The Everything

Details to follow

Because I'm me, I spend an awful lot of time in my head trying to pinpoint exactly what traits I'm missing that might make me an all around better person. As you can imagine, this is a fairly exhausting mental exercise. Obviously, the last two years of my life have been all about learning this challenging new set of skills, so while it's not entirely limited to cheesemaking (because let's not forget it's also important to compare yourself to others who are in successful relationships and make a decent living and have achieved professional success), most of my daily hourly minutely ponderings have to do with all of the intrinsic deficiencies I have that, had I been raised differently or chosen to cultivate a different group of interests, might not exist and therefore make me a killer kick ass cheesemaker. Holy run-on sentence Batman. 

You still there?

Anyhoozle, in the realm of the senses, which for some reason is how I've elected to filter this, my facilities are with sound and with smell and taste, not so much touch and sight. I can remember melodies of songs that I haven't heard in 20 years (which is a useful skill for an as yet nonexistent gameshow that should really be a thing and not much else), but draw me a makeshift map of a paddock and tell me where I need to fasten the electrical clips and my mind literally goes blank. Try as I might, at this point when Michael grabs the nearest writing implement to attempt to explain via drawing where on the property the girls are at any given time and where we are setting up fencing my brain goes immediately into sleep mode and it takes very concerted effort to wake it back up and absorb what he's saying. Spatial reasoning, manual dexterity and precision are all things that, had I worked in a kitchen or even done any amount of advanced home cooking as a younger person, might come as second nature to me. But being able to look at two freshly formed cheeses and determine that one is .2 pounds lighter than another is an ability I'm still actively trying to attain, and making my hands draw the cheese knives through the curd in a straight line and then overlap them at regular, orderly intervals requires an intensity of focus and stillness that's borderline monastic. 

#whyisuckatyoga 

The other day I was "helping" Michael to set up a paddock, which involves gathering up old fencing, determining where the girls will be going for the next several days, and then sectioning off areas for them, all the while calculating how many lengths of fence it will take to go x amount of yards and where the gate into the lane and/or abutting paddock will need to go. It's all one big real-time puzzle, and as he talked out loud making calculations I could tell that this is the sort of problem-solving he really enjoys. "It's just like sculpture!" he said jovially.  Or at least I think that's what he said, I was busy trying to avoid being impaled by thistles as he strode merrily a half a mile in front of me. 

It is shocking and not a little discouraging to think that two of my supposed areas of expertise/academic and professional endeavors have been cultural anthropology and writing, both of which require a keen sensitivity to the world around you, heightened observational skill and an ability to absorb, retain and express detailed specificity. In contrast, I live my life as a series of half-baked intuitions and impressions, making broad generalizations and sometimes, occasionally, correctly assessing or describing things. A couple of weeks ago, I had fastened the girls into their night paddock without, somehow, completely shutting them in. When Michael and I went out to the paddock the next morning so that I could retrace my steps and figure out how I'd managed such an oversight, I couldn't remember even the tiniest bit what it had looked like the night before. The physical reality before me undid my memory of how things were set up a mere 12 hours prior. I hesitate to blame early onset senile dementia, for this is a thing that has plagued me, it seems, for at least a decade, or certainly as long as I've been aware enough to notice how bad I am at short term remembrances. 

A few days ago in the cheese room, Michael was wondering aloud why my co-worker Helen parked the wheelbarrow parallel to the fence when she finished cleaning the barn while I parked it perpendicularly. This is not a matter of great import, but I understand that to Michael, it is revealing of something deeper - an ability to notice small details and work with intention, both of which are hugely important for farming and cheesemaking. The daily variation in the milk, in the pastures' plant life, in the weather and temperature, the humidity, the timing of the adding of the culture, the length of time stirring curds, the time a cheese takes to drain, the amount of time it's spent in brine and the atmospheric humidity and temperature in the brine room -- these are things you need to have a working knowledge of, to be able to compare conditions from one day to the next and understand how or why a cheese might be developing in or tasting a certain way compared to another cheese. At this stage, I've only just managed to replicate the milk house and parlor set up, which took months of what amounts to the real life version of that game they have in bars where you have to compare two pictures of a naked lady to determine what is present or missing in one pic (always check the number of folds in the curtain and the manicure or lack thereof) versus another. This is effectively recreating something static, and it took me literal months to get right. When it comes to moving parts, fucking FORGET IT.

"It's not really about focus," Michael said, stirring the curd thoughtfully. "It's about noticing the  ... everything." 

I assented, recalling that for weeks when I went out to fetch lettuce from the garden for our lunch, my mind was so set upon that one minor task that when I wondered aloud whether we were growing tomatoes, Michael chuckled in disbelief that I hadn't seen the plants growing less than a yard from the lettuce patch. 

To be fair, I was probably so single-minded because I was T-minus five minutes from eating and all bets are off when my stomach is rumbling. But this lack of awareness is troubling to me. Can it be learned? Is it too late? And if so, has my entire fucking life been one big joke? What am I good at? What am I meant for? Am I meant for anything at all? Is even asking that question a totally privileged line of pondering? DOWN THE FUCKING RABBIT HOLE I GO.

But not too far, because my tumtum has alerted me that it's time to eat.