For some reason this has been a topic of conversation in our house lately, and then I saw this post at was it the Pagan remark? and felt compelled to talk about it.

What is it with recurring dreams? Actually, I’m referring to the good ones; I guess we all have recurring bad dreams, that tend to use the same elements over and over: I’ve always had tidal wave and tornado dreams—somehow not all that hard to figure out. But what about the recurring good dreams? DH has flying dreams, of which I am very envious. ED has egg dreams, in which she stumbles across nests full of fantastic eggs, sometimes in unusual colors or shapes. Isn’t that the greatest image? It’s such and image of wealth and abundance. She’ll stumble out of the bedroom some mornings saying,”I had another egg dream last night,” and then she can hold that lovely feeling close to her all day.

Mine are house dreams, but not just ordinary houses! It is always a small house or a camper, usually in some state of disrepair, until I go inside. Then I realize it’s a mansion. The camper will have several floors and a swimming pool and a full basement. Once I dreamed that I was going to visit my grandmother after my grandfather died, and when I went in to her fairly ordinary house I found that it was many stories tall, with hundreds of beautiful, white painted rooms, and I explored for hours, and it was a house from my past, and there was so much in there to discover about myself. When I woke up I was in a state of bliss and excitement, with a nagging feeling that I’d been there before, in waking life. I kept that lovely feeling of inner spaciousness for days.

What are your recurring dreams? The ones that make you wake up saying,” Ahhh—another one!”? It’s interesting to speculate on what they mean for us.

Just a little green
Like the color when the spring is born
—Joni Mitchell

St. Patrick’s Day is supposed to be green, not white! Isn’t it so totally appropriate that we celebrate the color green this time of year? Green is more like a nutrient than a color after a long grey or white or brown winter. St. Pat’s day is one of the little cluster of holidays that celebrate the spring equinox—along with Easter.

Yesterday we didn’t think we could stand another grey, rainy, funky day in the house, so we took off on an impromptu trip to Ashevegas—it was great to get out and “blow the stink off” as DH’s mother used to rather inelegantly say. We browsed around a downtown bookstore for a while, running into a friend from Hot Springs as we almost invariably do, and then went to see Hitch, which we all thoroughly enjoyed. As we were leaving the movie theater, DH confided that when he was younger, he was a lot like Will Smith’s character. Bless his heart. I felt compelled to break it to him that he was a lot like a character in the movie, but it wasn’t Will Smith’s.

I also got a much needed haircut at an honest-to-god salon, but today I don’t really like it. I was aiming for sassy, and I’m afraid I got matronly. I look like a soccer mom. It’s short-ish, which I like, but it’s also kind of round, which I don’t like. I look bubble-headed, or maybe like I’m wearing a football helmet: not really the look I was going for. Sigh.

Good grief. It is a dark and dismal day, and only promises to get worse: our forecast is for several inches of snow over the next couple of days. Spring in the Appalachians, huh?

Even with all the wet weather we’re having, though, the ground is staying drier and firmer, maybe because of the windy days we’re having in between, or maybe because of how much longer the days are now. Whatever the reason, it’s lovely to not have to slog through soup everywhere we go.

I’ve been concerned about the cows lately. The grass is greening on the mountainside, and they’re not particularly interested in hay anymore, leading me to worry about grass tetany. So yesterday I asked the guy at the feed store what he had to prevent it (you’ll remember from my earlier post on this subject that grass tetany is a magnesium deficiency that seems to happen in early spring when the young grass comes on; I’m not sure if it is because the grass has less magnesium this time of year, or if it’s because there’s just not enough of it.), and he sold me a high-magnesium mineral block. But, unfortunately, it’s for cows only, no goats or horses, so it’s going to be a bit of a challenge getting it to just the cows. I’m feeling better just having it in my possession, however.

Yesterday was the most incredibly glorious day: a gorgeous warm breeze, a bright blue sky , lots of sunshine, tons of crocus and jonquils. The temperature actually made it over 70°, and we all have pink cheeks to show from being outside all day. DH was off both Saturday and Sunday, and we enjoyed hanging out together all weekend.

Today, however…
It’s rather dark and foggy, and the forecast is for a wintry @##@!!&%!!@ mix tomorrow night and Wednesday morning and then again Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Blech and double blech! Once you’ve seen 70° it’s hard to go back, folks.

Last night we had our friends S* and T* over for supper. DH and I could hardly get a word in edgewise, because the girls love S* and T* so much that they never quit talking! For dessert we had a goat’s milk and goose egg flan that turned out spectacularly well, if I may say so myself. I had a cheesecake made with sugar-free Da Vinci syrup, that would’ve been incredible except for the paper towel that somehow managed to fall in the food processor when I wasn’t looking. I’m not sure I can handle the shreds of paper in my teeth—it’s a texture thing, you know? All is not lost, however—DH’ll eat it. He’ll eat anything.

The girls and I came home from town just in time for a pounding sleetstorm this afternoon. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it come down quite like that before! Then it turned into fat snowflakes, and then to rain; now it’s snowing again. At one point it was snowing hard out the front window of the living room, but out the side window, here at my desk, it was raining!

We received a certified letter from the landlord yesterday, saying he’s raising the rent. Admittedly, we pay very little rent, but we’ve also done all the improvements on the place—-he has done exactly nothing in the five years we’ve been here! OK, not going to get started. Let me just say that I’m feeling desperate to find a place of our own. I think now we might be able to manage the financing, so it’s just a matter of finding the right place. I’m not starting a garden, we’re not having babies—my energy is going toward moving away from here. Send me good thoughts!

One of these days…….

DH has a very strange relationship with alarm clocks. The problem stems, at least in part, from a vision he has of himself, which has absolutely no basis in reality: he’s always liked to think of himself as a serene and industrious early riser. Which he so isn’t. DH can easily sleep for ten hours a night, and still need a power nap the next day. But in his mind, he’s one of those early risers who just can’t sleep past dawn.

So anyway, last night he set his alarm for 5:45 am, which is what time it went off. He never stirred. I lay there listening to that most hated of sounds, finally giving DH a good shove to wake him up so he could turn the damn thing off. No response. So I kicked him. Hard. He woke up (sort of) saying,”What? What?” and I told him to turn the alarm off. He did, and then rolled over for a nice morning snooze. I was seething at this point, and wide awake, too, I might add, and was not in any mood to lay there listening to him snore til 7:00, which is what time he’s been rolling out of bed all week. So I bitched and pestered, finally (literally) kicking him out of the bed at 6:15.

5:45? Give me a break! I think that he can then go to work and nonchalantly yawn and say,”Yep….been up since 5:45.” And the guys are supposed to be all impressed or something. Which they’re not, because they all know DH, and know that he’s not one of those dawn risers that he likes to think of himself as.

So DH has a birthday this month—the 26th—and giftwise I’m thinking along the lines of an alarm clock that administers a mild (or not!) electrical shock to the user.

A year ago today, on a windy, sunny, and very cold March morning, we went out to check on a doe who was due to kid that day. Desi—one of our original does— had been in the kidding pen since the day before, and I was fairly confident that she would kid sometime that day, However, when we got out to the pen, she was down on the ground having convulsions—actually she looked like she was in her death throes. The day before she had seemed a little dopey, but I didn’t really think much of it, because sometimes the does get really spacey just before kidding. Well, by the time we found her, she was obviously dying. We tried to move her, and get her comfortable, and I was frantically scouring my brain for what the hell it might be, but DH finally went and borrowed a .22 pistol from a neighbor, and shot her. I brought out a very sharp knife from the kitchen and performed a fast c-section the second she was gone, and brought out two black doe kids; they were floppy and weak, but breathing (barely), so the girls and I rushed them into the house while DH buried Desi. The little doelings were cold, so we immersed them in warm water, holding just their noses out, and then vigorously dried them off and put them in the oven of the wood cookstove. They were still too weak to suck, even from a Pritchard-valve nipple, so DH found an old electrical cord, and stripped the wires and insulation out of it, and cleaned it really well, and we worked it down into the stomachs of the kids and gave them a couple of ounces each of warmed colostrum that we had frozen from a doe who had already kidded (we always keep colostrum in the freezer—it can save lives); after that and a nap in the oven they were up and about, tottering around the kitchen calling for the bottle. The girls made them a soft hay bed in a cardboard box under the kitchen table, where they lived for the next couple of weeks, until we moved them into a pen on the front porch. It was the girls who bottle-fed them for the next three months, and so I gave them the two little does. Their names are Pippsisewa and Magdalena (Pippi and Maggie) and now they’re vigorous and healthy yearling does: Pippi is smallish and looks like Desi (who was also small); Maggie is a big, long, very dairy doe who looks a lot like her sire, Moonshadow. Happy birthday Pip and Mag!

Later research led me to believe that Desi had grass tetany—a magnesium deficiency—caused by eating only the little tiny new grass that was coming up in the early spring. That’s always a hazard this time of year—they’ll absolutely ignore good hay, choosing instead to scour the hillsides looking for every little blade of grass; ideally we would lock them up and feed them for the month of March. Anyway, she might’ve been saved with an injection of magnesium, but it would’ve been an hour each way to get some (and a vet is nearly two hours away—not that we’ve ever been able to get one to come out here), and she would not have made it that long. It’s a steep learning curve sometimes…

We took a nice long walk in the early spring, 60° sunshine yesterday. It was lovely, right up to the moment that poor ED got a migraine—her first. I felt terrible for her, and the last half of our walk was spent just trying to get up the mountain to the car, as quickly as we could, so we could get her home and in bed. I had the most curious feelings during all that—sorrow, knowing the misery of migraines; guilt, for being the parent who passed that delightful little gene along; and anxiety, at how fast the years have flown by: my little baby girl isn’t a baby any longer—she’s a tall and willowy young woman who has sick headaches and her whole own life ahead of her.

When we got home she went straight to bed and fell into a deep sleep and woke up refreshed and headache-less, with just a touch of filbert-head (the feeling that your brain is loose and is bouncing off your skull when you move your head too fast). We had a nice supper, and were watching an episode of All Creatures Great and Small when the phone rang: it was a neighbor, calling to tell us there were two cows in her yard, and were they ours? Of course they were! So off we went with leadropes, and buckets of feed, and rubber boots and flashlights; DH and Bernard in the car, ED and I on foot. The cows weren’t in any great hurry to come home—Fionn, our Great Pyr , has been chasing them off. He hates the cows and has decided (the thick-skulled idiot) that they’re a huge threat to the welfare of his goats. So we chased the cows around in circles, cross-country, finally moving them up the mountain towards home. It went smoothly after that, and ED and I confided in each other, there in the dark, trailing the two recalcitrant cows up the steep driveway, that we actually were sort of enjoying ourselves.

This morning I woke within a nagging cloud of anxiety: nothing terribly specific—just the feeling of what’s the point? What am I doing here? What should I be doing with my time, that would make any difference to anything? I know what it’s all about—I feel at loose ends with no pregnant goats getting ready to kid, no seedlings on the kitchen table, no chicks coming in the mail. I feel a little lost.