Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [55]
I set Amy free then. She runs off to play with Fritz the Dog, a German shepherd and one of two dogs we are sitting for friends. I walk across the yard to store my tools in the old granary. The day is still misty, and twinkling beads of precipitation hang from the underside of the apple tree’s slenderest branches. Down in the valley the pheasant is still squawking. In the yard, a male mourning dove drops groundward and lands just behind his female companion. He hops toward her tail, then flutters just above her until she flits briefly ahead. He follows, hops, and flutters again. A lighter-than-air tumbling act, they hopscotch each other all across the lawn until I come too near and they spook into a wing-whistling takeoff. At first burst, white bars flash from beneath their gray-brown wings; then they swoop to roost atop the granary, settling nervously atop the ridge cap, dipping their heads and side-glancing my approach.
Inside the disused wire-frame corncrib just beyond the granary door, two juncos are chasing each other in abbreviated figure eights. Between flights the juncos drop to the circular concrete floor of the crib and scamper their own fluttery do-si-do, the rain-slick slab an impressionist mirror reflecting their jitterbug. Inside the granary I see barn swallows daubing a nest in the rafters. We live in a time when earth cycles are in question. I look at the yard—frost-free and soaked, already with an undertone of green—and the trees with their buds preternaturally frayed, and I think there is certainly evidence for discussion, but then I look at the evidence of all the birds this morning, and it is clear some cycles remain resolutely intact. Gray and wet it may be, but the birds are sunny in love.
There are the usual deadlines, so I climb the path back to the office. I am squeezing all the pig-penning, wood-splitting, cold-framing, and daughter-consequencing in between the desk and road time that pays the bills, and looking around me at all the relentless evidence of time and seasons passing, I hear the little voice telling me that a guy ought to pare down. We are a breathless society. I love what I do and am grateful to do it, but I am hooked into short-winded cycles of my own, and a simple move to the country does not stop the clocks. It strikes me that this morning’s chores should have ended not with me checking the time and switching the computer on but with Amy and me taking a long stroll into the valley, to learn the land together. This room above the garage gives me a wide view of the place, and I can see her in the yard beside the granary, squatting in her pink rubber boots with her arms wrapped around her shins, nose to nose with Fritz the Dog, who is currently chewing on a dead rabbit. As I wait for the computer to boot, I watch Amy lean in for a better look as Fritz gnaws away at the rabbit’s hind leg. She turns her head this way and that, studying the carcass from every angle as the dog grinds through hide and muscle, working the skull back to his molars so he can crack it and taste the brains. When he curls his lip and pulls at the guts, Amy leans in so close I expect her to topple. With no other dog to compete, Fritz is eating leisurely. A good fifteen minutes pass before he is nosing the final morsel—a front paw—around in the grass between his own front paws, and Amy is still squatted there, transfixed. Anneliese and I constantly second-guess ourselves as parents. We wonder if we are sometimes too strict regarding issues such as the enforced wood-stacking. We wonder about the effects of me being on the road as much as I am. We wonder if we are projecting our idea of country living too heavily on her childhood. We wonder whether we are cheating her of our own happy public school experiences by homeschooling her. Whatever the case, I look at that little girl out there, now on all fours to watch the unlucky rabbit’s foot disappear down the dog’s gullet, and I think,