My grandpa had a stroke.

My grandpa is by far the strongest man in my life, and the one who loves me the best. We’ve been particularly close since I bought the Liberty House– he’s been my go-to guy when I need advice, equipment, someone to explain how to operate the damn mower. I didn’t quite realize how much I relied on him until he wasn’t there.

And, listen , you couldn’t take that man down with a tank, much less a little blood-clot to the brain, so he’ll pull though this just fine, but since he’s got some recovery time ahead of him I suddenly found myself without my go-to guy, and I was a little like, “Well, shit. Now what do I do?”

What I’ve been doing is visiting the hospital as often as possible, reminding myself how lucky I am to have him and to have spent so much time with him in the last year, and digging deep to remember that as long as I’m willing to work my ass off (no doubt that work ethic came straight from Papa, too) there’s nothing I can’t do.

So the little cart with a flat tire that my grandpa was going to fix and bring up to the farm so I could hitch it up to the mower and use it for mucking the donkey barn or moving wood out of the junk pile became my first project…

I hauled that thing–flat tire and all– up into the trailer while wearing a skirt and flip flops.

First thing Saturday I set to fixing the tire and hitching it up to the mower:

My grandpa was right (as usual) this cart made life on the farm a thousand times easier. I’ve been trying for the last two weeks to get the remaining part of the junk pile under control so that it could be mowed around. I’m having a huge problem with ticks on the donkeys (and myself) so getting rid of any tall grass in the pasture is priority one.

As you can see, I’ve got my work cut out for me. I actually found another wheelbarow-ish thing in the remaining rubble…

This may be one of the greatest finds in the pile so far because look what I can do with it.

However, the cart was actually way more efficient for the volume of crap I need to move.

I hauled a ton of brush and wood to the burn pile, and more wood went to the big barn to be sorted for future projects. Plus there was a truck-bed liner, and six garbage bags full of actual junk to haul around.

It doesn’t look like a good 30 hours worth of progress, but wading your way through a mass of vines, brush, grasses, and fallen-over-barn takes longer than one would think. There was a point where I was up to my eyeballs in what could only be Devil’s Snare and the first thought that came to mind was “I need a machete.”

Uh. I’m the person who damn near lost a finger tip to a piece of metal roofing. Give me a machete and I’ll probably cut off my own leg.

But, I happened to find this thing at the local hardware store instead…

Yes. It’s every bit as amazing and destructive as it looks. Plus, great practice for your golf swing. Not that I would ever take time to golf.

The cart also made a deep-cleaning of the donkey barn significantly easier than the last time I did it (which required enlisting my mom to help me drag a twenty foot tarp heaped with stall bedding a good 50 yards to the compost pile.)

I’ll tell you honestly, in the last week I’ve felt pretty stuck. Stuck because I don’t have nearly enough time to get all this work done, stuck because half the time I don’t have the right equipment or enough man-power to get things under control, stuck because sometimes I don’t even know what questions to ask much less have anyone to ask them to. But if I wanted to sit on my ass watching TV and eating bon-bons all day, I’d buy a brand new condo somewhere that doesn’t require any work or maintenance.

The truth is, even when it’s hard, even when it seems overwhelming, I love the work. I love spending eight hours outside on a Saturday fighting the jungle that is slowly encroaching on my property, slinging around barn beams that by all account should be too heavy for me to move, doing everything I can to be the best caretaker of this property that I can be.

And, you know, it has it’s rewards.

The good news is, starting Saturday I’ve got nine whole days off from my day-job (I haven’t taken a full week of vacation at once in…maybe ever) so if this place isn’t in working order after that, it might never be.

And that might be the understatement of the year. But really, why go to the trouble of making all that sawdust if you’re not going to build something that’s at least a little awesome?

The chickens concur.

The Nugget Barn isn’t 100% complete, but it’s close enough to give you a look at how I built this baby from scratch with nothing but a picture for inspiration and a desire to use a lot of tools. (God, I love my tools.)

Anyway, here’s a fair warning before we delve into this project… I don’t have a step-by-step plan, complete with measurements, fasteners and “attach board A using screw B” directions for building this coop. My favorite part about building shit is not working from a plan, so I don’t have one to give you, but I can show you the techniques and tools I used throughout the building process– what things worked well, and what things almost cost me a finger. So hopefully that gives you a leg up if you decide to build your own chickens a small and tastefully decorated McMansion. (Really gives a whole new meaning to the term, doesn’t it?)

So, let’s dive in. Here’s a really high-level look at the materials and tools involved in this adventure…

Materials:

• 3/8″ Plywood – 1 sheet for the platform and roof sheathing
• 1/8″ luan – 1+ sheets to skin the sides of the coop
• 2×4′s – several to build the frame
• 2×3′s – several to build the frame
• 1×2 – 1 board for door accents
• 1×6- 1 board for ramp
• 3/4″ x 1/2″ trim – 1 piece for ramp treads
• old barn wood – various sizes for siding, trim, and doors
• 1/2″ wire mesh for doors
• hinges and latches
• corrugated metal roofing – 2 pieces for the roof
• 10″ metal flashing – 3 lf for the roof cap
• 20# roofing felt
• a shit ton of framing and finish nails, screws, a few brackets, and roofing screws

Tools (this is the fun part)

• Table saw
• Compound miter saw
• Circular saw (this saw was the hero of this project)
• Hand-held jigsaw
• Framing nailer
• Drill/driver
• Finish nailer
• Stapler
• Level
• Tape measure
• Chisel
• A not insignificant number of Band-aids (if you’re smart, you’ll replace this item with gloves)

Here’s how it went down:

I started with this image from Williams-Sonoma (via Pinterest) as inspiration…

This thing costs at least $600 retail, but I spent under $200 in building materials, including the metal roof and wheels (which you’ll notice are not attached to my coop yet, but, you know, will be eventually.)

Side note: Sometimes people get a little up-in-arms about the retail price vs cost of materials, but I’ll tell you, given the number of hours I put into this baby, $600 is a fair price.

Now back to the building. I sketched this out a few times to really wrap my head around how I was going to build it, what supports would be striclty necessary and what ones I could sacrifice to keep the weight down. In the end, I started with a platform built of 2×3′s.

The platform is roughly 3′ x 4′, and I assembled it by end-nailing the boards into place, similar to how I would if I was framing a wall. (Here’s some more info on legitimately framing something, and all of the techniques can be used on a smaller scale when, you know, building a smaller house.)

Next up were the legs. I used a 2×3 and 2×4 for each…

The legs were about 18″ tall, and this was definitely the wrong spot to attach them…

I mean, it makes a nice table, but the point was to have the nesting boxes as an overhang– this is the kind of thing that happens when you’re figuring it out as you go– but in the end, no big deal to take two of the legs off and move them to the proper spot.

There we go.

Now, at this point I should have also attached the braces for the legs, but I didn’t think of it at the time– which, in the end, meant I had to lay underneath the coop to attach them after the Nugs were already living in it. Unless you like chicken poop in your hair, I suggest doing it at an earlier stage in the build process.

Ah, well. Live and learn.

The top of the platform is 3/8″ plywood, cut to size with the circular saw and tacked down with screws.

Then it was time to start actually framing the structure of the coop. I used 2×4′s for the main area.

And 2×3′s for the nesting-box “addition.”

Since I was figuring out the dimensions as I went, when it came to cutting angles I would hold the board in place and mark the cut-line with a pencil instead of making my eyes bleed with mathematical equations. I’m building a chicken hut here, not a bridge.

You can see the beam for the top of the roof was attached with brackets, but everything else was nailed together with the framing nailer.

Here’s what the coop looked like framed in.

Next up was figuring out how I wanted to sheath the damn thing. There are a few things to take into consideration here, particularly the type of siding you’re using and your climate.

For example, if you were using something like T1-11 siding, you could probably just use 1/2″ without sheathing the coop first. I decided to use some old barn wood, however, which coincidentally, came off of the very barn in which I built the coop.

“Well hello down there. I will make something awesome out of you one day. Like….. now.”

It was fairly warped and not very structurally sound, so I decided to sheath the coop in 1/8″ thick luan first, to make sure the Nuggets would be protected from the elements. I used screws every 6-8″ on the studs to attach the sheathing.

To cut that arch I first tried to freehand it, and then realized I was being an idiot and wrapped a piece of wire around a screw and my pencil.

Makeshift compass for the win. (Of course, I later realized my actual legitimate compass was exactly seven steps away from where I did this, but whatevs. It worked.)

Next up was siding. For the trim I ripped down some 2×6 barnwood on the table saw.

Then filled her in with barn wood.

Just for fun I used some different wood for the nesting boxes.

Two tips about working with old-ass barn wood. 1.) You are going to get splinters. One of them may still be under your fingernail three weeks later…

…and 2.) Sometimes you’ll need to creatively persuade a board into place. With clamps, a hammer, and the sheer force of your stubbornness.

But it’s worth it.

Next up was putting the roof on. So, here’s a true confession for anyone who thinks I brazenly take on any project with the slightest hint of fear… that’s a big fucking lie. Number one on the list of projects I’ve manage to avoid in the last decade is “things that occur on a roof”, number two is “things that involve cutting metal.” So basically this portion of the project gave me enough frown lines to keep Botox in business for the next decade.

But, before you write me off as a the worlds biggest wimp, last year I had to suck it up and re-roof the donkey barn which taught me a lot about roofs and getting the eff over my fear of falling off of one. And since I wasn’t actually going to be climbing on the roof of the Nugget Barn, all I had to do was put on my big-girl tool belt and cut the corrugated metal roofing down to size.

Here’s how that part went down…

First, the metal roofing panels I got from Lowe’s were actually a lot thinner and lighter than I expected them to be, which bolstered my courage when it came to cutting them down.

I decided to use my circular saw with a metal cutting blade, which meant the wood blade had to come off…

Metal blade went on, along with safety glasses (which are 100% necessary unless you want your eyeballs burned out by little flying pieces of glowing hot metal), but I did not put on long sleeves or gloves. In retrospect, sharp edges of metal roofing + gusting winds = goodbye fingertip. So. Yeah. Don’t do that.

Cutting the roofing was much easier than I anticipated though, even with the wad of gauze and bandaids keeping me from bleeding out all over my new chicken roof.

To attach it, I put 3/8″ plywood on to sheath the roof, then stapled on some roofing felt…

Then the pieces of metal roof were attached, overlapping, using some metal roofing screws that have a rubber gasket on them to seal the hole as the screw is driven.

For the cap, I used some aluminum flashing and a makeshift brake (ie a 2×4 and my T-square) to bend an angle into it.

This works for now, but I need to find some thicker metal for the final cap.

The last thing that needed to be done for this phase of coop building was to build the doors to the side of the cage and attach everything.

To build the doors I ripped down some old barn wood (similar to the trim) to make the frames.

Then I clamped them together, used my staple gun to attach the wire cloth, and screwed some metal brackets in over top to both hold the frame together and keep the mesh in place.

Once I held them up to the coop though, I knew they needed a little something extra.

To make the cross braces, I used some pressure-treated 1×2 (technically scraps from building the frames for the run, which I’ll get into in another post). To get them to lay flat I used the same technique as I did when I built the legs for this picnic table– cut notches into the wood then chiseled them out.

Plus a little paint…

The very last thing was to build the ramp so that the nugs could actually get in and out of the coop on their own.

This is a 1×6 with the treads spaced every 4-5 inches, evenly across the board.

I glued the treads in place and then tested it out with the actual end-users before finishing it off…

Ehhhhhh…. what is this strange thing that is ergonimically designed for my little chicken feet so that I can easily make my way up and down from the penthouse?

Who needs wings?

To finish the ramp off, I added some dowels to the top and then drilled holes into the platform on the coop to hold it in place.

The hinges and locks were the last thing to go on (and I’m still figuring out double-locking mechanisms for each of them, to keep any smart-ass racoons out.)

And then, of course, I had to but in the bed and kitchen.

You’ll see I put a little roost in up by the roof (which is why the roof on my coop is taller than in the inspiration pic) and they totally love it.

Before they moved in, I also installed braces on the legs and painted any exposed “new” wood so that it didn’t stand out so much. I don’t 100% love it, so I’m deciding if I’ll clad the legs with barn-wood or just see if it grows on me.

The chickens have been living in the coop (and free-ranging when I’m home) for over a week now, and they seem to love it. You know, because I’m a chicken psychic now and totally know what they’re thinking.

However, the Nugget Barn is not quite complete yet. To finish it off I need to:

1.) Build a brace to hold the roof of the nesting box up to make it easy to collect eggs.

2.) Divide this space into 3 nesting boxes using some 3/8″ plywood and brackets.

3.) Build the attached run so they can be safely outside when I’m not there.

4.) Attach the wheels/handles to make the coop portable.

And that, my friends, is how the Nugget Barn came into existence. It was a really fun project, and there are so many different ways you could finish these things off with new and re-claimed materials. (Which may or may not be proportional to the number of ways you can find yourself in a little padded room for hoarding farm animals…)

If you’re looking to build your own coop from scratch, here are a few books that were extremely helpful when it came to inspiration and building techniques:

Reinventing the Chicken Coop

Free-Range Chicken Gardens

I have some friends that have brewed up some pretty impressive beers, and if there’s one thing every homebrewer needs (other then their own kegerator, of course, and been-there-done-that) it’s a fancy-ass beer flight with which to bestow their beautiful hoppy creations on us commoners.

And by “fancy-ass” I mean, I pulled a couple of pieces of old barnwood off of my pile and drilled some holes in them.

What? I can do fancy.

Since I built these for a friend, she provided the tiny mason jars, and I just measured the bottom, dug out the correct hole saw (in this case 2-1/2″) and then drilled down about 1/4″. Since I was using the hole saw and not a paddle bit, I needed to remove the wood in the center, so I used my oscillating saw to cut some notches and then popped them out with a small chisel.

I also had some leftover chalkboard pieces from my wall calendar that I cut down on the miter saw and then attached with some drywall screws.

All that’s missing is the beer (and better lighting, but it was after dark when I finished and I didn’t a chance to take a picture in good lighting.)

We built two flights, and I bet the cost came in under $10. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to start and finish a project in an evening, and this was doubly fun because, duh, it’s related to beer, and it was a gift for someone who likes a good homebrew even more than I do.

Can’t wait for the first tasting.

Or, in this case, go out to the luxury super-coop built specifically to cater to their every whim and chicken fancy.

Like pretty much everything else on this property, the Nugget Barn isn’t “finished” yet, but it’s habitable, which is what counts.

I’ve still got to finish a little siding on the back, put in the nesting box dividers, replace the roof cap with something more sturdy, and put stick tiles down on the floor to make for easy cleaning. Plus building the whole detachable run and adding the wheels and handles to make it moveable… but that’s a project for another weekend (or two.)

Still, if you consider where I started less than a month ago, with just a little inspiration…

And the bare bones of a frame…

It’s come a long way.

Now if only I could stop getting up every two hours and checking on them out there on their own, we may finally have a little peace in this house.

(Complete tutorial on how I built this thing from scratch coming up next week.)

What do you mean I don’t need my hammer to garden?

Well, this is crap.

But seeing as how I’ve already got a load of gravel in my driveway and four raised beds built… I guess I’m in for the planting and nurturing thing. (I’m pretty sure I can nurture with my hammer, but whatever.) And I finally decided the first step to getting those beds in the ground was to design and stake out the garden.

Here’s my current plan:

The idea is to build a more permanent chicken structure in the middle (and maybe use some of the old windows I found in one of the barns for a little greenhouse), and then use half the space as a vegetable garden that will be a chicken-free zone except for specific times of the year when I use them to help cultivate the beds. Mostly the chickens will free-range in the paddocks that will contain all kinds of chicken (and people) friendly plants. (Sunflowers, mulberry bushes, blueberries, chickweed, hops, and chard are on that list.)

Realistically the structure of the garden– buildings and fences– probably won’t be done until late Summer, but you’ve got to start somewhere so I started by climbing a tree…

In crocks. My tree-climbing skills are unparalleled, and in this case, useful, because I’m not an engineer and in order to properly stake out the garden, I needed a birds-eye view. (I’m telling you… living with an engineer for a few years will really give you a false impression of how easy it is to lay out building stakes.)

To make it easier to visualize I actually just mowed the grass inside my proposed garden area and left everything else a jungle for a few days. This worked surprising well.

Then I started setting the first three of my six beds (you can see how I build them for $25 here), which I expected to take a couple of hours, and by “a couple” I mean “eight hours and a decent sunburn.”

I don’t know why in the hell it took that long, but I did spend some time puzzling over how do deal with my gently sloping yard. In the end I decided to “step” the boxes, so individually each one is level, but they step down with the grade.

Next up, two more boxes need to go in, and they need to be backfilled and planted, hopefully in the next two weeks. Then it’s time to move on to things like fences and foundations.

I’m so good at this “gardening” thing.

I spent a lot of time cutting barnwood.

It went here.

I also spent time cutting corrugated metal roofing…

Which graciously returned the favor, and almost took one of my fingertips with it in the process.

Protip: When working with large sheets of metal roofing on a windy day, don’t be a dumbass… wear gloves.

With the help of some friends I moved the coop outside.

It’s not done– the finger incident might have slowed me down a bit– but it’s not too far from habitable. Just need to get the doors attached, and then I can worry about the finishing touches after the chickens are out of the house.

I did get approval from the future inhabitants, however.

And I spent a lot of time hanging out with the animals– herding chickens, getting my face licked by donkeys…

Reminding the cat that he is not one of the flock…

It’s useless. He’s already decided he wants to be a chicken when he grows up.

Kids these days.

I also spent a good deal of time installing my raised beds for the garden, mowing the grass (and then immediately walking over to the guy mowing my neighbors yard and hired him… check that off the list for the rest of the year) and, gasp, doing laundry. (I know, right? Who the hell am I?) And even though I was hoping to come out of this weekend finally feeling on top of things, the truth is that my to-do list feels longer than ever.

Luckily it includes a lot of things like “spend more time hugging donkeys” so really, who is going to complain about that?

Don’t get me wrong… I love every minute of it: Airing out the shop, firing up the big tools, spending time with the animals without needing six layers of long johns to keep my extremities from freezing off. But.

But I am just barely keeping my head above water.

I know this is a part of the rhythm of my life. I test my boundaries, take on more and more things, and then when the fault lines start to appear in my sanity (or, frankly, the state of my laundry) I know it’s time to pull back, rethink, rearrange.

I’ve been spending a lot of time this week just doing this…

Laying in the grass, enjoying the farm, napping under the apple tree…

And resting up so that I could be fully recharged for the next three days.

I could only manage a day and a half off work until later this month, but that gives me a solid three day weekend in which to get some shit done.

I spent my afternoon off stocking up on supplies. Made my first ever trip to Ikea and came away with two dressers that need a little work, a rug and some lights for the office, and a lingering desire to mow people down with a shopping cart. Hoping that last one starts to fade before I have to go to the grocery store.

If I get nothing else done this weekend, I’ll still consider it a success if I get the chicken coop finished and my flock moved outside.

But my list also includes:

• Doing a full clean-out of the donkey stall
• Installing my raised garden beds and gravel walkways
• Hacking my Ikea dressers and moving the small mountain range of clothes off my bedroom floor so that I don’t need climbing gear and a compass to get to my bed
• Installing new light fixtures and curtains
• Scheduling lawn maintenance and finding someone to fix the floodlight at the top of the electrical pole (alternatively, renting a bucket truck)
• Maybe actually doing laundry. Or washing a dish.

Not at all impossible in 72 hours, right? Right.

Sawdust is about to fly my friends.

For real.

That may have been the result of losing my tempter, but, in the end it allowed me to take the top part of the kennel outside so that all of the girls could delight in the beautiful weather we were having.

Since they were well and secure outside, I thought this might be a good time for introductions to other members of the Farm.

I wasn’t sure how this was going to go, because the cat has basically been sitting obsessively outside the door of the chicken-room for the last six weeks. For about one second he looked like he might be interested, then he realized those chickens were about half his size and not one bit scared of him…

And he decided he was more interested in a belly rub, actually.

So that simplifies things when it comes time for them to free-range. That time, by the way, is rapidly approaching. I expect they only have two more weeks in the house before “the big move” which means I needed to make some serious progress on their “summer home.”

The last time sneak peek I shared looked like this:

This weekend I managed to finish the framing…

And skin the majority of the coop with 1/8″ thick luan.

I’m actually going to use– gasp!– some old barn wood to side it, but I wanted to make sure there was a good draft resistant backing underneath it.

Next up will be siding, building the doors, and then putting on a tin roof (which, in theory, I’m excited about… in practice, working with metal is not my favorite thing ever, so we’ll see how that goes.)

I also have seven more 3×3 screens and the frame for the run to build which means a lot of time in the workshop over the next few weeks. Luckily I’ve got Friday off this week which will give me a little more shop-time, and hopefully bring me a few steps closer to living in a nugget-free house again.

What is more surprising to me than having a small flock of birds living in the house is that they no longer resemble the fluffy little six pack of nuggets that lived in a tupperware four weeks ago.

Oh no, we’re in full-blown feathered chicken territory now.

Chickens do not just sit around in a heap of fluffyness and snooze the day away. Oh no. Chickens have things to do.

These things involve playing keep-away with chicken treats, running around in circles like little feathered drama queens, and, a new favorite, “pile on”, in which one chicken stands on the roost or the top of the waterer and then basically belly-flops onto whoever happens to be under her.

Almost weekly I’m making some kind of adjustment to the cage to accommodate how quickly they are growing and what kinds of messes they’re making.

The water dish has been a particular point of fascination. Based on recent experiences I’m guessing if I could speak Chicken, these are the kinds of things I’d be hearing about it:

“How many wood shavings can I put in here? Is that enough? More? More? Let’s put in more.”

“How about poop? I totally think we should poop in our only source of fresh water. PoopPoopPoop. Poop party at the watering hole!”

“This looks like a good thing to sit on top of. OH MY GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING?! Why is this thing on it’s side? I was just sitting on it FLAPPING MY WINGS, I don’t understand what’s going on here.”

Up until last weekend I was using pine shavings for the bedding, and just setting the food tray and water dish on the floor of the cage, but since I’d about reached my limit with cleaning soggy poop-covered wood shavings out of the water dish (why yes, my life is as glamorous as it sounds) I tried something different and put down straw for their bedding and raised the food and water up on some bricks.

[pic]

These are chickens going, “WHATTHEEFF IS THIS STUFF UNDER MY FEET. Ah. Ahhhhh! Ah. Get me outta here. Getmeouttahere. It’s going to GETTTTTT MEEEE!”

Seriously, it was a chicken meltdown-slash-pile-on in the corner of the cage for the first fifteen minutes, but they finally got over it. Amazingly, the water dish stayed free and clear for two whole days but the chicken cage smelled way worse with the straw instead of the pine shavings.

So, we’re back to shavings for the time being, with the hope that having the water dish raised up on bricks keeps it clearer than before. This was a great experiment for figuring out what will work best in the coops as well. The chicken tractor [link] will have a similar cleaning schedule to their current cage, but in the “big coop” I’ll build later this spring I’m going to use the deep litter method with pine shavings. [link]

And speaking of the chicken tractor (ie, the “moveable coop”) I’ve made a little progress over the last couple of weeks. You know, when I wasn’t being dragged around my property by a pissed off donkey.

The girls are about big enough for outdoor excursions (I think… I mean, what the eff do I really know about it?) So I switched from working on the coop itself to the detachable outdoor run that will accompany it, and I also rigged up the most backassward area for them to get a little taste of the outdoors in the meantime…

If I get the actual covered run done first the girls can spend some afternoons outside over the next couple of weeks before they’re ready to be full-on outdoor birds. And it will also be conveniently sized to fit over my raised garden beds so the flock can be put to work on a specific area.

And that is just one of the many little adventures happening on the farm these day.

Saturday evening, my hands were fine. The usual amount of scrapes and scarring, nothing to write home about. And that’s where this story begins. Saturday evening, with only mildly beat-up hands, and a couple of donkeys who were out, mowing the lawn, and needed to be put back in the pasture.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working with the donkeys on being “off the lead” in the yard. They wander around and keep the grass down. They don’t run when I get close. They come when I call (mostly to see if I have a carrot hiding in my pocket). And when it’s time to go in, I hook Doc up to the lead and Parker follows complacently behind.

They’re not perfect. They walk on the leads great until it comes to taking that last step inside the gate of their pasture, and then it takes oats and singing, and sometimes a firm shove on a donkey butt to get them to actually cross the threshold. But for the most part they have been fantastic.

Here for example, are my boys stretching their legs, and come full speed when they hear me shake the oats bucket.

Saturday, started out just like every other time I’ve let the boys out in the yard. They spent a few hours meandering around the house, tasting this-and-that, and since I was leaving for dinner with friends it was time to go back in the pasture. Doc handled it like a champ… walked great on the lead, right through the gate. For the first time, however, Parker didn’t follow.

So once Doc was in, I hooked the lead up to Parker’s harness and led him back to the pasture. We were almost there, when he decided to detour around the side of the barn, and then Parker– Parker, who has been my sweetheart from day one, who hid with his face pressed against my leg the first time we went out on the lead– Parker got spooked. The lead rope rubbed up against the side of the barn, make some sort of a noise, and that donkey took off.

My immediate reaction was to tighten my grip on the rope. These are little donkeys– about the same size as a large dog on a leash–and of the four I’ve had close contact with (including a few struggles on the lead) not one has actually gotten away from me.

But not only did Parker get away, he took a good chunk of my finger-skin with him on the rope.

“No problem,” I thought, “A few oats, another 10 minutes, I’ll have him in the pen.” I may have even rolled my eyes at the delay. And the blood dripping down my hand.

I’ll skip the play-by-play of the next two hours, but suffice it to say, Parker plays a mean game of keep-away.  I probably walked, jogged, and ran 3 miles worth of circles around that donkey as he trotted just out of reach.

As the sun started to set, I let Parker calm down and graze at the very back end of the property for a while, and I strung 600 feet of fence-wire between the house, donkey barn, and pole barn forming a “funnel” to lead him back to the gate.

Then I walked a wide arc around him, approached slowly, expecting him to run away back towards the barn. Instead he let me come right up to him, checked my pockets for treats, and didn’t mind when I grabbed a hold of the lead. But when I tried to walk him back toward the pasture?

Dead. Stop.

I talked to him, stood silent, got down on my knees in the dirt and tried to have a logical conversation with him about taking a step (just one step) forward. I sang. I waited. I pleaded. I made up rhymes about stubborn little donkeys who didn’t want to go home. All to no avail.

It was officially dark, and I was afraid at any time something might spook him and if he took off into the field behind my property I wouldn’t even be able to see him. So I considered for a minute what had happened so far, if Parker was likely to take off again, and if I could control him if I had a tight grip on the halter or the lead close to his head.

I mean, he’s three feet tall. I know I don’t have epic proportions myself, but I was pretty sure I could handle a midget donkey, for crissake. So I wrapped the lead around my wrist a few times and gripped it tightly.

I was totally in control.

And then– to my surprise–I was totally being dragged across a field, face down, arms stretched out in front of me with a death-grip on the lead, by a donkey the size of a doberman.

This is probably a metaphor for my life.

Also a metaphor for my life. I hung on. I was never stuck, but Parker was heading away from the house, and I knew if he was spooked enough to drag my flailing ass through fifty feet of bramble, letting go might mean I never see him again.

He actually stopped for a minute, snorting and pulling as hard as he could, and there I am laying on the ground, two hands on the rope, playing the most ridiculous game of tug-o-war ever invented.

I lost.

He took off again dragging me behind him, and when he hit the actual bean field behind my property I gave up and let him go. And then I laid face down in the field for a minute and contemplated both the new level of ridiculous my life had reached, and my options given that it was pitch dark, I was bleeding from one hand, numb from the wrist on the other, and had a bucket’s worth of dirt shoved down my pants. So I finally, finally did what an actual reasonable person would do at a time like this: called for help.

My neighbors? Oh you guys, I can’t even tell you how much I lucked out with them. They are huge animal lovers, totally love the donkeys, hardly even blink when they catch me napping on the roof of the barn mid-shingling, and occasionally pay to have my lawn mowed because I let them store a couple of cars in my huge-ass barn for free.

And when I call them at 9:30 PM and ask them to trudge around my property to help me guide a scared donkey back into the pen, they are there in a second.

The magic of having three people, a veritable donkey-funnel leading into the pasture, and one very tired donkey cannot be overstated. It only took another 15 minutes to get him safe inside, after which I thanked my neighbors profusely, walked inside, sat on the floor of the kitchen, and spent the next half-hour shaking from head to toe when the adrenaline crashed.

Holy shit, you guys. This is going to be one of those stories I tell a decade from now, when I’m an old-hand at donkeys and chickens and managing a small farm. I’ll look back and laugh about how I had no idea what the shit I was doing, and that time one of my tiny little donkeys dragged me bouncing across the field on my stomach. Oh, and managed to run me through a patch of poison ivy while he was at it.

But the aftermath is actually less intense than you would think. Parker and I are on speaking terms again (although I’m not going to halter him for another week or two), the boys will be staying firmly put inside the pasture, and since I managed to install a good 200 feet of fence posts on Sunday, I’m pretty sure there’s no lasting damage to either of my hands. The poison ivy effing sucks, but it’s limited to one hand. So in the end, all is well.

Except next time I go donkey-dragging, I’m definitely wearing gloves.