My Gentle Barn

“ My Gentle Barn is a wonderful book. You'll love Ellie Laks and the animals she rescued--and who rescued her back.” –Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig Founder Ellie Laks started The Gentle Barn after adopting a sick goat from a run-down petting zoo in 1999. Some two hundred animals later (including chickens, horses, pigs, cows, rabbits, emus, and more), The Gentle Barn has become an extraordinary nonprofit that brings together a volunteer staff of community members and at-risk teens to rehabilitate abandoned and/or abused animals. As Ellie teaches the volunteers to care for the animals, they learn a new language of healing that works wonders on the humans as well. My Gentle Barn weaves together the story of how the Barn came to be what it is today with Ellie's own journey. Filled with heartwarming animal stories and inspiring recoveries, My Gentle Barn is a feel-good account that will delight animal lovers and memoir readers alike.

Auteur
Ellie Laks has always loved animals and from the time she could walk she headed into the woods daily to be with them, sometimes bringing them home—much to her parents’ chagrin. In 1999, Ellie founded The Gentle Barn, an animal sanctuary that rescues and rehabilitates severely abused and neglected farm animals. Once the animals are healthy, they help Ellie heal at-risk inner-city and special-needs children. Ellie lives on the property outside of Los Angeles with her husband, who runs the Barn with her, and their three children. Learn more at www.gentlebarn.org.

Résumé
“My Gentle Barn is a wonderful book. You'll love Ellie Laks and the animals she rescued--and who rescued her back.” –Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig

Founder Ellie Laks started The Gentle Barn after adopting a sick goat from a run-down petting zoo in 1999. Some two hundred animals later (including chickens, horses, pigs, cows, rabbits, emus, and more), The Gentle Barn has become an extraordinary nonprofit that brings together a volunteer staff of community members and at-risk teens to rehabilitate abandoned and/or abused animals. As Ellie teaches the volunteers to care for the animals, they learn a new language of healing that works wonders on the humans as well.

My Gentle Barn weaves together the story of how the Barn came to be what it is today with Ellie's own journey. Filled with heartwarming animal stories and inspiring recoveries, My Gentle Barn is a feel-good account that will delight animal lovers and memoir readers alike.

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter 1

They say that two people can have the same kind of childhood--raised in the same crazy, dysfunctional environment--and one can become a psychopath while the other grows into a normal, functioning adult. The distinguishing factor is that the normal person had a witness as a child. Without a witness, abuse or neglect will drive a person over the edge.

I made it to adulthood intact because animals were my witness. Not that there weren't bumps along the road to my healthy, functional behavior, but always the animals were there to witness my every step.

I was forever escaping to the lake down the road or into the woods behind our house in search of peace and a place where I mattered. I would sit on the leafy ground under the trees and wait for the wild bunnies to come see me. They'd sniff at me and eventually hop into my lap, and I'd spend hours talking with them and petting them. My absence from the house was rarely noticed, except on my return, when my mom would call for me to change out of my filthy clothes before dinner. I didn't fit the mold that Orthodox Judaism had cut out for me--I was to help my mom with housework, grow up to have lots of babies, and keep my mouth shut. It didn't seem fair that my brothers never had to help with the dishes or that their voices were acknowledged while mine was ignored or silenced. The only ones who noticed me were the babysitters. Two of our babysitters were young men, and they paid far too much of the wrong kind of attention to me. One made me sit on his lap when I didn't want to, and the other would wait until my little brothers were napping, and then he'd take me into the bathroom where he said he had something to show me. He would take down my pants and force me onto the cold tiles. I learned very quickly how not to look at him, but instead to look out the window to the trees, to the sky, to the nature that held me close. Out there I was free. When he was done, he would give me little plastic animals. My reward for not telling.

When he set me loose, I would run to my beautiful lake with my Australian shepherd, Simon, where we'd muck around in the shallows and all was right again in my world. Simon and I would watch the tadpoles turn to frogs and track salamanders so I could hold their cool, slimy bodies until they wriggled away between my fingers. I loved that lake; it was my sanctuary, just like the field behind our synagogue and the woods behind our house. But on one particular visit to the lake, something different happened. A man I had never seen approached me and gave me candy and money to do things a seven-year-old girl should never be asked to do. I'd been taught by the babysitters to say yes and wait patiently until it was over. So that's what I did with this man.

When I got home I told my brother, who told my parents. My father was furious--not at the man, but at me. He banned me from ever going to the lake again. No one ever thought to hunt the man down; I was the one to blame. For me that was the day my father joined the other side, the adults who did me wrong. The young men used me, my mother didn't know what to do with me, and now my father had gone from merely favoring my brothers to shutting me out entirely, and on top of it taking away the one place that could give me solace. Without my lake, the emptiness inside me was too vast and too bleak. There was no one to love me and nowhere to turn, and I knew I must be horribly broken to be so invisible. The only solution I could come up with, the only thing I had the power to do, was to leave this world for good. Maybe then, I thought, they would notice me in my absence.

But I didn't know yet what it took to die, so I failed miserably at trying to leave this world. First I tried to smash my head in with a shoe; needless to say, that didn't work. Then I ran sobbing up to the second floor of our house, intending to jump out the window, but I couldn't break the glass. Frustrated and hopeless, I went down into the garden for refuge. As I sat crying on the brick path, I received a message that would change the course of my life. A hummingbird dove to within inches of my face, and there he hovered for minutes upon minutes, his thrumming wings filling my ears with vibration, his eyes--tiny beads of ink--taking in my face. It was as though he were suspended in time, allowing me to absorb every one of his shimmering colors. Gold, red, purple, blue, green. An entire rainbow rolled up into one tiny being, and this one being was seeing me, was interested in me, and was reminding me that I was anything but alone. The world surrounding me was teeming with life--life that noticed me and beckoned me to stay.

It was this diminutive messenger who gave me the courage to tell my mother everything. That the babysitters had been doing things to me for a very long time, wrong things. I even told her about the plastic animals.

"Oh, don't be ridiculous," my mother said, her shrill voice a slap in the face.

"But it happened," I insisted. "It did happen. It happens all the time."

My mom went back to cleaning up the house, doing the laundry, her jaw set on edge.

I followed her around, trying to explain--no one ever saw, the baby-sitters made sure of that. "They told me not to tell, but I'm telling you."

She put down the laundry basket and held up her hand:…