The sweetness of trails

Follow the trail of cans through the woods. They glint in the sunlight, hanging from maple trees, just under the taps we have pounded into holes Dave drilled. One of these days, the temperature will get above freezing and the sap will rise in the trees.  Theoretically, it needs to freeze at night and rise above freezing during the day for the maple sap to run. We’ve now had three weekends of cold weather and two days of above freezing weather. The sap didn’t run either of those two days. “Maybe it’s because the wind was out of the southwest,” we said the first day. Maybe it’s because there is at least three feet of snow on the tree roots, it can’t tell the air temperature is above freezing,” we said the second day.

It actually doesn’t matter. The days spent in the snowy woods are full of joy, beauty and conversations  with good friends and family. The sap will rise in the maple trees sometime this spring. It will drip from the taps we’ve installed and fill the silvery cans. We’ll empty the sap in the cans into buckets and carry it back to camp where we’ll boil it down over an open fire until there is only a quarter inch of thick, sweet liquid in the bottom of a 6” deep pan. Then we’ll pour off the syrup and use it for pancakes, granola, pecan pie, and a new discovery this year, maple syrup sauce on vanilla ice cream or snow.

At this time of the year, following a trail through the woods can lead you to incredible sweetness.

Pecan Maple Syrup Sundae

1 cup maple syrup

2 T butter

¼ cup undiluted evaporated milk

pecans

vanilla ice cream or fresh snow

Boil syrup and butter together for six minutes or until mixture reaches 225 degrees. Cool. Stir in ¼ cup evaporated milk.

Sprinkle pecans over ice cream or a scoop of clean fresh snow.  Pour sauce over pecans.  The snow absorbs the sauce so that there is none in the bottom of your bowl. Our friends Budd and Marguerite had snow sundaes when they were children with cream and sugar. The maple syrup and pecans are a modern variation.

Waiting

Pink and pregnant
one week away from lambing
freshly shorn ewes wait.

The Weeping Camel

Last night, Dave and I watched The Story of the Weeping Camel. It was a charming, fascinating documentary about a family of Mongolian sheep, goat and camel herders. That movie shows the best depiction of an animal mom rejecting her baby that I have ever seen.

It is not uncommon for a ewe who has had a hard labor or who has two or three babies to reject one of the babies. She either doesn’t allow it to nurse by moving every time it heads for her udder, or by kicking the lamb, or by butting it with her head,  or if they are no longer in their pen, by continually walking away. It is the most frustrating experience that I as a shepherd have ever had. We try a variety of different techniques to force or  trick the ewe into accepting her lamb. Sometimes we rub the rejected lamb on the accepted lambs, hoping that a different smell might help. We check the lamb’s mouth for sharp teeth. We try to retrain how the lamb sucks. We put the mom’s head in a stanchion so that she can’t move away from the baby. We hold the mom down and physically put the baby on a nipple, opening its mouth and sliding the nipple inside with our fingers. All the while, a clock is ticking in our heads. Babies need that milk. Twenty-four hours is the outside edge of how long a lamb can live without milk. It really should have milk with in the first couple of hours, especially in the winter, when the cold rapidly leaches heat from those tiny bodies still wet from amniotic fluid. It has to have that first milk from it’s mother to keep it warm, to make muscle and bone and nerves an skin, and to provide the antibodies it needs to survive until it has begun to make antibodies on its own in about 6 weeks.

If we can’t get the baby to nurse, we have to feed it colostrum (milk that is produced in the first 24 hours after birth) from its mother or another ewe or dried colostrum that we buy from the vet and reconstitute when we need it. If we can’t get the mom to accept her baby, we have to begin bottle feeding it with store bought lamb milk replacer. It’s not hard to bottle feed lambs, in fact it is really fun, but it does cost time and money. Usually, bottle fed lambs don’t grow as well as lambs who have been accepted by their mothers. In the long run, anything a shepherd can do to encourage a mom to accept her babies is worth doing. We learned a few new techniques  watching the Mongolians last night that we might be able to use when lambing begins on the first of April and we also realized how lucky we are to be raising sheep, not camels.

Country Driveways

Our driveway is ¼ of a mile long. From the road, it goes down a hill, through a woods and then up a hill to our house. In the spring, tiny purple violets bloom in drifts along the edge of the gravel. In the summer, leaves arch over the drive, creating a green shadowy tunnel. In late autumn, the rising and setting sun glows through the bare branches on either side. Winter brings ice and snow drifts, which are also beautiful but often inconvenient to the people using the driveway. Our upper driveway is open to the winds in three directions – west, north, and east – perfect for drifting snow. Once we’ve had a snow and cleaned the driveway, we begin the endless job of opening drifts. The more snow and wind we have, the more often we have to clean the drifts. Even a day with no snow fall can fill our driveway with feet of blown, drifted snow.

Last winter we had so little snow that we never even hooked the snow blower to the tractor. This winter is different. Dave and I have been snowed in for five days already. Kate, the friend who house sat for us while we were visiting grandchildren, was snowed in twice. She called a friend with a plow and he kept the driveway clean while we were gone.

Just having a clean driveway is not always enough. When our kids were teen agers, they learned how to drive up and down the driveway without getting stuck. You don’t back up too far when turning around at the house. You keep to the middle of the driveway when driving up or down. You drive up the slopes in first gear, as fast as possible.

Their friends frequently got stuck. We’d pull out the shovels, scatter wood ashes under car wheels and teach people how to push a car out of the snow – accelerate slowly, don’t spin your wheels, rock the car back and forth, and push, push, push harder.

Now we have a new American, an immigrant, who feeds our sheep when we’re gone. Hashi ran his car off the driveway at least twice. It’s not surprising; he’s only been here for three winters and the last one had almost no snow. He drove in Somalia but not in snow.  Last week he called me from the trees off the edge of our drive. I couldn’t imagine explaining to him where to find  the ashes and how to spread them under his wheels, how to push a car, or even how to accelerate correctly; so I gave him the names and phone numbers of several local car towing agencies. After two weeks he had conquered the snow on our country driveway or at least he hadn’t gotten stuck.

Yesterday, our driveway was again full of snow. Thigh high drifts crossed and re-crossed it. Newton and I spent ten minutes clambering up the drifts to the road and back down again. Dave had the drive way blown free by 1:30. It looked clear and open, with high banks on either side. When a delivery person called to ask about passability, I told her it was fine. The driveway was fine, but the driver hadn’t been trained by Dave or I to turn around at the house. So we got out the shovels and the ashes and then, with our fingers crossed, sent her up the driveway again.  I’m sure we don’t have the only county driveway.

 

π Day

Dave and I are geeks, there is no getting around it. In addition to his medical degree, Dave has a Master’s degree in physical chemistry. I have a Masters’ degree in biophysical sciences. We subscribe to four science journals not counting Dave’s medical journals. Our personal library ranges from astronomy to zoology with hundreds of books in between. The fact that we are shepherds hasn’t changed our love of science.

So it’s not surprising that we celebrate π Day (or Pi Day if you don’t know how to pronounce π), March 14, 3-14. Π is a mathematical constant, an infinite number that is used to calculate the circumference of a circle from its diameter (circumference = π times the diameter) . It’s a useful number. For example, when we’re trying to figure out how many taps we can put in a big maple tree, we know that in general, it’s one tap for every 31 inches of circumference. If the tree is twenty inches across, its circumference is  3.14159 X 20 or  62.8 inches around. That means that tree could have two taps. 

Because π is such an important and useful number, we celebrate π on 3-14, and, if possible, at 1:59p.m. we eat a piece of pie. This year, we’re going to have pecan pie made with maple syrup to celebrate both the number and the maple trees which we’ll begin tapping this weekend.

Un-knitting

Knit two together.

Knit sixty-four. Oops, mistake.

Un-knit sixty-four.

Un-knit two together.

Repeat

It’s a twelve hour drive from our farm to St Louis where our newest grandson lives. That gives me lots of knitting time, or in some cases, un-knitting time. I had just finished a sweater with five color changes and three separate cable patterns before Simon was born. That project stretched me a lot. I couldn’t fudge anything. Every mistake had to be taken out and reknit. It took me the entire back and half the front of the sweater (approximately two years) to learn to write down four things at the end of every row – yarn color, place in cable A or B pattern, place in cable C pattern, row number. Once I learned that I needed all those reminders of what I was doing, the knitting progressed rapidly.

I also learned that those twelve hour drives were the best times to knit on that particular sweater. If I tried to talk, watch television or listen to an audiobook, my mind got distracted in the middle of a row and I lost track of what I was doing. In the car, with Dave listening to music, I could concentrate well enough to keep the pattern in my memory. He even learned not to ask me questions in the middle of the row.

Just before Simon was born, I found Knit, Swirl, a new pattern for a beautiful sweater by Sandra McIver. It was advertised as being “so easy that it’s almost boring.” That’s the pattern for me, I thought. I really need some mindless knitting. Normally I knit socks for mindless knitting. Everybody I know has enough scarves, another potentially mindless project, and mittens to last for years, so I am supplying them with socks which eventually wear out. I can knit socks forever. But socks really are mindless once you learn the pattern. I wanted something a little more challenging. An sweater sounded wonderful after three years of concentration.

“Cast on 513 stitches” the pattern began. Piece of cake. “Place a marker every 64 stitches. Purl the next seven rows.” This is easy. “Continue in Welted Stripes stitch pattern throughout remainder of garment.” The welt pattern had me decrease a stitch on either side of my markers on the last row of the pattern. Yup, I can do that. Welt number three was the last one for which the pattern noted number of stitches at the end of the row, so as we started home from St Louis, I counted to make sure I was on track.

I was off by 36 stitches. Not only had I missed two entire rows of decreases, but I seem to have misplaced one of my stitch markers and therefore not done the proper number of decreases in several other rows either. Perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps it’s working with 513 stitches, but obviously even on “easy” patterns, I need to keep track of what I am doing.

I began un-knitting the sweater, stitch by stich, back nine rows. On a smaller project, I might have pulled out the needles and ripped out the yarn, planning to begin all over again. But having carefully cast on 513 stitches, joined them into a circle making sure the circle wasn’t twisted and then spent twelve hours working on the patterns, I wasn’t interested in starting over. I spent the next twelve hours un-knitting nine rows. 

After all, if I can spend three years working on a sweater, I am obviously more process oriented that product oriented. I am in no hurry. Un-knitting is intrinsically as satisfying as knitting if I don’t think about the tangles of un-knit yarn at my feet. And the pattern is beautiful. When I’m done, I’ll have a wonderful sweater, hand knit by me. What more can one ask of time spent in the car.