Free My Gentle Barn by Ellie Laks Page B

sparkling and orderly.
    Once everyone had been fed, and every last surface was raked or swept or wiped down, I could stop and take a breath. I inhaled the wonderful, sweet smell of hay, listened to the pigs snoring in their pigpile, and looked up at the stars, knowing there was no better, richer life for me.
    “Um, can we talk?” Scott said as soon as I walked back into the living room, and I was jarred back into my other reality. An hour had passed. It was past Jesse’s bedtime, and he hadn’t even had his bath. Scott hadn’t eaten, and he was hungry. No one was smiling.
    “Yes,” I said. “Just let me give Jesse his bath and get him to bed first. OK?”
    When Jesse was bathed, I put him in his jammies, nursed him, and sang him to sleep. By the time I walked back into the living room, another hour had passed.
    “This is crazy,” Scott said, looking at his watch. “What the hell’s going on here?”
    “I’m sorry. I’m here now.”
    “Now,”
he said.
    “I’m trying to be a good wife and mother. It’s a lot—”
    “Well, why don’t you stop all this crazy stuff with the animals, then? Just look at you.”
    I looked down at my jeans and T-shirt, caked with mud and manure, and realized my face must be just as dirty. “Scott,” I said, “that”—I motioned toward the back door and the barnyard beyond it—“that crazy yard full of sick and sad animals on the mend. That’s what I live for. Telling me to stop … that’d be like me telling
you
to stop eating food or drinking water. It feeds me more deeply than anything else in the world.”
    “Clearly,” Scott said, standing up, “it feeds you more than I ever could.” And he walked out of the room.
    I felt his hurt like a punch in my own stomach, but I didn’t see any way to go backward. If I stopped doing what I was doing, I’d be horribly unhappy. Yet if I kept it up, he would be equally miserable.
    Scott had always known about me and animals. I’d told him all about my childhood and the way I’d brought home hurt animals and tried to make them well. I’d told him how animals had been myonly true friends, my only true family. And I’d told him—more than once—about my vision of having a haven where animals and people healed one another. He’d always smiled and nodded, but apparently he hadn’t been listening. Or maybe he’d just figured I would never actually follow through.
    Truth be told, I was not thinking my way through some grand design to create my vision; I just kept following my impulses, sniffing after those whispers that had always led me. I’d stashed that dream away so many times it had sort of gotten lodged at the back of my heart. Frozen in place and forgotten. But little by little, with each new animal I brought home to the barnyard, my heart had melted just a little bit more. Until finally, two months after the last petting-zoo rescues and just a couple of weeks after our second horse, Shy, had arrived, that frozen dream was fully thawed. And it dislodged and fell with a thud at my feet.
    “Oh my God,” I said out loud. I was standing amid my now-healthy farm animals—fifty in all—and there at my feet, laid out before me and filling my yard in full, glorious color, was my vision, plain as day. The baby goats springing around the yard, the chickens scratching and pecking at the dirt for bugs, the pigs in their pig pile in the barn, the horses and goats and sheep commingling in harmony. “This is it. This is my haven.” I had healed all these beautiful beings, and they were healing me, daily. How I’d not seen what I’d been up to was beyond me, but finally I was in on the secret.
    It’s time to share this with other people
, I thought. The name The Gentle Barn came to me in a rush, traveling the same pathways as the whispers that connected me to the animal world. I snapped up the name, saying, “Thank you!” to the sky. “Genius!”

    “You’re going to open to the public?” Scott said. “Our house