That Look

If you read spy novels, you have learned to read the tell of characters that people your fictional worlds. If you know me well, you can read the tells that my life is raging beyond bounds: clutter abounds and I do not get to blog. Piles strewn, like mental labyrinths, can be navigated, but nothing compensates for a stockpile of posts piling like leaves, needing collection. So it is that this post is a retrospective, something that happened last weekend. It was an event, and it had that look.

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The notion of that look has morphed through time. Younger and thinner, I had that look, and walking through Hess's, I was often mistaken for a model. Grand fun. My mother loved every minute. Then, as you move through life, that look becomes a child's face on the moment of crumbling into something that will keep you up nights. That look on Cierra's face, poking out through the plastic sheets, had the tell. She was there, but somehow I knew Et Cetera was not. A mother's instinct easily transfers to animals, so I got on the golf cart determined to see if the fence was breached. Not. Then I saw her, in the middle of an alfalfa field, munching, determined not be to be lured. Long story short: when you have only you to count on, you pray to God and your favorite saint to give you that one chance you have to catch the wayward one. Prayers answered and Et Cetera rewarded with more grain than she deserved, but safely home.

Now we use the electric fence, which I hate but see as necessary. Still I am haunted about how she escaped. Next Friday we are adding a bottom row of fencing, and before the birth of our first cria, two things will happen: we WILL turn the electric fence off, and we WILL install a containment fence on the outside perimeter of our first fence. I have relearned how there are no sure things in life, just those things on which you hang your hopes and dreams, and you do what is necessary to insure their safety.