Finding Love

I grew up on a dairy farm with my mother and step dad. Mostly things were normal in my early years. My mom loved me and I loved her and we both worked very hard with my step dad to keep the dairy business running. At first I really wasn't all that happy living with a herd of cows. The hard work wasn't so bad after you got used to it, but what gave me the hardest time was going to school smelling like a cow. It would be terrible on the school bus when everyone would tease me and not come near me because I smelled so bad. I got in the habit of taking a bath everyday but all I had to do is step in the barn for morning chores and the kids on the bus and in school would know and make me feel like a freak.
You would think that after awhile they would get tired of picking on me for the same stupid reason, but noooo, the teasing went on forever with no end in sight.

So one morning while my step dad was filling up the manure spreader he happened to look my way and saw that I was crying. He asked why and I told him I really didn't want to face the kids at school today and I told him why. He then took my hand and led me to his pick-up truck and off we went to talk to the principal at school.

I did appreciate what he was trying to do for me but he still had on his farm clothes and his barn boots were thick with manure. But when we got to the school he took my hand and led me down the school corridor to the principal’s office. On the way the school kids went absolutely crazy holding their noses, making choking sounds and pressing themselves against the wall to get as far away from us as possible as we walked by. I was sure my step dad was leaving manure foot prints behind as we made our way to the principal’s office.

We opened the door and walked into a small receptionist room. When my dad shut the door behind us the smell of manure was so thick you could cut it with a knife, The secretary looked up from her paperwork with a look of horror on her face. My dad told her we were here to see the principal and she immediately got up, opened the door to the principal’s office, went in, and slammed it shut. I knew she was in there trying to figure out a way to get rid of us as fast as possible.

But then a strange thing happened. I was at the absolute lowest point of my entire life when I looked into my step-dads' eyes. He was looking at me and I could feel his love pouring into me and replacing all the pain I was experiencing. He was smiling and I could tell that none of what was going on in this school mattered to him at all. I was the only person who mattered to him. And then for the first time in my life I let myself love him back and smiled. He then took my hand and we left the school.

ject]"> The kids continued to tease me for awhile after that but it didn't seem to bother me anymore. And then a miracle happened. They stopped teasing me.

I wandered around thumbing and walking until I got to upstate New York from Massachusetts. It was September and I was livingout of a tent most of the time. Then I found a place where I could pick apples and still live in the tent in the woods just outside the orchard. I would get up in the morning and make breakfast from a cookstove I carried with me and go to the orchard and start picking apples. At the end of the day the owner of the trees would count the bins of apples I picked and I would get paid by the bin. Now this is really hard work lugging a ladder around and climbing the apple trees with a bucket around your shoulders. But I seemed to need to hurt as much on the outside as I did on the inside to be able to stand the emotional pain I was experiencing at the time. My body got really tough by the time November came around(Irented a room by then and was out of the tent) and decided to follow the Jamaicans(the migrant workers who were picking with me) south to Florida to pick oranges. There was an orange bus in Florida that anyone could get on who wanted to pick oranges. I was the only white person on the bus but for once I wasn't the only female. The driver was this big black lady named Sally Mae and one of the pickers was a girl also. After she found out how well I picked fruit, Sally Mae took me under her wing and became my surrogate mother. She got me a place to stay and yelled at anyone who gave me a hard time. I remember her saying to everyone on the bus that I was one of them even if I was white. I really loved her. Sometimes we would stop at a place to pick up a picker and the picker wouldn't come out of his house because he was too hung over and Sally would send a couple of guys from the bus to drag him out of the house. I stayed with them until May when I got back in touch with my mom and she wanted me back on the farm to help with the cows.

Leaving Sally was hard and we hugged and cried a lot and promised to do it again but it just wasn’t meant to be.

Still feeding the Ducks

Guys hitting on Me

I guess it’s all in how you handle it and what your tolerance level is. Like the guy that comes on,”Hi babe, You are really beautiful (most times I don’t even have my picture posted) and we should chat. Tell me about yourself.” I just have a really low tolerance for this particular brand of,’ come on’. I feel like I’m being interviewed for a job and have to meet the expectations of someone who I never even met.

I do respond to someone who approaches me intellectually but then again it usually turns out to be a ‘come on’ and the ultimate goal is to lure me into a date ( even if the guy is hundreds of miles away) Often times I indulge myself and the guy in sexually erotic banter, which just fuels his need to get his hands on me.
Sometimes I hang out with transsexuals, You know guys who dress and look like girls. They at least don’t hit on me, but they do seem to belong to a cult which excludes biological females for the most part.

But I don’t feel alone with this problem of relating to the opposite sex. Most of my girlfriends either relate to only their female friends or when they do try to relate to the male gender find the experience to range from ‘not too bad,’ to ‘really horrid’.
I don’t really see that getting married and having children is going to solve this problem. If you haven’t solved this problem before you get married, I don’t think you’ll solve it after getting married. Being married and having kids just makes it a 'do or die' situation. Maybe this is the only way to find the answer but to me it’s like jumping off of a cliff to see if you can learn to fly before you hit the ground.

So for now I keep a tight rein on my sexual urges so that I stay out of trouble. To be forced into a marriage and a family would be the ultimate bad move for me. So I learned to never make relationship mistakes.

Looking into the mind of a Duck

We have a small pond on our property and during this last summer I noticed that there is a lone duck living there. Every time I go by the pond I notice that he is still there swimming around and often times he would paddle over to where I am standing and look at me as if I were the answer to a problem he was having.

So the next time I passed by the pond I brought some bread along and threw it to him as he was swimming around in front of me. He got very excited and would go after each piece of bread I threw and gobble each piece up until all the bread I brought was gone. Then the next day I couldn't help thinking about him and felt compelled to go back with more bread. So this has become a part of my day, only now he jumps up on the bank when he sees me and eats the bread right out of my hand.

I look forward to visiting my little duck friend as much as he enjoys seeing me. But I sense that this contact is different from all the other contacts I have in my world. For one thing, all my contacts involve images. For example, I am in contact with people who project the image of a doctor or auto repairman or neighbor or even mother or friend. Then there is the possessive aspect to my contacts, like my mother or my friends and my cow or my horse and of course your mother or your horse or your dog. So I try to fit my duck friend into some possessive image but I can't really call him my duck just because he is swimming in my pond.

An animal belongs to the person who has raised it. But nobody supplied the heat to hatch the egg he came from. And nobody supplied the feed and shelter that kept him alive this long, so I came to the conclusion that this duck belonged to God. Then I thought of winter coming and wondered how he was going to survive the winter. I know what it takes to bring an animal through the winter and it seemed to me that God was not taking very good care of His duck if He expected me to help Him keep it alive this winter.

But then I thought of my life and what was keeping me alive through the winter. There was all the feed we made for the cows and a wonderful warm barn for them to take shelter in and the milk they would make and the money we would get for the milk. We could go to Walmart and buy all the things we needed which were produced by the people in China and I thought of our soldiers fighting on the other side of the world when suddenly I looked a little deeper and saw that everything was there and alive because God was there keeping my world alive in exactly the same way He was keeping this duck alive. And He loved the world of the duck as much as He loved me and my world.

And the mantra reverberated through my mind,"BE STILL, AND KNOW, I AM GOD.' I then left the world of images and possessions and entered the natural world of the duck in front of me and could feel Gods’ love giving us life.

Visiting the Ducks

Every morning I've been going out to feed a wild duck on a pond. Yesterday, a friend of mine sold me an adult, female, mallard duck which I brought to the pond and let her go. My male wild duck was very excited and I watched them court eachother and it made me smile at the beauty of the scene. So this morning I went to see how they were doing and took this picture.