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Sylvia’s Farm
Text copyright © 2013 Sylvia Jorrín
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN: 978-1-57826-469-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-57826-470-4
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Cover photography by Chris Lopez.
Cover design by Cynthia Dunne.
v3.1
This book is dedicated to Liz Gruen Rose who opened the first page, to David Dalton who continued the second, and my dearest brother Arnold Brickman who has always been there for me.
A special thanks to Ernest Westcott and his blue pickup, who saw to it I got where I needed to go.
Sylvia Jorrín is, quite simply, a national treasure. In this era of 10-minute news cycles, disposable luxuries, and soulless “personalities,” Sylvia’s stories are as refreshing and priceless as a cold glass of elderflower water on a summer afternoon.
The lessons of Sylvia’s farm are not just applicable for those who dream of living the rural life. They’re universally instructive, and joyfully addictive. One would be hard-pressed to deduce whether they were written yesterday, or 100 years ago.
For those unfamiliar with Sylvia, discovering her stories is like stumbling into a fully loaded wild blackberry patch—impossible to rush through, sweetly fulfilling, with an immediate longing to return to them again and again.
—Joshua Kilmer-Purcell,
The Fabulous Beekman Boys, www.beekman1802.com
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
June Grass Rose
Pastel Country
Racing for the Gold
Dandelion Green
Shearing Past, Shearing Present/Of Course, You Sell the Wool
The First Day of Summer
Cows
My Grandfather, My Grandson, and I
The Maple Leaf
A Story of Three Barns
Two Stories in One: My Mother’s Kitchen, Christmas 1993
January 14, 1994
Tomato Soup
Epiphanies and Other Moments
Samantha
On Rabbits and Death
To Milk the Cow
Watch and You Will Know
Rose
Rugosa Roses
Down There
Days of Grace
The Story of the Barn
Fiona MacDonald
Gratitude
Barred Rocks
Helping Hands
Shades of Peach and Coral
The Gooseberry Bushes
Compromise
A Pack of Coyotes
Mangel-Würzels, Rouge Vif d’Etampes Pumpkins, and Leeks
Pigs and Cows
This Is a Day
Busman’s Holiday
An American Soup
The New Stove
One Farmer’s Day
The Carriage House Farm
Two Women in the Kitchen
The Ugly Chicken
Miracles Great and Small
Summer on the Farm
To Patricia, from East Lyme
The Color White
My Hired Man
The Awful Day
The Pearl Necklace
Animal Stories
The Gift
February Days, February Nights
The Silent Rhythm of the Days
A Remarkable Woman
The Hawk
Punctuation Marks
Lady Agatha Van der Horn
The Simple Life
The Sweet Time
Abundance
The Lord’s Great Profets
The Half Day Off
A Note on the Author
PREFACE
I SAW THE house, last night, as it was the first time I came upon it, rising suddenly to view tucked deep within a valley, high in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. It took my breath away then as now. Surrounded by white snow and dark green pines, it is a mansion of a certain size, complete with gables and a large bay window rising out of the third floor, equipped with porches and floor-to-ceiling windows and their many small panes of glass. In the moonlight, snow everywhere, covering its roofs, and the edges blurred, it was much as it was when I came to see it, with only a few minutes to linger, the day I had bought it more than twenty years ago.
The house is a Connecticut River Valley shingle-style house, gray and white, very much like the houses of my New England childhood. Its presence is a mystery here in the Catskills. Only the name of the original owner is known, Greenleaf, after whom I named the house. More than a hundred years old, it was in its day the most modern and civilized of houses. “Fine 1885” is written on the most remote gable on its north side. With twenty-four rooms, or twenty-five depending on one’s count, it has sixty windows, to which I have already added two, and eight exterior doors. I live here, alone, accompanied by a hundred and fifteen sheep, their assorted hundred and fifty lambs (the full contingent only in winter), two cows, their calves, a flock of Toulouse geese, chickens, several Tamworth pigs, two Border Collies, and two marmalade barn cats, all housed in their respective buildings, of course.
I had never intended to become a fermer. My dear grandfather farmed dairy on the Connecticut shore. My grandmother was a lady, who spoke French with a perfect accent and had a maid to brush her hair before she married her handsome beloved. She never allowed any of her five daughters to milk. She was afraid their hands would become coarse, and they would not find city husbands. Oh, were you to see my hands today, what would you say to me? My poor farmer grandfather had only two sons, his firstborn who was never destined to milk, and his last, who hauled milk cans in a horse-driven wagon to sell to the neighbors on Society Road in Niantic, Connecticut.
I remember the farm as if it were yesterday. The 1790s house, with four fireplaces stemming from one central chimney, still stands. The land has long been divided, but the barn remains, as do the apple trees under which my mother was married seventy-five years ago. My great-grandparents lived on the flat top of a hill in the middle of an orchard overlooking the farm. They gave me my first and middle names, those two whom I have never known, as well as a past and part of a future that they could never have imagined. Whenever I climb the hill behind my barn and look off for miles to a mountain two villages away, I think of them. And when I bring my own grandson to the hilltop, I tell him about his great-great-great-grandparents and tell him to tell his children and grandchildren, when this becomes his, about us all.
I had been raised to fear animals of all shapes and sizes regardless of domesticity. It was easiest for my mother to follow her mother’s way and dismiss the entire animal kingdom than distinguish between those wild and those domestic. And so when I first bought Greenleaf, it was with amazement that I heard her say, “You must have a dog, you need a dog, you must promise me you won’t go into the woods without a dog.” Owning a dog seemed to be an impossible feat at the time. I went into the woods anyway. Alone.
The first years here were spent on restoring the house to its former glory, or rather trying to restore it to its former glory. It had been left empty for seven years before I saw it and ask
ed the realtor (exhausted from driving me around the country looking for the perfect house) to back up the car. “The house we just drove by. I’ll take it. Find me the owner. That’s the house I want.” I bought it. Three buildings came with it, as well as eighty-five acres of property. Inch by inch I devoted myself to bringing life back into the house and land.
When I first set foot in Greenleaf, I knew I could never be depressed living there. Afraid, perhaps; overwhelmed, possibly; frustrated, no doubt; but never depressed. The house has its own life, its own quality, which dominates over all else. It delights. It delights all who enter it. And it still has the capacity to delight me.
When friends would ask what I was going to do with all that land, it is fifteen city blocks long and a quarter of a mile wide, and pressed on to ask if I would keep animals in the great old barn, I’d say, “no. I can’t imagine raising animals. I am afraid of dogs, and cows terrify me.” Raising sheep had never occurred to me.
One day, when the circumstances surrounding my life were about to come together in a cacophony of disasters and epiphanies which were changing my life forever, I was on my hands and knees, intensely working in the perennial border. John Firment, the man who had once owned Greenleaf, stopped by. He asked me to take a walk with him across the road to look at the boundaries of the property that had once belonged to Greenleaf and still belonged to him. “I know you were always interested in those boundaries,” he said. I never was, but knowing he had a compelling reason to take me with him, I went.
A farm truck had stopped on the road, yellow, rusty, and battered, two tires resting on my front lawn. Two men climbed out and took fence posts, drivers, nails, and hammers out of the truck. They each wore winter hats, that beautiful May afternoon, earflaps moving as they walked, tie strings trailing in the breeze. One of the men was of medium height, thin, bearded, slight of build. The other was larger, sturdy, much bigger in form and stature. He didn’t have a beard but looked as if he were considering one. I watched them from a vantage point on top of a stone wall on John’s property. The two men barely spoke to one another. But they worked as if two halves of the same intent. It was a ballet without music that was being performed in front of my eyes. May skies. Thorn apple in bloom, its scent filling the air. There was neither a superfluous motion nor a movement without grace. They were laying up boundary lines by building fence. John wanted me with him as a witness. No boundary lines altered there. I knew he had a motive beyond my supposed interest. They finished. We all went down to the road. The smaller of the two men climbed into the driver’s seat from the roadside. The larger had to cross my lawn in order to climb into his side of the truck. We both knew that entitled me to speak to him. “Do you ever work for anybody else,” I asked. He said something that made me think that he may have said “maybe.”
I asked him if he were interested in working for me. His head still down, he slammed the door to the truck and repeated the same sound that gave me the impression he had said maybe once more. And that was the first moment of the creation of this farm.
One afternoon the man in the hunting cap appeared in my backyard. “You wanted me to work. I’ll be here tomorrow after milking.” I could hardly understand his accent. I never did understand but part of what he said. Gradually he spent more and more of his time working for me on the house. One day he suggested that I raise sheep here. I protested as I always did whenever the subject of raising livestock was presented to me. He then suggested that we create a farm together. We talked about it for four months. We seemed to understand one another. I said yes.
The South Central New York Resource and Development Center gave the farm a fine deal on a flock of sheep. They offered nine sheep and the advice of a livestock specialist. Free. A year after the sheep lambed, we were required to return three good ewe lambs a year to the program until the nine were replaced. In turn, they would pass those sheep on to another new shepherd.
That year they presented a choice. As our farm was the last to apply for a flock, they would give us, immediately, a flock of nine very miscellaneous sheep. Should we refuse, we would have to wait for the last flock of the year to be distributed. Should there be more applicants than available ewes, it might mean a wait for another whole year. We chose to begin immediately and accepted the nine miscellaneous ewes.
And so one day, a small pickup truck pulled into the driveway at Greenleaf. Phil Commings, the grand gentleman of sheep farming and the livestock specialist from the R&DC, was driving. His wife, Pauline, was by his side. Phil opened the gate of the cab. Out came a huge black ewe with a classic Suffolk head, to be named Ophelia. Then came a short, chunky gray ewe with a squat Southdown body, to become Amelia. Lavinia Brandon and Lady Fettiplace, two Finn-Landrace sheep, followed. Megan and Brigit, two Dorsets; Collette du Bac, a huge Corriedale, and a huge low-slung crossbreed who became Miss Pettitgill came next. One Southdown ewe, whose name escapes me, followed. Then, staggering on sticklike legs, thin enough to be nearly transparent, came an old Finn-Landrace sheep, mother to Lady Fettiplace and Lavina Brandon. “She’s free,” Commings said. “If you don’t want her, I’ll take her back.” I knew back meant the dog food factory. “I’ll take her,” I replied.
And so arrived Penelope, the mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother of most of my ewes. A fine sheep she was. Renowned, still. My daughter had come to celebrate the first arrival with us. And the man who said maybe and whose idea it all was, was here as well.
I made a noontime farmer’s dinner, served on my best dishes. White linen tablecloths, starched and ironed, were on the kitchen table. We bowed our heads and said grace. The farm, which had begun as the dream of a man wearing a woolen hunter’s cap with the earflaps down one May day, became, a year later, a reality, with nine miscellaneous sheep running around the barnyard, pasture, meadow, and the neighbor’s front lawn. And with the man, no longer wearing the cap, and me as their shepherds. The sheep were wild. They were from different flocks and therefore didn’t know one another. They made a practice of knocking me over, or trying to on a regular basis. When penned in the barn they raced in a broad circle, challenging me to catch them if I could. Feet needed checking; gums as well. Ear tags were wanting to be inserted. There are many reasons why sheep need to be caught and examined. They knew them all and also understood I didn’t know how to catch them. I’m convinced that they knew precisely what they were doing in those days, the days that seem so long ago.
Gradually, the farmer’s granddaughter who knew nothing of farming became, in the deepest sense of the word, a farmer herself. Imperceptibly, slowly, the mind began to become still. The eye began to perceive and the ear achieved its voice. They shall teach you what you need to know to take care of them, I was told in the beginning. I had dismissed the notion as both too impractical and too esoteric. The fence builder who became my business partner had several conditions to which I must agree, however, should I accept his proposal to start a sheep farm. The first was “no books,” or I’d “get ideas which would make more work” for him. I said yes to that one. Listening to what the sheep had to tell me was to be the only way by which I could learn to take care of them. The other was that I wasn’t under any circumstance to go near the sheep because they may knock me down. He built me a bench. I painted it a pale peach color. He placed it on a lawn overlooking the barnyard and said, “You can sit here if you want to but you can’t go any closer.” I said I would. I lied and he knew it.
Every morning I’d get up shortly before dawn and make my coffee. I’d then pull on a sweater, Catskill summer morning, and go down to the barn where the sheep had spent the night. The floor had been limed and a little spoiled hay strewn around. I’d sit on the sill of the barn and watch the sheep in wonderment. Restlessness possessed me. I wanted so badly to know, to know everything. To already be what even at that moment I was becoming. I wanted to have happened what was in the process of happening. At first, the sheep delighted in running away from me. While in the barn they’d stand in a corner
as far from me as possible and stare. When I’d open the door, they’d break free, as one, and then scatter. Donald had installed barbed-wire fence intending to enclose them in one section of the farm, but he was a dairyman and fences are different for cows. Sheep have fleeces; therefore, barbed wire means nothing to them.
He farmed dairy with his father and brother on the family farm down the road and was used to working for wages, both on the home farm and for the neighbors on his days off. He was not used to working for himself without wages. He never had. It became quickly apparent to him that if he put up fence on our farming venture, there was no cash in hand at the end of the day. If he built a porch for me, however, or laid a stone floor in my outdoor living room, there’d be money when the job was finished. And so the fence was built, sparely, and my wood room floor beautifully laid with stone.
Tension and confusion were created. He became tense, I, confused. The farm was his idea, hardly mine. I knew he’d be subject to relentless teasing about starting a farm with me. A woman and an outsider. When I told him that I knew he’d be teased, he said, “It don’t bother me none.” He was a direct man, of sorts. I believed him. I think he believed himself, too.
His grandfather on his mother’s side was a famous shepherd. In the great days of the railroad, the countryside was laced with accessible routes on which to ship livestock all over the country. They raised more than twenty varieties of purebred sheep and traveled with them to shows up and down the East Coast. They still raise a highly respected flock of Tunis. Donald’s father had a commercial flock as well, and so he was raised around sheep since he was a child. But his family “never did much with them,” he’d say proudly, as if that were a mark of glory. “The lambs survived anyway.” He had a customer base, knowledge, experience, and muscle. I had a barn, land, hayfields and pasture, and a small amount of cash. I had time, a commodity of which he had precious little. His wife had left him somewhere in between the time he first started working for me and his proposal that we start a sheep farm together. She left the children with him as well. His commitment to being a father was a driving force in his life. And it spilled over into his handling of the sheep. Sometimes.
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