Sheepish Read online

  We quickly adjust to life with a teenager in the guest room. She sleeps like the dead, so I need to wake her up the first few mornings because Melissa likes to get outside early to check on the flock. That first morning, I stop at the open door, confused. The comforter and top sheet are piled into a lump in the center of the bed. Either Amelia has fled the farm during the night or she is somewhere underneath that pile. I bring Robin the border collie in to stick his cold, wet nose under the mound until it emits a low moan.

  “Oh, good,” I say. “You’re awake. Time to get up.”

  Amelia is polite. She is funny and makes us laugh, an incredible gift in the midst of high tension. And not once does she say, “I don’t want to do that.” Instead she constantly asks, “What can I do to help?” She chases sheep, falls down, and picks herself up again. She doesn’t complain when the rain starts and doesn’t let up for days. Amelia learns to drive the four-wheeler. She learns to set up portable electric fences. And when Melissa thrusts a newborn lamb into her arms and hands her a loaded syringe saying, “Here, you can give the shot,” she learns to give shots.

  Melissa and Amelia mesh into a team. Soon I rarely have to wake Amelia; she appears at the kitchen counter dressed in her chore clothes even before Melissa is ready. I keep their bellies full and do load after load of laundry, washing off the manure, urine, placenta, dirt, and blood. Both Melissa and I are intensely grateful I can remain in the house. The farm breathes a sigh of relief, and anxiety drops.

  I’m not totally out of the picture, however. First with walkietalkies, then in later years with cell phones, if Melissa or Amelia need anything, they call and I quickly deliver it: more towels, the bottle of propylene glycol, a container for milking out a ewe with teats so full of milk the lambs can’t get their mouths around them. If Melissa and Amelia are stuck outside for a long period of time, I deliver water, sandwiches, cookies, and chocolate.

  I become the primary audience for stories. Melissa and Amelia might come back in from hours in the rain, excited about saving a baby, or dejected because they haven’t. They are overflowing with details, and it’s my job to listen and exclaim and congratulate, no matter how gory the details or how sad the story’s end. So much can happen in one day of lambing that if the stories aren’t shared immediately, they’re pushed aside by the amazing things that happen the next day. After three days of lambing, what was vivid and intense the first day becomes a distant memory.

  Sometimes it’s a lamb that has been born overnight and is too weak or cold to stand up and nurse. Melissa often calls ahead before they arrive so I can start thawing the cubes of colostrum we store in the freezer. I put my emotions on hold. The lamb will either survive, or it won’t. We’ll do our absolute best to make sure it lives, but even then lambs die. I set up a laundry basket in the front entryway with a heating pad covered with a towel. Amelia brings in the lamb and we all sit on the floor gathered around it. If the lamb is strong enough to have a sucking reflex, I can usually get it to drink. If not, Melissa slides a slender rubber tube down its throat, always listening for stomach gases to make sure the tube’s in the stomach, not in the lungs; then I pour the colostrum down the tube into the baby’s stomach.

  Sometimes all it needs is one tubing. A few hours later it drinks from the bottle, or we tube it again. When the lamb is up on its feet and crying, Melissa wraps it in a towel, hands it to Amelia, and they drive back out to the pasture. The ewe is always there waiting, searching for the baby that has disappeared. A bleat from the lamb and a nicker from the ewe bring the two together and the lamb begins to nurse.

  One late May morning Amelia zooms up on the four-wheeler and I meet her at the front door. “We can’t get the lamb out,” she says breathlessly. “We need your help.”

  “You need my help,” I repeat and we look at each other, realizing what a silly request this is. A lamb stuck in the birth canal? A problem that not even Can-Do Melissa and Never-Give-Up Amelia can fix? We’re in big trouble.

  “You’ve come to the right person,” I say, and I reach for the phone to call the vet. She arrives fifteen minutes later and successfully delivers a huge, coal-black female. I’m proud to play such a critical role in the miracle of birth.

  After the first week of Amelia’s stay, Phyllis asks Amelia how it’s going. “I’ve never been so exhausted in my life ... and I’ve never had so much fun.”

  I call Phyllis and ask if we can adopt her daughter. We’re sad she declines, since after a few weeks with this kid, we’re hooked.

  The Failed Environmentalist

  It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.

  —DAN QUAYLE

  I came of age in the 1970s. Earth Day. Recycling. Consume less. Compost. When Melissa and I moved in together, we bought a supply of cloth napkins, and in the nearly thirty years since then I’ve purchased only a handful of paper napkins. When we moved onto the farm, we built a huge compost bin. We turned off our lights, and minimized our use of both heat and air-conditioning. In fact, for twelve years we didn’t even have air-conditioning. We schlepped bottles and newspaper and plastic to recycling centers long before the rest of the world invented curbside pickup.

  I list all these admirable, eco-friendly activities not to brag, but in hopes that I may be forgiven for what comes next. Thanks to family and health and financial issues, both Melissa and I have been unfocused, overwhelmed, and distracted by all the hats we must wear. But we continue to drive our recyclables into town and put them in the correct bins. The compost pile, however, has grown cold. Instead, we toss some food out in the barnyard for the chickens to munch on, except for the chicken leftovers. That’s just not right. The rest of the food scraps find their way into the trash instead of into the countertop compost container. Keeping it clean seems to require more energy than I have.

  So I’m feeling a little guilty about the food waste. We should be composting it in a bin of worms under the kitchen sink. But we don’t have the time or energy to even look into this. And the job of taking the recycling into town just feels bigger and bigger. It doesn’t help that I experiment with drinking a nice big glass of wine every night, so our pantry soon looks alarmingly like the pantry of a person who experiments with drinking a nice big glass of wine every night. And the crushed cans of Diet Coke are piling up and threatening a coup of the kitchen.

  Recycling suddenly feels futile and exhausting. Then, with all the stress and crankiness and messiness of life, it happens. One day, as I contemplate filling the car with twenty bags of catalogs and magazines to recycle, five bags of newspapers, three large trash bags with glass, plastic, and aluminum, I crack. Melissa isn’t home, so she doesn’t see me throw all the recycling into our huge trash bin, which will be emptied that afternoon.

  I collapse in the house, feeling so relieved. Once the relief fades, however, the guilt settles in for a nice long visit. Melissa comes home and sees the house unencumbered by 500 pounds of recyclables. “Hey, thanks for taking in the recycling.”

  How shall I answer? I check my watch. Will the trash guys be here soon? Can I stall? If I tell Melissa the truth, will she march out to the trash bin and remove it all? Is failing to answer a question the same as telling a lie?

  The floor beneath us shakes a bit. The trash guys are coming down the driveway in their massive truck. I look Melissa in the eye and she reads the truth. “You didn’t.”

  “I did.” I attempt to justify my actions, but her disapproval is impenetrable.

  I am a failed environmentalist. It’s not just recycling. I hate the new light bulbs. They protrude from light fixtures and bug me. In my opinion, compact fluorescent light bulbs work just fine unless you actually need to see. I can’t read with these bulbs. I can’t see with these bulbs. The basement stairs go from well-lit and safe to a dim, depressing tunnel. Every time Melissa installs one, I curse and whine and say environmentally inappropriate things, then I remove the offending bulb and screw
an incandescent bulb back in.

  Should incandescent bulbs ever be outlawed, I envision a Waco-type standoff, with me barricaded inside the house, and U.S. marshals circling outside, guns drawn. They’ll hand Melissa the bullhorn so she can plead with me to give myself up before anyone gets hurt. When this doesn’t work, a marshal will take over. “Come out with your hands full of those incandescents, or we’re coming in.”

  Given my failed environmentalism, I am relieved we’re at least raising sheep on pasture. Grazing animals is much more environmentally friendly than sticking them in a feedlot and using lots of fossil fuel to plant a crop of grain, spray the crop with herbicides and insecticides, harvest the grain, dry the grain, transport the grain to the feedlot, and feed it to livestock. With grazing, the animals do all the work. They eat, they fertilize. Then they walk to a new area of the pasture. They eat, they fertilize. It’s a beautiful system.

  But then I receive disturbing news. While researching a book I learn that in 2006, the UN published a report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow” that identified meat production as responsible for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions on the planet, much more than the entire transportation sector of the world economy. What? It’s more damaging to the environment to eat a hamburger than to drive a car? How could this be? Said Henning Steinfeld, senior author of the report: “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.” The report goes on (and on and on) to list all the horrible ways livestock are really messing things up. The report leads to catchy news headlines like, “Cattle, Pigs, and Sheep: Environment’s Worst Enemies?” The anti-meat campaigns jump on this, and soon even Prince Charles is recommending we stop eating meat altogether to save the planet.

  There is no response debunking the study, only more and more organizations enthusiastically quoting it. People in the meat industry are fairly silent, basically because they’re already being harassed, as well they should be, for raising animals in energy-intensive factories. No one seems to be distinguishing between raising livestock in factories versus raising them out on pasture. The report has effectively put a red circle with a slash squarely over livestock of any kind, including my innocent little sheep living quietly out on our pasture.

  What about all the benefits to grazing animals? What counts, environmentally, is not only our emissions, but as Newsweek put it, “how the earth responds” to our actions. Half of the carbon we release into the atmosphere is absorbed, much of it by plants that suck it up through photosynthesis. It’s a cool cycle, actually—the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more the plants take up so the faster they grow to absorb even more carbon. Plants are good, in other words. It’s a reason to keep as much land in pasture as possible.

  But no one says this. Instead, the outcry is loud: Livestock are bad for the environment. I don’t believe it. But yet, what if it’s true?

  Great. I throw away my recycling. I don’t compost. I use incandescent bulbs. And I raise sheep.

  The planet is doomed, and it’s my fault.

  Minnesota Cranky

  I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

  —HUNTER S. THOMPSON

  Even though I have referred to myself as a tough muffin, I must now be brutally honest: I have never been even remotely tough. I was born shy and became a properly polite child. I hated drawing attention to myself. The first time Melissa and I went grocery shopping together I was at one end of the cereal aisle and she, from the other end of the very long aisle, actually called out to me, “Regular or Honey Nut?” Mortified, I hustled down the aisle. “Please don’t do that,” I whispered.

  “Do what?”

  “Don’t talk to me ... you know ... so loudly. People will hear.”

  The poor woman looked around. “You’re embarrassed if people know you prefer regular over Honey Nut?”

  Add to this shyness the pressure to be “Minnesota Nice,” and you have someone who doesn’t want to rock the boat or draw attention to herself or do anything that might lead total strangers to think poorly of her.

  But something is happening to me and it feels weird.

  The first time I realize my personality is getting wonky is when I’m driving 70 mph on Interstate 94 through Wisconsin. There is no traffic behind me. But suddenly, out of nowhere, a motorcycle passes me. He must be going 90 mph to have come up on me so quickly. Speeding pisses me off. Being startled pisses me off. When he passes me, my middle finger goes up before my brain can stop it. Only then do I see the back of his black leather jacket: “Hells Angels, Madison, Wisconsin.”

  If you know anything about Madison, Wisconsin, you know this isn’t as frightening as it sounds. Madison is a college town, a liberal city where every window seems to display a peace sign. Now if the jacket had read Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I might have been a little worried. Tougher city. Blue collar. Home of Old Milwaukee beer.

  The cyclist gets about fifty feet past me when it sinks in that I’ve flipped him off. He touches his brakes and drops back, level with me. I’m still too angry to worry about this guy being a Hells Angel. I glare at him from my righteous perch and wave my cell phone at him, then start talking into it, as if I’m tattling on him. The guy guns his bike and disappears on the horizon. See what I mean about Madison?

  Meanwhile, Melissa is in the passenger seat staring at me. “Who are you?”

  Good question. It’s like I’ve reached some weird place in my life where I don’t care what other people think of me. Then another day I’m once again in my car, this time on Highway 52, just beginning to pass a man who’s driving slowly in the left lane. He has his phone on the steering wheel and he’s texting. I am furious. He could cause an accident and someone could die. I pull up next to him. I can’t yell because he won’t hear me. I’m so frustrated. What can I do?

  When the driver looks over at me, I whip out my index finger and shake it at him in furious indignation. Shake, shake, shake, like he’s four years old. The guy’s eyes widen and he pulls ahead to escape Crazy Woman. I keep shaking my finger and he watches me, alarmed, in his rearview mirror.

  My reign of terror continues. We live on a dead-end gravel road in the country, so people driving on the highway often pull off onto our road to nap, make a phone call, or consult a map. I have no problems with this. One summer afternoon as I’m going into town to run errands, I see a car pulled over on our road. The driver, a young man in his thirties, is walking around the front of the car and into the ditch, reaching for his zipper. This stretch of highway has a gas station every ten minutes. It’s not a barren wilderness with hours between public toilets.

  He’s chosen a spot without bushes or trees. Cars whiz by 100 feet from him. There’s a house directly across the highway. The grass is short, but I doubt this guy is planning to kneel. He stops in the ditch, sees me come over the hill, but keeps going with the zipper. Unbelievable. Can’t you be arrested for this in the city?

  I am incensed. Using my angry index finger, I blast my horn all the way down the hill. He stops, obviously deciding to wait until I pass, but clearly still planning to pee. I am even more incensed, so when I reach him I slam on my brakes and roll down the window. “This neighborhood is not your toilet!” I scream, scaring even myself. “Go pee somewhere else!”

  He flings up his hands and stomps back to his car. I drive away, shaken but exhilarated. Some days, dropping the Minnesota Nice feels pretty good.

  I share my confrontational stories with my dad. He frowns. “Where did you get that from? Not from me. Not from your mother.” Realization dawns. “Ah, from your mother’s mother. Your Grandma LaRiviere could be ...” He searches for a delicate way to phrase this, then gives up. “Your grandmother could be ornery.”

  My grandmother raised sheep. I raise sheep. My grandmother could be “ornery.” I was turning ornery.

  Hmmm.

  The King a
nd I

  The Lord can give, and the Lord can take away. I might be herding sheep next year.

  —ELVIS PRESLEY

  I like Elvis. I like his R&B songs. I like his voice. And I think he was physically a beautiful man. I try to convince Melissa to name our latest ram “Elvis,” but she won’t. I begin sharing my love of Elvis with friends. That’s all they hear when they ride in my car. I have photos of him in my office. I can tell by their concerned faces that if I don’t move on soon, there will be a well-meant intervention in my future.

  My dad and stepmother visit Graceland, and since I’ve never been, I ask Dad to bring me something back. He buys me a book about Elvis’s life, complete with photos of Graceland. I spend one entire morning reading the book, mesmerized by his strange and complex life. When I’m done, I close the cover and begin to cry. I cry for thirty minutes. Why? Because Elvis is dead. Yes, he died in 1977, but only now, over thirty years later, does it hit me. The loss is overwhelming.

  Six months later I burst into tears again. Elvis is still dead. And again three months after that. Melissa grows concerned. Not only have I become Crazy Woman on the road, but I can’t stop crying over Elvis.

  I’ve already had my midlife crisis, so I’m not sure what’s going on now. When I was forty, and flailing around as a writer and new farmer, I pushed through and found myself on the other side of a few really bad years. To celebrate, I got a six-inch tattoo of a mermaid on my back. I was so relieved to have moved through this phase in my life that for weeks I’d pull my clothing aside to show off my tattoo. Melissa finally suggested, gently, that I stop disrobing in public. I decided that when I do weird things like showing off a tattoo, it means I’ve survived something.