Sheep and chickens!

I have a new job at Ghost Ranch: on weekends, I’ll feed the farm animals – seven sheep and about 15 hens and one rooster. I am thrilled.

I’ve always been fascinated by farm animals. i’d head to the county fair and linger in the barns with the cows and sheep – even the smelly pigs! I’ve always imagined living on a farm. Now I will feed the sheep and hens/rooster every day, be sure they have water, even use a pitchfork to stab some hay and put that in the sheep pen, too.

Kris, a volunteer here at Ghost Ranch from eastern Nebraska, has been doing this all fall, but she’s going home Nov. 27. The ranch hands (Bennie and Sabino) feed the critters during the week, but they aren’t fed on weekend, when Bennie and Sabino, who live nearby, are off.  The animals survive – but Kris has been feeding them then,  and she worried about them, esp. in the winter.

So I said I’d love to do it. I’ve never had relatives on a farm, never wandered into animal pens; I did milk cows during a church youth group week in Middlebury, Vt., but that’s the extent of it. Kris showed me how to do it yesterday. I spent the afternoon in the pens on the northwest corner of the ranch, under the bright sun, dumping food into the containers and pitching hay.

There are seven sheep. two seem to be the alpha sheep; the rest just bumble along behind them. They are growing fat coats for winter. As for the hens – they peck around, lay eggs dring the day, and I will collect those too and give them to kitchen and maintenance workers at Ghost Ranch, all of whom live nearby.

I can’t wait to do this. It is something very basic that humans have done for centuries – my grandparents did it – but which I, born and bred in a post-World War II suburb and sent to college and undertaken a profession –  have never even attempted.

My cousin’s children in Bennington, Vt., live on a farm. They grew a few crops this summer, and they just slaughtered pigs. They are educated but they are learning to live off the land in ways most of us never do. I will keep you posted!

 

Dwindling crowds

The cottonwoods have dropped all their leaves, and crowds are dwindling here at Ghost Ranch. The last guests from the RAH! (Roll Around Heaven) class left after the dalai lama from Bhutan gave a peace service/offering (?) Friday.

The First Presbyterian Church women from Albuquerque were here for the weekend, but by Sunday night, the dining room that seats 300 had just two tables of people – about seven volunteers and a few B&B guests.

Last night, we put little candles on two tables. We wanted to serve wine, but the dining manager said that was a no-no.  We have just a handful of guests – a couple from Long Island touring the Southwest for their 45th wedding anniversary. They went to Las Vegas and San Diego, then drove north on Route 1 to San Francisco, the Napa Valley; went to Lake Tahoe and Reno, then flew to Albuquerque and are here at Ghost Ranch for a few days. The husband was here about 11 years ago. They are friendly and talk a lot – typical New Yorkers.

There’s also a young woman from Brainerd, Minn., who got gift money from her uncle for a three-week road trip. She went to Sious Falls, S.C., then Grand ISland, Neb., and will be here for a week. I told her to drivve over to the rez to visit Joe. He and Janice are going to New Orleans for Thanksgiving, but Joe said Ramson will be in the shop, and there might be dances or ceremonies. Ramson is a terrific talker and interpreter. She’s very intrigued and may go.

We also have a woman, a landscape designer from San Diego who is healing a broken romance. She said “something” made her drive here. She’s overwhelmed. I took her to Mass Sunday at the monastery 13 miles out in the Chama River canyon.  She wants to stay at least until Sunday so she can go to Mass again. She is hiking today. She has discovered our labyrinth by the mesas, too, and the Japanese peace garden. She is soaking it all in.

It is quiet, like the season. All is winding down here. We now soak our own dishes after dinner so the kitchen folk can go home early.

Two young women hiked to Box Canyon this morning and saw fresh mountain lion and bobcat tracks. The rule here is: don’t hike there alone. A coyote is hunting daily on our alfalfa field. Today at dawn, he howled, and another animal wailed. I think the coyote found his breakfast.

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Adios, mouse!

My little roommate is history, dispatched off to mouse heaven with a slop of peanut butter on a mouse trap. Bennie and Antonito in the kitchen told me they have a “new kind” of trap that grasps the mouse with glue, but my fellow volunteers (all of whom had mice in their houses) swear by the common trap. It worked – but I may keep it baited all the time because mice will come in, seeking refuge from the cold.

We had a little snow last night that dusted the mesas and was lovely this morning. I keep writing about the landscape, but it is awe-filled. The alfalfa field gently slides a mile out to the highway (U.S. 84) and we can see way beyond that, out to the Chama River and the Jemez Mountains beyond; it is grand, and when I go outside in the chilly morning and walk a half mile up to breakfast, I never fail to feel reverence and joy, even after much time here.

Last night we volunteers had our weekly Monday night evening of togetherness at Beth and Kris’s joint house out by the campground. We worked a jigsaw puzzle and some knitted, and we talked, and it was quiet and restful. All four women there will leave by Dec. 1.

I am one of just two volunteers who will stay all year. The other is Carol, the librarian, who spends weekends in Albuquerque because her son, 30, has a degenerative disease that struck him at 14, and he is dying. She worked for artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived and painted here, and she has lived on the Navajo and “two other” Indian reservations, and I am anxious for some time to sit down and talk, but that will come here. It always does.

I had breakfast this morning with the two southern California men who run Stillpoint, a two-year course for spiritual directors that meets here four times a year.

Tonight I will go to a class being taught this week by Jessica Maxwell, a lively redhead who used to write for Audubon and National Geographic and similar quality magazines – but who kept having spiritual experiences – like seeing her father’s face in the sky, smiling, after he died. Her sister, elsewhere, saw it too. They had no religious training and thought it was all blather.

She thought she was crazy, seeing her father’s face in the sky, until she chanced upon a professor from Oregon who confirmed all this – and much more. She now writes best-selling spiritual books. We have become fast friends; she is so much fun. She insists we all experience surreal things but keep our mouths shut because society shuns the spiritual. If it can’t be “proven,” it doesn’t exist.

Her class of 12 meets after dinner and tonight they will see a spiritual movie, and she invited me to come – insisted that I come. She wants me to sit in on her class all day, but I’ve been proofing the 2012 Ghost Ranch catalog, 72 pages – and I cannot go.  The proofing has been fun. Tomorrow I help the staff prepare for the board meeting this weekend.

Even with my mouse, I am so grateful, so blessed, so happy to be here, so in awe of the landscape and the full moon, and the stimulating people here. I have been reborn here.

Home, at last, in New Mexico

I am back home. I drove down the mile-long dirt driveway into Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, N.M., at 3 p.m. Sunday,  and I stopped at the “City Slicker” cabin (yes, from the old movie with Billy Crystal) along the road, on a high ridge, and nearly wept with joy. Spread out in front of me was a panorama of mesas, a cloudless sky, and far off, tiny rustic Ghost Ranch buildings settled almost invisibly into the mesas.

I was home. Where my heart lives.

My friend Ted was here, having hiked with the Sierra Club at the ranch that afternoon; he volunteered at Ghost Ranch with me last year and now rents a house about 25 minutes south of Ghost Ranch. He helped me unload my car; then we sat and drank wine outside, by a golden cottonwood, dwarfed by the grand mesas to the north and east, and mountains to the south and west, and I knew I was home.

At 5:30 I had dinner with old friends – so many hugs, laughs, a stimulating discussion on health care – and then I took my laptop to the cozy, comforting, beloved, 24-hour Ghost Ranch library. I found a little carrel by a window – one of my favorite places last year – and worked on my Sun News column, due this week. Then I came back to the little house that will be my home for the next year, and hopefully, long beyond that.  It was very dark. I forgot my flashlight. but I stood and looked up, at the stars, and my eyes adjusted.

I am working in fund-raising and all week I’ve been going over donor records and folders, weeding out those who no longer give. Monday was Halloween, and in the afternoon employees dressed up and hiked to various offices getting treats. I had no costume, so I ws one of two judges, stationed in the dining hall where employees got caramel apples, freshly made. Such fun.

It’s the people who are unforgettable – old friends and new ones. This week there is a big writer’s conference here, and I had breakfast this morning with a woman from Springfield, Ill., a mother of six, who, with her Presbyterian pastor husband, run a successful drug treatment program for the last 18 years.  She hopes to write a book about it. Another woman at the table is a retired community college president from near Ventura, Calif.,  not far from where Sara and Peter used to live.

At lunch today I ate with one of the writing workshop instructors, from Omaha, who started out in banking, hated it, and now writes and edits full time. with him was a Methodist minister from near Pittsburgh who retired so he could write books. And tonight I ate with a Presbyterian minister from Traverse City who wants to come to Ghost Ranch after she retires next year.

There is so much to say, to listen, to learn.  There are 200 people or so here, each with a story. Tomorrow will be the third meeting of the lunctime book club, when anyone can eat near the fireplace in the dining hall and discuss their favorite books.

I awoke to tiny snow flurries this morning and saw black, angry clouds over the mountains to the southwest, but within a few hours the sun was out. Snow covered the ground north of here, an area towards Colorado which is higher than our 6,500 altitude. The snow was a novelty, as were the growling gray clouds, but it dissipated. 

I am living in the cozy back half of a house – little living room, tiny kitchen, big bedroom and bathroom and a desk in a spacious hallway where I can get the Internet. I have found posters etc. for my walls. It is very dark at night; I am getting used to that. Tonight I heard coyotes not far away. At night are more stars than I have seen since I left here a year ago, a sky freckled and spattered with tiny pinpoints of light, creating lovely patterns, and to the southwest, a swelling moon. I look up in awe.

It is quiet and still. I do not lock my door; I am adjusting to that.  And I was told to drive my car at least once a day, even if just the mile-long dirt road around the ranch alfalfa field (our main road), so mice and rats do not climb into my engine for the winter to keep warm, and nibble on my wires. That happened to someone here last year and repairs cost $200.

My housemate (she has the front half of the house, but our living spaces are separate) is away weekends because her son, just 30, is dying of a degenerative genetic disease. She is about my age; she is running the Ghost Ranch library – and years ago, she spent weekends with artist Georgia O’Keefe, who used to live here, two miles out another dirt road. She seems sweet and cheerful despite the agony of her son wasting away – she says this place gives her strength. I want to hear all about Georgia O’Keefe. She asked if I wanted to share the cost of satellite TV this winter, and I smiled and said no. I don’t need TV.  

I am so content and happy. I prefer little dirt roads and paths here, and mountains and mesas, and walking to work from breakfast – I even like walking TO breakfast. My house is a half mile from the dining hall, but the scenery is so glorious that it is a joy. And my old friends and new friends and new people and new stimulating ideas – I think I have, at last, died and gone to heaven.