Trauma Farm Read Free

the cat door! I know that Wu, despite his intrepidity, will be sitting in the dark like a dummy, staring at the door that betrayed him, and I can’t help smiling. I lie back in bed, thinking mouse thoughts. Terror and freedom. They live side by side. My eyes are now wide open.
    I question the world, which means I sleep like the spring on my water pump—ready to work as soon as the switch level is too low or too high. When I was wild and twenty I fashioned words on a diet of Southern Comfort—raw on the belly and harder still on the nerves. I often wouldn’t fall into bed until four in the morning, catching only a couple hours of sleep before I went to work. Now my body has reversed itself, and I sleep early, waking often, fevered, eager to begin each day—one less sunrise to witness in a lifetime. I’m hot under the comforter. I slip out of bed while I listen to the soft bubbling of Sharon’s breath. She will sleep for hours yet, waking momentarily, perhaps, if she senses I’m going downstairs—to call for tea, which I will bring up, steaming, and leave to grow cold on her night table, since she will have already faded back into the luxury of sleep.
    When I open the mud room door a dog rouses. It’s Olive, our Labrador-Rottweiler cross, unwinding out of her Japanese/Thai/raincoast-fusion doghouse, one of the more absurd structures I’ve built over the years. She’s short-furred, large, black, and muscled like a bodybuilder on steroids. Jen, the border collie, our herd dog, stirs beneath her doghouse. Jen prefers hidey-holes and ungratefully sleeps under the deck and the house I built for her. She slithers out and arrives like a dart, eager. They expect raccoons—the opportunity to prove themselves in the protection of the farm—but tonight we’re only walking. I step into my gumboots. They’re stagged—cut off at six inches high because that makes them easier to pull on, and as anyone who wears gumboots knows, if you stick your feet into mud deeper than six inches, it’s going to get messy whatever you’re wearing. I close the door softly and take the path behind the house with the ease of a man long-lived in his home and on the land he’s worked. I’m a raincoast boy, in my element. I walk this landscape one or two nights a year. Depending on the season and my mood, I might heat a mug of hot milk or run a glass of cold water and slice lemon into it. I find my way to our back road where the cedars are six feet thick—the dogs panting at my side, wondering what’s up. Nothing. Only the night, only the lovely darkness.
    I dislike clothing because my syndrome made my skin so sensitive every touch almost burned me until I was twenty and the treatments began. Years of steroid injections have blunted that raw barrier, so sometimes I relish small delicate contacts, like the damp, humid air of a summer night. Now I want to feel the world on my skin, especially when the world is tender. That’s why, on these special occasions, I enjoy walking naked in the forest. This was once common to the human species. Today, it is so rare that most people regard it as kinky, or even disturbed, which is only more evidence of the growing separation between us and the wilderness that was once home.
    I live in a temperate island climate. That makes it easy to slip out from under our goose-down coverlet on a night like this—the shortest of the year. The solstice. The plants are gearing up for summer while washed in the silver moonlight. Everything looks like an old science-fiction film. The tomatoes already want to flower, the snow peas are extending their green tendrils. The ferns are Jurassic.
    Walking among the cedars I feel as if I’m also made of quicksilver, cool and pale. The moon, peeking between branches, is actually a dark landscape, one of the least reflective objects in our planetary system. Its intensity is equivalent to only a quarter of a burning candle—hard to believe when witnessing this spray of silver and