My Sheep Can Dance

I never imagined  thirty-one  years ago when we bought our first four sheep that they would kick start my writing career, but they did. Three adult sheep books later, I have branched out into children's books. This year, Northcroft Press published My Sheep Can Dance, with wonderful water color illustrations by my friend Linda Christensen.

When I asked her if she wanted to do some illustrations, she said "I've never painted a sheep." I sent her a bunch of photographs and the results were outstanding. Linda combined ideas from different photos to create new scenes. I actually had no photos of children dancing with the sheep, but Linda painted one.

Her illustrations also changed the story. I had sent her a photo of Bob the ram because he was a good example of a colored sheep, not because I had written about him. I thought she'd just add him to the flock somewhere. But when his painting appeared in my mailbox, I added a stanza and a page to the book.

Bob, the ram, was a crotchety guy

You could tell he was mad by the look in his eye.

But when his sheep danced home, he welcomed them in

and danced as old Davy played violin.

Collaborations are great fun for the writer and the illustrator, and the resulting book, My Sheep Can Dance, is great fun for the reader.

Still not local

 We stopped in Iceland on our way home from England and were taken to visit an Icelandic sheep farm. Ingi and his sheep live at 66 degrees latitude and we live at 46 degrees latitude so they are much further north. They struggle with cold winters, but even more importantly, with fierce winds.  Their shepherding year is very different than ours. In November, Ingi brings the sheep into the barn, shears them and then breeds them to the ram.

For older sheep during shearing, they leave the wool on the rear end of the animal to help them withstand the cold. After shearing, the sheep don't go outside again until after they lamb in May. Even where the ground wasn't snow covered, I saw almost no grass. We did see plastic wrapped hay bales, so they had enough grass land to cut hay which they fed to their animals all winter. Then, in the spring, the animals are turned out onto the slopes of the mountains where they graze happily and completely alone (except for birds and nonpredatory  small animals.) In the fall, all the shepherds and their sheep dogs go up into the mountains to collect the sheep. They bring them to sorting areas where the animals are sorted by the marks on their ears that identify to which farm they belong.

On the other hand, we breed in the fall, shear in January and lamb in February and March. Our sheep are only restricted to the barn for twelve hours after shearing and during blizzards. Local farmers have told us  how important it is for the sheep to get exercise during their pregnancies, so we feed them hay all over the farm to force them to walk. Also, as much as I'd love to, we can't turn the sheep out into the federal land beyond our pastures because there are too many neighborhood dogs and coyotes. Our sheep must be protected not from snow and ice cold winds, but from predators. Farming is so local.

Farming is local

Many years ago, a friend suggested that I go to Peru to help the farmers there learn the best ways to raise guinea pigs. I declined because I knew nothing about guinea pigs.This fall I actually realized the wisdom of that decision. Not only did I know nothing about guinea pigs, but I knew nothing about Peru. Farming is local.


Dave and I just spent five days in a cottage on the south coast of England. The sheep and cows there grazed in small fields divided by dense hedge rows of bramble rose, gorse and holly. The pasture grasses were still abundant and green in the second week of November. Roses, cyclamen and small amaryllis bloomed in the gardens and the grass. The clouds hung low four out of five days, it rained everyday, and sea spray filled the air with mist when it wasn't raining.The fields were slanted at such steep angles that I doubt the farmer ever tilled them or possibly even ever cut them.

At home, by mid-November, the pasture grasses are short and brown, the leaves are gone from the trees and the flowers have all died. We cut our pastures several times during the summer to keep the grasses from blooming, setting seeds and then going dormant. I have never seen such luxuriant November fields as I saw in England. I'm lucky that the book I used to learn how to raise sheep, The Sheep Book, was written by a shepherd who only lived an hour from our farm. We were raising sheep under the same weather conditions, the same climate conditions, similar soil types and similar weed problems. I got my first shepherding advice from a local farmer. If I'd been reading an English shepherding book, I would have been really surprised. Farming is indeed local.

The death of summer

The Virginia creeper vine climbed a tree in the backyard and I knew that fall was coming. The five leaflets glowed brilliant red against the fading green of the box elder. Red sumac leaves are the first harbingers and the Virginia creeper turn shortly after that.

People talk about the maples that turn the entire world to fire and I do  love that peak of fall color, but for me, that garland of red Virginia creeper winding its way through the forest wakes my eyes up, almost like a neon light flashing "Look at me!"

Another season is passing, leaves dying, nutrition descending  to the roots to be stored until next spring when the first tiny leaves open to delight our eyes after the winter. I don't think of winter as a time of death. It's more like a breathing space, where the outdoor chores slow down. The weeds stop growing. The lawn doesn't need to be mowed. The garden's harvest is all in the freezer or the root cellar.

That streak of crimson in the woods and the golden glow of maples remind me that we're almost done canning tomatoes. Soon I will resume my winter activities - felting, knitting, writing. Fall isn't so much the death of summer as the resurrection of my creativity.

Apples

We've been planting apples since we first moved to the farm. We tag each tree, but as years pass, tags fade or are blown away, trees die and are replanted with different varieties. Now, most of our apples are unidentifiable.

 We periodically pick an apple on each tree to determine when to pick the rest. Are the seeds brown? Is the apple sweet?  The Haraldsons ripen the latest and are best after a light frost. Only the apples on one tree ripen early, most years so early that we don't even notice until most of the apples are lying on the ground - a feast for the wasps.

This year that tress was covered in big, beautiful apples, no worm holes or hail dents or bird pecks. I vowed to enjoy them before the wasps did. I picked the first apple in mid-August. Bland taste, hard texture, white seeds. Not ripe yet.

By the first of September, the seeds were brown, the texture was mealy and the taste was still bland. Wonder why we chose to plant a bland mealy apple? Oh well, I thought, they'll make good apple sauce. However, in spite of the blandness, they didn't fall apart when I cooked them unless I completely covered them with water and boiled for an hour. This made runny, applesauce completely lacking in heat labile nutrients like vitamin C.

Then the apples began falling - fast. We gathered them by the bucket, quartered them and cooked them in the pressure cooker. A quick trip through the Squeezo strainer made nicely textured applesauce with no flavor. Alice, Dave's mom , was visiting and we cooked up a pan of her honey crisp apples. They made wonderful apple sauce - sweet and tangy.

Then Dave, the winemaker in the family, had a brilliant idea. He looked up the concentration of malic acid in honey crisp apples and figured out how much powdered malic acid we would need to add to our bland apples. (Malic acid just happens to be one of the useful chemicals that wine makers keep in stock). The newly adulterated apple sauce was delicious and all we had done was to add a little bit of what makes apples taste like apples.

Change

                                             photo by Jesse Walker

Everything changes all the time, but we seldom notice. Weeds bud, bloom and spread their seeds. Socks develop holes in their heels. Lambs grow to be ewes. Our friends'  faces wrinkle and their hair grays. Most changes are so subtle that we don't notice them day to day.

Last month my fourth grandson, Caius, was born and suddenly our lives changed. Such a tiny focus for that change - a little over eight pounds, he hardly had any weight in my arms, but the space he occupies in my heart is huge. As a parent, I had no idea of the emotional impact my children had on their grandparents. In the instant when I first held each one of my grandsons in my arms, I realized that each little boy would grab my heart in his tiny hands and I would be changed forever.

Leaving the farm

At the end of last month, I left the farm in Dave's capable hands and drove north to Ely to spend time with college friends, most of whom I hadn't seen since we all turned 50, 17 years ago.

My shift in perspective was startling. Sheep sales, wet hay and weeds had been my focus for two months. Suddenly, I was looking beyond the fence lines and the world sparkled.

Gretchen identified rabbit tail clover, a plant that I found along the edge of the road. Melissa taught me about Solvay, a heat sensitive surface used to glue small pieces of fabric together, Laurie and I talked past canoe trip routes and the joy of paddling. Linda, my junior year roommate, introduced me to Fibonacci quilt patterns, wonderful repeating designs based on the Fibonacci series, a mathematical construct. Linda, my freshman year roommate, and I proudly sold My Sheep can Dance, a children's picture book which I wrote and Linda illustrated, and began planning our next collaboration.

Four days away allowed me to return to the farm full of creative ideas, looking forward to Dave's and my next canoe trip, and ready to bale our next crop of hay.

                                             Laurie, Gretchen, Joanie, Melissa
                                             Linda, Linda