Signs From the Other World

Part 1. Sparky

When we first moved here I was overwhelmed by the natural world that surrounded me. It is all farming, i.e., corn, soybeans, etc. and the raising of animals.

There is a famous poem of Robert Frost's and I can't remember the title. It's short and elegant and it has something in it about going to look at a newborn calf; "...it's so young, it totters when its mother licks it with her tongue." This is what came to mind when I first saw the very young donkey, probably only a few weeks old, that belonged to our adjoining neighbors, the Woolcocks.

When we passed by, if "Sparky" was outside of the barn with his mother, we'd stop and look at him. The sight of this young creature made something inside me roll and turn and want to laugh. I still can't quite put it into words, what this meant, to live so close to real life instead of being surrounded and choked by expensive new houses, too many malls, and the worst part of all, the raping of the land.

Sometimes Sparky would canter around the edges of his large pen, slowly and with his eyes partly closed. You could tell that he was running just for fun, like I did when I was young. After we stopped to look at him for some time, he got curious about us and came up to the fence to look at us. His mother didn't like this; she got herself quickly up to her son's side and pushed his head away from us with the lower part of her head, where her nostrils are. It was funny and it was normal, just like people.

I have a picture of this creature, who personified what life was going to be like here, on my wall. I keep writing about my son but sometimes it's unavoidable. He took the picture and had it framed for me; after that one of our neighbors saw it and liked it and bought a copy from Michael.

You develop a kind of third eye when you live here for a while. As my husband says, one of the hazards of living here is that you get distracted while you're driving-- by a hawk, a mountain, a sunset, a field of flowers. Fields of flowers are my favorite distraction; when we left the Philadelphia suburbs there was little left of anything that was natural to the environment. But I've trained myself to keep my eyes on the road.