Living Large

The word is out that Richard and I collect other people’s poop – not from them, from their horses. Nancy called to give us the opportunity to collect her garden gold. The day dawned bright and beautiful, so we took her up on her offer.

On the way to Nancy’s, we dropped by our across-the-hill neighbor’s house to drop off dirty rice stuffed peppers and noodle pudding. Their granddaughter Cassie was being motivated to clean her room by the prospect of going to Nancy’s to help scoop the poop. Now, that’s a new one on me: If you clean your room, you can go clean poop out of a pasture. Whatever works; Cassie showed up at Nancy’s in short order.

We could have spent the entire afternoon strolling through the woods to enjoy this perfect weather, but we chose to get up close and personal with nature. Richard and I had a little system going. He’d hold the snow shovel while I raked the meadow apples into it; empty and repeat. Two and three quarter hours of walking and talking while shoveling shi_, and the pasture was almost feces-free. Richard commented that the horses must feel really important that four people were so interested in their droppings we spent a whole afternoon collecting them – by Richard’s estimate, about two thousand pounds of poo-poo.

Because we so enjoyed the barbecue shrimp and cakes the night before, we wanted to share the experience with more friends. We had packed leftovers for Nancy and Jim, for Deborah and Charlie, and for Jack. When we finished loading our trailer, we began to make our meals-on-wheels rounds. Nancy agreed that it was a pretty good trade: predigested food in exchange for what her ponies had already processed. Deborah traded fresh turnips and Jack gave us a head of his home-grown broccoli for our leftovers.

Deborah had also asked me to share my wing-it secrets to creating a flapper costume, as this was my attire for last year’s Halloween party. Since Deborah is so tiny, she’d fit on my jeans pocket, she certainly can’t simply borrow my costume. We spent a little time discussing options and trying on her pieces of potential costume pieces. Richard and I were pretty happy with our afternoon’s activities.

Dusk was settling by the time we got to Jack’s, so we sat on his porch a while and enjoyed the mountain vista. It was such a perfect ending to our day that we decided to put off spreading the garden gold until the morning. As Richard is fond of saying, “A great pig like that, you don’t eat all at once.” We’re retired; it’s about taking time to smell the roses -- and the fertilizer they grow in.

We hardly had to dirty our kitchen to enjoy a feast of steamed broccoli, leftover salad and re-heated barbeque shrimp before collapsing on the couch for a bit of TV before bed.