The birds begin. Ethel, the border terrier, stretches and yawns beside me. I listen for a while, then consult the time. It is so much earlier than I’d thought — 5:11 and nothing to do about it except listen for a little longer, then get up. I have the brief, puritanical thought that I should know all these birds by their songs. Perhaps they’re the same birds I hear at twilight, some of whose names I know.
I’ve been away from the farm for longer than I care to think, away from the work and the mental habit of it. And yet on this first morning home, I find myself stepping out the door at 5:30. Ethel comes first, her walk and breakfast, and then it’s down to the barn to let the horses out of the night-corral. They pause in the barnyard, always — I like to think — with a sense of delinquency. I come out of the barn with a screen door that needs rescreening and startle the horses up the drive and into the pasture, where they instantly settle to grazing.
I have an endless list of tasks. I begin by lopping a pair of stray hickory saplings that are crowding a Parrotia persica, which has sprung into adolescence since I last saw it. I will have to do something about a piston-shaft on the mower that has gone. The bees are spilling out of the hive, but before I can inspect it, I have to fix the fence post that is leaning against it.
What is missing is new life. It’s all around me, but I mean the life of husbandry. I came back to the farm via Wyoming and a place I know with a small herd of dairy goats. One was due to deliver, and I became completely absorbed in the goat-watch. She had reached her term — 150 days — and hour by hour her behavior and conformation changed. I marveled at her readiness, her deep knack, the timing of it all.
It was only my timing that was wrong. I was on the road when her twins were born. They are females, and I hope to have a couple of their kids. They were on my mind when the birds began this morning. Over my coffee, I dog-eared the pages of a fencing catalog.
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