When we return home, the fourth ewe gives birth. Time to take stock. We have two healthy lambs. We have two baby lambs in a laundry basket in the house, one who’s been unable to stand since birth. We have an injured ewe with a lamb that isn’t getting enough to eat.
The good news is the little lamb that can’t stand grows stronger every day. In a few days, he can get to his feet unassisted, then he begins staggering around. But since there isn’t room in a laundry basket for him to get the hang of walking, I build a pen in the unheated barn, complete with a thick bed of straw, a towel-wrapped heating pad tucked inside a cavelike box, and a heat lamp. Then I cover the pen with enough wood to retain heat but allow the lambs to see out the sides and watch the steers. The 600-pound steers are fascinated with the six-pound lambs and stare and stare. Soon the lamb is walking without stumbling, and eating like a horse.
The ewe with the broken leg isn’t doing well. She’s in a great deal of pain, then develops pneumonia; the leg is infected. On top of that, the ewe is wild with fear, now associating any human with pain. Melissa continues to treat her, and to supplement her lamb with a bottle, but we’re both concerned. Melissa often works hard to save an animal’s life, treating it for weeks, only to be forced to accept defeat and put the animal down, but she’s determined to help this ewe get better.
Late one evening, Melissa calls me from the barn. She’s spent thirty minutes on the phone with our vet discussing the ewe’s condition, and it’s not good. Melissa has a choice—watching the ewe suffer every day, in so much pain despite painkillers that she can barely walk five feet to the water bucket—or end her suffering.
Over the phone, she tells me where to find the handgun, and which bullets to bring. It’s cold and dark as I walk up to the barn, so familiar with our land I don’t need a flashlight. The barn is cold, but well lit. In the far pen the two healthy lambs and their moms nibble on hay. The injured ewe is sitting back in a sheep “chair,” basically a hammock designed to sit a sheep upright so Melissa can trim hooves or treat injuries.
Melissa and I talk quietly for a few minutes, concerned about how Alex will take the news, worried she’ll feel responsible since the injury happened on her watch. But sheep hurt themselves, they hurt each other, they hurt farmers, and farmers accidentally hurt them now and then. It happens.
Melissa catches the injured ewe’s lamb and hands her to me. The ewe bleats for her baby, so I hold the lamb near her face, trying not to cry as the ewe nuzzles the lamb. Then I tuck the lamb inside my coat and trudge back to the little barn where the other two bottle lambs live. I put her in the pen with the twins, then go into the house to prepare a bottle so she can fall asleep with a full stomach.
Having an animal sick or in pain is something that never leaves you during the day, since a tiny part of your brain is always worrying about it. I don’t hear the shot, but later Melissa says it only took one. I put an ad in the paper for bottle lambs, and in a few days a nice young woman buys all three.
And thus ends our winter lambing.
Not Exactly a Goddess
Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.
—ELSA MAXWELL
Spring comes. There are thirteen pregnant ewes, three ewes with lambs, and a handful of retired pets. With only thirteen pregnant ewes, I don’t worry about lining up all the Pasture Goddesses. Mary H. comes for a week, but only two sheep give birth while she’s here. “So,” Melissa says after Mary leaves. “Who’ll help me out in the pasture now?”
Amelia is working full time. Bonnie won’t be done teaching for another two weeks. “Lucky girl,” I say, “you get me.”
During a normal lambing season, Melissa might help at most six ewes out of fifty give birth. At most six lambs out of 100 born might die. So if you’re only lambing out thirteen ewes, wouldn’t it make sense to expect that the numbers of difficult births and dead lambs would both be down?
Yes, it would, but since this is the year the Goddess of Shepherds has frowned upon us, it’s also the year that four out of thirteen ewes need help. We lose five lambs out of twenty-nine born. We have nearly the same number of problems with thirteen sheep that we have with fifty. It’s a grueling week.
One morning finds Melissa and me on our knees in the dewy pasture, me holding the reclining ewe by her head and Melissa at the other end helping with a difficult labor. Both lambs are stillborn. That night we’re on another spot in the same pasture, in the same position. Both lambs are stillborn. An immensely painful day.
Another day we stand in the pasture, the sun beating down on our heads, as we puzzle over a family mess. Two ewes both want all three lambs and the lambs don’t know which mother is theirs. We finally decide one lamb is a single and belongs to the younger ewe, who’s never given birth before. Melissa puts temporary fences around each group so the ewes won’t keep stealing each other’s lambs.
The next day the same thing happens with two more new mothers, only there are four lambs. Holy smokes. I’m so impatient I nearly jump up and down. What’s wrong with these sheep? At this point I wish I were playing Farmville so I could just log off.
Melissa is used to these sorts of messes and begins searching for placentas. Since she picks them up every day, the only placentas on the ground this morning would be from the four lambs. Eventually Detective Farmer finds a single placenta, very fresh, then not far away she finds three older, drier placentas. One ewe had a single, the other ewe triplets. By watching the lambs, we identify the youngest and eventually sort the two families out.
One ewe has a problem with her udder, so we bring her up to the barn in the Rubbermaid cart pulled behind the four-wheeler, her lambs tucked in around her. We must also do this for another ewe. Both ewes and their lambs are eventually fine, but it’s very hard work.
Melissa finds a lamb with entropion, an eye disorder in which the eyelid is turned inward and causes pain and blindness. She puts little silver clips, which she calls “eye spangles,” on the eyelid to pull it away from the eyeball. I hold the lamb, squeeze my eyes shut, and turn away. I can’t say why I turn away, since my eyes are closed, but it helps. Once the eye spangles correct the problem, they’ll fall off when they’re no longer needed.
Finally, the last pregnant ewe goes into labor, and of course needs help. The ewe has chosen the only bare spot in the pasture, so I lie in the dirt, holding the ewe down by the shoulder, while Melissa delivers the first lamb. She plops the baby in front of the ewe’s face, which is also in front of mine. “Big boy,” she announces as I stare, aghast, at the seemingly lifeless form. Melissa barks an order for me to clean him off, then returns to the ewe’s back end where she pulls the second lamb and plops it next to the first. I towel off both wet lambs. They’re a bit stunned to no longer be tucked inside the womb, but they’re strong and healthy.
Melissa slips her arm back inside the ewe one more to time to check for a third lamb. Meanwhile, between all the fluid, and the ewe instinctively eating birth stuff off the lambs, and the pool of blood under the ewe’s back end, I feel a little queasy. I rest my head on the ewe while Melissa finishes her job.
“It’s remarkable how amazingly ill suited I am for this particular activity,” I say.
Melissa smiles, which is nice to see. “This is not news to me.”
Focus on Feet
One can never have enough socks.
—ALBUS DUMBLEDORE, HEADMASTER OF HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY
To escape the harder parts of farming, I tentatively dip my toe deeper into the ocean of knitters and am immediately sucked in by a riptide. I find knitting groups, spinning clubs, craft councils, and a gazillion knitting blogs with creative names like Purls Before Swine, and InsubordiKnit. I join ravelry.com and lose entire days browsing through patterns and yarn.
Turns out knitting isn’t just for the elderly anymore; it’s for everyone, including men. The Craft Yarn Council of America estimates that the number of knitting men has increased in this century from 1.5 million to 2
.6 million, making them about 5 percent of the knitting population. Many men and boys of the “skateboard” generation wanted to create their own hats, individualize their looks.
Male knitters aren’t doing anything new. European sailors as far back as the fifteenth century knit their own sweaters, and knitting was popular in the United States for men during both World War I and World War II. And if men want to learn more about knitting, they don’t have to read Stitch and Bitch by Debbie Stoller but can head straight for Knitting with Balls, by Michael del Vecchio.
I yearn to knit something more interesting than a scarf. The whole sweater thing is intimidating, and I don’t wear hats and as yet have no relatives who need baby blankets. What’s left? After lurking on blogs and Ravelry and talking with knitters, I realize the best item for me to tackle next is the sock, the one piece of clothing that seems ridiculous to make by hand because machines do them so well. Kathy knits socks because they’re like miniature works of art in which she can refine her knitting and colorblending skills. Phyllis knits socks because they’re easy to carry and don’t take long. I begin, reluctantly, to explore the sock.
Wool has never been very great as a full leg stocking. Think thick. Think saggy and loose fitting. But wool stockings were manufactured by machine in England starting in 1599. Those machines were smuggled into other countries, and the Mennonites ended up in possession of a few. They brought them along when they emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1683, formed Germantown, and built the first woolen stocking factory in America.
Socks were used to barter with the Native Americans. A document in 1689 made mention of the Dutch trading six pairs of these stockings for one beaver skin. Heck of a deal. In 1676, Mary Rowlandson was captured by Indians in a Narragansett raid on her Lancaster, Massachusetts, home. She found it difficult to survive on the spare rations she was given, so when the Indians would raid more homes and bring back piles of picked-apart old stockings, she’d use the yarn to knit new stockings and barter them with the Indians for more food.
When Joseph Watt led a wagon train and a flock of sheep out west in 1848, it took them six months to travel from Missouri to Oregon. The winter was harsh, and many sheep died, but the hardy settlers took the fleece off the dead animals and knit 150 pairs of socks. During the Gold Rush that next spring, Watt traveled to California and sold the socks to the gold miners.
Although wool still doesn’t make great pantyhose, it does make warm socks. Our friend Robin sends me a copy of her easy-tofollow sock pattern, which I study every afternoon over my glass of wine. Then I accompany Kathy to a St. Paul knitting store, where I’m exposed to the fascinating idea that commercial sock yarns are dyed by computer to create designs. All you have to do is sit down and knit with one of these skeins, and a colorful pattern emerges, with stripes or flowers or swirls. Magic.
There must be something to this sock craze, so I buy a skein of blue and purple variegated yarn. Socks are usually knit using four short needles. This is as awkward as it sounds. The needles are pointed at each end so you can knit from either end. Or if you’re me, you can accidentally let your stitches slip off one needle while you’re working with the others, thereby creating much sockrelated cursing and confusion. I have so much trouble that I consider giving up. Why not buy socks from Wigwam Mills? It’s going to take me ten to fifteen hours to knit this sock; a factory machine can spit one out every ninety seconds.
I struggle to get started and do it all wrong about three times. I finally resort to YouTube and get myself back on track, at least for a little while. I need help “turning” the heel. I need help with the gusset, the little triangle-shaped thingie near the heel that machine-knit socks don’t seem to have. After help with these from Kathy, I march on solo to the toe and make a mess of it, but then I’m done. It looks like a sock for a deformed foot, but a sock nonetheless. I try another one, and only need help with the gusset. Even my toe turns out better.
I find knitting the sock to be more enjoyable than I’d expected. As I begin to get bored with the section I’m knitting, it’s time to switch to the next part of the sock—the leg, the heel flap, the heel, the gusset, the foot, the toe.
Melissa likes the sock I knit for myself, so I measure her foot. Because she’s not a fan of bright turquoise or pink, I choose a nice brown and green tweed for her sock. For the first time I successfully make my way through the gusset on my own, partly on faith, partly by sticking the needle in different places until something works.
I proudly present Melissa with her very own homemade sock, knit with love and a bit of bravery.
“Very cool, “she says. “Where’s the other one?”
The other one? Ungrateful wench.
Apparently if you don’t have a farmer standing there demanding a second sock, many knitters find it boring to knit the same thing twice and never get around to making the second sock. I avoid the dreaded SSS (single sock syndrome) by promptly knitting a second sock.
I continue knitting socks. I love how they feel on my feet. Melissa loves how they feel on hers. And we anxiously await our yarn from Montana, hoping it will be suitable for me to knit into a sock, or perhaps two.
My Head Is Full of Colors
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No.
—PABLO PICASSO
Our yarn from Montana finally arrives on the UPS truck. To my inexperienced eyes, it looks like ordinary white yarn. I give Kathy a skein to try, and she says blushingly wonderful things about it. I think she’s just being sweet. “Lovely! Great for cables! I want more!”
Nice to hear, but she’s a dear friend and would of course say the yarn is great. Then while at a rally for health care reform, Kathy sits next to a friend of hers, a well-known designer of knit clothing and patterns. Annie teaches knitting all over the country, writes knitting books, designs patterns for Vogue Knitting, blogs, and raises two kids. Thinking about her life makes me beyond tired. But she watches Kathy knit and has to know where the yarn came from.
Annie isn’t one to waste any time, so in less than a week she brings her family to the farm so she can meet us and meet our yarn. “So white. So soft,” she says, stretching a bunch between her hands. “Great spring.” Before I know it she has draped a skein over her knees and is winding it into a ball. She takes the yarn home and begins knitting, soon sending off an enthusiastic e-mail: “The more I work with your creamy, worsted weight yarn, the more I love it!”
We don’t have any of the fancier fine wool breeds I see in fiber magazines, like Cormo, Merino, Romney, Rambouillet, or Blue-faced Leicester, but our yarn is still pronounced as lovely.
Melissa and I are intrigued. This fiber idea is fascinating, but I have no idea what to do next. Should we change our breeding? Should we sell through a Web site? Visit some of the over 100 fiber fairs held across the country every year?
I need a wool coach, so I ask Annie for help. She puts out the word on her widely read blog and the perfect coach responds. Joanne knits and spins and dyes and writes and knows sheep. She pronounces our roving as crisp and easy to spin. Apparently crispfeeling wools are longer wearing and better for outer garments like a sweater or socks. The finer wools I’d been thinking of, like Merino, wouldn’t stand up to the strain. I should have remembered that Thomas Jefferson had already discovered this.
Joanne likes the color, saying the natural wool is a bright white that has great potential both for selling as “natural white” and also for dyeing, because the yarn will dye a truer color than creamy or off-white yarn. To test it, Joanne dyes up a small batch using Black Cherry Kool-Aid. (Who knew one could do such a thing?) It turns out a lovely soft red.
I bombard her with questions about our sheep and dyeing and marketing and the meaning of life. She responds with wit and insight. Basically, we don’t need to worry about introducing any of those fancier breeds into our flock because our fleece is just fine as it is. We might want to introduce a Corriedale ram to bring those wool qualities out e
ven more. Melissa and I are amazed our fleece doesn’t have to end up in carpeting. People might actually wear it.
Our brains spin with possibilities, but regardless of our future plans, the most immediate task is to dye the yarn we have. Dyeing seems a complex process, and my life is too full to make room for another project.
Annie suggests I contact a skilled dyer named London, who is happy to help. We meet at a coffeehouse halfway between our cities and I transfer bags and bags of white yarn to her car. When she asks what colors to dye the yarn, I’m so overwhelmed by the options I can’t decide. Do what you think looks best, I say, and I drive home dreaming about color. My head is full of colors.
An Intimate Secret
The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.
—FLORENCE SCOVEL SHINN
There are few topics as intimate as underwear. I continue my search for wool underwear and finally hit pay dirt. According to The Shepherd magazine, a company called KentWool announced a new technology that creates yarns “softer, more subtle, more durable, and more functional” than any previous wool yarn. The company proclaims that this product will turn wool from a twoseason product—fall and winter—into an all-season product.
This is a great idea. I contact Ramblers Way Farms, the Maine clothing company developing products from this fabric. And their product line is—get this!—underwear: undershirts, camisoles, boxers, underpants, long johns and janes. The yarn is spun from superfine fleece sheared from Rambouillet sheep raised in the United States. Innovation can happen with wool, and it can happen naturally by selectively breeding sheep for the desired fiber. The company was started by Tom and Kate Chappell, the couple who brought us Tom’s of Maine toothpaste. Why get into wool underwear? As Tom explained in Sheep Industry News, “Because the older you get, the colder you get.”
Sheepish Page 17
