My Gentle Barn (21 page)

Katie had been horribly treated and yet, given the time, she had forgiven the hurts and healed 100 percent. Animals just seemed to heal emotionally much more quickly and completely than humans did. Their process was streamlined because they didn’t assign meaning to their hurts, thus dragging those emotional injuries along with them through time. We humans are not as adept at this process.

Paige was a perfect example. When fall arrived, Jay and I were disappointed to see that our once-wonderful neighbor had not laid her anger to rest after all. The break she had taken in calling out the authorities had apparently just been a time of research—digging through city code books.

The barrage of complaints was back on, and the authorities started calling us and knocking on our door again. Only this time Paige had apparently found loopholes to back her up. Building and Safety sent someone out to check on the distance of our barn from the fence that divided our property from Paige’s.

How on earth had she measured the distance between the fence and my barn? She would have had to hop the fence in the middle of the night with a measuring tape.

“Unfortunately,” the inspector said, standing next to the barn, his measuring tape in hand, “she’s right. The barn is almost twelve inches closer than it should be to the fence.”

The infamous fence was fine, but the barn was too close to her property.

Jay and I walked the guy to the door, my head spinning with questions.

On the porch, the inspector stopped and said, “I’m so sorry you’re going through this.”

But sorry or not, two weeks later we got the official notice in the mail. We were being ordered to tear down our barn. If we tore down the barn, our animals would have no shelter. Rebuilding a perfectly sound barn a foot farther from the fence seemed absurd, not to mention very expensive.

We hardly had a chance to figure out what to do about the barn before another complaint came in. It was a Sunday morning and we’d done our usual preparations for our visitors’ day. One of the last things Jay did before we opened each Sunday was to pressure-wash the fence. Our pigs’ favorite spa treatment was to soak in the mud hole and then,
still wet and muddy, give themselves a good massage against the wood. The fence bore the evidence of their daily rubdowns. That Sunday, as Jay put away the pressure-washer, the front doorbell rang. Sometimes this happened. People would miss the hand-lettered sign telling them to go around to the side gate. Prepared to redirect our first visitors of the day, I opened the door and I froze. Standing there in front of me were two policemen. Black uniforms, silver badges. This was a first.

“Mrs. Laks?”

“Yes,” I said, and quickly did a mental headcount of all my family members. Two kids in the house. Jay out back. Talked to my mom last night. My brothers? My dad? “Is everybody OK?” I said.

“We got a report from your neighbor that you sprayed her in the face with a pressurized hose.”

“Oh my God,” I said, and I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Come on in.” I took the officers through the house to the backyard, and when Jay saw them I could see concern on his face. I pointed at Paige’s house, and I saw his concern turn to anger. “Apparently there’s been a report that we sprayed Paige in the face.”

We showed the officers the fence and explained about our muddy pigs. Jay wheeled the pressure-washer back out from the tack room and pushed it over to the fence. The pressure-washer was a big, heavy machine with a four-foot-long hose. The fence was six feet high, the same height as Jay. We stood back and let the officers imagine the scenario; it would have taken some impressive gymnastics to spray our neighbor in the face. We also explained that this neighbor had been calling out the authorities for anything she could come up with.

The two uniformed men looked at the pressure-washer and the fence, then at us, then at each other. One of them shook his head and the other said, “OK, we’ll make a note of our visit. You folks have a good day.”

The complaints kept coming, some easily resolved, others not. But the one that hurt us the most, the one that really landed its blow
squarely at the core of the Gentle Barn, was the second complaint Paige made to Animal Control.

When I answered the front door and saw the Animal Control officer standing on my porch, I must have made an audible sigh because he said, “I know. I’m sorry. I was hoping I wouldn’t be back either.”

“She called again?” I said.

The officer nodded.

I was baffled.
What on earth could she have dug up now?

“It’s about your pigs,” he said.

“My pigs?”

“We know you have pigs,” the officer said. “You’ve gotten some of them from us, and we totally support you.… But technically you’re not zoned for pigs.”

Not zoned for pigs?
“There must be twenty-five pet pigs in the neighborhood,” I said.

Jay joined me at the front door. “Even Paige has a potbellied pig now,” he said.

“Would you like to report her?” the officer asked.

Jay and I looked at each other. As angry as I was at the mess Paige was making for us, it wasn’t her pig I wanted to see behind bars. “No,” I said.

The officer looked over at Paige’s house and shook his head. “You know she badgered us for days, threatened to have us all fired if we didn’t serve you notice. I’m so sorry to have to do this.” And he handed us a slip of paper.

On the slip it said we had one week to get rid of our pigs. It also said we had to keep our roosters seventy feet away from any neighbors’ houses. The only spot that was seventy feet from all neighbors was behind the barn, and we’d have to cage them to keep them in that spot.

I had promised all of our animals they could live the rest of their lives with us in peace, that we’d never hurt them or cage them and we’d never give them away. Not only was my promise in danger of
being compromised, my whole mission was being threatened again. I couldn’t believe I had come this far, helping so many animals and so many kids, and one person was about to pull the rug out from under us.

“What are we going to do?” Jay said.

“I don’t know. I was hoping you had the answer.”

The Animal Control officer had hinted that the seven days on the notice was just for official purposes, that they were going to give us leeway on the deadline. Building and Safety had indicated the same about our barn. At least that gave us time to figure this out. But over the next few days, we made no headway in coming up with a solution. I tried to picture finding homes for our pigs, maybe at another rescue or with a family who would love them—with lots of space and a great mud hole. But each and every time, I ended up in tears. I kept running out to the pigs to reassure them that we were not going to send them away, or to the roosters to promise we would not put them in cages. Each and every day I ended up leaning into Buddha’s solid frame to let her fur sop up my sadness.

I began to wonder what the universe was trying to tell me. Was it time to wrap up this whole endeavor? How could that be, after all I’d put into it? I had felt so guided as I’d built up the Gentle Barn; was that same force now guiding me to dismantle it all? Or did the Gentle Barn have a life span that had reached its end, just like Mary and Katie and the others who had died of old age?

In between my bouts of tears and uncertainty, I was flooded with anger. I didn’t understand why Paige was doing this. Didn’t she understand how many people and animals she was hurting? How could one person be so selfish?

In the midst of all the upheaval I would go out to the barn and stand there looking at the animals, trying to remind myself of why I was doing this work in the first place. Sometimes I couldn’t see past the fear and grief. I felt targeted, victimized, hopeless. Other times, especially when I worked with the groups of kids or sat with Buddha, I
connected with a sense of hope, a glimmer of my old sense of purpose. “I have to keep on going, right?” I’d say to Buddha. “This is my path.”

We tried to carry on as though everything were normal, especially with the at-risk kids and with our Sunday visitors. We’d pull it together when people arrived, and sometimes I even did forget for an hour or two about the whole mess we were in. But as soon as the group was over or the visitors had left, reality came flooding back in. I felt trapped in a horrible situation and my old childhood feeling of despair returned.
Nobody understands. What’s the point? It’s not even worth it to continue
.

Each Saturday night I was filled with dread. We used to have fun preparing for visitor Sundays—making the place spotless, prepping for special activities, guessing at how many visitors we’d get this time. Now it was a tension-filled day or two, as we tiptoed around hoping that Paige would not strike while we had a barnyard full of visitors.

After one particularly tension-filled Sunday, Jay had finally had enough. “We’re taking that woman to court,” he said.

With what money?
I thought.

“She’s ruining the Gentle Barn,” he said. “She’s destroying our business. Our kids are upset. We’re going to stop her.”

The next day we started calling around in search of legal guidance, and the following days were filled with research and meetings and phone consultations. Could we fight this in court? Did we have a case that would hold up? How much would it cost?

Notices continued to arrive from Animal Control and also from Building and Safety, and the language was growing stronger with each letter. Get rid of your pigs and tear down your barn, or else. I started to wonder if we should even be trying to fight this at all or if it was simply time to give up. Maybe we needed to place the pigs in a good home, keep as many animals as we could privately, and shut down the Gentle Barn so we’d no longer be a target for those who wanted to hurt us.

We were still sorting through this tangle of questions, trying to get a foothold and find a path out, when the winter holidays arrived, bringing everything to a lull. The lawyers had gone out of town; the consultants took days to return our calls; even Paige seemed to be taking a break. So when a horse rescue called and invited us to have a look around their place, we decided to jump on the opportunity to take a vacation from our troubles and get out of town for the day with our kids.

I’d heard a lot about this horse rescue but had never done the hour-long trip up to Ojai to see it. We drove on out of the city and through the rolling hills that were lush and green this time of year. An hour later we headed through the gate and onto a property covered with ancient oak trees, and I could feel my body begin to relax. Our host, Liz, greeted us with a huge smile and then took us out to the stalls housing the rescued horses. We had packed along some carrots and apples for them and walked from stall to stall giving them treats. There was the tiny pony who served as their mascot, then a gorgeous chestnut mare trained in dressage, a tall black quarter horse who was terrific at trail riding, and several other horses eager to say hello and accept our offerings. These particular horses were in great shape and had mostly ended up here because their owners had moved away or lost a job and could no longer afford the upkeep.

Then I came to the stall of a gray mare. Unlike the other horses, she didn’t come get a treat but instead stood way at the back of her stall. I climbed over the rail and walked slowly to her. “Hey there, girl,” I cooed to her as I approached. “What’s going on? Don’t you want a treat?” I held a carrot out to her, but there was no response. Then I took out a piece of apple and held it right under her nose. Still no response.

“What’s going on with that gray mare?” I asked Liz.

“That’s Blue,” she said. Blue had lived for many years at a home with another horse. When the family’s kids had grown up and gone
off to college, the two horses had been dumped at the rescue. “The other horse, Sasha, got adopted out. Blue didn’t. She’s been like this ever since.”

“What’s going to happen with her?”

“Well, just like Sasha, Blue’s a kid pony, so she’ll probably be adopted by another kid. When that kid outgrows her, she’ll go to another kid.”