What a Future it Will Be by Eugene Wyatt

The Goshen Farm

June 2006

Looking at sheep keeps them healthy.  I walk into the flock, morning and evening, talking softly and  listening to them.  They seem to like these fields of Goshen and mostly ignore me, laying there chewing, looking off into space like children reading breakfast cereal boxes.  Once a week I move their fence to enclose an acre and a half of fresh grass.  Moving the fence takes about 2 hours; then Shade and I will herd the sheep into the new paddock.  The sheep know the routine and are always eager to go.  I use Shade for her love of working sheep rather than needing her to move the flock.  We pretend, because I want to tell her she's a "good dog."

Baby, my seven-toed cat of 18 years died yesterday.  The day was a deathwatch.  Baby had been in decline for over a year, but usually purring; yesterday afternoon she slowed down and stopped.  It  was as beautiful a death as I have ever seen, no pain, no drugs, no vet; she died as simply and as well as she lived.  I note this after having watched my brother die in a hospital.  Had Kirk chosen to accept his illness--but who among us can do that--I would have said he died of cancer; but my brother took the medical deal offered--most people do--he took chemotherapy, drugs and more drugs to counter the side effects. Yes, he got a little more time, if you are to believe the comparative survival time estimates which are always unverifiable, but certainly that time was of a dubious quality because the drugs he took to prolong his life also disturbed and diminished it.  My brother did not die of cancer, he died slowly of medicine and hospitals.

I'll take Baby to the farm, lay her in the tall grass at the end of the lane and say good bye.

I'm alive and so are you and what could be better than that.  When I realized that my life had led up to the expression on my face, I smiled at her.  She smiled back as she walked past. I've been waiting for this Saturday for two years, now what will I say to her, should I ask her name or should I let her pass, or both.  I wonder what it's like to have a woman older than I am, at my age.  I feel like Walt Whitman in the prime of his middle age.

I'm putting my sheep online: colorful pictures of their yarn, shopping carts to be filled with it.  I'm doing what I love to do: plan into the future and plan away the past.  And what a past it was and what a future it will be. And what a surprise both were to me--I couldn't see them until I had left Sullivan County.  Yesterday is an entrapment, a curse that duns tomorrow, it is comfortable and worse, it's predictable.  Shade and I are errant dogs we're "gate, paragate, parasamgate," (from the Heart Sutra) we're "gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond."  I tell her she's good, I have a good job.

Eugene Wyatt