Sylvia Jorrín is, quite simply, a national treasure. In this era of 10-minute news cycles, disposable luxuries, and soulless “personalities,” Sylvia’s stories are as refreshing and priceless as a cold glass of elderflower water on a summer afternoon.

The lessons of Sylvia’s farm are not just applicable for those who dream of living the rural life. They’re universally instructive, and joyfully addictive. One would be hard-pressed to deduce whether they were written yesterday, or 100 years ago.

For those unfamiliar with Sylvia, discovering her stories is like stumbling into a fully loaded wild blackberry patch—impossible to rush through, sweetly fulfilling, with an immediate longing to return to them again and again.

—Joshua Kilmer-Purcell,

The Fabulous Beekman Boys, www.beekman1802.com

Excerpted from Sylvia’s Farm: The Journal of an Improbable Shepherd and featured in Farm Aid: A Song for America …

“Farmers are dreamers of the first order. The most romantic of dreamers. Feet in the soil, head in the clouds, backs bent even in today’s tractors. They are most wishful of all of those who have inherited the earth as their legacy and work with their bodies as well as their minds. Who else depends so strongly on the unknown and goodwill of the unexpected as a farmer does? The impending birth of calves inspires dreams of the calf being the right calf and growing into being the right cow. The planting, the haying, even the milking, all being controlled by forces within the realm of knowledge and experience and yet controlled by a force far stronger than one can even begin to imagine. There are years when only steadfast grim concentration can carry one’s step to the barn. And days when all goes so well that life is as close to perfection as is possible on this earth.”

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The Improbable Shepherd

Text copyright © 2013 Sylvia Jorrín

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN: 978-1-57826-471-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-57826-472-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Cover photography by Chris Lopez.

Cover and interior design by Cynthia Dunne.

v3.1

This book is dedicated to

my daughter, Justina Jorrín Barnard,

my son, Joachim Jorrín

and

John D. Hillis, the man in the blue truck

who told me to write it.

With all my love,

Sylvia Jorrín

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With gratitude

I offer thanks to

John D. Hillis

Arnold Brickman

Stephanie Carter

Susan Daley

Andrew Flach

Steve Gross

Chris Lopez

Valerie Razavi

and

my wonderful editor

Anna Krusinski

You have each in your own way made this book possible.

With love,

Sylvia Jorrín

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Great Blue Heron

Letter to a Friend

Arrivals

Names

Fly Flannagan

Persephone

Bubbles and Edna

Rugosa Roses

Rooms

Small Increments

The Extra Mile

The Penhaligan and Merriman Sisters

My Story

The Pattern

Weeding the Wildflowers and Other Stories of Adventure

Lady Petunia and Lady Pansy

The Familiar Time

Hopes, Dreams, and Wishes

The Silence

The Thaw

The Icy Path

Alive

The Kids

The Tragedy

Autumn Cooking

The Beauty of October

Priscilla Skipworth or Patience Skipworth or Comfort Skipworth

Lambing

Envy

The Newest Lamb

The Kitchen Farm

Small Details

The Adventure

The Party

As Ernest Lay Dying

The Sick Day

Roses

Shades of Elizabeth David

The Two Dog Chair

One Step at a Time

In the Beginning

To Be Ready for a Miracle

Wuthering Heights

Because of Rose Brickman

The Cousins

The First Moon

New Year’s Day

Postscript

A Note on the Author

INTRODUCTION

I HAVE THE privilege of living my dream, here in a valley deep in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. Orange day lilies, double-flowered, rich in their intensity, are framed by the great stone pillars that demarcate the windows of my outdoor living room. There are five such windows, each framing still another view of the lovely hills that surround my farm. I had a stone floor laid here some time ago, the autumn before I began to farm. It is built over a huge, deep stone cistern, which keeps this room cool on the rare day that summer becomes too hot. My dog Samantha lies at my feet on the stone floor this morning. She is nearly 12, and beginning, just beginning, to prefer to stay near me rather than race with my young Border Collie puppy, Fly Flannagan, who, instead of chasing her, is attempting to catch the barn swallows circling his head.

The morning fog is thick today. We are enclosed, all of us. My sheep, crowding in the cool shadow of the barn this summer morning. The goats, one staring out of the open door of the carriage house loft. Is he watching Fly racing toward each swallow who chooses to dive toward his head? Fly is the enemy, you see, and has been known to bring me one, still shivering and afraid, only to be released upon command. “Fly, bring it to me.” The chickens, recaptured after their most recent breakout, are safely (or is it the Savoy cabbages I am so carefully nurturing now the safe ones) ensconced in their outdoor duplex portable chicken coop, once again. Once again.

It is lovely here, this early morning. Not beautiful. Beauty is reserved, in my mind at least, for grander vistas, but it is lovely. The paradox, of course, that lies in all things is how to keep what is not from spoiling what is. How to keep the knowledge that heartache is inevitably included in life on the farm from intruding on all that is truly beautiful in that life, and in that, spoil it.

I am a farmer, and am most of what that means most of the time, and all of what that means me rest of the time. I have farmed it in these hills for many years. And shall continue to farm it for the rest of my life. This was not my first dream. My first dream was to live in a beautiful house, and I do. A Connecticut River Valley shingle-style house, set by accident or design, far, far from the river and far from the Long Island Sound of my New London childhood. The farm became a new dream, born in these hills. It still surprises me. There are moments when it is my greatest despair. And moments when it is a most silent and profoundly peaceful joy. But it is always my dream. And I live it.

THE GREAT BLUE HERON

THE GREAT BLUE heron soared over the length of the brook, then gliding to the pond, settled on the gate post of my long wooden fence surrounding June Grass Pasture. They have become a symbol here on my farm. Were I to create my own coat of arms, something quite unprecedented in these hills, I’d choose the heron, wings spread, carrying a lamb tied in a ribbon. They Soar would be the motto. They Soar. As do my dreams.

I watched the Heron before me and my flock surrounding me as they grazed the round bale I had just opened for them. Baleage. Sweet smelling with a faint hint of malt, and yet keeping the breath of summer, white plastic peeled away, six hundred pounds of second cutting hay. A joy to both this farmer and my sheep.

I took armfuls to the goats. They are living in the lambing room for the moment, neat and quite tidy. Fairly content, except for the moments when they, for no explicable reason, attack one another. With a vengeance. Goats fight. Sometimes. Sheep fight rarely. Except as today when two very pregnant ewes decided to face off and butt heads, the sound shaking the rafters, until the sound of my shouting diverted one. Not the other. And the exercise lost its interest.

My wood room is nearly full of firewood. It is one of the biggest rooms in this house of many rooms, a story and a half tall, L-shaped, surrounding my farm office. The wood in the foot of the L is stacked eight feet high, eight by eight by six and a half, 416 cubic feet. Nine weeks worth, I hope, of firewood to burn in January and February. If I seem committed to a fascination with multiplying numbers it is because I am. All farmers are. Protein ratios and total digestible nutrients and selenium content are the things with which all farmers are obsessed. I don’t milk, except occasionally some of the goats and so I don’t have to figure out protein levels and somatic cell counts. But when I milk, I do weigh both milk and grain and enter neat tiny figures in my daily journal. But the amount of wood in the wood room, the summer kitchen, and the pile on the lawn still to be brought in under cover, influences how much work I shall have to do, subzero afternoons, and how much suffering shall have to be endured here this winter. I burn 30 face cords a year, a fire in the fireplace or one of the wood stoves each month of the year. This year there shall be more than enough for the first time in a long time. I’ve been stacking it myself, and proudly show it off to anyone who will put up with me. It is almost perfectly neat, and is divided into classifications. All nighters, big, heavy unsplit wood for the fireplace. Slab wood, thin, hot burning, good starter wood for the fireplace as well. Limb wood for the blue enamel Vermont Casting Defiant stove in the kitchen, to keep it going, in theory, all night. Round cardboard bins of pine cones, still damp and tightly closed. Split wood of varying lengths to accommodate each of the three stoves and one fireplace I keep going all winter. One more stove to be added when I get the chimney cleaned.

My son, Joachim, shall help me put up the storm windows. In this house of over 70 windows, that is a task. We won’t get to them all. And he shall help me worm the sheep and goats before they are put in the barn for the winter, where they are certain to pick up parasites from one another. The problems of proximity. Worming is essential to the wellbeing of this flock of pregnant ewes and soon to be bred does.

I am a farmer. It has been an evolution of sorts, a demand, rather, because I had never intended to become one and had no background to sustain this way of life. It was the farthest thing from my life experience imaginable. I had been raised in an overprotected environment where cautionary tales about the dangers of all creatures having four legs were instilled in me from the time I noticed a puppy existed in a form other than that of a stuffed toy when I was six. It was of great sadness to me that I was not allowed to even pet the horses that were living next door, let alone even dare to be taught to ride. I spent much of my childhood bedridden, making paper dolls and their clothes and inventing stories about their lives. My favorite had auburn hair, green eyes, and lived with her uncle. Shades of The Secret Garden. That I would grow up to sleep sandwiched between my Border Collie, Steele, and her Border Collie cross-daughter Samantha, winter nights, was inconceivable to me. Sometimes it still is. The tiny puppy who has now enlivened my farm would have been equally inconceivable. Fly Flannagan. Border Collie pup. Male. Seven weeks old today. Fly, Fly Flannagan. Fly.

The thick sweet smell of baleage filled the air as I bundled some to take to the carriage house flock. They are a combination of newly acquired black Finns, two less recently acquired dairy ewes, and a Horned Dorset purchased last year. As none of them were born here, they don’t exactly know the rules, and consequently have given me something of a hard time, and having led the flock once too often to the neighbor’s, are now locked inside. Less freedom for them. More work for me. They too needed baleage.

I’ve walked, of late, with great regularity, across the June Grass pasture to the small pond the beavers have made in part of the brook. My task is the opposite from theirs. I tear out a niche in their dam nearly every day to lower the water table so it shall not flood my pasture. They patch it each night to raise the water table so it shall flood my pasture, enlarging their home pond. The heron fishes the brook and now the new pond as well. He would not be deprived of fish were the pond made lower, but the beavers would be deprived of their needs. They’ve cut most of the trees and shrubs from the length of the brook up to the sheep crossing. Marsh grass is beginning to invade the pasture. I tether the goats to the wooden fence and let them graze it down, I hope to extinction. I love that little walk and the vehemence added to my day when I toss branches, mud, and sedge with wild abandon from the dam back to the pasture.

The sheep have had their fill of the sweet malt flavored round bale of second cutting and drift away. I gather still another armful for the carriage house sheep. And the great blue heron soars.

LETTER TO A FRIEND

THE SHEEP GAVE me a gift today. All 152 of them. Instinct born of experience told me they were going to try, en masse, to escape to the neighbor’s across the road. Oh, they had ensconced themselves nicely, as a matter of fact, last evening, in the enclosed barnyard. Almost all of them. The few remaining outside stayed immediately around the barn. Still in close proximity of each other. They go in quite on their own. Nearly dusk. As night falls across these hills and the stars appear, one by one.

Sometimes I sit with them on the stone stairs leading down into the barnyard. They look at me. And, one at a time, the ones who need to, come to be petted and fussed over. Staring into my face. Intently. We are together in those moments. And I am well aware of my place. I am the one with less clarity. I work for them. They are because of me. But I am the servant. Willingly. They give more than I, I only give my labor. Every day of the year. My heart, most times. My strength. Every day. My determination. My will. Always. They give me peace. Theirs is the greater gift. And they keep me in my place.

I have my favorites. And feel guilty saying so. This year I love the Raggedy Ann and Andy–looking ones. Funny faces. Charming. Winsome. A little amusing in their aspect. And intelligent. The winter’s lambs with freckles, or the fly away airplane ears of the East Friesian crosses. The ones with black eyelashes. How could that be? “I know your grandfather,” I’ll say when they come to me. One little pretty-faced eweling has developed across her nose the triangle patch of freckles of her late lamented great-grandfather, Noah Saltonstall. And then there is a pair of chunky twins who weren’t expected to be born. I was given their mother. To save her from being turned into dog food. “She can’t be bred again,” I was told. “The vet said she couldn’t freshen safely again.” I took her. I always do. While I sell ram lambs for meat, I’ve not sold any adult ewes for meat, ever. Once they are chosen to stay, they live out their lives here.

One day, mid-winter, I was putting the sheep back in the barn. They had gone out for half an hour to exercise. I suddenly heard amidst the flock (had over 100 lambs born this year and a hundred or so adult sheep), a little tin horn sound frantically piping. A newborn! But where among the many sets of four legs, racing to the barn? I saw it. A perfect, square, blocky little thing. About five pounds. And there, equally frantic, was the big old ewe who wasn’t supposed to survive giving birth. She barreled her way through the crowd and found the lamb. I went back outside to secure the door when I heard another little tin horn. Alone in the snow. I became the frantic one. There, out on the sheep path to the brook, was still one more lamb. As wet as the first. A newborn. I scooped her up and raced to the barn. The big old sheep looked relieved. I penned the twins and their dam in the lambing jug bedded down with fresh straw. She had lambed easily, with twins in less than 20 minutes. Outside. In the snow.

Those two lambs are now nice blocky, young creatures. Square. Tall. Looking like their mother. Their lines please me. They lack the delightful quality of the ones with freckles and fly-away ears. But they, too, shall live their lives out on my farm. They shall not be sold as a starter flock. They gave me joy one wintery day. And again last evening watching them in the barnyard.

The pastures are getting low again. Part of the fence here is still down from the Great Flood a few weeks ago. The sheep found a breach leading into the brook. The line fence is still down in that section. The entire flock went through it to the neighbor’s. I got them back but had to keep them in an over-grazed pasture until the fence is fixed. The south pasture has thick grass that I have saved for September. I decided to leave the gate to it open in case they needed to graze it. The southwest wall is stone. Five feet high. Shoring up the road bank. Across the road is a large open meadow. Owned by a city person who has it cut but who has never farmed. He has no patience with sheep.

I woke this morning shortly before dawn. “They’re going to go to the neighbor’s,” I thought. “Now.” I jumped out of bed, got into some corduroys and a sweater. Catskill summer morning; called my puppy and ran outside. Swirls of mist rose in the air. I was on an island, surrounded by a great white sea. Other islands of dark green emerged and disappeared. Parts of the hills that surround this farm appeared for moments and then receded into the fog.

I sat down on the road side of the great stone wall. And there they came. Into the pasture. Through the gate. One. Two. Three at a time. Sheep. Lambs. Emerging out of the mist. They approached me. Looking at the wall. They could scale it. I knew it. They knew it. Practice. I stayed on the wall. The sheep looked at me. And began to graze the pasture. My pasture. White shapes moving slowly across the fresh, dew-laden grass. My puppy, Glencora MacCluskie, sat, “sit, stay.” Beside me. Ears up. Watching. And I sat on the stone wall. Watching. Listening to the silence.

ARRIVALS

IT HAS ARRIVED. In all of its attendant glory. Once again. Winter. It was -2°F outside my kitchen window at 7:30 this morning. It is still -2° outside, 32° in the living room, and 42° in the kitchen. Usually it gets warmer faster than this. But I hadn’t filled the stove very well last night. It had gotten too hot. I was afraid of over-firing it.

The sunrise this morning was beauty incarnate. Snow is everywhere. Pale blue sky. White etching the trees and covering the meadows, pastures, and lawns. And a splash of peach, pink, and coral at the tree line across the top of the hills in the southeast. It is the beautiful time here. I’ve never seen more than lovely in this countryside, summer. It is the winter where beauty reigns, queen. Loveliness includes pretty, and all of the lesser qualities that define it. Beauty requires a touch of something with a firmer back. I moved here because, in part, it is lovely. Beauty demands too much. Overshadows. Makes the individual insignificant. In nature, at least. I’ve seen beauty in the desert at the Four Corners, New Mexico. And couldn’t live, so tiny a creature, among those astonishing shapes and breathtaking colors. But here, the scale was perfect. I could still be myself, significant in my own life, and accompany what nature had to offer. In winter, when there is snow, it becomes different. I had to become a sharper self this morning. Race downstairs, find a hat and sweater to put on, in the house. One hand lit the cook stove to heat the water for the coffee, the other brushed away the curtain to see what the temperature was outside. Some bread dough was rising overnight. I turned the oven on to preheat it, something I never do but this new bread asks for a hot oven, and started the fire in the kitchen wood stove. I have a new system for starting it that actually works. Ten Nantucket lights, which are rolled sheets of paper tied into a knot. Ten pinecones and eight of the nice, short, seasoned limb wood that works so well for me. It never fails to catch. And after I put a piece or two of real wood it begins to roar, that old, welcome familiar sound. I kneaded the “noknead” bread and put it in the hot oven.

I’ll never understand how one interprets or experiences the quality (I nearly wrote concept) of “warm.” The kitchen air is swirling around me, and feels not only warm but nearly hot. Off come the sweater and the hat. But the indoor thermometer reads only 52°F. The outside one is a high of 10°. It is comfortable. But that is impossible. I shivered coming into the kitchen when it is 52°, mornings. The bread has begun to fill the air with its “nearly done” message. This time, the second time I’ve made it, it has risen astronomically. I’ll have to write down how I did it, if it is better tasting, and I can remember. There had been some discussion in the New York Times and followed by Cook’s magazine about a method by which one can achieve a bakery kind of chewy, old-fashioned holey bread at home. It is also no knead, or perhaps little knead. It had, when I made it for the first time the other day, a quality that I’ve never seen in a home-made loaf, tasting of bread from the Italian bakeries in a neighborhood where I once lived. This is the second time I’ve made it. It is almost no work at all. Part of the joy of it is that it needs to rise for 12 hours. Which means I can have dough to put in the oven upon coming down to the kitchen, mornings, and have bread when I come in from the barn. If this loaf is as good as the first one, and it may be better having proofed longer and subsequently risen higher, it may be of great service to me. Bread and cheese for breakfast. Toast for tea. And a bit of stale bread to thicken a soup.

I do know how to live here. But sometimes it seems as if I can’t. Of late. For the first time. But hope has slipped in on welcome feet once again, and there is possibility once more. It seems as if the right man to do some needed work on my barn has turned up. None too soon. And by this time next week I’ll be looking at a barn that shall be functioning. At least, better than it has been in quite some time. Hope is mysterious. It may come at one end of a shovel or a skid steerer. Often, for me, that’s all it takes. I know that taking care of myself, to my amazement, translates into taking better care of everyone else here. And having something ready for me to eat makes a difference when I come in from the barn. But, unfortunately for this farmer it has to be the right something to eat. And the kitchen cannot reproach me for a mess made while preparing it. The thing that pleases me about farm life, one of the things, is an interconnection of all things. When it works, it is beautiful. Table scraps to the chickens. Coffee grounds dried to use to help start the fire. Laundry drying around the wood stove. It requires discipline on my part that is lacking, at times. But more deeply is required a belief that can affect my life here. That my actions will actually benefit what it all is here. And that has been a crucial point. Uncertainty has entered my heart. That is not good. Today, however, inspired by a loaf of bread and thoughts of someone to hoe out the barn, all seems well.

I have been downstairs for two and a half hours. The kitchen feels roasting at 68°F. It is 14° above zero outside. Some of my animals have been fed. Others shall be shortly. The chickens get the scraps from the Fidget pie I made last night. Sometimes English country food fills the bill. Layers of apple, onion, potatoes, and bacon topped with a short crust and moistened with some chicken stock. The chickens, when all in life follows its appointed order, get the apple and potato peelings and the fire in the living room gets the onion skins wrapped in newspaper to help it start. And this farmer shall have some hot food upon coming in from the barn.

I came across a French cookbook (nighttime reading), that I’ve never used. My friend Valerie, who is an artist, bought it to paint from the pictures, and sent it along when she was finished using it. It was translated from the French and has the country recipes that are such a perfect fit here. Salt cod, which I make every Christmas, and bean soups. The recipes take time to prepare, something that is of advantage here. “Step two after an hour wait,” when coming in from the barn. Take long cooking, which also works well here on the top of my wood stove and creates a welcoming atmosphere in the house. And, usually, except for the price for the right cheese for the soup, very inexpensive to prepare. Quick and easy play no part here. But inexpensive and delicious do. Were I ever to think in terms of healthy food, which I don’t, healthy would come into play here quite by accident. At least if a well-balanced variety of foods is what keeps us going, a good winter soup, French country, will do it.

It is amazing what a little hope can do. There is hope that the barn shall be shoveled out next week. There is hope that there may be some repairs to it as well. There is hope that my last lambs will be sold. And hope that some firewood shall arrive next week as well. And there is another hope that is, in fact, a promise. And that is the one thing certain, without fail, to lift the heart and comfort the soul. On Sunday I shall be going to pick up my new pup. A sister of Glencora MacCluskie. An eight week old Border Collie puppy. To live with us and brighten my life. On Sunday, who shall arrive, winter afternoon, to the farm but Nelly Zolotoroffski, Border Collie.

Nelly Zolotoroffski shall arrive. Hope on four legs with a white blaze and wagging tail.

NAMES

I AM OFTEN asked how I arrive at the many names that are given to the livestock here on my farm. The most noteworthy has been of course, Giuseppe Patrick Nunzio McGuire, donkey. Hardly in second place but quite even with it are my Border Collies, Glencora MacClusky and Nelly Zolotoroffski. Of course there are also Burgo Fitzgerald and Doby Fitzgorman, rams; Adelaide and Honey Merriman, goats (mother and daughter); and the Young Pretender, ram. Then there are Candida Lycett-Green and her daughter Cameron Lycett-Green, and her daughter Cecelia Lycett-Green, goats. Grandmother, mother, and daughter. The next family offspring in their line shall be Candace Lycett-Green.

I’ve never completely invented a name. They are always suggested to me from one source or another. Originally, when I first had sheep, the Barsetshire series, 30 or so novels written by Angela Thirkell (the grand niece of Anthony Trollope), provided me with numerous names. Lavinia Brandon was a favorite. However, Thirkell also commented that first names were more difficult to come by than last names. Witness our current fancy for giving girls last names as first names. MacKenzie and Taylor come to mind. She had continued the Trollope series, the six Palliser novels, skipping a generation or two, but writing about the same families and the same neck of the woods in Barsetshire, England. She wrote over a period of 30 years, describing the inevitable and gradual intermingling of families and social classes, usually through marriage. But she had the same problem that I have. Do I name another sheep Lavinia Brandon after my first Lavinia who died 15 years ago? It is too lovely a name to be buried in a sheep’s grave. But am I deriding the original Lavinia by giving her name away? How do I do that? Assume that one of the kitchen lambs, or both, for they are twins, is a great-granddaughter? They then could become Lavinia and Lattice rather than Virginia and Veronica? The names that seem most delightful are usually British. Of course, Sterling Burgess is an interesting one, American, our own Tasha Tudor. Sterling shall be a goat, I think, of outstanding qualities, of course. My donkey bears one of the names of the friend who found him for me at an auction. Included are the names of his father and grandfather. Glencora was the central figure of the Palliser series and Burgo Fitzgerald was the name of her first love. Irresistible to have them both around, even if one is a dog and the other a ram. Nelly is the name given to all of my grandfather’s dogs. Some pictures were recently sent to me by my cousins of our family “fahm” that included pictures of several Nelly’s, always rolling on the grass, tummy exposed, ready to be scratched. Her last name has become Zolotoroffski because she needs a last name with some ring to it. “Here, Nelly,” doesn’t quite cut it, calling her in from the fields and woods. “Nelly Zolotoroffski, here!” has more authority behind it. So be it.

I shall be looking for a Toggenburg buckling soon for the goats. His last name shall be critical as all of his line shall bear it. All of the cats, barn cats as well as indoor cats, have names beginning with the letter P. Prentice and Prescott; Pembrooke, Pendelton, and Peabody. The next ones, and I’d love to find an orange pair once again, are to be Penhollow and Pendograst. Next summer, perhaps, I’ll luck out. The Horned Dorsets are Bess Throckmorton and Melody Throckmorton, respectively. Mrs. Sinkins, a name given by my old friend Liz Gruen. Margaret Fearnley Wittenstall and Alexis Lennox Boyd. Bess is named after Sir Walter Raleigh’s wife. The name Melody came to me without much thought. Margaret and Alexis were mentioned in the English magazine Country Living. Those names flew off the page at me. Delight and joy! The twin Horned Dorsets born this winter to my most impossible, and therefore unnamed, sheep have yet to be named. They are five and a half weeks old. One suddenly stopped nursing and needed heroic measures in order to save her life. She, of course, was then brought to the house. When she seemed big enough she was moved to the carriage house until I realized she was at risk from all of the other animals in there. Many are horned. All are adults. She now lives with another lamb in the wood room. She is growing, energetic, and even finer in confirmation than the twin sister who remained with their mother.

It is unfortunate that their dam has never been called anything but the Impossible Sheep. The designation was well earned. She was five or six years old when she came here five years ago. And a fine jumper, par excellance. When she began to train some younger ewes who never thought to challenge a fence before, I began to despair. Two winters ago she sprained her ankle. I checked for an infection. Found none. There was nothing I could do for a sprain. She limped around the barn for weeks. And never leapt a fence since. She is 11. And recently decided to accept me. Will wonders never cease! While I seem to be remiss in naming the twins, I found on my pages of suggested names two that had been considered shortly after they were born. Felicity and Fiona. And so they shall be. And their mother? The Impossible McPhearson seems best. Therefore they shall be Felicity and Fiona McPhearson. Twin Horned Dorset ewe lambs. My future.

And that is how my sheep get their names.

FLY FLANNAGAN

HIS NAME IS Fly. Fly Flannagan, this fluffy round ball of a puppy, lying here in the crook of my elbow. I had never really liked the name Fly. Or rather, I had never really understood it. In Scotland, where Border Collies live in great abundance, Fly is a name commonly associated with the dogs of the renowned trainers. All shepherds. Unlike the trainers stateside who seem to be comprised of Frisbee throwers. I’ve read stories of countless dogs with the name of Fly. Fly the dog who found and dug a ewe and her lamb out of a snow drift, having been buried for days. Fly the faithful. Fly the swift. Fly the greatest sheep dog of all.

But I am an American. And here in cluster fly country, black fly country, and many others of the species of fly, had not an appreciation of the name. But in its perplexity, it always gnawed at me. I wanted to like it.

One day, suddenly, with no apparent reason, I understood. I saw in my mind’s eye an infinity of shepherds each calling, “Fly. Fly. Fly.” as this inimitable Border Collie races, feet barely touching the ground, up a hill, across its expanse and back down again, the sheep, in a flock before her. If, indeed, it is a her. And that was part of the dilemma. Is Fly the name of a dog or a bitch? I didn’t know.

Fly has fallen asleep. Instantly. The moment I sat down with him. He is exhausted after having a wonderful playtime with Peabody, the cat, in the kitchen. She sat on a chair. The better to swat him on the nose. He’d retreat. And then charge. Only to be swatted again and retreat once more. Life is good.

My Border Collie Steele farmed here with me for 10 years. She had been exquisitely trained and her training combined with her superb instincts created a miracle on this farm. She and I were inseparable. She was my lead and my shadow. I could not imagine how I could manage my farm without her, and found that after she died it was more difficult than I had thought possible.

At first the sheep believed she was still at work when I called out to an unhearing wind, “Steele, put them in the baaarn.” But soon they realized that she was gone; her daughter, only half Border Collie, with her show dog father’s instincts, was inconsistent at best, and they began to know they could thwart my wishes. A hundred 150-pound sheep, thwarting my wishes.

I’m not a natural with dogs. Was hesitant to train one myself. Didn’t want a male. However, when I saw that little doggy dog face, eyes staring me down, ears flopping, with the same white arrow on his forehead that Steele had, I asked to see his parents work. His father, mother, and aunt each went out to the pen and separated a flock of sheep from a herd of goats and brought the sheep to their trainer. They then, singly, returned the sheep to the pen and brought the goats to their trainers. He asked me if I wanted them to drive the chickens to him as well. I replied, “May I write you a check?” I was sold.

My former hired man, now driver, Ernest Westcott, and I brought him home in the truck yesterday. “Two hundred miles roundtrip,” Ernest said. The puppy stared up at me. The music in the cab of the truck was a little louder than usual. Strange sounds to that little creature who spent his whole life in an outdoor pen. After awhile his eyes closed, and, with my hand over his ears he fell asleep. I looked at his registration papers. There was the answer. Both answers. His father’s name is Fly. And one of his grandmother’s names is Fly. So be it. And Fly he became. That little round ball with the round eyes, staring up into my face.

But what was to be his last name? I thought of McGillicuddy. It almost seemed right. However, almost doesn’t satisfy here. I’m not known for my ability to live well with almosts. I tried McKenzie. But that name is already possessed by a sheep, and a little girl I know. Fitzsimmons has been done here as well.

I went to bed, Fly curled up next to my shoulder, thinking Fly McKenzie would be the name of choice. Got up in the morning, dissatisfied with my choice. Put him on my lap and in that moment got it. He is Fly Flannagan. Fly Flannagan. Across pasture and meadow. Hill and brook. Fly. Fly Flannagan.

New animals bring hope to a farm. The heifer calf, born of one’s second best cow. The triplets out of the old lady ewe. Even a new pair of marmalade cats for the barn. And new chicks, of course. They are the well-spring of the farmer’s eternal faith that life shall bring life and all shall therefore grow and prosper.

Adam Smith wrote a great deal about farming in The Wealth of Nations. True wealth, he maintained, generates more wealth. Nature’s laws of increase. Service industries do not. Should one employ a cook, the value of that service is gone the moment the food is eaten. Should a farmer plant a seed, income and wealth shall be created with the help of nature because of the plant that did not exist only a short time before. If it grows, that is.

We are increasingly becoming a society drained by our needs for services. Services that require a payment but produce nothing of lasting value. The phrase “sustainable agriculture” has always confounded me. I’ve never understood how a farm dependent on gasoline could consider itself to be sustainable. Farms run with horses create another horse from time to time. A foal to sell or a foal to replace its dam or sire. I use no machinery myself but am dependent on those who do to cut and deliver hay, and so would never dream of calling my farm sustainable. Except, of course, in matters of the heart. And then it is totally and absolutely sustainable.

Is my new puppy part of the new or old order? Is he a member of the service economy or of Adam Smith’s design for increase and the creation of true wealth? That remains to be seen. For the moment he is simply part of my order of things. He is part of the laws of the increase of the heart.

PERSEPHONE

I MET PERSEPHONE for the first time in the parking lot at the hardware store. Probably it was the first time that parking lot experienced such an encounter. She, a little doeling, sat quietly in the arms of her soon-to-be prior owner in his red vehicle. And cried inconsolably while looking at him out of the window of Jeff Arnold’s truck as she sat with me. It was a good thing that we had errands to do before she was introduced to my farm. It gave me a chance to hold her, and for her to look at me. I could pet her and talk to her and explain that although it would be different where she was going, that she’d like it in a while, because I was so happy to have her join us. She is a pretty and affectionate creature. It will be a good thing for us all. I put her in a pen with Cecelia Lycett-Green, who is about her age. Cecelia immediately proceeded to bash Persephone against a wall. The battering stopped as soon as I threw in some second cutting hay and gave a stern lecture to Cecelia. It must have been the lecture that did it.

There is something about bringing in a new animal to the farm that adds even more than simply its own life to the mix. Perhaps that is it. Within the equation is an expansion that is equal to more than its own life. I’ve only had three original (to me) ideas in my life; one of them is that two and two cannot possibly make four. Each of the two is either diminished slightly by the impact of their joining therefore being a mere conjectural, three and seven eighths, or are added to with the heat of the combustion caused by creating the combination. On the farm, and in my life here, it is always equated as more than four. Persephone Winterstall has added a little bit more than herself to the mix of young goats and to the combination that includes me. For I, while I am the shepherd, and stand taller than the others, am simply equal, although different, from the rest of us. And am greatly enhanced by that. This little goat, who cried so before I came into and after I left the carriage house, and who is only at rest when putting her face between my hands. This little, little goat adds to me. One and one in this instance does not make two.

The second morning that Persephone was here, I found Ethyl Merriman and her young daughter in the pen as well. Doby Fitzgorman, young ram, was removed to the pen as well after I found he had discovered the hole in my vegetable garden fence. I moved Ethyl Merriman out. Left her doeling in and realized my next move would be to get all of the doelings in that pen. A sliding bar needs to be made at the pen’s outer wall to keep the goats from jumping into it from the adjacent stairs but that can be removed quickly should I have to get in quickly.

The air is sweet today. Soft. Almost spring-like this rainy afternoon. Late October. The rain clatters where it clatters and drips where it drips and in all ways makes it a time to wish for a little more comfort and warmth. The fires have caught, reluctantly, but caught nonetheless. Windows that were open all summer and had become jammed shut, and the two in the basement that were most flagrantly letting cold air and wind in from the north and west have been boarded up and sealed.

I made some scones today. Scottish ones. On the griddle, the way they were meant to be. Fireside things. To be eaten around the fire as well as to be baked over one. I changed the recipe and found I had made something of a mistake in doing it. Butter is my favorite food. No harm in adding a little more butter to the batter. But there was. It promptly melted out and started to fry the little triangles rather than allowing them to bake. I won’t do that again. They are good spread with jam and eaten accompanying a cup of tea, strong, without milk or sugar. Irish Breakfast or Russian Caravan. I could be so happy.

The new goat here on the farm is unmistakably a Nubian. She has a loud voice, a very loud voice for a creature so young and small, and yells, there is no better term for it, when she hears me leave the house, at the top of her voice, and keeps it up until I open the big doors to the carriage house, rush in, and take her face in my hands. I’ve already told you her first name is Persephone. I’m not certain of her last, but Winterstall keeps coming to the forefront of my mind. That may be it. That is it. Persephone Winterstall. I’ve wanted a Nubian herd forever; long before I inherited my Toggenburg, for Candida Lycett-Green is a pure Nubian. Her daughters, Cameron and Cecelia are half Nubian, as shall be her next daughter, considering the prolonged visit Cornelius, flock sire, has been making here. Cameron shall only be part Nubian, but her firstborn carried the same characteristic markings as she. The breed has more butterfat but less volume of milk than the Toggenburgs. But I like them for some absolutely mystifying reason. The color and markings of the Togs please me so. And having a herd that is usually uniform pleases me as well. The Nubians here, at least, are all piebald, if anything, and are not particularly beautiful to my eye. Those with Tog in them have cream stripes down their faces. They look better to me. The hay is sweet. Square bales. I love to wind the string into compact balls and hang them on a row of nails. Rows of round green balls. Tidy and neat. The windows need to be replaced there. Soon. Perhaps tomorrow.

There is a peace in the carriage house farm that is almost palatable. The order is simple. Subject only to a modest amount of refinement. Which is necessary in all ways here at the moment. I have much of what is needed to make it work properly for us. What is lacking is that illusive quality. Time. The will remains unshakable, although it almost seems as if it is simply obstinate stubbornness, a quality with which I am most familiar. Once more there shall not be water this winter. But electricity is a certainty. And hay, square bales, shall be forthcoming. The thought of carrying water all winter from the house is unbearable. However, perhaps a new way can be devised. It remains to be seen. My plan for a number of years has been to house both goats and young sheep stock in the carriage house so they can be most closely monitored. This year’s variation on the theme is to keep the Horned Dorset flock and the goats ensconced in there. And the donkey. And the chickens. I have a beautiful desk there as well, so there also is room for me. Hope combined with a sense of purpose and firm resolution is what is needed to carry the day. What I’ve often said when I feel discouraged is that the only thing to do is buy a cow. Perhaps Persephone Winterstall, goat, Melody and Bess Throckmorton, and the three yet to be named Horned Dorsets can equal a cow.

The wild creature who ran away rejoined the flock on the neighbor’s lawn two mornings after she first headed off, straight to Treadwell, she is quite wild. I expect that is why she was sold in the first place. To date, I’ve not been able to separate her from my flock proper. The moment I come near them she suspects me and tries to run for the nearest hill, mountain, valley, or glen. Anything to get back to Norwich. If she comes to this farm bred, as I was told, I’ll know soon enough. However, if not, she may freshen with a Friesian cross. The farm is entering its interesting stage. Again. It will be good.

BUBBLES AND EDNA

THE BARN SWALLOWS swoop over my head as I milk the two latest goats to arrive on the farm. They come burdened with two rather impossible names. At least impossible to incorporate into the previously established genre of names I am accustomed to give here. The sweeter of the two comes to the call, “Here Bubbles.” The rambunctious one is Edna. While to some the kind of names I give my livestock are amusing, to me they are simply a delight. My beautiful, late lamented sheep, Fancy Bewling comes to mind. I loved looking at her and saying, “Now, Fancy that!” The goats have family surnames. The Merrimans and the MacDouglases. The sheep are another story. However, I was told these two goats will come when called, provided I call out Bubbles and Edna.

Edna was the more vociferous of the two when she first arrived. Tethered to a fence, she looked longingly at me and spoke her opinion loudly and in no uncertain terms. But about what?

Yesterday afternoon I tethered her once more to a fence post and left her for a short while. When I returned she was gone. The rope in tatters. My Yankee soul is loath to not try to reuse last year’s ropes, the ones I painstakingly braided out of a new roll of baling twine. I’ve begun to accept, however reluctantly, that I must start afresh each year. While they seem to still be quite strong, they have a tendency to disintegrate when any stress is applied to them. So be it.

Instinct prompted me to look to the pasture rather than search among the more luscious of possible edibles in the vicinity. There, in the distance, mingling with the sheep, grazing quite nicely at that, was Edna. Oh, no! What now? “Edna,” I called. “Edna. Come.” My sheep looked at me as if I had lost my mind. It was the appropriate time for me to call out “Cahm ahn! Cahm ahn,” and put them in the barn for the night. But no. Here I was singing quite a different tune. Some stared at me. Others just picked up their heads. Three or four started to saunter to the barn and then stopped. Edna came, at a leisurely, lady-like pace, directly to me, let me pet her head and lead her back to her carriage-house home. She has probably been called Edna for all of her life. But shall not be for much longer. Louisa, maybe. Even, perhaps, Millicent; but Edna, no. However, making the transition shall take some ingenuity.

My carriage house has been hoed out to the walls with the exception of two of the pens that hold livestock. It hasn’t been like this since I started farming. Everything has been sorted out and reorganized, ready for me to determine how I want things to be. Those words alone are part of the miracle. Far too often, expedience is the driving force here. Or rather, perhaps, immediacy. I’ve rarely had the luxury of being able to choose where and how I want things. Some quite forgotten or often ignored things surfaced. One was a little table that shall soon be moved to the lovely, lovely place where I milk goats, under the barn bridgeway. A table on which to put the milk pail when I am bringing the goats back to their places, mornings on the lawn, evenings to the carriage house, has been a long-time necessity. I’ve been of the custom of propping the buckets on top of an old wine-colored plastic garbage can that has disturbed my “dairy” for far too long. Upon opening it the other day I discovered a treasure of composted manure I had dug from the barn some time ago. The miracle workers have moved it, as well, to be spread under the apple trees my mother bought me the year I bought the house.

My “dairy” has a stone floor. It is under the barn bridgeway. Hence the visitation of the barn swallows. They have, over time, built their wattle nests on the floor joints of the barn bridgeway high above my head. They seem to be away from home, mornings. It seems to be evening milking to which they object.

I make cheese. And bought some very nice gallon jars with wide mouth tops in which to store the milk. One per goat. I’ve never fancied the kind of goat cheese that has a strong taste. The one I make is very mild and delicate. Sometimes I top it with pepper and chives. Or rather, bottom it with pepper and cheese as I sprinkle the cheesecloth on which it drains with the above and turn it upside down when serving it. My goats make very delicately flavored milk. Tomorrow I shall buy some yogurt to start making my own. There is a nice cheese made from drained yogurt that can be stored in olive oil that has enticed me for years. Soon it shall be made here.

Sounds of the roof being torn off shatter the silence. The baby chicks in the two cages in the living room become agitated with the sound.

The new roof is the second miracle of late, cedar shakes. Copper box gutters and flashing. A revamped chimney or two. A civilized house in the making. I’ve had the good fortune to have found a remarkable crew who are fair, efficient, and entertainingly funny. They sometimes shout unacceptable things at each other. At least things that would be utterly unacceptable from me, but that they seem to accept with equanimity. I’ve loved every minute of having them around! And will never be able to express my gratitude to them. They are a joy.

White rambling roses dot the pastures and hillsides here. They were once planted as hedgerows to keep the cows in. They are now considered to be weeds. I love them. Some were dug up across the street one year and discarded. I wished to have them. A year or two ago I saw a tiny one, roadside, my roadside, at that, among the sumac trees. My sumac never quite produced any fruit for me. I do so love “lemonade” made from the pinnacles. Therefore, I usually end up picking it elsewhere rather than from my trees.

And so, it was with no compunction that I broke some branches and some small trees that were obscuring my view of the soon-to-be blossoming rose bush. For, you see, that rose bush has grown beyond my imagination. And it is trailing, gracefully at that, over the fence, and the sumac that is still standing. It is lovely. Lush and full. Thick and yet rambling. There are many buds on it. It shall be lovely to see. It makes me so happy to have noticed it.

I found, this afternoon, almost in the same moment, an undergrowth of tiny currant bushes, all about a foot to 18 inches high. They are begging to be transplanted in sunny and fertile ground. I have a decent amount of black currant bushes. Some gooseberry bushes, and a few gigantic, now that I understand how to grow them, red currants. However, this find shall dramatically expand the red currant plantation. Frost hit much of the berries this year. However, in the words of Beverly Nichols, fearsome gardener, gardeners are always talking about “next year,” “next year.” As am I. Next year, or in the case of the purloined currants, the year after. They are a perfect size to transplant with the least amount of trauma. I’ve just to decide to where. There are two triangular gardens on the far side of the big vegetable garden here. I had thought they would, or at least the biggest, be devoted to black currants. But, perhaps a section of red ones will be in order.

I seem to be buying a couple more Horned Dorset ewes. Described as two year olds, then changed to three year olds, they are something I’ve wanted for some time. There are already six here and a ram, plus three ewe lambs and a ram lamb. They are not easy to find, of late, those original Dorsets, old fashioned, chunky, ancient faces from the English Downs. “Will you give me the magic I need?”

Life has become intense here in ways anticipated, but not wished for. I struggle with experience versus hope. I buy baby chicks, sheep, goats, a roof, perfume, vegetable seeds, and dahlia tubers. My heart has been engaged as well. And that alone has lightened the load.

RUGOSA ROSES

THE RUGOSA ROSE seedlings are coming this week. I’ve wanted them for 20 years. I am inching forward. Slowly. Too slowly. And backward. Too quickly. The first planting will be next to the green, partly painted fence on the Meredith side of the house. It is a neglected side at the moment. But won’t be for long. I’ll finish the painting, with any luck, shortly after the planting.

There is a charming backyard that comes in and out of favor behind the carriage house. When I first came here it was impassable. Full of rusted horse-drawn equipment interspersed with saplings and non-productive blackberry canes. I regret the horse-drawn machinery. One piece of which was stolen. The rest traded for services not rendered. And rejoice in the lawn that emerged. It has alternated between being neat and not. This year and last it has been a storage area of wood, both wood to be burned and wood to be used. The last of the wood designated for the barn is piled there as well. Some bad hay was dumped over the barn bridgeway wall. It has dissolved at last, what wasn’t moved. I think I’ll put a row or two of the Rugosa rose seedlings there as well. There will be more than enough. I haven’t thought through where they all shall go. I bought a hundred. Minimum order for the price. A joy absolute.

There are some quince-colored horse chestnuts in Cooperstown that I have also coveted forever. It has been impossible to track down their source. But I shall. And plant a row of them in front of Greenleaf. Two of the ancient maples that once were along my lawn are gone. An ash is about to go. Two elms were down close to the house long before I ever saw them. I am still filling the holes in the lawn made by their roots. Every spring I pile more dirt, manure, and hay seeds hoping to fill them. Had I not, the holes might be humongous. As it is, they are awkward to mow over.

Some flowers have jumped the perennial border in front of the house, self-sowing themselves in the lawn. Last year I left them. They grew amazingly tall and abundant. Perennial bachelor buttons. Magenta rose color. This year I intend to move them.

I had once gardened in a deliberate but general kind of way. Flowers in clumps balanced each other. I tried to keep the perennial border in constant bloom. And succeeded. For the most part. No orderly rows in any of my gardens. But I have changed. A little. The newest borders are, and shall be, in rows. Rows that will bloom continuously. But rows. With any luck I’ll move the self-sown dealbatas from the front lawn to the two new borders. The daffodils have begun to bloom. Some bow at their waists, the effect of cold weather and the abundance of rain. They shall present their joy for several more weeks, in their many splendid varieties.

The geese kept my lawn mowed this summer past. The horseshoe shaped front lawn is very neat because of that. I’ve been putting waste from the chicken coop onto some sections of grass that have been particularly shabby, with great success. The manure piles on the pastures, the ones which have been well raked, have performed their mission. Dark green surrounds them. With any luck, this year’s manure shall be spread such as well. The pastures need all of the help they can get.

I’ve noticed that farmers tend not to have flower gardens. Vegetable gardens exist more often than not on farms that have a work-at-home wife. The effort of putting up the results of success in the vegetable garden can be a full week’s work. I’ve not figured out yet how to best handle the autumn abundance of apples and pears, let alone vegetables. An ancient—and I do mean ancient—recipe called “apple cheese” was one of the most successful and delicious things I made this year. It consists of a finely sieved apple puree with sugar, cooled until it almost gels. It is left in a mold for three months. Turned over and sliced thinly. Fantastic.

However, I am both the farmer and the farmer’s wife. The dual role is decisive to say the least. I find myself walking through the vegetable gardens every day. Looking. At what? The paths are strewn with debris from the chickens. They love to scratch in the small plots that comprise the garden as a whole. There is nothing to be seen. There are no perennials, or rather not many perennials in the vegetable garden.

It should be the perennial borders that draw me. And an occasional foray to see them and pick the daffodils hasn’t as yet inspired me to recreate them. I shall. All it will take is sitting down in the gardens and pulling a few weeds, to remember the first garden I ever had. When I was two and a half years old. And raised my first Iris. Now I have hundreds of Iris. And thousands of daffodils. It took the better part of 10 years to create the perennial border. I remember a dairy farmer asking me how many hours a week I spent on the flower garden. Embarrassed, I lied and said, “About ten.” It was more like 30. No longer, now that this gardener has become a farmer.

I’ve bought a thousand leeks. Plants. From Georgia. Grown inside to be replanted, “in clay.” They are coming the first week of May. I intend to be ready for them. Famous last words. I also ordered tiny savoy cabbages. Fifty of them. And 50 Brandywine tomato plants. Tomorrow, my grandson and I are going to start the test to see if any of last year’s seeds are still viable. There are a lot left over. I had no idea I’d spend so much time on fencing and stone last summer. The garden was ignored. Except for some very early mornings in May when I spent the hours close to dawn, digging in the garden and listening to someone’s rapturously beautiful music floating up the valley.

Winter continues its embrace. Thermometers read optimistic numbers everywhere but here. The electric heater rattles away in the kitchen. My grandson and I sat by the living room fire last night. It is almost impossible to believe it is time to think of planting tomatoes and buying May cut hay.

The English have a saying, “If you have but tuppence, buy bread with one, and a hyacinth with the other.” I used to understand that. But I’ve lost that quality, or rather mislaid it somewhere. Without the hyacinth, life begins to lose its savor. And it is that savor that feeds the soul and enables me to earn an additional tuppence, to buy bread and possibly more hyacinths. For too long there has been only one pence in the purse. And it has bought flour, yeast and paid some of the gas bill to make the bread. But the lack of hyacinths, so to speak—I prefer parrot tulips—gradually prevents the hand from becoming willing to bake the bread. And then one begins to give in to living without baking or eating bread at all. The tiny little things that both make life more pleasurable and take the edge off of its harsher aspects are necessities in themselves. In their own way. And so, the perennial border has its own essential role here. As does the vegetable garden with the daylily borders. And the rugosa roses that are about to arrive.

In the late summer, early autumn, when visiting my friends Liz and Arthur Rose (and those of sheep of mine, which visit them summers), I look for the roadside place near their house where some grow wild. Rugosa roses are forever in my mind associated with these two dear friends. Now that there shall be a hundred seedlings started here, I shall have an abundance of their simplicity to make me think of them both. And especially Liz. Her roses were of a far more elegant variety than any of mine. And better cared for as well. But I know that she shall be smiling down on this venture from her particular spot in heaven and once more cheer me on.

ROOMS

THERE ARE THREE rooms in this house of many rooms that I use as bedrooms. Not at the same time, of course. I’d be hard pressed to choose a ‘favorite’ among them. Take the summer bedroom as an example. It was, when I first came here, used year round. It had been two small rooms. A servant’s bedroom and a separate bathroom, complete with a copper-lined bathtub, and running water piped in from the huge laundry room, now my dining room, immediately next to it. I took the wall down, saw the beauty of the space with light coming in from the three windows and said this room is mine. It has a very beautiful ceramic tile-covered wood-burning stove, pale grey with cream, pink and green dogwood embossed on it, French, from Nancy, a tiny firebox and a dark green enamel stove pipe. For a short time there was also electric baseboard heating. The room is the shell pink color, walls and ceilings, I’ve used in the living room. I had the one-inch molding near the curved 10-foot-high ceiling painted in a Florentine gold that mimics a gold leaf perfectly. I wanted to keep this room simple and relatively unadorned but that took more restraint than this Connecticut Yankee could maintain (my personal style is too Connecticut to be borne) and so, bit by bit some pictures began to adorn the walls, some of sheep, and some of my family. The linen drapes proved too tempting as well, and so I began, in a rash moment, to embroider a scene from one of the windows it covered, winter nights, sheep, and two of the monumental pine trees that surround the house. It isn’t finished, of course, but what has been done is draped to its advantage to be seen day or evening. The grey and pink marble top on the stove holds some things I like to look at as well as the occasional bouquet of flowers. I had a window seat built along one wall. It is used, in part, as storage. It holds many of the feather beds I buy whenever I find them, and blankets. I am a compulsive buyer of blankets. On its lid is a feather bed, jammed into a rose velour cover, high and puffy. A cozy thing on which to lie with a book. Attached on one side is a little ledge on which to perch a teacup and a plate of cookies. I used to think I’d sit there and read in an afternoon. I did, a few times, even going so far as to say to myself, 15 minutes is better than nothing. The far end of the window seat has another backrest of sorts, compiled of assorted blankets, appropriately sized sheets for that room, a towel or two, and is covered with a cream colored cashmere blanket. I did manage to leave one wall, the one next to the bed, unadorned. For now. The bed, however, is adorned. The coverlet is an antique linen table cloth with white embroidery. The bed is narrow. Not as narrow as the captain’s bed in the winter bedroom, but narrow nonetheless. Sometimes there even is a lambskin rug on the floor. Best of all is my exquisite little Art Nouveau desk, rosewood, beautifully carved. Above it is an ivory and ebony framed miniature of a very perfect Edwardian lady. The interior of the desk is reserved for the most precious things in the house. To me, that is. A small jewelry box holds my favorite antique buttons. A thick stack of picture postcards that I bought in the Louvre. Several silk ribbons, black, dark green, and wine. A small stack of out-of-print newsletters about making cheese that I’ve never wanted to mislay. And a folder in the drawer of pictures I’ve cut out of magazines of rooms I love to look at. There is a lady’s boudoir chair I bought at auction the first summer I was here. Now it is fashionably frayed, but had I the money, I’d reupholster it. In velvet. This room can be cold. However, the most lovely of all the things in the room are the three windows. Or, rather what can be seen from the three windows. Nighttime I’ve watched the moon, a sliver of a golden thing, move slowly across the one above the window seat. And sometimes have seen it set at the crest of a hill through the western most window. And counted in seconds the time it took to move from one pane to another. Sometimes an evening star will make its way across as well and I’ll count the time it takes to go from one to the next. The window that boasts of the embroidered linen drape, they all have them, but only one has the sheep and pine trees, is brushed by a tall young ash tree (or if it isn’t young, it was here when I came, it seems to be). It is wide enough when in leaf to completely obscure anything else beyond it. The leaves are in constant motion, varying shades of green. But afternoons, when the sun is on it, the leaves dance, gold, and sparkle, as if green leaves could sparkle but they do. Sometimes when I have been sick in bed I’ve taken great pleasure in watching those leaves in constant motion. Dancing to delight me, they are. Dancing to delight me.

The white guest room is one in which I’ve only begun to sleep. It is bigger than the summer bedroom with the appearance of three windows as well. One, however, is a door, leading out to a lovely porch. I’d taken down a wall there as well. In this case I do not think the wall was original but installed by the people before me. The porch faces south. The other two windows reach from floor to ceiling. It used to be my daughter’s room and has a bigger bed than the other two bedrooms. I was able to restrain my hand in this room. I wanted it to be a very quiet, calm place, with no distractions, visually or otherwise, and yet it asked of me that it not be austere. It isn’t. The curtains are flat, white lace panels. Stiffly starched white sheets are the drapes held back by gossamer ribbons threaded with gold. A white filigree and linen cloth covers the antique dark wood chest. A small round table by the window has white lace tablecloths in tiers and white coffee cups and a server. A wing chair in doubtful condition is shrouded in a stiffly starched white sheet. The bed is painted white. In winter there is an enormous white down comforter on top of which is still another white linen table cloth on top of that. There are three small paintings between the windows by my favorite artist, Valerie Razavi. There are two large mirrors, one with an antique gold frame that is lined up opposite the windows to mirror them. The other, in a dark walnut frame, has a touch of gold on the edge of the molding. They, in effect, create windows on two of the walls that don’t have any. On the bureau is another confession of the influence of my Connecticut upbringing in my style of decorating, a ceramic basket in shades of mustard complete with three ceramic rabbits in black and white, sitting comfortably together looking into the room.

The beauty of this calm and pretty place is enhanced by the view from the windows and open door. The moon favors rising in the south and will give me, at times, the pleasure of seeing it, bright orange between the great pines in the meadow in front of the house. There is a window seat on the porch where it is possible to sit sometimes and watch the sky in the mornings. Mist rolling up the valley, obscuring the surrounding hills, leaving me floating on an island far from land. The sun pours in through the windows and glass door and creates an unusual warmth in this house which has an affinity for the cold. Sometimes the room above it and the one below are heated, and because of this southern exposure, it can become one of the warmest in the house. This spring I’d taken to sleeping there. The dawn’s first light slips over the hills surrounding the valley where I live and turns night gradually into day. This summer I’ve awakened a little after five and watch the subtleties of change. The peacefulness has kept me in bed. Sometimes until after six, when the burst of sun cresting the hill jars me into activity.

It is that burst of sunlight that is the most appealing thing about the winter bedroom. I had painted that room a very bright clear goldenrod yellow. The paint was never mixed properly and the walls became what was for a while a fashionable stria. The first couple of years found me disconcerted by the streaks, however subtle, but I gradually came to love it. It was first designated to become a studio, this smallest of rooms in this house of many rooms. At least of those that are not service rooms. Its ceiling is 10 ½ feet tall. It is in the wing where the summer bedroom is. As was the summer bedroom, it was also a servant’s room. One of four. Most of the part of the house that I live in is the servant’s wing. I stenciled a border of pears and their leaves at the place where the ceiling begins to curve. As the summer bedroom, it was made of two parts. A hall and a room. I took the wall down from a hall to widen this room and to add a second window to it that was at the end of the hall. It is the most decorated in the whole house. Not by intention but by its own request. There is a large stone tabletop that once must have been in a dairy that now sits on a frame I had made from lilac branches, reincarnated as my desk. On it is a large clear glass lamp that is embossed with cream-colored leaves and a cream shade. When I bought it, it reminded me of lamps in my Aunt Katie’s sunroom in Connecticut. It has a rich lady’s aura about it. I was pleased to have this large work table on which to draw, sew, or write. It sits in front of two windows that each have a lace panel for a curtain and cream-colored crewel-embroidered drapes. Of course, seemingly unadorned space created its own temptation. And soon a little china ink pot from France in just the right shades of gold and red soon found its way there, next to a black toy bus I bought in London and a tiny metal silhouette figure of a man and woman at a table that I bought in France but was indeed from Germany. Folders in a beautiful glowing stack of colors assumed pride of place in one corner filled with clippings of things I couldn’t resist saving. Decorative tins, some containing knitting needles, others with sewing things, began to crowd the tabletop. Black and red and green. A tin from Scottish shortbread and one from a single malt, and one from butter cookies, and one from Lu®, my favorite shaped like the dearly familiar basket the little boy traditionally carries in all of their advertisements. There are pictures in ivory frames of my children, my dogs, my grandson, my sheep. Gradually there came to be no room for the sewing machine. Only room for the things I liked to look at. All of which needs to be dusted.

A chest painted the yellow of the room is unadorned. Unadorned, that is, except for its top, of course. Which is as well covered as the would-be work table. I bought a curly maple highboy, a lovely piece, perfect except for a slightly damaged top. That called for a lace runner. Of which I have many in “to be ironed” baskets or “needs to be mended” baskets. In this instance it was easier to restrain my hand. I had bought a lovely little French clock, brass, on thin metal legs. It filled the space perfectly. The space created by a wall behind it with a carefully arranged group of pictures, photographs, and tiny mirrors. Looking at it from the bed, sometimes couch, everything is equal distance from each other, including the piece of magenta wrapping paper, pinned neatly to the wall. The tiny room is crowded with baskets of linen sheets to be turned, my notebooks telling about the life here, small wooden boxes filled with magazines, a bamboo bookcase packed to capacity and propped up by an equally tall stack of books. Mostly farm books, interestingly enough, and all of Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell–Sherlock Holmes mystery books.

There is a closet in this room, without a door but with shelves. In it are fabrics. Fabrics to remind me who I am and who I was. Tons of fabrics from a city spilling over into the country. Dreams. Dress fabrics for the perfect summer dress. Slip cover fabrics. Fabrics that may never be used. No matter.

There is a narrow bed against a wall. A captain’s bed. Or a hired man’s bed. I am both, of course. It is barely wide enough to turn around in. No room for the dogs. It is tightly made with Dick-and-Jane printed flannel sheets so it is like sleeping in a cocoon. There is a feather bed on top of the very skinny mattress under the flannel sheets. And when it is not covered, daytime, with clean clothes and linens fresh from drying on the fence needing to be folded, it is covered with a silk quilt, the exact color of the walls. A crystal-clear yellow despite the windows facing an unblocked north wind, and the high ceiling, this remains to be the warmest room in the house, although I have woken up in it seeing my breath. It is tiny and right over the kitchen wood stove. If there is a possibility, even a remote one, to be warm at night, it is in this very bright visually involving room.

But that is not the best thing about it. Although its aspect is north, it really faces north-east. Winter morning, the sun cracks over the hill between 7:00 and 7:30. It lights the room through the lace panels on the windows and beside the crewel work drapes. It passes through the large glass base of the lamp and casts both bright light and golden shadows on the yellow wall. I love to watch that wall as the shapes change perceptibly, as the world turns so rapidly on its rounds. There are different shapes every day, beginning and ending at a slightly different moment. It is lovely. That is the reason it so pleases me to sleep in that room. The mornings.

The light in the summer bedroom is best at the end of the day. The late afternoon sun sings in the ash tree. The white bedroom is best throughout the day. A morning retreat with a cup of coffee. An afternoon nap with a book falling out of my hand. But this tiny, crowded, visually stimulating room is at its best when the day has just begun.

SMALL INCREMENTS

WE ARE AT the edge of it. Winter with all of its attendant glories. And glories are there yet to be. I’ve been gaining here in increments so small as to be nearly imperceptible to anyone but myself. But I am making progress. The sheep were shorn a couple of weeks ago. Last year I sheared late as well, but never this late. The sheep are round, fat, and sleek. I’ve never seen them looking this good. However, I’ve never shorn in November before. The grass has been lush in the pastures until a very short time ago. Hay has only now been needed to be fed out in the barn. They are inside for the duration. And hay is the order of the day. The goats, which have, by default, been living in the carriage house on hay, are also looking sleek. Their coats are becoming thick. Usually, when the sheep are shorn, I have the goats clipped as well. This year, however, they shall need all of the help they can get. Every hair of their winter coats is essential. They often, if the winter becomes severe, also sport woolen sweaters from the Salvation Army that I have felted and make into thick collars around their necks.

There is a reason, nonetheless, why some shepherds shear so close to winter. It is easier to identify the sheep, for me, at least, as I put braided ribbons on their necks, color added to ones sported by their lambs. The lambs have a far easier time finding their dam’s udder, when there is no fleece obscuring their access. And while the fleece is already growing back, enough to keep the chill off, the lambs benefit from their mother’s heat loss when lying next to her. She gives off warmth to them. Most importantly, I can see if a sheep is bred, how close it is to freshening, and sometimes, how many lambs she is carrying. It shall be interesting to see if I have a higher survival rate this winter. I strongly suspect that I shall. What shall be especially pleasurable for me is that I can actually create a color-coded system for the braided ribbons that I put on the ewes. All too often they become entangled with the thick lanolin rich wool on their necks and I lose track of who is who until shearing when, lo and behold, they become visible and I now know that Bessie MacPhearson is the mother of that beautiful little lamb I want to keep. It will also make it more obvious who has not delivered and who shall not deliver this winter. I will be more certain of the age of a lamb and how well it is growing. In other words, I am facing the approach of lambing with a far different feeling than ever before. After 21 years it may become manageable. Particularly if the barn is finished. The inside, at least.

The lambs sold for the Muslim holiday this year as well as some private orders have replenished some of the money I borrowed from my barn and the construction budget to buy extra feed and second cutting hay. All but one of the lambs I had for sale has been sold. Two, rather. The first one was a surprise. He was born at the end of July and was the mirror image of his half brother. Every time I saw him in the barn I thought he and his brother were one and the same. The brother was caught and sent to the auction. He remained. The other day, to my chagrin, I came upon him. A three-month old ram lamb with small horns. It would be best were he to not stay. I hope to not have to feed him this winter. Something needs to be done.

Also kept was a very, very, very fine horned Dorset Friesian four-month-old ram lamb. I’ll keep him for a replacement ram although that is beginning to be too many. Perhaps I’ll sell him to someone as a flock sire. What shall his name be? There now are William Greenleaf Flock Sire, the Great Pretender, Burgo Fitzgerald, and Doby Fitzgorman. Four rams. A little too many here, I might say. But you, young ram lamb, whose highly compromised life has been saved, shall have a very fine name indeed. The Young Prince comes to mind, although there has been a Young Prince before. I’ve already had a Bixby, who now shall live out his life at the farm of some good friends. The Duke of Gloucester is another possibility although there may also have been one in the flock some time ago. The right name shall present itself in due course.

There is, for the first time in several years, enough wood cut and split for the winter. The wood room is half full, being emptied and refilled with great regularity, but holding, as I speak, about 10 weeks worth of firewood. Outside, in front of the wood room is a stacked four weeks worth of wood. I’ve started hoeing out the basement and there shall be a well ordered, most conventional place in there to get even more.

It snows. The fire spins out its story in the living room fireplace. It is warm here. And still. December will arrive in four more hours. I wait for it. The November I love so is leaving. I hardly know to where. Without me having loved it enough. To be ready for winter is utmost in my mind. Lambing on this farm starts at Christmas. I am doing some things here that do not directly seem as if they are related to winter’s approach, but they are. The ducks have been moved in the carriage house to the pen where the market lambs were kept. It is thick with the coarse hay the lambs did not want. The ducks spill so much water on the carriage house floor in an effort to splash and to dip their beaks in water so they can breathe properly. If they spill out their water, as they do three times a day, they will spill it onto a thick bed of hay rather than all over the floor. I’m afraid of an ice buildup shortly. The temperatures have hovered, evenings and night time, in the low thirties. It soon shall be the season of water freezing weather. It would be best if the carriage house floor were not to become an ice skating rink.

I hoed out a closet, or half of it, in the middle of the night last night. It’s one that I haven’t looked into for years. Or so it would seem. There were many surprises. Not all of the best kind. Some things full of moth holes I had long forgotten. But there was a set of sheets for a guest bed that I like very much and am frequently at a loss for spare ones. And some glasses I didn’t like at all and can’t imagine buying, but shall be grateful for. And a cashmere scarf. A wide, long, thick one. Not a flattering color, but one that shall be exceptionally warm. There was a lot to throw out. Something I am also very happy about. Perhaps there shall be enough room to store the many feather beds I have accumulated over the years. Neatly, that is. Instead of being jammed in. Helter skelter. Every which way possible.

I have created a new window in this house of many windows. It is in the wall between the kitchen and the living room, a wall which was, once, before me, an exterior wall. It is immediately behind the wood stove a spot which sometimes can register over 110°F on a thermometer. The wall on its reverse side can read as low as 40°. There is a pretty place in which to sit by my large French doors, formidable in winter and inhospitable early spring and late fall which are, by the way, the times I would love to sit there, have tea, and watch the sunset. It also is where I now put the Christmas tree. Too cold to comfortably stand and decorate it. But, we do, nonetheless. Many years of collected ornaments to put up. We do it. However, this year, this year, it won’t be even faintly chilly in that part of the room. I am gaining, in small increments.

THE EXTRA MILE

THE BARN IS remarkably peaceful and still of late. The silence before the expected arrival of lambs and the attendant commotion that accompanies them. Oh, it’s not that lambs are so noisy. But it is that mothers looking for their little ones and the whole sorting out process can bring a little excitement into the otherwise quiet atmosphere. The big doors, a work in progress, however, are temporarily installed. And do break the wind. In addition to keeping the building warmer. Considerably. The temperature inside the barn is at least 15°F higher than outside. The experience of it is even warmer because we’ve been persuaded it is winter by some winds, of late, that resemble those of March. And it feels far worse outside than the thermometer indicates.

Some ewes even look decidedly round. Others simply look sleek and well fed without any certain indication that they are bred. I had put three rather thinner ewes in the carriage house where the competition for hay and grain will not affect them. The water line to the barn froze but thawed today. I had let them out to the brook to drink. A nice way for me to drop the hay and feed it into mangers without interruption. One of the wood cutters had left a gate open, however, and the sheep, or rather some of them, managed to escape to the neighbors’, where they haven’t, by the way, gone this year. At least not en masse. I managed to get them home without much fuss. In fact and in my mind. However, I am going to announce to the men splitting wood that I’ll dock five bucks from each paycheck if they leave the gate open again.

I’ve not thought through exactly how I want the barn set up this year. Or at least, I’ve thought through many possibilities, but nothing that is completely satisfying. Perhaps the best thing to do is to set up that which I know shall work and plan out the rest around that. One big manger fit perfectly into a space that held a keyhole feeder for 12. It is a nice one that Brett Miller made for me 8 or 10 years ago. It has stood a lot of abuse. The second one needs to be emptied from a manure pack that has blocked its use for a year or so. I’m making a 40-foot-long utility area for myself, similar to one I had when the barn went down. It used to be swept and limed almost every day. It will be nice to have it again.

The Horned Dorsets that arrived with great promise last year have been a great disappointment. I’ve one decent ewe lamb out of them. Two are in the carriage house looking “not great.” One is the mother of the very nice ewe lamb and, as she nursed heavily, is entitled to be not in the best condition. All of the sheep’s fleeces have grown back somewhat. Thick. Very short. Very dense. The whole flock is, as hoped, warm enough for now. It is the hopeful time of year. I’ve saved a ram lamb born this summer to breed the young stock this coming summer. My two older rams look fine to me. Last year’s “replacement” looks good, too. He was the fastest growing lamb I’d had in a number of years. He is a fine young creature. I’ve pinned some hopes on him.

The remaining Sable ewe is growing wider and wider. I hope she is not bred to the last Toggenburg buck that I had here, but if she freshens before February, she, to my dismay, has been. The only other possibility is that she is carrying more than one kid. A little doeling, born on Christmas, at a friend’s farm, is curled up next to the fire screen in the living room. Fortunately I have a 15-inch-high guard around it made of copper. She didn’t know how to suck until this morning when she suddenly looked at me and began to move her mouth in a kind of sucking motion. She has had five feedings today and is almost up to the required number of ounces on her own. I did all of the things that are possible to do for her when she came. Tube fed with a milk, egg, espresso coffee mixture. An injectable antibiotic, a B complex shot. And when she started to scour, Pepto-Bismol and Neomycin. It stopped in a few hours. One of her back legs isn’t working correctly. The other is a bit crooked in an attempt to stabilize her gait. She will make it, however. She is a game little thing. I’ll miss her when she goes home.

Christmas on the farm lasts for 12 days. We have, in our family, always celebrated Twelfth Night, January 6th. It had always seemed too intense to me to cram everything into one day, and therefore, Epiphany always was a welcome escape valve. Presents that are not quite finished can be finished over the 12 days. Things that didn’t get mailed can be. And friends and family can be loved and entertained as leisure. I made an incongruous dinner for Christmas Eve that nonetheless met with approval. Cassoulet de Castelnaudary has been a favorite dish in the family repertoire for seemingly forever. It is a slowly cooked dish of sausage and beans, peppers, tomatoes, and onions. It has been served here at Christmas Eve, traditionally, for a very long time. One of its chief advantages is that it can cook on the wood stove, slowly, for hours, and still taste good.

One Thanksgiving found me and my children in Paris. I wanted us to have a dinner that was familiar to celebrate the holiday. I ordered cassoulet in a restaurant we were told specialized in the dish. The waiter tried to talk me out of it. “The children. No! Garlic!” he kept repeating. I insisted. You can imagine my delight when he returned, a smile on his face, pointing to the empty plates in front of the kids and said, “Madam. The children. Garlic. No!” and I lifted the lid from the terrine and pointed to its emptiness and said, “The children. Garlic. Oui!” But also on our Christmas table was a more recent addition to the menu. Cod fish. Baccala. We’ve been having that as well for several years. Needless to say, while many of the ingredients in both dishes are the same, there is a distinct difference between dried salt cod soaked in olive oil, and sausages and bacon cooked with beans. My family and friends all seemed to enjoy the meal. The combination is, I’m the first one to admit, peculiar. But it was all gone at the end of the evening.

This was the first Christmas since sheep that I was almost satisfactorily organized. I started shopping in October. Had some gifts mailed in early December. Actually got the tree a few days early. It even was up in its stand before my son arrived. It seemed as if I would start to decorate it before Christmas Eve but that didn’t happen. It still has a few empty spots that I keep filling in. There are years of ornaments collected here and a missing box to be found. The last perhaps shall be on January 6th. Therefore I don’t feel terribly remiss to not be quite perfectly finished.

We are entering a new year. I have some strong feelings of optimism this year that are new to me. And a few feelings of discouragement that have grown increasingly familiar. There is something about the way I managed Christmas this year, quite a bit more focused and possibly efficient than ever before, that is most encouraging. I hadn’t expected myself to improve the way I do things. Too much “putting out fires.” Too much giving way without trying hard enough. “To go the extra mile” are words written next to the front door of my house. Without doing that, progress will not be achieved. But I’ve been “showing up.” And that has resulted in its own kind of progress. Somehow this coming year has brought a touch of enthusiasm and promise with it. I am looking forward to it. My birthday is at the beginning of the year as well. There is something very nice in knowing that each day grew brighter and the sun shone longer as I grew into the world.

THE PENHALIGAN AND MERRIMAN SISTERS

TWIN EWE LAMBS arrived a couple of days ago. Fat, chunky, nice little creatures. Their mother is a sensible older ewe who freshened in the safest place in the barn and kept her girls there for several days. I brought her second cutting hay and she slipped outside for water from time to time. The lambs and their dam shall be bedecked with bright orange collars and shall stay forever. I had once thought that at a certain point I’d stop keeping replacement lambs and let the flock diminish naturally, but I’ve passed that point and find it impossible to resist keeping certain lambs to augment the herd, read to delight my heart. That means that they and I expect to be around and farming it for another eight or 10 years. I want their names to be pretty. The unclaimed names on my list are amusing for the most part rather than pretty and so I’ve not made my choices yet.

Clearly it is naming season again. Of the doelings, two are Merrimans and two are Penhaligans. Adelaide Merriman’s girls are bigger, older, and stronger. Rebecca’s girls are Sables although one looks like a Toggenburg, albeit a black one. The other looks like a Saanen. They are supposedly Sables. I don’t know any more. The little white one is going to be a piece of work. She is the brightest looking little thing on the farm. She figured out almost immediately that the strange object in my hand, read bottle, was a source of delight. Milk, that is. It took her sister no less than three days to come to me of her own volition rather than having to be caught by one leg, thrown up into my right arm, and having the bottle’s nipple jammed into her mouth. The little black-and-white goat, her twin, looking like a black Toggenburg, is a little slower at everything. The white kid, who has just now become Verity Penhaligan, figured out how to escape from the pen in the carriage house in about 20 minutes after being moved into it from the pen in the cellar. When rescued from a knocked-over garbage can she decided to never again attempt leaving the pen.

Glynnis is a skittish three-year-old goat who thinks that I am, perhaps, her enemy and she may be right. She races away from me in her pen every time she sets eyes on me. She freshened with a charming chocolate-brown single doeling about a week ago. To my dismay I realized Glynnis was missing one teat. The left side of her udder had become hard and swollen with milk with no way for it to be released. Her little one nursed quite nicely from the right side; however, it was apparent she was making too much milk even from one side to feed a single little goat. I caught her. Trapped her. Got her onto the milking stand and milked some from her swollen right side. When I put her back into the stall I realized there was a solution, Verity. I grabbed her and in a moment Verity knew what to do. She nursed on Glynnis and Glynnis stood for her. At least she seemed to. I had my shoulder digging into her flank and my free hand tightly grasping her lead cord. I fed her some corn. Backwards, a handful reaching behind me in the direction of her mouth. Thank goodness she has no horns. Then Verity’s sister realized there was something to be had and dove in as well, pushing Verity aside. I tried the same maneuver today. Glynnis’s bag wasn’t as full today as yesterday, so it is possible the twins nursed her quite on their own as well as her still as yet unnamed little girl, or she wasn’t making as much milk.

I still may not be able to keep her. And so her look of distrust may be well grounded. This is something I may be able to stand. The way she stares at me. And she is right to doubt me now. I know someone who wants a goat for a brush hog. However, he is certain to want to breed her at some point. That may not be a feasible idea.

The Wilcoxes, my vet and his wife, are due to arrive in about an hour. They’ll help me to decide what to do. Glynnis is a wonderful mother to her little doeling who dances around the pen with all of the joy that kid goats bring to the world. Another reason to not want to part with her. My motherless kids do not dance. Not for me anyway. They consider me to be the bad mother who only bottles them three times a day rather than intermittently as real goat mothers do all day long and so become excited upon seeing me rather than lay about, relaxed, or dance and play together. In other words, they try to jump all over me. They all live in the same pen with Glynnis. Today they all become disbudded. That, too, is an ordeal; however, they become totally anesthetized, and, in theory, won’t remember anything of it. The very fine chestnut-colored little buck shall be dehorned as well. He is sold to a friend for a flock sire, in exchange for work rather than cash. I need the work done so badly.

I’ve been rereading Angela Thirkell, of late, fourth time around the Barsetshire series of novels taking place in a county in England. The people in said county are far more varied and the subcultures, which on occasion, do overlap, are also more varied than anything we experience in this neck of the woods. Some families have lived in Barsetshire for many hundreds of years. Some, perhaps, for thousands. And then there are the newcomers, who are either first or second generation, or perhaps even third. For the most part they marry among their own social class. On occasion, however, someone who doesn’t quite fit in, such as Lydia Merton, as an example, marries dramatically out of her class a man who successfully integrates part of himself into the world to which she belongs. A rare few leave the county, usually because of marriages.

Each reading gives me a fresh insight into the life here. Everyone in Thirkell’s Barsetshire seems to be interdependent upon one another. Those systems of living have evolved over centuries. In this country, ours haven’t been in existence long enough. Families there were large and extended. There always was to be found someone whose particular gifts were the ones needed to do the job. Jasper, part Gypsy, is an example. He understood horses and people in a very deep sense. His grandmother was a witch who turned herself into a black hare. He manifested seemingly out of nowhere with just the right animal whenever a horse or a pony was needed. He appears throughout a half dozen of Thirkell’s books. As locked in as social class in England seems to us, there was fluidity as well. A young woman, born in one of the lower middle classes, rose above it with the aid of both an education and the mentoring of a well-meaning upper class matron. Her husband to be was from a wealthy brewering family (lower class, of course), went to Oxford and emerged looking and speaking like one of said matron’s sons’ friends, some of whom would be taken for a brewer’s son. He “passed.” And presumably their children shall as well, although not to be thought of as “county” for several generations, they shall float in and out of the county’s lives with ease.

Dorothy Hartly, my favorite historian of daily life in the British Isles, wrote that in as early as the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, a quick and clever young man with a gift for math and language could, in his lifetime, dramatically alter his social class if he applied himself to making a living at the great fairs that dotted the country.

What I think I envy most in Thirkell’s world is the ready availability of people to help one another. Someone to bring one tea in a moment of crisis or exhaustion. How I have grown to hate waiting for hot water to drip through my single-cup coffeemaker that I use seemingly all day long. I’ve started making a whole-wheat Irish soda bread. While whole wheat is nothing I’ve ever developed a liking for, James Beard’s recipe with buttermilk is passable. I just bought raisins to try in the next loaf. It may elevate the bread from passable to acceptable. However if I am to have it this afternoon at tea, I have to bake it myself. Furthermore, I have to wash the bowl I used for the one I made two days ago, clean the wood ashes off my coffee table, and remember to buy more buttermilk if I ever get to the store again. Will the wish to have a cup or two of the Russian Caravan Tea that just arrived in the mail, on some finely sliced soda bread with a thin coat of butter on each slice in front of the fire following afternoon chores prevail over my reticence to make a mess in the kitchen once more? I don’t know. We’ll see.

MY STORY

THIS IS A story I wrote for the people who have come to hear me tell stories. And if I am right, it shall have some names of animals in it because people who read these stories love to hear the names, and it shall have some animals in it because people who like these stories also like to hear about animals. And it shall have me in it because I am the one both looking at it as it happens as well as living it.

And so it shall therefore start with a tree. I have often been tempted to cut down a tree here and there around the yard or in the pastures. But cutting down a tree is a permanent thing, except in the instance of choke cherries or thorn apples. Then it becomes a semipermanent thing. As in the case of the choke cherry tree growing between the stone steps behind my back porch. I cut it down once or twice before the porch was built, a wooden frame over the erratic cement steps leading to the mudroom and summer kitchen. It grew back. The last time it grew back, it became an enchantment of white blossoms in spring and dark, red choke cherries come fall. But even more lovely was the way light fell on it from the kitchen windows, nighttimes. In the rare times I’ve sat in the dining room, evenings, which is at right angles to the porch, the light and motion of the leaves have been enchanting. The year before last, the tree died. Or began to. And I, full of objections to the erratic lines its barren branches made against the night sky, cut it down. It saddened me to see it gone. Opening this door to be outside became being too outside too suddenly. I didn’t like it without that tree. Too abrupt a transition from one place to another. It now grows back, lush green leaves looking like a pretty little bush rather than the tree it will become. There is another choke cherry tree, a nonbearing one (or is it two?) in the perennial border. I’ve often thought to cut them down, and have cut down the runners it sends across the garden that shoot up among the flowers and across the lawn. But summers, I’ve noticed from my bedroom windows, it forms a triangle, light and bright green, against the dark green of the pines across the road. It is a perfect triangle, and forms its reverse, nighttime darkness, dotted beautifully with a sprinkling of stars and planets and airplane lights. I count, sometimes, how long it takes a sliver of moon to make its way from one pane of glass to the next. I’ve lain sick in bed, on occasion, watching the light play across the leaves of the trees, wishing I could hold each moment for just a little bit longer so I could etch it on my memory. But I can’t. Too many leaves. Too quick the passing moment.

There is a lamb who loves to sit in my lap, I’ve most recently discovered. She has followed me everywhere she could since she was a few days old. A very pretty thing. Tiny. Delicate. A Finn-Landrace eweling, in appearance. Because she’s driven me quite to the end of my patience as I find her in the house, in my room, under my feet, unexpectedly and often, I had not named her. Until yesterday. It has taken me all of her life, which encompasses an intense four months, to realize that what she wants most is to sit in my lap. And so it was not a surprise to me that yesterday, one of the most beautiful mornings I have ever seen here, she escaped through a break in the pasture fences that only she knows of, and made a direct dash across the lawn to where I stood looking at still another tree I had most recently decided to cut down, and was now glad I hadn’t. I sat down on the lawn and she ran up to me. The moment I put my hand out to her, my dog Samantha ran up to me as well. The lamb climbed into my lap. She put her head in the crook of my elbow as she pretended to fall asleep. Her name became Cordelia O’Shaughnessey at that moment.

The lay of the land was virtually pleasing to my eye. The mock orange in front of that side of the house complemented the round choke cherry growing beside the stone outdoor living room in the far distance. The curve of the garden corresponded with the daylily border I had planted so long ago. I don’t remember doing it anymore. Halfway between them was a sturdy strand of sweet cicely, now in seed, its lovely and delicate white flowers gone. And slightly beyond it, stands an ash, a young ash, only about 25 years old. Round on top with a straight trunk. It has been pruned, over time, by both sheep and goats. It is the last tree to leaf out on this farm, looking stark and dead right through lilac and honeysuckle time. It now boasts of pale bright willow-green leaves, small and delicate. Lace against the deeper, richer greens of the surrounding hills. It is the latest tree I’ve thought to cut down, determined to rid my eye of all that is, or seems to be, both scraggly and dead. I didn’t.

A lamb died a day ago. And one lived. I’d bought the medicine with which to treat them but it came too late for one, and barely just in time for the other. I held out hopes for the one who died. And had a heart full of despair for the one who lived. I still have a hard time believing that a small amount of clear yellow liquid in a bottle can make a difference in a life. And yet my mind knows it can and does. It is my heart that has trouble believing anymore.

I brought them both into the house that rainy night. I didn’t want them to get soaked and die alone in the chill of a June night. Mountain air. I bottled them with my special mixture, including the clear yellow liquid that came in a very large, very expensive, very impressive bottle. In the morning, one was dead. It was the smaller of the two, my favorite ram lamb, one who shall stay forever as a breeder, who recovered. And wanted his bottle eagerly for the first time in days.

How I have loved to see him run to me across the pastures as I open the gate and call to him. Up the porch steps he races to get his two-and-a-half bottles of milk replacer. And then off he runs, tail wagging with equal enthusiasm, back to the gate to return to the pasture. His name has not been chosen yet. In the meantime I call him little boy. “Come here, little boy,” I call. And I try to hold in my mind’s eye forever that one moment when he lifts his face and looks at me and begins to run across the field, tail making circles in the air.

THE PATTERN

THE DUCK HAS taken a fondness for goat’s milk. That is not good. She lives most of the time in the carriage house with some lambs who are being weaned and the goats. It means taking the big bucket outside, when she is inside, where it sometimes is augmented by a little rain when I am milking the next one or two. When the duck is outside I can leave the big cow milk pail inside as well and add to it the milk from the container that I put under the goats. Until one of the roosters and it may be the one who is married to the duck, one can see them together most days in my flower garden, then decided he, too, wanted to taste the milk. That became a problem. Milk in or milk out. Duck and rooster in or duck and rooster out. Then Cameron, my very nice and somewhat intimidated by Rebecca Penhaligan doe, decided she too liked goat’s milk. That created a more special kind of problem. Obviously, she is much taller than the duck and the rooster and so where to put the milk if I continued to fill the larger bucket from the smaller inside the carriage house. Outside was an option to be considered. However, the barn cat began to get wise to the smell of milk when I milked outside under the bridgeway and I’d offer her some. She rarely went into the carriage house, never to my knowledge; however, she has begun to show up at bottle time and milking time. I don’t really want to have to stop milking and run to the house with it before I’m finished with everything, including bottling the doelings.

It took awhile before I figured out a routine of sorts and it almost works. When I can find some big hooks so the goats who are waiting their turn can have a lead cord attached to their collar and be attached somewhere away from the milking stand so they are not fighting with each other for grain, there may be a routine that works. Until I move them one and all to the lambing room, then it will start all over again. How to do it? How to do it? My mind doesn’t figure things out well in advance. At least not logistical types of things. I must improve on that score. Perhaps if I arrange to have everything well set up in the lambing room for them to move in the day after shearing it might be more efficient. Gillian MacDouglas is bagging and eating her grain very nicely, thank you. She is the last to freshen. Unless little Pansy Penhaligan is bred, but she doesn’t show any sign of it. Gillian is a sweetheart of a goat and shall live out her life here. Her sister, Glynnis, is skittish and difficult to handle. She won’t stay. Her kid is a buckling, for which I am grateful. Were he a she out of a skittish and unfriendly dam I’d be hard pressed to know what to do with her. A buckling is easy. They are sold. One especially fine Sable buckling is sold for a flock sire. The rest for meat. But I don’t want another temperamental goat in the carriage house. All of the young stock are dehorned. However, Cameron and Rebecca are not. Cameron was born in the summer and my vet cautioned me about the possibility of fly strike in the wound so she wasn’t disbudded. Rebecca came with horns. She is being boarded here, and is a dominant goat on my farm. Adelaide Merriman also came with horns eight years ago or so. The rest are far safer animals for me to take care of, as well as to be around each other. Rebecca harasses Cameron who gets along well with Gillian. I’ll be glad when Rebecca goes to camp this summer. However, Gillian, who shall be in milk by then, may go as well. To camp, that is.

Spring has, however, reluctantly seemed to arrive. The lilacs are in bud, although I don’t know how they dare, it is that cold. The barn swallows moved in on May 5th per usual. The black, red, and champagne currants are heavily laden with blossoms and surrounded all day long by bees. Last year’s heavy manure application certainly paid off. I fully intend to match it over the next week or two. The manure is well composted; the well-rotted bottom of the pack is on the top of the pile outside the carriage house and well within wheelbarrow range. I have learned that a three-foot radius of manure around the currants is what they like the best; however, some bushes are so big that a three-foot radius from their outer edge would not only be over my carefully laid stone paths but, in some cases, well into the lawn. It has been my custom, as did Thomas Jefferson, to walk mornings, around the farm on this side of the brook. He rode and it took him a bit longer than it takes me. Nonetheless, I saw a spot where some additional black currants were needed to continue a line visually, from the approach to the house by the road. A little while later I came across some branches I had rooted last year which had five or six good-sized shoots and another half-dozen small bushy ones all in a row. Perfect to cut from the main stem I had laid down in the loose composted manure and fastened to the “part” at a bud jointure with a rock. I created about 10 more little bushes that way; however, this one was shaped perfectly to both fill the newly needed spot and create a new line of bushes.

All of which brings me to the central pattern here. What to do next, or first, or first thing in the morning tomorrow. Because some floors in the house have been insisting on getting washed and I haven’t done laundry in seemingly forever. It is with gratitude that I’ve been coming across some unworn Salvation Army jeans with a price tag still on them or I’d not know what to do. It was impossible this year to dry sheets in the kitchen behind the wood stove as that was rarely lit and so there are probably all of the flannel ones in the dirty laundry and some of the plain ones as well. I buy sheets. This promises to be a rainy week which does not bode well for washing sheets but does bode especially well for washing woolen blankets and letting wind and rain kick out the wrinkles. And, while looking at the currants, jostaberries, and gooseberries, I was reminded of France, which is why my vegetable garden is comprised of rectangular plots bordered by stone paths. Neat stone paths now obscured by last year’s dead weeds. However, these glorious bushes, about 80 of them including small new ones, only about a foot high, all remind me how insulted they’d be were they not bordering neat little plots of vegetables. Just miserable weeds. Except for dandelions, of course, which I leave in because after a number of years crawling around in July and August looking for dandelions for the famous garlic, bacon, potatoes, and cider vinegar salad, it suddenly occurred to me—I am slow—to stop digging them out of the garden. Leave them in one patch as the vegetable that they are here, in this household.

I started to ready the summer bedroom yesterday, in between all things. I usually move into it at the end of April or first of May. It is late this year. The room is now neat. The door and windows are dirty. My Art Nouveau writing desk is polished beautifully, looking as if an army of housemaids used beeswax on it. But the over-used winter bedroom and studio is also begging for a thorough cleaning. Dust is on the edge of every picture frame and covers all of the pretty little things I’ve arranged in my big desk. Covering it completely by the way, leaving no room on which to sew or draw or write. And accomplishing those three things is what that room was originally intended for.

It is not hard to see the dilemma. Do I choose my tasks randomly, which, for the very first time in my life here I’ve been doing, or do I choose my roles and demarcate part of each day to them individually? Am I just the goat herd, dairy maid, or am I the gardener, the upper house maid, or the chatelaine of the castle? Do I mow all of the lawn in one day or in sections? Do I move the peonies from the bedding plot to the main perennial border and do the roses as well leaving the vegetables to Mr. Mulner? I’ve never accepted the fact that this house had three servants’ bedrooms plus having people in from East Meredith to work. I have always thought I could do it with proper organization. And money. This is the rub. I am not, no matter how much I want to think I am, those three live-in servants and the dailys from East Meredith and the farmer. However, I did, in between sentences, telling this story, write my order to the seed company for the vegetable garden. France always wins out.

WEEDING THE WILDFLOWERS AND OTHER STORIES OF ADVENTURE

JULY IS ACCOMPANIED by an intensity that is unique unto itself. The race is on, it declares. Vehemently. And I am intensely aware of it. June disappeared with reluctance. Some days I write down what I’ve done throughout the day. For some unknown reason, I tend to stop writing things down at about 11:00. Where the time goes remains to mystify me. The chickens take up far too much of it; however, they do reward me with eggs all day long. Yesterday were 21 eggs from 27 chickens, two of whom are broody meaning there were only 25 productive hens. I get two dollars a dozen from a store that I pass every week when I go to town. No extra gas money to deliver them! The price of their grain went up 10¢ per dozen eggs this week. I’m not going to raise the wholesale price yet because it is certain to continue to skyrocket over the next few weeks, and I am reluctant to raise my prices every week.

Shelling bean seeds planted three days ago are sprouting before my eyes. Some little dark orange winter squashes planted only a few days ago are also sprouting. The black currants are turning color. The gooseberries are still green; however, there is hope. They shall soon turn alizarin crimson. My ancient bushes mildewed badly last year and I hadn’t hopes for their survival; however, they are bearing heavily at the moment. Gooseberry fool!! One bush managed to set down a long stem a year or two ago which then rooted! Taking a chance, I pulled it up this morning, found it unattached to its parent with a root ball firmly embedded in the composted manure that I surround them with. I’ve only learned this year how essential that is. In a three-foot radius. I’ve been applying it, heavily; however, haven’t achieved the six-foot diameter yet. The currants have been under siege and behave accordingly, punishing me with quiet and remorse. My dog, Glencora MacCluskie, dug up two in an ambitious attempt to shovel out the manure for me. She is in the habit of digging a hole to China in the composted manure pile. It is an efficient way to loosen it up for me to cart it to the gardens so I let her. I’ve been putting buckets full around the jostaberries as well as the black and red currants. So, when she noticed the manure around the two mature bushes, she promptly dug it all up again. One bush was completely defoliated. I was heartbroken, it was three years old, and tucked it back into the ground. Lo and behold, a few weeks later new leaves appeared and are continuing to appear.

I’ve spent more time in the vegetable gardens this year than any other in recent memory. And yet, they continue to elude me. I write down a careful record of what is planted when, and on which day the seeds begin to sprout. I’ve numbered each plot. Drew a schematic in my day book. But because all 18 of them are in varying sizes, something I didn’t want, and some have been extended. Several times, the only way to have a clear picture of what I am doing is to measure them carefully and then draw a schematic in the garden book. Many of the plantations are of beans destined to be dried for the winter. Some seeds, however, have not germinated, which also adds to my confusion. Originally I had in mind to lay ladylike beds of vegetables, rectangular in shape, bordered by stone paths. One year I actually had a real mason lay two cut stone paths, 60 feet long each, the length of the garden. I laid the eight bisecting stone paths. But for some reason I no longer can remember, I created the second half in both triangular and curved shapes. One triangle holds the gooseberries. One quarter round holds the black currants. One long section now is bordered by dark blue Siberian Iris that has now quadrupled in width. Some magenta-colored perennial bachelor buttons have self-sowed in one plot. They are thick, green bushes of plants, far more lush than those that have self-sown on the lawn or grace the perennial border. I’m leaving them until they bloom and then shall cut them back and replace them with kale, which shall visually take up the same space. They shall rebloom.

July heralds a spectacular day lily display here. In the vegetable garden, of course. That, too, started as a narrow border, in an L shape. Very nice. Its shape enables it to be enjoyed from all perspectives. However, I never thought it would spread as widely as it has. I did dig some thinnings and extended a neat row the length of the vegetable garden. It was that second half, 60-foot-long—complete with curves and triangles—that afforded me the greatest pleasure this year. The currant and gooseberry bushes there were sporting a lush, rich green foliage that reminds me of France. Their proportion was perfect in combination, first, with the Siberians, and then with the emerging day lilies. In the fall they shall continue to give pleasure against the heliopsis, golden six-feet-tall perennial sunflowers.

Today I prepared a dish using the first of the magenta-stemmed chard. It was a sort of pizza rustica, with bacon rather than the salami that I customarily use, ricotta, eggs (thank goodness two or three had a tiny crack), Parmesan cheese, and chopped baby chard, all in a crust. The men working here were all in appreciation. There was a nettle soup as well, and a very crude pear tart.

The adventure of the day, or shall I say the best of all the day’s several adventures, was dressing my new ram, Burgo Fitzgerald in his marking harness. Jeff Arnold caught him and held onto him by his massive horns while John Hillis dressed him in the leather harness with a green crayon. More arduous and less dramatic was dragging this fine young fellow out to the sheep. Unfortunately for us there were no sheep in sight in the pasture proximate to the backyard. Burgo ran off, deciding that the far corner of the fenced in pastures was the desirable place to be. I’d quite forgotten that he had never been out of his pen where he was raised, or the pen where he has been housed in the carriage house, with the exception of an hour’s ride in the back of Jeff’s truck. He was frightened of the space. When the ewes were finally encouraged to go to the pasture where his confusion reigned, one ewe stood for him. He followed her everywhere, would turn his head to look at me, blatt, and then continue to follow the ewe. It will be most interesting to see if any ewes sport a green crayon mark on their back in the morning.

LADY PETUNIA AND LADY PANSY

THE PHLOX ARE enchanting this year! Dancing ladies. Gaiety personified. They have been beautiful most years of late. The most feminine of all flowers. In the south border against the house they are about five feet tall. I don’t stake them but am considering some unobtrusive system for next year, so they bend and form a cloud of loveliness against the house. The ones in the front border have had some competition of late and are not quite so glorious. They come into bloom, second, facing west rather than south. The first and last to bloom are some in the perennial border, first were a couple of weeks ago, beginning with cerise, and punctuated by star fire, my least favorite and one I actually mistakenly bought. A pity. It is designated for a friend’s garden where it shall be showy but not clash with the rest of the flowers, as it does here. I put three small bouquets on the porch corresponding with the ones next to it. There are three more bouquets in the window of the soon-to-be redeemed kitchen, those all cerise with a cast of cream here and there. They lighten my heart in their own way, whenever I walk in the room. I hope they last awhile. I thoroughly scrubbed the Roland mustard jars that I use for vases. Stoneware. A study in contrast to the delicate cheerful flowers.

I’ve found myself going the extra mile of late. A departure from the activity here over the past year. For us all to survive was in itself a feat that was its own extra mile. No room for embellishments or progress or grace or anything remotely civilized. However, changes do occur, slowly sometimes but real, nevertheless, and, I hope, one of an enduring nature. I’ve set myself three goals to be accomplished each day, accompanied, of course, by carefully orchestrated lists of things to do neatly written in a book with the anticipated time of execution encouraged with due thought. In theory they are to be crossed out each day as duly noted. I’ve taken, of late, to writing the true date next to the checked-off item. However, there are only blanks to be filled in after writing the goals at the head of the page. The first is, “Do something to ready for winter.” The second is, “Do something for progress.” The third is, “Do something to remind myself why I came here.” There’s no room to write, “In the first place.” But you’ve gotten the idea. The reasons I came are clearly defined and most easy to forgo. They don’t have the sense of urgency and compelling necessity that doing something for the winter has, as an example. Or even to create a measure of progress. They are about achieving a way of life, now commonly called a lifestyle, and can and have been set aside for more urgent activities. What should not be ignored is that the principal support of those seemingly more urgent demands is that way of life. And when it becomes eroded, as it has, those more obvious and urgent demands cannot diligently be addressed. And so, with an unexpected and surprisingly intense change in gear, I painted the porch. And tore into the front garden. And made myself some pastry. And boxed kindling. And weeded the quince bushes. And picked more flowers. And painted the larder floor. And mowed more lawn than I have this year. And scooped the grass off of stones on the paths. And. And. And.

At first it seemed impossible to address, each day, the three goals. Along with everything else. I didn’t. Couldn’t. But suddenly I could. What is most curious, however, was that I was still tired. As I have been. But that didn’t matter one bit. No frequent coffee or food breaks needed here. Just an occasional distancing to look at what was left to do. And to dream a little about what I’d like to do. That in itself is amazing to me. I am grateful.

I want to walk Nelly on her red leash along the road. I want to bring sweet cicely seeds up to the fenced in reservoir to see if they will grow there. I want to iron a stack of tablecloths for the kitchen-to-be. And bag the goat droppings in the carriage house goat loft. Where will all of this fit in with the lists comprised of tidy the hall? Sweep the stairs? Mop Joachim’s floor? I’m not certain.

Nelly, dog of dogs, runs across the pasture. She chases birds on the wing. She may know she’ll never land them. But it is the race that she seems to love. The dogs are remarkably different from one another and each in her own way demands me to be a different person. Nelly is a wild creature. And out of nowhere will rush to me for a pet and to climb into my lap, a constant doggy wiggle in my arms and a sudden relaxation and to sleep. Glencora watches. Sits at my feet. Slips into my lap quietly when I hang up the phone. Dogs. My companions. My joy.

There’s about to be a kitchen here after a year or more of winging it. Three burners. No oven. I bought a stove to replace the one I enjoyed using so much, the one that mice found made so comfortable a home that they lived in the insulated walls, winters, and chewed so nicely the wires leading to the control box. Were they in the way? It was a luxury for me to be able to set the controls to burn on or off and have food ready when I came up from the barn or a bread ready to be eaten first thing in the morning. The floor has been scrubbed to within an inch of its life and shall be painted and faux finished right after the men deliver the stove. The furniture, stacked for a year in the mudroom, shall be polished and retrieved as soon as the floor is finished. The windows are already gleaming. Spider webs festooning shelves are gone. I am nearing readiness.

The new goat, whose first name is Rebecca and last name vacillates over becoming Tottingham, shall arrive, for the second time, in two weeks, or shall be returned in two weeks, and is in milk. A cheese-making station shall be set up in the renewed kitchen. She is giving a decent amount of milk each day. My friend Barbara Arnold is a practiced cheese maker. My cheeses have been failures over the past two or three years. It is unimaginable but true that I have been unable to create curds in the milk, which is, in essence, that I can’t spoil it to make cheese, for some unfathomable reason. I hope to learn from her as it is critical that some real use be made beyond yogurt and cappuccino. Oh, Rebecca vacillates not between being Tottingham and another equally interesting (to me) last name but between being Tottingham and not. Her offspring shall bear her last name, you see, and therefore I shall be committed to that name for a number of years and to her offspring for the rest of my life. The last name is, therefore, a very serious affair. Westmoreland comes to mind. I’ll see if it sticks. The little doeling who saved her own life has had her name attached, unstuck, and now, perhaps attached again. “Lady Pansy Lamb” appeared on a printed page and seemed tempting. But she is a goat. Petunia slipped in as Lamb slipped out. She is a Merriman as a matter of fact and now she, it would seem, is Lady Petunia Merriman. Belinda’s daughter presents a problem. Or half a problem. She is now Pansy. Lady Pansy, at that. However Belinda’s surname has not stuck, and so that line is still up in the air. It shall come to me, I know. She is a beautiful mahogany color while her twin has become a deep rich ebony. He is not as yet named. It shall be soon, however.

Thunder rolls in across the great white sky and carries disquietude in its wake. Summer storms were once a pleasure to me. Events to be enjoyed for their attendant drama and the anticipation of the relief, which it so often brought. A single word has changed all of that for me. Hay. The imperative in many of our lives. Is there to be hay? Will the hay be ruined? Again. The incredible arduous intensity of the labor that goes into making hay. Will there be another disappointment after the backbreaking work that occurs simply to make the hay the winter demands to feed our livestock? I don’t know how the men endure it. The good season. The bad. The good day. Then the bad one. Rain, unexpected. Destroying or compromising everything. I look across the hills in the direction where the hay fields are from which the hay will be coming for this farm, at least. Is it raining there? Sometimes a grey cloud will race across the sky from that northern corner and dread enters my heart. It is not a fear that there will be no hay. There usually is enough, except for last year’s. The dread comes from the terrible price a day’s rain can cause. The exhaustion of body and soul and heart. I still don’t know what keeps a farmer going. From where does the courage come? The endurance? The strength in the face of hopes dashed. My admiration is couched in heartache.

THE FAMILIAR TIME

IT IS THE time of year that is so deeply familiar to me. And yet I am not familiar to myself. It would seem that I should know how to do all of it. The wood. The storms. The drapes. And yet when I saw a featherbed in an unused room, it was almost in surprise. Oh, I’d better put one on my bed in the summer bedroom. I still sleep there. There is a pretty, nicely tied bundle of twigs on the wood in the wood box. Oh, I should make 10 a day of those. Fire starters. Until the snow flies. Perfect for. For what? Or rather, for which? The last choice of many places here asking for kindling is the stove in the summer bedroom. Partly, I must confess, because they’d look so pretty in the green metal washtub that I use for firewood in that room.

One old familiar routine is the belief, even if it has played me false, that should I chip away at something every day, it will get done. That never takes into consideration that more will be added to the “something,” such as more dirty laundry, a classic example on this farm where I’ve never gotten used to the right way to be dressed to do a chore, and clothes become far dirtier here than, I’m certain, on any other farm. All the things I’ve thought I knew how to do, start the bread in the morning so I can have a nice tea in the afternoon; put tomorrow’s clothes with me in bed at night so they’ll be warm rather than 40° when I put them on in the morning; grind the coffee at night; Oh, oh, oh, all of those instructions. A multitude of instructions. But it is the exception that breaks the rule. And, today at least, I barely know where to begin.

We had a skunk visit last evening, my dogs and I. I don’t know who startled it but I know it was the goat feed that drew it. The smell lingers on this morning. Nelly is the most likely to worry a skunk into emission, if that is the right word. It may also have been drawn to the chick pen, formerly the goose pen. Cover it at night with a tarp. It’s been in the 30s. Give them some cracked corn and warm whey in the evening to help hold them over. The chickens have reconsidered laying eggs repeatedly. Some days they do and some days they don’t. The Aracanas, with their exquisitely beautiful pale blue eggs, seem to have become relatively consistent. Five, sometimes six eggs a day from six pullets, almost chickens. It is my much-touted Welsummers who are disappointing me. Two are laying nearly white eggs rather than the brown ones as have been their custom. Two of the 17 sexed chicks I bought are showing signs of being roosters. My friend took eight of the 25 and two of those seem to be roosters as well. The hatchery allows a measure of two errors in sexing chicks in a batch of 25; therefore there will be a credit on two next year, if I remember to ask for it. Next spring it would seem that I’ll have approximately 36 chickens and shall have to revise my system of selling eggs. I’ll have to revise my system of selling lambs as well.

This business of raising them to sell in the fall is not working. Or rather, is less profitable than most endeavors, here on the farm. I’ve lost two, one to coyotes, one to fly strike. That makes the additional money I charge melt into a loss, averaging the price I earn and their cost to me. A friend of a customer asked me the old question that newcomers often ask. “Do I eat my own lamb?” thinking, of course, I’d be too delicate or sensitive to eat an animal I raise. The answer always is, “I can’t afford it.” Including the price of slaughtering the meat. Their barbecue dinner party, albeit, a group of friends all ate that afternoon, cost what I spend for groceries, dog and cat food, and cleaning supplies, for three weeks. So be it. I have eaten my own lamb at a wedding, once. It was delicious.

The barn has undergone a repair that is both skillful and visually satisfying. The mow floor had begun to sag and was certain to give way, if not this year then in the next couple of years. I have been afraid to put the winter’s hay in it. Not that much of it has arrived as yet. A set of supports was installed with a crossbeam in such a way that it was not only functional but pleasing to look at. One worry gone. The creep feeder in the south pasture has been modified and now does its job. The lambs for sale have been placed in there as well as a ram who has no longer served his purpose. I never thought I’d sell him. And thought to let him live out his life here. However, it was he who decided to jump into the south pasture. Not because he was thinking to end his life, but, I surmise, his sons were becoming aggressive toward him and he wanted to get away from them. He is eating grain now, and second-cutting hay, and stomping his front foot at his youngest sons. If he is sold, so be it. If not, so be it. He will cost $90 to feed this year and $20 to bury if he goes. The $110 could feed some young stock. I’ll let his fate decide for him. I am of mixed emotions about it.

Frost has decimated my beautiful musquee, the orange winter squash that I planted in the composted manure pile by the carriage house. In all I got about 10 good-sized squashes, 15 smallish ones, and 25 tiny ones, some of which have gone into a soup currently simmering on the wood stove. Had I planted them a month sooner I’d have a superb crop with enough to sell, as well as enough to feed me for a part of the winter. The fava beans are maturing. Their expected 80 days are, by today, 100 days attempting to become beans. Some are fat, round things, big enough to dry. Some are brown tinged, hit by frost. A few are way too small. There still are a few white and black flowers which will never turn into beans. The plants themselves are lush and thick and still beautiful. I had planted some in both triangle gardens, and now know that the best ones grew in the easternmost patch. Next year. The refrain of all farmers and gardeners. The heliopsis were their usual magnificent display. Some as high as seven feet tall. The tiny pale cream Michaelmas daisies that look like baby’s breath overtook the perennial border this summer, and were this fall only an imitation of themselves. In other words, nature disappointed us, most of us this year. Again. Oh, there is comfrey to dry for the goats. I hadn’t picked it this summer at all. Rebecca Penhaligan doesn’t favor it. Green that is. The three kid goats may. Niccolo is growing into a fine, sturdy young fellow. (I just read in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend that to be called a fellow was in Dickens’s day, an insult.) Niccolo will have the shoulders and back to pull a cart nicely. His twin sister Lady Petunia Merriman is small next to him. I spent some time sitting with the two of them and the shy and retiring Lady Pansy yesterday. The Merriman twins are most affectionate, rubbing faces next to mine. Lady Pansy will consent to touch my hand with her face. So be it. I’ll win her over.

This afternoon was the first this autumn that the trees showed any color that was in any way to be admired on my hill. Nature has not been kind this year. But for a few moments, today, she was.

HOPES, DREAMS, AND WISHES

SHEARING OCCURRED HERE three days ago. Late this year. Last year’s was late as well, but shearing in October is not the same as shearing in November. Nor are either months even remotely the same as the typical April or May event. The spring discloses sheep who have been nursing lambs all winter, are on hay, and maybe grain. The autumn tells a pasture story. How good was the summer grazing, and was there any decent grass in the early autumn? The sheep proved to be, to my intense gratification, quite sleek this year, moving into winter. Only two of the 75 shorn, and the 26 unborn remaining combination of escapees, summer lambs, and market lambs, were on the thin side. No one, however, was bagging yet but it is six weeks before I expect to start lambing. They still have quite a bit of time. Some are heavy bellied. Twins, perhaps. Others are not. But without their fleeces I shall best be able to ascertain who is due to freshen and possibly when.

There are a number of advantages to autumn shearing. The newborn lamb can find its mother’s udder far more easily than having to dig through a summer and early fall’s growth of matted, burdock filled, thick fleece. While the dam might possibly experience a little cold, the heat loss from her body will warm the baby lamb lying next to her. Some fleece shall regrow in the six weeks to two and a half months between now and lambing which shall add a measure of comfort to the sheep. With the exception of last winter, I have kept the barn, for several years, in a most comfortable 30 to 40 degree range. Quite a bit warmer than in the past when the thermometer in a corner could easily register 20°. This year it shall more likely than not be somewhat better. The mow is now filled with hay as well as the room next to it, which has a fairly thick pack above where they shall live this winter. The pack is an excellent insulator. I may be able to put a double wall in the north side, and there shall be shutters as well as new glass in all of the windows to keep out the cold. There is enough old straw to provide bedding to make the lambing room comfortable as well.

The barn is about to undergo some renovations that inevitably shall make my work life easier. I had converted, 21 years ago, an old style stanchion cow barn into a sheep and possibly goat barn. Much of that has been torn out when I had the barn skid steered out last winter. And yet, the things I had built over the years were salvaged. These things can be reused in a very nice way to make the barn a more beautifully efficient work place for me and, I hope, a better place in which the livestock can live.

Much of my life in the winter is spent in the barn. The quality of that life depends a great deal upon how well the barn functions. The rest depends on how well the life here in the house functions. On that front, I appear to be gaining. Catching up and moving forward. There is a tiny almost room in my house that is referred to as the “home art center.” It has a window in its one exterior door; however, it has never been designated as a room. Nonetheless, I clean it as a room. Therefore its floor has been stenciled with a leaf design, its walls painted and the charming service door with its built-in tray and lift through which food was passed from the kitchen into my living room, the long ago dining room of the house, has been stenciled with orange poppies and dark green leaves. My daughter painted the charming face of a chef peering out of the closed “pass-through” to the kitchen, plate in hand, as well as a cat walking along a wall that is so very life-like that cats of mine have tried to attack it. And so it was with a great sense of purpose that I scrubbed the smoke-tinged walls, cupboard, and three interior walls down to its original butterscotch paint, stenciled windows of the fourth door which leads into the landing of the very neat wood room, farm office, and two-seater john room in addition to the well-worn floor. The floor now sports two coats of floor polish, gleaming like beeswax polish on an English farmhouse floor. And so, when I was at a loss as to where to serve the shearing dinner (the kitchen is uninhabitable, the dining room would have been bitterly cold, and there was not room on the living room table for all that I customarily serve), it suddenly occurred to me to set up a table in the home art center. I did! Complete with a linen table cloth. I put some framed prints on the walls and on a door, of sheep, of course, to honor my shearers. It was so pretty, I haven’t removed it.

My poor, once-lovely living room, now looking like London in the Blitz, begged me to restore whatever could be possible, even if my pretty wall of French doors and sidelights had to wait for the incomparable roofers to put them back. (Don’t ask me why they need to be put back or when the roofers will do it.) And so I addressed the desk where all of my most important papers were piled when the ceiling above it fell down and the floor which I had washed twice, by hand, on my knees, a system inspired by Home Comforts which advocates the method, leaving streaks of red clay in its wake as well as countless buckets of muddy water to be emptied onto the driveway. The desk is now partially visible for the first time in ages, and the floor responded, at last, to a third scrubbing followed by a thorough waxing. I’ve done a number of things in the room, washing windows and mirrors is always a morale booster. And knowing that only Christmas wrappings are behind the great wooden shepherd’s chair, rather than a disquieting conglomeration of curtain rods and old shoes, is certainly an encouragement. There is very little left to get the room to the next stage. For winter, of course. With any luck the roofers will repair the wall before the snow flies and I can hang the drapes I made a long time ago, once again.

My larder has some very nice things for winter. Pickled sweet and sour prunes. Sweet and sour cherries. Cherries marinated in vodka for three or four months. Pear marmalade. Pumpkin jam. Green walnut liquor. And a number of other miscellaneous things as well. There are salt capers that my grandson’s mother sends and dried Jacob’s Cattle Beans from last summer and pickled radish pods and sour cherry conserve. I’ve managed to make the larder quite neat and have, with some severe resolution and a modicum of pride, kept it that way for about two consecutive months. The new shelves in the dining room look very nice as well, with the gleaming glass jars neatly lined up filled with exquisite things to eat and drink.

The evening sky read classic November when I went to gather some of the slab wood by the carriage house to make the fire burn a little warmer. Tonight I’ve needed it. Not because the room was very cold. Nor because of the general severity of this life that can become so wearisome but because of something slightly different. Sometimes I so deeply long for things to be “all right.” I want this evening to be a comfortable and pleasant one. The simple relief of suffering no longer is enough. It does not touch me as it has in the past. It is something else that I need instead. The relentless and illusive pursuit of order brings no real sense of satisfaction any longer. Or, very little. Unless I can successfully maintain that order long enough to enjoy it. What I am now longing for is that things here be lovely. To be comfortable. To be consistent. I want to spend the evenings sometimes with people I love in a relaxed atmosphere where there are no disconcerting interruptions like wood to be brought in from a cold out-of-doors, or the sudden chill when opening a door to the next room. I’d love to read sometimes, by the fire in warm clean clothes in a warm clean room with nice little things to nibble on when the mood strikes me. I need the pretty things I own to be in repair and to hand so I can wear the long skirt I made when sitting in front of the fire, having afternoon tea instead of remembering it and wondering where it is as I tuck cold feet underneath my cold jeans. I need this new, neat, pristine notebook in which to write plans and dreams and a pen with blue ink which flows thickly, unhampered by the cold. The first thing I’d write about would be a list of names for this year’s new lamb crop, and perhaps the recipes I’m creating for Thanksgiving this year, as well as the ones for shearing dinner. Some names have been used before. There has been a Patricia Fitzpatrick. There never has been a Bessie O’Grady. But there shall be this year. Patricia was a favorite. Can I name another by her name again? Or in her memory? Some dishes have been prepared before. I’ve made Alice B. Toklas’s Bird’s Nest Pudding with and without this year’s short cut. Nor has there been marinated Jacob’s Cattle Beans with Pomeroy mustard and red onion. This year’s daube was cooked for a day and a half on the wood stove with tangerine peel rather than orange peel. It was all I had. It is from this that great recipes are created.

It all seems so possible when I write it down on clean paper with a new pen. What I do know is that we sheared on Friday, and that shearing always is, for me, a time of evaluation. And most importantly, a new beginning mid-autumn.

THE SILENCE

I LAY ON the hay mow floor once again, accompanied by the sound of the rain on the metal roof high above my head. Two or three little birds flew through the shutters above me. They appear to have made homes for themselves in the abandoned pigeon nests that seem to be everywhere among the rafters and crossbeams. It is the sweet time. The sheep are eating the hay I’ve tossed down to them through the chute. All is wrapped in silence except for the sounds of ruminants munching their dinner. The rain. And the few little songs of those unfamiliar birds. Who are they? And how can they survive this cold? It is the sound of the rain that is familiar. How many times have I lain back here and listened to it for a while? It is simplicity in itself. The essence of simplicity. As am I for a few brief moments between the this and the that which rules my day. For now I am torn. The hay I lie on. The sheep below me. The roof above me. Those two or three birds. And the sound of the rain. It is for this that I shall never leave here.

The barn sills, at least 20 some odd feet, are now in. It was an incredible moment for me. “For” is such a tiny word that it seems almost impossible that it can hold so much meaning. It means. It means that an old sill, almost a hundred years old, rotted out from the pack of manure that had lain against it far too long. Last winter the miracle worker skid steered a two-year pack from the barn and spread it on my fields. In itself that was a miracle. The sill crumbled. The miracle worker shored up the siding on the building, making a sort of frame for it to lean against and we hoped. The concrete floor leading up to the sill was shoveled cleanly as was the stone foundation to the barn. To everyone’s amazement but mine the foundation was as perfect as the day it was set. Level. Neat. Beautiful. And to my surprise, the edge of the concrete forming a right angle to the foundation was perfect as well. Bringing the 10-inch-by-10-inch 12-foot-long sills from my barn bridge way down to the ground level and then into the barn itself took the miracle worker and his tractor as well as the help of two young men and a heavy chain. I was in awe. The final positioning, a day or two later, took four men, crow bars, chains, and once more, the expertise of the miracle worker. I applauded when the first sill dropped perfectly into place. “The other side isn’t in yet.” “No, but this one is,” I replied. And so it was. I still applauded. The siding is pretty much nailed in. The second of the two big doors on the north side is temporarily nailed in. The barn, today, was 10° warmer than it was outside. One manger is in place and already in use. I’m not remotely set up. But it is all much better than it was a year ago.

The sheep, most of them, have been shorn. It shall be far easier for me to see who is bagging. Certainly I shall know who is not. I shall soon start braiding collars for them. Creating a new system. Purple shall be a color in every collar that shall tell me who freshened in the first week of lambing. Red shall indicate week number two, although most collars will have other colors to best identify both mothers and lambs. The sheep look at me expectantly now when I close the big doors behind me and step inside to be with them. They mill around me, even after I feed them their hay. Do they remember the beautiful times we have had together? Do they know it has begun again? Do they know? I think they do. There are so many of them now. Some of the Horned Dorsets look good. But two that I bought last year do not. They and the ram shall be moved to the carriage house where they can be fed grain and some Red Cell without interference from the others. I don’t like the performance of that new bunch at all. At least the ones from the first farmer from whom I bought Horned Dorsets. The ones from Kate Henderson look very good, on the other hand. Although I must say, the daughter of one of them is huge and perfect. Her mother may just need to be built up a little. We’ll see. They can’t already be bred, so keeping the ram with them may see them bred for summer.

Usually the first lambs born here arrive around the first day of Christmas, although this year it may be later. No one seems to be bagging as yet. This shepherd is closer to being ready for the holiday than I have ever been in past Christmases. Some gifts have already been sent and received. Unopened, I hope. Others are sitting here ready to be wrapped. Most are bought. Tomorrow I shall begin the baking. Apricot walnut bars for my grandson’s mother, and with any luck, for my dear brother; cornmeal and golden raisin cookies for my daughter; and the famous date nut balls for my brother, my son, and the miracle worker. I’d like to make some croissants for myself. Perhaps I shall. We give a wonderful combination of both practical and fanciful gifts in this family. With great delight I’ve only just thought of the perfect gift for a dear friend who is famous for being hard on machinery, for breaking the unbreakable machinery, such as tractors. I’m going to get him a matchbox size John Deere tractor and a second one for when the first gets broken. I hope he gets the joke and understands the appreciation that shall accompany it.

When my children were young and I was in the beginnings of my seemingly usual impecunious state, I established a precedent for gift giving. All gifts are equal, I decreed. Therefore a beautifully painted brand new toy truck was equal to a package of gum and a pair of socks. The routine was, and still is, that all gifts are opened in front of everyone one at a time, oohed and aahed over appropriately no matter what the gift is. Therefore, this shepherd is as thrilled with a package of three-way pink light bulbs as a bottle of Cointreau® or a down jacket. Not to mention bar chocolate or emery boards. We are careful to try to satisfy both wishes and needs as well as tastes and try to add a touch of luxury here and there. Our gifts say to one another, I know you and think about you.

My birthday is also during Christmas. The 12th day, although the 11th night. There is something good about that. I was born when the Three Kings came bearing gifts to the child. I remember singing “We Three Kings” when I was a child, quite certain that they were Three Kings from Ory and Arre. Perhaps they were. And maybe still are.

I’ve solved a perennial problem about the Christmas tree this year. As a family we have always decorated it on Christmas Eve. But that has become increasingly impossible as the dynamics of the family have been altered and logistics have become unconquerable. Rather than becoming disappointed and upset upon finding, yes, finding boxes of ornaments hidden away rather than hung, and the tree not always quite looking the way I want it to as I cook in the kitchen and leave the tree trimming up to others, I’m getting the tree early this year and am starting the decorating, guess what!, myself. I may even make myself some hot chocolate with real whipped cream to sip while putting on the tinsel. There has been in the past few years a reasonable but slightly discordant note added to our Christmas Eve supper. By me, I might add. In other words, nothing in this meal really goes with anything else. For many years, cassoulet de Castelnaudary has been the main dish. Principally because it is loved, familiar, and cannot be overcooked. Made quite a bit in advance, it can’t be harmed by an extra half hour in the oven. What we all love, as well, and doesn’t “go” with cassoulet at all is double chocolate brownies, which are brownies (the recipe is on the chocolate box) with an added half package of semisweet chocolate chips thrown in. Now, they don’t really “go” with cassoulet, but they do “go” with decorating a Christmas tree. Complementing or enhancing that, perhaps aggrandizing is a better choice of words, is the always there hot chocolate made from scratch. With gobs and gobs of freshly whipped cream. Our stomachs may rebel at the combination but tradition rules firmly here. However, added a few years ago creating a combination that would bring horror to any reasonable gourmet’s mind is baccala, (dried salt cod fish), made with potatoes and onions and peppers and and and. Now that is something that makes me laugh as it is so appalling. How this combination evolved or ever even seemed to be reasonable is beyond my comprehension. And I’m the one who created it! Nonetheless, we’ve all agreed to forego our ritual Christmas goose although I may have some ducks instead for Christmas dinner. However, a cotechino baked in a lard crust is essential and in the offing. I’ve received a gift of two of them recently, and they (two giant sausages) sit waiting in the freezer.

There is new hope and promise here on the farm of late. It slips in between the customary trivials and in between some new ones as well. However, hope and promise and a great deal of love have slipped between the cracks and are managing to fill the heart with a newfound love that grows deeper by the day.

THE THAW

JANUARY THAW. JANUARY thaw. The waterline to the carriage house thawed after I had been carrying bucket after bucket full of water to 10 goats, one donkey, and some chickens, day in and day out from the kitchen sink. It created a short term flood in the building, however, a water trough had been placed beneath the faucet of the hydrant and it diverted most of the water outside. Miracle of miracles. Should the miracle continue beyond today, I will no longer have to haul water from the house this winter.

Two of the goats are clearly bred and, while not yet showing an udder, are broadening every day. For some obscure reason, apparent only to themselves, all but Cameron decided to walk into the big goat pen with no hint of encouragement on my part. Cameron, who is bred for the end of March or the beginning of April, quarrels with some of the other goats, and, it would appear, has a more peaceful life alone with the donkey and the little wethered goat Niccolo Merriman, whom, I hope, shall pull a cart for me this summer. Niccolo is possessed of some charm and a friendly personality. Mother Katherine is expected to come to celebrate the Twelfth Day of Christmas and should she make it, I hope she will show me how to make a halter for him. He and I shall then begin to train together. Mother Katherine has been asked to bless my flock on Twelfth Night. I haven’t done that in quite some time. It used to be a most observed practice here on my farm. Circumstance prevented it happening for the past few years. Necessity and a profound need to celebrate joy have prompted me to ask that it be done again.

The house remains cold. I become conservative with the use of firewood when temperatures rise; consequently it often is as cold inside when the outside temperature is 42°F as it is at 10°. I must change my ways. Hard to do. Fear governs. A hard and determined taskmaster.

More optimism has been dwelling here over the past few days than has been all year. For some completely inexplicable reason I believe, with no evidence to substantiate my belief, that this shall be a very good year. Systems have begun to present themselves to me. On modest levels. Pretty little containers in which to save change with which to buy those Italian red onions I tried to grow last year. And one or two to save change for leeks. I even started scrubbing the cobwebs off of the shelved things in the kitchen, a very old set of ceramic canisters, a Royal Copenhagen coffeepot without its spout, and cans too pretty to throw away. The sheep are contributing to my sense of optimism as well. No lambs yet! I’m not ready for them. But some very ample-looking ewes, wandering around. They each have their favorite spot in which to eat their dinner and stand not far from their mangers looking out at me when I come down the ladder. Most don’t crowd around when I start feeding them. They wait for me. One older ewe got herself bred the other day. I hope it means a June lamb. And if so, a ewe. There has been more interest in lambs of late than usual, as well. From very different groups of people. While this does not necessarily mean more actual customers, it does indicate a new interest which creates a modicum of hope all on its own.

I’ve been rereading one of my favorite books of all time, Cache Lake Country, by John J. Rowlands. Rowlands writes about each month of the year that he spent living in the North Woods. It is a little like the stories I write; however, he seems to be always happy and always comfortable in his surroundings. He describes how to wrap oneself in a mere two blankets in order to sleep outside. Winters! I’d forgotten about that, having wrapped myself according to his instructions several winter nights in the summer bedroom before the winter bedroom was ready for me, on more than one occasion. The point of it was to not be able by accident to slip out of the covers and freeze a foot or toe. I found myself nearly tied in on occasion and it was almost impossible to extricate myself quickly enough to not be squashed by my pups or able to race to the bathroom. Rowlands, unlike me, includes an awful lot of information on how to make things. Everything from baked beans to cooking in a hole dug in the ground, to creating refrigeration or moccasins. I’ve always wanted to sew the moccasins for which he gives a pattern. They make sense. If I ever could tan a hide it would be a nicer thing to do. There is a peacefulness about his writing, which permeates the book, that I feel somehow after reading it, even though I don’t really relate well to the ways he describes how to survive. I think, were I suddenly in his shoes, I’d probably remember very little about his methods that would sustain me. However, the peacefulness and a sense of mastery of the environment linger on long after the pages are closed. My son and I both treasure the book and I have ordered it for a Twelfth Night gift for a person who is certain to appreciate it.

Tomorrow is my birthday. It is a very different kind of birthday than I have ever known. I love holidays and celebrations of all sorts and hope to be able to take a little time tomorrow to celebrate. Life here has changed in one very big way and in many small ways and will never be the same. While the vicissitudes of daily life on a farm have a familiar cycle of ups and downs, my own life has become, in many ways, unfamiliar and a little uncertain. Oh, there are things of which I am most deeply certain and that live in the bottom of my heart, but a new dimension of late has caused me to stretch beyond what I thought were my limits in directions that I didn’t know existed. This year is full of hope and promise that were absent last year at this time. The best I could do was hold on and survive. The way I did it was to become as silent inside as I could be. Still. Quiet. And to never resonate with any fear or foreboding. I succeeded in that. But this year, even beset with more financial problems than are the custom, there seems to be an element of possibility that I’ve not experienced before. It is in the air in these mountains. The air I am breathing. Now.

My dog, Glencora MacCluskie, has decided to take her chances in an attempt to sit on my lap in the green chair. What is challenging her most is that Peabody, the cat, is sitting immediately at my side, preventing me from occupying the whole seat. Glencora hates Peabody. She is now balancing on my leg, head on my knee, one paw only about a half inch from Peabody’s back. The fire is giving off some heat. The three of us are reluctant to move, although Glencora is probably in the more comfortable position, I, the second, and Peabody is the most well placed. She had occupied the chair first, and I was reluctant to move her. The dogs take turns with the cat sleeping with me, of late. One cat one night, under the covers, keeping me warm, or warmer. Two dogs the alternate nights. One behind my knees, the other, her head on my pillow. That one is Nelly. I try to cover her over if I can without smothering her. Sometimes it works. Glencora seems to have a thicker coat, and doesn’t mind so much.

I got some unexpected money a day or two ago, and shall spend it on morale boosting. In other words, I bought some books. Nothing like a little escape from what has been a cold but not too awful winter as yet. My daughter is a pastry chef and made chocolates for those fortunate members of the family. Chocolates. A new book. Perhaps a fire. Heaven for winter nights. I’ve come across some favorite poetry, Virgil’s Georgics, the part about shepherds, and some Li Po Mountain poems, and am wishing they could be read aloud at the close of the day. Perhaps they shall be. There is a beauty to winter evenings that no other season presents. I think, perhaps because I was born so close to the first few days of winter, that I appreciate the lengthening of the days and the silence of the evenings in a different kind of way from people born in the bright days and shorter nights of summer. There can be a peacefulness that I experience at no other time of year. Of course, as lambing hasn’t begun as yet, that peacefulness may soon end; however, at the moment it fills this house with its unique presence.

THE ICY PATH

THE WIND TONIGHT defies the imagination. The tall pines behind the carriage house bent, if possible, and stared back at me. I was afraid of both the sound and the sight. Or lack of ability to see beyond the building. The snow hides the barn from me, swirling into my face. The thought came to turn back. I wanted to but couldn’t have stood the sense of failure that that would have brought me. There was only one new lamb since five this afternoon. It was just born, and so there may be a second. It has been primarily a twin story since yesterday. Fifteen in all including this wet little thing. One lamb had found itself trapped in a manger, and its mother wasn’t able to tell it how to get itself out. Her sister had gotten herself in an odd corner as well. Twenty feet away. Their poor mother was frantic trying to rescue each of them. So I did it for her.

She is an East Friesian I bought from Old Chatham some years ago. These two will be among her last and I want to keep them. One has a distinctive black spot on her back. The second looks too much like most of the others. I had found them around 11 last night. Wet and newly emerged into the world. In the wrong place, of course. The now defunct lambing room where many had freshened in the past. When I came home today from jury duty (I was excused for six months), they had slipped and slid back into it. One followed her dam outside to a snow bank. The other stood on some ice. Blatting as her little legs buckled under her. I picked her up. Called to her mother, “I’ve got her. Calm down.” And so she did. They were all, this little family, moved to the barn proper where I’ve put them several times already. Were I only to have a way to shut them in, even if only at night. That may still happen.

I won’t go out again tonight. The path is ice created from my repeated footsteps. The snow melts under my boots and then freezes. The flashlight bulb is dim. And the drama induced by the wind has conquered whatever courage I might have. Were I to slip off at the bridgeway I wouldn’t be found for days. Yesterday was my biggest lamb day of all this season. Twelve lambs, six sets of twins. Today there seem to have been three more, although I’m not quite certain. It only works if I collar every one, and there are still a number from last week that I didn’t collar yet. I’ve run out of yarn colors, which surprises me, but I’ve made a few braids anyway. A couple of the ewes will sport the same colors; however, their lambs are different enough to distinguish them from the others.

The lambs are mostly males this year. To sell. I always think. And some ewe lambs to keep. One in the kitchen has a particularly fine long fleece which is why she is inside. She was a single with a good mother, but I couldn’t get her dry enough. By evening her long fuzzy legs were cold. Very cold. The temperature that night was expected to drop. I knew I’d find her with frost bitten legs, so in she came. She is particularly fine and shall stay forever.

The sound of the wind is a little more than I want right now. It is the ocean far from land. I had bought myself this most solid house some years ago, and the wind never made one curtain even think about giving so much as a shudder. I grew up on the edge of the ocean, two blocks from Long Island Sound in Connecticut, as a matter of fact. But it was along a river that I walked, a wide, deep-harbored river, but a river nonetheless, to go to the beach on the Sound. So while the ocean was not far from my mind it was the safety of visible land that surrounded me. I’ve often thought of taking a stack of books and going on an ocean liner from New York harbor, sitting on deck under a cashmere throw or two, being served tea and little sandwiches. The problem with that is I think I’d be afraid of the ocean. The vastness and the sound of it. Tonight is one of the worst wind storms I’ve ever heard up here in these mountains. Even the lambs in the barn when I went down there were blatting for their mothers. It is usually silent when I go down at night. Tonight it wasn’t.

I’ve firewood now, to last at least three if not four weeks, especially if I restrain myself to living in a one-room cabin, sometimes called the kitchen. I am making some progress in this room. Minor progress, but progress nonetheless. The firewood needs stacking, but it is undoubtedly adding to a vague sense of the possibility of life getting a little better here. I bought something for the house today. Most satisfying. I had given myself a small allotment from some unexpected cash and bought several books, the prices online made it tempting and I succumbed, and several gifts. One, the best one, for my artist friend hasn’t been sent yet, I was waiting for the driveway to be plowed so it could be picked up. It may go out tomorrow. My dining room is walled in cedar wainscoting. The dishes are white as are all of the tablecloths, napkins, and seat covers. I came across in Stephen’s Antiques and Collectibles a group of six cups and saucers the brown of the cedar walls, and cream. It was obvious that I’d regret forever not having bought them as I do long for a set of brown on cream espresso cups I saw five or six years ago. So, with the last of the discretionary money they came home with me. And sit now on the dining room table. All but one that I’ve left out in the kitchen to look at for a little while. The name of the designer on the bottom of the cup and saucer is Clarise. A perfect name for a goat. There has been over the years a sense of “c” names in one line of goats. Cameron is due in April. Her doeling, should she drop one, shall be Clarise.

Names are beginning to present themselves for the new lambs. This month’s World of Interiors gave me a possible three. Thank goodness for the English. Turtle Bunbury shall be a sheep. Marisa Guinness is a maybe. All found in one page. Olivia has never been used here before. Dado Parington and Chuffy Farnsworth are new to this farm as well. Pricilla Arbounoth was bestowed a couple of weeks ago.

Next morning. Three new arrivals, singles, today in contrast to the plethora of twins the other day. Last night was bitter cold. As was this morning. It gave lie to the predictions I had heard that it would be in the 40s from three days ago throughout the week. How disappointing. Some of the sheep remember freshening in the lambing room and are going in there again. One eight-year-old has, and last night a yearling, had a single in there as well. She was wary of me and wouldn’t let me near her new baby. I hope the lamb is a ewe because she will learn from her dam how to be an attentive, serious mother herself. I’ve decided to recognize whose boss and shall this afternoon bed down the room with some hay. Unfortunately, I need the hay. However, they shall need the bedding. Others shall follow suit. I’m certain. And if they eat it, so be it. One of today’s arrivals is out of a Friesian-Tunis cross that was crossed by accident and here in error. His grandfather had been introduced to his grandmother by a trucker who didn’t think the East Friesian ewes and Tunis ram would be interested in each other. They were. I had a Friesian ram at the time and wasn’t planning on a mixed flock. Thank goodness the lamb is a ram and I don’t face any harder decision than the one to sell him. This year’s choice for a replacement ram may have appeared in the little Horned Dorset ram. I’ve been asked to reserve my most beautiful ram lamb for a customer. It will take a month or so to make that choice. Many haven’t even freshened yet. A couple miscarried and may have been rebred for summer lambs. I’ve seen one or two covered already. It will be interesting when it is all finished to see what has happened. To date I have mostly ram lambs. All females except a few that were promised to repay a debt shall stay. It is unlikely that I’ll want to sell any starter flocks this year. I need replacements. There are a number of lambs now in the barn who, because they aren’t sporting collars, I can’t identify. I’m off to braid ribbons.

ALIVE

THERE ARE MIRACLES that happen on farms, sometimes. A certain special kind of miracle that is clear and simple and can be attributed to the gift of timing, perfect, yet accidental, timing. Sometimes I become tired in the mid-afternoon. There are nights when I lie awake from three to five in the morning. Other times the tiredness is less understandable; however, I’ve been known to take a nap around 3:30 for a half an hour. The other afternoon I compounded the felony by picking up the book that had consoled me in the middle of the prior night and read for a clocked 15 minutes. Guilt ridden, I then raced to the barn to feed out afternoon’s hay. Late. The sheep raced out to the barnyard. Baleage was their afternoon tea and brings more enthusiasm than square bales. Blatting, bellowing, calling. A noisy lot. But there was one sound that was different. Louder. Regular. Insistent. I raced down the stairs and the ladder to the barn proper. There was a ewe behind the bigger feeder lying on her side. I ran to aright her when I saw something white at her back end. A lamb. A big one. Stuck. She couldn’t get it out. It was her agonized groans I had heard. I didn’t wait to soap my hands but reached in and pulled. He came out all at once. Alive. Had I gone down when I thought I should have, I’d have left the barn before she went into labor and would have lost both mother and lamb.

This morning I found, in the normal course of things, a lamb born a few days ago, with his front leg caught in an old stanchion. This wasn’t the miracle of accidental timing in discovering Genivere and her little Mr. Big, but was satisfying in its own way.

I am still lambing. Still lambing. March. And can only say damn. The latest ones have come after a hiatus of 10 days or so. And there are more to come. This was one of the strangest lambing seasons I have ever known. Thank goodness the lambing pen in the cellar was built a couple of weeks ago, because there are three kid goats in there as well as too many lambs. Adelaide Merriman, goat, is giving me enough milk to bottle her twin doelings and nearly one more lamb. The other day she topped her record and gave me 128 ounces of milk. Were I to put milk in my coffee, there would have been some left over for me, too. When another goat freshens, I may be able to have milk for a piece of cheese.

Being surrounded by animals is beginning to get to me. The cat just ran off and hid the pen I’m writing with when I went downstairs to bottle lambs. The kids and lambs have developed sharp teeth and hoofs, and I am black and blue from them accosting me when it is bottle time. It seemed to make sense to bottle two or three at a time, but slow as I am, I’ve begun to realize I am neither bitten nor jumped on, nor trashed into if I only do one at a time. I’ve managed to open the gate just a little, letting each one come out separately. They will all hate me someday, however, because they don’t like to be put back summarily into the pen. Or should I say with dispatch. Shall they remember I fed them or shall they remember I bodily picked them up and dumped them over a gate? So be it. Two of my favorites are in there. Twins. And three other ewe lambs whom I am keeping. Two are the biggest and one is the fluffiest. Another fast grower may be my choice as well. A lean and neat looking younger lamb may stay, not because she is particularly beautiful, she isn’t, but because she is classic in form and style.

The sheep broke out the other day. I should have expected it and didn’t. About 20 of them. Adelaide Merriman and I have had an agreement. I call “Adelaide Merriman. Now!” and she sometimes saunters, but usually walks quickly to my front porch, jumps onto the window seat where a box of grain sits. I then sit down and milk her. Of late, if there isn’t extra corn in it she will knock over the last in her grain box and leave as I get the 300th squirt into the milking pail. The errant sheep took only about as long as it takes to race up to the porch and devour every last grain of sweet feed, leaving behind a miserable mess of ground in droppings on the stone steps. That meant no more milking on the porch if I couldn’t get the sheep back in. I couldn’t. None of the gates are in working order. Eventually I got 20 or so back where they needed to be, or where I wanted them to be. Three ewes and two each of their twins remained upstairs in the barn where the baleage is. My worst sheep, or perhaps she is the most interesting, is the one surviving Horned Dorset. She, alone, got into the living room the first day the sheep got out by knowing how to use her horns. Her most perfect replacement ram lamb, that also has the ugliest face, got separated from her and was in the barnyard without his mother for all of a day and a half. She wandered about, seemingly not to look for him but rather to find extras to eat, such as laying mash. Suddenly I saw him upstairs in my barn. He found her. He may be as intelligent as she. I hope not. He is certainly staying. I hope he won’t be the kind of sheep she is. His confirmation is perfect for this breed. A Horned Dorset dam and a Friesian-Dorset sire.

There are two bottle lambs in the barn and they found themselves upstairs as well. One is marked to match her mother. The other lost her collar but has a black spot on her rump. They spend time together and race to me, blatting like crazy when I appear anywhere in the barn. They have mothers. Need a supplement or two each day, but in all other ways look as unalike as could be. There are in the barn several left of the Old Chatham flock of lambs I bought eight years or so ago. One was on the upper level of the barn, lying somewhat languidly near the round bales. Sometimes she would come to me to be petted. Sometimes she seems too peaceful and content to bother. And so it was with absolute amazement that I saw her stand, stretch, and call out. The two, completely different-looking bottle lambs ran over to her and dove in to nurse! They were both chosen to stay. I had thought the lamb with the black spot belonged to a Friesian ewe but, after the first day or two I didn’t know which one. And so, the lambs that are to stay to replace my winter losses are beginning to be sorted out. The twins of ewe number three who is also living in the lap of luxury upstairs in the barn also shall stay. I hope I can catch them to put the same color collar on them to distinguish them from the others. Choosing, for the most part the ones with the very thick curly fleeces because, if it is an inheritable trait, it means their lambs will have a chance to be warmer if born in the winter. Nine in all to date, have been chosen. Names have not begun to come to me with any permanency; that is, with any luck. If I get my part of the kitchen floors, now primed, painted, I’ll be able to go down to the barn and begin to choose replacements. The lambs seem to be fond of racing madly around the barn when their mothers are outside eating. More room. They circle and circle and then leap into the air, do a spin and toss their bodies in full circle, only to repeat the performance again.

Goats are different. They are more mischievous at a much younger age and were far more impossible to stand those few days they were in the house. Two of my youngest goats do not seem to be broadening at all although they have been running with a buck for a very long time. Even Cameron who should be bred doesn’t look very big. Rebecca, Saanen-Sable cross, does lounge around a bit more than usual. She is big as is Belinda, the beautiful disappointment. I think the Saanens are the biggest of the goats. The Sables are derived from the Saanens, they are brown Saanens, all opposed to the white ones. Rebecca, Belinda, and Mungo are my biggest goats. Four more goats should be bred giving me the possibility of four to eight more kids for the lambing pen. But it remains to be seen. They will all be out of Mungo Penhaligan, beautiful mahogany buck from the Holy Myrrhbearers Monastery in Otego. April should be an interesting month.

Life here has assumed a sharp edge that was unexpected. Spring is a short time away. Formally, that is. I don’t know what shall happen. It is to be expected that life will soften a little. But I am not sure.

THE KIDS

THERE IS SOMETHING enchanting about this latest batch of kid goats. They had been bottled from the time they were 48 hours old, and lived together with nine lambs in a pen in the cellar. They were subsequently moved to a horse stall in the carriage house and weaned, gradually, but with a touch of haste near the end of it. Nonetheless, while in the stall they developed the habit of calling out to me the moment they heard the door to the carriage house being opened. And, furthermore, continued their clamor until I petted each one and fed them. It would start all over again the moment the grain was finished. They became particularly vociferous while I milked their mothers. A yearling doe, full sister to two of the twins, half sister to the rest, lived with them as well, and joined in vehemently with the others. They were moved into the carriage house loft a few days ago where they have free choice hay, water, and are grained twice a day. They run and leap around in the space. And sit at the loft door looking down at me when they hear my front door close as I leave the house.

Today I decided to spend some “quality” time with them. I needed to braid lead cords to use with the new goats that I bought, and decided to bring the snaps, baling twine, and scissors upstairs to the loft to be able to sit with the goats rather than my dogs on the side porch. They surrounded me like puppies, putting their little faces up to me to be stroked and to have the place behind their ears scratched. They all took turns rubbing their faces against mine. The year-old doeling, last year’s Petunia, sat on the bale next to me, chewing her cud nicely after having been reprimanded severely for putting her front feet on my shoulders. One of the little goats sat next to my feet while the others stood at my knees looking up into my face. They are still small enough for me to be able to pet two with each hand, leaving one with which to rub faces. I am fortunate having these five plus one, four doelings plus one buck, and the yearling because they may be the last kid goats that I shall keep. Adelaide Merriman, grand lady doe, is at least 9 years old, if not 10. She ultimately needs to be replaced; however, she still is my best milker. Her twin doelings, this year, are outstanding. They, unfortunately for me, have the cream markings of the Toggenburg; however, one is a perfect pitch black, the other is a rich chocolate brown. Three new goats have arrived. Big goats. They are Sables, an offshoot breed of Saanens. Just as large. One is cinnamon colored. Her milk is abundant. She may do best being milked three times a day for a while. Her twin sister is a shiny espresso coffee in color. She, too, has a great deal of milk. Both have been nursing twins and have extra milk for the house. They shall be a joy to me.

A surprise has been Sherlock. Not part of the original plan but a very nice addition, indeed. I’ve struggled with the name and am highly reluctant to change his first name. The last name of Witherspoon (one of my choices) has not stuck. MacGillicuddy has always been fun for me, but he is a bit too dignified, charming, and artistic to be saddled with MacGillicuddy as a last name. Then Lawton Pearsall Smythe turned up. It seems like a perfect fit. It shall be Pearsall for short. I don’t know how to tell his former owner that he is no longer Sherlock, at least here; however, I shall have to.

I am breeding for brown goats, with no other color or markings. I don’t care which of the many shades of brown from cinnamon to black coffee they manifest. They just need to be brown. Sienna. Mahogany. The goal for me is to have a herd of solid color brown goats.

Cameron is a multi-colored doe that has lived here for her whole life. About four years. She is shades of tan and brown and butterscotch, with the fly-away ears of her Nubian grandmother. One of her twin doelings strangled herself in my fireplace between one of the andirons and the brick wall. A black kid with white facial markings. The second one, a tricolor, has been sold. Cameron shall stay as she was an early addition to the flock. Born and raised on this farm. However, she is not part of my breeding program. She shall probably be bred to Pearsall and I shall not keep her kids. Five goats to hand milk are quite enough. Too many for that matter.

I’ve come across a remarkable cheese recipe. It may possibly be an ancient one. Since the normal temperature for a sheep or a goat is around 103°F, it stands to reason that their milk, immediately after being drawn, is about that temperature. The recipe calls for “warming” the milk to 89° (presumably it is a lot colder coming straight out of the fridge). One is to add ½ cup of cultured buttermilk, store-bought will do (I add one cup), and ½ teaspoon liquid rennet (I add one teaspoon). It is to set for 8 to 12 hours at room temperature. It is then drained, salted, and weighed down. The resulting cheese is similar in texture to a ricotta without the graininess. Smooth and creamy. I’m going to use it in a recipe I’ve read in The Country Kitchen and roll it into balls, drying them for two days and then putting them into a jar, covering them in olive oil. That shall be made of today’s milk.

The summers seem to be taken up with the goats, of late. Autumn and winter belong to the sheep. The goats, sheep, and chickens take up the spring. The chickens are the most time-consuming of all. Trip after trip to the portable coop, and trip after trip to the indoor coop. The 10 indoor pullets give an egg a piece a day including two or three double yolkers a week. A bonus 11th egg occurs a couple of times a week, as well. The outdoor chickens give 10 to 14 eggs a day. Considering one is lame and can’t make the nesting box, one is molting, and one is ancient, it is a goodly number for the 15 of them.

The chickens lose money for me, of course. They need to be fed. Laying mash and oyster shells and scratch feed. They are doing a lot better eating their grain when the oats and corn of the scratch are added. Of course, they are laying about 12 dozen eggs a week and eating about $14 in feed. However, those that go to my table are supposed to be counted as earnings. One is expected to charge oneself. I can’t afford such fancy eggs and have been known to buy supermarket eggs for baking. I do make cheese for the table and were I to charge myself the going rate for a pound, it probably would represent a profit. I also sell kid goats, the bucks, for meat and others for breeding stock or lawn mowers. So it may be said the goats are income producing. In moderation. Lambs no longer are. The feed costs are too high. My hay price was not raised. This year. A miracle. But grain shall be.

I’ve heard many expressions of late to describe the farms in this area. Hobby farm is one. Lifestyle farm is another. Those farm names were not in the common parlance when I started 23 years ago. I did, and had reason to expect, earn some money farming it. And I did. I no longer do. However, I have made a commitment to my livestock to keep them going, and have honored that for near enough to 25 years to say almost 25 years. Every time I have set a date to start to phase down, and gain a year or two into it, it suddenly becomes too close, and I back away. How could I possibly say the week-old lamb running around with her mother, a wild little thing, shall be the last I shall keep? She could live eight to 12 more years. Will I keep none of next year’s lambs who would live 8 to 12 more years? Would I ever be able to restrain my hand from keeping the newest most perfect ram lamb? This year’s two are each magnificent in his own way. One a huge Horned Dorset, almost, at four months, as big as his mother, and certainly bigger than some of my yearlings. And the Horned Friesian I chose for his fleece is an absolutely beautiful creature. How could I resist seeing what lambs they throw? And keeping the ewes out of them? I can’t.

THE TRAGEDY

THERE HAS BEEN a tragedy here of some consequence. I heard the sound of wood hitting wood somewhere in or near the house. While the sound of something banging is not terribly unusual, it was startling to say the least. I didn’t look to see from where it came. A short time later I brought a bunch of my favorite orange day lilies into the dining room. There on the floor was a square board and, next to it, a familiar pile of twigs. I picked up the pigeon nest and turned it over. One baby pigeon was dead. A bleeding mess. The other, the larger of the two, a fat little thing, picked up its head and breathed its last. I had seen the mother pigeon fly through a missing piece of glass in the dining room window, twigs in its beak, building a nest on a piece of wood someone had nailed a long time ago, to a cross beam near the peak of the roof that comprised the ceiling. Everyone told me to get rid of it. “Screen in the windows. Do something. Anything.” I couldn’t bring myself to destroy the nest. “The last thing you need is more pigeons.” That was obvious. But I still couldn’t bring myself to block off the bird’s access. Of late, I hadn’t seen her sitting on the nest. Perhaps, I thought, she’d changed her mind. Or the eggs weren’t fertile. So be it. Until the sound of the board hitting the floor 15 feet below.

The pigeon now flies through the open window. Looks at me and flies away. Once she flew over my head onto the rafter where the board had been nailed and looked all around her. I had gotten rid of the dead baby birds and moved the nest to the side of the room. I couldn’t bring myself to burn it. I shall. But not yet.

Two pigeons flew in and out over the next couple of days. I repaired the quarter round window that had been their original door; however, glass is slipping out occasionally, of the other windows, begging me to replace them. One missing pane afforded the pair a way in from the box gutter in the roof where some of the flock had made their home. I watched them as they frantically flew out the moment they caught sight of one. It was a couple of days before I saw a new nest being made. So be it for the moment.

This story has many levels. One level is high above my head where a pigeon has made her nest again in the dining room. This room is a beautiful one. To my eye. It is two stories high within a peaked roof. Eight windows plus two quarter rounds. The farm surrounds me here. The walls here are of cedar wainscoting. The 10-foot-long table is covered in a white cloth. The dishes are all white with a touch of gold here and there. The only color comes from the flower garden outside of the windows that cover one wall or that I sometimes arrange in clear glass pitchers. I’ve designed one last thing here. At the peak of the ceiling is an unfinished space that Dave Goldberg, master roofer, shall help me create. He shall cut a triangle of wood for me to stain and paint. On it I shall paint in it in a gold moon and stars and perhaps a Capricorn and even a Sagittarius. Benjamin Moore makes a gold paint that looks like gold leaf which I shall use for the moon and stars.

Last evening I gave myself a moment or two to lie on the chaise in front of the wall of windows and watch the sheep wend their way into the barn. A flash of white caught my eye from a small ledge high above me on the far wall of the dining room. I looked up. It was a pigeon. She had grown bored sitting interminably on her nest and had taken a little walk to a place with another aspect of the room in view. I clicked my tongue hoping to get her attention. Instead, the dogs rushed in. She looked at them and then turned her head to me. This morning she is sitting, 6:47, as the sun breaks over the hill surrounding the house, back on her nest. Waiting. I don’t want pigeons in here. But I can’t bring myself to block her way in and out. Not now.

I have started the winter’s food preparation here. Pickled sweet and sour cherries to go with the pig I had butchered. Peach marmalade. Black currant liquor. Brandied sour cherries. And today I shall pickle some magenta chard stems. Oh, I pickled some prunes as well, sweet and sour. I’m trying to make rillettes, however I ruined one batch by cooking it on the top of the stove rather than in the oven. The fat that the pork was simmering in didn’t quite cover the meat, and in the end some of it fried rather than melted. Today, if there is more real time than illusion, I shall try once more. Some of the pork I had had butchered came back to me in mysterious forms. No shape or cut of which I’d ever heard. None the less, one form seems to lend itself to the making of the shredded pressured pork called rillettes. With any luck, my second attempt shall not be in vain.

The wild thyme is coming in with abundance this year. It is now on the near as well as the far side of the brook. I love the stuff. Some I dried last summer is almost as good as it was initially. My daughter uses it in her restaurant and says it is unmistakable in the croutons they make for salads.

It rains once again. I, who don’t believe in requesting of God or Nature any variation on what the weather might be, found myself cursing the rain. The thunder and lightning cursed back at me just now. “How dare you criticize us? We know what we are doing!” they called out in unison. However, I cannot stand the despair in the hearts of the men who still have hay on the ground. The sky has become white. The leaks in the dining room roof clatter into the pans I have beneath them.

To my horror the newly created leaks in the living room (for some reason the roofers never seem to believe it will rain and do not tarp properly what they have started and left unfinished, they tend to disappear if there are hay making days), have flooded the room. My new roof leaks where it has never leaked before. Only this time in spades. Or should I say in rain. The one area that has leaked, apparently forever, no longer does. It is brand new places that have been created, a work in progress, that I find disconcerting.

The view from the dining room windows now includes the phlox that bear the name cerise as their color. I had a dress that color when I was eight. With tiny green-glass buttons down the front. My mother chose the best colors for her little, dark-eyed daughter. There is a child who has been visiting here lately. Her favorite color is pink. Last time I taught her to distinguish between pink and magenta. Next time I shall teach her about cerise.

AUTUMN COOKING

SEPTEMBER HAS SLIPPED by even faster than August, to my dismay. A major renovation project, or rather rejuvenation project here in the house has been undergone here and is in the final stages of completion. This latest last phase has been fun, accompanied by no real agony. Amazing that! The miracle worker has hired and organized a responsible crew and has supervised their progress through the front of the house. It was an act of faith and ultimately wisdom to allow his decisions to take precedence over mine, however difficult it was for me at times. I’ve been known to sometimes concede a point or two to a workman because I’d consider it an imposition to ask a worker to complete a task, or to rip out work I was not exactly satisfied with or something he will not think important enough but I do, such as using drop cloths everywhere. But men listen to men as I readily acknowledge, and they all listen to him and don’t change his mind without asking first as they so easily do with me. Change my mind, without asking me. Sometimes they know I’m sparing them such as in “it isn’t necessary to move over there” and “put the brush here.” They, then, not taking me seriously, but rather assuming I’m trying to spare them, now, “there,” anyway, and throwing the offending branches that I had seen would impede their ability to mow that section of yard onto my carefully nurtured black currant bushes, to “get them out of the way.” They probably announce, “We knew you really wanted that section mowed.” I did. But I didn’t.

I cook for the men working here. Usually a one-dish meal. Dinner we call it. In the fashion of the English countryside. At around two o’clock. It takes me time because it usually involves several pots. And sometimes the cooking takes place in both my side of the house and the front half of the house.

My family spent a three-day weekend here and cooking for them was a marvelous experience. Richard Olney in his Simple French Food, which is rarely simple but often very inexpensive, had a recipe that was described as coarse but good to serve after a walk in the country, or in the heart of the winter. It seemed appropriate to serve to my family after they had walked the hills up here and, if successful, then to the men recreating the front half of my house. It seemed, while assembling it, to be a rather odd combination, but upon serving it, it immediately achieved the “old family favorite” status. My variations were minor. I do claim the privilege of being entitled to alter a recipe on the first try, a privilege earned by time and experience, but I did choose to not eliminate an ingredient I don’t like. Brave of me. “I’ll take a chance,” I thought. I used four times as much shallots as his recipe required. There are very few instances where I can ever consider two tablespoons enough of the onion family. And I did, with some reluctance, add finely chopped flat-leafed parsley to the sauce as it cooked. I find I don’t have the Mediterranean taste for bitter vegetables, although cooked radicchio does appeal to me. The shallots and butter effectively calmed the spirit of the parsley. The recipe was declared to be perfect. Write it down, begged my daughter. “Make it again,” requested my son. “It is equal to the bacon, potato, dandelion dish. Another old family favorite.”

The cold nights continue to inspire the rams to cover the ewes. I’ve rescued Mungo Penhaligan buck goat, permanently returned to the farm. With any hope he will breed the goats in October rather than this month, so I’ll have kids born in March rather than February. My young stock in the carriage house is looking nicer than I’ve ever seen young goats look. They are accompanied by a beautiful chestnut-colored six month old buckling, son of Belinda and Mungo. He is old and tall enough to breed the young stock. One was in heat a couple of weeks ago. They live upstairs in the carriage house with the penned-up pullets. Of the doelings, Verity has remained to be a very pretty little thing. Pure white. A Saanen throwback. She and her twin are out of one Sable parent and one Toggenburg parent. I am breeding for color. The adult Saanen-Sables are bigger than my Togs by far. More muscular than crossbred Cameron who is approximately their height. The kid goats had begun a habit of jumping on me, a habit I tried very hard to discourage. At their mature size they could certainly do some damage. As it was it was an unpleasant experience to say the least.

The most aggressive doeling is also the brightest. At one point I almost felt she would, to my great reluctance, have to be sold. However I decided to try to figure out what it was she wanted; this bright, clever, beautiful doeling that I had bottled since she was two days old. I sat down on a stool in the carriage house loft and waited for her to try to jump on me. As she approached I reached out my hands and scratched behind her ears and on the sides of her face. She stood perfectly still. That was it. She wanted acknowledgment from me. And gets it. She shall stay.

It is her twin who was in heat recently. A black-and-white doeling. Possibly covered by the chocolate brown full Sable buck. It shall be an interesting winter. Thank goodness I now have the pen in the basement for the youngest lambs and kid goats.

The brightest biggest of the bottle ewe lambs sports very substantial horns. She and her twin sister lived at the camp in Andes all summer. She remembered living in the south pasture, however, and did all she could on her return to rejoin her pen mates. That included jumping a gate, and in all ways persuading me to make it easier for her to join them. She finally, quite by accident, got through the fence near the portable chicken coop. The laying mash is indeed a draw to sheep. This time I didn’t return her to her old friends. She is now, reluctantly, with the main flock, hopefully being covered and bred by my older rams. She comes to me looking demandingly as if asking to be out of the big pasture. What she doesn’t know is that her twin and other sisters shall soon be joining her. Only the meat lambs shall stay in the south pasture to be fattened for, well, for.

I was given some ducks again this fall and four young chickens. With any luck the chickens are chickens, not roosters. Two ducks are the white ones. Two are cocoa and cream. Two are black and white. Last year’s remaining duck is white. My son liked the black-and-white ones and asked me to keep them. I like them, too. They shall stay. The two white ones shall appear on my table. The cocoa and cream ones shall be sold. The one who has lived out the year here shall stay, as shall his or her companion, the Buff Orphington rooster. How pretty the carriage house shall be with that most beautiful of birds in flaming orange, the black-and-white ducks and the big white duck! The carriage house, after my kitchen, is the next major project. The miracle worker has ordered and seen to its delivery all of the wood, 16 feet in length, to build that most needed and longed for grain storage room. It shall be constructed, in theory and perhaps in fact, so that the grain for the goats, ducks, and chickens can be off-loaded at the door to the building and put in any of my garbage can collections with minimal obstruction from livestock. That will mean that it will no longer be necessary to store grain in my house. Just their house. Some goats know how to open the latch to the wood room. Brunhilda, sheep, has been known to pop the door to my living room, and in one morning created purgatory for me. I found almost the entire herd in there, trashing the room but miraculously not breaking any of the lamps or china on the coffee table. It took me days to clean the mess. Salt is still ground into the floor. However, it is except for the salt, back to its former state. Pretty. But overcrowded. But pretty to my eye in its own way.

Autumn is almost upon us. Another day or two, and it shall officially be here. There is enough firewood, albeit not all inside. Hay is promising. The mow was swept out this morning. The sheep have never looked this good in September. The wool check shall provide me with a Christmas. The front half of the house is looking beautiful. There is a winter’s worth of apples destined for the root cellar. I recite these imperatives over and over as I look for my misplaced confidence.

THE BEAUTY OF OCTOBER

A FEW DAYS into autumn. Pumpkins. Pumpkins. Pumpkins. I have 17 curing on the porches. About four to six still on the vine, and dozens the size of chickpeas among those still flowering. Had a good day yesterday. Even though the goats knocked me down. A neighbor brought me some kale, both Lacinato and Red Russian, and I cooked some right away to freeze. The rest shall be done today. If I am successful in putting up both kale and pumpkin, I am safe about having enough of the right vegetables for winter. Of course, pumpkin very often means jam to me. Can I ever be consistent in choosing my favorite of preserves? Today, with pumpkins both dark and amber and pale orange lined up, I think, of course, that pumpkin jam is my best loved. Except, of course, when I make tomato jam. Or buy black currant jam at the grocery store. Their Belgian made is equal to anything homemade. Whole-wheat soda bread, homemade, has been only an occasional success here. An old book recommended covering it over with another tin while it is in the oven to prevent the crust from getting hard. I’ll try that as soon as I can pick up some baking soda. It would seem that pumpkin jam would be exquisite on whole-wheat soda bread.

The sheep have escaped twice in the past three days. I was at a total loss about from where. The fence by the road has been maintained fairly well and while my Friesian-Tunis cross ewe and the Young Pretender have two to three times jumped it until I barbwired it, there was no sign of where more than 80 sheep had walked down the road. What to do? I decided to check the fence between me and my neighbors to the south of me. The drainage ditch on their side has been silting up for quite some time, causing a small swamp to develop on my side of the stone wall. A gate had been standing in the wall for many years. Now the backed up ditch had formed a small pond or rather large puddle beneath said gate. My sheep, knowing with the certainty that all animals possess, that there were even more apples lying under the trees in the neighbors’ unused pasture than under my trees (they had eaten most of the drops on my farm), decided to push down the weakened gate, forge on through the puddle, which by the way was over my boot tops, and on to the fallen apples. I was dismayed to say the least. The gate was smashed beyond repair. The area was now a small, tiny in fact, swamp but a swamp nevertheless, and I couldn’t even lift it out of the water, nor could I even dream of repairing it.

A few days later. The wood to make a new gate arrived at six o’clock last night along with the wood with which to build one of the fences that I am contracted to put up in still another conservation project. Thank goodness. The new gate will be installed by tomorrow. While I try to repair rather than create new, this gate shall last a few more years than a reconstructed one. I may even paint it. That would add some years to it. Fortunately there is some primer and deck paint left from the painting I had done on the south pasture gates this summer. A controversial color at that, I like it of course. Willow green, I call it. However, the color does have unfortunate implications in some necks of the woods and I have been hearing a criticism or two. I still like it. So be it.

This month, week, day is intense with its demands. Putting food up is, of course, an imperative. How I live in the winter depends on what food is put up now. And how well it is put up. The wood is the second priority. I have nearly enough. But it is not in the right place, for the most part. About eight face cords are outside waiting to be stacked. Four more or so, in the form of slab, are also waiting. But in their case it is the cutting that needs to be done. I hope to have it piled in such a way that it can be sliced right through in 22-inch pieces near the cellar window. I love stacking wood and have created the perfect place for it in the cellar. After all of these years I’m beginning to figure it out. How to do it, that is. In all fairness, some things have changed here requiring the reordering of old systems. The French windows in the living room have changed my heating requirements dramatically. The lambing pen in the cellar has also caused me to have to rethink how I am going to keep us all warm and safe this winter. This winter. I do dread those words. Everyone has been sounding more worried this year than ever before.

However, my attention is now drawn to the carriage house. My young stock are in their own pen for the moment. The older does are ensconced in the big pen. The buck shall be introduced back with them tomorrow. Cameron is still being discouraged from the hay by some of the new goats. I don’t know why. She was once the aggressor. I can’t fathom how that hierarchy was altered. The little white supposed Sable has been living with them and has attracted the ire of one of the new Sables. I couldn’t find her anywhere this morning and was in a panic at the thought of how she could possibly have gotten out, when suddenly I noticed Cameron in a corner seemingly sporting eight rather than four legs. Verity was hiding behind her. I immediately moved Verity into the next pen and tried to get the three other kid goats, two doelings and one handsome Sable buck, cinnamon in color, in with her. They got in and Verity got out. So be it for the moment.

Should the does be bred when Mungo is introduced this week, it shall mean that there will be kids born in March. At most the best time for me. I need a doe in milk in the winter but that is unlikely to happen, unless someone got bred the week I brought him home. I need some to freshen in April to be useful to the camp in Andes where two or three milking does live in the summer. However, kid goats do better when born in the spring than they do when born in the colder months. We’ll see.

A grain room is going to be built in the carriage house shortly. The wood is here. The miracle worker has it all planned out and shall begin to build it on the next rainy day. I’ve had my hands full carrying grain from the house to the carriage house every day for goats and chickens. I am so grateful that I don’t have to figure out how to set it up.

Some new chickens have arrived. Twelve for me and five for a friend. They are the same age and breed of the pullets I bought last spring. Mine have faded out in laying. These 17 supposedly are still laying. Given a few days to adjust and eat a different menu, I have hopes they will produce at least nearly as well as for their previous owner. They have laid a few eggs. Brown like their cousins. I need them to produce more for my customers than I’ve had in the past couple of weeks and hope not to have to buy eggs this winter. There is something about feeding chickens that aren’t laying that drives me crazy.

PRISCILLA SKIPWORTH OR PATIENCE SKIPWORTH OR COMFORT SKIPWORTH

THERE ARE FOUR new baby lambs in the barn for Christmas. There may be more, however I’ve not gone down there to check again tonight. The newly repaired barn lights have malfunctioned. I am not safe by flashlight, evenings. However, the four little new ones are a pleasure. The twin ram lambs are from an older ewe who knows what she is doing. She is penned with them in one of the newly repaired lambing jugs, as one of the two is a little small and I don’t want him to run his weight off dashing around the barn after her to nurse. The firstborn of the season is a single. His conformation is what I look for in a keeper lamb. Chunky. Dorsety. Blocky. Heavy. His very ancient dam has a full bag and keeps her eye on him. A good mom. He plays with his half sister, a day younger than he. Her last name is Fitzgerald as she is clearly Burgo Fitzgerald’s daughter; however, her first name has not, as yet, revealed itself. I usually keep two ram lambs from each year’s birthing as replacements. Although I have only three in the barn as of tonight, this very first one has such a strong likelihood of being chosen that I have taken a chance and named him Gringly Skipworth. There was a decision to be made between Skipworth and Gibbon. Skipworth has a better ring to it as a last name for his daughter. Pricilla Skipworth or Patience Skipworth or Comfort Skipworth. There remains to be quite a number of interesting male names on the list. Too many to ever be used. Female names are, of late, more difficult to come by as I’ve used so many of the ones I fancy over the years. Fortunately, I continue to receive a spare but ready supply from the English magazines and books I so enjoy.

Names go in and out of fashion in seemingly 10-year cycles. I became a Sylvia at the very edge of a style change that slipped into Susan and Sheila. Cynthia came a bit later. What I’ve never been able to pinpoint is when the fashion for using men’s names for girls began, nor why. Vivian, Shirley, Ashley, Leslie, and now Taylor, all started out as men’s names. Georgina, Victoria, Raphaela are all feminized forms of men’s names and not simply an unaltered man’s name. I did recently come across a nineteenth-century woman named Douglas. However, none of my ewe lambs shall be a Douglas. It just won’t do. For a sheep, that is.

I have a customer coming from New Hampshire for three bottle babies, two ewes, and one ram, and ordered from the feed store the first bag of milk replacer of the season. Sixty bucks. I can only say damn. She needs bottle lambs so they will be tame to her, and I shall be very glad to sell them. She is getting last year’s price. This year’s hasn’t been decided yet, although I think breeding stock ewe lambs shall have to be $150 after hers leave. Meat lambs, rams, of course, shall have to be at least five dollars more than last year. It feels far too much to charge. A shocking amount for that matter. But the price of everything has risen, inched its way up, and losing more money than I already am losing is unacceptable. I can’t even afford to buy my own meat.

I am sandwiched between two Border Collie dogs. Mine. Glencora has managed to insert herself between Nelly and me. I don’t like Nelly to be pushed out. Glencora gets most of the attention from me, but Nelly seems to need it more. The fire is dying in the living room fireplace and I am reluctant to move them aside to get more wood for it. Going upstairs to bed doesn’t appeal to me either. The stairwell is almost as cold as the wood room that it shares a common wall with and the rooms I sleep in are most often around 40°F at night.

Christmas was different this year from all other Christmases in my life. The gifting was the same. Numerous and sensitive, thoughtful gifts were given and received in this family. But I was, for the very first time, alone. None of the people I love were able to come. We all talked to each other on the phone all day long, but there was no cooking, no hugging or laughter, and no tree. I have been very well taken care of this year, however. Chocolate and woolen tights, and eight books, and kitchen matches, and a Royal Daulton ceramic pin and earring set, and Bendicks bitter mints, and goat skin gloves, and a Ukranian scarf and a copper double boiler with a ceramic insert, the better to make hollandaise, and pot holders, pot scrubbers, Cavalini file folders, and 500 coffee filters. I could go on and on. It was fun. I refused to let loneliness take over, although it tried, and spent some energetic and constructive work in my poor kitchen. It is experiencing a sense of surprise of late in being made pretty in places, decorated window sills as an example.

I did, by the way, buy myself something that is special to me and that I have wanted for a very long time. The last time I was in Paris I bought myself an Opinel knife. It was a long time ago. They are sized and the one I had was perfect for my hand. There is a very fine shop in Oneonta that sells camping and hunting gear of top quality. It is where I buy heavy socks as a Christmas gift each year. On my way out of the store I noticed an Opinel knife on the counter. It was too small for my hand. The sales person didn’t seem to know they are sized; however, with a little persuasion she pulled another out of the box. It was perfect. I bought it. The price was reasonable. Most of my shopping except for that in the Salvation Army is over the phone. It is possible to buy these knives online but I was reluctant to. I had shown my old and prized knife to John Hillis who cautioned me to never take it outside again were I not want to lose it. So, it never again accompanied me to the barn. Now my old one, carbon steel by the way, not the miserable stainless, shall accompany me fearlessly while the new one, most treasured, shall stay in reserve in the top drawer of my little rosewood desk. Safe.

We are at the onset of winter. Some years I have loved it. Some years I haven’t. Last winter it started with hope and promise and crashed miserably in the middle of February. Therefore I find it a little anxiety producing to feel hopeful this year. And yet I do. Mysterious. The sheep look good. The goats look good. Wood doesn’t. Hay is not what it should be. One ewe, a granddaughter of Noah Saltonstall, bearing the triangle of freckles on her nose that characterize his descendants, has suddenly sprang as broad as I’ve ever seen an ewe. She scrambled off when I tried to see if she were bagging so I don’t know how close she is but I’m curious beyond belief as to what she is about to offer. The number of bagging ewes increases daily. There shall be lambs for Easter this year. It is the goats that I am concerned about. My little Verity follows me everywhere. She is the supposed Sable who is the startling white of a Saaren. Her twin was Toggy looking. Brown with cream markings. Go figure. I’m no longer certain that the breeding records of some places that have sold me goats are accurate. The goats from the Holy Myrrhbearers are always consistent. Others aren’t. And so while lambing has some measure of certainty to it, kidding does not.

A hundred days of cold are before us, more or less. Today has the damp raw quality of late March and I can’t help thinking of gardens especially with catalogues coming in. But the joy of this season is lambing, and in that I am grateful. My reason for rushing out throughout the day is not the emergence of daffodils, but the arrival of Noah Saltonstall’s great-grandchildren.

Kid goats are born around the equinox, although I like to have them born a little later than that so the does will be in milk to lend to the children’s camp in Andes. They love to have goats to milk. Last summer four were sent down. My young stock are about 10 months old and still look small to me. They have been better fed than any of my prior kids. Their size mystified me; however, they are about as big as a two-year-old Toggenburg here. They look well filled out with shiny coats, clear eyes, and energetic personalities. The young buck is beautiful and perfect in all ways. The goat story shall be a series of surprises to me this year.

May the new year bring enough joy to carry us all through. May our hearts be lightened and our eyes opened to the beauty in each given day.

LAMBING

OF COURSE THERE is a lamb racing around the kitchen this grey and bitter cold morning. Single digits again after the promise it would be “warm” for a few days. I resent seeing my breath in the house when I first get up. After all, I was raised with central heating wasn’t I? A long time ago. The memory of it lingers on.

The lambs look good this year. Even the mysterious littlest one who may or may not be the sister of the fine little ram lamb here in the house. I had seen an ancient ewe lying in waiting by the barn wall. There was no movement in her sides, nor was she straining in any way; however her back legs were stretched out and her face had stillness to it that I recognized. I went up to the field where some firewood was being cut, thinking there was at least a half hour before the lambs would be born, but instinct born of I don’t know what led me back to the barn right away. There, apparently, were four new lambs. Another ewe had, with no fanfare dropped twins, as did the ancient sheep. The lambs mingled, staggered, and flopped around each other and their respective dams. Now that was the question. Who was whose mother? Both ewes claimed all of the lambs. I saw the tiny one under the older ewe. Tail wagging. The deep rumbling that came from the sheep made me certain she was her mother. But the younger, bigger, sturdier ewe butted in, claiming her. I ribboned each ewe’s neck, and decided to give them an hour or so to sort themselves out. When I came back down one large ram lamb was nursing from ewe number two. One ram lamb was looking miserable, his back hunched over, and was wandering from one of the two sheep to the other. The tiny pretty little ewe lamb was curled up next to my black sheep, Ophelia, cozy and alert to the world. Ophelia was not her mother. All three had a full tummy. Peggy O’Shannesey, the older ewe was bellowing, looking everywhere for her lambs. I counted. Three. Not four newborns. Three. Both ewes claimed the lambs. In the course of a few minutes I saw each one nursing, yes, two. But there would be only one wandering near the second ewe. I never did see two ewes each with two lambs at a time. However, they each tried to claim which ewe was nursing from the other.

It was the hunched-over lamb who has found his way into the house. At first he couldn’t figure out how to suck and had to be tube fed. By last night he had figured it out and that morning would have gladly taken more than his allotted six ounces per feeding. More would have made him sick. I’ve decided to mark him distinctively and put him back in the barn. Tomorrow. He will be bottled, but I really don’t want any lambs in the house right now. The pen in the basement is ready for them; however, it is bitterly cold down there and it would be best if he were able to snuggle up with some sheep.

This morning, the tiny ewe lamb who has claimed both dams as her mother and the black sheep as her nursemaid is alive and well and enthusiastic about her life. She has captured my heart and shall stay. Most of the ewe lambs shall stay. The few that I am not keeping are going to starter flocks, one in New Hampshire. I need more sheep as I have turned away requests for over 40 that I could not fill this year. Yearlings don’t often freshen until they are two and yet I’ll keep as many ewe lambs this year as possible, and hope that a few at least will freshen next year. I am considering buying some more ewes. We’ll see. Several of this year’s lambs, of the twins, are tiny. One large, one small. I’ve been told that sometimes when a ewe conceives triplets the one alone on the side of the uterus will develop normally; however, one of the two on the other side may be reabsorbed, leaving the remaining one with less to receive nourishment, and grows as it would were it to share that side with another lamb. That may be why the two ram lambs from my two very mixed-up sheep are so big and the little ewe lamb is so tiny.

This is the interesting time. There were two accidental deaths and an unexplained death. And so, out of 35 lambs surviving, as of this morning, lambing has gone well. A remarkable number of lambs not needing to be bottled. A remarkable number of yearlings mothering their lambs. So far.

I have made a mess of my living room, racing back and forth to the barn all day long and twice at night. The baby monitors no longer work, so I can’t hear what is going on from the warmth of the house. However, several of the births I witnessed were soundless. A small number were born in the feeding area outside in the sunshine. Ewes wearing thick winter coats don’t realize their lambs are outside. They do frantically lick them off both to dry off all of the birth fluids and to stimulate them to move around.

I brought in one of Noah Saltonstall’s granddaughters and her twins yesterday afternoon from the feeding area outside. She wears the triangular pattern of a freckle on her nose that he had. One of her lambs is a ewe. I wish they both were. Her bag was red and her nipples long. I penned them in a jug. It wasn’t easy. One of the lambs had trouble figuring out how to reach the opening in the teat to get milk. She sucked the sides of the nipple and wouldn’t get it quite right until I showed her how to bend her front knees to get underneath with a bit more convenience. She didn’t need much more than being shown once.

Some much needed construction has been accomplished in the barn. A sliding gate that never worked properly has been enhanced dramatically and I can open and shut it with one finger. My dream. Another gate functions for the first time in years. Today an additional one will be installed that will make moving hay into the mangers that much easier. I’ve a hay chute to be built and a ladder to the hay loft to enable one to save a lot of steps. A natural salt feeder has turned up in a scrap pile outside. After it is dug out it will be perfectly useful. And I am almost finished with it. The sheep prefer to eat out of plates, that is, from mangers rather than from the floor and so an outdoor feeder needs to be made that can be brought inside when it is no longer needed. Still another idea. Oh well.

I braid yarn to make necklaces by which I can identify and pair up the lambs and their mothers. Some are pretty to my eye and some are not. All are recognizable. Some on the littlest ones have to be cut off already and made bigger. Those on their mothers are all right. Some lambs have slipped through the cracks and aren’t wearing necklaces yet. Tonight I’ll sit by the fire and braid some. Each year I learn something new. This year it is to not go down that ladder without some braided necklaces in my pocket.

It has been years since I started going down to the barn with a thermometer in my pocket. The foolproof way to tell if a lamb has nursed or not is to take its temperature. Should it be 101°F or less the lamb is carried off to the house to first be tube fed and then bottled. Their normal temperature is around 102–103°F Real danger is a reading below 100°F. That calls for emergency measures. This year that has not happened although I am keeping my eye on Noah Saltonstall’s great-grandchildren. I’ve had a step placed in front of her jug to help me climb over its gate. Last night I was pressured into hoisting it up and crawling underneath it to get in to check the twins. Twice.

This is the interesting time of year. It makes the winter easier to handle in many ways. The night skies are beautiful and going down to the barn gives me an opportunity to appreciate them at their best. The moon sometimes comes up over the mountain in the east, and I try to catch it in the early evening. It takes until the count of 120 to emerge from an awakening glow to a perfect circle. The sun takes eight minutes to rise in the morning, through the window of the white bedroom. I’ve run down to the brook from the barn in order to see the moon rise in its fullest when it has started to appear at a higher elevation.

The sheep and goats and dreams are what make it possible for me to live here. I’m not certain what I would have done if I didn’t have them. Oh, my silver would be polished and my linens ironed. I do like that kind of thing. And terribly miss having things the way I like to have them. Today I wrote down everything I did from the moment I came downstairs until I went to the pharmacy to buy some more thermometers. Also written down was a list of things I wanted to accomplish today. They all seemed easy to do. And to not require much time. A reasonable list. Start the fires times two. Bring in wood for each once in the morning. Once in the afternoon. Empty each ash bucket twice. Make a loaf of bread. Tidy the living room, kitchen, wood room, and white bedroom. Sweep all stairs. Sort the laundry to be taken to town tomorrow. Et cetera. Next to each task was a number. One half, one quarter, one hour. The farm was taken care of. The firewood was brought in. And none of the rest of it was accomplished. Only three lambs were born today. And I don’t really know why I didn’t get the rest done. To the barn.

The timing was perfect. I saw the moon at exactly the moment it peaked above the hill and got to watch it as the world turned.

ENVY

THERE ARE SO many places for this story to begin. I don’t know from which to choose. Last evening it would have been about Nelly, sweet dog, a free spirit. Or yesterday, about water. And today about the frozen pump. And perhaps the lamb that shall be born in the next hour or two. Of course, there is a story about a dish or two that I recently bought. And the lamb coats I am fashioning from a very warm sweater that has become too holey to wear. Perhaps there even is a story about envy, having started to read, last night, a book by a very famous writer who wrote about living in an old house in the country. She had many friends, family, and someone to share the experiences with, as well as the money to feed stray cats, real fish, and meat. There are two more places from where to begin. Both came in yesterday’s mail. One was a box of books and a few other things, a birthday gift from a fellow farmer in Kansas. The other was a box of Honeybell oranges, a gift from my cousin Marilyn. Both boxes took the edge off the water and pipe issues. As did paying for the dishes, although I was too late to pick them up. Overall it was a balanced day that preceded this one. And the color of the oranges sitting still in their open box delights me and has taken the edge off of what’s maddening in the day. Oh, I forgot the 111 bales of hay brought yesterday. Second cutting. I am deeply grateful. Left by the road, however. My driveway is impossible without a four-wheel-drive truck. And the kindness of the neighbor who lent his so the person who has been helping here can draw them into the barn with a little more dispatch, rather than pulling them piled high on the toboggan. The bottle lambs, the bigger ones, shall go in a pen in the barn today, without fail, and the kitchen, which has become pretty again, in some respects, shall have the floor scrubbed to within an inch of its life after chores this afternoon.

The floppy-eared two-day-old ram lamb has a fondness for sitting himself in hard-to-reach places, or rather places that he can squeeze into but would strangle himself getting out of, such as behind my cook stove. The plug in is at the correct height for him to hook his jaw over and won’t give when he tries to pull his head out. The drainpipe out of the sink is another favored spot, as is the bottom spokes in the rocking chair. I’m not certain if he is big enough to go back to the barn, but he may have to. A little coat I’ve made for a ewe lamb this morning was a little bit too small; however, it fits him with room to grow in. He’s got to go. I’ll fill a lambing jug with some straw and put five of the six in there for a couple of days to acclimate them.

The latest one is too small to leave. He is one of the miracles that occur here from time to time. Occasionally there is what I call a bell that goes off in the back of my mind. Sometimes more loudly than others but always clear and distinct. It always signals instructions about what I must do. Now. And it is always in regard to preparation for a future event. It never discloses what the event shall be. But it always designates what preparation needs to be made. In the old days it signaled the necessity to sew some dresses. Of late it is about being ready for “the next phase” without giving any indication of what the next phase would be. Just a strong, loud, insistent, “Get Ready.” It does have a minor note. Polish your shoes. All of them. I’ve never known what causes the bell to go off in my mind that warns me to go into the barn. Now. But it does ring on occasion and I always drop whatever I am doing and obey it. Immediately.

And so it came as no surprise that when I raced down there yesterday afternoon I found in an unexpected place a newborn. Wet. Ears either red from its dam’s blood or beginning to become frostbitten. I tucked him under my jacket and got us up the ladder without incident. The wind was fierce from the north and there was enough ice under my feet to scare me. However we made it to the house. I dried him. Tube fed him my magic mix: an egg, corn syrup, cod liver oil (if I have it), and lamb milk replacer. He was then ensconced in the lamb warmer box, which has a “hot water bottle” fashioned out of an Ivomec® plastic container. It is flat-sided and squat. Much better than the water bottles I have used in the past. Nelly Zolotoroffski, Border Collie dog, found this latest addition to the indoor flock fascinating. She has been known to be accepting of lambs, unlike Glencora MacCluskie who hates them with a passion. I’ll let Nelly stay in the kitchen for a while, I thought. She stared at me questioningly for a moment and carefully climbed into the box with the lamb. She arranged herself around the little creature, put one front leg over the back of the lamb, and looked at me for reassurance. Is this alright? It was. She kept the lamb warm all night.

I have rarely had the experience of envy. My mother, when I was 16, gave me a lesson about envy that I never forgot. We used to go on Wednesdays after school to Peterson’s Ice Cream Parlor to spend time together the last year I was in high school. One afternoon three girls sat in a booth behind us. They were students from Connecticut College. They wore cashmere twin sets and pearls and had the “regulation” blond hair, straight, each with a barrette holding it away from her face. They had the loud cheerful laughter of the privileged class of people who believed themselves to have inherited the earth, and it would be of no consequence if they were a bit of an annoyance to the people around them. Their conversation was what my mother would call foolish. “And you think you’d like to be like those girls,” my mother asked. She knew how I envied the education that Connecticut College offered, in all ways. “If you were like them you’d have to talk like them, too.” That did it. Years later when I was alone in the world with two young children, their father had abandoned ship, and watched the women who lived in the middle class housing across the street from the tenement whose six flights of stairs I climbed two or three times a day, a baby in a sling across my chest and a two and a half year old by the hand, groceries or laundry in the other, I never felt a pang of envy for their baby carriages or their husbands on the park bench next to them on Sundays. Would I really want to be them? No. The price would have been too high. However, last night, in my cold bedroom, under six blankets and comforters, with Glencora MacCluskie by my side, I read a book written by a woman who wrote the kind of stories I write. She has a house in New England that she called a farm and a house on the Cape. She bought both with a friend. They both had husbands to support them although they each earned their own money. She wrote about pipes freezing at night, and winter’s beauty and attendant drama. However, she lived in a community where helping hands, workmen, friends, and family were abundant, available, and willing. And had the money to create a life quite comfortable for herself. I think it was the cheese store in the village near where she lived that got to me. She couldn’t resist the selection, often overbought, but had many visitors to share it with. I came home late yesterday from a plumbing supply expedition in Oneonta. On the way, I stopped in at the Meridale Market for a lump of Gouda. It became supper. It was delicious but not a real consolation. Reading that night about a real cheese store, and the other shops that created the woman writer’s village, I found myself possessed by the rare moment of envy. The contrast was a bit much. The carnations I bought a few days ago to remind myself of who I am froze in the vase in the hall between my kitchen and living room. Until their stems bent, they looked like exquisitely perfect wax flowers. White carnations. I chose this life. I didn’t inherit it, nor did I marry into it. I’ve never regretted the farm. It is the lack of wherewithal that came as a surprise. The lack of wherewithal. And the repercussions that accompany that. I’m not surprised at the repercussions. I am, however, dismayed and grossly inconvenienced by the lack of money. Enough said. Somehow I’ve managed.

The other day I received a phone call from my daughter. Someone had tried to contact me through email. She sent the woman my phone number. Apparently, the woman had met me last year at a fair. Since it is three years since I attended a fair I had reservations about giving my number but gave my permission. She called and said she had bought my book but hadn’t read it until a few days earlier. She seemed to have liked it, at least enough to drive up from Margaretville to see where it all happened. Can she pay a real visit? I agreed. For April. My kitchen is bespeckled with lambs, at least today, and I’ve decided to not heat the living room for a while. If l can get a phone to work in the kitchen, I’ll live in a one-room cabin. It can be nice in there. It’s almost nice now. But not nice enough for a stranger and her husband. She then placed an order with me for some books. A nice order. A very pleasant surprise. Hence dishes. My friend Valerie and I have agreed that we have accumulated much of the worldly goods we each need or want at this stage of our lives. I am the older by four years, but we both have been accumulating for a respectable number of years now. I still buy all linen napkins in the Salvation Army and tablecloths and white cotton sheets. However, were either of us to become affluent, the one thing she or I would buy would be dishes. There were some most unusual ones in Stephen’s Antiques the other day. Blue and white. Nice ones. And so, while I’m too cheap to buy some much needed slippers, $12 is too much to spend on something I don’t even like. I decided the book money was “mine,” not the farm’s, not the house’s, not toward hay, but mine to use to delight the soul and lift the heart. I bought the most beautiful teapot I’ve ever seen. It was even more interesting to me after I got it home and examined it more closely. The design on it is a picture that is carried completely around it. It is of the sea, or probably the bay. All waves in blue with a tiny bit of shore line covered in trees. On the sea are several canoes with Indians, a large ship, some skiffs with Pilgrims sailing toward the coves. It is absolutely enchanting. And so this is a story about almost everything. But most of all about the rich fullness of the life here. Lambs, frozen water pumps, dogs, Honeybell oranges, dishes, and friends.

THE NEWEST LAMB

I MADE A Boston brown bread this afternoon, inspired by an attempt at making baked beans. My beans, of late, have lacked what I call depth of flavor. Not enough molasses, perhaps. The bread was perfect. It sliced beautifully and butter simply melted through its finely crumbled texture. I haven’t been able to find rye flour here anymore and used, instead, some buckwheat flour as a substitute. The bread made me feel better somehow, at least better than I have been feeling of late. It took the edge off of the sadness that has plagued me.

The newest addition to the little flock of bottle lambs is now standing for the first time here in the house. She just sounded her first little blatt. A long-legged thing, and rangy. Another blatt. Do I pick her up and tell her I am her ma ma ma now, or do I let her walk around a bit, getting her legs used to a wooden floor rather than the texture of the barn floor? She just nuzzled some papers I stored in a bucket to use to encourage a fire in the wood stove. Did she nuzzle hay during her three-day stay in the barn? Perhaps. Her mother had a perfect and full udder when she first freshened. A large, mostly East Friesian ewe. But may have developed a hard bag in the intervening days. Therefore, not enough milk. The lamb was brought into the house in the limp-as-a-dishrag position, tube fed, and packed snugly into a smallish wooden box with one of my acrylic hand-knit barn sweaters, no time to get some old fleeces from the barn, and a gallon jug of hot water. She wasn’t responsive enough, but now, six hours later, has responded to the tube feeding, the corn syrup, the B-complex injection and the antibiotic. I wouldn’t call her lively, but she did lie down on the sweater and get up again on her own. She’ll live.

A day or two later. The newest bottle lamb had gone under the kitchen table, pushing on my knee to encourage me to give her her bottle. I’ve just achieved a rare experience, a perfectly hot cup of tea thanks to the most lovely gift of a blue bee teacup, and am reluctant to leave it untested in order to heat the lamb’s bottle. She hasn’t been named as yet as I was uncertain that she’d live. She shall live, however, and shall grow into being a very large sheep when an adult, long legged. Fly-away ears, with a classic East Friesian head and face. A couple of new names have turned up of late. Two begin with the letter C, which is reserved, on this farm at least, for goats. One of them is Calliandra. Is that where the local appreciation of the name Callie or Kyle comes from? Calliandra does seem to suit this little sheep. Perhaps. It is possible to have two Calliandras. One a goat and one a sheep. That hasn’t been done here, but I can always choose to change my systems, can’t I? After all, it is my farm.

The days are longer. It seems as if the weather should already break, and spring should appear with a suddenness, immediately. It won’t. March brings with it a threat of snows, the snows we have not experienced this winter. Usually around the first day of spring, which sometimes is on my son’s birthday, there is a blizzard of sorts. I expect it this year as well. I’m at the edge of being out of firewood. A bit scary, that. There is slab to be cut, about two weeks worth; however, it is expected to burn fast, if I can get it cut. I’ve used more electric heat this year than I ever have. The 40°F temperatures in the kitchen at seven in the morning does not encourage me to come downstairs. Not that the room I sleep in is much warmer; however, by morning the four wool blankets and one synthetic down comforter that I sleep under have begun to do their expected thing, and I become reluctant to climb out of the bed and have my feet hit the very cold floor.

A small amount of cash has come in of late, unexpectedly. This cash is actually mine. From work that I have done, not for the house or for the farm, and I intend to use it to replace some money I had saved in order to buy some pear trees from Saint Lawrence Nurseries. Last year I placed the order too late. This year I’ll place it in a day or two. Four trees. The best place for them visually is the worst place for them for their safety. It is where the beavers have relocated. Inside a riparian buffer zone that was denuded of the rugosa roses and crab apple trees planted there a number of years ago. The spot cries out to be replanted, however: how to do it without jeopardizing the new plantation? Perhaps there may be a solution. Were I to plant the pear trees outside of the fence and make a sheep-proof fence in front of them, then visually they will satisfy the space and yet, in all likelihood, escape both beavers and sheep. The beavers appear to have returned once again, although I haven’t been to the brook of late to check their attempted progress. The edge of their embankment is still visible from the barn window. The crab apple plantation looked good last year for the first time. The rugosas have been disappointing but perhaps the manure spread last spring and an addition of rose fertilizer may bring them back.

A new bottle lamb entered my life a couple of hours ago. She was found stretched out in the “I’m dead” position in the barn yard. When she was brought in she did take an ounce or two from a bottle, but tube feeding her seemed safer and so I did. She was 96°F when she came in. Is 96.8°F now and looks promising. My yearlings are lambing and aren’t quite certain what to do with the little thing that caused them pain. Sometimes they are outstanding mothers and sometimes not. This latest addition clearly hadn’t even been nursed or cleaned off. She passed the black tarry stuff shortly after she had been tube fed. She is tidily ensconced in the lamb box with her half sister. The kitchen hasn’t achieved 60°F as yet, but they are both warmed by milk jugs filled with hot water.

I am waiting for a person to arrive from New Hampshire to pick up the three lambs she bought from me to begin her flock. A long-held dream of hers. Today I am giving someone else the privilege of living her dream. She wants a Friesian-Dorset flock, and has patiently waited for this moment, waited for the “right” lambs to be born here and be ready to go since last autumn.

I remember the arrival of the first sheep here and how I sat every morning in the barn watching them for the first few weeks. It was the house that was my dream initially. I never anticipated becoming involved with animals of any kind. After all, I never was an animal person. But here we all are. The house evolved, crashed a few times, and evolved some more. Thank goodness the Greenleafs built it so well. It never would have survived me were that not so.

I think about the woman whose voice I have been hearing over the telephone but whom I have never met. The drive from New Hampshire is a long one. She got directions online which are suspect to me. When she read them back to me it was all about taking back roads from I-88. I don’t trust online directions and don’t like back roads for a stranger to the area. Too easy to get lost. She is an hour late already and my plan to take her to lunch has been put aside. It is, for me, a privilege as well, to be starting the foundation stock of her dream.

The house is silent except for the sputter and crackle of the wood stove. It is a rare moment for me to be able to sit for a few moments in quiet. I hadn’t had a kitchen for several years and it still feels strange to be sitting at a table in what has sometimes been a one-room cabin, for me. And I am ever more unaccustomed to a moment of repose. I chose my finest lambs for her. And she is nearly here.

THE KITCHEN FARM

THERE WERE TO be no lambs in the kitchen once more this year. I was resolute in my decision. Two bottle lambs are in the barn proper, the third is now living the good life in New Hampshire, and three are in a pen in the carriage house. So what is this fairly unappealing, gangly creature doing chasing Peabody, the cat, around this room? That they are fond of each other is without question. Peabody rubbed her back under the lamb’s chin and then sat down. The lamb pawed the cat to get up or at least to move to a more likely position for her to curl up against. Their favorite place is next to the wood stove which is in front of the electric heater, only to sit on my pink bathrobe, which will, therefore, soon be in need of two runs in the washer at the Laundromat and, to be certain, hasn’t been worn by me for quite some time. Peabody moved a moment after the lamb made herself comfortable and snuggled next to her. She now has moved to the window sill. The lamb has followed and nuzzles the cat in a seeming attempt to get her down. She then has stretched her head to be able to look out of the window. Peabody does not move. Enough of the lamb for the moment, she appears to be saying. The lamb does not give up. She has not ever been quite alright. She takes a bottle more easily of late, but only four or five ounces at a time. She calls for it when she is hungry. By now she should be on three 10-ounce feedings a day but rather is on five or six feedings of four or five ounces a day, sometimes one at two A.M. That still doesn’t justify her living in the house when I am bottling lambs in two other places. The barn and the carriage house. There was a moment when there had been no lambs in the kitchen. A brief moment. And I let the dogs in instead. However, Glencora MacCluskie hates lambs passionately and so she and Nelly were banished once more when this new one arrived. There was something pleasantly still in that animal-free moment. A sense of freedom that I rarely experience. And yet, I chose to keep Caliandra inside. The better for her sake although she is not becoming socialized with sheep, only with the cat. And me. And I her.

I loved it when the six-bottle lambs had begun their dance around the kitchen, leaping, running, jumping, but it was at that moment I knew they had to leave. It was also at that moment that a large lamb, with a broken leg and multiple fractures arrived. He sported, in the fullness of time, a formidable cast. No practical way could be found to return him to his mother. So, in addition to a $115 vet bill, he will cost me the better part of a bag of milk replacer at $65 a bag. The cost of feeding his mother and 1/70th of the cost of feeding his father, and will not earn what he would have had he not suffered a broken leg. In other words, some of the lambs had to stay in to keep him company. When he was ready to go out, the others left, too. And now reenter Caliandra. Oh well, it continues to be my choice. I just can’t let her suffer her chances in the barn or the carriage house with the bigger bottle lambs. At least not yet. I was raised by an overprotective mother. It shows.

A few days later. The lamb continues to improve, whatever that means. She drinks quite nicely from a bottle. And yet, she is still indoors with me. And the cat. Why? One could say I love her, but I don’t think I do. She isn’t even a smidgeon like the lambs I have loved. I like the look of the curly fleeced ones. Boxy. A little square in shape, with, however, the classic elegant Friesian head and shiny hair on their faces and legs. She has the head. The legs. The shiny white hair of a Steiff toy. But her fleece is very close to the body, flat, grey (not only from the wood ash in my kitchen, she came that way, and not particularly appealing). Her back has the hunched over look of a motherless, hungry lamb. Her legs have stretched out of proportion to her back. She only looks good when she is running. Her ears are predicting her size as an adult. She definitely prefers the proximity of the cat. And yet, my glance is always upon her.

I don’t understand the nature of love. What it means and what it does. When this lamb didn’t get up one morning for her breakfast, I gave her some aspirin and decided to put her to bed for the day. She became packed in towels and gallon jugs of hot water which were periodically refilled. She fell asleep. I didn’t wake her. After about seven hours she climbed out of the box. Asked for her bottle and chased the cat. Now I have a new “save the lamb” technique. Put it to bed. But is this love? I hear tell rather often that I love my animals. I don’t know what that means, exactly. Is it because I just got up to throw a cut-up sweater over her because the kitchen temperature is dropping? I don’t know. What I do know is I really don’t want to let go of her. Not yet.

I’ve been reading some of Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire novels over the past few nights and polished shoes are mentioned several times. Were the house not so insistently cold, I’d go up to the summer bedroom and dig out the special polishing kit for my Zimbabwe-made hiking shoes. Now. (I’ve been accused of frequently jumping from one thing to another and would agree at the moment were I not freezing in this kitchen with the grossly inadequate electric heater on full blast, and still another log not wanting to catch in the wood stove knowing the summer bedroom temperature is below 30°F.)

My mind now requests “finished units.” That room is now perfect. For seemingly forever I indulged in “Grand Miscellany,” going from one thing to another, not weaving the threads of a sweater in after finishing the knitting of it, but wearing it anyway. The theory was to not have anything “too bad” and making small progress on all fronts.

When I was nine and had some ombre wool brought to the house (where I spent most winters sick in bed), I remember being given sets of questions and answers to fill out. I’d do the first three and then jump ahead to eight and nine, thinking it would be a sort of surprise and allow me to finish the homework that much sooner. I’ve done that ever since. But finished units have begun to appeal to me.

My house has suffered terribly from neglect and poverty for the past few years. The farm of course, has taken priority, always. But my living quarters have been allowed to disintegrate before my eyes. I had taught myself to look at that which was increasingly unacceptable and turn away. Bad choice for the soul. But, at the time, I could conceive of no alternative. However, a chance event caused me to come to terms with the farmhouse dilemma. And I took some farm money to repair part of my house. The part, especially, that looked like my house had been in the London Blitz, which in a manner of thinking, it was. Shall I call the roofers the bombardiers? Ceilings, walls on the floor. Several. Not all. But primarily, both my once finished, completed living room and bathroom. The living room has now been repaired as far as I care to go. And is newly painted in two coats of my favorite shell pink. In the late afternoon light it is quite a different color. Deeper. Richer. Prettier. I’ve wanted to replace the old wall paper in the bathroom but the front bathroom looks so nice, and as the bathroom has the same light, I’ve decided to paint it the same color. Somehow it no longer seems so impossible to finish that room. All at once. Perhaps the sudden sense of urgency that possesses me will make it happen. As Connie in Stephen’s Antiques said to me the other day, “What’s next?”

SMALL DETAILS

THE SNOW HAS not surprised me. Perhaps it instilled a touch of dismay, but as there is always some at the end of March, it was to be expected. I sold my most obnoxious goat a few days ago in an effort to make life more manageable. She gave me an exceptional doeling, and did show promise as a milker. However, she proved to be aggressive to other goats and killed a kid I had very much wanted. The Sable twin doelings. She has been sold to someone who has no other goats and whom I have known a very long time to be gentle with livestock. He wants the milk with which to raise calves, and can breed her back to my Sable buck. Part of the payment was in shoveling out the pen where most of the goats are living. I don’t think she will ultimately be sold at auction; however, she shouldn’t live with other goats. Ever again.

I had done all of the things, separating her, tethering her, even putting her, however briefly, in another building. It didn’t’ work. Her kid is a beauty. While Rebecca is some kind of Sable called “Experimental,” she looks like her Saanen fore bearers, as does her doeling. My son has the privilege of naming the two doelings who are staying so she isn’t named as yet. However, she is the most clever and ambitious of the four kids that I have this year, sitting in my rocking chair while she lived for a few days in the kitchen, rocking slightly while staring at me. It was when she leapt onto a kitchen chair that was two feet from the table and eyed said table that I knew she had to go to the carriage house, now. And so she did. Two of last year’s doelings were covered two weeks ago, which means if it took, I’ll have milk for fall as they will freshen in late August. That would be wonderful! These three are very tame to me. Verity is the most affectionate, but they all are quite nice. I’m trying to keep away from the buck that is still small, but very nice. He’ll stay for a while, a few years, I hope, and I don’t want him to get too relaxed around me.

I’m milking. I haven’t hit my stride yet, which means it is never at the same time of day; however, one has started to milk quite heavily, she is the harder because she is lopsided and I’m always squirting some outside of the pail. That means I don’t get an accurate measurement of her production. A new blue enamel pot has arrived to get started with making some cheese. An exceptional book was given to me with the most explicit directions on cheese that I have encountered as yet. The recipes have more specific types of starter than I’ve seen in most catalogues, in addition to the sources from which they can be obtained. One of the goats is a heavy milker. The mother of the Sable twins, and I expect to get enough production from her spare to make cheese in addition to feeding the kids. The new white goat’s mother is now gone, and the little buck’s dam doesn’t give much, so a lot shall be demanded from my two does who are in milk. Every year I say this year I’m going to do it right. Never can tell. Maybe this shall be the year.

The currant bushes woke up during our interlude of springsummer weather. The buds on some of them have leafed out a few weeks early. There is a customer for the red currants this year, in addition to eggs. I’d like to find the name of the company who sent me this latest flock of chickens in substitution for my original order. They may be Golden Cochens. They are tiny chickens who lay huge, heavy, heavy eggs. I’m averaging 22 a day from 26 chickens, including two old ones that were a gift. That gives me 10 dozen to sell, two for Wendell and one a day for me!

The flowering quinces have budded out. I pick some for the house. They are, in nature, a flamingo color, shocking, almost. Their green leaves against the Charleston green fence relieves the intensity somehow. Before the fence was built it was almost too ostentatious. Now it is just right. In the house the buds open as a very pale pink, almost a blush-tinged white. I put them in a mustard pot on the work table in the kitchen. The kitchen still does not satisfy me. I don’t really know why. All of the old pieces are in place. The drawings I made from delft tiles some time ago have faded beyond redemption. I’d have to redraw them were I to want them on the wall over the kitchen table once again. Now I know to get glass that will prevent them from fading. I do love to draw. It is rare for me to have both time and inclination all at once. There is even a box of Crane’s writing paper waiting for me and several of the pens with which I like to draw. Cleaning out a desk gave discovery of a very beautiful fountain pen that I have never used. Did I also find ink? Perhaps if this chilly weather continues I’ll do some drawings, evenings, and pretend it is winter rather than spring beckoning me outside.

I am waiting, at the moment, for an aspect of this life to play itself out. The question is how to make best use of the time. Time has become more precious, of late, and I want to be able to use it well. I bought a watch the other day. Eight dollars and change. It is a copy of one I bought in Tiffany’s a long time ago. This is an acceptable copy. Today a piece of paper cut from a catalogue fell out of this book. On it was a picture of a watch I had wanted over the past couple of years. When I had the money, they didn’t have the watch. It was too nice for the barn. Looked as if it wouldn’t stand up to being as wet as I can get sometimes on the farm. I may call the company and see if they still have it. It may become my prize for having managed this winter.

To survive is not good enough. I’ve refused to look at life as a war, although it has often tried to seem that way. I also dislike the concept of life as a learning experience. I am not a child in school. And adding information upon information and how-to-do-it doesn’t satisfy me either. What has come about for me over the past few years is a belief that life is a process of our true selves emerging, to live the essence of who we truly are. There are, in each decade, a set of assumptions that become fairly generally adopted by society to explain our lives or to guide us through the maze. For the most part, although we as a people are fairly religious, we don’t rely on our places of worship for a uniform sense of guidance and values as we once had. Pseudo-science and newly invented religions have in some respect captured our imaginations. Life as a learning experience was one seemingly sensible of those approved rationales. “What can I learn from this?” is often the question, rather than exploring the reality of becoming more truly ourselves. I had trouble adopting that philosophy, and have since abandoned any attempts. For myself, at least, as I see my life, becoming more truly myself is the best I can do. We are, each of us, unique and individual. The life here has been harsh in many respects. I’ve lost two small animals, a kid goat and a ewe lamb I wanted very much. But that has never stopped me from noticing the beauty here intrinsic in small details. And that may be who I am.

THE ADVENTURE

THE ADVENTURE HAS begun. Kid goats. Candida Lycett-Green, last week. Twins. One large male. One smallish doeling. Half Toggenburg. Half Nubian. Two more in the past 24 hours. These two came about 155 days after being exposed to Cornelius. Buck.

The sheep broke out a day or two ago. Smashed a newly made barnyard and latch and invaded the upper two stories of the barn. Baleage and some hay were stored up there. Candida and her kids were nicely penned in a corner, next to the big doors on the loft level. Until the sheep barged in. They realized quickly enough that there was something enticing to put on the other side of the pen wall and barreled their way through the very nice set-up that had protected the little family. I broke down what was left of the bales and gate that enclosed the goats, scooped up the little buck, and opened the big door. “I want you in the barn now.” The sheep went. With dispatch. Candida ducked and hid from the sheep. I gave her the buck. Propped up the gate, shut the door and went to the corner of the pen where I had seen the doeling, safely ensconced. No doeling. Anywhere to be seen. I looked under every table, shelf, feed bag in the left level of the barn. She was too little to climb the stairs. She is a brown-and-tan little thing. The same color as everything else on that floor. Nowhere to be found. Candida joined me in the search. Her voice is a little loud, to say the least. Shall it be called rather distinctive? The neighbors have had cause to wonder about her, summer evenings, as she protests my leaving her alone after milking. They even have been prompted to ask me, “What in the world is the matter with that goat?” Only not quite in those words. Nubians are known for being extremely vocal. Especially when they have no family members around or old friends, for that matter. And so there was every reason to suppose that the little still-unnamed doeling would respond. But she didn’t. I went back to the house. Dusk was settling in. Got a flashlight. Came back out. Looked everywhere. Again. On the off chance she got swept away by the mass and rapid exodus of sheep. I went to the ground level of the barn, flashlight in hand. No kid goat. The last and now unlikely place was among the flock in the barn yard. I crawled among their legs, my flashlight lighting up the now dark barn yard. Despair began to enter the edges of my mind. I couldn’t leave her alone in the dark but where was she? As I stood up, the flashlight hit the corner of a sidewall beam now made low by the long developing pack. And there, a couple of feet above everyone, in a corner was a silent, huddled hunched over little goat. Found! Goats climb. Sheep stay at ground level. I was looking in the wrong place.

I like each kid goat as it comes. Even if it is hard to choose when they are this young, I often say, “Oh, I’ll keep this one. And that one. Or not. But this little one, yet unnamed is a pretty little thing. Tucks nicely under my arm. Takes a bottle readily when I had the occasion to offer her one.” And is already a delight.

And then, of course there is the story of Cameron Lycett-Green. The kind of story that shows this shepherd that I probably don’t have a clue about what I am doing after a mere 20 years on the job. Cameron, a few weeks from being a yearling, has been a very goaty goat since she was born. In other words, sometimes sweet and tame, other times quite evasive to say the least. Until a few days before her dam freshened she was staying in the pen with her. Candida likes company and Cameron was never very friendly with her half sisters. It was a good combination.

One day she jumped out, knocking over the bales of hay stacked as a windbreak around it. I was too busy to put her back in. She, being a goaty goat, jumped down the hay chute and joined the sheep. For a while. One way or another, she eventually leapt a fence or two, trashed open a door, and came into the upper level of the barn. I saw her and went over to her. She proceeded to leap in the air and stand, head cocked, on her hind legs. Goat for, “I’m mad at you, let’s fight.” I went back to unwinding baleage, my head lowered as I pulled out the bottom layer. Barn. Cameron hit me. Full force on the side of my head. She’s going. I decided immediately. A hundred dollars would take her and her unborn kid. She was bagging nicely. However, she was not showing any of the round barrel, swallowed-a-watermelon look of her half sisters, Ethyl and Lydia Merriman. Nor even a hint of the round barrelness of her mother. Oh, she won’t freshen until mid-April, if that, despite the fullness of her udder.

Yesterday afternoon I went in to milk Lucinda MacDouglas who, I have just learned freshened when I was away with a kid who had strangled in its afterbirth (that’s another story best left untold). There, in the manger where Cameron liked to stay, as far from her stall mate, Lucinda the Terrible, as possible, was a small, not tiny as predicted, but definitely small, perfect, wide-eyed, newborn (by about only a few minutes) doeling. I put her down with her mother, wiped her face and tried to point her in the right direction. She still couldn’t stand. Cameron licked her baby’s face, cleaned her off beautifully. I put some grain down for Lucinda. Cameron glanced at it. It was clear she was tempted. But immediately she turned her attention to her little baby. The kid was strong enough to stand and, in a brief 20 minutes, began to nurse. The kind of brief that makes you feel it lasts forever. Will she figure it out or not? Will I have to tube feed her to get her started or not? Cameron nuzzled that little creature into place and nursed it as if she’d freshened a dozen times.

Last night I went to check on them. Late. The wind had started to blow in a fury. It was almost as if it was angry, gentle April that was here rather than March with its blatant permission to blow. Cameron had somehow taken Lucinda’s favorite place from her, under the lamp in a nice protected corner. She had curled herself around her baby and kept nuzzling her face against that of her kid. “What a nice mamma you are,” I said. “You’ll stay. You’ll stay.”

Ethyl Merriman freshened with a doeling this morning. Her first. A pure Toggenburg. Deep chocolate brown with cream markings, this little one. There is a customer who wants to buy a pair of doelings. With any luck, her twin Lydia will have a doeling today as well. They will pay for the amazing work being done on the carriage house this week. That lovely, lovely building is beginning to function again. Or, perhaps for the first time. Maintenance will be the next problem. However, if I am lucky I can get into a routine. That would be a miracle!

THE PARTY

I WAS INVITED to a party in New York last weekend. And went to it. I had gone to nursing school when I was 17, in New York City. Manhattan. Got sick. Missed a term and returned a few months later as an 18-year-old. One of my classmates had roots in the Lower East Side. Her parents owned a small restaurant on Second Avenue between 13th Street and either 12th or 14th Street.

One spring day, this overprotected Connecticut Yankee girl who had never gone anywhere out of her accustomed circle unaccompanied got on a bus and headed downtown. Alone. The restaurant was small, plain, and clean. The classmate’s mother looked a little disconcerted by the sight of this very tailored dressed girl in high heels and stockings with a peculiar accent who introduced herself as a friend of her daughter’s. I ate the soup. Was slightly disappointed in the cool reception I had received and began my first inspection of the Lower East Side. English was not the common language heard on the streets in those days. At least not there. Various dialects of Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish floated past my ears. I was fascinated. In New England, particularly in New London, Connecticut, I was raised to have a great love of my country, a love embroidered and woven and painted throughout with a wonder and appreciation of all of the different kinds of people who had left their homes, crossed the great oceans to settle here, and make us the people whom we are. And here had it stretched before me. Clothes strung on clothes lines flapping in the breeze between the fire escapes. Rabbits hanging from poles in front of the butcher shops. Pigs’ heads, neat and clean in their windows, an apple in their mouths. But it was the alive bustling in the streets that most enchanted me. A vitality that I have rarely seen anywhere else. That New York is gone. Perhaps it is mirrored in Chinatown. Or Queens. But the people who created what I first encountered raised their families to prosper more or less (actually it never could be termed as less), and created their part of America’s middle classes.

I went to nursing school at Mount Sinai, which, at the time, shared with Bellevue the position as the finest nursing schools in the country. That was, and is, situated in a most affluent part of Manhattan, Central Park and Fifth Avenue, a few feet from my dorm, and Madison Avenue, a half a block away. I was as equally confounded by all there was to see on Madison Avenue as I was on the Lower East Side. But Madison Avenue was closer. A couple of times a week I’d walk from 98th Street down to 57th Street on the right side of the street and back uptown on the other side, carefully examining the content of the windows. It was apparent that nothing in any shop was even remotely comparable to anything I had been raised with in New London. I thought, at 17, that I was much too old to learn what all of the art, furniture, antiques, and even dishes were about. However, I trained my eye to begin to distinguish characteristics differentiating the quality of said objects. Little did I know I would, at a much later stage of my life, support my family using that skill. Shortly after leaving school, I married and moved from Fifth Avenue to the Lower East Side. There were two Italian coffee shops, De Robertis and Veniero’s, that I began to frequent on a regular basis. The first time I went into De Robertis there were a few tables in the back of the pastry counter, several of which were occupied by men drinking coffee from tiny cups and eating very elaborate looking pastries. I ordered something and started to proceed to one of the tables. “You can’t sit there,” I was told. “The tables are not for people.” In the fullness of time I not only became one of the “not people” but was invited to the son of the family’s wedding. That Sunday I wandered around the old neighborhood. Up and down the streets where I had wheeled baby carriages and walked toddlers and took my children to school. Where I had started businesses and careers and had dreams and saw them grow or not. Where I reared my family as a single mother. The strawberry shortcake in Veniero’s has always been a draw and so I went in and sat at a table where I had sat before my children were born. And after they had grown and left home. And after I, too, left home and came to these hills and became a farmer. I realized something so deep and true. That I am the same person I was at 17, first getting out and away from New London, and yet so deeply formed by my Yankee childhood. And that even though this farm may not seem to be a satisfaction of those dreams and longings, sitting in De Robertis or Veniero’s, it actually is. Because it all is, here, out of the same person. I had wanted a large palette from which to paint. And a large canvas. Everything I have here is of that self. I haven’t been living the way I was of late. The cold I suffer and heartache that is built into farming for many of us these days, has, for a while, taken the enthusiasm out of my approach to life here. I confess to feeling defeated at times. But in fact, I realized I have everything I need, except enough money of course, to make things work out. At least, to have the style of life that I wanted once. And there is love here, that long absent essence of life, that takes all of the sharp edge away from what is broken and needs to be mended. I sat at my old table with the familiar coffee and cake in front of me, and knew; all I had longed for is now realized.

I went to the party. On the subway. Partially accompanied by my grandson who still lives in an apartment in the building where I raised my children. The friends whose party I attended were a family I had met at the County Fair several years ago. I was standing by the goat pens and saw a family clustered around a sheep pen. The mother had her hands on a stroller. The father was kneeling down looking at the sheep, a big smile on his face. “Look children,” he was saying. The children bounced around as children do, all in delight at the proximity of the little white sheep. I wanted to go over to them and hesitated. “I have a farm with sheep and want to invite you to come and see how they live outside of a pen,” I longed to say. But I was loath to intrude. What if they became annoyed with a stranger walking over to them and interrupting their experience? I’ve always believed it is a sin to not give when you see an opportunity to share of yourself. And so I walked over to the family and invited them to the farm. The father looked a little disconcerted. The mother smiled as she always seems to be doing. And two days later their van pulled into my driveway and the visits began. Later I learned the father was doubtful about coming. The mother was not. The family has grown. Another family was added to the visits. Summer people, who have a camp for young people. Now the entire camp pays a visit once or twice a summer as well. Boys from the Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Chicago, London, Iran, the Basque country in Spain, all come to see my sheep, my goats, my donkey, my geese, ducks, and chickens. I love every minute of having them here.

I was invited to a party in New York City. And went.

AS ERNEST LAY DYING

I SAW THE tree a day or two ago, for the very first time, willow green it was. Just beginning to leaf out. Startling in its gravity against the alizarin crimson of the maple wood, the wood so familiar to me for all the spring-times I have farmed here. It is on a hill which prevents the sunrise in its total splendor from entering my valley. Only a slim golden gleam in the morning enters my windows, rich and astonishing in its intensity. And that appears in slivers of gold, lighting the bright yellow walls of the winter bedroom. It is a surprise, each day, the slightly varying shapes, bars of gold, marked by distinct shadows: the mullions of the window sash, the shade of a lamp on a table, and the geometry of the mirrors I’ve placed to catch the light. It is why, in part, I chose that room in which to sleep winters. I lie in bed, mornings, watching the sun’s performance. A few brilliant moments and it is over. The sun moves. Or is it the world that moves? I’ve heard it was the world. But, early mornings, it would seem to be, most certainly, the sun.

The summer bedroom has its loveliness as well. But that lies later in the day, when the sun has moved, or is it the world which has moved, around the house, and heralds late afternoon as it enters the windows. No slivers of light here, but a warm and gentle glow fills the room and broad bands of golden light fill the squares of the window panes. In its final gesture, it passes through the thick old-ivory–colored linen drapes, making them gleam in light and shadow, and then, onto the old ceramic stove, its tiles in shades of salmon and peach and gold on the petals of the dogwood blossoms with which it is embossed. The stove glows in the last rays of the sun as it drops behind another hill to the west.

One window frames the pine trees, huge dark triangles summer and winter, that themselves form another triangle, created by a cherry tree, pale green leaves and ivory-colored flowers in spring, dark green leaves in summer, and shafts of gold in fall. A second window includes a wood itself, of no particular distinction, but it is through that that I see the sky. These windows frame a view that has never tired me, even though it changes less than any of the others in this house of many windows and many ways of seeing things. The sky itself provides the variations, as one by one the evening stars appear against the deepening blue. I have watched them move across one pane of glass to the next and then disappear from sight. Until the next evening. They, too, vary their position ever so slightly each night. Modestly, but enough to notice. For there is a moment when they, one by one, do not reappear again.

I remember a mirror in my mother’s house when I was a child. It had a beveled glass edge. It was gold. “Ornate,” my mother would say with disdain. “Too ornate.” I loved it. One September afternoon, it cast a rainbow on an adjacent wall. The rainbow appeared, afternoons, about the time I came home from school. It lingered for only a few minutes. Never longer. Each day it moved its position ever so slightly. By the end of September, it was gone. It returned the next year. In a slightly different place. The following September was the last time it appeared. Lacking its original clarity. But it was enchanting to me nonetheless. As is the tree I saw a day or two ago for the first time. The bright, pale willow-green color I love so. It has not moved, of course. It remains in its place. To be noticed from my front lawn. A surprise of color against the spring’s favorite alizarin crimson of the maple trees and their faint, indistinct blooms. Spring. But today its color has changed.

Deeper and less distinct. No longer asking for attention. Soon the deep red of the trees in bloom shall be replaced by green. A bright and darker green than the willow-colored tree. And that tree as well shall become a similar darker color. And I won’t notice it any more. Distinct and separate against the hillside. I won’t see it any more.

THE SICK DAY

SPRING HAS ASTONISHED all of us this year. It has arrived a month early. This day has been reminiscent of late April, early May some years. My custom is to put the sheep on pasture on April 20th. The last year it was on May 10th. Twenty extra days of feeding out hay. About 250 more bales. A small catastrophe. This year the grass is greening up before my eyes. March. The seep, of course, has been green for several weeks. But even the hillside has a breath of green touching it. Several of the sheep have taken to leaping the stone wall around the barnyard. They don’t try the pastures yet. It is the baleage at the upper level of the barn that draws them. Nonetheless, two or three get out. The wild three that are rarely ever inside now have taken semipermanent residence in the relatively empty hay mow.

My horned ewe, a year old this month, is bagging. I want her lamb, and so, rather than taking any chances that it may be born in a pasture next to a stone wall, she and her ewe friends have been tricked into living inside for a while. More work, but I want to be certain this young mother, whose mother was a person, not a sheep, will know how to take care of a baby. If not, I’ll take it right away. Her fleece is so long and thick that a lamb might not be able to locate the udder with any ease. My ancient Horned Dorset ewe may be bagging as well. I certainly hope so. Her last year’s lamb is my choice for a replacement ram. Only for his configuration and rapid growth. His face is the most unhandsome that has ever appeared on my farm; close to ugly, as a matter of fact. There hasn’t been a ram to catch my eye this year, as yet. I do spend time sitting in the creep feed and its anteroom most days to see who will come over to me. Some do every day. I want to braid some collars for them but have been sick for a few days and even that is too much to do. I truly want to mark those who are the most tame to me. There is one very old- fashioned–looking lamb with a classic Friesian head and no fleece near its face that is a throwback to a pure East Friesian. No horns. Probably a ewe.

This year’s lamb sales have been different as well. It is the first year that I have had more requests for starter flocks than meat lambs. As reluctant as I am to sell ewe lambs, I have sold some to four sets of people who want to begin to farm sheep. Always included in the sale is my offer to mentor the new shepherd if they wish. This year I have helped found four such beginning farms. All, possibly, to become my competition. Should they breed ram lambs, those, more likely than not, will be sold for meat. I only hope they don’t charge less than I do. I remember when my lamb prices began to hit $100 apiece and some new people were charging between 60 and 80. I wonder what became of them? The people, not the lambs.

Two of my one-year-old kid goats were covered the other day. They stood for the buck and may have been bred. Were they, it would be close to ideal for the farm. The timing, that is. To have milk from mid-August for a few months toward winter would be ideal. I’ve always wanted milk at that time of year. And it might mean that they’d always freshen around then. One doe lost her kid recently. A brown goat. A Sable. Twins. Also brown. A disaster for me. It is what I am breeding for. Two other Sables are getting quite wide in girth. And the Saanen, who is white, of course, was sold to me as a Sable because one of her parents is a Sable. Sables are brown Saanens. One person buying a lamb today wants a kid goat for meat. Of the three bred does, there shall be at least one buck. I lost Adelaide Merriman this year to age, and one of her daughters, I think to aggression on the part of other goats. And so, even though three does are coming in, their kids shall not overcrowd the carriage house. Of course there shall be the issue of names. The most fun! It is my little white Verity, by the way, who got bred the other day. It is now the time to braid lead cords for them so they can go outside and clean up the brush in the cow path. Still amazing that I am thinking about that now rather than in May. It is hard to decide what I am sick with. It almost feels imaginary, although women do tend to attribute illness to being psychological rather than real. I can’t really breathe very well. Throwing a few bales of hay makes me want to lie down and I do. Braiding some lamb collars seems to be just too much. And yet 10 minutes after lying down all I can do is think about what needs to be done and I jump up to try to do something and find I can’t. Is this the flu? I managed to bake a couple of Boston brown breads. Molasses, buckwheat flour, corn meal, white flour and whole wheat, with a generous amount of molasses and buttermilk. No kneading. And even that took me upstairs in the middle of making it. I get “better” fast. Expect to. Demand it. And there are too many interesting things to do to stay abed.

Beyond my envy of Thirkell’s interlocking society is an even deeper envy of the education that is possessed by seemingly everyone in her novels. They quote Browning and Virgil, Dickens and Shakespeare. I can’t quote my favorite Georgics by Virgil, even though I love it so, and it is all about farming. Perhaps it is simply Thirkell’s education I envy. It is from Thirkell that many of the names of my sheep and goats come.

ROSES

THERE IS ONE white rose bush among the rugosas planted in the buffer zone several years ago. The rest are cerise. There had been another that got killed by beavers. Or deer. Or. It has been gone for quite some time. The new one disclosed itself a day or two ago for the first time. It made me wish I were rich. Or at least had middle-class money. Were I not tied irrevocably to being a farmer, and all the money I get one way or another going into paying for the needs of the farm, I’d hire someone to at least keep the area around the rugosas trimmed so they would proliferate the way they long to. I do, some years, give them a shot of rose fertilizer. Watering has been to date impossible, although a new solution may have presented itself after I had planted the five much longed-for pear trees in a nicely fenced in area next to said buffer zone. In an effort to repair what has been injured in my heart, I, every day, do something to affect that. Which is why, at 7:30 in the evening, I found myself wading through the blackberries and the about-to-take-over goldenrod, trug and knife in hand, wearing gloves, to my amazement, to cut some rugosas for the kitchen table. There at the end of the fence I found it. The white one. One bloom. The remaining in bud. I brought it in with the others. Placed it in its own jar. Away from the cerise ones. Eye level for me as I washed dishes. And moved it from room to room as I did my chores. It is enchantingly beautiful. I’ve often sketched a flower, on envelopes, or on the border of pages on which I write. It was only now, looking at that lovely thing, that I realized it was a rugosa rose that I have been drawing all of these years.

My principal task, of late, is to get ready for the next stage. For which both repair and progress are demanded. I know that stage has begun. Although I don’t know anything about what it means or what it shall be. Gradually I see improvements. Often to my surprise, some things are not remotely as bad as I thought. Take the foot of the stairs and its entrance to the mudroom as an example. There was a moment when it made sense to leave things there needing to be brought upstairs. Or to the carriage house. The pile became formidable and disconcerting. Throwing a beautiful quilt over it didn’t help. Clean laundry went on top of the quilt, and then, failing to go upstairs with the rest of what was in my hands, only added to the height of the pile. It only took a half an hour to dismantle it all and put everything in its proper place. A lot of clean sheets.

I love sheets. White ones. Cotton. If I had spare money I’d send them out to be starched and ironed. I buy any that I come across in the Salvation Army. The beds here vary in size dramatically so I buy them indiscriminate of dimension. There must be 30 or so sheets here. They become curtains and bed spreads in summer. Drapes in winter. An occasional tablecloth. I love the look of them.

There were a few surprises upon dismantling the pile. One was a very nice pair of chocolate brown desert boots I’d never worn and quite forgot I had bought a couple of years ago. No real junk to toss out. And nothing horrible. To my gratification.

The new chicks had arrived with a real place to live. A box turned up, a big one that fit perfectly on the newly cleared landing. The young man who sometimes lends a hand here created the perfect way to hang the infrared light that chicks need to keep warm their first few weeks. And so, now that they moved to their own outdoor coop, there is a slightly horrible task to deal with on the landing. However, it will only take a few minutes. And all will be as it once was, some time ago. I had stenciled a vine on the wall that was from a drawing I had made in the Pope’s bedroom in the Palace of the Pope in Avignon, a long time ago. It is still nice. “Make something better. Nothing worse,” was an old motto. Not the motto for today. I don’t know what that is yet. The baby chicks seemed to fall in love with the outdoors. They immediately began to nibble on grass. Twenty-one out of 25 made it. Chicks to become chickens. Hope does reign here sometimes. Farm life. Somehow the farm manages to endure and grow. As do I.

Sometimes life here seems straightforward. Put one foot in front of the other. “Proceed,” said someone once to me. Someone who does know the right thing to say to me. “Proceed.” I’ve often thought to embroider that on a pillow. Haven’t as yet. Don’t know why. I guess I am waiting for Stewart’s Department Store to carry DMC embroidery floss. I even think I know which chair the pillow shall go on. The shepherd’s chair in the dining room. It stares at me. I moved its pillows off because the annual starling visitation, read building a nest in the top of the wainscoted wall leaving memories of their visit on my carefully painted chair. The chair now looks ready to be scrubbed and for me to think of a new pillow. Goldenrod yellow embroidery on a cream ground, perhaps. Corn, as are embroidered some of Marie Antoinette’s chairs.

Sometimes life doesn’t seem straightforward at all. Today it isn’t. I’ve started working on some things. The library upstairs on the third floor landing. Sorting books by author, and then by topic. Now there are piles on the floor. They say you can tell a lot about someone by the books they own. Mine, I think, would confuse someone terribly. Twentieth century. English mysteries by the score. All of Marsh, Allingham, and Innis. Wherever are my Sayers? Only one has come to the forefront. Then there is a taste for “mediaeval” mysteries. Sharon Newman, Margaret Frazer. And English history. A biography of Sir Walter Raleigh, Rural Economy in the Medieval West; Women and Work in the Middle Ages; Treatise on Human Nature, by David Hume. Well, perhaps that is a thread there. Tying it all together with a book on the invention of clock escapements in the thirteenth century. Of course there are 87 cookbooks in the kitchen cupboard and probably a dozen or two more scattered throughout the house. Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking surfaced the other day reminding me of who I was when I first came here, and who I may not be anymore. She influenced my life more than any other writer, and a writer she was. Her recipes were prose in its most pure form for me. And her principles certainly affected the life here in the deepest sense.

The roses in the long neglected perennial border are in bloom. Lush, thickly petaled, pink Bourbons. At a friend’s they grow in an abundance that is outrageous. Here they hide among the phlox and sweet cicely and monkshood. When I go to visit them, evenings, I always promise myself tomorrow evening I shall work on the border again like I used to. Perennials are an enormous amount of work. The daffodils beg to be divided. They were too crowded to bloom at their fullest this year. I had planted “The Works” about 30 years ago, in units of three. Little triangles. They have multiplied so prolifically that they are now merely lumps of green stems. No flowers at all. I put bunches of green leaves from the quince bushes by the driveway around the house, in five or six rooms. They cool the rooms off so nicely in summer. Of course they then die and begin to drop leaves. I take them from their cases, jars, and mustard pots, strewing leaves everywhere, of course, and try to stuff them in the wood stove where I burn egg shells and the like on summer mornings. Obviously the debris is everywhere, demanding the broom. So be it. I can’t help being myself. Nor can I not be annoyed at myself. Which is it? Am I a joyous housekeeper putting green and wine quince leaves everywhere, choosing carefully which to pick for which vase, no less than four in the dining room? Or am I an absolute slob, strewing dead leaves everywhere throughout this enormous house? When I used to polish my copper pots more frequently the thought ran through my mind: I think I am a Russian princess. Thirty or 40 copper pots to polish! Some with catsup and salt. Some with the latest commercial polish. My son sends me, often, a carton of six cans of spray starch for Christmas. They are all used up by the end of June. Today I plan as a gift to myself, to iron a group of shirts so should the opportunity ever arise to leave the farm for a little while, I’ll have something to wear.

The sun has climbed over the hill. The leaves of the willow by the carriage house are gleaming. A shimmering gold. Usually that tree’s branches fill almost the whole of the dining room’s open window. I watch as the sparkling light moves from one leaf to another into another. The upper panes of the window, fogged with all that befalls windows in the country, gleam a dull gold. A starling flies in through a lower window, sees me and the dogs, “sit, stay, coffee,” and perches on the sill of the open fan light window. The whole world in its mystery and joy in a space about eight feet high and two and a half feet wide. The open fan light window revealing a pale blue cloudless sky. Below is the gleaming gold of the clouded panes almost too bright to look at. And then the green of the willows, changing moment to moment. Perhaps it all is there. The wonder of this day.

SHADES OF ELIZABETH DAVID

MY SENSE OF self has always been tied irrevocably to food. Who I am and how I live my life has, since I was 20, been defined by the food I prepare, sometimes for myself, but most often for the people who touch my life. It isn’t just that giving food is giving love. That is too obvious. It is the rest of it. All of the rest of it.

I sit at the dining room table. It seats 10 easily, 14 with a bit of a squeeze that the extra people don’t notice, but I have to. Serving four more. It is heavily decorated with dishes, bowls, a Limoges coffeepot, a white china creamer shaped like a cow, salt and pepper shakers shaped like little chefs, an ironstone bowl in the form of an eggplant, pâté platters, a beautiful toy sheep in full fleece, wine glasses edged in gold, candlesticks holding gold and cream candles. All things in white or ivory. Some touched in Florentine gold. The tablecloth is white. Always. Ironed. Usually. And speckled with tiny dots, reminders of all that flies through the open windows, or falls from the exposed wooden ceiling. The only color on the table is on a small French bowl, wearing a wine, ochre, cream, and green painted design. Sometimes I fill a white soda fountain ceramic jar with green leaves. The room is thought of as the most beautiful in the house. It is two stories in height. The walls are of cedar wainscoting. There is a shepherd’s wing chair that I had built, country grained, maple, in one corner.

A row of sage plants are on a window sill. There are four normal-sized windows. Two quarter rounds and a wall comprised of eight sashes, two of which combine to be the size of a normal window. Therefore, there are the equivalent of eight normal windows as well as the quarter rounds in these sides of this room. There is a chaise longue in dark green placed on an angle from which I can watch the sheep in the pastures. Evenings. I determined that I wanted the only color in this room, besides the green seen from the windows, to be that of the food. And so there is only white with a touch of gold surrounded by the wainscoting. On occasion, if there are flowers to be had, I will put some in a pitcher or a glass jar. But nothing else.

My favorite tree, a willow of great age when I first came here, curves itself over a set of stone steps by the side of the carriage house. The view of it fills the open window. Willow green. For reasons I can never define, this room with all of its imperfections, always draws a gasp of surprise and delight from all those who enter it for the first time. It is a joy to me. The barn swallows’ song fills the air as they fly out of the carriage house and around and around past two of the windows. They are eating their breakfast. They are enchanting. That is the dining room.

I have cooked French country food since I was 20 and first moved to New York. First Avenue, downtown, where I lived was comprised almost entirely of food shops. It has now been transformed into restaurants. Not the same thing. I had come across a French workbook, by François Garvin and soon after French Country Cooking, by Elizabeth David. The recipes were fundamentally inexpensive to prepare and many depended on a tablespoon of this or that that had been bought for the prior day’s dinner. The same ingredients could be used in completely different ways meaning that nothing could give the impression of being a leftover. Beef miroton was a classic example of one day’s pot au feu turned into a hot main course of sliced potatoes, shredded beef layered on top, a very nice sauce of onions with a touch of vinegar and salt capers on top of that, bread crumbs and a dash of the broth. The following day might see a cold salad with the beef and a dark French mustard with the seeds in evidence.

I loved shopping for food on First Avenue, and Saturday morning at the Essex Street Market. I’d make menus, to be discarded when necessary, and walk with my husband to Essex Street. We’d look along the way to see what was available in the vegetable stands, compare prices with those at Essex Street, and carry food back to First Avenue and Fourth Street. We’d then walk north to 11th Street to buy our cheeses, meats, pasta, and coffee. There was a small pasta factory, a mom and pop, that had a wall of drawers with clear plastic faces so one could see in and choose from what seemed to be a hundred or so varieties. Except for salads and bread, I shopped for the week, worked every day, had lots of dinner guests, and managed a household, preparing the food for at least 20 to 30 people a week. I loved it.

When I was little, about two and a quarter, my Aunt Katie and Aunt Mamie lived next door to one another. They were my father’s younger sisters. Aunt Katie was what was termed the lively one, quite social and gregarious, and if I am thinking clearly about it somewhat of a controlling type. Her presence was always felt wherever she was. She laughed a lot. Finding amusement in all things. She held a Sunday brunch every week for her children, my Aunt Mamie’s children, miscellaneous friends, and my father and me. The table was always covered with food and the house packed with people. Any Saturday night dates of my cousins were invited as well. I have a picture of myself standing smiling on the steps of her porch. Needless to say everyone fussed over this little, very verbal two-year-old. My oldest cousin was 25 years older than I. The rest were scattered in between. I loved the liveliness and joy and enthusiasm. A stark contrast to my well-ordered home where my mother was taking care of my newborn brother.

The joy of having people around a well-spread table has never left me. My shearing dinners are eagerly looked forward to. And when life was a little different, this house was filled as well with friends, family, and the ritual of four meals a day. By the time I moved to the country, afternoon tea had become an established ritual for a number of years when my children were small and we lived in the city. It was a practical decision. Children are hungry after school and a fairly substantial tea was in order. Often there were women in the house who worked for me when I was a dress designer, and we’d all end their day and begin mine with my family over the tea table. I never could get dinner on the table before eight and Justina and Joachim would go to bed right after eating. Not without a song and a story, however.

It now amazes me sometimes to think of what I cooked as a matter of course for myself and two small children. Little stuffed cabbages with peas, canned liver pâté and shredded lettuce cooked on a bed of sliced turnips, potatoes and carrots. A savory cabbage left whole but opened after boiling water was poured over it, then stuffed with a mixture of sausage meat, ground beef, sliced green pepper, and black olives; tied with twine and poached for three hours in beef broth. (I conceded to using canned broth.) My children graduated rapidly from baby food to French Country. And I never really changed. Oh, there have been a few forays into Italian cooking, beet tops with tomatoes, and some English (Country English, of course), Fidget Pie and Mereworth biscuits. But fundamentally it has been French. I remember Joachim stamping around the apartment, eight years old, shouting, “French! French! French! Does it always have to be French?” “Okay. You pick something. And cook it.” He had a children’s cookbook. He chose macaroni and cheese! You guessed it. French.

THE TWO DOG CHAIR

THE GREEN CHAIR died. It was a valiant death, not completely unexpected, but sudden nonetheless. Instantaneous. One afternoon. I had bought it at Lettis’s auction when I used to go to auctions. The bidding started at $10. Dropped in a minute to one dollar. I bid the dollar. A young man bid two. I bid three. He shook his head no. It was mine. It was an armchair covered in a green-gold fabric with a goldish kind of color design on it. Very 1930s. I was to discover, when the material began to tear, that in the first incarnation, it had been olive green velour. It suited me perfectly. It was a one dog chair, however, to be placed by the wood box next to the fireplace.

There usually have been two dogs here on the farm. An odd thing in itself as I am not a dog person. But nonetheless, for a number of years, there was only room for one dog to sit in the chair next to me. That dog always was Steele, my beloved Border Collie, whom I had the pleasure of living with for 10 years. Her daughter, Samantha, was the product of alliance with the long-haired collie across the street. She had inherited his size, long hair, and, unfortunately, his brains. Steele was an incredible dog, never far from my eye, exquisitely trained, and a real help on the farm. I didn’t bond with Samantha until the last years of her life. But that is another story. She was far too big a dog to sit in a chair with me and chose instead to sit at my feet in front of the fire.

One day one of the arms broke. Not off. It was still attached to the base; however, it leaned precariously to one side. The right side. I propped it up with a rather interesting looking piece of a tree trunk that had a flat top and three limbs as legs on the bottom. That is how it became a two dog chair, for now, both of my present dogs Glencora MacCluskie and Nelly Zolotoroffski could fit. A bit of a tight fit, but the three of us now could sit together in the warmth of the fire, late summer until early summer. Catskill Mountains. There isn’t room enough for me to knit, or write in a notebook, but I can read or think, particularly think. Sometimes one or another of the dogs will get up and lie at my feet, but most times we will sit there snug and cozy together.

Then, one day, to my dismay, not too long ago, the springs popped through the seat. I had been adding pillows under the cushion to disguise the lumps that had begun to emerge. Sitting in it became a miserable experience. It took awhile before I, most reluctantly, decided to retire the chair and trade it for a more serviceable one from a rarely used upstairs bedroom. That chair, with its slipcovers in a quincey color of velour, was bought new, quite some time ago. I was furnishing an apartment for an elderly relative. Is 82 elderly? I guess it is. While I did a lot of very clever shopping in secondhand stores, some things need to be bought new. The chair that she’d spend much of her time in had to be perfect.

I toured all of New York’s best shops. Oh, not looking for a valuable antique, but for an attractive, comfortable good chair that could serve my aunt well for an expected decade or more. I sat in one chair after another. Were the arms positioned correctly so she could get up out of it easily? Was it comfortable? Did it look good? I found it in Lord &Taylor. It was upholstered in blue and white cotton. It was twice my budgeted price. I called over the manager. There was a tiny hole in one arm, the size of a pea. The price was immediately cut in half. Perfect. When it was sent the hole was gone. Lord & Taylor doesn’t deliver furniture with holes in it.

And so it was exchanged for the green chair, which I can’t bring myself to send to the dump. However, it is only a one dog chair. Maybe it can be a dog-and-a-half chair. Glencora MacClusky has climbed up, squeezing me to the side of it. Curled up like a cat she is, pushing me just a bit farther off the seat by the minute. I can’t bring myself to move her. Were I to get up, she’d get up too. I can’t do that to her. She is just right. Nelly is downstairs, giving no indication of wanting to join us. For the moment it is the best thing. She will agree to sit at my feet if Glencora has taken all of the room; however, not until she has climbed onto my lap and put each foreleg on my shoulders and tried to lick my face. We then become a two dog cluster in a one dog chair.

ONE STEP AT A TIME

THE EFFORT TO achieve manageability has been the driving force here, of late. For the past three and a half months. Gradually it has become, in increments, achieved. Oh, I’m not there yet. And it may be too late. However, it is the force guiding my labor. I have a tendency, when driven by any immediate necessity, to make choices that, of themselves, create disorder. Feed the chickens. Upstairs in the carriage house. Now. Oh, and water the goats. Downstairs. Now. Which means that the eggs I’ve gathered from the coop are, for the moment, hidden in a grain bin so the kid goats who are visiting upstairs in the hay loft don’t knock over the chest where I sometimes put them, later to be found, a surprise, and need to be carried in a corner of my sweater back to the house. Meaning the other things I needed to be carried to the house couldn’t be. Not enough hands. At that moment. Maybe never. Oh, I’m not there yet. And it may be too late. However, manageability and the attempt to achieve it is one of the guiding forces of life these days.

The carriage house chickens shall be moved tomorrow to the outdoor coop. I saw a rat today in the indoor coop. It ran immediately upon seeing me. There must be more. A friend will trap or shoot them or something soon. It wasn’t a big one. Medium sized. But my grain is there and it possibly may explain why two days of eggs were short in number. I don’t know if rats are in agreement with possums and skunks in their joint appreciation of fresh-laid eggs. But on two consecutive days there were only 18 eggs rather than the 22 to 24 that I am accustomed to be given. Great chickens, by the way. Just bought 25 more. Baby chicks. Same breed. Golden Comets. Perhaps. This hatchery says they have variable names. Twenty-one of the chicks have made it. I’ll need replacements, and I do need to expand the flock somewhat. Egg sales are good. Very good. Last fall I bought some of the same breed from a local woman who said they were still laying. Great, I thought. They’d be still laying when mine begin to molt. They weren’t still laying. For me, that is. But they ate. All winter. City. Country.

We sheared on Saturday. It was the best shearing yet. Part of its success can be attributed to the fact that I had paid help to prep the room where we sheared and to do all manner of clean-up to best assess the lambing room. Part of its success was because a dear friend and her daughter helped me to get the dining room in readiness for shearing dinner. Part of it was due to my son and his expert and experienced help. He devised, at last, the perfect system of moving sheep in and out, barn chute to lambing room to pasture, with dispatch and no stress on the sheep, shearers, or helpers.

I served 12 different things for dinner. This would have been the 13th thing. Forgot the pickled cherries. The bread failed again to rise. That would have made 14 things. I do think something is off with the yeast. No one missed the cherries. However, since they are something I have never served before at shearing dinner, no one knew I’d forgotten them.

The sheep looked good this year as well. We sheared lambs and by accident a couple of ram lambs. The ewe lambs had begun to get too warm in their fleeces. Those shall go to be spun into yarn at the mill in Edmeston. There were a few fleeces that were good enough to be sent as well. Stephanie Carter is going to have yarn made for her new adventure. She’s bought Stewart’s Department Store in Delhi, to be reopening it shortly. One of the yarns there shall be from my sheep. I’m so glad she is reopening the store. My Fisher cloth coveralls are showing their wear and tear after all of these years, and I’m ready for a new pair. They fit like a miracle and have served me well. Time for a new one. Stewart’s is the only place around here to carry them.

The table was surrounded by friends, new ones and familiar ones. Nancy Meiers, of course, has been shearing my flock for a very long time. Paula Decker has recently come on board and they do a magnificent job together. I couldn’t have been happier with the event, the company, the day.

We are at the summer solstice. It frightens me. While I am trying to live in the present and not project into the future, the day itself now grows shorter and darker. Hay is always an issue, and contributes to the feeling of apprehension. I have paid for close to seven hundred bales of hay on time payments. I owe for approximately five to six hundred more from last winter, this spring. I may have to feed some out in July. The pastures don’t look good to me. It may rain today. That may help. Farmers have had a blessed window to make hay this week and I’m certain I’ll have enough for winter. There seems to be 17 ewe lambs this year to add to the flock. I still need more sheep. I am already turning customers away. There is one very fine ram that may go to a friend’s flock. Two triplet ram lambs may as well become breeders, leaving only three ram lambs to sell for meat. That’s it. Money. Money. Money. The lack of it dismays me. The forever relentless lack of it. This year, once more, at the high point of the year, shearing, I know I shall once again lose money on the farm. Even so, it is not that that would make me leave. It would be the loneliness that would eventually break me.

I hope to build on what has been improved upon here, for both shearing and last spring’s photography shoot. Doing things more efficiently has become the norm of late. Systems evolving from my earlier practice of reacting rather than acting have come into play. I didn’t start out in this grand venture knowing anything at all about it. I certainly tried to establish systems and abandoned the unsuccessful ones with dispatch. Now, however, solutions have evolved and it is all much easier. My sheep do cooperate, at least so far. The goats are shaping up as well. Verity is an example of a well behaved creature. She is the most obviously affectionate of the mid-range young stock and shall visit a children’s camp in Andes this summer. I usually send down two ewe lambs and two does in milk. This year there are no does in milk; however there are two who may be bred. Were I to send them down they might freshen at the camp in August which might be a great deal of fun for the campers. I’ll know shortly if that is an acceptable idea. I’d love to do it.

There is an inner voice which speaks to me, quite clearly, loudly, and with few words. It may tell me something to do. Right now. Such as get ready for the next phase. Which it said a few weeks ago. And I listened. In small increments I began. It now tells me I am already in the next phase. Everything seems different to me. Colors appear in my mind that have not existed in juxtaposition before. People are turning up who are new to me. And with friendly aspects. Both interesting and even helpful. I try to be aware of what people want from me. To not have people to whom to give is a lonely thing. But one thing that I am currently most careful about is allowing life to unfold without my hand managing anything more than my dogs and my kitchen sink.

IN THE BEGINNING

A MELIA IS SUCH a pretty name. Each sheep suggests her name to me, one at a time. Amelia did hers. Such a pretty name for one of my most unappealing animals. She is short legged to a fault, low slung and small boned, barrel bellied with tiny, oddly placed ears. Her face is a beautiful black as are her eyes which, therefore, cannot be seen, and her fleece is a dull flat grey. She never allowed herself to be petted or chucked under her chin, and moved, leaping with astonishing agility, away from me should I dare try to approach her. Such was Amelia.

Her first daughter, Raggedy Ann, is of wide eyes and has taken from where her mother left off in the ear department. Hers are large full ones, set at the same straight-in–the-air angle as Amelia’s but three times the size, or perhaps four. Raggedy started out as skittish as her mother, but I had fallen in love with her and made an effort to tame her. That was very quickly accomplished, quite to my surprise. She, of all of the lambs that year, responded to her name when I had grain. I should have known. I made certain she was fed first and to this day, “Raggedy Ann, Ragged Ann” brings her running. She has Amelia’s barrel shape, but her Dad’s long legs, proportion, and head, and is a fine (if slightly amusing) creature.

Amelia eats. Her finest quality is that with an almost unapparent udder she nurses her own fat lambs, always singles, as well as all comers. This winter she supplemented the biggest pair of ram lambs I’ve ever realized, as well as the runts of some triplets, plus her own chubby girl. So it was without question that I was most lenient with her when she squeezed through the fence and began to nibble white clover on my back lawn. At first she ran when she saw me as did any of her friends and relatives who had followed her. “Yummy eats,” they’d say to one another, “look what she’s found,” only to scramble away upon sighting me.

One morning I found her alone on the lawn behind the carriage house. Startled, she jumped up and then backed away. It needed mowing, and I decided, on impulse, to let her stay. Warily she watched me. “It’s alright,” I said. The next day I stood watching her from the top of the barn bridge wall. She stopped eating at first when she caught sight of me, and then warily, started in again. Subsequently, when her friends and family joined her I’d chase them off, and Amelia would run with them, then hide under the apple tree or barn bridge and slip stealthily back to the clover. She realized almost immediately that she would be allowed to stay if alone and would be chased away if she had the others with her, and subsequently managed to evade the others as well.

Amelia wears a bell now so I know if she is in the yard rather than in my garden. “Amelia, Amelia,” I call, taking great pleasure in the pretty name. “Amelia, Amelia,” I say as she looks up at me. “Amelia, Amelia,” as she approaches. Amelia, as I give her an early morning hug.

Amelia lived another eight years on my farm. I just found this story among some papers in the special stuff drawer of my desk. This is the rest of her story. She is the only adult sheep I’ve ever brought into the house. No, not the kitchen, but in the lamb pen in the summer kitchen in the basement. She’d freshened with a ram lamb, a single as always, but her first ram. White. Chunky. Very nice. And had not a drop of milk for him. She almost knocked me down when I picked him up to take him in to bottle. “No. Don’t knock me down. You’re coming, too,” I told her. She followed me out to the barn, up the hill, through the gate, and into the basement. I put her little newborn with her, got her some sweet hay and grain, and gave him a bottle as she stared at me. Her milk came in on the fourth day. This ewe who had at her best kept four or five lambs going in the barn. I continued to feed him a bottle until he rejected it completely and had more than enough milk from his mother. In the fullness of time I moved them both back into the barn. In a very short time he was as tall and round as his dam. One day I didn’t see her. It was only late that summer, when berrying high up on the side hill, did I find what was left of her. Amelia.

This is not a sad story. I am a farmer. Were all of my livestock to live as perfect a life and die as simple a death as Amelia, I would think life was good. She was perfect. And loved that last lamb as she loved them all. I know she went on that side hill to die. As animals have often done in the order of things. She fulfilled me as well. As I gave her the best of myself. And she gave me the opportunity to be all that being a shepherd is. Amelia, Amelia, such a pretty name.

TO BE READY FOR A MIRACLE

BY THE DAWN’S early light. One more sheep killed by coyotes. I awoke at 4:45 this morning with the sound of an urgent voice in my mind. Go down and see if the coyotes ate the latest murdered sheep. It took another half hour to summon my courage. They hadn’t touched it. It is getting more difficult to proceed. I’m not certain if I know how. Too many defeats have occurred to wear away the dreams. All of them. I seek hope in the familiar.

My most beloved willow still lives and pleases my eye from the dining room window. I’ll have its dead branches trimmed soon. It has been on the work list for two weeks. The Pound Sweet apple tree has been trimmed and its dead branches bundled in the very nice French country way that pleases my eye. Tidy bundles tied in bailing twine.

The sun just broke through the dining room window. It shines on the page. The question is, were I still inclined to go the extra mile, would doing so make a difference?

I love the fuchsia-colored phlox in the perennial border and watched them wilt yesterday afternoon in the devastating drought that has fallen upon us. I’ll get someone to bring up the barn hose and water the flowers today. But. But. I read in a country magazine editorial the other day that drought destroys the soul. In part because one doesn’t perceive the moment when hope is lost.

I watched last night from the dining room windows, the most beautiful storm that I have ever seen. Lightning lit up the clouds. Not in flashes zigzagging across the sky, but, rather setting the clouds on fire, huge blazes of color in the north sky. I was certain that whatever the storm was, it would bring rain here. It had to be raining in Meredith and Davenport. Sleep was impossible so I went back down to the dining room to watch the progress of the rain. It didn’t come. Some small sprinkling must have happened later because the phlox are no longer wilted although the color has faded. A wise man told me that in his holy book it said the farmer is closest to God because we are always looking up to the sky, in part, asking for the right weather. I replied it was to ask for the courage to handle that which we have been presented. I protest the unkindness on the part of our Maker. To try to live as our best self is an excruciating discipline of sorts. To insist that we take joy in the day. It has never been hard for me to find beauty somewhere. But what has become the hardest is to apply the gifts that I have been given to create a life that still satisfies me. I fill the vases and mustard jars in the dining room with green leaves from the quince bushes along the driveway. It makes the room cool, even though the windows on three sides are all filled with views of the green hills that surround the house and farm. There is one white and gold Gevalia® canister that is empty on a shelf by the row of windows, overlooking the perennial border. It asks for green leaves, too, and shall get them when the coffee in the cup before me is too cold to drink. The willow is being kissed by the sun and begins to assume the glittering gold leaves that so please my eye. The quince branches on the table are becoming lit as well.

A few days later. There was some rain. It feels ungrateful to say, but not enough. There is a lamb in the house. His dam didn’t let her milk down. He’s big. And nice. And ensconced in a corner out of the light of the kitchen. When he was first found this morning my brother asked me if he were to be a bottle lamb. Oh no, I said. Well, he is now. The Barred Rock hen is in the house as well. She was sitting on 10 eggs. Due to hatch soon if fertilized. I found one tiny chick in with her this morning, some shells, and only six eggs left. The chick came into the house in a basket. Immediately. But what to do with the hen? I found a plastic bin and put some hay and the eggs in it. Grabbed the chicken by her legs and climbed over the fallen down hay bales in the loft and made my way to the house. The hen was then bundled in with her chick and eggs into the plastic bin. I put a window screen over the top. It was too small. I then put a chair over it. And a log on top of the chair back. She has water and grain and seems to have settled down nicely. There may be some more chicks in a day or two. With any luck. And then, may they be hens and not roosters.

I had a ghastly scare this afternoon. No water came out of either the hydrant or any of the taps. It terrified me. The well here has never been known to go dry. But there always is a first time. It seemed to be kicking on too often of late, and I thought there was a possibility that the four-year-old motor had for some incomprehensible reason died. There were three lambs, one only a few hours old, in the lambing room as well as their mothers. And no water. Twenty-two six-month-old lambs and a donkey in the south pasture. And no water. Twenty-four chickens in the portable coop and 21 chicks and one hen in the coop on the lawn. You get the picture. Aside from dogs, cat, hen in the nesting box and it seemed apparent one lamb was about to become a bottle lamb. With no water with which to make milk replacer.

I opened the gate to the south pasture to let anyone who understood what that meant be able to go out and drink from the trickle that the creek had become. The donkey realized immediately what I was doing and flew on winged hoofs out and into the far pastures. Only some of the young stock realized their freedom had been won. They left as well only with a bit more caution. I went into the lambing room, grabbed the newborn in one arm and let the ewes and their offspring out into the barn proper. There was a joint compound bucket to hand, and I first went to the pear trees enclosure down by the brook to get the hose leading to a water trough in the pasture. My first thought was to drag it to the slope leading to the house, but it was too heavy. So I filled the bucket with water and, the lamb tucked under my arm, made my way up the slope to the house. A last bit of hope whispered into my ear. I turned the faucet and nothing happened. The only thing to do was to hit the phone. No hope there. I tried the faucet once again. Water. Water. Water.

The fear of having no water hit the part of me that is the weakest. I have been with increasing intent concentrating on letting go of the control of events and allowing life to simply unfold. God’s will. When I first started the farm I decided, rather than bothering my Maker with every little detail, I’d simply ask to be told if I want to continue. In no ambiguous terms. One summer I didn’t have a ram nor did I have water to the barn. Nor did I have a source of hay. This may be it, I thought. Within two weeks, Marge Rockefeller called offering to sell me hay. John Firment from whom I bought the farm came and told me where the shut off was to the water line. And a man who bought two ram lambs at the auction sold me one of them for $17.55. The hay was good. The water was good. The ram was less than useless. However, I stayed.

I now await another miracle. One of the spirit and the heart. I make not even a gesture to help it happen although I work hard on mending my own heart and creating manageability here as I go through the days. To be ready for a miracle. The lamb asks to climb into my lap to take his nap. I do hope he will make it. He is very, very nice. The gold finches sing as they fly among the phlox picking seeds from the pigweed. The drought continues. This is a day the Lord has made and who I am is what I do with it.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

I WENT UP to the field, Wuthering Heights, one afternoon a day or two ago, to see what the effect was of the rain we have been enjoying this week. The grass is very, very short, but it is emerging at last. The twin pasture, the one we didn’t fence, one half of the original project, has to date been growing faster. Five-inch high green grass has emerged from the brown grasses, the remnants of last year’s growth. The fenced-in field is now showing regrowth as well, fairly thick. Very nice.

There is a drainage ditch there, providing water for the sheep in the spring, part of the summer, and well into the fall. I’ve found what once must have been a small stone bridge creating a crossing. One stone has shifted, and a willow has taken its place. Were I to cut the willow, it would be possible to replace the stone. With any luck I’ll have it done by the men who will soon move the pallets of stone that were left behind in the field last summer.

Jefferson once wrote that the thing he loved the best on his farm was riding around it on horseback and looking at things. I understand that. It is a deeply satisfying thing to walk this land of mine. Looking at all things, tiny things, important things, and things of no significance whatsoever. My land is not good enough to ever be called beautiful. But it is, at its best, absolutely lovely. And at its worse it remains to be a nice little farm.

One of the many reasons I am here is that I wanted an endless palette, one with which I could engage my life. Stone walls to be recreated. Orchards to be planted. Trees to be replaced. Brush to remove.

There is a stone wall surrounding my wood lot. All manner of seedlings have jumped the wall and become, in turn, saplings and small trees. They are relatively close together and have grown tall, thin, and straight. A few are oak. They shall stay. The rest need to go. I’ve started to clear this some time ago. Twice. And what has been cleared has stayed relatively brush free. The stone wall is magnificent. And largely intact. Behind it is a strand of huge trees. Beneath them is almost no underbrush. Were the saplings to be gone, the wall could be seen, as well as the orderly neat stand of huge trees behind it. There is a blue stone wall up there, as well, that I don’t like very much, although I am expected to. It is the fashion to like blue stone walls. And a waterfall that I’ve never seen in full flow. But everyone else in the family has. A spring has manifested on the property line. Wrong side, unfortunately. And, on the southeast wall are not only some very prolific apple trees, but a row of rugosa roses. I pick the rose hips every year, to make a bit of jam. They’ve never jumped the wall, unfortunately, and are on the wrong side. I pick the rose hips anyway. A hundred rugosa seedlings are arriving here shortly. I’m not planting them on the line fence, however.

The secret rock has not moved, of course. But the brook has. And now its outer edge is only a few feet from the rock itself. It is one of my favorite places. The rock is huge. And water runs through and beneath it. From certain other equally secret places the sky is visible through the opening underneath the rock. Someone, once, a long time ago, built 10 feet of stone wall next to the magic rock, a perfect place to have a picnic. Nothing to change there. It is simply perfect.

Not very far away, is another huge rock. It is almost a perfect square. And its top is perfectly flat. It sits below a thorn apple tree. A branch or two just low enough to have easy access. And that rock is the one that makes me wish I had a full-time hired man. Trim those branches, please. Quite inspiring, that rock.

Slightly beyond that rock is a stone wall that always makes me wish I were rich. It is a massive wall with huge vertical sheep tips in disrepair. All of the sheep tips, vertical rocks on a horizontal wall placed so sheep can’t jump over them, on my property are relatively flat and of the same size. These are quite different. Huge almost impossible for one to move, sturdy, and beautiful in their own way. I think this wall was made by a different mason from all of the others on this farm. The rock pile nearby is comprised of rose stone and much smaller rocks at that. Clearly this was not the source of the stone. I don’t love the hillside above these pretty places. I would were it covered with grass rather than moss. It cries for lime that can never be spread. And clover seed which will never be bought. The hill is too steep for the lime truck. And the seed will never grow without it. I’ve got a favorite place in the woods where I go, but rarely. It is near the top of the hill. The woods rise sharply there to reach a stone wall, still in relatively good condition. And on the other side of the wall is a flat and grassy place. Tall trees are evenly spaced there, almost as if chosen. And perhaps they were. It is shady there in summer. Silent in winter. And in all, the calm, well-ordered, nearly manicured little wood that I love so much. It is, in fact, a man-made place, at least in part. But who the person was who made it and why, I shall never know. Were I only able to go there more often to think and dream.

BECAUSE OF ROSE BRICKMAN

MY MOTHER’S VOICE rings in my ears, “Don’t put it in writing!” And so I hesitated sending this story to my typist. Is it too forceful? Too opinionated? Perhaps a bit controversial? It has sat in my notebook for a couple of weeks. I read a piece written about me for inclusion in a book the other evening. In it I was described as a “writer” who moved up here and who wrote my “autobiography.” I have a quick temper that rises, rarely, but more or less occasionally, in flames. What to do? I’m still wrestling with myself to find a way to correct the erroneous information the writer had managed to construe from the telephone interview. There were several other misunderstandings as well. I’d prefer to be referred to as a laundress and a farmer. It would be more honest. It is more accurate, if describing something I “do” to an occupation that takes more time. Doing laundry certainly takes more of my time than I spend scribbling with blue ink on white paper. Before I came here I was, and still am, a mother and a homemaker, and supported my family in whatever miscellaneous ways turned up. I am now a farmer, which takes up most of my life and combines the best attributes of being a mother and a homemaker. So, here is the story my mother would tell me not to tell.

I have, on occasion, been referred to as a writer and a farmer. Or, as a farmer and a writer. When I was growing up, possibly because I was a voracious reader, the people in my life would say “She will be a writah.” No one, including myself, ever imagined I’d become a farmer. It always rubs me the wrong way when I am referred to as a writer. I am a farmer. My 24th anniversary as one was a few days ago. I always rebelled at the suggestion when I was in school that I become a writer. It seemed too pretentious an ambition. Too egotistical. Unseemly. Immodest. It felt, and still does, like a presumptuous demand that absolute strangers read my writing. On the other hand, it is not a demand but, rather a necessity to expect people to eat food, without which the human race would rapidly become extinct. Therefore it is a most honorable profession to be a farmer.

When I first started farming, and began a year or two later to write about it for The Delaware County Times, it struck me that the reason I was called a writer was that in people’s minds writing was a special thing to do, and farming didn’t have any cachet. Now that perception has become somewhat reversed. All kinds of people now call themselves farmers, including some who have a backyard garden or three or four chickens. It has become a fashionable thing to call oneself. “Know where your food comes from” is the hue and cry of today’s politically correct and fashion conscious people. “My eggs today came from Buleah, the black-and-white hen over there on my patio.”

On rare occasions, a customer will buy a lamb from me saying they’re glad to know where it comes from. Most of my customers are Southern or Eastern Europeans who have been raised on farms and are experienced with the slaughtering of animals whom they are about to eat. They would never think to say they are glad to know I’ve raised their lamb or kid goat. I’ve never had the courage to ask the questioner, usually a woman, accompanied by a boyfriend or husband, why they are “glad” that their dinner is coming out of my farm. While their assumption, correctly or not, is that said lamb has had a nicer life living here and therefore shall taste better than one bought in a gourmet butcher shop, they have no way of truly knowing what kind of life I’ve given that animal. Another frequently asked question from the want-to-know-where-their-food-comes-from crowd is, and then only from the women, “Do you eat your own lamb?” I now look them straight in the eye and say “No, I can’t afford it.” The 18- or 20-pound dressed weight lamb they have bought from me at about a $150 to serve their friends at a barbecue not only is not in my food budget, but I can’t afford to take that money away from my hay payment.

We can now move on to eggs. I rarely eat those either. I am paying five dollars a week more for laying mash that gives me 30 percent more eggs than the cheaper grain, adding some oats and corn for scratch. The store I sell eggs to can’t up their price any, so I make it up in volume like an industrial farm but only eat eggs when a box of a dozen isn’t complete or when there is an occasional 25th egg in a day. Oh, they pay their feed bill now. But I have to buy some replacements this week, chick starter, and feed the new non-layers over the winter. No eggs then.

Martin Harris, whose opinion column in Farming: The Journal of Northeast Agriculture I read immediately upon receiving, wrote about the recent proliferation of hobby farms, ones that don’t require a profit to stay in business. Some farmers worry that the hobby farmers who seem to be proliferating up here will drive down prices. I worry about that a little bit, particularly this year when I’ve gotten more requests for starter flocks than in the past 10 years. There were one or two years, a long time ago, when hobby farmers sold lambs at Easter for a considerably lower price than the rest of us and my business was hurt. Fortunately, that year, some year-round lamb eaters turned up, and I did sell all of my ram lambs. I’ve never been stuck with any livestock by the year end. However, the four people to whom I sold starter flocks will be my competitors. One already is. While price fixing is a no-no, and I did have lambs to sell to one of his customers, this is presenting a problem. The idea that having more lambs available will draw more customers holds no reassurances for me. I did turn away requests for a large number of meat lambs this past year. So demand is up. But will prices go down? My costs have gone up as I have given myself the luxury of paying someone to, as in today, help me sort lambs to bring to the south pasture. The grass is better there and I can feed them in the holding pen, worm there, and tame the ones who shall remain in my flock to my liking. And so I feel that expense and know because of such luxuries I shall lose even more money this year than last. I am raising my price for Memorial Day five dollars and, if I have any left for Labor Day, another five dollars. That will probably net me about $50 in my income column this year. The new chicks will cost $110 for 25 Golden Comets plus the starter grain at $16.50 a bag, plus what a grower ration will cost to feed them until they start to lay.

There was a time when voices discouraging me from farming were loudly suggesting I write a mystery book (because I read them) and give up the farm. They only wanted to be helpful. The next question is obviously, why do I do this? Buy chicks, feed them, and go without eggs. It is a bit more than because I love it. Although that is what most people assume about me. It is a bit more than love. It is because I am deeply proud to be a farmer. To me, aside from being a mother or parenting, it is the most heroic, courageous, respect-worthy occupation of all. Those of us who day in and day out put one foot in front of the other to raise food for the rest of us has taken on a life that is increasingly without rewards and has even become controversial in a negative way. The scale is being tipped again, however slightly. The new balance occurs in part from our perceived detriment to the environment. But a tinge of romance has followed us, the vanishing breed of farmers, and the pet chicken owners and backyard gardeners are beginning to refer to themselves as farmers, too. There was an article in the New York Times about several “retirement homes” that have sprung up recently for chickens that urban chicken raisers no longer want. Great idea. It is unlikely that Buleah or Sadie will end up in a pot. Who wants to eat a pet chicken? Someone will begin to make money on said retirement facilities. No axes or chopping blocks on city terraces.

In other words, as blue ink crosses this lined page, and I am in the process of telling this story, it isn’t the telling it with which I want to be identified but the doing of it that matters to me. The doing of it. Because I am a farmer.

THE COUSINS

GRANDPA WAS OUR first love. Oh, our fathers were wonderful men in their own right, and we loved them deeply as well. But it was Grandpa who had that sparkle, that little extra something that I, for one, have looked for ever since. My father was a deep and quiet man. Someone who made me feel an unshakable sense of security that went to the bottom of my heart. He loved me. And I felt it. But it was Grandpa, bent on one knee, arms outstretched to catch me as I ran to greet him on the farm, that added a touch of enchantment to the feeling of being loved that I can never forget.

Of the seven of Grandpa and Grandma’s children, only 10 grandchildren were born. One was the mysterious red-headed son of Uncle Herman, who was only a rumor in our lives. My older sister, Berenice, died before I arrived, leaving only three little girl cousins. And the three of us each agree, so many years later, that it was Grandpa whom we have always loved. I know that starburst wrinkles around the eyes mean laughter and joy and would never dream of associating them with age. Only joy. I boast proudly to my cousins, I have Grandpa’s starburst eyes. But it was Grandpa who wore them so well.

We three were always attractive women. Unusual that, and even more unusual that we are still thought so in some circles. But it was Grandpa who instilled that feeling in us. Each of us, as each of his daughters, were beautiful to him. And each of his daughters believed herself to be his favorite. At least each one who confided in me thought that. It was impossible not to. Our grandfather was a remarkable man.

Sometimes, that first summer I was here, I’d see Grandpa in my mind’s eye looking down at me, laughing with delight at the sight of his Sylvia tramping about, bow saw in hand, mercilessly cutting down a weed tree that offended her sensibility. Incongruity has always been the heart of humor, in my way of thinking. And his delight at his granddaughter in boots walking up and down the line fences, “This one shall go. That one shall stay,” was a reality to me even so many years after he was gone to this world. He, too, of all of my family and the community in which I lived, always thought of me as someone who would do something creative, with an emphasis on a long, drawn out “a” in the word, and somewhat “brainy” with my life. Never to be taxed with anything in the way of physical labor. Not that I was thought of as lazy, but rather as fragile and sensitive, with a tendency to be a bit sickly.

Oh, how I’d love to go with him on the farm when he went to dig potatoes for dinner, and he’d let me pick up the tiny ones to play house with. “Too small to cook,” he’d say. Little did he know I’d someday search out tiny ones to boil in a stick of butter for his great-grandchildren. After I started farming it, I’d sometimes ask my brother and my cousins, “What would Grandpa say were he to see me now?” But I’d never ask that of myself. Because I’d look up into the blue Catskills sky and see him looking down at me, starburst wrinkles around his eyes. Smiling.

THE FIRST MOON

THE LIGHT HAS changed. The first week of August. Late afternoon. Early evening. It is beautiful. And I don’t know if I can stand it. Wood was cut this afternoon that has been waiting to be cut since last fall. About nearly a face cord of slab. It is most needed. It helps to start the fires, and fill in the cracks when there are larger pieces in the stoves and I want it to burn hot. There is something to be said for getting firewood. Especially now. Last night was chilly. Cold, actually. And I had washed the cozy comforter that has tucked me in most nights this summer. It was with great reluctance that I considered using it and didn’t.

Peabody, cat extraordinaire, often sleeps in the white bedroom, days, and on occasion, nights, there with me. Cats are reputed to be clean. Indoor-outdoor cats can’t be. The other afternoon she left the undigested remains of a mouse on the comforter. So much for that for a while. I even made a special trip to the Laundromat with it after scraping off what was left into the wood stove. Yes, that is lit almost every day to accommodate such adventures and the occasional misadventure.

The sun has moved across sheep meadow and now lights only the tops of the trees on Wuthering Heights. Early. It makes me sad.

I have, in small increments, been gradually achieving a greater degree of manageability, both in the house and on the farm. It has been accomplished in subtle ways as well as more obvious and evident ways. It is always an instruction in the back of my mind, and while seemingly in random ways, there is an order in the procedure. Open a drawer and go through it. Burn, toss, sort, read, and put back what I really want to keep. Some surprises turned up. Nunzio’s Coggins as an example. His birth date was on it. He is 20 years old this year. I’ve never remembered. Thought he is about 16. He put his head under my arm yesterday when I was looking at the brook. I’ve resolved to spend more time with him. Donkey. A lovely, lovely donk. Protector of sheep and delight of visitors. He shall become more of a delight to me. I opened the lid to the window seat in the summer bedroom and found a dress I had forgotten I owned. I ironed it and wore it to town. A white-and-pink shirt dress. It was the latest thing once. And is again. I’ve found some lists from the first days here. To do. With a column for the amount of time and the amount of money each thing would cost. Some lists were 20 years old. One was 30. Needless to say I’ll save them.

The living room door was repaired today. It functions for the first time in months. I celebrated by buying a chair. Next to the door was the only intact chair in the living room. Recently the seat began to rip. The new chair is needlepoint. All of the colors in the living room. I also cleared a part of an old mess in the room, inspired by the new door as well, and rearranged some art on the walls. The living room was repainted recently, two coats of “Shell Pink.” I sat in it for the first time in months. While I found a picture or two a half inch off of the correct angle and moved them, I was able to ignore the final small mess on the floor. Or at least managed to ignore it and was able to see what is lovely in that room. The afternoon light through the French doors is enchanting. It makes the walls glow a soft, subtle shell pink. People look good in rooms of that color. It imparts gentleness to faces. That is why it was chosen. The curious and interesting thing about paint is how color changes with the variation of light. Mornings that room can almost be called a neutral no-color kind of color. Late afternoon it becomes transformed. Even at that, different walls or different parts of the room each take on their own differentiation. While not in complete order yet, I was able to appreciate all that it is. It is easy to forget in the pressing need to survive, how much some things mean to me. And how they help me to find the will to proceed. I don’t pressure myself to do anything that isn’t entirely important of late. It seems best to let the day unfold. And slowly, bit by bit, improvements occur. Some permanent, some temporary. However, I am beginning to realize how far it has all come.

The sheep are afraid to graze across the brook where there is plenty of grass, although it is interspersed with the dreaded June grass. It annoys them, gets in their eyes, and tickles their faces. It is my favorite grass for hay, however. No waste. They did decide to venture forth late morning, today. They can be seen from my dining room window, clustered in one end of the field. Some of them like the spiney heads of the thistle that dot my pasture. I thank them for removing the seeds. Less down for the gold finches who use it to line their nests this time of year. But fewer new thistles for my fields.

I’ll never forget the first one I ever saw up there. On the side hill. Magenta. There was a time when I’d hoe them and when they first appeared an inch or two above the ground. It took a while to realize that clover grew at their bases. The sheep ate that, September, when the main stem of the thistle went by. It was then that I stopped hoeing them out. I learn gradually. That has its unfortunate aspects. Sometimes it is too late. Sometimes it is just too slow. And sometimes I am glad.

Today is a rich and full one. Ivomec has arrived. I’ll worm the young stock when they come in this evening.

It is a joy to work with the young stock. The lambs from this winter who shall be wormed tonight are tame to me having lived in the south pasture and been grained in their little holding pen. They surround me at times and look hopefully at my face. Will there be grain today? No. They had to be moved in with the adult sheep when the drought burned up all of the grass in their paddock, and it became a brown-colored field with nothing green in evidence. I cannot grain everyone, summers. It is bad enough that I am feeding out hay. The winter’s hay. The grain for the chicks has risen 20 percent already in two months. Corn has gone up 25 percent in less time than that. Because the young stock is so tame, in the day they will be easy to catch and drench.

Every moment counts in August. I used to make jams throughout the month. Enough for an army. And knit sweaters. And start buying Christmas gifts. This week I bought peaches and picked sumac. Sumac makes a lovely drink, akin to pink lemonade. I’ve always wanted to make jelly from it as well. Perhaps this week I shall. The peaches are started for peach preserve. I let an equal weight of sliced fruit set overnight in the same amount of sugar. By morning, enough juice is extracted to provide enough liquid in which to cook the sugared fruit. I use an unlined copper pan in which to make the jam. It is from France and sat on my lap once on an airplane across the ocean. It is impossible to decide which of the many preserves is my favorite. Sometimes I’ll say it is tomato. Sometimes it is pumpkin. And sometimes the delicate flavor of pears. In this house jam is often served with yogurt. The Boston brown bread I’ve been making of late (oh for a metal coffee can to bake it in) calls for the more flavorful ones. Today’s loaf shall be the milder white bread. A Shaker Daily Loaf. I’ve some pear preserve left that will go nicely with it.

Remembrances of things past are affecting those days of sudden and renewed hope, intertwined with a touch of sadness and longing. The little voice in my mind that cautioned me to prepare for change was right. Change has begun. I hold to its simplicity.

NEW YEAR’S DAY

THERE ARE MOMENTS on a farm that exceed perfection. Words fail to describe them. Imagination defies itself to reproduce them. They are about happiness in its simplest form. And are always accompanied by silence. Today contained such a moment.

Some of the sheep had become notorious at getting out. Everywhere. All the time. All over the lawns. To visit almost all of the neighbors. And nearly everyone who saw them stopped and told me about them. As did I, indeed tell myself. All about them. All the time. Their next-to-last excursion was to my neighbors’ across the road. They decided to pay a visit to the horses who live there. As had one of the horses that decided to visit the sheep in my pasture.

I had had baleage put in a wonderfully misguided place. By the stone wall. By the road. And, yes, well within range of the sensitive noses of my neighbor’s horses. I’m not always the brightest. At first my sheep ignored the baleage. A series of very heavy rains had flooded a drainage ditch immediately before the baleage was placed there. The sheep panicked at the sight of the flooded field and refused to cross it.

After a couple of days, nine somewhat wildish ewes (three of which were not born here and are therefore unfamiliar with my ways) decided to cross over the running water and have lunch. Baleage. The pasture was even more enticing across the road where the horses lived and so they decided it would be pleasant to join them for tea. Immediately after lunch. There was a low spot under the horses’ electric fence. An open door to sheep in full fleece. And off they went. And stayed for a couple of days.

I have reason to be hesitant around one of the horses who took an instant dislike to me when she was in my pasture eating her perceived share of the sweet smelling baleage. She saw me standing near it, holding Fly Flannagan in my arms. A two-headed, six-legged creature, appeared to her. She reacted accordingly.

Peter Slavinski helped me to drive the sheep off his fields that next morning. Onto the road they went. I followed. Before I could direct them home, a passing motorist helped me drive them through the barbed wire into my neighbor’s pasture on this side of the road. The one neighbor that the sheep had not visited this fall.

I couldn’t get them home. I brought them cracked corn in the old familiar grain bag. To no avail. Mineral salts. To no avail. An armful of hay. To no avail. I brought my dog, Samantha. Poor choice. They must have encountered a coyote or two on their meanderings, because they decided Samantha was their enemy. Each time I went to bring them home, they flocked and stared past me down the road toward the barn and house. I realized they expected I had the dogs somewhere behind me. They had determined never to come home with me again were she to be driving them.

This afternoon, desperation reminded me of still another way to entice the sheep home. Baleage! I put on layers upon layers of clothing in anticipation of staying out a very long time. My only really warm gloves were too new and too pretty to wear carrying hay, so my hands were tucked up in the sleeves of my jacket as I carried an armful of baleage up the icy road to the corner where the sheep were pawing for grass under the snow. I know Cornell’s sheep live off grass under snow, winters, but never wanted my sheep to have to emulate them. Mythical stories about how sheep are fed abound. I never have trusted them. However, my distress was only one of many reasons I wanted my sheep home.

They would not come. One of my old girls, one with a touch of Cheviot on her face, stared me down. She had never forgotten her grandmother was Cheviot, a wild creature, and refused to come near me or the enticing baleage. I grew desperate. And knew I must silence my desperation and make myself as still inside as I could. Finally a truck appeared from the hill, turned the corner near us, and stopped. Pete, God bless him, got out and quietly walked through the snow behind my sheep. I called, “Cahm ahn.” He kept on walking behind them. They suddenly decided it was a very good idea to come home with me.

The air was still and sparkling with cold. A pale blue sky hung a thin sliver of moon above our heads. A faint blush of rose made magic of the day’s end. Snow was everywhere. White and gleaming. The ice on the road spilled diamonds before us. The only sound was that of the sheeps’ hooves as they slowly, carefully walked single file behind me. “Cahm ahn,” I said as I made my way down the road. “Cahm ahn,” as I set foot on our front lawn by the wooden fence leading to the pasture. “Cahm ahn,” I said as quietly as I could.

I opened the gate. The Cheviot-nosed ewe stopped to think a moment or two, and then walked with measured pace, through the gate. Each one followed in turn. Slowly, then quicker, until the last one ran home. I put the baleage I was still carrying on the snow. Two or three stopped to eat it. Home. Home. The sheep, then, single file, walked quietly across the pasture to the open door of the barn, and, one by one, leapt inside. I followed.

I went to see how the first lamb of the year was faring. His little belly was full. He still wore the pink coat I made him in honor of being born. Only yesterday. His mother seemed content in the pen with him. It was the very first time I had ever known that restless ewe to nurse a lamb. The silence was perfect. My mind and heart were at one with the absolute quiet of the moment. I have been asked, of late, why do I stay farming. Why do I stay? I stay because of today. I stay because of the stillness in my mind and heart, walking those sheep home, across the neighbors’ pasture, along the road, down the lawn through the gate. All of us walking together into the barn. I stay because of the silence and its absolute perfection. I stay because of the silence.

POSTSCRIPT

THE SNOW HAS arrived, and with it all of the mystery that it in its silence conveys. Its beauty lies in the simplicity that it wraps around the world outside of these windows. And the prospect of moving inward to an equally quiet place. I first came here at the beginning of winter in what is now a long time ago. I also saw the first light of day in the early days of winter, seemingly not a long time ago. My dreams for the life to be created here have not changed, except that I have added an unexpected dimension in the forms of goats, chickens, sheep, dogs, and a donkey. But, in a way, they are a continuation of the original dream. Each day presents the possibility of achieving the dream. Or rather the potential for coming close to it. I have accumulated much of what is necessary here to realize the goals that I once thought were too far removed to be realized. The missing ingredients are in the realm of possibility even if, at the moment, they are beyond reach. Each day brings its own whisper of promise. Who I am is what I do with it.

There is now a lamp on the kitchen table. I don’t like dark rooms, and keep the overhead light on, even in the day. There was a time when it was broken. I think yesterday was the third time it has been rebuilt. Not bad for a 60-year-old fixture. The linen cloth on the table gleams in the glow of the lamp. There is a small crèche figure of a sheep that my daughter brought me from her recent trip on the Danube in front of it. The table is unadorned. Unusual for me. I’ve always been one to decorate nearly everything. However, there was a time when it was the only light, evenings in this room. I don’t know when it was, but it was before the dramatic changes of the past five years. I would come in from the barn, winter nights, and sit at this table, reading or writing. Occasionally I’d make the special treat of hot chocolate with freshly whipped cream on top. The only sound was that of the wood burning in the stove. It was a peaceful time. I didn’t mind the solitude, or the comparative silence. I loved the special kind of bone-weary exhaustion that comes from doing physical work. And the light of the lamp on the gleaming table cloth. The work is easier now because of the familiarity and experience. I knew that would happen. The peace that comes from working in the barn is also deeper. I knew that would happen. I now approach the work as if the past 24 years have not happened. To climb down the ladder, or to get a boot stuck in between hay bales in the mow seem like an adventure, devoid of the familiarity of repetition, winter after winter. “I am here,” I call out to the sheep. “It is I!” They turn and look at me. They know who I am. And I am rediscovering myself.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Sylvia Jorrín has been a farmer in Delaware County, New York for 25 years. Hers is one of the few large livestock farms in the New York City Watershed solely owned and operated by a woman. For 24 years she has published stories about her life on the farm in the Delaware County Times, and on her website, www.sylviasfarm.com. In addition, her writings on agriculture have been published in many of the region’s magazines and newspapers.