Here is my Whole Cloth

Almost two years here.

Things are getting pretty intense; and no I don't mean politically or socially. They are intense for me, because doing what I've always wanted to do was a scary jump into a void. Not of knowledge, I had that. Not of experience, because I've had that, too. But of occurrences. When single threads start coming together to make a whole cloth, the cloth sometimes has colors that one does not expect. The challenges of weaving together a life from different threads are, in a word, multitudinous.

Who, after all, believed that this was what I really wanted? So many folks came up to me and said, "If I'd'a known you were like THAT..." and "You can't be SERIOUS!" and even "You'll be back!" - the folks who obviously didn't know me at all, of course.

I have things on my webpage and blog now that would interest no one in Beaufort or Jasper County, certainly no one whom I used to hang out with. How many of you would want to view the graphic pictures of my boss cow, Billy Jean, delivering her first calf? To me it is a miracle, and not just of birth, but of life and future and hope and change that matters personally, not in some unreal fantasy or phony political promise. How many of those folks who used to buy my eggs back in Hardeeville could relate to the fact that here there are no ordinances to ban my chickens, that my cows can be seen from the road in front of my house, that my eggs are the biggest and brownest and most sought after in town? How many of you would marvel at the progress of my reversible quilt, with the summer fruits on one side, the Christmas colors on the other, and the ruffles all around? Would you want to hear of the fourth snowiest season ever recorded that occurred this year, of what fun it is to whisk through snow-covered streets and skid into turns on ice, or to watch the snow drift down like tiny cellophane flakes?

Would you want to see pictures of the day-old calf gamboling happily around his mom, or the way the other cow and even the bull babysit him, or the way they all lay together in the afternoon sun, a happy and content family? Do you want to hear how we bake our own bread, fill our woodbox for the next snowstorm, take out the ashes and put them with the manure and kitchen scraps to compost? Do you care how we clean out the coop and corral, sludging through manure that we see as glorious and full of natural fertilizer and mulch, good for our growing things, an endless circle of life? Do you care if we steer the newborn bull for processing later, or keep him whole to sell his semen to promote good breed traits? Do you want to know if we will band or use the paste to dehorn him, do you care if he appears to be a successful production of homozygous traits?

Do you want to know that my lupus lesion has quit splitting open and has stopped oozing and bleeding, and that my body is actually starting to clean itself out and correct all the damage done by fast foods and a faster lifestyle? Do you care that my DH, whom so many were so interested in insulting and trashing just for being married to me, has found a quiet joy again in building things and working on engines, and working with animals who do not judge him, who do not scream at him and curse him as most of his patients did, who appreciate what he does for them - and who are fond of him and show it? Do you care that he no longer has to work a 60-hour work week, but can take his time as his pain levels dictate, and work at his own speed, and still be respected and included in a comfortable and friendly lifestyle?

I am happy to have left the WalMart and Starbucks world behind. I am content in what I have chosen. Folks say that I should write a book about what "really went on" the past 20 years, but you know what? None of it was important, as much as they like to think it was. Mean and angry and perpetually cruel people banding together to tear each other apart have no interest for me - or, now that I'm gone from their sights, in me, either. Any book I write will be about the joys, the hardships, the overcoming, the successes, even the failures; the building of my life the way I choose, not fighting those who choose different paths and want to drag me vociferously with them, or down if I do not agree with them.

Here I am, weaving the threads of all of my knowledge, all of my experiences, and all of my desires into a whole cloth, something to last, something to remember, something that is real and able to be felt, held, and used in a good clean manner. Something that all of the naysayers and eternally self-involved can never take away. Here is life. Here is joy. Here is hard work and success and achievement, sweat and dirt and tiny green plants poking their way into the sun, tiny newborns growing to full and heavy production. Here is blood and bone, feather and fur, knife and axe and fingers separating meat from skin, nitty and gritty and hay and manure, life and death in its most definite beginnings and ends. Here are long silent nights and endless silent days, with nothing but the cackling of an egg-laying hen or the indulgent moo of a mothering cow, or even the gobbling of the wild turkeys or the far-off howls of the yotes being hunted once again. Here is my whole cloth.