A hundred years ago, when sheep farms dotted my county, the farmer’s wives would all gather at one another’s farms for skirting parties, they would all help skirt the wool of the sheared sheep, pick out the hay and dirt and stones so that the wool could be spun into yarn and roving. There aren’t many sheep farms now, and we only have nine sheep, so the skirting party was Maria and me. We had a great time, we went through one bag of wool after another, picking out the dirty and messy stuff sheep accumulate. Above, we did Kim’s wool, it was very different, very beautiful.
We got the sheep because Maria wanted to sell the wool as yarn. Red came later. Kim is going back to Vermont on Tuesday along with Ted, she will live on a farm there and be bred again. We got all the skirting done today, the wool is going to a mill in Vermont and returning to Maria as yarn. I especially love the traditions and rituals that surround a farm with animals – shearing, trimming hooves, skirting. They remind us that we live in a special place and in a special way. I appreciate my life, I am grateful for it, I will not speak poorly of it.
I’m not sure I’ve ever put my lunch up on the blog before, but this one seems important.
I eat very well, I think, especially in the past 15 or 20 years of my life, as I have learned more about nutrition and the food I was buying and eating. My diagnosis of diabetes seven years ago was a landmark in my education about food and nutrition and since that, I continue to pay attention, look for good foods, educate myself about food. I have essentially given up on supermarket shopping, buying my food at co-ops, farm stands and organic outlets and markets.
I am not a vegan, not a vegetarian, but I rarely eat red meats, I do not eat any fried or processed foods, I have little breads, and only multi-grains, I have a diet focused on protein, low-cholesterol foods and fruit and vegetables. I have not eaten processed sugar in years. Understanding nutrition is a continuing thing, our knowledge of foods and the things inside of them changes all of the time. It is so easy to be fooled by the “organic” section of supermarkets, if you read the labels carefully, as I have learned reluctantly to do, you learn the that all kinds of foods are labeled healthy and organic that are not.
This week, another step, I often eat at the Round House Cafe, my friend Scott Carrino is determined to make healthy food inexpensively, and his food is delicious as well. This is a combination I have rarely found in my eating life. This week, he steered me towards a new salad I might like, and the minute I saw it, I knew this was the perfect lunch for me. It is a Greek Salad, with a scoop of tuna fish, lined with avocado, seasoned with feta cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers and boiled egg, among a few other things. I even eat the flower.
It is not only a good meal for a diabetic – I almost never use dressing – it is a good meal period. It tastes great and fills me up. Learning is the joy of life for me, when I stop learning it will be the first death. In America, good food is a complex, elusive and confusing thing. I love this lunch, this is the lunch for me. And in the summer, I can often make it myself. Neat.
Animals on a farm learn to be with one another and accept one another in inspiring ways. The hens gravitate to the barn cats and the cats – fiercely independent creatures – accept them and seem to like having them around. This afternoon, Flo took a nap under one of the lawn chairs and the white hen came over and lay down alongside of her. Then the gray hen showed up under the shade of the bird bath. They all took an afternoon nap together, reposo.
The animal negotiations at the farm got intense about a week ago and have gone on all week. There is the usual gender stereotyping online about what Maria is like and what I am like – we share a common revulsion at people who tell us what we are like – and another revealing chapter that tells us how some people have pets and some people have animals and the two cultures see the world in very different ways.
People who live with animals on farms are always figuring and reconfiguring their animals lives, animals are always coming and going, depending on weather, the price of hay, the cost of a water-free pump, the cost of fencing, the cost of veterinary visits, temperament, feed and the amount of time in busy people’s lives. People who have pets buy or rescue them and expect the animal to be with them for the rest of the animal’s lives, anything else is heresy. The idea that you would send an animal somewhere else to live, or even to slaughter is almost incomprehensible, as the line between pets and children has increasingly blurred in our culture.
When we decided to lamb – something Maria and I wanted to experience together – we agreed that we would keep two of the new lambs, the others would go back to the farmer for breeding or to market. When Maria and I pulled some lambs out of their mothers wombs and saved their lives and gave them names, that changed of course. Maria said she would absolutely not countenance sending any of the lambs away, no matter what we had thought before.
Gender stereotyping works both ways, there are sexist women as well as men, many people assume that because I am the man who puts up sweet photos of Maria and the animals that I am a hard-ass who puts his foot down and makes decisions for his gentle and nurturing wife. This is not only sexist, but hilarious to anyone who knows Maria, a fiercely independent artist of Sicilian and German extraction. I rarely try and tell Maria what to do, and on the rare occasions when I have tried, it did not turn out well for me. If you want to guarantee that she will do something, tell her to do the opposite. Even that doesn’t usually work.
So this week we went back and forth. I believe strongly that the people who love farms and wish to keep them have to make hard decisions about them every day. Sheep are not pets, they are not furbabies, one does not keep them around because they are cute. Maria sells the wool and Red herds them, two important uses for us, but we do not need to feed and care for twice as many sheep as we need to do those things. If you emotionalize animals on a farm, you will not have a farm for long.
So after some intense negotiations – believe me, it is no fun to try and persuade Maria to part with animals – we settled on a very good compromise. Kim, a Karaluk ewe with charming face and Ted, the ram, would go. For Maria, it was not much of a compromise, as Ted was always going after lambing and Maria ended up giving up no lambs and one ewe.
I announced this, prompting the now-familiar outbreak of hysteria and outrage on Facebook and other social media. “Kim has done nothing wrong,” one person messaged me angrily. “She deserves to spend her life on the farm.” It is true, Kim has done nothing wrong. Sheep do not make moral decisions.
Maria surprised me yesterday by saying she thought the two new chicks should be returned. We don’t need them, she said, and the two we have are fine. I agreed, I am always looking for a way to reduce the number of animals here, they seem to always be increasing, although slowly. This morning, this decision bothered me. I realized I had been taken, snookered in a negotiating ploy.
Two hens cost nothing and are no bother. Chickens have a habit of not living too long, everything on earth eats them. Having four hens looks right to me, and means we will probably get at least one fresh egg a day among them. The roost can accommodate many more, and how much corn mash do two hens eat? Maria had just thrown the chicks in to throw me off the scent. It worked too.
This morning, I wondered if we needed to give the chicks back. “Okay, so you want to keep them?,” she said, a bit too quickly. “It’s okay with me.” So the chicks are staying, and one of our sheep is leaving. We have four new ones. You can do the math for yourself. Poor Maria, it must be difficult dealing with another of those heartless and willful men.
I have a bookshelf made out of an old chicken coop from the first Bedlam Farm, I love it, I keep my books and a few lenses there and looking at it in the afternoon light, I realized that lenses and books symbolize so much of my life, I can’t imagine living without both of them. I have an e-book reader, and I love my books, they do not seem to be going away, there are more of them than ever around here. I believe the world will encompass both of them, and I am grateful for that, as the author of 27 books.
Life is a process, a compendium of things and symbols and feelings and connections and emotions. Maria and I have decided to part with Ted the ram and also Kim the ewe, we do not wish to be caring for nine or ten sheep, it is expensive and time consuming and we wish to keep a firm control on the number of animals here. At the first Bedlam Farm, I realized how dangerous and unhealthy it is to keep more animals that once can know, care for an afford.
Of course, within seconds there was the usual nasty and intrusive e-mail, this one to Maria (I get them fairly often, although less and less over time) suggesting that by agreeing to part with some of the animals, she was obviously being controlled by me. If you share yourself online, you open yourself up to people like, Maria is also getting used to it. She answered the woman more kindly than I might have, she said she obviously knew nothing about either one of us if she could write an e-mail like that.
I love working things out with Maria, we often have different feelings about things, we are both passionate and intense about almost everything. This one was tough, Maria was upset at the idea of letting any animals go, she loves all of them very genuinely, she has so much rich and wonderful emotion. But we always work it out, we came to a compromise with are both comfortable with and that required both of us to give up.
To be honest, I would have parted with more than two of our sheep, but they are Maria’s and she sells their wool and loves them, so I am fine with it, and so is she. We both have a lot of experience with being controlled, we knew what it really is. Maybe, Maria said, she should have just told the woman to mind her own business.
No, I said, she didn’t really need or deserve an answer at all.
Our life together is rich and good and it is never sweeter than we each of us has to learn to heed and understand the other and take away this joyous and almost miraculous feeling that we were heard and understood, that our feelings were respected and listened to. That is so new to both of us, I think we will never quite get used to it.
