Mid-May, after school was out, I found myself staring six weeks of unemployment in the face. This bothered me only until I began to envision myself reading novels in the shade of my favorite hickory tree, or making and eating entire batches of chocolate fudge, staying up late to watch black and white movies. How long had it been, I tried to recall, since I spent an entire day on my horse or in the treehouse? My mother, however, had no patience for such idleness, and she lined up myriad farm chores to occupy me--including mucking out her big horse barn. The manure was so deep in places that the horses were scraping their heads on the ceilings.

"How are we going to get rid of this stuff?" I asked.

"You're going to load it in the back of the truck," said Mom, who was conveniently under doctor's orders to refrain from activities such as scooping, lifting, and flinging. "And then we're going to sell it."

She placed ads in the Kalamazoo Gazette and The Kalamazoo Shopper, offering manure for 35 dollars a truckload. My portion for doing the physical work was a generous 20 bucks; Mom got 15 for providing the truck and the product. Right away we got calls. A surprising number of people wanted the stuff we were so anxious to get rid of.

I spent much of that unseasonably hot May and June sweating inside the barn, moving layer after layer of manure and urine-soaked straw. Periodically, Mom brought me quart jars of iced tea to keep up my spirits and electrolytes--I could tell she was even feeling a little guilty about my working so hard. I didn't tell her that, far from feeling wretched as I loaded the truck, I was feeling revived. For one thing, I was in good company. The horses and donkeys wandered through and sniffed at me; the dogs lay in holes they'd dug outside the barn door and chewed on chunks of manure; a little garter snake who lived in a hole in the dirt floor slithered in and out of the barn under the wall. And I was enjoying letting my thoughts wander. After months of sitting in class, focusing on the drone of professors and poring over books and notes, I finally had rejoined the world of the living.

Delivering the manure was a little embarrassing at first. The body of my mother's pick-up truck was rusting away and the two sides of the bed were held together with shock cords. Most of our deliveries were to west side neighborhoods, and it was problematic that construction crews had narrowed West Main to one lane in each direction. Stuck in a traffic jam, in ninety-five degree heat with a half a ton of manure in the back, we made quite a sensation. In the beginning, I put my hand over my face and hoped that I wouldn't see anyone I knew.

Within about a week, however, I began to see the absurdity of our situation as liberating. As we rattled through well-kept neighborhoods in a pickup full of stinking manure, I loosened the safety belt and hung my leg out the passenger side window, and I felt like master of all I surveyed. Perhaps this was how a prostitute felt toward a wealthy, respectable client; I might be dirty, but I have something you need.

Mom and I provided an excellent quality product at a fair price to decent folks. The people who bought our product were nice--after all, only very earthy people would order manure from the farm rather than buying it deodorized and sterilized in bags from the store. Customers often tried to help me shovel, but after I rebuffed their advances they stood back and smiled at the cascading dung. Hands on hips, eyes sparkling, they might have been fantasizing about late-summer gardens brimming with tomatoes and squash.

One man who lived just off Stadium Drive was planting a full acre of garden on land he'd rented from the utility company. After I unloaded the truck under the power lines, he took Mom and me to admire a mound across the way. "Do you know what that is?" he asked. "That's llama manure. And this pile over here, that's pig manure. And that's chicken." The pig pile was so fragrant that I figured he'd soon have trouble with his neighbors in the nearby apartment complex, but his enthusiasm was touching. I felt proud that our manure was out in the world, mingling with other manures, making things grow.

There is no vocation more honest than selling manure. Consider what most people do for a living. They go to work where they build crap, or sell crap, or move crap, or spin a line of bull over the telephone, all the while trying to convince the customer that their product is something other than crap. When I deliver a load of manure to someone's garden, the customer and I are both upfront about what we were dealing with. All I have to ask is, "Where do you want this shit?"

This experience has made me reflect on the idea of work in general. Any job is an important job, whether it is selling manure or selling insurance. People should take pride in what they do, and not assume that a low-paying job or a dirty job makes them second class citizens. And even the smelliest job has its rewards.

My darling Christopher works second shift at a paper converting plant in Parchment. "What are you doing today?" he asked me, as I walked him out to his truck. I told him I was going to spend the afternoon shovelling manure.

"Aren't we all," he said, nodding. "Aren't we all."

News in Brief:

Mary Szpur wrote from Chicago in March. "Are you having this warm weather? The people of Chicago have responded by acting like complete maniacs--driving crazy, wearing bikinis, everone out on streets and bikes, and fly-dumping their construction materials right next to our garbage cans, necessitating me to grovel to our aldermanic candidate ("Can you take care of this?")

Keren Hamel (1991 bike trip) visited Kalamazoo on her recent trip to Battle Creek where she had to teach some cereal makers how to use her software. She looks beautiful, but needs a little more meat on her bones. (God, how old and fat am I getting to be?) Keren writes from South Carolina about gaining security clearance to a restricted installation: "I think I passed my urine test, although it was kind of tricky. The drill sergeant was throwing orders at me at unbelievable speeds. I was somewhat perplexed after she told me to go behind door #3 and give her half a cup without flushing the toilet. When I asked her why I couldn't flush she said if I didn't know, that meant I didn't use drugs. I now have clearance into controlled areas of the plant."

My darling Christopher was very sick in February. A flu turned into bronchitis, which turned into pnemonia. For three weeks he could only lie on the couch and moan. By the end of three weeks the living room felt like a mausoleum; the cat, the dog and I just sat around staring at him, wondering if he would ever return to the living. He couldn't even watch television! Three weeks later he arose, twenty-five pounds lighter. His latest beer making venture has been Belgian Cherry Beer. Aging currently in 22-ounce bottles is an Oatmeal Stout. Bitter is on the way.

Charlie Glazier often takes time out from reading the Grateful Dead bulletin board to send e-mail messages. He and Cousin Sonia went to Washington D.C. Charlie reports: "Sonia marched for justice. I visited civil war battle fields in North Virginia. It's becoming clear to me: every battle field has one place on it where the two sides really fought it out, going back and forth at each other, and each of these places is about the size of ... you guessed it ... a football field. So I conclude that football is our cultural acting out of repressed war trauma."

Also from Boston, news comes that Cousin Mimi has been accepted in the linguistics graduate program at the school of her choice in Pennsylvania, and is being given a four-year $15,000 fellowship. This news comes paired with the sad story that she will probably sell #29 Lourdes Ave. back to the bank for little or no more than what is owed on it. She concludes her letter: "In any case, I have exhausted the strength in that withered appendage formerly known as my writing hand."

Myself, I am enrolled in an MFA fiction writing program with a graduate assistantship. That's my life, just one sensible decision after another. Sorry, you're all going to have to continue to put up with me, and chances are I'm just going to get worse and worse. My advisor and new patron goddess will be novelist Jaimy Gordon.

Anne Sjostrom has moved to Austrialia. She is not satisfied with her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering--a degree having something to do with computers which I never understood--and is now going for a second master's in Environmental Studies. She says that the fact that she and I can't decide what to do doesn't necessarily men we're flaky women. She write: "For the past few days we've had a pediatric surgeon from Belgium staying with us. Last night at dinner we were talking about the new studies showing metabolite consumption in the brains of men and women. Apparently it shows up quite clearly that the men tend to use one or the other side of their brains at one time while women use their whole brain." Thank you Anne; that explains a lot.

Brother Tom has begun major reconstruction on his newly purchased lake home. I stopped by to visit and found wind blowing through the living room. Paraphrasing his girlfriend, Carrie: "There was this little hole in the wall and Tom was wondering if he should patch it with some plaster. Then he drank a bottle of wine and decided it wasn't worth fixing. Next thing I knew he was tearing out the walls with a crow bar." He's now rebuilt the ceiling and walls with newly placed windows and a new door. He's ordering oak flooring from some discount place in Coldwater, Michigan, at only $1.50 a square foot.

Kristian Olsen (bike trips 1993 & 1994) is still living in Estonia. His address is listed c/o Via Baltica News, Kuninga 4, Tallinn, EE0001, Estonia. His e-mail "Kristian@viabalt.ee" doesn't seem to be working. So to answer your question Kristian, no I am not going to be having a baby soon.

Red House Island News F.W. Herlihy is holding together well. His ulcer acted up so he had to quit boozing for a month. "It makes me realize I'm not an alcoholic," he says. He lost his oil-barrel float in a later winter ice floe. We spotted it near the end of Linden Drive, but it was unreachable without a boat and it was too darned cold and swift for me to launch the steel rowboat. He is in the process of building a new one on the bridge.

Terry, Kathy, Julie and Andew Herlihy forsook the traditional Easter holiday at the island and instead inflicted themselves on Amtrak conductors and passengers between Chicago and Boston where they are visiting Lipsons and other national sites. Terry can be contacted at Terrymc2@aol.com. Uncle Terry, still enmeshed in fixing up his building, writes: "I was procrastinating the search for the working staple gun. The broken one is in Kathy's drawer... She was stupid to loan it to me cause I dropped it 60 feet from a 40 foot high roof to its demise from internal injuries. That search involved looking under Irene's stuff from the house next door, piles of electrical fittings, pipes and pipe fittings, jacks, Orville's precious pos-sessions, Kathy's toxic art chemicals, Steve Cwain's baby bed, Joby's precious possessions, wrong size drywall screws in crates, the pair of table saws, empty tool chest with all the tools scattered all over the place mixed in with the pre-viously mentioned shit like peanuts in brittle. I found the story you sent me un-der ten weeks of Science News and some Sky Magazines, a leprechaun made by Julie and some catalogs, on the buffet with the broken angels with lost trumpets."

Susanna's Farm News: Baby Donkey expected anytime now. Jenny is moping around the barnyard looking swollen and uncomfortable and her bag is starting to fill out. Susanna is still working at Goodwill Industries. She is very proud that she's burned only 600 gallons of fuel oil to heat her house this winter, although to say she provided heat is somewhat of an exaggeration. Tenant Denise Martin moved out, having found subsidized housing elsewhere. Jim Coe is back in jail.

Bird News So far this year, identified outside my window on suet and other feeders: Yellow Bellied Sap Suckers, Red Bellied Woodpeckers, Downy Woodpeckers, White Breasted Nuthatches, Brown Creepers, Titmouses, Chickadees, Northern Juncos, Gold Finches, House Finches, Cardinals, Robins, Wood Thrushes, Cowbirds, Mourning Doves, Bluejays, Crows and Mallard Ducks.