January 28, 2008 – Cold, sunny. This winter is hard on all of the animals on the farm, and the humans too.
The donkeys and sheep slip on the ice and hole up in the pole barn, and the cows huddle under their feeder. There has been lots of snow, hard ice, bitter cold, sharp wind. The barn cats rarely are seen, and the only animals here who seem oblivious are the goats and cows.
  it’s toughest, though, I think on Rosie, my hero, working dog and spirit of the farm in so many ways. Rose needs to work, and for the past two months, there has been little or no work for her to do. Herding is unsafe, and there is no grazing, escapes, or other crises for her to attend to. We haven’t had a sick sheep in more than a year, so there isn’t even any vet visits to worry about. The last work she did was around Christmas when she brought the sheep into the barn for a Nativity scene involving local church families.
  Rose is not herself. She seems disoriented. She eats irregularly, seems confused, rushes back and forth. She comes up to me all day and puts  her nose on my knee, then rushes to the window, where we can see the sheep. She can’t seem to light, settle, anxiously running here, then there. She pops up onto the bed at night at odd times, and looks wan, anxious. Outside, she sits in the snow and stares at the pasture, sometimes chasing trucks as they go by outside the fence.
  Rose hates riding in the car, but I take her for walks, toss balls, look for things for her to do. She loves to chase Lenore around, but Lenore is no sheep. The other dogs don’t mind the winter. Izzy does hospice work and is easy-going, Lenore hugs the woodstove, gnaws on things and lays by my feet.
  Rose is outside of herself, and I worry about her sometimes, she is such an intense and mysterious creature. It’s hard to see her rush to the back door all day, hoping to go out and do something.
  “Rosie, just wait a month,” I keep telling her. “There isn’t anything to do.”
   There isn’t, short of driving her down South for some warm weather work. Rose makes life possible for me here, and has bailed me out of so many messes I can’t even keep track of them. She moves the sheep around, chases escaping donkeys and goats, keeps the rams off of me, separates donkeys and sheep when they grain, nips my ear when I fall until I get up. When I was laid up with spinal trouble she wouldn’t leave the bed for any reason unless I crawled outside with her. She is a great dog, perhaps the greatest.
   The vet says Rose is fine, that she just wants to get to work. She’ll be fine. But it’s a tough winter for her.