Our Neighbor Gina

Meet Gina.

 

Gina lives in the yard of the house that backs up to our landlady’s orchard. We have to walk to the back corner of the lot constantly to throw our food waste in the compost pit. Usually Gina is out there chillin in her yard, sometimes she comes over to see what I’m doing, sometimes she just flicks an ear at me and goes back to eating her grass. The kids and I took to calling her “Dominic the Donkey” after that super annoying Christmas song. Then we discovered “Dominic” was in fact a she. Oh and also, that she’s not a Donkey, but a Mule (half donkey, half horse). So then we took to calling her “Monica the Mule.” One day recently Claudio’s daughter, Sylvia, came to stay in his house for holiday and she brought the kids and I over to the neighbors to meet Gina. Not Dominic. Not Monica. Gina. We fed Gina some bread, took some pictures, and then Gina’s sweet adoptive human parents showed us around their little farm which includes a dozen chickens, 7 or 8 hunting dogs, and a huge room full of mounted antlers. Gina’s Daddy is a hunter and uses Gina to haul his kills out of the mountains. When we left to walk back home, my hands were full with fresh eggs, homemade pasta sauce, tomatoes, basil, and garlic from their garden!