DONKEY JENNY FEELS MORE AT HOME

jenny and jack

It felt so good today with temperature above freezing in the afternoon, I looked out the window and saw Jack on his side with his head down on the ground like he was dead. One ear sticking up. His belly to the sun, he was soaking up some rays, feeling good. Jenny was standing still receiving the sunlight on her side. Calf 21 was lying down chewing its cud. I walked up to neighbor's house and had another long hot bath. It felt good in the sunlight. Not much wind today. A very pleasant day to follow the coldest day of the year. The calf stays close to Jack or Jenny and by now feels free enough not to be close to them all the time. It seems like the two donkeys have a new attitude toward the calf, and the calf toward them. Before, they were distant. It was the donkeys in one part of the meadow and the calves in another. Jack and Jenny have taken to 21, supporting the calf. I'm thinking the donkeys are able to hear the calf cry with their telepathy. Even without telepathy, they know the loneliness the calf is feeling. Jack, Jenny and the calf were all abducted, taken from their friends and mothers. Jenny is still feeling the loss of her goat friends. I've been seeing in Jenny a calmness come over her in the last week or more. Jack stays close to her, and she stays close to him. One knows where the other one is at all times. On the phone this morning with Carole, I was remarking how calm Jenny has become recently and how Jack kinda seemed like he was hovering somewhat. It appeared to me to be a protective feeling in Jack. I can't read donkeys very well, but his interest in being around her gives the appearance of feeling himself Jenny's protector.

 

jack's nose

 

Jack is a very interesting being to me. I've had a chance to know Jack for some months before Jenny came into the meadow, and by now we are friends. While I was fussing with the hay, Jack was wanting another carrot, which I didn't have. He was poking his nose at my shirt pockets where I carried the carrots, giving me a pesky look with his eye. My glove has a Velcro flap at the wrist that I did not have fastened. It was sticking out from the glove and the sleeve. Jack took the flap with his teeth, looking at me with fun in his eye, I let out a yelp and he let go. I explained to him the carrots are gone. I noticed in the last few days the niggling joy within when I carry an armload of hay through the gate. I let Jenny and Jack each take some hay to chew on while I walk out to where the sun shines. Calf 21 wanted a chew this morning. Now, instead of two and two, it is three. The calf has become Jack and Jenny's friend. I'm glad to see 21 has them to comfort her. I called today to ask about 23. Still has not stood up of its own will. I'm wondering if it is feeling lonesome, taken away from its friend and the donkeys, solitary confinement in a stall with heat and plenty to eat. It doesn't know what is happening. Another abduction, taken again into the unknown. What kind of will to live could it have? It doesn't know that if it gets well, it will be reunited with 21. I'm so bad that I have become acquainted with their personalities to the place I see them people. The stockyard is the same to me as a slave market. I can't talk about this. I live in a world of people who see no value in the person in the animals, same as slave-holders don't value the person in the human.

 

jenny's profile

 

One day talking to Jenny before I realized she understood what I was saying, I mentioned I'm glad I bought her, and she reacted to that word with a brief turn inward to her sorrow. I told myself never to talk about buying her. It was a reminder that she is my slave. Though I don't think of it like that, I don't see how she could think of it any other way. I tell Jenny I'm glad she came to live with me. I'm happy with what I got from the luck of the draw. The better I know Jenny, the better I love her. Her disposition has calmed down so much in the last week or so that I'm suspecting she might be with child. I like her walking beside me while I carry the hay out into the meadow. Jack is close behind and the calf follows Jack. Jenny, being obviously the head donkey, wants her hay first, her grain first, and she wants to be the one next to human. Jack gets too close to me, Jenny's ears go back and she gets a streamlined face that says she's ready for action, face-on like a wolf. She has a fierceness about her she wears well. She's gentle naturally. She's a donkey. It doesn't mean she's going to take any old thing that comes her way. I would not be able to see how fierce a donkey is. I started to write can be. But a donkey is fierce. They have access to their most ferocious self at all times. If you've ever seen on tv wild horses fighting, they have some power in their legs and some power in their jaws. They stand and walk all day and they munch grass and hay all day. Equines are powerful beings. They are gentle by choice.

 

jack's brow

 

Jack has had a quiet about him recently, side by side with Jenny's quiet. It's a restful quiet. I'm feeling they are possibly in process of bonding. Carole's suggestion was that Jenny might be pregnant, going by the recent change in her behavior. I'd say it is a pretty fair likelihood she may be. It takes a year, so she'll have he baby just in time for winter. It happens every winter. It's nothing new. By then, we may have a little better shelter for them. Recently, I have been feeling a safety among the four-leggeds. I feel like Jenny is not going to kick me. I've walked close behind her a few times when she'd turned her back end to me, just to see if she'd kick. It's like swinging her rump around is an automatic defensive move, whether or not to kick is a conscious choice. I think Jenny is learning to trust me. I am learning to trust her. The change in her feels like she is more relaxed with me now. We are not so mutually apprehensive. She has a pesky streak in her nature and likes to play tricks on me. Simple donkey tricks, like biting my shirt tail just to see me jump. It makes her laugh. I like to see a four-legged play and I like it when they play a trick on me. I feel like being included in their play is the best form of communication with them. When one plays a trick on me, I feel like I've broken through the language and all that goes with it barrier. That's when they tell me we are indeed friends. I no longer reach out to touch them. I just walk with them and talk to them and laugh at their tricks. I feel safe with them in their trust. I have always been gentle and humble with them and they are the same to me in return. I'm told that I spoil them. Whatever. I'm safe among them. That, for me, is the main thing. I'm safer among them in gentleness and humility than I am by threatening and hitting. Me heap big Alpha Male! Not. Just somebody who recognizes that they are beautiful people in horse bodies.

 

jack and jenny

 

 

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SOUTHERN STUFF

landscape with commentary





I found the bumper sticker above somewhere on the edge of Hamptonville. Allan next door had the day off and wanted to go to Hamptonville to get pictures of a few graves for his own family's genealogy and for somebody else's. Geneologists photograph grave stones for other genealogists via internet when they live too far away to see for themselves, a friendly thing to do. It's been so long since I've been off the mountain looking through a windshield down 21 that every place looked new. I've been half a dozen times in Alleghany in Motion vans, but that's looking out side windows at distant landscape because the near landscape zooms by, and concentrating more on conversation with the other riders than the view. Every time it has been with interesting people and some really wonderful people.







The other direction, Virginia, I've only been to Woodlawn to see Bobby Patterson at Heritage Records and Fairview for Ralph Stanley concerts. I like living so close to a place where Ralph Stanley puts on a concert every year. That's about as far as I care to go out of my mountains. Though it was nice driving along highway below the mountains and seeing the mountains in the background. It strikes me odd how the landscape can be so flat, flat as Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, then straight up the mountainside. The mountains don't start gradually. They're suddenly there.




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Elkville String Band is playing at Mountain Music Jamboree near Glendale Springs this coming Saturday night the 27th. The Jamboree has a website http://www.mountainmusicjamboree.com/. If you like mountain music or are curious about it, this is a good place to hear it. Arvil Scott runs the place and makes it happen. All regional bands. Dancing and eating and big parking lot. A whole lot of people and it's real friendly.



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Driving on familiar roads I'd not seen in so many years they've changed beyond recognition, one thing held it all together. We were in the South. Everywhere we went it was the South. I was thinking when one of my Yankee friends visits I'll take em on a drive around Yadkinville, Hamptonville, that area, any highway, a tour of the South. It's Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, northern Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, etc. When I visited friends in Georgia and drove on rural highways from town to town, I'd think, it's the same as everywhere in the South. Not exactly, by any means, but it's the South and the South only.







We're in the Southern mountains. We're in the South, but the South as it appears in the mountains is different from how the South appears in the flatland, or piedmont. Down along the coast it's even different, but it's all the South and it all comes under the red field with blue X and white stars. Political correctness likes to belittle the rebel flag, but I tell you what, it aint a-dyin in the South. That flag unites the entire South. After the South had been my home 45 years, I went outside the South to Kansas and learned people outside the South know next to nothing about it and all they have is contempt for it over slavery. I wondered if the mystique the South held for me through childhood came about because I didn't know anybody who knew anything about the South. I don't have to apologize for slavery. So my great great grandfather had slaves. I can't help it. It was a different time, different way of thinking in every way--Baptist Old Testament thinking, which isn't so very different from today. They didn't have electricity or plumbing. It was very different.







In London in 1971 I was talking with a man who was a History teacher in their equivalent to our highschool. I was renting a room in their house while staying there. I sat with them one evening watching the telly, and there was a BBC documentary on slavery. It was interesting, as those kinds of documentaries are. I forget his name, but he swelled up and told me it's a shame what "you Americans" did to the poor black people in those dreadful ships and slavery and all of it. It was one of those wise cracks that comes out of the blue and catches you completely unprepared to deal with it gracefully. It's what I call a cheap shot. As they say, it went all over me. I'm thinking: this guy teaches? I didn't have time to think about it. I heard myself say that when the slaves were bought in Africa and sold in the New World, it was British buying them, British shipping them, and British selling them to British colonists. When we became "you Americans" we've been at working out the mess youBritish created. Phew. I didn't know where that came from. I had never consciously put it together like that before, but there it was. It was one of those divine moments. It was like somebody else was saying it with my voice. But I accepted. My sentiments exactly. That was the end of it.







Another time, I came close to knocking a man backwards off a a barstool in a pub for talking a bunch of shit about my southern accent and what you southerners did to those poor black people. His life was saved that night by me thinking for a split second what it might be like, an American in a British prison for life. I got up and walked away. All I had to do was straighten out my left arm to the left, connect fist to face, he wouldn't even see it coming, and over backward he goes, a concussion for sure, probably death. He came real close. By then I didn't like it there and was past ready to come home. I didn't want to stay there the rest of my life behind bars with Viking thugs.







Allan went to see this old pre-Civil War cemetery of some of his ancestors. The forest that grew up around the old farmhouse and outbuildings and cemetery was being logged. They'd flagged the cemetery with pink and orange plastic tape surveyors use. It was a small area. All the stones were flat rocks. No markings, no names, no dates. Just rocks. It was beautiful. All the graves were sunken in. One great big tree of a kind we don't have up here on the mountain, the bark was new to me, and I didn't think to ask Allan, it grew right up out of a grave. He found a tip of the gravestone the rest of the tree had grown around completely. Big tree, old too, almost dead of old age. We marvelled that this tree had the entire cemetery for nourishment. The family tree. I think Bell was the name. It's where I found the bumpersticker. I love it that he doesn't wash the truck, but keeps the sticker clean. It's a good one. He wears it with pride, like a guy I know named Jack who wears a Jack Daniels hat, big white letters on dark blue. It's his dress hat he wears to funerals.