Charlie, Suzie and Zebo

Charlie/Cy, the lost horse from previous posts whom we returned to his owners (Horsin' Around, Gift Horse, Sorry, Charlie!) was sighted last Friday. My husband was heading out the door on his way to work when one of our neighbors drove up in his pick-up. He was here on business, but while here mentioned that the horse was loose on the road and that several people had stopped at his place to ask if it was his. 

So my husband headed out to see if he could round him up. He saw him run off into the woods, but being dressed for work and already running late, he gave up the search and headed to his office, er... cubicle, er... workspace... okay, desk. Sigh. 

After hearing that he had run off and was still loose, I loaded up my kiddos in the family van (along with a bag of carrots for bait) and we did a driving survey. Two of my kids thought they spotted him in the open space of the neighboring land. But when we turned around, there was a man with a compact car parked on the property, and hopefully he was after the horse. (It wasn't the man who came to my door for the horse though.) We felt we had fulfilled our obligation and that the horse was probably taken care of, so we returned home.

It was awfully fast for Charlie/Cy to have escaped again. I'm thinking we'll be seeing him in the future. Our place is nearly entirely fenced, so he'd have had a hard time getting here unless he came down the looooong drive or through the woods directly behind the house. He was already very close though, and far from his home. His location seems too coincidental.

That's the good news I guess, compared to my next bit of news. One of our young goats is dead. She somehow managed to clamber onto the hay feeder yesterday and get her head stuck in the bars that hold in the hay. She must have panicked and kicked her body over the side, for she was hanging by her broken neck when she was found. And... the kids found her during a game of hide-and-seek. Sigh. 

Her name was Suzie Cubed, a play on words as a nod to her lineage. (Although it frustrated my son, as it was not mathematically correct.) Her dam was named Suzie 2, and her grand dam was named Suzie. Of course she was the favorite of our two doelings. She was pure white. She wasn't a jumper. She was calm and was gentle. She would have made a great milker, had she lived long enough.

That's one of the things about rural/farm life. Out here you can't seem to escape death. There's always a dead critter to pass on the road, a feral cat trying to sneak inside that gets inadvertently trapped under a garage door, an animal that becomes sick and dies, is attacked by a predator or which is slaughtered for food, someone whose tractor rolls or whose farm machinery does him in. Some would view this as a draw-back to life "in the sticks." While I admit that it is definitely difficult and unpleasant, I think that, in general, it is a good thing. It helps us to cope with reality. It keeps us grounded. It makes us grateful. 

My husband may not feel the same way at the moment. He had the dubious honor of extracting Suzie and burying her. That's tough.

But overall, I think that the endless string of "little" deaths out here, the exposure to the reality that all life is limited, helps us to deal with our own mortality. Knowing that we and those we love aren't going to live forever causes us to live more purposefully. It causes us to be more appreciative of every day that we're alive, every day that get we spend with those we love. It puts into perspective our gripes and complaints, and life's other difficulties.

I'm not immune to the sorrow or the difficulty of facing death. I'm not even saying it gets easier to face. But another way to look at it is this. The dead animal on the road feeds the turkey vultures (as I saw today on the way home from the docs.) The the stray cat that loses its life means that the mice, songbirds, and other small creatures live. Even the animal who sickens and dies feeds wee beasties and enriches the soil for future plants. Do you see where I'm coming from?

Faced with sudden death without preparation, it seems senseless. But faced with a pattern of death and re-birth from a young age, death can just be viewed as a part of life. After all, isn't that one of the many reasons why life is valuable? Our life here on Earth doesn't last forever. If we did it would probably be just be one more thing we took for granted. And as much as we hate that living things die- especially humans (sometimes seemingly needlessly, before their time, or in horrible ways) their death makes room for new life. And to folks like me, it means more kith and kin to intercede for us from the other side. To use a trite and Disney-fied phrase, it's the "circle of life."

Oh yeah, maybe now is a good time to mention that I found out today at the first ultrasound of this pregnancy that the baby I am carrying is a boy (whom my 3 year old son wants to name Zebo!) Having previously suffered through a miscarriage, as well as having given birth to a stillborn daughter whose birth defect was incompatible with life outside the womb, I can say that those deaths certainly make me value the gift of my fertility and the lives of my children more than I probably would have otherwise. The depths of sorrow can serve to heighten our joy... if we put it all into perspective.