Every morning we have tea and breakfast before Ayşe arrives. Ayşe is a formidable woman in peasant dress and her 50s in constant back and arthritic pain who grew up as a nomad herding animals. Eight years ago when Tamer and Şadan bought the farm, they poached Ayşe from the service of their neighbors, who had her cleaning and housekeeping with her pained hands and not taking care of animals, what she knows best.
We follow Ayşe down the cobble path past the rows of fruit trees on the hillside, some more ravaged than others by the adolescent cows on mornings when it is too hot for anyone to pay attention to whether their leashes are properly staked into the ground. We reach the animal pens and usually the ram is already ramming the gate of his pen demanding out. He’s a real bastard, always butting his mate and his children when they try to eat from the shared trough and picking fights with Efe the goat. The only male animals I like are the eunuchs.
Efe is a eunuch. Tamer and Şadan had Ayşe’s husband castrate Efe so that he would fatten up in time for their son’s wedding. The wedding was postponed because the son’s fiance wanted to finish her doctorate first but then just yesterday Şadan got a phone call that the fiance did well with her dissertation defense so Efe is back on death row.
As Ayşe feeds and milks the animals we pick up shovels and brooms and buckets and gloves and we collect their shit and piss for the compost. Mother of Love, the cow mother, shits enormous piles and we have to be careful never to dawdle behind her as there is no warning, no change in posture or lifting of the tail, before she lets loose a faucet of pee. I get the most satisfaction from scraping up those mountainous shits and hurling a bucket of them into the compost pile for the chickens to sort through; the pebbles of the goats and sheep are more mundane and raise more dust as we sweep them up. Mother of Love is indifferent to us, as are all the animals except the ducklings (who beg for food and nibble my feet in the afternoon), the hostile geese and the goats.
Sometimes I start early on the goat and calf pen as Ayşe has called my girlfriend Brett over to do trigger point massage and range of motion exercises on her shoulders. They all love Brett and she has already learned all the animal and food names, though no verbs yet except the imperative forms of Come, Go, Open (Start), Stop.
After cleaning the pens we fill their water buckets and Ayşe lets them loose: the male goats and ram to the back woods to forage, the chickens and four generations of ducks and hissing gawking geese to wander as they will, Mother of Love’s daughter and the latter’s fiance to the forbidden fruit trees and grazing lawns up the hill. Mother of Love stays in her pen always. The horse and her foal also stay in their pen. The foal was born at 2am two nights ago after a year-long pregnancy. Brett and I slept right through the birthing drama but watched the next morning as Tamer and a horseman neighbor tried long and patiently to get the foal to suckle and finally succeeded. Tamer with his big grey hair and thick glasses gave a goofy grin and thumbs up and whispered to me that the foal had chosen to live, after all.
We follow Ayşe down the cobble path past the rows of fruit trees on the hillside, some more ravaged than others by the adolescent cows on mornings when it is too hot for anyone to pay attention to whether their leashes are properly staked into the ground. We reach the animal pens and usually the ram is already ramming the gate of his pen demanding out. He’s a real bastard, always butting his mate and his children when they try to eat from the shared trough and picking fights with Efe the goat. The only male animals I like are the eunuchs.
Efe is a eunuch. Tamer and Şadan had Ayşe’s husband castrate Efe so that he would fatten up in time for their son’s wedding. The wedding was postponed because the son’s fiance wanted to finish her doctorate first but then just yesterday Şadan got a phone call that the fiance did well with her dissertation defense so Efe is back on death row.
As Ayşe feeds and milks the animals we pick up shovels and brooms and buckets and gloves and we collect their shit and piss for the compost. Mother of Love, the cow mother, shits enormous piles and we have to be careful never to dawdle behind her as there is no warning, no change in posture or lifting of the tail, before she lets loose a faucet of pee. I get the most satisfaction from scraping up those mountainous shits and hurling a bucket of them into the compost pile for the chickens to sort through; the pebbles of the goats and sheep are more mundane and raise more dust as we sweep them up. Mother of Love is indifferent to us, as are all the animals except the ducklings (who beg for food and nibble my feet in the afternoon), the hostile geese and the goats.
Sometimes I start early on the goat and calf pen as Ayşe has called my girlfriend Brett over to do trigger point massage and range of motion exercises on her shoulders. They all love Brett and she has already learned all the animal and food names, though no verbs yet except the imperative forms of Come, Go, Open (Start), Stop.
After cleaning the pens we fill their water buckets and Ayşe lets them loose: the male goats and ram to the back woods to forage, the chickens and four generations of ducks and hissing gawking geese to wander as they will, Mother of Love’s daughter and the latter’s fiance to the forbidden fruit trees and grazing lawns up the hill. Mother of Love stays in her pen always. The horse and her foal also stay in their pen. The foal was born at 2am two nights ago after a year-long pregnancy. Brett and I slept right through the birthing drama but watched the next morning as Tamer and a horseman neighbor tried long and patiently to get the foal to suckle and finally succeeded. Tamer with his big grey hair and thick glasses gave a goofy grin and thumbs up and whispered to me that the foal had chosen to live, after all.
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