'You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh; the fundamental things apply, as time goes by....' I sing softly to myself.
My husband will be home soon. Sometime this evening he will say to me, "Did you exercise today?"
"Of course," I reply with lifted eyebrows.
"What did you do?"
"Well, I began by mucking the horse stalls..."
"Oh," he says, his face falling slightly. "Well, that's a good workout."
To put it mildly, I respond, unspoken.
My husband is a personal trainer and body sculptor; he does marvelous things to his body in a gym on expensive equipment. But workouts for me - time is so precious.
I derive great satisfaction from what I am able to do by myself. A slight 125 pounds at 53 years old, I would be handicapped without my Rubbermaid two-wheeled cart. I bought it as a present to myself last spring after wrenching my arms trying to balance the one-wheeled barrow with a heavy load.
My daily "workout" consists of repeatedly hefting a manure fork full of horse droppings and wet straw, (back, shoulders, arms) twisting it into the cart, (biceps, waist) and pushing it uphill (legs and glutes) up the driveway, down over the lawn to the dumping site, pressing the handles up over my head and tipping the contents out onto the compost pile, (triceps and pecs) turning and pulling the cart behind me, (posture, back, and triceps again) back up over the lawn and down to the upper barn. (I know the terminology; you get the idea.)
I fill the cart full of straw and steer it down to the lower barn where I spread straw in the horse stalls, then fill it again with grass hay cut from our own hay field every summer, stored in the lower barn. I push the cart back uphill and throw the hay out into the sheep and llama pastures, more mud than grass at this time of year. Then I carry three big, heavy buckets filled with grain out into the fields for the ewes and the rams. I'm sure I work every muscle in my body, not in a way likely to sell many fitness manuals, but a way that makes sense to me.
Hay hooks are another great enabler. With hooked extensions, my puny arms become amazingly strong, and I can maneuver great blocks of compressed grasses I couldn't begin to lift without them. I began wielding mine more than 25 years ago, when I was a one-woman horse breeding/green breaking operation in Nevada. The hooks were a gift from a dear friend, an old, wiry, grizzled, gap-toothed Oklahoma cowboy I met by lucky chance, who could do anything with a horse. I absorbed his wisdom like a sponge; to this day, whenever I work with horses I ask myself what he would do, as my final equine authority.
Today I decide to give the ten pregnant ewes their first taste of green candy this lambing season. I lamb late, hoping for good weather, so they are still five or six weeks away, their impending motherhood evident in swaying, stilted stride, swelling bodies atop impossibly spindly legs.
I carefully balance the unwieldy, heavy, welded iron ladder almost vertically up against the cross beams in the upper barn, climb to the top and secure the ladder onto a pole with that great farm fix-all, a piece of baling twine. Then I ease off, working my way around the pole, inching sideways onto a platform. There is no floor here; a wrong step will send me falling into nothingness between the lofts. My hands grip the pole; I don't look down until I'm safely on the alfalfa loft. Then my hooked arm extensions lever, balance, and tumble three 120 pound bales down off the loft onto the gravel floor below.
I maneuver my way around the pole again to the top of the ladder and descend, then roll the bales up onto a wooden flat in the corner, my boots slipping on the feathered lining of a fallen barn swallow's mud nest. The alfalfa looks unpromising, dusty and gray, but when I cut the strings on a bale, the blackish moldy shell cracks to reveal a leafy green inside, even though the bales are over two years old. I call to my "girls" in a high, sing-song voice. They run toward me; they love alfalfa time. I count backs; six black, four white. Or rather six charcoal/taupe, four sweet cream. My fleeces are legendary, long, soft, and curly. I ache for the time to spin again. It's been awhile since I've felt the yarn form magically under my fingers.
The bulbs are up four to eight inches now, depending on the location in regard to the sun; some of them are forming heads. In a week my yard will be a riot of daffodils, hundreds of golden, bobbing bonnets, but today it's early, treacherous February, and the temperature at three o'clock has already dipped to 33 degrees, sending me back out into the chilling afternoon.
I decide to clean and refill the eight big stock water troughs while the hoses still run. I'm in luck; two of them are clean enough to just top off. I don't top them every day because I have to let the water level drop down far enough to tip over for scrubbing, and many of them are heavier than I am. Today I tip and fill five of them, water the fuchsias wintering in the greenhouse, then disconnect and drain all the hoses. I plunge my numb, rubber-gloved hands into the ruff of my huge dog and constant companion, Yukon. He has the thick, double coat of a great silver timber wolf, a not-too-distant ancestor, and is always warm. He is beginning to shed, another harbinger of an early spring. Tufts of soft dog wool cling to my rubber fingers. He licks my frozen chin.
It has already dropped below freezing in the north pasture where the rams live; the hoses almost won't run. That side is always colder. On frozen mornings, I climb over the barbed wire fence to chop ice out of the water troughs with a flat-tined pitchfork, then lift and pitch the chunks out onto the ground so that they don't quickly freeze back together like cracked crystal jigsaw puzzles.
In the rams' trough the ice is always thicker. On very cold nights it freezes almost two inches, but as long as it's only on the top, the water lasts almost a week, and by then the weather has usually broken. Western Oregon has a mild climate, thankfully. When faucets freeze, lugging water in buckets is too hard a workout for me; it makes my arms lengthen, shoulders slope. I'd rather slog through mud than slip on ice, 'though today I have to curl my toes to keep the mud from sucking the boots off my feet.
I sing softly: 'I'd like to swim in a clear, blue stream, where the water is icy cold; then go to town in a golden gown, and have my fortune told - just once, just once, just once before I'm old...." I look down at my stained, baggy blue jeans full of barbed wire holes, and my vision clouds. In my mind, I see myself as a dark-haired teenage girl, sitting at my piano playing and singing this song, when "The Fantastics" was new and life was a promise yet to come. A lifetime of choices ago.
I still have the horses' water to do. It is the most difficult, a 100 gallon tank I really struggle to tip before I can clean and refill. I stand watching the water swirl into the tank, Oasis, our six year old Arabian mare, watching over my shoulder. She turns her head and I breathe warmly into her nostril; we touch noses in silent communion, watching the water, my pale gloved hand light on her warm neck. The wind is chill today; wisps of my white hair tickle my face as Oasis gently pulls the tie string of my hood.
Her Mister Spock ears tuned toward us, our Peruvian/Arab filly, Amazing Grace, watches intently for any hint of apples appearing from my pockets. Her head snakes forward; she bites the plastic bag of apple slices, swinging away, refusing to give it up. I laugh and pry the bag from her teeth; two sets of gentle horse lips compete for the apples in my palm. We have to fix the dripping faucet stem; it's getting worse. I try to ignore it.
It takes forever to fill 100 gallons. I sing: 'I'd like to dance 'til two o-clock, or maybe dance 'til dawn; or if the band could stand it, just go on and on and on - just once, just once, before the chance is gone..' So many years. Vision blurs again. Why is it so hard to sing that song? 'But I want much more than keeping house; much more, much more, much more!"
Tonight I am a piano player, my favorite thing to be. I'm the primary pianist for a melodrama theater, and tonight I'm in a theatrical production, a mystery spoof on Humphrey Bogart. I have selected over a hundred favorite songs, mostly from the thirties and forties, to play for two hours during dinner and dessert, requests and anything I want to play, like the Rhapsody In Blue, the Warsaw Concerto, Maple Leaf Rag. And of course, Casablanca's As Time Goes By.
A woman comes up with a request.
"Don't your hands get tired?" she asks me.
"Never," I smile back. I could play for days, weeks, months. Some days, when I am at home alone, after doing the farm chores I sit at my piano almost all day, playing all the great classics, everything I love, losing all track of time. I play from "Fake Books" or "Real Books" the professional pianists call them, big lead sheet books with just the melody line and chord notations so that I can improvise the rest. That way I can't make a mistake; I can play anything, and most people listening don't realize I'm making it all up, instant arrantements, never the same twice.
My piano was a bequest from a beloved grandmother, left to me because my concert pianist aunt didn't want it, a treasured possession I have moved all over the country with me since I was eleven years old. When I play, in my mind I am in Carnegie Hall, and my fingers fly over the keys, stunned audiences gasping to their feet in spontaneous applause....Tonight I play the request: 'She may be weary, women do get weary, wearing the same shabby dress...She may be waiting, just anticipating things she may never possess...While she's without them, Try a Little Tenderness...'
I stand in the receiving line after the play and a man wrings my hand.
"Oh I loved your music!" he says. "Fifty years ago was my favorite time!" Life was new to him then.
The muscles in my scalp above my ears ache from smiling.
Rebecca Just Wagner, 1997
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