Moo If You Love Mozart-Part II

July 30th, 2011

TO CONTINUE WHERE I LEFT OFF YESTERDAY…..

Arm resting on my open window, I started my careful cow-pie-avoiding weave.  In desultory fashion, heads wagging and tails switching, the cows moved out of my way.  The calves, like all young ones, took the diversion of my car’s presence as an excuse to wiggle, buck, leap and spring hither and yon.  All was moving along well until I found myself fender to nose with a large black cow. Her thick pink raspy tongue licked her nose.  We were close enough that I could count the long black eyelashes above gentle eyes, which surveyed me with an expression of tender sadness and perplexity.  “Why disturb my reverie by making me move?” she seemed to ask.  “Until you came along I had all day to decide whether to go or left or go right,” I imagined her thinking, if indeed she were capable of such a thought.  “Do you really expect me to make such a crucial decision now, just because you need to get to the other side?   Of me…”

She was right of course.  I couldn’t honk at her to move.  After all, I was transitory.  She lived here.  (more…)

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Moo If You Love Mozart-Part I

July 29th, 2011

There’s a two-lane blacktop that runs by our ranch headquarters, a throwback to what I imagine Route 66 might have been like fifty years ago. For most of the day it’s empty except for an occasional cattle, hay or logging truck roaring past on its heavily-laden way to the auction barns and lumber mills of the Front Range of Colorado.    The big rigs are passed by sprightly Subarus sporting the requisite mohawk of a bicycle or two sticking up from their roof.  A caravan of RVs may lumber along, towing boats or other vehicles behind, interrupted now and then by the burping chop of a Harley Davidson club.

This highway might seem unique, but it’s not. There’s another even emptier one about 13 miles west of us.  Like two long arms passionately  hugging the rambling sagebrush hills in between, the two highways meet and cross over in our county’s main, and only, town: Walden.  They form two sides of a snaking, skinny triangle, the base of which  is a sparsely used dirt road that just happens to start right across from our hay shed.
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Ethiopia: Coffee and Qat–Dispatch 6

March 9th, 2011

So, this is adieu. Or for those of you whom I live near, a soon to be given hug and hello.  I left Ethiopia two days ago.  Brunhilde’s been given the cleaning of her life, right down to a tickley sort of tool inserted into her vents to swipe the dust away from those little orifices.  Her dashboard’s been Armor-All’d, her engine steam cleaned, her bare body parts oxy-coated.   I, too, have gotten clean, with a long, long, long hot shower to make up for all the ones I missed these passed two months, as well as a mega-pedicure session, lasting two hours over two days, which, among other things, required shaving off two-months accumulation of hard dry heel skin with a scalpel. Hey, a girl’s gotta do what she’s gotta do.

This evening, after our customs agents return from prayer at the mosque, we will put Brunhilde in a container and say good-bye to her for awhile.  She’s been a true champ, her fortitude attested to by two rear tires so battered by tough roads that they look like rats have feasted on them, and an air conditioning hose that got rattled to pieces, leaving a portion of itself somewhere on the long dirt road between Dire Dawa and the Djibouti-Ethiopia border.  It’s been an extraordinary trip, filled with indelible images, none of which I expected to see, all of which will, I’m sure, only get more vivid as time passes.

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Ethiopia: Coffee and Qat–Dispatch 5

February 18th, 2011

Oh, to be a Hamer woman, hair in ochre ringlets glistening with fat that drips down her neck, staining earthy red the heavy metal necklace squeezed tight around her neck. Or the pride of the Mursi tribe, with a 4-inch plate stretching her bottom lip until it could be the coaster for a husband’s beer glass. Or a proud Beni wife, body covered in large welts, the scarred reminder of the night she showed her love for her future husband by allowing her arms, back, legs, belly to be whipped until she bled. And then begged to be lashed some more in a show of extreme devotion destined to win his heart. And of course his family’s cows.

Hamer woman on the road to fetch water

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Ethiopia: Coffee and Qat–Dispatch 4

February 12th, 2011

Yesterday I had what I like to call a calorie-free lunch. It was one of those where food comes in the front door, barely stays long enough for a polite howdy-do with my stomach, then runs out the back door faster than you can say “Uh oh.” Such a speedy exit, such lack of civility. I hate it when that happens. This lunch of Ethiopian fasting foods, in a roadside establishment whose appearance coincided with our hunger pangs, was perfectly enjoyable while it lasted, the colorful display delighting both the eyes and the taste buds. Ethiopians have plentiful religious holidays on which they fast until 2:45pm. But that’s not all.

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