This farmstand is a metaphor for the weather for me, it is all about summer and corn, maybe some spinach and potatoes. Spring is bursting all around it, it will soon come to life.
Next weekend I’ll be making a curious pilgrimage to New York City to meet a Native-American Chief who wants to talk to me about the carriage horses. I’ll write about it more later, it is World Peace Day in New York and people are also gathering in Central Park to protect and celebrate the horses and pray for them to remain in their safe homes with people who will care for them.
I’m going, Maria is coming with me. I’ll write about it more tomorrow, I’m too fried after all the lambing, I want to do it justice.
Maria and I had lambs because we wanted the experience of lambing together, and it was a good decision. I suspect we will be keeping most, if not all of the new lambs, the sheep are good moms, Maria is a wonderful caretaker. She keeps an eye on the water, ferries fresh hay back and forth. She loves to care for the lambs, it is something powerful and beautiful within her. We stood together out in the barn, she just stood and watched this process, it is a peaceful and sweet place to be, the ewes talking quietly to their lambs, cleaning them, the lambs finding the nipples, their tails wagging as they eat.
I thought we might lose the second lamb – Maria wants to call him Pumpkin – but he is getting stronger, I think he will be fine.
We went out to barn around 9:30 to check on the lambs in the barn. The barn was peaceful, eerily beautiful in the light of the two heat lamps, one in Liam’s stall, the other named Pumpkin by Maria tonight, her friend Athena gave her the idea. I was surprised my camera picked up the red light, screened out the rest. We stood there for a half-hour, it was a peaceful and beautiful thing to see.
The evening sky was full of portent this evening, a beautiful sky. We sat out on the Adirondack Chairs and reflected on the day and greeted the wind. We saw it coming a long way off.
Our second lamb is doing better, I feel confident he will pull through. It took him five or six hours to recover from a very hard birth and a distracted and weakened mother, but mother have settled down, we were fortunate, we knew what to do and we had the tools on hand to do it. I think the vitamins and booster shots saved his life.
Maria was shaken by the experience – we saw some real life today – but in a positive, even healing way.
This is why we are here, this is why we are not living in a split-level somewhere settling in to watch our favorite TV show. There is nothing wrong with that, we each make our own choices, but this is why we both are here, to live a real life in the very real world. Nature is the greatest teacher of all, we sat with a small thing, the birth of a lamb, but it speaks to big things – life, choices, decisions, death, risk and the natural world. I feel a great responsibility when it comes to animals, the decisions we make or fail to make can cost a life, or two.
It felt like we were on that fault line today. The world does not care much of a ewe or a lamb lives or dies, there is no such thing as a no-kill farm, on the scale of things it does not matter. In our universe it is about our own strength our own commitment to living in the world in a certain way, in a responsible and compassionate way, in a way that is free and creative.
I felt today was a big day for us, for us as a couple. I knew lambing would be important. As Maria prepared to set out for Gee’s Bend Alabama, she has triumphed over a very powerful experience, and I have put the things I have learned living here to good use. I am relived our second lamb – as yet unnamed – is doing better, I am confident he will be okay.
We were grateful all day to be in the company of new and loving friends. They were all around us. New for both of us.
Today was a small day in the scheme of things, a good day for me and for Maria.
