I’m at the farm picking up milk the Dancer and the young Scientist can eat/drink without getting sick. We have been under lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic for the past nine weeks. I brought my dad along and our sweet girl dog, who are waking around while we wear our masks and wait in line six feet apart as the skies sprinkle random raindrops.
Two little children are sitting on a bench, singing, “it’s raining, it’s pouring,” laughing between verses, and I am carried back to my childhood at their age, on a rainy afternoon in NYC, looking out a red curtained window eighty feet above the street, seeing the raindrops slide down the glass, my young treble singing the very same song in a very different environment, surrounded by the scent and sounds of everyday city traffic and fresh rain, so different from where I stand today, surrounded by the scents of grass and rain and cows and the sounds of birdsong orchestra in full voice responding to the dimmed light of overcast skies and a small river burbling along the tree line a short field away.
We are downwind from the barn, and as the eau de bovine manure wafts our way I am thankful that this is primarily a small dairy farm. Some of our friends raise pigs as their main crop, and their farm smells fine. But there is another pork operation outside of town that is pretty ripe and I suspect they have wrecked their neighbors’ land values.
Ten minutes ago, a woman I haven’t seen here before came outside and walked down the line, asking each of us in turn how many quarts we wish to buy. As always, she reached a point in the line when she told the remaining hopefuls that this was where they would run out of milk for the day. The first three times I came here, I joined the line too late and I learned to arrive 20-30 minutes before the store opens. Today I have landed in the group which can still buy milk.
The shop has just opened. In another twenty minutes I will reach the door of the farm shop and it will be my turn to buy milk. I will enter the glass door on the right, carry my large mason jars to the milk dispenser, unscrew the lids and line them up to receive milk. A doe eyed young woman with long dark curls and a sergeant’s stripes tattooed on the back of her ring finger, has been tasked with the job of pouring the milk. She will turn the handle on the faucet, opening the stream, and fill one jar to its shoulder, not the neck and not the brim, but to the bent shoulder of the the jar, then turn the tray and fill the next, never touching my jars. I will screw the lids back on my jars, carry them and my eggs to the register, pay for my purchases and leave through the middle glass door. The glass door on the left is close by. I don’t know where it leads but a sign on it cautions those who enter to “Be careful of kittens!” I see it and I smile.
As I lug my now heavy blue crate of jars back to the car, I pull down the mask and breathe deeply of the fresh air. Ahead, I see a young couple holding a toddler, showing her some newly arrived neighbors. I am surprised to see a dozen shoats, young pigs the color of drawing charcoal smudged on creamy drawing paper, already weaned, grunting baritone greetings behind a fence across the path, nosing through the grass, certain a treasure I would never recognize is there, just waiting to be found. I watch them as I walk, admiring their color, amused by the repetitive grunts, but admittedly, warily, making sure the wire fence around them will hold. These pigs are young, perhaps 40 pounds apiece, but pigs are strong, they can be dangerous and I don’t wish to make their acquaintance.
My father has returned to the car with our dog. After stowing the crate, I climb behind the wheel, stash my surgical mask in my purse, climb back out to make sure no children are behind me, climb back in and carefully back out and begin the trip back home. I will find a place to stop for a milkshake for my father en route, a treat he likes. He turns off Pollyanna, the audiobook he was listening to while I was getting milk, and turns on Homer’s The Odyssey, the audio book we chose earlier for the trip back to town.
Now in his eighties, my father has decided to read through a number of the classics and the Great Books which he hasn’t yet gotten to, and both of these books are on his list. Along the way we pause the recording from time to time, clarifying what was said and figuring out how long a fathom is (6 feet).
We arrive home and carry our things inside. The Dancer is at work, clerking in a small grocery shop, which is why I made the trip for her today. The Young Scientist comes inside and demands answers about why the tax paperwork is still on the extra folding table in the dining room and why the folding table is still set up when I had planned to take it down a few days ago and it isn’t supposed to still be there in that corner under the window and why is it still there because it isn’t supposed to be there. I take a deep breath, and quietly tell the Young Scientist, “You’ll have better success reaching your goal (getting the table cleared and put away) if, instead of asking why it isn’t done, you ask me, “Is there anything I can do that would help you get that cleared and put away? I know you wanted to get it done.” He turns away and goes outside, back to mowing the lawn. The Young Scientist isn’t going to ask the productive kind of question yet, but I teach him the scripts when they come up and hope that one day my teen on the autism spectrum will internalize them enough to be able to reach his goals and build and protect healthy relationships when he needs them.
It’s eleven o’clock. And I head back to work.
Maximum Grace 