Kate is a friend of ours. When she moved back to Pelican Rapids to help care for her elderly parents, she offered to farm sit for us, caring for the dog, cats and sheep. She has become quite a good shepherd.
Kate feeds hay and corn to the sheep and checks the animals daily when we are gone. A year ago, while we were in Missouri, our rams got into the ewes' pasture a month early. Kate led the rams back to their own pasture and then repaired the fence. Last fall she taught dyeing at our fiber day. This winter she helped with shearing. This spring she recorded while Dave and I inoculated lambs. In the last month, Kate has brought Budd, her father, to visit the lambs nearly every day. He's 94 years old and is slowing down, forgetting things, perfectly happy to drowse on the sofa for much of the day. But Kate shepherds him off the sofa, out of the house and into the car for a trip to the farm. Then she and her dad sit in the sun and love the bottle lambs. The lambs nuzzle their hands, chew on their shoe laces, and rub their heads against Budd's knees. While they sit and watch, some of the lambs' energy rubs off on Budd. He returns home full of joy about the experience and memories of the sheep he had when he was a child.
Kate spends the time at the farm beside her father observing the sheep. "Number 3 blue is limping,"
she told us when we returned home from playing with our grandchildren. "Number 31 is breathing real fast," she said on the phone last night, "Even when he's lying down. I watched him for half an hour."
Dave and I would eventually see the limp and the rapid breathing, but not as fast as Kate has. We don't take the time to sit and watch our sheep at this time of the year. We're too busy with other things. Even though she hasn't birthed a lamb in the middle of the night or baled hay or cut off a tail, Kate is a real shepherd. She carefully watches over the animals, the true definition of shepherd.
What a blessing to have Kate as a shepherdess!
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