Sheepish

by Catherine Friend

  Any sheepish person understands that although you want your accountant, doctor, and dentist to like you, it’s not the end of the world if they don’t. But because shearers are almost as endangered as sheep, nothing is more important than keeping your shearer happy.

  Freakishly Exotic People

  We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.

  —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

  Because ancient cartographers didn’t have the whole picture when constructing maps, they left the undiscovered lands blank. Or they filled in those blanks with fanciful images of what those mysterious lands might hold—“sea serpents, dragons, griffins, hippogriffs, and freakishly exotic people,” writes Peter Turchi in Maps of the Imagination.

  Farms and farming may be one of the blanks on your map, and you’ve likely filled in the blanks not with sea serpents, but with red barns, black-and-white cows, pink pigs, fluffy sheep, and sturdy farmers who work night and day in the wind and rain and muck and manure. Talk about “freakishly exotic people.”

  As two of those “exotic” people, Melissa and I must find a market for our products. We find a market for our lamb—people who eat meat and care about how the animals are raised. And just for the record, lamb (the meat) does not come from lambs (the babies), but from animals nearly adult-sized.

  We struggle, however, when it comes to a market for the wool. We ship it off to a wholesale wool warehouse, which is what most shepherds do, even if it’s not very lucrative. How unlucrative? We recently sent three years’ worth of wool to a warehouse in Illinois, where the fleeces were sorted and graded. Based on the grade, we were paid a certain price per pound. Our check came a few months later, and was for $382. By the time we pay the shearer and buy food for the shearing party, our annual expenses are $100, or $300 for the three years. Subtract the $300 in expenses from $382 for a profit of $82, or $27 per year.

  Wow. We won’t be putting anyone through college on our wool profits. Wool prices have been so low that some smaller farmers just compost the fleece or use it to mulch their gardens.

  The other option is to sell the wool directly to those people I’m going to delicately call fiber “fans.” As we consider this option, I spend a little time with shepherds who sell their wool to fiber fans. I quickly decide that spinning and knitting and weaving are all major time wasters and I want no part of them. We won’t be getting involved in the fiber world. Besides, these people seem a bit loopy and dewy-eyed when it comes to yarn. Not us. We have our feet firmly planted on the ground instead of our heads stuck up in some fleecy sky. But because we produce wool, we now and then brush elbows with spinners, knitters, weavers, people who are, in my opinion, truly freakish and exotic. So when I say fiber “fans,” I confess that I really mean “freaks.”

  A friend, who unfortunately falls into this category, explains her stash. “I love buying yarn, of every color and size, and then I put it in my closet and never get around to knitting it.” She laughs. “I can’t open my closet.” I imagine that if she did, fuzzy skeins of yarn would tumble around her head like dead Tribbles.

  A fiber fan will spend hours and hours knitting a wool sock—a sock, people—when there are machines out there able to manufacture a perfectly fine pair of wool socks for under $20. There’s even a “Sock Summit” with the motto: “Taking Sock Knitting Almost Too Far.” Forget Extreme Snowboarding, or Extreme Mountain Biking. Recently, when the online registration for this Extreme Knitting event began, 40,000 people tried to register and crashed the system.

  In my earlier search for words to describe loving sheep, I came across the British poet Gower, born around 1330. This man had a serious affection for sheep, but an even greater love for wool. Here’s what he had to say, speaking directly to his fluffy paramour:The beautiful, the white, the delightful one.

  The love of you sings and binds,

  so that the hearts of those who make merchandise of you

  are not able to disengage themselves from you.

  Wow. The love of you sings? Gower must have been the original fiber freak. Why someone would be so enamored of wool escapes me, but if I alter Gower’s words slightly, they become, “The love of ewe sings.” This I get.

  Fiber fans are so in love with the process that they’ll make the same thing over and over again. My friend Kathy and I take the train to Chicago. While I write and read, Kathy knits a pair of fingerless gloves. As the train chugs along, I look over now and then to see her progress. Good, the eight-inch glove is almost done.

  Five minutes later there is nothing on her needles but an inch of knitting. “You’re on the second glove now?”

  “No, I made a mistake and am starting over.”

  Yikes. A few hours later she has the glove almost done, but then begins unraveling it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I think I’m going to change the pattern a little,” she says calmly as she unravels nearly the entire glove.

  “A little?” I say weakly. “I’m not sure I can take it if you rip that glove apart a third time.”

  “Frogging is part of knitting,” Kathy says casually.

  “Frogging?”

  “When you take something apart, you rip it, rip it ... ribbit, ribbit.”

  The next week, Melissa and I pull on our rubber barn boots, yank on heavy leather gloves, then head outside to spend two hours pitching straw from the barn floor, straw soaked with cattle piss and caked with manure.

  As I tell Melissa about the frogging, and about the “freakishly exotic people” who knit socks, we start pitching wet cow poop.

  “Weirdos,” we both say.

  Spinning in Circles

  As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes.

  —MEL BROOKS

  If we don’t make much money selling to the wholesale wool warehouses, and we feel it’s wise to stay as far away as possible from the fiber freaks, what other options do we have? None. It’s either one or the other, and we don’t like either option. So I decide that perhaps, to better understand the fiber people, I should get more in tune with our wool. I will learn how to spin. I will do so in a grounded way, my level-headedness protecting me from the lure of fiber. So the next year I retain a fleece for myself during our March shearing party. It sits in the feed room for another month until spring arrives and I find the courage to give this a try.

  My goals are grand. First I’ll clean the fleece, then card it into roving, which means fluffing it. I will spin the roving into yarn, and knit the yarn into something to wear. I buy a spinning wheel and I ask our friend Kim to teach me how to spin.

  Kim is someone who can bake a soufflé, starch and iron his dress shirts, knit a pair of Fair Isle gloves, watch TV, and spin. All at the same time. I “iron” by sticking my clothes back into the dryer until the heat removes 50 percent of the wrinkles. In our house, a spinach soufflé looks very much like a frozen pizza. Despite this, we still love Kim.

  Spinning’s supposed to work like this: Depress a pedal with your foot, the wheel starts spinning, the bobbin turns, the roving pulls from your hand and through a small opening, unfortunately named the orifice, and then around the bobbin. Start the wheel spinning with your hand, then take over with the pedal while your hand gently pinches the roving so it twists and gets sucked through the orifice.

  I create my own technique. Start the wheel spinning with your hand, then push the pedal so hard the roving breaks. Stop the wheel, curse softly, then thread the roving back through the orifice, and begin again. I recommend repeating this step approximately twenty-seven times, or until you feel close to tears. On the twenty-eighth attempt you get the speed right and you pinch the roving just right and the yarn begins to twist and accumulate on the bobbin in a mannerly fashion.

  Yarn is supposed to be slender, and relatively uniform. Theoretically, one pound of woo
l can be spun into ten miles of yarn, but not if I’m spinning. Within a space of ten seconds, my yarn goes from the size of my thumb all the way down to dental floss, then back up to thumb-sized. Kim smiles encouragingly and explains this uneven type of yarn, with its slubs and irregularities, is called designer yarn and is highly valued.

  Right.

  Of course when the yarn is thin dental floss, it breaks, which means I have to stop, rethread it through the little orifice, and repeat my twenty-eight attempts to get the thing spinning again.

  Why am I finding this so hard? My mom is creative. My grandmother was the Queen of Crafty. She once sent us a branch cemented into a white mug, the “tree” hung with peanuts. My favorite was her Kewpie doll with the holes poked in its head to convert it into a talcum powder dispenser. Given this background, and given that spinning is a craft, I should be able to conquer it. Millions before me have learned how to spin a plethora of animal and vegetable fibers: alpaca, angora goat, angora rabbit, buffalo, camel, cashmere goat, cat hair, cotton, dog hair, flax, guanaco, hemp, llama, mohair goat, musk ox, ramie, silk, vicuña, wool, and yak.

  What’s so important about spinning? Abby Franquemont had this to say in Spin-Off magazine:Without spinning, there is no civilization, no technology, no history, no agriculture, no animal husbandry, no permanent settlements, and the whole of human history just did not happen. Without what I’m doing now, making yarn, there is no life as we know it. Cultures lacking in textile production capability don’t generally advance beyond hunting and gathering.

  Yes, the iPad’s cool, but can it make the same claim? I think not!

  The first sheep arrived in the American colonies in 1609, and by 1664 Massachusetts alone had over 100,000 sheep. The American colonists were all rabid spinners, determined to free themselves from Britain’s expensive cloth. Entire families carried their spinning wheels to church and spun while the minister spoke. Spinning contests were held in the public squares, festivals that attracted huge crowds much as we gather today to watch car derbies or football games or marathons.

  The colonies were so serious about spinning that they required it. Massachusetts passed a law requiring each family to spin a pound of yarn a week for thirty weeks out of each year, and the colony charged a penalty of twelve pence for every pound a family fell short. Many families began supporting an unmarried relative or friend in the house to perform the task, which is where the word “spinster” came from.

  Even the kids spun. They were so adept that five children under the age of thirteen could spin, weave, and sew all the clothes for thirty people.

  To add a rich sheen of irony to all this, my Friend ancestors came to America sometime after the Mayflower but before the Revolutionary War, which makes them American colonists. They surely struggled against the high price of English textiles. They likely spun with the rest of the colonists. The spinning gene must get weaker with every generation, since I obviously haven’t inherited it.

  Luckily, there are still some people who possess this gene. Among the people who’ve connected with our farm over the years through my blogs and books is an avid spinner who offers to spin one of our fleeces all the way into yarn. Sure, why not. I’m certainly not getting very far on my own. Sherry is coming to Rochester, so we agree to meet at her hotel. She’s in her late fifties, with silver-gray hair and a great smile. Melissa and I shake her hand, then she hugs us both. I take an instant liking to her.

  We sit down in the fancy, hushed lobby of the Kahler Hotel. When I open the black plastic bag, the scents of hot wool and lanolin and dried manure float up. “Sorry about the smell,” I say.

  Without hesitation, Sherry plunges her bare hands into the filthy fleece. “Oh, this is lovely, just lovely. I’m really looking forward to cleaning this up and spinning it.” (See what I mean? Fiber freak.) She pulls out handfuls as she continues to praise the fleece, not caring that people are now turning to stare.

  Sherry will drag our dirty fleece home with her to Colorado and return in a few months with the finished product. Then I’m contacted by a woman from the East Coast named Karen who loves to dye wool. She offers to turn one of our fleeces into roving, the fluffy stuff spinners use, then dye it. Slightly curious, I send her a box of raw wool, then promptly forget about it. I don’t expect much from the fleeces we give to Karen and Sherry, but if these crazy women want to waste—I mean—spend their time this way, fine.

  My wheel continues to torture and confound me. I realize I’m not interested enough in the craft to really commit to learning it. Besides, why should I spend a gazillion hours spinning and knitting when I can buy a wool sweater at Macy’s for $50? After a few more tries, I tuck the wheel into a corner of our living room and turn it into what Melissa likes to call a Dust Accumulation Research Project. Clearly, our wool market will continue to be the wildly unlucrative wholesale warehouse. I won’t be spinning fifty fleeces into yarn anytime soon.

  The patron saint of spinners is, interestingly enough, Saint Catherine. She was a Christian martyr in Alexandria. In 307 AD, she was condemned to be torn apart by the spokes of the wheel.

  Well. No wonder.

  Sheep Sex and Other Natural Disasters

  Lambing, I felt, would take place automatically, and would be the sheep’s business, not mine.

  —E. B. WHITE

  Shepherds. Sheep. Shearer. Market for wool. Now, for a truly sheepish life, one needs baby sheep.

  Starting somewhere mid-May, our ewes paw the ground, turn in circles, and bleat. Then a red bulb of fluid exits each sheep’s vagina. Little lamb noses and little lamb toes appear from the same place, and if all goes well, each lamb enters our world with a moist plop onto the ground, followed by a stringy mass of blood and stuff called the placenta.

  Lordy. Personally, I’d prefer a stork.

  I have no business birthing babies. Unfortunately, I don’t know this until I find myself up to my ankles in placentas that first year. If only I’d realized that if you allow a male sheep and a female sheep to have sex, five months later baby lambs will arrive whether you are emotionally ready or not.

  As shepherds have done for thousands of years, we let our ewes give birth outside on pasture during warm weather. In the mid-1950s the U.S. Department of Agriculture convinced shepherds it was smarter to bring the sheep into the barn and lamb during the winter as a way to spread out farm tasks. Farmers would have time to lamb because they didn’t have any field work. But to do this, farmers must get up several times a night to check on the lambs, for a wet lamb not dried off quickly enough will become hypothermic and die. The barns protect the babies from the snow, wind, and ice, and can be warm inside from all the body heat that the sheep give off. But barns are often damp and moldy, so sheep in barns can get sick, and sometimes being crowded in together interferes with their mothering abilities.

  Instead, we time our breeding so the sheep give birth outside in May when it’s warm. Instead of being kept in a pen, the ewe chooses her own spot to give birth. She has plenty of room so there are few mothering problems. She knows which lambs are hers and she takes good care of them. We believe so strongly in lambing outside that we only built a three-sided barn, open to the south. Why would we ever need a barn for winter lambing?

  Our first year of lambing does not go as expected. The farm picks me up and spins me around and around until I’m dizzy. I expect the sheep will give birth one at a time, much as people take numbers at a customer service desk and wait their turn. That four ewes all decide to give birth at the same time seems a really bad idea.

  I don’t expect them to give birth during rainstorms. I don’t imagine that a first-time mother might let one of her lambs nurse, but then get confused and reject the other one, which means I must feed the second lamb with a bottle. I don’t expect to come into such intimate contact with so many animal bodily fluids.

  I don’t expect that a ewe, right in the middle of giving birth, will try to steal another ewe’s newborn lamb fifteen feet away, even as her own l
amb is partially out of the birth canal. I can still close my eyes and see that image. The poor ewe’s mothering hormones were so high she couldn’t help herself.

  Know how irritating backseat drivers are? During lambing I become the most irritating backseat farmer on the planet. “What’s happening? Something’s going wrong? The lamb’s dead! The ewe’s going to die! We’re all going to die!” I drive us both crazy.

  The entire four weeks of lambing is such a shock that after the very last lamb is born, I sit on the front step and cry. We’ve made it. Lambing is over. Melissa joins me on the steps and tears up as well: “I have to wait an entire year before we can do this again.” I know opposites attract, but sometimes Melissa and I stretch this theory a bit too far.

  Lambing once again happens the following spring, which thrills Melissa and unthrills me. And the third year? Let’s just say that my anxiety at lambing is one of the most consistent forces on the planet. After three years it’s obvious that the whole birthing thing is considerably outside my comfort zone.

  E. B. White wrote, “A lamb, newly born, is in a state of considerable disrepair.” He ain’t kidding. My fear of lambs in “considerable disrepair” likely sends people into two camps: those who are saddened that I don’t find the miracle of birth beautiful and profound and deeply moving, and those who, if thrust into the same situation, would prefer to be in the house with me, eating Tostitos and revising Chapter Seven.

  Melissa and I both think lambing will get easier for me, but it only gets harder. The more I know what can go wrong, the more I worry.

  So when the fourth lambing season rolls around, I get smart. I fire myself.

  We find the perfect replacement in Amelia, the teenage daughter of my friend Phyllis. Amelia is between colleges with time on her hands. She is tall, strong, and beautiful, with mischievous eyes and a sparkling smile.