This blog was going to be titled, 'The first year Take-Away', until yesterday. Yesterday, I helped my son prep 13 chickens from live to freezer. (Notice I didn't use the word KILL) As I was cutting the heads off of the chickens, after Zac bled them, it crossed my mind that this was a long way from IT at Emory!! There was no way I could have ever envisioned this life - and certainly not processing chickens and tripping over pigs!
Randy, a friend from Emory, and his partner Chuck, stopped by for the day. They were also moving to new lives in California and wanted to know what transitioning process we went through after we left Atlanta. It is a good thing to have people around you who ask these kinds of questions. Sometimes we need to stop, focus, and put into words - for ourselves - what we are experiencing and feeling. I told them that after 11 months, I felt that my mind had caught up with my body. I felt that I had finally 'centered' myself living on the farm - no longer wondering if I was in a dream. And I found myself looking forward for what I wanted to do next, rather than turning in circles trying to figure out where I was.
Which brings me to 'The First Year Take-Away'. Since Thanksgiving, I had been trying to think about what was the most important thing that I learned from this first year. I thought about how I learned to cut vegetables more professionally, build electric fences, relearn being patient around small children.... I thought about all the opportunities I was thankful for given to Alyce and I from Rachel and Zac. But then - as usual - life happened and I got my take-away.
So Rachel, the kids and I had returned late in the evening from shopping and buying a xmas tree. It was close to dinner and I had dinner to make and not that much time left to make it. But as we got out of the car - there were the pigs out in the field. The electric fence did not have enough juice and they quickly figure it out. So I ran to chase them into the fenced field where we keep the rabbit cages. As I led them into the fenced field - I saw that 4 rabbits had escaped out of their cages and were running around. It was almost 5:00 and it gets dark at 5:08 - so I went into panic mode. I called 7 year old Charlie to round up the rabbits as I corralled the pigs into the field. I noticed that the pigs had pulled out the rabbit feeders and they were laying out on the ground which is where the rabbits had escaped from. I was trying to fix the rabbit feeders back onto the cages and couldn't find the strings. By this time, I was angry at the disarray and my son pulls up the driveway. Charlie, by some miracle, got the rabbits into their cages and I sent him to ask his father for some string. Zac, my son, walks into the field and says - "Mom, it's OK, dinner will be late I will make snacks". I wanted to be angry, but at that moment I realized I had all the time in the world, there was no big catastrophe happening and what was I doing creating a panic!! It was a flash of insight - A SENSE OF HUMOR was missing from this situation - and there it was - my take-away for the year.
When you are a controller - it is hard to learn to have a sense of humor when everything isn't in it's right place. The world isn't going to end! Look at this family!!
So a merry christmas to all who read this. With lots of love and laughter....Kim
