In Our Own Ways, We All Act Our Age.

Apparently, I’ve started using voles to aerate my farm.

It amazes me how much the wildlife on my farm changes year to year. Some years we were absolutely flooded with rabbits. The last few years I haven’t seen one. There have been herds of twenty deer in the pasture, families of coyotes, dozens of migrating pelicans on the pond.

This year’s invasion is voles. The entire farm has been turned inside out. They’ve stayed out of the horse pens but have tilled the soil on either side of my driveway between the road and the house. From the amount of dirt piled up, the entire farm might implode. Poison isn’t an option. I trapped them as a kid. Not going back there. I decided on solar-powered sonic deterrents. Before I could locate some, the voles crossed the line into the backyard. We found a huge fresh pile of dirt with that faint circle that lets you know someone is close by.

Jolene stepped up. She believes the best defense is a good offense, so she began digging down to confront the vole. That seemed fair. When she had the entry just right, she sat about five feet away and waited. She continues to patiently stand guard.

This is who Jolene is now. She’s a dog that can walk past a pair of Crocs without running outside with one. She walks beside me and has a reliable recall. She is mature enough to take this rodent control job seriously. After so many intense months of relentless puppy play, Jolene is acting her age.

Mister and I look at each other and shrug. We’ve barely seen her all week. She is very serious about these intruders, out there every daylight hour, and it seems to be working. Now Mister and I have uninterrupted noodle time. We excel at sitting around and looking at each other soulfully.

I acted my age this week, too. There’s a long history in this country of women of a certain age taking on community work. As long as I have voted, and I’ve never missed an election, I’ve seen elder women at the polling place doing the necessary work. It still comes as a total surprise to me that I am that age, but I asked to be considered.

I did a bit of research on Colorado voting. It ends up that Colorado’s system is widely acknowledged for getting it right. But if you have doubts, sign up to work. The process has intricate circuits of checks and double checks. We have always been the country of free and fair elections, and seeing the back side of the process made me proud.

There’s some pretty serious training involved. In Colorado, each registered voter automatically receives a mail-in ballot, but they can bring it to a voting place, mail it, or use it at home to mark their choices and then come to a polling place to cast a paper ballot. Voters can register on election day, so we learn that procedure, too.

This process requires bipartisan participation. Whether it’s a red county or a blue county, both sides are equally represented. That’s one of the things that appeals to me: working with people from different parties who believe in the right to vote. There was a sprinkling of men in the group, and a few folks in their 40s. The majority looked like me. Half had worked previous elections, and some recognized each other like old friends.

We met in a government building for training. A full day sitting in a windowless room behind a computer learning how voting is structured. Your backside starts hurting about ten in the morning. We were given a handout of rules and procedures that ran over sixty pages. At first it sounds like gibberish, but once you learn the acronyms, it gets easier. Then we learned to use the secure computer software to search for registrations, check the voter in three places, and finally issue their unique ballot. We practiced each eventuality again and again.

In 1893, Colorado became the second state to grant women’s suffrage. It was 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment was finally law. What can I say? I’m a politics geek. Recently, some extremists have suggested women should no longer have that right. It sounds far-fetched, but other rights have been revoked. I’ll stand guard here.

I’m convinced the process is solid. No one mentioned the recent attacks on the integrity of the midterm elections. No one needed to. They will have to get by a bunch of gray-haired women to wreak havoc, and one of them will be me.

Meanwhile, there is duck mucking to do. Mister would like you to know their poop is delectable. I think the ducks perpetrate olfactory crimes. I was raking up the unholy-smelling, murky substance that used to be straw. When I do this, the ducks stay in their little house while I shovel the stinky stuff out, leaving the door open to load my bucket. The pen is just the right size that it takes some coordination, especially on ground that is not only muddy but also slimy.

But now the ladies know they get turnout. For the first time, they ran out of their house, screaming and flapping. They didn’t shove me out of the way, but definitely caught me off guard. I was mid-shovel, and at a precarious angle. Not sure if the dogs were outside, I nearly panicked thinking of those long skinny necks and how Mister has behaved in the past around birds. It would have been a bad idea to scream, so I peered out and quietly said, Hey, Mister.

He turned and looked at me calmly. He was standing with the ducks, in a huddle by the fence. He said, I have your ducks here.

My first instinct was to grab him and get him in the house. Mister looked at me a little nervously, like he might be in trouble. I walked over, and he stepped away from the ducks. I started walking them back towards their pen and invited Mister to come beside me. Miraculously, he did. When we got to the door, he flanked them to the side, keeping a slow, deliberate stride. The ducks went in. Jolene sat in a lawn chair all this time, not remotely interested.

Mister is no saint. He still runs and barks at the sheep. He still threatens homicide to the barn cat every time he builds a monument to his poop mere feet outside of Mister’s yard. Being a rescue dog, I don’t know his exact age, but I see his body beginning to slow down. It was the first time he’s been able to hear my voice over his own excitement. It’s bittersweet. Mister looked at me like an aging Cary Grant. Gray around the muzzle but much too charming.

In hindsight, having the duck pen in the yard might have been ill-advised. Mister and the ladies spend a certain amount of time each day nose-to-beak. The ducks are mature now. Maybe they’ve become friends and will soon spend afternoons playing pinochle.

Expectations are too often wrong, and it’s easy to take time for granted. We need to keep up. The thing about aging is that everybody starts trading jobs. Youngsters become adults. Midlife creeps on. Elders look for help from younger folks. Some of us fight the norm, and some of us are content. We take on the tasks that others have done. We pay our good fortune forward. The pendulum of opinion swings one way and then the other. Who winds up with these ducks is hard to say.

We still have a choice about the world we want. Vote your conscience. Please, use your vote.

…  #noai #humanart

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Women Aging Cantankerously