I woke up yesterday morning with a pounding headache in a bed that wasn’t mine. My first thought after acknowledging the pain was about the car. I’m using my mom’s and I remembered she had arranged to get it inspected at 7:30 that morning. It was definitely too late for that. My second thought was about the person lying next to me. I lingered on...

perseverance: steadfastness in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success I cooked dinner tonight, I cut my finger and then I cried. I cried because I didn’t know what I was making when I started, and it was starting to show. Only I was so sure I wanted to make dinner, and my uncertainty about the end result wasn’t stopping me. So I just...

In order for my mom and I to put the outdoor furniture on the second floor of the barn today, we had to move the gate to the chicken coup and let them run in the lawn. As my mom pulled the gate aside, she let a big piece of wood crash down that make a loud noise. The chickens started running frantically, flapping their wings and clucking. My mom smiled. “I’d be a...

I worried that I wouldn’t be able to eat meat after seeing the turkeys die. Like after getting to know it would make it less edible. Instead, I found that a turkey looks more like a turkey to me when it’s dead and plucked than when it’s alive. In fact, I bet when it’s cooked it will look even more familiar. That said, I ate strictly vegetarian that...

Animals Are People Too  All four turkeys were slaughtered that day. I “watched” one be killed, and then went to work at the clothing store. All day I looked at the furs we have for sale and reconsidered my stance on them. “Well, they’re already dead, so it’s like recycling,” I reason to customers. “It’s kind of like they serve as an organ donor when...