Moo Cows

4” of snow at the Farm. It’s not even November. Mother Nature firing a shot across the bow. Time is marching on.

Cold nights, falling leaves, and SNOW tell us that time is marching on while Baker is forever a newborn in our minds and hearts. It’s soothing on the one hand to know that the earth still turns on its axis and we’re revolving around the sun, moving into shadow for a few months, but on the other hand it’s a cruel reminder of the life that Baker doesn’t get to live – the ghost costumes he won’t wear, the mittens he won’t lose, the snowballs he won’t throw.

He’s forever a baby, our baby, stuck in the suspended animation of his interrupted life.

We’ll put the Farm into suspended animation for a while – draining the pipes and making the old place weathertight against winter storms.

It’s a place apart from our everyday lives where we can think of Baker unencumbered by routine and obligation. At home we think, “Would Baker’s room be warm enough?” “How would it feel to be working part time?”

At the Farm I can think about him at another level– the spiritual level, the universal level. I see my boy in the sunrise and hear him in the rushing brook; I feel him in the wind that rushes up the valley and sweeps under the door, and I laugh at the Holsteins at our neighbor’s farm and think about Baker “mooing” at his cow friends.