Labors of Love
A few visits from a brave (and horny?) fox rattled my nerves. But the fox was only a small blip in a much more troublesome month…
The air was crisp and cool enough to feel like early morning, even though it was mid-afternoon in what was turning out to be an unseasonably cold May. I don’t know why I did it; the window is far enough from the sink that turning to look out it didn’t make a ton of sense. But the minute I did, I could see the orange of the fox against the red of the barn — more sienna-colored in the sunlight than a real orangey orange.
It’s odd to me, looking back, at how calm I had been. I didn’t shout or even swallow a surprise. Instead, I slammed my fist against the window pane, not with fury or fright — but to show the fox that I meant business. And away it went, heeding my warning, at least in the short-term.
I turned to the dog, spread out in a bright sun spot — “that’s your job you know.” I don’t think she cared.
It wasn’t until I walked back into my spacious home office that my chest started to squeeze — not from the fox, but from all of the other predators. Time. Money. Bosses. Clients.
“The fox was a small blip in a more troublesome month...”
And maybe that was the thing, really — the basis for my earlier calm. The fox was a small blip in a more troublesome month — a long line of threats, maybe not to my life, but certainly to my liberty and pursuit of happiness.
We were in big proposal season — trying to convince a long list of Federal agencies to pick us over the next guy, that we were better, and smarter, and that we understood what they needed, even though none of what they were asking for was entirely clear. While we were doing that, we were ignoring the growing list of contracts we were ending, ignoring the choices that that might provoke. And two team members — our best — were headed out on maternity leave.
With every meeting I felt the emotional labor of running a department. To be profitable. To be an expert. To create opportunity. To keep everyone in high spirits despite the pressures. Add to that that I had been working 50 or more hours a week, which could be worse, but was certainly more than my requisite 40. And it was cutting into farm time during the one season we couldn’t afford to mess up.
And I felt emotional labor there, too — of choosing my day job over the farm. Which really meant choosing work over my family in a way. We had wanted to be here. We had chosen to be here. I couldn’t un-choose that now. Nor should I have needed to.
Putting on overalls for the last few hours of daylight seemed like more of a chore than it was worth. But I was afraid of ticks and I couldn’t very well stay inside. Brad was building the garden fence between rain storms and cold weather; I owed him what energy I had left.
When given the chance, I’d choose to work with the post hole digger, even though it was nearly my height, and I knew I’d be sore tomorrow. Pushing it deeper and deeper into the ground, pulling out soil again and again until the hole was deep enough was cheaper than therapy and worked better.
“I’ll sleep well tonight,” I thought as I knelt to dislodge a rock from the heavy clay.
But by the time I hit my pillow, the aches in my body couldn’t overcome the activity in my brain.
The fox.
“In the fury of the workday, I had forgotten about her bravery.”
In the fury of the workday, I had forgotten about her bravery — being out in the middle of the day like that. So close to people, all in the name of a meal. Worse yet, I had forgotten about the chicken coop door — which had broken a few weeks before and was now permanently held open inside of the run. The fox would only have to dig under the first fence and she’d have a full meal entirely at her disposal. Plus leftovers.
I lay there and I wondered if she’d noticed during her scouting mission today. I wondered if she’d be back tonight to test a few weak spots, to make a plan. If she didn’t, she should, I thought. She’d have both time and darkness on her side.
This hadn’t been the first time that the fox had interrupted my sleep. Not a few weeks earlier, I had woken from a dead sleep to the screams of what I thought was an injured child. I woke Brad in time for the motion-detected light in our driveway to flick on and off. On and off. Peering out either side of the bedroom blinds, we could see her pacing the driveway and screaming — a female fox crying for a mate.
Now, weeks later, I swore I could hear her again, rummaging through our woods, ready to fuel her unborn litter (assuming her last visit had yielded a satisfactory result). Brad laughed and rolled to my side of the bed, where I lay on my back, hands folded to my chest like a paranoid mummy. “We built for this, remember? It’s going to be fine.”
“No. No, we didn’t.” I reminded him that what we built, we had built for duplication, redundancy — to ensure that no one thing could take down the entire flock. When working together, the door and the fence were a stronghold. When one of those was broken or removed, the other became a single point of failure.
He smiled and rolled back to his side — back to his book, back to relative peace — while my nightly mind spiral began. Other failures. Other risks. Work. Home. Family. Childhood. Bad nights. Worse mornings. Things I didn’t say. Things I probably shouldn’t have. All a draining and droning lullaby apparently, because suddenly I woke to the typical morning chortle from the chickens — not a crow exactly, but a reminder that laying an egg was a labor all its own.
For more on work in all it’s glory…
This essay was created from a writing prompt from Illuminate, a writing program by The Kindred Voice. This month, I’m joined by the following amazing women, each of us writing about “work” — emotional work, the work of motherhood, actual job-related work… you name it:
How Do You Define 'Work'? by Adeola Sheehy
What Do You Do? by Hannah Kewley
They Say a Mother's Work is Never Done by Leesha Mony
Working in the Margins by Laci Hoyt
You Gotta Work B**ch by Amy Rich
on my terms. by Eunice Brownlee
I Am a Writer by Christine Carpenter
Potted Houseplant by Crystal James