Sunday Morning Desire

It’s five in the morning, and I settle into my rocking chair on the front porch. The trees around the house drip with last night’s showers as a fog moves in. Having arisen from the creek far below, it starts by enveloping the barn. Pulled about on invisible currents, it then becomes animated in the shadowy light of the stars and the waning moon. Vague, unidentifiable sounds emanate through these mists, travelling on uncertain paths. Was there a gate left open last evening? Is that the footfall of cattle, the snort of hogs, the delicate dance of a furtive fox at the henhouse, a deer dining on the last of my Ginger Gold apples? Whatever I am hearing, it adds a pleasurable sadness to the world that I share each day before sunrise. It’s the sadness of being alone and small that I cherish.

After a few minutes I begin with my morning ritual of some years standing: I voice aloud that for which I am grateful. The practice is something I adopted from the first of Marcus Aurelius’s collection of meditations. In it he thanks each person who has shaped his life in the positive. (I also picked up the custom from famed seer, philosopher, and theological explorer Mark Wahlberg. I figured if Marky Mark could benefit, so could I—and I have, so a belated thank-you to Marcus and Mark.)

I go inside and pour my first cup of coffee. Upon returning to the porch, I think about sex. Far up on the hill pasture behind the house, where the sun sleeps in for another couple of hours, Lucy bawls out a call for love. For two days running she has sung the same refrain, which, honestly, sets my teeth on edge and makes me anxious. For too many times before, that sound has heralded cattle on the road, on the loose, leaping fences, finding love when we would prefer that they wait until of age. But Lucy, at fourteen months old, is in heat and answers to no one but her own teenage certitude. A bull responds in the next valley in lustful invitation, and she answers. Her call, loosed among the hills, returns through the fog in fractured lyrics of longing. She will persist with her pacing and beckoning for another day, over fifteen acres of hillside pasture and another five of woods, in search of the local Lothario.

It is now six o’clock, and I hear groans and snorts of passion from a different lot on the farm. Past the barn and behind the equipment shed, in one of the hog paddocks live two gilts. The young females are both closing in on 200 pounds, and they are both in standing heat. The females share their abode with two smaller castrated males, or barrows. Yesterday, the four spent the day in a futile orgy—barrows mounting gilts, gilts mounting barrows, gilts mounting gilts.... All participants anticipated some event of consequence, but all were inevitably disappointed. Yet the sex party has resumed this morning, and I grab a second cup of coffee and pull up a ringside seat to enjoy the comedy at hand.

Such is life on the farm, that it begins in serious reflection and then moves onto sex, and ultimately ends in a bit of comic relief. I turn from the show with a smile on my face and walk back to the house to make my list for the coming day. Lucy bawls again, joined by our other cattle. This time, from the paddock closest to the house, she and the others demand not love but food.

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Reading this week: The Fortnight in September (R.C. Sherriff), Goodbye to a River (J. Graves), and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The last is far more entertaining than I expected.