Morning is my favorite time. We usually wake up around five, or five-thirty if we’re sleeping in, and whoever is the most awake, usually Vanessa, paddles out to the kitchen to push the coffee button. Then, we sit in bed for about an hour, drink coffee, check the weather, read the news, and scroll through Facebook. And lately, I’ve been playing Wordle, but I won’t go into all that now.
Just before sunrise, the dogs start to get antsy. Mitt, who sleeps with us, starts stretching and yawning, and Cooper and Bobo, who sleep on various couches, starting wandering in and out of the bedroom and staring at us expectantly. They know the routine. When I close the flap on my iPad, they get real excited, so I get up and dress, and they bounce around by the laundry room door while I put on my hat, my coat, my gloves and my muck boots. When I finally open the door, they fly across the driveway like they’ve been shot out of a cannon.
They generally run down toward the pond, into the swale where there is a little grove of mostly black walnut trees, and start digging in the soft ground for mole-rats. Vanessa had never heard of mole-rats before, but then she didn’t grow up out in the sticks in Missouri. A mole-rat is any number of little creatures that live underground and make tunnels. Anything, that is, between a mole and a rat, or any combination of anything thereof.
Anyway, just before dawn every morning, three of our dogs (Bobo, Mitt, and Cooper) are Kings of the Mole-Rat Chasers. The mole-rats on our property are generally safe, being smart enough not to be where the dogs are digging. Mike tags along, but he doesn’t have the mole-rat instinct, so he stands back and watches, wondering, I suppose, what all the fuss is about.
I generally take a leash and snatch Bobo by the collar about fifteen minutes into the morning mole-rat foray. That’s the signal for the other dogs to head back to the house, where Vanessa is filling their dog bowls. By they time they eat (or decide they don’t want to eat, which is Bobo’s normal routine), the sun is just rising over the hill.
So we head to the barn. If it’s really cold, like the last several mornings, we’re carrying buckets of hot water to melt the ice that froze on the water bowls overnight.
Vanessa gives all the dogs a treat, which is why they come with us. Treats aren’t as tasty as mole-rats, I guess, but the dogs know they’re a sure thing. Then, Vanessa feeds grain to the goats in the barn, lately that’s Pokey and Justine the Justinator. I feed grain to the sheep and to Buck and Mr. G. over in Buck ‘n’ Ram Palace, on the other side of the garden, and then we give them all hay, at least in the winter time. When we’re not carrying up water, the morning feed takes about fifteen minutes.
Which means we’re coming down just when the sun is a few degrees over the horizon. Those are some of the most beautiful times on the farm, especially in winter, when it’s cold and clear, and the slant of light hits the frozen limbs in a particular sort of way. If we’re coming down early enough, and I think I can capture some of it, I will run in and grab my camera to take some pictures.
