Agriculture

Part of my chore-time ritual, twice a day, is to muck a wheelbarrow full of accumulated waste hay and sheep poop from the barn floor and trundle it out to the compost heap. Even with this effort, the stuff builds up. It's anywhere from 6 inches to a foot deep in the part of the barn closest to the hay manger. This morning, as I was doing the mucking, I felt my fingers go a bit numb. I was wearing inner gloves and outer gloves, but it was pretty cold to be working in the barn. It was the sort of cold you feel when the air hits your face walking into a freezer storage room. My reaction, to my surprise, was to echo my late great-uncle Max when he entered the lake at our Catskills bungalow colony on a hot summer day. In my memory, he bellowed out "L'Chaim" as he splashed himself with the cold water, which you all know from Fiddler on the Roof means "to life," a toast.  As my cousin Al, who actually speaks Yiddish, has corrected me, he actually was calling out "mechaya," "a pleasure." This morning, I