Okay, can we just have a talk? Because I am one chicken nugget away from putting a “For Sale” sign on the front gate and listing every single one of these animals on Facebook Marketplace. I HATE IT HERE!
They tell you farm life is so peaceful. “Oh, you’ll connect with nature,” they say. “It’s so rewarding,” they whisper. Let me tell you what’s rewarding: air conditioning and a door that locks. What I’m doing right now is the opposite of rewarding. I am being punished for sins I must have committed in a past life, possibly as a Roman emperor who outlawed wine.
My only goal for the day—my one, simple, solitary goal—was to clean the big water trough. That’s it. It sounded simple enough when I wrote it on my little to-do list this morning over coffee, feeling all organized and productive. But I failed to account for the fact that this water trough has become its own self-sustaining ecosystem. It’s less of a trough and more of a primordial soup experiment. I’m pretty sure I saw something in there evolve and crawl out. It smelled like a frog’s graveyard.
So, I get the plug undone, and this green, unholy water starts gushing out. The smell alone is enough to singe your nose hairs. And who comes running, not away from the stench, but towards it like it’s a five-star Michelin buffet? The chickens. All of them. Led by Brenda, of course. Brenda, with the look of pure chaos in her beady little eyes, starts pecking at the algae sludge like it’s caviar. She’s flicking it everywhere! I have green, slimy, chicken-poop-flavored goo on my boots, on my jeans, and I swear a fleck of it landed on my lip. I may need a tetanus shot and an exorcism.
As if that’s not enough, here comes Jackson, the donkey. Now, Jackson has exactly two brain cells, and today they’re both on vacation. He sees me scrubbing the inside of this trough, and he decides this is the perfect moment for affection. He’s nudging me with his head, trying to “help,” which translates to him trying to push me headfirst into the swampy abyss I just drained. He’s breathing his hot, hay-scented breath directly into my ear while I’m trying not to slip on a patch of what NASA should probably be studying.
I’m sweating. I’m covered in filth. My star employee, Brenda the chicken, is leading a slime rebellion, and my giant gray security guard is trying to baptize me in the name of all that is unholy. This isn’t “connecting with nature.” This is a hostage situation, and the animals are winning.
I’m done. I’m going inside. They can drink the mud. They can photosynthesize for all I care. Someone else can handle this. I’m about to trade this whole #farmlife for a condo with a balcony. At least the only poop I’d have to deal with up there would be from a pigeon, and I can handle that. I think.
