Sylvia's Farm (24 page)

Two gates divide the aisle now. It would seem to be possible to keep him separate from the lamb bar. I went down the ladder with very mixed feelings. Am I going to create more problems for myself? The aisle is where I drop hay and do my chores. Will Nunzio interfere? There he was. He had opened the latch from the lambing room and was standing in the aisle. He was eating a little corn left from the lambs' last evening's dinner. He looked a little worse for wear. My heart went out to him. He promptly put his head under my arm. I wrapped my arms around his neck.

The marmalade barn cats, Prescott and Prentice, have been living in the cellar of the house during these deep snows and cold weather. I put them out a few days ago when the thermometer balanced at thirty degrees. They returned to their real home, the barn, immediately. Lambs love cats. They rub their faces along the length of the two orange cats from the tip of their noses to the tip of their tails. The cats love it. It is a delight to watch. The roosters have also decided to move into the barn along with some of the summer's new chickens. I was filling the mangers with hay when something made me look up. The barn was filled with sheep and lambs. Prentice and Prescott were sitting on the old stanchions. The roosters, green and gold, black and orange, were perched on brackets. Nunzio was standing, his head over a gate, his bridle a tomato red. Suddenly it all felt so very right. It was right for us all to be there together. Balanced
perfectly. Something I didn't realize was missing was now there, Nunzio was the biggest part of it. But Prescott and Prentice counted as well. And the roosters. Suddenly it felt more than perfect. It felt like fairyland.

T
IPPY HEDRON
is dying. Slowly. She doesn't want to. She is a sheep whom I always think of as young but is, in fact, old. Just as I think my dog Samantha is only four years old but is, in fact, going to be eight on Thanksgiving. Tippy Hedron has separated herself from the flock a great deal this summer. I'd come across her on the side hill from time to time, or looking into the pasture, Wuthering Heights, when the other sheep were inside. Of late, she has been coming near me asking to be petted every time I am amidst the flock.

A couple of days ago I saw a single ewe in Wuthering Heights. It seemed odd to me. As I also wanted to check the amount of water in the runoff up there. I went across the brook and on up to the field. While the sheep I had seen from the dining room window appeared to be standing, by the time I arrived, she was down. The rock she was lying on was warm from the sun. I couldn't lift her to her feet and had to drag her to the softer earth. I bit off small pieces of the two apples in my pocket and fed them to her. She ate voraciously. I pulled some thick green grass, which she also ate quickly. I then went back to the house, drew a couple of gallons of water, got some second-cutting hay, and went back up the side hill. She was more hungry than thirsty but ate and drank with a serious determination. There was no way to bring her down to the barn. It seemed best to leave her. I sat with her for a while, and then, in the dying light, went back down the hill, home.

The rains came that night. I woke to the sound of them. Guilt ridden and full of despair, I stayed awake all night at the thought of Tippy
alone in the dark, pelted by the heavy rain. I fell asleep at dawn and woke two hours later. The brook was high for the first time since the beavers left. I was certain she had died in the night. I waited for my workman to come to help me bury the sheep. The brook was too high to cross in the pickup, so I went, with dread in my heart, alone up to Wuthering Heights. The sheep was nowhere in my line of vision. The gate was open. I went in. And there was the expectant, eager face of Tippy Hedron looking up at me once again. She tried to stand and could not. I moved her, trying to position her more comfortably, filled her water bowl from the water jugs I had left behind, and ran back for some more of the second-cutting hay I had fed her the day before.

She is going to die. She is older than the age when most sheep are either culled (sent to the auction to be bought for dog food) or die from accidental or natural causes. My sheep live far longer and continue to breed older than most. Knowing all of this, it remains almost unbearable to lose one.

This morning I shall go across the brook and up the hill once more. Do I carry an apple or two in my pocket and a flake of hay in my arms? Do I risk the despair of leaving it there upon finding her dead? Or do I go up empty-handed and risk nothing of my heart, most willing to race back to the barn for some more second cutting, should she still live, to buy one more day for her? Do I anticipate heartbreak and live with it ten minutes sooner than need be, or do I dare hope knowing that said hope may be dashed? The choice shall be made from either the place in my heart that has been worn down by experience, or the place in my heart that has held a lamb in my arms in the rocking chair in the kitchen, wintertime lambing, until it shows life or dies. On this most glorious of September mornings, which shall it be? Or rather, who am I, Tippy Hedron? Who have I become?

I have tossed away a commitment to the following of lists, of things to do, if not the actual lists themselves. It is a high-risk departure in this
September of all Septembers. Never before have I been so close to the possibility of being able to manage this farm as I am now. Some built-in pressures have become alleviated, and some other conditions have improved modestly, but improved nonetheless. The one thing I cannot stand, however, at the moment, is the tyranny of those lists. They were once a statement of my ability to control and anticipate order. They are now a prison from which I only can wish to escape. And so, for the moment, I can only follow my instincts as to what I do with my day. And the load is gradually lightening.

Yesterday was spent in sheer self-indulgence. What does that mean to this farmer? It means that the man who works for me came yesterday, did miscellaneous little things rather than big, serious, and obviously needed things. I had him cut up a downed apple tree for the Christmas fire and some pine branches for my French ceramic stove, the one that calls for hot-burning wood, pine or thorn apple. I painted the far side of a gate and a drop latch on another smaller gate that was left unpainted for both the lack of paint and the knowledge that only I could see the unpainted side. Ernest rebuilt a sawhorse I put down by the brook in which to cut up the kindling the beavers created when building their dam. He cut down a branch from the maple tree that obscured the view of the house from the road and in doing so caused said maple to appear to spread itself above and around the house in a broad embrace. An orange sign by the roadside announcing children at play was removed, since the children who played are no longer children. Some willow cut down a year ago was tied and brought to the wood room. And in all manner of things, details were arranged in ways creating order in my mind and took away, quietly, some of the pressure I live with every day. I think, when the pressures of life are so urgent, that it becomes necessary to lose sight of who one is as a way to protect oneself. But it is that personal self that provides solutions and a dimension of
being without which one does not survive. Therein lies the dilemma.

I realized something the other day about writing stories for the county newspaper. I realized that they are the only way that people here in the town where I live have ever been able to get to know me. Oh, I have, as everyone does in a small town, a reputation. Partially true, partially false, and partially a creation of the minds of the storytellers. I have heard, of course, much of the unflattering aspects of what people think of me and, as human nature usually dictates, very little of any positive aspects of my reputation. The world knows I am poor, certainly. That is obvious. And, in being so, have some of the problems that most people do when survival is the key issue of their lives. However, because I have never actually integrated into the life in the village, or even the lives of my neighbors on the Creek, I have rarely had the opportunity to give to the community what my nature would wish. Some efforts have been rebuffed and others received in the spirit in which I intended. But I have rarely had the ability to give what I would really like to give, except in the weekly writing over the past eight years of the stories of the farm. There are several threads that I understand to be common throughout them all. And those threads are what I perceive to be the gift. I stand here on this farm, alone of course, but not quiet. Over a hundred sheep, two dogs, one donkey, one barn cat, three geese, one heifer, and a multiple of roosters and chickens disqualify me from considering myself to be absolutely alone, but it is to be understood what I mean. And that gift is the demonstration that it is possible, no matter how hopeless one's life may seem or how impossibly difficult a situation, or how much of a sense of failure one's heart can absorb, it is possible absolutely, without qualification, to hold on to one's dream. Never, no matter what the circumstances, to let it go. If that can be my gift, it is the very best I have to give.

F
EBRUARY, AND
all I have ever known it to mean, brings with it a touch of dread to the mornings. Every day I steel myself to face the thermometer reading in the kitchen. With any luck the first number to greet me will be a sturdy forty-four degrees. Inside. And a pleasant twenty-two degrees outside. The only comfort in seeing forty-four degrees inside is the memory of my handwriting on a page one July morning. I had written: “kitchen 42 degrees, 6
A.M
.” Last night the weather created an accident. Cold descended upon this farm with a ferocity of speed that I have rarely seen. I had prepared some bottles and went to the barn to feed out hay and the bottle lambs. It was nearly dark. By the time I got from my kitchen to the barn door, my hands were locked with cold. My fingers froze onto the metal door latch. And downstairs my hand froze once again to my hay knife. I did my best in the barn, not good enough, and ran back to the house. The water had frozen in the front bathroom where it had been running quite nicely two hours before. The temperature was zero on the outdoor thermometer. The motor in the washing machine had frozen. Again. I did all of the things that one does, experience born of desperation, and waited. Then I did all of the things once more and waited. By eleven o'clock at night, I had stabilized the life here and went to bed.

In the morning the outdoor thermometer read thirty. The indoor thermometers read thirty-two in the living room, thirty-four in the kitchen. I've never seen so small a gap between the two before. The
washing machine intake had thawed and the machine had run sometime in the night, but the drain is positioned in an unenviable spot and was, therefore, still frozen. The laundry still sits, soaking, in cold and dirty water. I'll hang it to drip in the basement and then hang it to dry in the kitchen. I have an Excedrin headache. A rare occurrence, but nonetheless I have one now.

Of all the things I have learned living here, one of the most important is that in February the washing machine must be made to work. And in order to achieve a state beyond that of simply surviving, a virtue unto itself, details must not be ignored. Clean curtains in this wood-heated house, and tablecloths starched to within an inch of their lives, and scrubbed kitchen tiles all contribute to the sharpness of mind and eye that will help me keep my livestock in the best health and state of well-being. I become error prone in February and misstep on occasion. I do know how to avoid the dangers midwinter affords, but the line is a fine one. Carefully drawn. I must use all of what I know not to cross it.

It is a fortunate thing indeed to be blessed with this farm and all of the abundance and joy that its creation, maintenance, and possibilities afford. It is also a fortunate thing to have been able to apply who I am and who I have become to this farm, because in no other situation would I have been able to play out so many sides of myself. While I am an imperfect farmer, lacking the instincts and experience that ultimately make one that in the truest sense, other gifts that I have to offer have served us well. And my farm shows that. It is unique unto itself, its own kind of place, with its own spirit and vitality. I am glad of that. The issue at hand, however, is how best to husband us all using our strengths to overcome our weaknesses in this intensely treacherous month.

February is a month when books are of great importance to me. I need to get away, cabin fever, and nothing has the power to take me away as much as what one finds on the pages of a book. Unfortunately,
I am a fast reader. Equally unfortunately, it is only a certain kind of book that will do. There must be a variety of visual images, preferably of another country, England or France will do quite nicely. There should be some smells of fine food as well, imagined, of course, possibly to be recreated in my own kitchen. Simenon does that best in his Maigret series, as Superintendent Maigret loves to eat, and the stories always include some detailed and memorable descriptions of French cooking. I do recreate some of it on my wood stove, to enjoy while reading. If I am lucky, I will find a nice autobiography to provide a distancing from the sameness of days that February affords in such great abundance.
The Horse of Pride
, about a village in Brittany, served me well, as did my newly discovered
A Country Woman in Twentieth-Century France
(which, by the way, would have been more appealing had it retained its original title, translated from the French,
A Soup of Wild Herbs
).

I read mystery books not for any interest in the mystery itself; I rarely figure out in advance, nor do I care, who done it. What I love is the variety of people who are introduced into my evenings when I am curled up in my tidy green chair in front of the living room fire, after the lambs have gone to bed, and the countrysides, all of them, float back and forth in my mind's eye. Michael Innis makes me want to read with a dictionary at my side, or at least a pad and pencil. While I understand of what he is speaking, I don't even recognize some of his vocabulary and find myself searching his words for their Latin roots. The joy of English mystery writers with classical educations.