elfie and adaline grinned at us over the fence. clearly they thought we were kindred spirits. or maybe they just wanted one of the treats we held in our hands. either way, they were cute as all get-out and my heart was happy-happy to be heehaw-hanging out with them.

i do have a thing about donkeys. horses, too, as you know. but donkeys, like giant dogs, seem really doable. sweet expressive eyes and much shorter and more containable than horses, donkeys tug at me. i guess we’ll see. maybe one of these days. obviously, this town we live in won’t be the place. i can’t imagine our perfectly-yarded neighbors-to-the-east thinking that donkeys-next-door would be ok, though our neighbors-to-the-north are overrunning their place with all kinds of non-organic-non-living-plastic-rubber-battery-run-powered-by-electricity-noisy stuff so what’s a coupla donkeys in the ‘hood-mix?

a long time ago – over twenty years now – when i was directing a christmas cantata at a church i decided to go out on a limb and use a live donkey in the production. i made arrangements with a local stable and they were bringing out the donkey the morning of the cantata. we, necessarily, rolled out a plastic runner and i started the overture. ‘mary’ had to duck under the door frame as the donkey was led in by ‘joseph’ and started toward the chancel. the biggest-donkey-on-the-planet, it seems, carried in the star of our cantata. it took very few lanky strides to reach the front of the church. the donkey took its place next to the choir, shoving a few people over as it positioned itself before ‘mary’ was helped down and it was led out. giggling is good during cantatas, i reminded myself, as the giggle spread through the pews. apparently, there are donkeys and then there are donkeys. and this one – was actually a mule – much larger than its donkey-parent. a little bit of false advertising on the part of the farm, but what-the-heck. maybe i should have been a little more specific: no hybrids.

so elfie and addie, regular-sized donkeys, were pretty cute. watching them renewed my i-want-a-donkey and i looked at websites that even advertised miniature donkeys, so as to avoid cantata ptsd.

donkeys are smart creatures. it is said that you have to be smarter than a donkey in order to train it. it’s also assumed that they are dumb-as-rocks because they are rather stubborn. in researching i read, “things need to make sense to a donkey, they aren’t just willing to obey blindly.” ahhh. i can relate.

and they really were big grinners, those cutie-pies. though they don’t look like they have a sarcastic bone in their bodies, i did wonder if they were smirks and not grins. because they looked at us over the fence as if they recognized us. like they were saying, “yeah. we get it. you guys are artists. we’re donkeys. uh-huh. kinda outliers. samesies.”

heeeehaw.

*****

read DAVID’S thoughts this TWO ARTISTS TUESDAY