Sheepish

by Catherine Friend

  When I listen, I discover four ideas to help the rest of my “middles”—farm, relationship, life—go more smoothly.

  Yain: Slow down and focus on the basics

  All sheep do is eat greens, drink plenty of water, and get enough rest. This might sound boring, but when you spend time with them, they don’t seem bored at all. They seem well fed, well hydrated, and well rested. Sheep lie down when they’re tired. They stand up when they’re not.

  Verlyn Klinkenborg writes of animals and sleep in one of his New York Times editorials on rural life: “What a lot of shut-eye all the other species get, and how sleep-deprived humans seem in comparison! ... I can only wonder what it’s like to be so well rested, to know that the deep pool of sleep within you ... is filled to the brim.”

  Klinkenborg points out that animals do not berate themselves for closing their eyes now and then. “You are not a worse chicken for snoozing in the early morning, nor an inferior pig for napping the afternoon away in the shade beneath your house.”

  Sheep know there is no shame in getting the sleep they need.

  Tain: Do one thing at a time

  A sheep can’t chew her cud and run. She can’t chew her cud and talk. She can’t chew her cud and Twitter or e-mail or drive or exercise or really do anything but lie there and chew. I’ve forgotten how to do only one thing at a time, so I’m going to try harder to find a few minutes in my day when I’m not eating, talking, reading, writing, mowing, phoning, cooking, cleaning, doing chores, or stacking wood ... to sit there not doing anything but thinking. I might feel lazy and unproductive, but the sheep’s self-esteem has remained intact, so mine should, too.

  Eddero: Practice gazing

  My sheep stare off down the valley. What are they looking at? They might be relaxing their eyes. Years ago I read that the only way the eye can totally relax and get a break from focusing so intently on the world is to look at the horizon. Long distances enable our eyes to take a break from the assaults of modern life.

  Cities make horizon-gazing hard, but take a lesson from sheep. Find some way to gaze at the horizon. Imagine you’re sitting in the grass in the warm sun with a sheep, both of you chewing your cud. On second thought, imagine the sheep is chewing her cud and you’re sipping flavored coffee and eating from a sampler box of chocolates. When I remember to look up from my life and focus on the horizon, my eyes, and therefore my body and mind, relax.

  Peddero: Overdose on oxytocin

  We meet customers interested in purchasing meat from animals raised humanely and sustainably. We meet young kids desperate to touch a chicken, and older kids determined to touch the electric fence. We meet people interested in spinning and weaving, and people interested in sheep and llamas and small farms. These connections weave an amazing fabric between city and country, and generate their own version of Black Girl’s oxytocin fix.

  Sheep seem to appreciate what we do for them. I’ve decided that getting through the middle of a relationship requires appreciation, and lots of it. One day Melissa and I are driving up to the Twin Cities and I’m miserable. My changing metabolism and hormone replacement pills and other factors have added more weight to my frame than it has ever carried before. After a lengthy rant about my weight, my eyes fill with self-pity and I fall silent.

  Melissa turns to me and rests her hand on my thigh, then says, “You know, I will always love you, even when you don’t love yourself.”

  Just like that, the tears stop and contentment flows. “Tell me more,” I say, and she does. My heart sproings and worfls. We’re high on oxytocin.

  Rhubarb Sauce and Candy Corn

  Wise men say only fools rush in / But I can’t help falling in love with you.

  —“CAN’T HELP FALLING IN LOVE,” RECORDED BY ANNE MURRAY, PEARL JAM, AND SOMEONE ELSE ... LET’S SEE ... WHAT WAS HIS NAME? NAME’S ON THE TIP OF MY TONGUE. IT RHYMES WITH “PELVIS.”

  The call finally comes from London, the woman dyeing our yarn. We arrange to meet in a Target parking lot for the exchange. When she opens her trunk, my eyes drink in so much color I have problems speaking intelligently. She opens a large plastic container and shows me the hand-painted yarn, now all wound in cute round balls. The fun part about hand-painted yarns is that when knit up into something, the yarn has a random color pattern. In London’s trunk there are over twenty different color combinations, three or four skeins of each.

  This is it. Forget the greens of a lush pasture or the blues of a clear horizon. This is what I want.

  London opens a large plastic bag. Instead of painting these skeins, she immersed them into vats of dye, or dye pots, in such a way that the end result is variegated. I can barely contain my excitement to see, peeking out from a pile of green skeins, a mass of bright turquoise. Color. It’s mine, all mine. Totally drunk now, I nod numbly as London explains her process.

  The final bag holds round balls of roving that she has dyed a riot of pastel colors–green, orange, pink, and lavender. She hands me a sample of the yarn she’s spun from the roving, and I know I must duplicate this myself.

  That night I lay out all the skeins on the dining room table. Friends from California are visiting, and our neighbors stop by to pick up eggs, so I pour everyone glasses of wine and give them the task: Help me name these colors.

  Perhaps the wine isn’t a good idea. The color names begin innocuously enough—Grass Green, Sky Blue—but then we head into areas that might make the yarn a little hard to market, especially as we struggle to stick with farm-related colors. Fresh Chicken Poop. Twice-Chewed Cud. Dried Placenta. Clearer heads than ours are needed to name the yarn.

  A few days later I attack the job myself. The hand-dyed yarns glow with names like Coral, Purple Rain, Tuscan Gold, Autumn Leaves, My Blue Jeans, Rhubarb Sauce, and of course, Bright Turquoise. The hand-painted yarns become Lemon Lime, Lilac Bush, Mother Earth, Watermelon, Pink Roses, and Candy Corn.

  Not sure what to expect, I photograph all the yarn, disappointed the camera can’t accurately capture the turquoise, and put the yarn up for sale on my blog.

  Within a month, I’ve sold almost all of it, and those who come to the blog too late urge me to make more. I love our sheep. I love the farm itself. But this? It’s beyond my expectations. Soft pastels. Bright colors. Warm yarn that feels good in my hands. Amazing wool. Ah, the love of you sings and binds so that the hearts of those who make merchandise of you are not able to disengage themselves from you.

  Oops.

  Freaks ‘R’ Us

  I am a yarn whore!

  —(I’M NOT SURE ANYONE HAS ACTUALLY SAID THIS, BUT I’LL BET EVERY FIBER FREAK HAS AT LEAST THOUGHT IT.)

  Yes, it’s true. I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of fiber freakiness. I knit a sock from the skein of our yarn I named Minnesota Fields, a mix of blues and greens and browns. I can’t believe how good it feels to hold the yarn and wrap it around the needles and slide it through the loops.

  Fiber people have a word for when a yarn feels really satisfying as you knit it. It’s called “hand,” as in “it has a nice hand.” So, here we are, with only seven sheep, and I find myself saying, even though it sounds a bit suggestive, that our sheep “give good hand.” Of course they do so in an entirely healthy and platonic and non-gross sort of way.

  I finish that sock, and immediately knit a second. Then I perform a scientific test. Wool is supposed to repel odor rather than absorb it, so I wear my Minnesota Fields socks an alarming number of days in a row. And when I check, the socks are as fresh as a Minnesota field. It’s true—wool doesn’t absorb odors.

  I knit a pair in the Pink Roses yarn, a mix of pink and hot pink and tan and yellow. I resolve to be one of those people who wear socks with open-toed Birkenstock sandals so that everyone can see my socks.

  Okay, I’ve always been one of those geeks who wear socks with Birkenstocks, only now the socks totally rock. Besides, why hide such cool socks? I recently sat in the Colorado Springs airport guarding our bags while Melissa went in search of wate
r. (Yes, even though I gripe about not traveling, we do get out now and then. Thanks, Bonnie, for farm sitting!) As I sat there in my Pink Roses socks and Birkies, a well-dressed, not-yetmiddle-aged woman, perhaps in her mid-fifties, stopped in front of me.

  “Excuse me, but did you knit those socks?”

  I sat up straighter. “Why, yes, I did.”

  “They’re just lovely. The yarn is gorgeous. Do you mind if I ask where you purchased it?”

  I looked around for Melissa. She was never going to believe this conversation, which sounded like it had been scripted by a knitter overly fond of her socks. “I didn’t purchase it,” I said. “The yarn came from my sheep.”

  The woman arched an eyebrow, impressed. I should have had a business card to hand her. This is an interesting marketing idea. Perhaps I’ll just fly from airport to airport in my open-toed sandals, selling yarn to traveling knitters.

  My goofy pride in my socks only grows. Then one day I stand at the counter of our local yarn shop and when the sales clerk asks what I’ve been knitting recently, I say “socks.”

  “Oh, those seem so hard,” she says.

  “No, they’re not. And I’m knitting them out of our sheep’s wool.” Then, shockingly, as if I’ve suddenly been possessed by the Spirit of Inappropriate Behavior, I slip off my Birkie and hoist my foot up onto the chest-high counter. “See?”

  “Oh,” the woman says, a bit alarmed.

  Ten years ago when I had my midlife crisis, I’d celebrated its end by getting that mermaid tattoo that I’d showed off a bit too freely. As I stand there with my foot on the counter, déjà vu threatens to bowl me over. I carefully lower my foot before I strain something, then I apologize. But I’m excited. I feel the same way as I did with the tattoo. I’ve moved through some hard years of confusion and tension and crying over Elvis.

  Winifred Gallagher writes in Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, “You cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing.” Our lives are fashioned by what we pay attention to. Our future will be created by what we choose to focus on. Gallagher advises that if you were to direct your focus more consciously, “your life would stop feeling like a reaction to stuff that happens to you and become something that you create—not a series of accidents, but a work of art.”

  I’ve let the farm shape my life, but in a reactive way. Even though I was involved in all the decisions, there’d been nothing to really make the farm mine. But now there is. I can focus on wool and yarn and dyeing yarn and selling yarn. Fiber is the thread, literally, that I can pick up from the farm’s last fifteen years and carry with me into the future.

  One afternoon Melissa and I are walking the dogs down the driveway. “We made the right decision to sell the sheep,” she says.

  “And we made the right decision to keep some,” I add. Without sheep, how can I make more yarn?

  We walk. We talk. We yell at Molly the puppy to stop rolling in the coyote droppings. We wave to Robin the border collie, who’s parked himself back near the house because his heart’s bad and he no longer has the oomph to walk all the way down the driveway. We let Sophie the Great Dane sniff every blade of grass.

  Then we decide to keep going, and by that I don’t mean keep walking, but keep farming. We’re not done yet.

  Sheepish and Proud

  What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.

  —COLETTE

  Spring comes, but there are no lambs this year because we didn’t breed the seven ewes before we sold Erik. We were unsure if Melissa would be recovered from the surgery in time. I miss the lambs. I miss the Pasture Goddesses. I miss the sproinging.

  We purchase another four baby calves, and I rub their foreheads every day as we train them to drink from the bucket instead of from a bottle. Their front teeth look like brilliant white Chiclets. When their milk buckets are empty, they bang and push them until they end up wearing the buckets as hats. This makes me laugh every morning. I get my spring fix when I let them out of the barn and watch them scamper through the grass, kicking up their heels. Soon they’ll be old enough to wean and move out onto the pasture with the sheep and llamas. What a funny little diverse flock we will have then.

  The seven sheep and three llamas and four steers graze quietly all summer. We buy a Corriedale ram and will introduce him to the ewes in December. Next year there will be lambs in the pasture again. In about four years we’ll be back up to forty sheep. We’ll resupply our meat customers. We’ll build our yarn business. The farm is shifting into renewal. Sheep are good for the environment, for the clothing industry, for small farms, and for our sanity. Even Prince Charles is a friend to sheep. In January 2010, he launched the Campaign for Wool. It’s part of a global campaign to raise awareness of the benefits of wool by emphasizing the natural, biodegradable, and renewable qualities of wool. And their slogan? “No Finer Feeling.”

  We will likely continue naming everything on the farm (except for the female sheep). We struggle with what to name the new ram, but he finally ends up Inigo Montoya (“You killed my father. Prepare to die.”). Black Girl should now really be named Black-and-White Girl, because over the years the sun has lightened the fleece on her body, but why change a name she already knows?

  Melissa finds a new male duck to keep Helen company and decides to name him Atal Bihari Vajpayee after the former prime minister of India. When Mr. Vajpayee was in office, we’d wake up in the morning to a public radio correspondent rattling off the guy’s name so fast it made us laugh every time. Melissa calls the duck “Vajpayee,” but I’ve altered it to something phonetically similar, Mr. Bodgepie. Either way, it’s a weighty name with which to saddle any duck. For the first two months Mr. Bodgepie was here, Helen hated him and spent a great deal of energy chasing him around the barnyard. The chasing and hissing have stopped, so can the love be far behind?

  We’ll continue to survive the not-so-happy endings, and celebrate the happy ones. Just the other day Melissa finds our elderly llama Chachi near death on the ground, brought down by exhaustion or heat. After four days of Melissa propping him up, forcing him to drink water, and giving him shots, he’s now back on his feet, unwilling to let Melissa stick him with any more needles. This is a happy ending.

  As farmer John Burroughs wrote in the nineteenth century, “Cling to the farm, make much of it, put yourself into it, bestow your heart and your brain upon it, so that it shall savor of you and radiate your virtue after your day’s work is done.”

  I don’t “radiate virtue,” but Melissa does. She works hard, both off and on the farm, and understands that she needs the oxytocin release that comes with caring for animals. She’s firmly rooted to this life, and to this place. John Burroughs would have liked Melissa. He didn’t think much of nonfarmers. “The lighter the snow, the more it drifts ... the more frivolous the people, the more they are blown ... into towns and cities.”

  Farmers tend to be weightier people. We stay put. Either by birth or personality, we become attached to a specific piece of the planet and will go to incredible lengths to be able to stay. Marilee Foster explains why farmers put up with the instability of weather and prices and animal husbandry in Dirt Under My Nails: “We are able to tolerate this kind of instability because we are permitted certainty about one thing, that is, if all else fails, the land, which we continually pay for with our time and labor and taxes, is ours. And when it is ours, there is not only a future for farming, but options.”

  I’ve struggled to persist as a farmer. We’re told all the time that the only way to succeed at anything is to persist, but few self-help books or O Magazine articles explain how to persist. It’s been fifteen years, yet Melissa and I continue to persist as farmers. Not because we’re too afraid to change, or because we’re wildly successful, but because we still learn from our mistakes, and from our animals. We’ve given up the idea that this farm will look perfect. Our farm is beautiful to us; we don’t see that pile of old pallets waiting t
o be cut into firewood. We don’t see the weeds, the little gash in every building left by Melissa’s tractor, the banged-up equipment.

  I finally figure out that persistence is a choice. It helps to admit that quitting is an option, a decision writers face every day. David Bayles and Ted Orlando make an important point about persistence in their book, Art and Fear: “Quitting is fundamentally different from stopping. Stopping happens all the time. Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again—and art is all about starting again.”

  Therefore, even if our seven sheep look a bit silly on fifty acres, we’re starting again. The farm’s had some struggles. My middle’s a little thicker than I’d like. I’m getting older. I slipped off the recycling bandwagon temporarily. Time to give myself a few baby boomer bitch slaps and get over it. No memoir or self-help book is going to help me chart the rest of my life.

  Our sheep producers’ association awards four bred ewes to a young person every year, and these ewes become a starter flock for kids interested in sheep. The seven sheep we have left are our starter flock. So every day that Melissa or I tug on our boots and walk out to the animals, we’re starting again. Every day that we hold hands or make each other laugh, Muffin and Mrs. Muffin are starting again. Perhaps the secret to getting through relationships, farms, or careers is to start again every day, to find something new buried in the middle. Beginnings can happen anywhere, even in the middle.