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And that, well, that was pretty fucked, now, wasn’t it?
SIX
Meadow
“Heya buddy,” I murmured to the little brown creature nuzzling into my bare ankle.
He’d been with us about a week and a half.
And he already had about half my heart.
The other half, of course, belonged to Captain.
For all that it was worth – all scarred and bleeding.
But them being around managed to staunch the flow some days. And that, well, I guess that was the reason people liked animals so much. They didn’t care if you were happy or sad, beautiful or hideous, motivated or lazy. They were just there, happy just to be near you; nothing but bottomless wells of love and affection.
It suddenly seemed unfathomable that I had spent almost all of my life with no animal by my side.
I mean, sure, Gadget was a lot of work. He had to be bottle fed, he went to the bathroom indiscriminately all over the house – and his backpack sometimes – and he liked to nibble at things that he most certainly should not be nibbling at. But it was a true labor of love.
Captain was decidedly less work. And he took off with his buddies for hours at a time to tumble and play.
My war with Red raged on daily, though I hadn’t been nipped to pieces since that first day, so I was going to call it an overall win even if he did still chase me, did still seem to want to be put in his place all the time.
The chickens – or hens as Ranger insisted on calling them – were sweeter, following me around as I gathered the pastel rainbow of eggs they provided daily.
The donkeys and the goats sniffed at me, but didn’t seem to have eyes for anyone but Ranger. Which, well, I guess… who could blame them?
Once the instructions had been handed out, and I had been lent a permanent marker to scratch Xs into the trees on the way, so I didn’t get turned around, Ranger left me to my own devices with the greenhouse.
I found a certain kind of peace there, harvesting fruits and vegetables, watering, occasionally trimming off dying parts of the plants. Gadget hung around by my feet, warm and content in the sun-soaked space.
Maybe I should have feared the woods.
I read a story in a magazine once while waiting in the office of my dentist about survivors of terrible events who could never go to the places where they endured their own personal hells. Kids who could never go back to school after a shooting, tellers at banks who couldn’t go back to work after a robbery, etcetera. And it made sense, really, never to want to be in a place that triggered those memories.
Somehow, though, in this place that held some of my ugliest memories, all I felt was comfort.
Maybe it was Ranger. And the dogs. The safety they offered.
Or, possibly, it was this. Fingers in dirt, muscles aching from work, the fresh air, the sun on my skin, the quiet.
I never realized before how loud life was, how noise permeated every moment of my world before. The chatter of people at work, the low hum of the radio, cars engines, horns, neighbors, the TV that I left on all night long.
There was also a sort of freedom in never seeing another living soul save for Ranger. It didn’t matter if my face was free of makeup, if there was nothing to mask the bags I sometimes got from too little sleep or too much anxiety. My clothes didn’t matter. My shoes didn’t matter. How dirty I got simply didn’t matter.
And there was a sort of detox from the false comfort of social media.
Most nights in my old life, when I was curled on the couch watching TV, or in bed before sleep, my cell was out, I was scrolling endlessly through Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest – watching the lives of people I barely knew, occasionally envying things they had, feeling inadequate in comparison to their perfectly filtered, carefully modeled lives.
I once caught myself being jealous over some girl I went to high school with of her tour of Asia.
I didn’t, prior to that moment, ever even think of visiting Asia. If I dug deep, I would realize that I didn’t have any actual interest in going.
But that was what social media could do to you.
I found myself occasionally still going to reach for my phone. When a question arose that I wanted to research. Or when Gadget was doing something cute, and I wanted to snap a picture.
But snap it for what?
To share on my feed?
It was suddenly very clear to me how hollow that was – to search for validation in the form of likes and comments.
I didn’t need the reassurance of near strangers that he was cute, that caring for him, bringing him up was rewarding and emotionally intense, that this new life was suiting me, freeing me.
