Christmas letter 2002 - taking care

Dec. 19, 2002

Dear family and friends,

Some years are remembered for thrilling vacations or new jobs or maybe, if you're being honest with yourself, a change in attitude. We will remember 2002 as a year for confronting some of our beliefs about life and death.

Taking care of Amity Hills Farm last summer while our friend Edwin was in Santa Fe sounded idyllic. We fed chickens and geese and miniature donkeys and put in a big garden. There were three new dogs -- Ben, Mickey and Dandy -- to play with. Two donkeys and many puppies, kittens and chickens were born on our watch. We looked Creation in the eye. Something new began life and often life abruptly ended at the farm almost daily.

First we lost a newborn kitten that appeared one morning in the barnyard looking like nothing more than a lump in the dirt. We kept it warm and fed it formula, but the kitten died. Then Mickey, one of the Great Pyrenees dogs, gave birth to a huge litter of white puppies. We were so happy, but one by one they began dying. It seemed each time we returned to the farm one of them was missing.

DC renamed Amity Hills Farm the Farm of Death.

Mickey often moved the puppies around the farm. One of her favorite hideouts was under the bridge over the creek. One morning when only three puppies were left we arrived at the farm and found Mickey under the bridge, but only one puppy. The other two were down the bank and almost hidden in the weeds except for their whimpers. We decided to take the puppies home with us.

Then the puppies began losing their fur. Our vet diagnosed the disease as rare and sometimes fatal. Every day we bathed them in a chemical solution, gave them steroids and antibiotics, and held their squirming bodies as their mouths gulped goat's milk from a bottle.

We named the biggest one Bear, the multicolored one Patches and the baldest one Possum. Eventually their health rebounded and they went back to the farm. Possum already has a new home on a farm in a distant town.

Amity Hills Farm taught DC something new about nature. Before last summer, she thought of the natural world as a kind of benign Eden. She differentiated that world from the one occupied by human beings, who she knows to be capable of cruelty. Now that nature seems just as cruel, she feels responsible for protecting animals from each other as well as from humans. DC isn't so keen these days on all that God allows.

An injury helped Sam rediscover life without golf, although he prefers life with. DC still plays no sports but hardly ever stops moving.

Our little beagle Alvie is under going dangerous heartworm treatments again. He's tougher than any of us. Hank and Lucy are 7 1/2 years old now, middle-aged in dog years. They've caught up to us.

Sam's view of the farm is slightly different from DC's. Holding another being in your arms and trying to keep it alive, you never question the value of that life or the meaning. We fight, sometimes against each other, to prevent extinction because our hearts know that each thing on Earth contains the same Life Force we feel inside ourselves. What endangers one of us endangers us all.

Caring for ourselves, each other and our whirling home is all that's asked.

Merry Christmas,

DC and Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.