Still another lamb dances around the kitchen. She is a refined and lovely thing. Her fleece is already long and silky. Her face is finely drawn and beautifully formed. “Exquisite” is a word that could appropriately be applied to her. She, too, has claims on the word “favorite” in my eye. A violet ribbon on her neck designates her stakes in my newest flock. She is the exact opposite of the one now asleep in my lap. Oh, I have said of each, you are perfect.
I slept the entire night last night for the first time in recent memory. I got up very late and went downstairs to find the fire out. The kitchen felt dry, however. The day outside it is raw and gloomy. The melting snow betrays all of the winterlong efforts exerted to try to make the house warm. Black ash is everywhere on the snow, as are the remains of a frozen pumpkin that I had tossed to the geese and a bag of potatoes that had frozen when I mistakenly left them in the living room for a misguided day or two. I meant to toss them to the geese, but before I did they became buried, then embedded in the snow on the back porch. All things conspire to remind me how deficient I can be at managing winter.
But I came downstairs this morning quite without dread. Three of the four tiny kitchen lambs danced for me. A few embers left in the new wood stove caught at the paper and bark pyramid I built in it. The sight of a fire in the stove through the glass doors is an outstanding pleasure. A loaf of bread I was too tired to cut into last night is still in its pan in the oven. There was some coffee left in the pot to heat and have a cup in between feeding the older lambs. They are being weaned over the next two weeks, as they are beyond the age for needing milk replacer. They eat grain and now shall have the very best of my latest hay. Their brothers remain in the pen in the summer kitchen. The littlest are light enough to leap the walls of the beautiful new pen, to race up the stairs to stand by the door when they hear my voice from the kitchen answering the ring of the telephone. She’s here. Hooray. Bottles.
The main focus on the farm is shifting to the carriage house. The shift has been gradual. I love it when that happens. The scale of that building is quite different from the others on this farm. And it pleases me so. I brought milk, early morning, to the slowly-being-weaned group of replacement ewe lambs who are now living in one of the horse stalls. The loveliest one, Cordelia, still gets a bottle three times a day. She isn’t picking up the way she should and I don’t want her to compete with the others for milk. They all get hay. The lambs get a sweet feed, a sort of molasses-laden granola that smells yummy enough for me to wish I could eat. The cow doesn’t. And so she puts her enormous brown fuzzy head with the fluffy orange ears over the stall gate trying to reach the grain. The lambs are enchanted with her and run to her, stretching as tall as they can to try to touch Lady Agatha Van der Horn’s face. Nothing can delight me more. The two white goats divide their time equally between the barn and the carriage house. I didn’t know how to have them disbudded when they were babies, and now their horns make life a little less idyllic than it would be without them. But they are pretty, those two, Celeste Baldwin and her daughter Virginia. They are blocky little things, chunky and strong. They eat a lot and always look as if they are quite pregnant. Celeste is with certainty, but I suspect Virginia lost hers in January. They like to be in the carriage house when I am and come to the kitchen door for water when they grow tired of eating snow. They don’t have access to the brook as do the sheep and are dependent on what they can get nearer the house.
There is still an egg eater in the chicken coop. I don’t know if it is another chicken or a skunk. It can’t be a rat, as the four wild barn cats now live there full-time. Oh, I do see them in the barn on occasion, but it is the carriage house where the main events in their lives take place. Pretty little Perkins still stares at me and purrs from a safe distance, asking for milk. I give her some of the lambs’ milk replacer in an old cow waterer. The carriage house cats all come out for milk. They catch their own dinners, thank you very much, and I no longer have holes in the feed bags that fill the center floor of the building. I’ve been offered help from two quarters with the building and have gratefully accepted it. One person has taken it upon himself to do the carpentry that is necessary there to restore one of the existing horse stalls and hay drops so the goats can winter there well and create some new features that will enable me to better use the space. Soon the goats shall freshen and live there with their kids. The milking stands are already installed. It is my farm in miniature in that building. I shall love it soon again. I think one of the nice things about today is that it stretches unadorned before me. I expect no one. No interruptions besides the normally reoccurring ones. No people to deter me from my attempts to perform my appointed tasks. A possibility that I might live the day correctly or, at least, as I see correctly. “To make something better and nothing worse.”
I keep notebooks. Those of this past year have now become too numerous. They are fine notebooks, five subject ones with brown paper dividers containing two pockets each in which to keep things. It became quickly apparent that they needed tables of contents so I’d know what was in them, and so I took to numbering their pages. “Personal: Page 2”; “Where is it?” consisting of a list of things I commonly put in a good safe place, a place that is logical, safe, and self-explanatory until the moment, three or four months later, when I can’t remember where the safe place is. My mind is visual. Where I’ve put something on a day when the view from the window is green and light is hard if not impossible for me to envision in the dead of the winter.
It snows. The temperature has dropped. The kitchen is warm. With great comfort the lambs sleep, one like a rag doll in my lap. It is a Sunday. I am determined to change the tablecloth on Sundays. It can be reversed during the week, but a newly ironed, starched tablecloth should appear at least once in a while. I am determined it shall be on Sunday. I’ve tube-fed the lamb in my arms once again. His head rests on the crook of my elbow. I long to get up and cut into the loaf of bread still sitting in the oven, but I am reluctant to move the lamb. The fire sings. I am grateful for the new stove. It is the sweetest time of day.
ABUNDANCE
THERE IS still another most beautiful of all lambs here on my lap. The lambs of the past few days have had the large-headed, blocky Dorset look that I need, or at the moment think I need, as does this fine little creature. And Fancy Bewling, which just became her name, has a thick curly fleece and great charm.
There is a long list of names in the section of my workbook entitled “farm.” I’ve chosen approximately twelve, to date, for the thirty lambs in the carriage house, summer kitchen, and house. Only one of the barn lambs is named of yet. They are tending to blend in with one another, at the moment, that is. However, they are beginning to be distinguished by braided yarn necklaces and shall all be named soon. Twenty-six of the last names on the list are from the phone book. All versions of Mc or Mac with a few Fitzes thrown in for good measure. They would seem to be a Scottish flock. I tried to name the new East Friesian Whilimena but it didn’t take. Whilimena Fitzwilliam. She has become, and it does suit her far better, Phillida Greenleaf. The Greenleaf is after her father, William Greenleaf Sire, now dead. Still mourned. Mariposa Fitzgerald, twins Philipa and Phoebe Turnbottom, Victoria Gainsborough, Cordelia Fitzpatrick and her twin Carlotta (who lives in the barn), and Diedre McCormack are all named. Satisfactorily, I might add. But some of my better names, such as Marvey Chapman and Candida Lycett Green have not found the right lamb to bear their designation. They are too good not to use, however, and among the substantial number to be retained and the eight dairy ewes I am buying in July there shall soon be enough sheep to wear them all.
With the exception of a well-waxed floor, which shall manifest by afternoon, my studio is at last ready for me to work more comfortably. It isn’t possible to explain to workmen why an unfinished job can be so disastrous to my life. And so, when a lamp was left only partially rewired, its shade, its huge shade, I might add, placed on my recently acquired highboy, and the rest of its works all ov
er my writing table, I was much hindered from using the room to its proper advantage. For three weeks. It is now repaired and the room is only an hour away from being perfect.
I have bought everything (from a rather modest wish list) in the past four or five months that I care to buy. Books. Books. Books. Garnet velvet for winter curtains in the dining room, a tomato red telephone on which to make calls about the book (which, incidentally, paid for the phone), a beautifully made copy of an old French clock to help keep me working a set number of hours. I’ve bought five or six more woolen blankets from the Salvation Army. I collect them with a passion. And hay. Hay. Hay. That is it. It is now of interest to me to begin to repair some things. The socket in the lamp in the studio, as an example. And some broken Royal Copenhagen dishes I bought when I first came here. They were too beautiful to throw away. If I am careful with the repair, the single crack in each will be barely noticeable when they are displayed on the long shelf in the kitchen. My copper teakettle requires resoldering, as does a silver plate hot-water bottle I received as a gift a long time ago. It received a dent on its seam when it fell through the then-open grate between the studio on the second floor and the kitchen. It is a good time now to lay out some of the winter blankets while there is still snow to clean them and a warm fire to dry them near. And my collection, again from the Salvation Army, of four-dollar Pendelton wool shirts is due for a hand wash and dry on wooden hangers behind the wood stove.
I’ve adopted, once again after long disuse, a routine in which to do housework that allows for frequent excursions to lambs, now in no fewer than four places in three buildings, sheep in only two places, as well as cow, chickens, goats, et cetera. In fact the routine interrupts itself, but on such a regular basis that it hurries me along, rushing madly to beat the clock.
The carriage house lambs are doing well. I sat with them yesterday, for a while, in the afternoon, braiding tassels to attach to the violet I-am-to-stay necklaces that they so proudly wear. The better to remember and use their names. They prefer to be closer to eye level with me, I’ve noticed. Sheep as well as lambs. Some came to be petted who never raise up their faces to me when I am outside of their pen. I took a bag of yarn and some scissors and sat down in the middle of them. The black ram lambs, who are now Spencer and Thurgood Churchill (Randolph didn’t make the cut), are in there also. As well as a fine, very fine, East Friesian cross ram lamb who is for sale as breeding stock. It would be so nice to make ribbons for the black twin lambs as well, but that feels as if I’m going a bit over the top.
Mrs. Hudson has been in my thoughts a great deal of late. The housekeeper of Sherlock Holmes. I’m having the most wonderful time with the series of Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes books written by Laurie King. “Mrs. Hudson, I’m home,” shouts Holmes. The smell of beeswax furniture polish and freshly baked scones, Mary will observe, indicates he was expected.
The scones are what are getting to me. And the memory of the kind of hot baths I’ve been, on the occasion of having thawed pipes, able to indulge in my huge claw-foot tub, the kind that Russell also indulges in. And so I tried to bake scones on the top of my new wood stove. The first batch was a moderate success. I used the bottom of a quiche pan, well floured, directly on the griddle. I cut wedges of a round of buttermilk scone dough, firmly laced with some prunes which had been marinated in red wine, opened the damper, first mistake, and put on three very nice triangles of dough under a nicely rounded copper pot I bought a long time ago in France. The bottoms of the scones entertained the idea of burning. They scorched. Slightly. I turned them over onto the floured quiche pan bottom and cooked them a trifle too long again. However, and there is a very big however here, the steam that rose from them when I split them, the texture, and the aroma were absolutely perfect! Now, I don’t know if Mrs. Hudson baked hers inside of the range or on its top. Neither Mrs. nor Mr. Holmes divulged that secret. And I don’t know how she brought them from the kitchen to the table, keeping the insides hot enough to steam upon splitting them and thereby melting the butter. Herein lies their ability to enchant. But I do know that these, at least these without the bit of crust that Samantha, dog extraordinaire, was given, were worth the single-word paragraph written by Mary Russell at the onset of Justice Hall: “Scones.”
I’ve come close to the beeswaxed furniture look that Mrs. Hudson so lovingly achieved with a commercial product called Future. It makes the five wooden doors in my kitchen and the cupboard gleam with the soft shine that my living room furniture used to have when I could buy beeswax-and-turpentine furniture polish in London. Now that I have neighbors with bees I may try to blend the mix myself. Spring cleaning.
Spring shall be here in a matter of days. The sheep that became stranded in the snow this morning was looking for something green on which to nibble. She is very old. Has lived here for a very long time and considered it a reasonable occupation to head on out to find a bit of grass. I got her back, half lifting, half dragging, to a runoff which divides my pastures, through the mud and onto a bit of very water-covered but semisolid earth. There she found the only green plants, about half an inch high, on which to nibble. The sheep are getting the greenest hay I’ve fed out this year. It is so very nice that I’m back to feeding it in feeders to reduce waste. Nonetheless, they seem to want fresh green pasture instead.
This day the air positively gleams. The sky is Connecticut blue. It is crystal clear. The outdoor thermometer indicates that a long-overdue January thaw is upon us. In March. Change has come slowly upon me. Sometimes I have had to force change. Demand it. Immediately. Usually during times of disaster. I read once that people in concentration camps had a better chance of survival when they didn’t think about what had been left behind. I wonder what then happened upon escape or release. I used that piece of information, on occasion, to guide me through the heartbreak and despair that have often accompanied my effort to build this farm and become, myself, a farmer. Now change is before me once again. And while I make no demands upon myself to adjust to my escape and release from the burdens of banks and mortgages, those changes are happening slowly, quietly, gently, of their own accord.
While this February was the worst I have ever known, and the damage to the farm nearly catastrophic, the damage to me was slight. I had what I needed to live through it. Without being battered. Plenty of books to read in the middle of the night when worry and fear awoke me. Some nice chocolate and crystallized ginger occasionally to add to the pleasure. And the absolute freedom occasioned by my mortgage being paid in full. No disaster was compounded by the threat of losing my home. I become gradually, gently, slowly removed from the brutality that this life has sometimes occasioned. The lambs who survived this winter are so very beautiful. And we shall start anew.
THE LORD’S GREAT PROFETS
THERE ARE days so filled with abundance and goodwill and joy that are in so rare a combination that they are to be treasured. Yesterday was such a day. I’ve been wanting to build a cart in which to haul manure from my barn for quite some time. In this instance, quite some time means a few years. The cart of my dreams was described in a book called Farm Conveniences and How to Make Them, published by O. Judd in 1900 and Lyons Press about one hundred years later. The author, who does not seem to be identified, said it took him several years to work out the principles behind the construction of the cart. It needed balance, strength, and maneuverability. However, upon publication of the nineteenth-century version of written plans, small type, no diagrams, one picture, he believed he had achieved the perfect design. I suspect he was right. I shall, this summer, find out.
The wheels of the cart are to be four feet in diameter. The axle is fixed under the upper side bar, an unusual placement. Presumably this helps the cart to be balanced. The cart itself is eight feet long; therefore only two feet of cart stick out on either side of the wheels. The handles accommodate the length of a set of movable extenders, modifying the design, making them proportionally shorter. As I do not want the extenders, it shall be I
who shall have to determine their length. I may take a great risk and change the design to accommodate shorter handles. I’ve been eyeing a particularly fine set of long handles in Tractor Supply. They are varnished. Long. A chestnut brown. They may become the cart handles of choice. Some other designs I’ve seen for similar carts include bottom slats that pull out so the manure falls out as it is drawn across the fields. That requires the services of a very well-trained donkey, however, to draw the cart as I pull out the slats. I’ve failed, to date, to use Nunzio to advantage. So the first cart I am planning to build is to be one pushed by hand.
Nonetheless, the very first hurdle has been to find an axle and wheels. Whenever I am being driven around the countryside, I look for wheels. They are not hard to find but they are hard to come by. There would seem to be many, rusted or painted, leaning as decoration around gateposts or on lawns. As tempting as the thought is to drive up to someone’s house to offer to buy the wheels, there never seems to be an accompanying axle. Axles are not in my realm of understanding as yet. I haven’t looked at any closely enough to understand how friction doesn’t bind them to whatever they are carrying; nonetheless, the ideal combination for me is a set of wheels and the very same axle by which the wheels are accustomed to be borne. Therefore, upon visiting a shepherd in Norwich to buy some Horned Dorset sheep, where I spied in a field some wheels that seemed to be hooked up to an axle, my first question was, “How much would you take for them?” His reply was, “I don’t know.” I knew how much I had to spend. He didn’t know how much he wanted. I left, a Horned Dorset ram and ewe in tow, leaving the wheels and axle behind.
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