It is the Christmas holiday in 2017. I’m staying on an organic farm. Farmers really love this season.
My Airbnb hostess, and the owner of the homestead, is bustling for the marketplace, bringing her
freshly baked goods: bread rounds, decorated cupcakes, special jams, flavored olive oil, her marvelous
multi-colored chicken eggs, kale and lettuce and daikon from the garden, repurposed items from garage
sales, etc. She does it up.
The temporary helpers from Montreal sing coarsely in French while they help her package products
and load the truck in the early a.m.
In the pasture, the baby mule rolls and then kicks out in defiance when he fails to get up as gracefully
as his lanky legs allow.
The sheep ranch across the street has navel orange trees bursting to drop their fruit. Red apples are
boxed in the field by farm hands. Variety Christmas music blares from open barn doors (Jimmy
Durante, the usual crooners, hip-hop, and classical) while the sole black lamb performs joyous herky-
jerky airs above the ground.
New puppies next door cry and shriek, and the Palomino gelding, always aware and interested in
others, walks over to the edge of the fence with concern.
My dog has gut problems (from all the chicken shit she likes to eat) so I clean off the poo-poo butt plug
with a hose.
The house golden Labrador brings me a bird that presumably hit a window. The small, unmoving body
is still warm, so I carry it into the hillside and cover it with rocks, hoping the Lab can’t rediscover her.
I’m exhausted and sick from a year of unintended ‘Joad Life’ (after the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath)
that were it not for some family and friends, we’d be homeless with a capital H instead of a small h. So
I listen to Miles Davis on YouTube and pamper my skin with sample facial products.
And life goes on.
Tara Reale wrote and illustrated her first fiction book at 13, self-publishing it in the manner of the time: Xerox copies bound with extensive masking tape.
She has memoir and fiction stories published in Grande Dame Literary, TrashLight Press, and Möbius Blvd (Hobb’s End Press).