La Ritournelle

Gittles In Situ

And just like that .... I'm back in my beloved mountain home, land of leaving your car and house unlocked, and of giving pedestrians and bicyclists an absurdly wide berth. It was a cool 14 hour drive from South Bend, undertaken partly in the rain and dark, which matched my soul on the ride out (let's just say your Gittles is nursing a broken heart and leave it at that). My psychic partner Laini Fondiller, who has recently begun really embracing text messaging and has even started flirting with emojis, intuited my movements and checked in with me at the halfway point and again after my arrival, sending me an image of her Airedale Greta, newly shorn, celebrating my triumphant (LOL) return with her biannual haircut.  

Tuesday I arrived under cover of night, having gotten only minorly turned around somewhere near the Pennsylvania/New York border and bellowing with rage and frustration into the abyss of the rain-splattered windshield. Around 11 pm, I pulled into my pal's driveway, stepped out of the car and breathed it all in with greedy gulps -- the regular thrum of frogs and night-time creatures, the damp earth smell. Wednesday morning, I loaded up my car with the box filled with summer clothes I'd sent to myself in Italy in DECEMBER (back when I thought I'd be spending the summer in Toscana), which has since spent the last six months volleying back and forth across the ocean only to arrive, disappointingly unmarred, back in Vermont -- a highly recommended, if overly complicated way to stow your belongings. As I scurried around, I peeped my long lost friends THE MOUNTAINS. The sky was grey, the birds were chirping like their lives depended on it, and for the first time in a while, I could breathe.

I couldn't help comparing this latest drive to my little Vermonty home to the very first drive I took when I moved up here, and felt fully the weight of all that has changed inside me in that time. Now I know, at least in part, what it is I'm moving towards, and because it is only for a finite amount of time (at least as of this publication I'll only be here til the first week of July), I am committed to first and foremost enjoying the glorious, fleeting, fucking heartstopping beauty of this place in all its resplendent summertime gorgeousness and secondly to working my ass off and reconnecting with a part of myself that I feel I've lost over the last couple of years -- the pure, unencumbered impulse to create and to absorb and perceive and feel, rather than filling up the silences and gaps with things that have all the sustenance and substance of cheesy poofs (mmm but ewwwwww), things that have a proven track record of making me feel less rather than more connected to the outside world. This first week is going to be like going through withdrawal as I readjust to the silence and the space and begin to take in what's around me with a slowly sharpening gaze that's been dulled by the constant state of always ever being just halfway here and half inside a universe of disembodied dialogues and images and superficial joys. 

Wednesday morning, after stopping in Middlebury to spend an exorbitant amount of money on coffee and butter and spinach because obviously after a three month hiatus from working I am VERY RICH but also clearly HATE TO HAVE MONEY, I pointed my as-yet-ungoatified buggy south and wound up in Pawlet, just across the New York border from Granville and thus far the most southerly place I've called home in the Green Mountain State. There I met up with the farm's proprietress, Angela, and was led a mile and a half down the road to what is to be my lodging for my tenure here, a crumbling, mid-renovation storefront space that used to house the West Pawlet Fish and Game Club aka you cannot make this shit up. The groundfloor is an empty space that has been used variously for farmer's markets and local buying club meet-ups, and has a makeshift kitchen in the back. The upstairs is a shelter mag's wet dream, all distressed wooden floorboards and studiously mis-matched lamps and rustic antique furniture and books on foraging for mushrooms. How I lucked into this goddamned adorable little sanctuary is beyond me but THANK YOU GODDESS. 

After a positively idyllic run through the pastures and some random weeping over the rubble of my recently bisected cardiac area, I set forth unpacking and setting up my life for what I hope is equal parts re-conditioning and artist colony/soul cleansing. I already feel, if only in fits and starts, like I'm unearthing the person I was when I first moved here, enchanted by the insane beauty around me and the oddball glamour of this tucked away corner of the world. 

This morning I met up with the farm's managers, a darling young married couple named Sam and Mark, to get the quick and dirty (literally, as it's been raining and the loafing yard is ALL mud) on my duties around the farm for the month. After a brief tour of the recently expanded milking parlor, which now holds 24 goats at once aka 4 times what I was milking at a time at Twig, we visited the various pens of weaned and unweaned kids, all of the boys separated out and allowed to grow their horns and the girls recently disbudded and in various stages of weaning. Together, we mucked out two of the pens into the tractor bucket, throwing a pen's worth of 50+ pound doelings in with their sisters to clear out one pen at a time (fuck goat yoga, goat cross fit should be a thing), sprinkling the cement floor with lime and wood chips and, finally, hay for their bedding. Then we ducked into the milking barn to bottle feed the two doelings just born two days ago, one of whom has some sort of an anatomical abnormality and thus limited use of her hind legs. Over the course of that time, I extracted the essential information that I've learned one must glean while working on a farm in Vermont, especially in summer: the call number for Vermont Public Radio, the whereabouts of the general store with the best sandwiches and/or beer selection and/or Polar seltzer lineup, the location of the best and least populated swimming hole(s), the dossiers of the various odd characters who live in town (a harmless if bizarre artist who lives two doors down and collects rocks, a fellow named Mr. Egg with a white beard that falls to his knees, and a conspiracy theorist who will expound upon topics related to formaldehyde for hours if given the chance). 

After a quick afternoon break, we met back up around 3 to set up for evening milking. This has evolved into a two-person job, which is a LUXURY being that at my previous gigs this has been a solo enterprise and even with fewer goats to milk at once it's always a lot to juggle. Here, while I'd wager that it's pastabowl for one person to set up the parlor, get the goats in from pasture and milk the five heats of 24 (plus a group of stragglers) and do clean-up, which is pretty minimal, it unquestionably goes faster and more smoothly with an extra body, and I'm not about to argue with things that make my life easier. This point was driven home when the entire fourth group got loose and set to work wreaking havoc in the barn. Herding them back to their appropriate holding area was slightly less hellacious with a helpmate. 

While obviously every farm is different, with its own set of idiosyncrasies and cultural norms, I feel that at this point I've put in enough time working for small scale goat dairies in Vermont that things more or less click in and start to make sense at a more accelerated rate. For the first time I find myself actually having to try to unlearn certain habits I've picked up elsewhere in order to follow the specific protocols of this farm, which had not historically been much of an issue being that I was a complete novice. 

But UGH. MAN. Did it feel good to be back amongst my quadrupedular friends. While the rhythm of the milking parlor is going to take a little time to get into, it's by and large a pretty low-stress environment, between having an extra set of hands for helping and generally having fewer intensive chores pre- and post-milking to tackle. Not to mention this time of the year, the days are so clement and long that waking up at 5 am to milk and staying until 7pm (with a break in the middle of the day) feel less like a slog and more like a magnificent blessing. 

The herd is a mix of Alpines, Nubians and Oberhasli, and there are a gaggle of girls that were purchased last year from Lazy Lady, so of course they are my favorites, most especially a girl named Mouse who yells her head off and likes to walk pressing up against you, and Frida, who has a bum back leg and docked ears from a bout with frost bite so looks esPEcially freakish. I'm a sucker for an undergoat. 

I've no doubt my muscles will be aching when I wake up tomorrow after the first day back, but right now, as I sit enjoying a well-deserved beer in my skivvies, arms still streaked with iodine, I feel just so fucking grateful to be here, in this stupidly beautiful place, with my favorite creatures, and the opportunity to recapture the sense of wonder that my months of bew-hewiness all but snuffed out. It's too soon to say, and I've recently learned that the hubris of happiness doesn't often go unpunished. So for now I'll just say .... today was a good one.