Very young lambs need to be fed four times a day because their tummies are too small to hold much. It takes a while for a lamb to catch on to the bottle—the nipple doesn’t feel right in the mouth, so the lamb spits it out. My first year as a lamb nanny was hard because I was terrified that the babies were going to starve. I’d spend ten minutes trying to get a new bottle lamb to nurse and end up in tears because she wouldn’t. I’d go out to the barn every hour, sit down on an overturned five-gallon bucket, and try again.
Experience has taught me that a small lamb, once it consumes plenty of colostrum, might go a day without eating. By then it’s very hungry and will suck on the bottle in desperation. Suddenly the incandescent light bulb goes on: Holy Cow! There’s milk in here!
As our ewes mature and give birth to more and more triplets, I grow proficient at dealing with bottle lambs. My skills progress to the point I can feed five babies at once—two bottles in each hand, and one between them. But when the lambs are about three weeks old, they begin pushing each other off the bottles and maneuvering for the best spot. Chaos ensues. I must feed them one at a time, so I pick up a lamb and drape it across my lap. The weather is warm, the sun streaks through the open barn door, chickens coo happily around me, and I have a baby on my lap with a fiercely wagging tail making happy, slurpy sounds as it drinks. There are worse ways to spend an hour.
I don’t like keeping them in the barn all day, so I set up a temporary pen outside with a mix of shade and sun. Some of the lambs quickly become so tame that I take them for short walks with me. One year, three little lambs follow me all around the yard, single file. Mary had a little lamb, indeed.
The craziest year, however, is when we have sixteen bottle lambs, thanks to triplets and a few mothering mishaps on the pasture. Feeding sixteen becomes a major nightmare, so we buy a bucket designed to feed many lambs at once. It’s a white, five-gallon bucket with ten black nipples around the top. Running from each nipple down into the bucket is a clear plastic tube. All the lambs have to do is suck up the milk, and they’re good to go.
The bucket, unfortunately, has been designed by an idiot. The milk must come all the way up the tube to reach the nipple, which means the lamb sucks and sucks, getting nothing but air. Just as milk reaches the nipple, the hungry lamb gives up. I stand there and watch the milk slide back down the tube. Acck! Try again! I get the lamb latched back onto the nipple, she sucks, and just as the milk reaches the top of the bucket she gives up. We need a bucket with the nipples on the bottom so the lambs get milk immediately. We would have invested in this, or in one of the many other devices shepherds have invented to make feeding bottle lambs easier, but then I figure something out. Many people living in the country want sheep but don’t want to make their own.
I put an ad in the paper every spring, and nearly every year I have more orders for bottle lambs than I can fill. Melissa brings a triplet in, I feed it for a few days until it reliably drinks from the bottle, then I call the person at the top of the list.
When the very first buyer came, I carried the two lambs to their car, all the while filling the buyers’ heads with everything they needed to know to keep the lambs healthy. We talked and talked, and I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t leaving.
Oh. I was still holding the lambs. They’re hard to give up. Now I’ve learned to pick up the lamb, kiss its little head, then hand it immediately to the new owner before I change my mind. I’m not embarrassed they see me kiss the lamb because I want them to know the lamb is valued, and that I expect them to value it as well. As each car drives away, I sigh, missing the lambs already.
A Gaggle of Goddesses
It’s the friends you can call up at 4:00 AM that matter.
—MARLENE DIETRICH
Amelia helps us until she graduates from college. Then the next May she gets a summer job crewing for a tall-masted charter sailboat off the coast of Maine and is unavailable to help. What? She’d rather have a sailing adventure and earn money than spend two more weeks outside in the rain and mud, surrounded by babies? What is with kids these days?
Of course, she’s no longer a teenager but a confident young woman who can’t build her life around helping us every May. Melissa and I look at each other. Going back to having me as her full-time pasture assistant doesn’t appeal to either of us. A few days every spring is bad enough—but the entire three weeks?
As the next lambing season nears, I put out the word for “Amelia substitutes” and our friend Mary H., the one who’d dubbed me Mrs. Muffin, steps up to the plate. Mary brings her sharp wit and great laugh. After a week with us, having been peed on and pooped on and stepped on—all by sheep—Mary is both exhausted and exhilarated. She finds the whole experience “mindblowing.” As a horse person, Mary wanted to use her knowledge of cutting horses out of a herd, but thanks to the flocking behavior of sheep, horse techniques won’t work. Mary quickly comes to appreciate Melissa’s ability to see the world through the eyes of a sheep, and she starts doing the same thing. Soon the two of them work well together, almost without speaking, finding the same rhythm that Melissa and Amelia share. Mary calls it a ballet, a sort of pas de deux between shepherd and sheep. I call it a damned relief that I don’t have to be out there myself in Full Anxiety Mode.
When Mary arrives, I list the ground rules: Always close gates behind you. Never go into the ram pen by yourself. And no naming anything. The second day she’s here, Mary comes in from the pasture bubbling over with the birth she’s witnessed. “Brutus Maximus is so huge.”
“No naming the animals,” I remind her.
The next day, she tells me about Hoppy McHopper, who does much leaping straight up into the air.
“No naming the animals.”
“Oh, yeah, right.”
A few days later Melissa and Mary roar up on the four-wheeler with an impossibly small lamb in Mary’s arms. They’d gone out early in the morning to check on the ewes. Through the fog, they saw a ewe on the crest of the East Pasture hill. One new lamb stood beside her, and two lay on the ground. The women’s hearts sank. The ewe had triplets, but two were dead. They motored close enough to see the dead lambs were covered in blood, as if the ewe had never cleaned them off. But when the smallest of the “dead” lambs started to move, Melissa and Mary flung up their hands. “It’s alive!” they screamed. Mary caught the lamb and quickly tucked it inside her jacket to warm it up. Melissa determined that the other lamb was, sadly, dead, then quickly examined the standing lamb. It had a nice belly so it had nursed. The tiny baby in Mary’s arms had not.
They call ahead, so by the time they reach the house I’ve thawed some frozen colostrum. I cannot believe how small the lamb is, maybe three pounds instead of the usual six to ten pounds. Melissa threads the rubber tube down its throat and I pour in the warm colostrum. I set up a heating pad in a box and the lamb spends the day in the entryway. Now and then I let Sophie, our maternal half Great Dane, come inspect the lamb. I let her give the lamb a thorough licking because I think the stimulation will help.
Later that day Mary calls on the walkie-talkie. “How’s Little Bit? Is he eating?”
Little Bit?
I give up. Little Bit sleeps in his box on the floor in Mary’s room that first night, so they totally bond. The next day he’s drinking enthusiastically and in a few hours he’s climbing out of the box and peeing on the floor. Mary spends every spare minute cuddling the lamb she considers to be a real fighter. He’d been born during a cool night, had no nourishment, yet had survived. A few days later he’s out in the barn cavorting with babies over twice his size. I keep him longer than usual to make sure he’s healthy, then I find a great home for him. Mary reluctantly hands the baby over to the young woman, glaring at me. I’m not sure she’s ever forgiven me for selling Little Bit.
In the years since, Mary has come to realize it isn’t a great idea to get too attached to any of the babies, so the naming has slowed down a bit. She just calls them all “Lambie Doodle.”
; Melissa has her pasture goddesses, but I am the Goddess of Laundry. One day after a ewe gives birth, Mary brings in a bag full of dirty towels that they’d used to clean off lambs. I gingerly carry the bag to the washing machine, avert my eyes, and add it to the load of jeans. All goes well. But when the washer’s done and I’m pulling Melissa’s jeans from the load of clean clothing, something cold and long and slimy leaps from the jeans and wraps itself around my wrist several times. I shriek, but only in a brave, mature way, then see this same filmy stuff on Melissa’s clean pants, one glob right next to my other hand.
I summon Melissa and Mary to the laundry room. “What is this? What is this? What is this?” (An effective technique for communicating distress is to ask the same question several times in a loud, possibly frantic voice.)
Melissa pulls the goop off the pants with her bare hands, examines it, then pronounces it to be the film or sac that the lambs are born in, sort of a biological Saran Wrap. It must have been on one of the towels. I might have begun jumping up and down at this point.
Mary grins but shakes her head. “What’s the big deal? At least it’s clean.” She’s grown far too comfortable with sheep bodily fluids, which is why she is a Pasture Goddess.
Ugly rumors have begun circulating that I then walked around the laundry room shaking my hands and saying, “Icky, icky, icky.” These rumors are totally unfounded.
Mary helps as long as she can but then must return to her life. Enter Bonnie, a high school English teacher who calls herself a farmaholic, just the sort of person we love. She’s also the woman who’d been so disappointed during shearing when I’d decided she lacked the weight to stomp the wool. Once I get to know her better, I realize she has such determination and drive that she would have simply imagined herself heavier and done a fine job of packing those fleeces.
School’s out late May, so she joins us for the last week of lambing after Mary has left. Bonnie settles quickly into our routine. She’s fearless, not surprising considering her career choice. She drives the four-wheeler, chases sheep, gives shots, does everything. But there’s one thing she only does twice, and then declines. Putting the ear tag into a lamb’s ear requires punching through the thin skin. The lambs jerk because it hurts, and Bonnie decides she’s going to lose her lunch if she does any more ear tags.
Having new people on the farm forces us to slow down and see the process through their eyes. Bonnie finds the whole experience of birth intense and moving. One day she’s in the pasture by herself, keeping an eye on a ewe in labor while Melissa takes a break. After a long labor, the ewe, standing up, gives birth to twins. Bonnie watches, marveling that fifteen minutes after arriving into the world by landing on their heads, both lambs are on their feet and nursing. Many a time she and Melissa stand in the pasture watching a birth, and Bonnie wipes away tears, complaining about the wind in her eyes.
She, too, loves walking the pasture searching for placentas. This is clearly the test to use when weeding out potential pasture goddesses. Hand them a long stick stained on one end with old blood, and a paper bag, and ask them to pick up stringy placentas that may be very dry or alarmingly fresh.
I love these women, but I do worry about their sanity. However, they aren’t alone. Rancher Pachy Burns, who raises 800 sheep out west, has women flocking to her ranch to help with lambing every year. Some even pay to come. I wonder if Amelia, Mary, and Bonnie would still come if we started charging them. Perhaps we could advertise online: “Come run around the pasture until you’re winded beyond belief! Find yourself covered in pee, poop, and placenta! Experience the emotional ups and downs of farming! Only $99.95 per day.”
I know that lambing has enriched the lives of our pasture goddesses, increased their confidence, and given them a perspective they might not find living in the city. Continuing to farm just to provide people with this rich experience doesn’t make sense, but it does make it harder to stop. It feels as if we’re part of a web, one of the slender but strong threads that help city dwellers retain a connection to a way of life that, for most people, disappeared decades ago.
A Cure for Writer’s Block
Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing.
—PAUL RUDNICK
There’s no escaping a farm. The farm comes into the house on our boots and jackets, and on the feet of our dogs. On bad days, I want to be gone. Yet I can hear the animals outside, and if someone’s in distress and Melissa’s gone, I can’t ignore the problem. These are my animals, too, and I care deeply for them.
For me, there’s no escaping the worry. I wonder if worrying burns up calories. Worrying about newborn lambs is just the tip of the iceberg for me, as there are so many other things that can go wrong on the farm. I can lie awake all night imagining lambs stuck in badger holes, or lambs lost in the woods, or lambs being stalked by coyotes.
I worry about my relationship. Melissa and I are approaching thirty years together. Holy Frijoles. Not to get all hung up on symbolism, but my parents divorced after thirty years. I see my parents in so many aspects of myself that this causes some anxiety, and it isn’t helped when I hear on NPR that more people in their fifties are getting divorced than ever before. How do these people decide that life would be better by making a huge change than by staying put and finding a way to make things better? Is the situation too horrible to bear? Or too routine? Does the mountain called Going It Alone look more easily scaled than the mountain of Making It Work?
A relationship is like a well-running car—you don’t think to appreciate that it starts every day and gets you where you need to go. Only when it breaks down do you pay attention. I don’t judge others for ending relationships—my parents both seem very happy with their new lives—but the closer I come to that thirtyyear mark with Melissa, the more I wonder: How do people make it that far?
We rarely pay attention to middles. Perhaps we ignore them because they’re problematic. The middles of our beds often sag. The middles of our bodies sag. The middle of a long story told by your brother-in-law is likely to sag, and so you’ll need another beer to stay focused. Everyone needs a reason to keep going when they’re in the middle.
The middle of a long-term relationship can’t compete with the beginning. All around us, people—young, middle-aged, and elderly—are beginning new relationships, causing a buzz among family and friends. We’re energized by beginnings because they remind us of our own. Middles can’t compete with the ends, either. When I encounter a recently divorced friend, here’s what pushes my curiosity button: What caused the breakup? How did this happen? I find myself trying to be supportive and discreet, but inside I’m really desperate for details. A fight over money? Infidelity? Boredom? Some other deal breaker I’ve never heard of before? Perhaps I will see something in the sad tale to help me avoid my own relationship “crash-and-burn.”
The middle is full of cycles that can break a relationship at any time, which is why we should give ourselves more credit for getting this far. My first years together with Melissa were intense and amazing. Then we drifted into complacency, taking each other’s love for granted. The igniting spark of our relationship faded into mortgages and dental bills and fights over spending money. We drifted apart, far enough that something—I can’t even remember what—shocked us back into reconnecting. We worked harder at communicating. It was intense, and wonderful. Then we drifted back into complacency again until we once more shocked ourselves back into the relationship, and the cycle began anew. It’s like showing up in the emergency room every few years and being zapped with paddles before it’s too late.
I yearn for something, but I can’t put my finger on it. Do I yearn to know if—by following Melissa onto this farm—I’ve wasted the middle of my life? Am I supposed to be doing something else? I feel like the kid at the piñata party who’s been blindfolded, then spun around and around until he’s too dizzy to confidently take
a step forward. Life has spun me around and suddenly I’m unsure of my next step.
Something feels off. I should be happier than I am. I should be relaxed and content and comfortable in my own skin. Melissa’s not at her usual best, either. She’s tired all the time. She’s spinning her wheels, working harder and harder and getting less done. She gets sad for no apparent reason, although her mom’s declining health and odd behavior might have something to do with that. But even though we still laugh every day, the laughter’s growing a bit weak. I long to hit the open road and leave our responsibilities behind. We’ll take a few boxes of books, Melissa’s fly-fishing rods, and our dogs, and we’ll have all we need to be happy.
I research RVs online and discover the Jayco Melbourne, a snazzy little Class C home on wheels. We could sell the farm, buy the Melbourne, and have enough left over to stash away for a lifetime of gas refills and KOA fees.
My escapist reverie is interrupted by my need to meet a publishing deadline, so I file it away for later. I spend ten grueling days writing from 5:00 AM until 8:00 PM, trying to finish a draft of my current book. My brain is totally fried, but there’s no time in my schedule to stop. I have to get back to work. Instead, I look out the dining room window and notice that something looks odd in the pasture. The sheep are closer than they should be, and there is lots of baa-ing. Melissa is asleep, trying to shake one of the headaches that have plagued her for twenty-five years, so I slip on my purple Birkies and tramp out to investigate.
What a mess. Half the flock is where it should be, with water but nothing left to eat. The other half has broken through a fence into the next run up, where they have food but no water. Mamas and babies are separated by an electric fence and crying for each other. On top of that, two ewes have managed to find their way into a third paddock altogether.
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