Today’s thoughts as I cleaned the goat pen. There are many names for manure, shit, poop, crap, and dung included. They don’t call it womanure because this is an additional syllable. Men pick it up. Maybe this is the manly thing to do. As in, Man pick up your manure. Dunno.

There is a comparison to be made here. Both books and manure must be dealt with immediately, or else I will have too much of either on my hands. People say to me, “Oh, you shouldn’t work so hard,” to which I say right just to end the conversation. The problem with books is that they, like manure, pile up leaving me with more to handle the next day if I shirk my work.

I didn’t want to clean the goat pen and shed today. The only day in which I have time to deal is Sundays. The weather has been nice the past few Sundays, and so I should have done it then, but then I was busy. I also took the little time I had and got the horses out. (It’s a given that I will clean their enclosure, I do this at least once every day no matter what.)

Today it was raining – luck of the draw. I worked for a bit on my executive director’s report hoping the rain would let up. It did not. I had to get the job done because I felt like it was the point of no return. If I waited any longer, a physically tough task would have been tougher. Also, it is soon going to freeze, and I knew that if I didn’t do this today, that I would have had to wait until spring. So I began by cleaning the outside pen. I first gathered up the tools of my trade, flat rake, hedge row rake, grain shovel, and pitchfork.

Sassy

I picked up the soiled bedding with a pitchfork and tossed it over the wire fence. It was raining, and so the fork loads were heavy. And I cleaned off the roof of Sassy’s yard shed, so she now has a clean surface to hang out on. All this time, the goats were outside the pen eating some hay that I’d set out for them. This took a while of course. Pete appeared at the very last minute and tossed a pitchfork load over the fence.

Done, I went inside with Pete and had lunch. I hadn’t thought of the consequences of my actions, that it would be hard, cleaning the shed on a full belly. The space that the goats inhabit is really small and for this reason it’s hard for me to move around with any tools in hand. This time, I (using a pitchfork) put the manure into muck buckets and then hauled them out into the covered front area.

This secondary task was far more onerous than was the first task. I asked Pete, who was moving horse manure into the compost station and turning it with the tractor, to take the manure away. He drove the tractor up to the upper quadrant and did as I asked, dumping the soiled bedding behind the playground of higher learning.

I finally got the job done. I think I filled several chicken feed bags and 12 muck buckets full of crap. Oddly enough, the sense of accomplishment was much like the sense of accomplishment that I feel when I distribute books. Could it be that I’m using the same part of the brain for both activities? It is quite likely.

Next: 272. 10/12/26: A Tough Dispatch to Write