Another week on Whidbey

It’s my last full day on the island, my least favorite day in the weeks I spend here. It’s the day I clean the Buddha House. That’s part of the deal, leaving it as clean as you found it. In my case, it’s usually cleaner than I found it because I have the standards of an earth type, not the air and fires who come to meditate and don’t seem to notice rice crusted to plates and soy sauce smeared on the table. When I got here a week ago, I told Tommie that I had never seen the Buddha House this clean. She said no one had stayed in it since I was last there.

Windhorse, the retreat center and the Buddha House in particular, feel like a second home. For the past three years I have come for a week four times a year. The drive is familiar, the routine comforting. The sounds and smells evoke a quiet joy.

The sounds are principally the wind and the birds with occasional barking of dogs and braying of goats across the road as well as the sound of piano and singing. I contribute to the singing because I usually take two voice lessons in the weeks I am here and because I sing to the deer. I sing “V’adoro pupille” from Handel’s Julius Caesar. I want the deer to recognize me as the being who sings and doesn’t frighten. (Except for the time I tried to take a pan of water to the fawn I thought was wounded.) (Or when I get fixated on wanting to make friends with them and end up behaving like a stalker.)

I haven’t seen much of the deer. Four very young deer have made their home here. These would be the four fawns from last September, including the one I frightened with a pan of water. The retreat is pretty much their oyster.

I had one sighting of a tiny new fawn the day Tommie and I drove into Freeland for groceries. We were still in the woods a mile or so from the highway when we startled the doe and fawn by the side of the road. We stopped and watched the little one take off down the middle of the road, staggering like the toddler he was while the mother divided her attention between him and us. The fawn—not more than a foot high—finally crashed into the brush and the doe joined him.

The goats win the aroma competition, acing out the fragrance of incense and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day lavender dish soap. Two new kids bring the number of babies across the road to seven. They bring me across the road several times a day. I have designated goat clothes this trip since after my last visit, every piece of clothing I owned had goat poop on it.(I should explain how this happens: the goats poop in their straw. They go about their lives without discrimination as to where they put their hooves. Then they jump on me.)

Family Photo

The five kids born in March have doubled in size but they still jump on me. I notice the weight difference because they would knock me off my feet if the one in back wasn’t a force against the one in front. I grab their legs when they jump on me and sing “Dance with me, I want my arms around you” and add my favorite part of the song:

Heaven, I’m in heaven
And the cares that hang around me through the week
Seem to vanish like a gambler’s lucky streak
When we’re out together, dancing cheek to cheek.

I believe I’m on firm ground in stating that goats weren’t what Irving Berlin had in mind with that song.

The two new kids are about three weeks old but are already so big it takes a minute to sort them out from the pack. A male and a female, they both have white spots on brown and black hair like dog markings. The spotted bull in another pen is clearly the sire. The long-suffering nanny with the wondrous udder impeding her every move and seven kids pestering her is the mother.

The new kids

The loveys

This nanny in a yard full of adorable babies is surprisingly the first animal I think of when I get up in the morning, maybe even more than the staggering toddler of a faun. She and I have forged a bond that touches me deeply. It started the day I was trying to get a decent picture of the fast moving kids with a slow moving camera shutter. I felt something rubbing my back, up and down, over and over. When I finally gave this sensation my attention, I found the nanny wanting to put her long neck on my breast, push her face close to mine and gaze into my eyes. Every time I visit, she and I have the intimate exchange of two old souls.

Mama

The goats have stripped every tree limb they can reach—they like alder and maple leaves—so I pull down the higher branches and let them munch. They climb all over each other, the nanny and me to get as much as they can for as long as I am willing to stand there. I noticed the first time I did this, the two littlest kids wanted to join in but weren’t quite sure what we were doing. When they figured out they could eat these green things, they held their own with their older siblings.

I’ll miss them.

Now I need to clean the Buddha House.