Garden. And another thing. Gardening. When growing once weeds, be sure to weed them. Oh no. And dairy goats. Five of those. And counting. Kids with cries unknown while we grapple with our own. Caterwauling. Cat or walling. Equally intrigued by both. Enough hens to cover a family in eggs. Neighborhood game rooster crashes for the night. That is all right. I have no objections. He can stay, so long as he cries before that first splash of light across the fields down the hill. Covered over in hay cut and baled. Thinking a farmer better come and collect them. Hay bales left in fields too long have been known to walk off. Pigs. Smoking corn cobs like cigars, chewed down to the nub, blowing smoke in the cold. The part where pork in my freezer pranced in a lot and I fed him a lot and I worked on his pen, he gnawed on my fingers and untied my boot strings, no kidding, pig on the other side mouthing my gloved fingers through the interwoven pieces of pig fencing, low, and heavy. When the ground grew soft enough, they tore up the dented green deep planted garden posts that supported them and laid whole twenty foot sections on their sides, and the pork in my freezer took off on short lived bursts of adventure. Scaring customers. Scaring me. Even as I tempted him with hotdog buns back into the pen I kept him in. It is a hard life to live. A tricky dynamic. To keep an animal in conditions that are rightfully, globally accepted as wrong for humans. It’s like stepping into the mind of a spider. A thinking predator. A not always consensual symbiosis. Farming may yet prove to be nothing more than the most complex spider web ever implemented in the world. Dinner served all the same. Good food, nutrition. Life giving. Energy lending. And it is heavy. Taking the life of anything is. It needs to be. It introduces us to the idea that some day we will also die, and in this moment, for the first time ever, we will be something else’s dinner. Chicken. Pig. Produce. Beef. People for as long as time have been putting their hands together and praying thanks, good things, hopes and wishes, with the leftovers of perfectly innocent things decorating their dishes. There is only one thing that makes it all right. And that is the truth. That old Christian recognition.

Some day dinner will be on you.