What I wrote on Father’s Day
Gunnar throttled one of Peter’s hens today. Amid the peace of a near-perfectly-knit day, an unusual day composed of good will, love, & a nod to convention, a dog did what he is wired to do: unsupervised for a moment he chased a hen, and as is in his nature, he broke her neck. We have no idea how Gunnar got to her.
We all screamed, thrashing in the brutal intersection of nature & opportunity. The garden dimmed, the silence shattered into the noises we made that surely reached the lakes, because she was not the first hen to encounter her demise thusly. Andrew’s two golden retrievers and our Gunnar, a German shorthair (we’ve not known which culprit), have sadly been the agents of similar untidy ends of three hens of those we’ve started raising, in the last three years, for their eggs and their wondrous, unknowable presences on our patch of dirt and hopeful ground.
We have worked to adjust, accommodate, learn and tap into rural wisdoms about harmonies among the inhabitants of our place.
Earlier, I sat in a quiet moment in our bedroom, penning a ditty on a card for Peter on this Father’s Day. To steady my hand, I pulled a book from a pile underneath a small antique side-table from my long-deceased and much adored arch and witty uncle. He periodically shipped me an old piece, an ancient ratty Persian carpet, family photos reproduced from his ordered and catalogued archives, ensuring he’d always be with me in the ways that material touch can carry memory.
Peter had given me the book, Ghosts, by Roger Clark, nine years ago for my birthday. I’d started to read it, became distracted, and there it sat, pulsing away for its moment, or should I say, there it sat, brimming with momentous resonances I could never have imagined, waiting for revisiting.
Peter buried his sweet pullet behind the pond, at the corner of the pasture she’d pecked and explored as she was let out of the coop every day, and I sat on the patio, angry and heartsick with the image of this feathered clump of life twitching her end as we cried and roared at Gunnar. I’d accused the goldens and had to shout my apologies to Andrew, who came running from his back barn, when Peter told me, no, no, with tears streaming, it was Gunnar.
There is a stillness when the twilight comes. Vesper, the time of evening, a prayer, the liminal slow-turning from one day into the next, from the known to the unknown, when all that breathes and persists, all that went before until it became today, moves on, inexorably. The day is soon to be done.
I’d been sitting on the patio, sad. We aren’t farmers, perhaps inured to scenes like this. We’re people who searched for an edge environment, eschewing certain conveniences and habituations that ease the demands of daily life for others. Perhaps we overreacted, but we are learning and each time we lose an animal—mostly our pets— we grieve. When we’ve lost our pasture animals we vow to come closer to whatever lessons await to enable our improvements as their caretakers.
I’d brought Ghosts downstairs after penning the card for Peter. I opened it up again, to my long-ago bookmark.
I can’t say exactly why, but as I read and drifted away into the pages, which are not about proving whether or not ghosts are real, but, as Clark writes, about what we see when we see a ghost, and the stories we tell each other about them, of a sudden I looked up.
The world, my world, our world, stopped for an instant.
The colors of the landscape strobed brighter, the green away to the pond intense, the potted floral pinks and hots of what I think of as our patio garden room heating into the nanosecond; nothing moved, and there, in homeostasis, the gift of homeostasis, all the wee souls buried here, our beloved pets and creatures, the energies and persistences of those humans as well who came before us here, alive in their pasts in the old farmhouse built in 1842, all, all arrived in some fullness in the panoply that can never be measured or retained.
The air in a moment gone forever was vibrant; all was balanced. I took a photo. Every night the sun going down glows for some seconds in a purely round verdant aperture amid the tangled honeysuckle, spirea and evergreen, a golden orb, and then gone, as it rolls on its westward journey.
I don’t know why, but I was calmed. Homeostasis. All is well.

