Life on the Farm

I would wake up the next morning, as I would many more, to the cacophony of boisterous livestock. As a child, having been aboard my share of hayrides and having passed through a petting zoo or two, I recognized straightaway the chorus-line of baas, barks, neighs, grunts and oinks. It was at first a lot to negotiate; a sandy village covered in horse-shit, but step-by-step, I would soon make tracks of my own .

Following the first cries of the rooster, 430am precisely, I rather groggily came to accept life on the farm. Often abandoning my scorching NESQUIK® and loaf of bread, I spent my breakfasts ushering wayward chickens out from inside my room and herding ugly, crooked-legged goats, who beeped unceasingly from my front gate. I even once stood in between the growing antipathies of a ratty cow and a burly horse, as to see that the quarrel was settled before all of us carried on, But nothing was more distressing as when a moribund cat, crossing my path, whispered its last meow and before my very eyes, keeled over, earthward. She was later pitch forked by my brother and taken by wheel barrel to the compost.

Seldom was there any real escape from the rambunctiousness in merry Ker-Sadero, and for those moments, I and my American coeval, Erin eked out a wisp of privacy, we were promptly waylaid. After lunch, we often sat ruminating Russian literature, not realizing that for the busybodies outside, we had slid the curtain on something else a whole lot more sultry.

On afternoon in particular, when we had recklessly overstepped our propinquity, we were investigated by the whole harem, one concubine after the next. They teetered the doorway, occasionally entering, roaming unsurely from corner to corner Proceeding with that theatrical insouciance and chit-chat, a detective without a warrant so purposefully does, they searched, hungrily, for the scandal. But as I had said before, behind the hanging drape of privacy, we had little to show but a sophistic critique of Tolstoy.