Full Circle

Going in the time capsule

Last Sunday I squeezed my very last goat teat. I know what you're thinking: that sounds like the first line to a Pulitzer Prize winning future novel. Having dried off all but a dozen of our most productive does, the process itself took roughly twenty minutes, which meant a comparatively luxurious late start: instead of rising at 3 am, I slept in til 4:30. Chores and set-up still took about an hour, factoring in the shitshow that was sorting the snow and sleet-covered girls that needed to be herded into the holding area from the rest of the herd. Everyone was very confused by the ordeal.

Tuesday was my last time in the cheeseroom with Michael, and I was looking forward to finishing strong, but alas, I am me and life is life. I offered to set up the grey water pump before joining him in the dairy to help form Fuzzies, a task that should've taken roughly 10 minutes but because of subzero temps and frozen hoses (frozes) ie the bane of my existence, a truly biblical set of tribulations ensued, punctuated by a rogue hose-end spraying hot dirty water all over my face and head. No one said farming was motherfucking glamorous.

After calling the whole thing off until the hoses could be properly defrosted in the confines of the utility closet, I joined Michael just in time to drain off the whey and pile the forms with curd, inadvertently allowing a fistful of them to escape through the screen despite my best efforts to pay close attention and stand sentinel against the runaways.

Wednesday was my last time scrubbing that 1000 lb. stainless steel square vat, and my last time nearly falling flat on my face on the cement floor tripping over the jacket pipes and balancing on a bucket to clean the exterior of the pipeline. (While I would've liked one more chance to master the art of milk receiving on Tuesday, it had been several weeks since the last time and I knew better than to tempt fate with the death defying acrobatics required.)

Yesterday was the last time I flipped the cheeses in the cave. And tomorrow, I will hug my goatular pals and scratch their faces for the final time, VERY likely amidst a deluge of tears.

Between sifting through the clothes and artifacts that I've somehow managed to drag along with me for the last two years in spite of attempting a definitive purge when I left New York (finally getting rid of my cavalcade of age-inappropriate skorts, fyi), fretting endlessly about the situation in Syria and the ever more horrifying cabinet appointments and international blunders of our soon to be president, and making all the necessary arrangements to sell my car, send Bitsy off to her foster parents, and NOT DIE while traveling to and fro under the usual treacherous winter conditions (more on this later), I haven't had a WHOLE lot of time to reflect on the gravity of this transition. Yes, that was all one sentence. Going through my old things, the random shit that slipped through the cracks when I made my initial move up from New York, has been enlightening to say the least. (Think: shopping lists for very specific low-rise Levi's hand-written on index cards. The style alone indicates that this is a relic from the year 2003 or thereabouts.) Some of these random items predate even that -- a passel of diaries from my first days in New York which contain my usual list of New Years Resolutions, many of which have not changed for roughly 14 years ("Be more ambitious! Be more patient with friends! Go to the gym! Stop making bad romantic decisions!" #somethingsneverchange)

It seems it takes a temporal and spatial buffer like my two years in Vermont to finally get rid of the physical bits and pieces I've been reticent to let go of from my life in New York until now. The cards and dresses and knives (I know) from ex-boyfriends, the aforementioned shopping lists and Delia's dresses that might have looked cute on a twenty-something but would now look downright deranged on this mid-thirties body. Finally, it seems that whatever essential thing about me that I clung to in the form of these scattered remnants of my former life have been distilled. The memories worth keeping are here inside me. I don't need a 2012 U.S. Open plastic cup to remember the day I went out to Queens with my boyfriend and drank overpriced vodka and watched the Williams sisters and Rafa do their things in a haze of newly minted, unfettered love. I don't need the stack of yellowing Rolling Stone Magazines with my very first byline in it to remember my years of answering phones and tripping up and down the hallowed halls in too-high heels and interviewing my hero Bjork, who had just finished recording Medulla and was rocking a ponytail gathered squarely in the middle of her forehead for our chat.

But as I pack up my Zisla painting and my silk tapestry from Turkey and get ready to ship them back to my childhood home -- a thing that makes me feel like a nineteen-year-old transient again -- I find myself not yet ready to consign the things I've gathered here in Vermont to the trashbin: the hand-written note from Rural Carrier Gary and my Vermont Farm Women photograph book, the cherry-emblazoned barn boots Laini bought for me, and my best girl Gary's name tag, which I surreptitiously swiped from Merlin and Rebecca when I went up to give my boo a last, adoring hug. In spite of the inconvenience of lugging them along to the next place, I feel intensely that these things need to come with me to Italy, to remind me of the recent past, the recent me, which is all still a swirling blur.

Yesterday, I headed to work for my last "real" workday later than usual, as there wasn't a ton of pressing stuff to do. I happened to catch The Writer's Almanac on the radio, a segment I ordinarily miss out on because by the time it airs I'm deep in the throes of some task at work, and unlike at Lazy Lady, the radio is not constantly on and tuned to VPR at Twig. The sonorous voice of Garrison Keillor thrust me headlong into a visceral sense-memory of my harrowing Thursday morning Pyramid makes at Lazy Lady: the determination and anxiety of cutting that curd straight and true and scooping it evenly in a circular pattern in into those upside down triangle forms palpable as I listened to him drone on about ... what was that now? That today is the birthday of Puccini, born TUSCANY 1858 blah blah blah ... and EXCUSE ME did you say it also happens to be the birthday of Kenneth Rexroth, famed Beat Poet, born South Bend, Indiana? A lightning quick series of sentimental catalysts knitting together to form a the strange patchwork of my life up to now and the path forward.

At which point I rounded a turn, slid on some slush and spun all the way across Route 30 from one side to the other, narrowly avoiding going off the road entirely. It was the blink of an eye, my body flooded with so much adrenaline that my muscles became inflamed and sore in an instant.

Life. It goes by so fast, and so slowly. And the memories are what make us who we are. But to dwell too much in the past means missing the now, and, potentially, the ability to avoid totaling one's car  and sustaining bodily injury.

As I've stated before, I feel I'm still too close to all that's happened here over the last two years to fully see or appreciate or process what I've learned and whom I've become. The one thing I know for certain that Michael taught me was that the only way to learn something or know something and to get better at it is to do it, and to keep doing it, over and over again, until it becomes rooted in your mind and body. To confront the things you dread or are uncertain of or feel convinced you will be terrible at. I've lived through dozens of humbling and terrifying challenges over the past two years, and while I'm still far from being a master cheesemaker, I know this to be true: Eventualy, the scary thing stops being scary, the wondering becomes certainty, and even if that certainty is that you aren't meant for this sort of life, at the very least you can walk away  with the confidence that you are brave and you are capable, that you faced down the difficult thing, and that you did it.

And that if you did that, you can do anyfuckingthing you want.

Now the only question that remains is: what in the hell do I want to do?

For once in my life I have some ideas:

Item one: To live abroad and learn another language. Status: In progress

Item two: To find meaningful work and forge a career that fulfills me and provides a comfortable living. Status: LOLZ

Item Three: To have a baby friend and/or to fall in love (with a male human) again. Status: EVEN LARGER LOLZ

And herein lies that greatest lesson realized. After proving to myself, almost unwittingly, that I've been able to achieve the goals I've set down for myself over the last couple of years (even when those accomplishments didn't necessarily result in my own happiness), I now really, truly, fully have faith in myself that I can make the above-mentioned things happen. I don't expect that actualizing these hopes will assuage my existential pain or answer all of life's mysteries. And the understanding of that feels like a massive psychic unburdening. 

Once I cross those things off my list, it's on to healing the world and eradicating human (and animal) pain and misery.I'm down for some help if you're interested in furthering the cause.