A Lovely Day, Manure Notwithstanding

As a favor to our friends at SuperSuris, we will be working as hands on the farm every weekend during the show season.  This is formalizing our working relationship with them, which has been largely casual up 'till now, while possibly allowing us to purchase a second animal.  As their first auction is this weekend, in Las Vegas no less, I spent the weekend bent over a pitchfork, learning all the feeding and cleaning tasks necessary of a given weekend. 

Far from an onerous task, cleaning the barns has the ancillary benefit of allowing me to interact with the animals and to work alongside them, complete with their curious glances and intent hums.  I quickly found that by singing they would cluster around, trying to figure out what I was doing.  I got to know so many of them that I haven't seen much of that it was well worth the smell and the hard work.

On the many trips to the manure pile I made sure to stop and look around me.  The snow has nearly all melted, thanks to an unseasonably warm front which brought us a week of rain, and all the moisture is rising out of the ground as a low lying fog.  It is at times both eerie and beautiful and an earnest sampling of the spring to come.  The alpacas were enjoying the temporary thaw, pronking and prancing all over the fields they have mostly abandoned due to the snow and ice.  I loved it.