Carl.

In charge.

When I go away for a day or for a vacation, Carl steps in. He feeds morning and night. Opens doors. Closes gates. Waters most of the time. Cleans a stall or two if it is really in desperate shape.

Before the pandemic, this is how it went. Mostly Monday through Friday. Then I would swoop in and exhaust myself with a week’s worth of fastidious barn work concentrated in just a day or two. By the middle of the second day, I began to feel like I couldn’t lift my arms any more.

Throwing hay. Shoveling, well… you know, cleaning stalls. You can really feel the very specific muscles that lay deep in your abs and your back when you lift shovelfuls of manure from down low on the stall floor to up around chest high to the back of the Gator. The chickens hop in looking for bugs. So curious.

By Sunday night when we’d get in the car to head back to the city, I would fall asleep in less than 5 minutes. From exhaustion. And delight. I love doing farm work. I love feeling strong without going to a gym. I like to work.

I haven’t asked him, but I think Carl (as much as he likes me) prefers being in charge of the farm without me there. He is useful. He cusses at the animals. In a weird, loving sorta way. “Murphy, you bastard!” he hollers. “C’mon, Granny!” he yells at mama goat like she can’t hear well. Carl actually doesn’t hear perfectly himself, or perhaps he has selective hearing, a practice whose value I have grown to appreciate.

Sometimes I get a call. Carl doesn’t care if I am in surgery or halfway around the world. He calls. Sometimes just to say hi and ask me an unimportant question. “Where’d you get these egg cartons?” He was just wondering. But he knows some will arrive at his house soon. Because he does for me with full generosity and I like to return the favor.

More often than that, Carl calls because there’s a problem. Chances are he’s solved it already or is about to tell me how it needs to be solved. Still, when his number pops up on my phone, my heart usually skips a beat. “Who died?” I think to myself. “The donkeys are shivering.” he told me one January right after New Year’s. A negative 15-degree cold front had parked itself over the barn for three days and didn’t show signs of abating. I made myself busy finding them coats from two continents away without mentioning my location.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have been on the farm full time. Who would have thought it would have lasted this long or that I would have stayed. My heart is here. My work is here. And Carl is too. He comes by at least once a day to check in, to borrow a watering can, to bring me my mail. I never get my mail anymore, even though I love having a cliché black mailbox with a little red flag for outgoing letters. It’s a good excuse for Carl to drive up the road to say hi and to check in on any project I have brewing. And I do. And now Carl finds himself useful giving me tips or fetching me a better tool from his house than the limited assortment I have here.

I think Carl likes it when I am away. For a time. But the farm is just as amusing and maybe more so when I am here making mistakes and working on my calluses.

xo, Farm Girl