My Million-Dollar Donkey Read online

  Nevertheless, I voted to have the ban lifted because, for me, living in a place where liquor was treated like liquid leprosy was simply too darn inconvenient.

  I no longer enjoyed eating out. Driving 40 minutes to find a place that would allow me to order comfortably was cumbersome, and I had no interest in bringing a bottle hidden in a brown paper bag to the local eateries like some kind of wino who can’t go a few hours without. I continued to drink a glass of wine with the meals I made at home, but suddenly this felt weird, too, like I’d become a closet drinker. The strangest part was I never cared much for drinking before, but the fact that alcohol was prohibited in our town had me more focused than ever on the joy to be gained in a heady sip of wine at the end of the day.

  I guess if you tell people they can’t have something, they want it all the more. History shows that speakeasies and illegal clubs tripled in number in our country during Prohibition. This led to a huge surge of mob-related violence. With the income potential from crime skyrocketing, bootleggers and mob bosses grew more powerful than our elected officials. People who were not much interested in spirits before Prohibition now kept a hidden bottle behind the books in their libraries and secretive drinking became all the rage. Did the religious anti-alcohol population have any clue what a boon their efforts were doing for drinking in the bigger scheme?

  Having friends to dinner became a minefield of correct behavior because you just never knew on which side of the debate acquaintances stood. Wine complements a refined meal, but when I offered up a fine bottle to accompany a fancy dish, the alcohol often languished, untried.

  Wine was on my mind, historically, experientially, and philosophically now.

  “I want to learn to make wine at home,” I announced to Mark one morning. “There’s a class offered on how to make country wines at the Folk school and I want to sign up. The way I see things, wine-making is just one more form of cooking, like making jam or canning pickles.”

  He looked at the description of the class in the brochure. “Sounds fun, actually.”

  “Want to take the class with me?” I asked, even though I knew my husband was about as likely to pause from his building project to spend time making wine as he was to fly to Paris for croissants that weekend.

  “I’ll stick with driving the get-away car when we start transporting rotgut across state lines,” he said. “But I might be interested in taking a blacksmithing class on the same weekend. I’d like to learn how to pound iron for house garnishes. We can have lunch together on the breaks.”

  It was a date. A date in two separate rooms, but a date nevertheless. Within a few weeks, my bedside table was brimming with wine-making books and my first issue of Winemaker magazine. I diligently studied chapters on how to use a hydrometer and how to rack wine from a primary fermenter to a carboy. I read about the importance of potassium metabisulfite, pectic enzymes, bitartrate, and potassium sorbate. I learned about yeasts and supplements, refining agents, acids, carbonates, and bacteria. A person needed a degree in chemistry to understand how to make wine at home.

  Winemaking turned out to be a popular subject at the folk school. The class was full of wine enthusiasts and nearly everyone had tried making wine before, mostly from kits. In a kit, all the ingredients are rationed out in little pre-measured packets and all you have to do is follow the day-by-day, step-by-step instructions to create a foolproof wine. I was much more interested in rolling up my sleeves to do things the old-fashioned way, even if the project meant wrestling with the learning curve once again. Most traditional wine is made from grapes, but country wines are blends made with fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Since I had an abundance of garden delights right on my fifty acres, I determined country wines could be my forte.

  At the first class, the teacher said, “The greatest thing about homemade wine is that people can’t deny the beauty of taking natural ingredients and laboring over them for over a year to create a refined beverage that is a celebration of harvest, friendship, and life. Rarely do people turn down a glass of homemade wine.”

  If learning to make homemade wine did indeed make a non-drinker soften to the idea of a harmless drink, I had found the perfect solution to the dry county dilemma. I was inspired!

  The class started with instructions on how to make a batch of strawberry wine. The last strawberry wine I drank was Boone’s Farm, right out of the bottle in the back of my boyfriend’s Chevy at the drive-in in 1977. Good stuff, as I recall, and to my recollection, strawberry wine was quite the aphrodisiac. I pictured opening my first bottle of homemade wine in the backseat with Mark. The possibility of rekindling the passion my high school sweetheart showed me way back when made me even more inclined to take winemaking seriously. I wrote the recipe down in my notebook, because we just so happened to have a drive-in in Blue Ridge.

  “First, we need to clean and prepare some bottles,” the teacher said.

  The class scraped labels off the surface of used wine bottles. Since this fell in line with my earth-friendly goals, I scraped happily. We sterilized containers, heated five pounds of sugar in a pot of purified water, and cut fruit to fill a mesh bag. We measured chemicals while receiving a quick lesson on how to use a thermometer and a hydrometer to determine alcohol content after fermentation began. The process wasn’t nearly as complicated in the classroom as books made the process seem. The only difficulty would be remembering the details because we began sampling wines in different stages of fermentation at nine in the morning and kept sampling until five. Eight hours of wine sampling does not bode well for accurate note taking.

  Homemade dandelion-chamomile, kiwi, and strawberry wine sweetened with fresh lemonade all flowed, most of which tasted similar to a good Chardonnay with a dash of summer flavors tossed in. We were served blackberry and elderberry reds, and potent golden mead, too.

  Most helpful was being able to sample batches of wine in different stages of fermentation. We tasted strawberry wine just after the batch was mixed, then tasted a batch six days old, and again after six months. The experiment concluded with a one-year-old bottle that went down smooth and delicate.

  By 3:00 we had finished our winemaking lesson and the country winemaker happy hour ensued. The teacher was a member of a bluegrass band, and the crew showed up to give us a rip-roaring standup comedy show filled with backcountry wine jokes. The bass player was also a beekeeper and between sets he gave a short lecture on how to make mead with honey. I jotted down notes, giddy with inspiration.

  There I was, drinking blackberry wine while enjoying the song

  Take Me Away from Concrete and Greed played on a homemade percussion instrument complete with a tin can, plunger, washboard, and bicycle horn attached to a walking stick. This was a far cry from the sophisticated world where I once sat in fine restaurants sipping imported wine and listening to a jazz trio.

  I stomped my foot to the silly songs and watched the crowd of carefree, suburban deserters who, like me, had taken a break in their middle years to come to the folk school to learn something new. I liked these people. Liked this wine. The moment was sweet. I was no longer questioning my life choice or struggling to validate my existence by stacking up pros and cons of what life was like now compared to what life was before. I wasn’t questioning my identity or wondering how making homemade wine might save enough money to justify the expense of the class, as if all of life was a balance sheet requiring a practical return on every investment. True, drinking all that wine might have helped me reach this personal nirvana, but nevertheless, I was happy doing nothing of great servitude or purpose, just savoring the flavors of homemade wine and good company.

  Later I met up with Mark and I listened to his news of the blacksmithing experience and all the new things he was learning, too. He talked of house building and how he wanted to make copper trims for railings. He talked of all the new tools he’d seen in class that he wanted to buy. Mark almost never drank, but I offered him
a glass of my homemade wine anyway.

  “Well, if you made this yourself... why not?” he said, filling his glass to the brim and holding the wine up for a toast.

  “To us,” I said.

  “To the things I can now make for our house,” he corrected.

  “I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without an end. “

  —Henry David Thoreau

  ANIMAL HUSBANDRY, SANS THE HUSBAND

  Raising animals may be called animal husbandry, but in my case, tending to the farm creatures was entirely a wifely pursuit. Sometimes, I felt foolish taking on so much unnecessary work in the name of experimentation. The mud, effort, commitment, and endless routine of animal care curtailed my freedom more than I ever imagined. More than once, I tallied the time and cost of keeping animals, imagining just what kind of vacation in Europe we could have taken instead, if only Mark been up for the trip. But he had made absolutely clear that he wasn’t planning to take me anywhere anytime soon, so I focused instead on the meaningful lessons I might discover in each barnyard endeavor. I was contemplating not just man’s relationship with animals, but all human food sources and man’s impact on the natural world. These were lessons my soul longed for, an in-depth awareness of nature’s basic mechanics beyond the surface education I was given from schoolrooms or a book.

  I was fascinated with small discoveries, such as the fact that chicken eggs are not fertile until several days after the hen has mated because a rooster’s sperm doesn’t affect the egg already half-formed inside her, and instead impacts the egg yet to be developed. The chicken maintains ‘reserve sperm’ and her eggs might become fertile for weeks after one mating. See, I never knew that.

  A drone (male bee) has no stinger. Neither does a bumblebee. You can hold them up to your arm and nothing will happen. All those years of my running away from anything with stripes and wings were for naught. A worker bee will indeed sting you, but stings are good medicine for arthritis. Many people use sting therapy to heal themselves. See, I never knew that either.

  A horse is pregnant for 11 months.

  It takes 39 days for a duck egg to hatch, 31 for a chicken.

  A rabbit is pregnant for 39 days. A queen bee can live 7 years, but her workers only survive a few weeks.

  Slowly and surely, despite many mistakes, I was learning about the natural world. I could doctor wounds and groom, medicate, and train all manner of creatures now.

  My attitude regarding animals could all be summed up by my relationship with the donkey. After months of tugging fruitlessly on Donkey’s lead rope to get the stubborn beast to budge, I discovered that if I stood calmly beside him, he would walk side by side with me anywhere I wished to go. When I tried to force him to move, a frustrating battle would ensue. Only when I treated him as a friend and partner would he eagerly follow my lead. Now, if that isn’t a metaphor for living in harmony with nature...

  I had but to call out to my horses and they would come running as good-naturedly as a dog to his master. My chickens came running when they saw me, too, comfortable to peck in the dirt around my feet or to take a powdered donut from my fingertips. My rabbits would sit docilely in my lap. My goat...well, he never did learn to behave, but that’s another story.

  I felt like a cross between Dr. Doolittle and Mr. Hyde. I had a wonderful affinity for animals now, but the joy came with steep associated costs. I’d created a monster of inconvenience and hard work for myself, and the closer I came to nature, the more alienated I felt from my marriage.

  My horses would accidently push me into the barn door and I’d have a bruised shoulder for days. My rabbits would panic when the dogs came sniffing and I’d end up with arms covered in bloody scratches. Occasionally our rooster would start feeling his oats and attack, creating a small gash or two on my calf before I could boot him away like a feathered football. I couldn’t go anywhere without undertaking a complex schedule of feeding and care arrangements, calling in favors from friends and family. But as battered or tired as I sometimes got, I never considered throwing in the towel because this was the life Mark and I had chosen together under the pretense that a simple life would bring us closer, and I wanted so much to make our new life work.

  One day, my husband’s horse got his foot stuck in the fence. I had just tied the horses up for a feeding; Goliath pawed the ground and caught the bottom wire of the fence between the back of his hoof and the horseshoe. The more he pulled, the deeper embedded the wire became, not a good thing for the horse or the fence.

  I climbed under Goliath and wedged my shoulder under his leg to free both hands to pull, but for the life of me, I couldn’t get the wire out from under his shoe. The horse was busy eating, but soon the grain would be gone, and then he was bound to start fighting the fence. I needed to free him or there would be hell to pay.

  I tried using a horse pick (a device used to clean rocks and dirt out of horseshoes) to dislodge the wire. No good.

  I cursed, but that didn’t do a thing either.

  My fingers were frozen, my temper hot. I called Mark to explain the situation; Goliath was his dumb horse, after all.

  “What do you want me to do about it? I’m at Wal-Mart, 45 minutes away,” he said.

  “Where are the wire cutters? I’ll simply cut the fence away.” “I don’t have any.”

  I was certain he had wire cutters. Hadn’t I watched him cut away the fence once when the goat got stuck, only days ago? I reminded him of that.

  He was silent for a minute and then said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We don’t own wire cutters.”

  He was always deeply possessive about his personal things, so I assumed this answer was really just his way of saying he didn’t want me touching his tools.

  “I’m having an emergency here,” I said through gritted teeth. “Just let me use your wire cutters.”

  “I don’t have any. Honestly.”

  “If that’s the case, will you please buy a good pair to keep with my tack for the next time this happens?”

  “Wal-Mart doesn’t have any.”

  I was pretty sure our Wal-Mart had every basic tool imaginable, considering the store carried rifles and chicken feed to serve the area’s consumer needs. Perhaps this conversation wasn’t about Mark protecting his wire cutters at all, but about the fact that he didn’t want me to cut the fence.

  “If I leave the horse stuck to the fence, he’s gonna bring it down. That or he’ll get hurt, which means a big, fat vet bill. I’ve tried everything. I can’t free him.”

  “I’ll call the fence guy. Maybe he can run over and help you,” Mark said.

  The horse was getting more and more agitated, pulling at the fence with greater force. I turned to Goliath with renewed determination, wedged my foot on the bottom of the fence wire, and yanked with all my might. Nope.

  I tried slamming a piece of wood against the wire. Nope.

  All that was left was for me to do what any resourceful, independent girl would do in a situation like this. I cried. After indulging my self-pity for several minutes, I wiped my tears on the back of my sleeve and gave Goliath more grain. How much could I feed this horse without harming his constitution? I offered a prayer to the horse heavens as I sobbed. I put my head between my legs, too tired even to cry anymore. Eventually I turned around to discover Goliath’s horseshoe was no longer caught in the fence wire. His foot was conveniently resting through the wire mesh now. I pushed him away with all my might before he did something stupid like jam his foot into the fence again. Drama over.

  “How was your day?” My kids asked that night at dinner.

  “Uneventful,” I responded.

  Crying over an animal and getting into an almo
st-fight with Mark because I felt vulnerable and inadequate and he showed no sensitivity or concern for my wellbeing was an everyday occurrence now. No biggie. Nothing to do but accept that frustration is a part of raising animals—and a part of being married.

  That is, except in the case of the goat.

  There was no denying the goat was cute, running to greet us with enthusiasm and delight, but he didn’t seem to understand he was a goat. Freckles thought he was a hood ornament, clambering up onto the roof of my car and stomping back and forth while I yelled and tried to swat him down. He played king of the mountain and I was left with a hundred little dents marring the roof of my new SUV.

  Sometimes Freckles thought he was a puppy, thrusting his muddy body up onto our laps whenever we sat by the fire ring. He’d eat our marshmallows and knock over our coffee mugs, leaving us dirty, sore, and inclined to throw a goat on the fire rather than another log.

  The goat was forever getting stuck in the fence, or sneaking out of the pasture. He ate our flowers, broke into the feed bins, and trampled the chickens. We’d expend great effort to catch him and put him back in the pasture, where he’d force his way in front of the horses’ food buckets to cause an equestrian uproar. He bit holes in our jackets, butted anyone who was foolish enough to bend over in his vicinity, and ate everything and anything EXCEPT the weeds swallowing our pasture. Even the passive donkey had enough of his shenanigans one day and finally kicked him good, breaking one horn tip completely off.

  Still, we were tolerant until the day Freckles discovered our neighbor’s garden and wreaked havoc on the elderly man’s carefully tended vegetables. It was all well and good for us to endure the goat’s destructive antics, but we were not willing to invite open warfare with our country neighbors.

  “The goat has got to go,” Mark said. “He’s too destructive, too annoying, too... goatish.”