Last of the year

A clear and sunlit close to this circle ’round the sun. The children slept over with friends, so it was a queerly quiet day. I spent a pair of morning hours learning marimba parts to play with a new band and then we fell to chopping firewood. We’ve been building German-style round stacks that we roof with pieces still wearing their bark, so the whole stack can season for next winter without needing shelter.

At three I rode a horse up a hill for a glimpse of the sun winking low over the sea. It was the first time the mustangs have been separated in years and they were not pleased. Horses rely on their herdmates to feel safe, so my mount was anxious and jiggy, pirouetting and bending to nibble my boot toes in her need for connection and reassurance. The one left behind was wild with worry and spent our whole ride tearing around the field. Every inch of her winter coat was soaked with sweat and she wouldn’t come to me for a rub down.

I walked back down to the pasture after we put the kids to bed. It’s a chilly night, almost freezing, and I wanted to be sure Yahzi had cooled down properly. A still, calm night, with Orion pricked over the barn amid the thin clouds. I wore my headlamp to find the horses by their eye shine, but Yahzi mistrusts the bright light and kept her distance. I brought her a pan of minerals to lick and fetched towels from the lambing kit to dry her a little more. With the headlamp stowed in my pocket, there was still starlight and the glow from Victoria and the gleam of houses across the valley—so many more houses on Little Mountain than there used to be—and I could work over the horse’s rough and muddy coat by feel anyhow. She accepted the toweling with relish, stretching her face to the sky so I could rub harder beneath her neck. The barn cat ghosted along the hedgerow nearby, pale and formless in the dark.

I remember being just a little afraid of the night woods as a child, secure in the knowledge that there is nothing dangerous abroad on this island but still tingling with imagination, straining to hear beyond the drum of my own heartbeat and to categorize any scuffling whisper in the trees. A flashlight makes it worse. The dark is less knowable beyond the limit of its light. I have learned to switch off my lamp and love the darkness on this farm. I stand with the horses and listen to them licking and grazing, I breathe the falling damp and scry among the wan stars—yes, the clouds are thickening, the temperature is climbing a very little, the bright weather is done and the rain will be coming tomorrow or the next day. In a couple of months I’ll be making this night journey to the barn to check the lambing ewes.

The year is turning. The wood is stacked high. The family is sleeping. I stay up late to stroke the dog as she quivers and pants at the fireworks. I have too much steadiness, too much wry self-knowledge (I am to be forty next summer, after all) or some combination of the two for resolutions, so I make none. I have no reasonable expectations that the coming year will be better or worse in sum than the one we’re leaving. On we hurtle through space, and if I have a wish it’s for clear eyes to notice the good and open hands to extend the good to others. A soft night to you all and joy in the morning.

Sprouts

Some knitting projects volunteer themselves and prove as delightful as flowers you didn’t plant.

The vision of a new design can grow from almost any seed—from the yarn itself, from nature, from history, and sometimes from all of these braided together. In April I found I couldn’t set aside the remnants of a skein of Spincycle Yarn I’d used for a hat for my father; the earthy tones still wanted my attention, and they wanted prominent display on the yoke of a sweater. As it was spring, I had flowers dancing before my eyes, and as I was leafing through a book of Scandinavian mitten designs, I chanced across a thumb motif I thought might be the right scale for a child’s sweater if worked at the larger gauge I was imagining. I fossicked in my stash for likely partners for the Spincycle—namely a main color—and found three plump fingering-weight skeins of Catskill Merino in the springiest watercress green. Another remnant skein of heathered brown Raumagarn was just right for the flowers’ roots (and I loved that the flowers had big strong roots in the original mitten). I knew I hadn’t enough of the Spincycle to carry me through the foliage in the motif, but lo, there was the skein of BFL/silk I’d made in my first year of spinning practice, featuring the same olive and golden greens with burgundy. It could easily pick up where the Spincycle would leave off. I auditioned a whole raft of neutrals for the yoke background and wasn’t satisfied. Everything was the wrong weight or looked too flat or too stark against the lively color play of the handspun contrast colors. But when I popped into Wild Fibers in Mt. Vernon for some buttons, there was an intriguingly flecked pale golden skein of Noro Kumo that leapt out at me. Everything was coming together.

I’ll have to steal it back to block the button band!

In the middle of my merry progress, I learned that Catskill Merino had lost Eugene Wyatt, its founding shepherd. I wrote on Instagram, “Once in awhile in life you brush against someone with a truly original spark and it kindles something in you that burns for a long time, perhaps unnoticed. Eugene was one of those—and a good writer to boot. That I’m a shepherd now is, perhaps, a little bit due to him.” Eugene certainly expanded my sense of what kind of person might choose to devote himself to sheepkeeping. He kept one of the best blogs on shepherding, equal parts poetic and practical. He punctuated his market days selling wool and lamb at Union Square with jaunts to the cinema; he read a lot of Proust. Even in a brief conversation you could sense the depth of the living and thinking he’d done.

I think about Eugene Wyatt whenever people are surprised that we’ve shelved our city life in favor of a sheep farm on a tiny island. I think about the assumptions I once made that farmers were mostly folks who’d inherited a way of life and hadn’t escaped to anything more intellectual. Eugene made me consider that you could be a passionate intellectual and a farmer all in one. And now I know from experience that learning how to farm uses every intellectual skill you’ve got—and then some. Writing about it as well as Eugene did clarifies your purposes and precipitates beauty out of the daily soup of humble chores like mowing, moving fences, scrubbing water troughs, trimming hooves, mucking sheep sheds, battling weeds, and making up fecal slurries to count worm eggs.

Eugene and Dominique, who dyes the yarn and helps with the flock and now carries the work forward alone, were also at the beginning of my awakening to the farm-to-skein story of the wool I choose to work with. Most knitting shops weren’t carrying yarns like theirs when I took up the craft, and it was fresh and marvelous to sink my fingers into wool raised just a few hours away and dyed with botanical extracts. Since I first discovered Catskill Merino, the market for locally grown wool has really begun to flower, and that’s wonderful to see. I’ve had the chance to knit with many more single-flock yarns over the years, and I’ve loved most of them. The beautiful green skeins in Ada’s new sweater only rekindled my appreciation for the quality of breeding and craft at Catskill Merino: this is really excellent wool, terrifically soft without sacrificing character. It’s still head of the class even now that the class is larger.

The true testament? My kid didn’t take this sweater off all day when I gave it to her, even as the mercury climbed to eighty.

Someone’s going to ask when the pattern will be available. I’m going to revise the motif a little bit—maybe take out some of those three-color rows with long floats—and grade it up to adult sizes. I might make a pullover for myself. I may chart a shorter version of the flower so the yoke depth can be shallower, allowing for smaller kid sizes. I’ve got another design project on my needles right now, but I’m looking forward to picking this up in September.

Night drop

Lambing season. April 9 was the date I circled on the calendar to begin night checks at the barn, 145 days after first possible conception for the seven ewes we put to Perseus and Hermes back in November. It feels like a season ago. The daffodils and plum blossoms are gone; now the dogwoods and apples are in full flower, as are the bluebells and the buttery scentless roses along the driveway. The fields are drunken vibrant green with new grass and spangled with dandelion seed puffs. Every evening is soft and luminous with sunset pastels and robin song.

This is the fourth week of trading shifts to tramp down to the barn in the dark, either near midnight or before dawn, to watch and wait for signs of lambs on the way. We both know what it looks like now. Sansa went first, a textbook labor and delivery despite her youth and inexperience. She pawed the straw, she circled the barn trying various spots, she whickered to her unborn lamb and licked the air. She lay down, she strained, she leapt up again and looked to see if anything had happened. She produced a bag of fluid and then, an hour and a half later, a neat pair of toes. We watched them emerge, retreat, emerge, retreat. It was my first chance to watch a birth. We were poised to spring in with the birthing tackle, to suction the new lamb’s mouth and nose and perform an increasingly acrobatic string of tricks if it should be slow to breathe. Like thoroughgoing beginners, we moved in too soon and Sansa took flight down the barn with the flock, her lamb still only halfway out. We scooped up her newborn and enticed her to follow him into the pen we’d prepared with fresh straw. He was a fine big fellow and didn’t need us, not really, but we fussed over him as Sansa licked him dry and we helped him to nurse and dipped his umbilical cord in iodine to prevent infection. The children named him Jupiter when they met him a few hours later. At three weeks of age he is a strapping, muscular fellow, long in the body like his father and with his mother’s stylish head carriage. He is a relentless imp, bounding atop the poor old grannies whenever they lie down to rest and dominating his week-old half-brother by chasing him in circles around the barn and paddock.

Athena with Pluto, her pretty ewe lamb

As so often happens at lambing time, there are sad notes, frustrations, regrets. Artemis delivered a stillborn, premature baby back in March. We count ourselves lucky that she showed no ill effects afterward. Athena gave birth to twins, and we were minutes too late arriving at the barn to revive her big ram lamb. Her daughter, Pluto, is beautiful and vigorous, but only nursed on the right side, and within a few days we were trying to fend off a case of mastitis on the side that should have fed the lost twin. We milked her out every four or five hours around the clock, discarding the infected milk and taking care not to spread the bacteria to other ewes.

There are moments of comedy, too. I left the island to pick up a thousand pounds of seed for the pastures, and meanwhile Adam caught Aphrodite in the act of delivering a very nice ewe lamb. When the twin (and I was sure there must be a twin in there; Aphrodite had been the size of an apartment complex for a month) hadn’t arrived an hour and a half later, I told Adam I thought he had better fetch it out. I’d read the lambing manual over and over during my night shifts and I’d been to a one-day lambing camp at a big sheep ranch in eastern Washington back in February, so I coached him through it on the phone while I sat in the truck in the ferry line. I sent him back to the house for chlorhexidine gluconate rinse to scrub his hands. It was a beautiful warm afternoon; all of us in the ferry line had our windows down or doors open to enjoy the sunshine. At some point I realized my husband, with his cell phone propped on the barn wall on speaker, might not be my only audience. I suspect a few fellow ferry riders learned a thing or two they weren’t expecting that afternoon. “If the cervix is too tight, run your fingers around in a circular motion and gently try to stretch it. Now open and close your fingers inside the vulva. That should stimulate a contraction.” The lamb had one leg back and an elbow locked on the pelvic bone; I talked Adam through walking his fingers up to pop the elbow loose and then pulling it by one leg, which I’d practiced at lambing camp on a dead lamb who sportingly donated his little body to science so a bunch of shepherds could work through the maneuvers that might help them save luckier babies. And it worked. Out she came, very weak, and Adam toiled over her to make her breathe and dangled her upside down and tickled her nose with straw and generally willed her into sticking around. We gave her a nutrient drench and a vitamin injection and she lasted through the night and was up and nursing on her own the next morning, a little stocky fluff ball of a lamb with a coat that waves rather than coils. Ada named her Venus.

Aphrodite’s girls, Venus and Starshine (you bet it’s after the Hair song)

We had another birth to remember when Persephone finally went into labor last weekend. I watched her Saturday night on our spanking new barn cam, rampaging around the barn harassing one of the oldest ewes the way a ram would. I perched myself on a hay bale and cast on a Littlewing vest for a human baby due to arrive soon and settled in to watch her labor. Three hours I watched her squat and lie down and strain, but to no effect. No fluid bag, nothing. I read the lambing manual again. (Laura Lawson’s Managing Your Ewe and Her Newborn Lambs. It’s been indispensible.) As I feared, the signs pointed to a breech baby plugging the dyke, in which case intervention was going to be absolutely necessary.

Persephone values her personal liberties and is one of the ewes Adam calls Tank 1 and Tank 2; she outweighs me by a clean hundred pounds even when she’s not pregnant and thinks nothing of plowing me into a wall. I didn’t fancy my chances of penning her for an exploratory feel on my own, so at 3am I woke Adam and mixed up the disinfectant wash. We corralled half the flock and, as predicted, Persephone barged around the pen like an angry rhinoceros and smashed my knee into the concrete while I tried to hang onto her so Adam could push the others back out again. We left her to cool down long enough to fetch the lambing kit, and then I scrubbed up for action. She struggled very briefly, but in my own experience a body doesn’t feel much like galumphing about during an internal exam, and the ewe seemed to agree with me and elected to cooperate.

It’s a curious experience, fishing for lambs. I found nothing at the cervix but bags of fluid and began to wonder exactly how far I’d have to reach in and whether I’d even recognize a lamb amongst all the hot slippery mysteries in there. Down, down below the pelvic bone my fingers touched something bony. A jawbone? Yes, there was an ear nearby. But no legs. Deeper in. Sorry, Persephone. There’s got to be a leg somewhere. Here! But is it a front leg, and does it belong to the same lamb? Back to the jawbone and down the shoulder to be sure. I worked the leg forward. It jerked away again. I can’t tell you how slippery a lamb leg in a birthing sac is. I gripped its tiny pastern between my thumb and forefinger with as much force as I could exert; my whole hand squeezing along the length of the leg wasn’t as strong a connection as I needed. I used the spare fingers to try to make sure the jawbone was coming along, too. Little by little I hauled my lamb foot and my jawbone up toward the birth canal, and I was spectacularly and repeatedly bathed in fluids as some of the sacs ruptured. (This post ought to have been sponsored by Grundens rain gear for fisherfolk; those pants really are waterproof!) I kept my grip on the single foot. Persephone pushed, I pulled. We rested a moment and tried again. Downward, downward. The book says to rotate the lamb a quarter as you’re pulling to bring the shoulders through more easily and to protect the lamb’s organs from bruising, but with only one leg out it didn’t seem possible. And then the head came free and the rest of her slipped out afterward. A strong little ewe, flapping her ears and struggling even before we had suctioned her mouth and nose.

The book also says to go right back in and get the second lamb immediately if you’ve had to pull the first one, so I did. Two feet to work with this time, and the nose nicely alongside. A smaller brother, not flapping any of his parts, rather weak. We worked over him as Persephone licked both her babies. The girl was suckling the air already, so I slid her aft under the teat, stripped out the wax plug for her, and on she went without even needing to stand up. The boy was still floppy. I held him to the nipple and milked it for him. Adam went to wake Ada, who’d wanted to witness a birth so badly. It was nearly 4am. I clipped and dipped umbilical cords and toweled sodden hides and tried to keep the lambs from floundering back into the puddles. Ada was beside me, helping the ewe lamb to find milk, passing me fresh towels. “Mom, what’s that sac hanging out?” she asked. “Oh, the afterbirth,” I answered without looking. There’s often a little red sac the size of an apricot along the cord to the placenta and I thought that’s what she’d noticed. Then I looked. It was not a little red sac the size of an apricot. It was a big white sac the size of a grapefruit, and that’s the sac that means a lamb is on the way. And sure enough, there he was, nose and toes coming right behind it. A tiny ram lamb, only half the size of some of the big singletons we’ve had, but full of vigor, up and sucking in no time. A proper little North Country, this one. We worried over the middle brother, still wobbling like a twig in a gale if he stood at all, and we gave him a vitamin drench and a shot of BoSe. I knew I’d gotten some colostrum into him, so I tucked him into the warmest of the knitted lamb sweaters, crossed my fingers for him, and wobbled off to bed myself as the neighbors’ rooster was doodling up the sun. And lo, we were both much stronger after a few hours’ rest.

Triplets! Comet, Saturn, and Ceres.

There’s one ewe left to lamb. I don’t think tonight is the night. Maybe Ruby will be kind and produce her babies at a nice civilized hour, say, between school drop-off and lunchtime. But it’s my turn on night drop patrol, so down I go to watch her behavior for a little while and to top up the triplets with a bottle before bed. (Persephone is mothering them all beautifully, but making food for three is a lot to ask and we are helping her out.) The stars are out, which means I’ll see Leo bowing to the western hills as I walk through the dark. My feet know the way to the barn. My hands know the way to a lamb. We’re still beginners, but we’re getting our seasoning.