Afternoon In The Barnyard, Slow and Steady

I pulled the hay feeder over and sat on it next to Jon.  It didn’t take long for Fanny to present herself to him, looking for scratches.

We sat in the barnyard, the sheep skinny without their wool, looking more like goats, grazing in the back pasture.  But the donkeys hung around, looking for attention.

It took longer for Lulu to show up.  But when she did she gently but firmly nudged Fanny away from Jon and stayed with him until we left the barnyard sometime later.

Fanny slid her flaring oval nostrils up and down my knee getting whatever smells she needed to give her the information she was seeking.  I scratched the warm soft hair on her jaw and she rested her head on my arm.  I pressed my face into the side of hers breathing in her smell.

I don’t receive information with my nose the way she does, but her smell calms, grounds, and delights me like a good memory.

The sun was warm and without a wind.  I took off my wool socks and boots and put on my sneakers.  While Jon sat with Lulu, alternating between taking pictures with his new camera and paying attention to Lulu, I shoveled manure from the growing pile into the old metal wheelbarrow that was in the barn when we bought the house.

Once we bought a new plastic one, with a tire. It was bigger and easier to push until the tire punctured and we couldn’t replace it.  That’s when I became a believer in the old metal one with the metal wheel.

I’m on my yearly mission to spread the winter’s manure, piled up from all those mornings of mucking out the pole barn, around the pastures.

I’ll do it slowly like I did last year.  A wheelbarrow full at a time, dumping it on the grass and spreading it out with the rake. I stop when I get tired or my back starts to hurt.

There’s no hurry.  I’m taking a lesson from the Tortoise…slow and steady.