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.

My Dream and resulting Date

This is not a very exciting dream but I am writing about it for two reasons. First I remember it so vividly and second I hardly ever dress-up for going out. But this dream started out with me in a room trying on a blouse that was kinda frilly and just came down below my bra(which I hardy ever wear) Then I noticed there was a man in the room who I didn't know so I left the room and went into my moms' room. I was looking for a low cut pair of panties so I could wear my jeans low and have plenty of exposure between the blouse and jeans. Finally my mom came in and found a pair of panties that would work and that made me happy in the dream.

Well after having that dream I knew I was in for a difficult time. My body was trying to tell me something I already knew but was trying to ignore. But now I felt like a cat in heat and I knew I was going to materialize a certain kind of situation whether or not I wanted to.

There is this guy who comes to the farm selling cow medical supplies and he has been trying to put the make on me since forever. So last Friday he came and could tell immediately I was in a vulnerable state and he laid it on pretty thick. I, for my part, flirted with him in a coy sort of way. The long and short of it was that he asked me out to a party the following night and I accepted.

Now this animal medic guy who asked me out doesn't come with the highest, moral standard rating, as my mom pointed out to me. She knows I'm pretty much an idiot when it comes to guys. In the heat of the moment I might just as well think,"Maybe it's time for me to become a mother." Understandably, she was a little worried but knew if I didn't make some kind of move soon, I might end up an old maid.

So last night the animal medic guy (Bob) showed up at my door and off we went to a party at one of his friends house. When we walked in, there were about twenty people with loud music playing and lots of alcohol being drunk, Typical party. Bob immediately left me to talk to his friends and he figured I would go join the company of the few girls that were there. But instead I saw a guy with long hair and a beard, sitting on the floor smoking a joint. So I sat down next to him and he offered me a hit and I took it. We started laughing and enjoying each others' company and then he asked why I was with Bob, who he considered a real ass hole. I told him sometimes you have to make a choice and all the options are bad.

Finally Bob found me again and told me we were going to his place. I said goodbye to my new friend and followed Bob out the door. At his apartment there was the usual kissing and grabbing and groping I've come to expect from men. But then in the heat of the moment, when it could have gone either way, I gave Bob a push and said, "I'm not that kind of girl." That surprised the hell out of him and me too.

He was drunk and looked at me trying to figure out if I was just fooling around or if I really meant it. For my part I was ready to defend my new found virtue and fight for it if necessary. In the end, Bob figured I wasn't worth the hassle and drove me home.

The last thing I said to him as I left the car was."it was real and it was nice but it wasn't real nice."

We were young when we met, we were both 16. At that time my mom, step dad and I were having a very hard time running the dairy farm. There was a lot of stress and things were looking bad until David showed up. Even at 16 he made a great difference in our lives and especially mine. He was as dedicated to the farm and the cows as I was and we would work together day in and day out. It was wonderful. I got to the point where I was so grateful that I would do anything for him. He had about 15 brothers and sisters so he didn’t get much attention growing up.

I remember going to Walmart with him and realizing that he had never been in a big store like that and started to get really nervous to the point where I had to take him outside. That’s how pure he was.

After a few years he got married and brought his wife to live on the farm too. But our relationship didn’t change. We were still dedicated to the cows and making the dairy work was the most important thing to us.

One night I dreamt that some kind of monster was attacking the farm and I tried to stop it but it was too strong for me and then David came and overcame the monster. But then as the monster ran away, he went after it and in the dream I had the feeling he wasn’t coming back. That killing this monster was his destiny.

Well the night before he left I woke up from a sound sleep because the house was filling up with smoke. Now I usually just sleep with a T-shirt and ran down to the wood stove in the basement without stopping to put more on. Our houses are connected in the basement and David had also smelled the smoke and came running down. It turned out to be just a stove pipe had come lose and it was soon fixed. But as we looked at each other I felt something I had never felt before. I felt for the first time that I wanted to give myself completely to a man. It didn’t happen of course but I guess I’m still waiting to feel like that again to the person I marry.