? I'm the guy who left to go to vet school' I don't give a fuck how you know me, you might have just killed my dog!"
"Oh! Right." Harry crouched beside her, examining the terrier mix sprawled on the pavement. Its leg was bent at an awkward angle but its eyes were open, and it was breathing, so Harry passed it off as alright.
"So, really?" he said. "You don't remember me?"

Monday, June 23, 2008

Sophomore Ramblings

I'll probably give this up in a week, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

I found this in an old notebook from Sophomore year. I kinda liked it:

My Shakespeare professor wears no wedding ring. Her face is round and her hair is gray, pulled back everyday in the same low ponytail, parted to one side. Her large, round glasses make her always surprised, magnifying her make-up free eyes. When she smiles she looks afraid, and the show of emotion quickly falls from her face. She desperately uses her hands to make her points and emphasizes every few words by rising up on her toes. Her favorite word is "uh" and her voice shakes when she speaks, tapering off at the end of every sentence. She shows the most feeling when she reads the Bard aloud, and I wonder if she spent her younger days reciting lines in front of a mirror, her voice bouncing and echoing off the bathroom walls. I wonder if this is where she saw herself when she sat in a classrom just like this one, in this very building, with a breeze smelling of spring rustling the blinds and the late afternoon sun giving everything the perfect light. If she got bored in class and daydreamed, writing love letters she never found the courage to send. Maybe if she had sent them she would be far away from here, watching one of Shakespeare's plays performed at the Globe, making her daydreams real. Or maybe this is exactly where she dreamed she would be, speaking softly the words of Shakespeare as the sound of the church bell striking three reminds us there's only an hour left in class.