We pulled into the farm and started into a few basic chores, which included delivering a few bags of feed to each barn. In the ground floor of the hay barn, where a few goat pens are housed, I noticed that a little white goat kid was acting funny: head in the corner, not chewing her cud, not running up to greet me like the rest of her pen companions. Abbe, who followed me into the barn a few minutes later, saw what I saw and took action. She carried the little one outside to give her some fresh grass, fresh water, and a little grain. Here she is eating with the chickens:
How sad. How pathetic. Anderson went to retrieve medicine, and we would have to wait and see about her condition.
Okay, so maybe it's not going to be a great day, but still...could be pretty good...
Around 11:30, Abbe tells us to hop in the car and drive a few hundred yards down the road to her neighbor Dave's farm. Abbe and Anderson have been renting milking space from Dave, who has a heard of dairy cows; now they want to disassemble all of their milking equipment and tear down a barn's worth of goat pens so that they can relocate to their own side of the street, rebuild their own milking area, and save some money. Fair enough--we're glad to help out...
The first tear-down task is to remove some fencing from a milking area that's been sitting empty for a few months. Would be a fairly simple, straightforward chore, except for one thing: spiders. I don't exactly love 'em, and Shelly hates 'em. I mean HATES them. And I'm not talking about little harmless daddy longlegs. I'm talking about big, hairy, nasty arachnids. The kind that bite and leave an open sore dripping with ooze. The kind that make me put on work gloves and won't let me pause long enough to pull out my phone and snap a quick pic for this blog.
By 12:30, we were finished with that nightmare of a little chore. Okay, so maybe not a good day, but still...a solid day...a rewarding day...gettin' things done...
Around 1:00, we joined Abbe, Anderson, and another part-time farmhand named Megan to help with some serious barn tear-down. We hoisted our crow bars and sledge hammers and began pounding away, removing wooden planks from goat pens and stacking them up for nail-removal. It may sound like a drag, but truthfully, it was a lot of fun. If we've learned anything from our two year old son, it's that destruction, too, can be a form of creation. It feels good to see the results of your toil immediately--in this case, a pile of planks stacked up at one end of the barn and nothing but the framework of the pens behind us. Here's Shelly reveling in her work:
But not long after this photo was taken, a tragic turn of events. From across the barn, I hear the following:
"Uh oh. I stepped on a nail."
Mind, this is broadcast in a normal volume, in a monotone voice. Next thing I know, I'm helping Shelly hop out of the barn. Abbe's got a paper towel applied to the bottom of her foot to staunch the bleeding. Anderson's speeding back to the farmhouse to retrieve a towel. I throw all of our crap--boots, crow bars, bloodied socks--in the trunk. Then I undo the car seat and toss it in the trunk to make room for Shelly,
who, as you can see, is as cool as a cucumber the entire time ("I can't even feel it, really").
With her foot wrapped and my head on straight, we drove for 15 minutes to the ER at Robinson Memorial Hospital in Ravenna. I guess a nail in the foot is not a big deal, because we waited for nearly two hours to receive treatment. At last, an inspection by a doctor, some x-rays, and the diagnosis: a clean puncture wound, no bone damage, 10 days of antibiotics, and some pain killers if needed.
The hardest part of the whole ordeal for Shelly was the shot of novocaine the nurse administered directly into the bottom of her foot before scraping and cleaning the wound. She said that the pain of the shot was worse than the actual nail.
And finally, for those of you who love blood and gore, here it is:
Okay, so maybe it wasn't a good day at all...but these things happen, right? Perhaps what Ohio's breathtaking farmland was telling us was just a big load of crap?
Hopefully, Shelly will be mobile enough by Friday to enjoy the wedding we're headed to in Philadelphia. If she's proven anything, it's that she's tough as nails. She should know.
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