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 prompte
d 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.
The Improbable Shepherd Page 14
