The ill wind that blew no good

.. was no good wind at all…

Bad news should always be delivered fast I think.  So here it is.

Yesterday when I woke up I discovered that our Old Big Dog had died in the night.   I won’t put you through a nostalgic slide show. He was a good dog. And an old dog too. And now he has died quietly in his sleep.

When I looked out the window at dawn, I saw Boo circling and circling around his old mentor (the one who taught him to bark at cars up to 2 miles away) , then sitting and looking at the house, then circling again.  When I came out to see – I discovered that, under his blanket, the old dog had died. Right in the line of the sunrise, where he always slept so as to catch the first rays of the day.

Rest in Peace Big Dog.  He was almost 18 years old, his name was Cooter and he was found by John  as a pup on a construction site, tied with wire, his head at a cruel angle, to a barbed wire fence. Covered in bites and cuts and bruises. John put him in the cab of his truck and brought him home and they have wandered through life together every since –  almost 18 years.    That is a pretty long relationship.

John buried him in the shade of the tree by the root cellar, then took out a six pack and sat with him a while and allowed the sadness.

Miserably there is more.

Yesterday Daisy’s mastitis began to morph into something really evil,  holes appearing in her udder.  We have lost the fight to save her.  The vet concurred that she is not pregnant  and that the end is in sight for her. When this manifested itself one of The Fellowship was here visiting, and she knew a guy who knew a guy who came around straight away. So tomorrow the guy will come back and take her away with him in his big truck and have her put  down for me.  And that will be that.   She is in pain now but soon it will be over.  I cannot have her suffering any more of this. I think that many of you saw this coming. Mastitis is awful.  I am spraying the sores every hour to keep the flies out, it is all I can do. This will be a long day.

My neighbours heard and came over to pay their respects to the Big Dog and carried in bags of  freshly dug carrots and garden treats for Daisy, so she has piles of good tasty food to nibble while we wait.  The waiting is pretty hard.  Thankfully Daisy is a cow and does not seem to mind.  But I could just scream my head off. I am not very good at Allowing the Sadness. I do not go softly. I rage. I rage …

Sometimes don’t you feel like sitting on a stump and just Howling.  Just letting yourself Sob – loudly.  And when this great sobbing howling misery surfaces we never cry for just that one thing. We cry for it all. We cry for every last one we lost. We cry a litany. We cry for our mothers and cry for our lost babies.  We chant all their names and roll our heads and wring our minds, tears running through the dust while we scratch out all their faces and just Bawl.  Bawl.

People used to say to me that having a good cry is good for you. Well, I think that is crap. After I cry my thoat aches and my head spins and I feel just awful – then I have to crawl all over the floor and pick up every precious miserable memory and re wrap each one tightly so it will fit back into the Misery Box that I keep in my head. Because I refuse to forget any of them. Then I have to sit on the metaphorical  lid  of the metaphorical misery box so I can redo the heavy lead latch. Then once all my tears have been choked back down through the throat of the box I turn the Key. Lock. And I am alone again.

I still miss them.  I  do. But I own my sadness, it will not own me.

But I so thought Daisy was going to make it.  I really did.

Well there you are –  now we are all crying.  But that is Ok.

Tomorrow I will not be here in the farmy blog.

But the next day I will be back.  Of course I will. We will.   You and I. Because we are The Fellowship and seeing each other through this stuff is what we do.  And there is work to be done.

Love from

celi