Start the day right. Get your back scratched. Somebody wrote on Facebook the other day that Maria looks very serene in all of the photographs. I smiled. Maria is Sicilian. She is not serene, except when she is with the animals, brushing donkeys, walking dogs, talking to chickens, scratching the backs of sheep. Zelda is a triumph of human-animal communications, she was a wild animal when she came. Maria’s emotions are on the surface and animals can smell, see and read them. That is how she communicates with them. That is how I communicate with them, in a way that is similiar yet different.