Valentina
I spent the last week on a farm-cation, a fancy way of saying I helped a friend on her alpaca farm. She billed it as a 'writing with the alpacas vacation' and I bit. What could be better? A week on a scenic farm in Western Washington where the weather promised to be a lot cooler than in central Texas? The decision was easy. I didn't even care that I might have to do some 'farm work' around the writing and researching I planned to focus on. What I didn't count on was Valentina. She was about two and a half weeks old when I met her and three weeks, two days old when I had to say good bye. I knew her a sum total of seven days. That's it. And she completely changed the way I view my life and my survival. Valentina was born with a nasal abnormality that affected ability to breathe and eat. As alpacas breathe almost exclusively through their noses and only use their mouths when agitated or excited, Valentina's prognosis from the beginning wasn't very...