My friend Donny was a neighbor in Vermont, a bachelor farmer born in the house his great granddaddy built, still farming the same land. At 79, he uses the check for spring lambs to pay taxes like he always has, and raises heifers for a living; he mucks out the barn by hand. He and I have always understood each other. I’ve brought him cakes and fruit breads for sixteen years, and if I were 30 years older and born on a farm in Waitsfield, that man would never have been a bachelor.
Donny has had a hard winter. He started using a cane, and went blind in one eye when a heifer kicked him in the head. He’s always full of stories, and we talked for an hour and a half in the road.
And then he had to go throw bales to the heifers and muck manure.
Donny has an eye for folk art, and has cultivated a curmudgeonly exterior for a long time. Here’s an old story of his: sometime back in the 1980s, the Postmistress said that everyone had to have their name painted on the mailbox, including Donny. He said, I’ve lived here all my life, and so did my daddy and my granddaddy too. If ye don’t know where I live by now, to Hell with ye. And he painted a name on his mailbox: Attila the Hun, now nearly faded away.
Here’s another Donny story: in the 1930s, a friend of his found a bear cub and raised it as a pet. It was very attached to these boys, but when the bear was one year old it was too big to have around, so his father said that they couldn’t keep it anymore. They put the bear in the back of the pick-up truck and drove it to the next town, and the bear was back the same day. So they put the bear in the back of the truck and drove it to the next county, and the bear was back the next day. So they drove the bear clear across the state to New Hampshire, and the bear came back the next week. So the father shot the bear when it was up in a tree, and they had a Hell of a time getting it down.
He’s had a good lambing season with two cossets, a new noun for me. Those are the bottlefed lambs that live in the kitchen (one was a rejected twin, and he found the other wandering motherless in the barn) (cosset-verb (used with object) 1. to treat as a pet; pamper; coddle. - noun 2. a lamb brought up without its dam; pet lamb. 3. any pet. [Possibly from Anglo-Norman coscet, pet lamb, from Middle English cotsete, cottage-dweller, from Old English cotsǣta : cot, cottage + sǣta, -sǣte, inhabitant; see sed- in Indo-European roots.] )
His cossets are out of the kitchen now, and you can pick them out because of their dirty faces and the red stripe painted on their back.
There was good news this visit, too. Donny’s new dog is shaping up well, and seems to be road trained. His last good dog died when I lived there a decade ago, and he’s been alone ever since–his pups kept getting run over by cars. This dog seemed to understand the rules, and has paths in the snow on either side of the road. Named Rascal.
And there’s a Plattsburgh boy in his early 20s living in a yurt, helping out in exchange for a place to set up his tent. Here’s another Donny story:
Donny had <Misery Manor> carved into a stone on the stone wall in front of his house some thirty or forty years ago.
How much do you think it cost to get that carved, he asked. I guessed $100. $600, he said. He saw me coming from a long way off. He had just done a big job in Boston, 20 feet in the air.
These are a few of Donny’s lambs this year
and here’s goodbye, with him taking his cake up to the house before he gets back to work.
May you live long.
Recent Comments