Sheepish Page 5

  So if I’ve already had my crisis, why am I crying so much, as if I’m stuck in a PMS loop? I grow concerned about my constant crying, so I make an appointment to see a therapist. In our first session, she asks for examples.

  “Well, don’t laugh,” I say, “but I burst into tears fairly regularly because Elvis is dead.”

  She laughs. Then she prescribes antidepressants, which I take for a while but since I continue to cry over Elvis, I decide they aren’t working and stop. Besides, even though I know I shouldn’t like Crying-over-Elvis-Woman, or Crazy-Behind-the-Wheel-Woman, I do. I have great affection for my deteriorating personality. It’s like every vertebra in my spine has gone from mush to metal.

  I like it.

  Brokeback Farm

  After you’ve done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. And after ten years, throw it away and start all over.

  —ALFRED EDWARD PERLMAN, NEW YORK TIMES, JULY 3, 1958

  Because pasture is scarce one fall, Melissa sets up the temporary netting outside the main fence to let the sheep munch on grass and clover in the windbreak. They are still fenced, only not with a heavy-duty perimeter fence. Our flock has never been outside of the fences because we live an alarmingly short jog to a major highway, and it isn’t safe.

  The next day, Melissa leaves for work and all is well. Midmorning, I look out an east window and see there are sheep in the backyard. This isn’t right. I look out the west window. There are sheep on the driveway. Also not right.

  Then it hits me. The entire flock is outside our perimeter fence. They are unfenced. They are fence free. They have the unfettered ability to dash down into the neighbor’s alfalfa field and gorge themselves so badly they bloat up and die. Or they can run down the driveway and turn left, where they can perform all sorts of mischief on a neighbor’s land. Or they can turn right, and in a comfortable ninety-second dash find themselves at the highway, where they’ll face death by speeding car.

  My heart nearly stops when I realize it’s up to me to get the flock back to safety. I throw the puppy in her kennel, jam my feet into my barn Birkenstocks, then race outside. Our border collie, Robin, is now mostly deaf, so he can no longer help, and there’s no time to call a neighbor because as the sheep graze, they are spreading out farther from the house.

  I dash to the barn for a bucket of corn, then race for the fence that should have kept them in. They knocked it down. I disconnect the electricity so I can touch the fence, then run to the pasture where I need to move them.

  I’m a planner. I consider the options, weigh the results, and then make a decision. This time I act on pure instinct. The sheep are outside the temporary fence, but the llamas are still inside. When I open the fence to call the sheep in, the llamas will want to leave. They are contrarians like you wouldn’t believe. I decide I’d rather have three llamas running loose than the entire flock.

  I have one chance to lure them down the driveway into a ninety-degree right turn, up the hill, then a ninety-degree left turn into the pasture. If this doesn’t work, they’ll become suspicious, flighty, and will likely run in one woolly mass down the driveway.

  I open the fence, rattle the bucket of corn, give the odd yodel we use to call the flock, and all the sheep come running from the yard, driveway, and barnyard. A handful make the ninety-degree turn and start following me. The rest hesitate. As I expected, the llamas head for the opening and freedom. In a burst of energy fueled by terror, I push up the hill, rattling the bucket and yodeling. I risk a peek over my shoulder. Thank God for the sheep’s desire to stick together. They all make the turn and follow me up the hill. Even the llamas come, having been swept up in the woolly crowd.

  I turn left into the pasture, and every sheep and llama follows me. I shut the gate behind them, fall to my knees, and mourn Elvis. If there’s a god or goddess or saint responsible for watching over shepherds, he or she has smiled on me today. There are many things on the farm at which I am of no use, but I am a shepherd, and I know how to move sheep. I don’t know if my shepherd grandmother even liked sheep, so she might have thought I was wacko to be raising them, but still, I wish she could have seen me today.

  After staggering to my feet, I turn to face the naughty sheep, fling my arms wide, and in what comes dangerously close to a bad parody of Brokeback Mountain, shout, “I wish I could quit you!” A few sheep look up, bits of grass sticking out of their mouths as they chew thoughtfully.

  I love these animals. There’s No. 66, still going strong. There’s No. 75/101. Her baby ear tag was No. 75, and because she was raised as a bottle lamb, she learned her number. But when we gave her an adult tag, No. 101, she didn’t know we were calling her. So she became No. 75/101. Sounds like a radio station when we call out her name ... I mean, her number. We don’t name our sheep.

  I watch No. 75/101 return to her grazing after my outburst.

  Despite my sheepishness, I might be a bit cranky to still be farming. I’ve barely made a dent in all the places I’d hoped to visit. I imagine that other people are having considerably more fun in their lives than I’m having in mine. They’re dressing better, earning more, and are just more together than I am. They’re going to more parties, attending more plays and movies, taking interesting classes. Their smart phones live more interesting lives than I do. I need a break.

  So where can a farmer escape when she’s tired of farming?

  It’s a quiet afternoon and we’re both inside. I sit at my computer in my office, and outside my open door Melissa sits at her desk in the family room. Suddenly Melissa leaps from her desk and heads for the stairs. “Something’s wrong,” she cries. “A sheep’s in trouble.”

  I wince, totally busted by the sheep bleat that Melissa has just heard. “No, that’s not a real sheep.”

  She stops on the stairs. “Not a real sheep.”

  I sigh. “It’s a virtual sheep.”

  She now stands in my office looking over my shoulder at my computer screen. “What the hell are you doing?”

  I purse my lips, wishing I’d thought to mute the animal sounds on the game. “I’m playing FarmVille.”

  She looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind, which isn’t far off.

  I’d first learned of the game through a New York Times article. Apparently FarmVille could be played through Facebook. By the end of 2009, the game’s first year, over 62 million people signed up to play. This means that the number of virtual Farmville farmers outnumbered actual farmers by more than sixty to one.

  In FarmVille, you’re given land and seeds to plant, then once your “crop” has matured, you harvest and sell it. While you “farm,” pleasant music plays in the background, punctuated now and then by a cow mooing or a sheep bleating.

  From the article, it seemed life as a virtual farmer went like this: Check your computer every day. When your harvest time nears, set your alarm before going to bed. Wake up when alarm sounds. Turn on light. Reach for laptop. With a click, harvest your blueberries and put them up for “sale.” Turn out light. Go back to sleep.

  I’m not sure if this game is good or bad. Do virtual chores help people better appreciate the work involved in raising real blueberries? Or does the game increase the sense that food appears on the shelf without much effort?

  I decide that rather than criticize a game I’ve never played, I should give it a try. I sign up and my farm appears with six little brown plots in an acre of green. I plow those six plots, then plant them with strawberries. I return a few days later to find that my strawberries have withered and died. They matured but I hadn’t harvested them in time.

  A day later when I move my cursor over my cow, it says “97% complete.” This must mean the cow is 97 percent on her way to needing to be milked. What I don’t know is how long it will take for that last 3 percent to happen. And when she reaches 100 percent, what if I don’t milk her right away? Will I log onto the game to find the cow belly up?

  It’s my day to do r
eal chores on our real farm, but I find it hard to concentrate. As I fill the sheep waterer, I worry about my virtual cow. As I make sure the steers have fresh water, I worry about my virtual cow.

  Barely noticing the warm summer day or the live animals around me, I finish chores and race inside. The cow is “100% complete” but hasn’t exploded or died, so I “milk” it, sighing with relief. Then I happily plant some “strawberries” and feed the “chickens.”

  I start playing every day, then twice a day. I accumulate a flock of sheep. I build fences, but in a funny little twist, I leave an opening in the fence, my own way of making the virtual farm more real. And sure enough, the next time I log on, two sheep have escaped the pasture and are in the strawberries. I scold them affectionately and move them back. It’s a very different experience than those ten minutes of terror as I worked to get fifty real sheep back inside the real fence.

  Virtual farming is fun. It’s clean. There are no disasters.

  When it comes to real farming, there are days when I think: Okay, enough is enough. We’ve done this for fifteen years. Fifteen years of little travel, not much money, and a great deal of manure on my jeans. We recently purchased four baby calves, and as I carried one into the barn, he peed all the way through to my underwear.

  An idea takes root in the back of my mind. What if we sell the house and the farm, then buy a small, cute RV? We could travel around the country picking up odd jobs. We’d have fewer headaches, fewer expenses, fewer urine-soaked pairs of underwear. It would be new. It would be less stressful. It wouldn’t be farming.

  Searching for Memoirs by Moonlight

  Perhaps, being lost, one should get loster.

  —SAUL BELLOW

  Perhaps, being lost, one should get lobster.

  —DEAN YOUNG

  I continue to struggle with the name of my book about the farm. Then the scandal breaks about James Frey and his novelized memoir, A Million Little Pieces. He was a bit too free with the truth in his book, and Oprah smacked him down for it. When I worry that as a result, people will no longer believe memoirs, Melissa snorts and says I could always call my memoir “A Million Little Fleeces.”

  No wonder I love this woman.

  I find an agent who’s willing to sell “Sheep Sex and Other Natural Disasters.” It takes her a few years, during which time I work as an instructor for a correspondence course, and continue raising sheep, but the agent finds an editor who loves the manuscript. The only problem, the editor says, is the book’s name. Apparently the phrase “sheep sex” might take people’s minds in the wrong direction. Uff da.

  So I once again rename the book, this time Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn. The one surprising thing about the book’s publication is that both farmers and farming enthusiasts come out of the woodwork. Farmers approach me at speaking engagements, look around to make sure no one else can hear, then confess they had the same accident with the drag as Melissa did, or that they’d also let their tractor run out of oil. Sadly, no one confessed to planting 200 grapevines upside down.

  Gay and lesbian farmers reach out to me. I meet elderly people who love the book because it brings back memories of growing up on a farm. I meet middle-aged people who speak wistfully of having wanted to farm at one time in their lives. I meet young men and women who rush up to me and say, “I’ve always wanted to farm, and after reading your book, I want to farm even more.”

  I gently suggest to each of them that they should reread the book, repeatedly, until their sanity returns.

  The weird thing about publishing a memoir is that the characters in it are frozen in time, like little action figures perfectly preserved in amber. Melissa and I are in our late thirties when we begin the farm. Hit by a Farm is published ten years later. During dinner with friends, I meet a man who has just read my memoir. In his mind, I must be forever energetic, forever earnest, forever thirty-seven. As I shake the man’s hand, the words slip out before he can censor himself: “Wow. You have more of a patina than I’d imagined.”

  Patina. A sheen produced by age or wear.

  Gee, thanks.

  In reading the book, people have laughed with us and learned with us and shared our story with others. There’s the lesbian in Puerto Rico who felt estranged from her mother, judged because of her sexuality. She gave her our story to read. I’m not sure what actually went through the mother’s mind—recognizing that being a shepherd was weirder than being gay? Relief her daughter didn’t raise sheep? Either way, upon finishing the book the mother invited her daughter and partner out for dinner, and the relationship began to mend.

  Others find in the book encouragement that their relationships will survive the start of a new venture or project. Some use it as a manual on how to raise sheep. People love that two women started a farm and have stuck with it. The praise embarrassed us: “You two are amazing!” “Look what you’ve done! You’ve started a farm! You’re living your dream!” Over the years, nonfarmers repeatedly reach out and lightly touch our lives as if to reassure themselves we’re still here, still together, as if they’re emotionally invested in our ongoing success. If we continue farming, it seems to give people hope for making changes in their own lives. One reader wrote, “I love the way you two found your way out of the misery and into the sunshine again.” Another said, “I’m glad you found the balance that makes your lives work.”

  Sigh. How did two introverted shepherds become role models for farming, healthy relationships, and balance? If people are relying on me to show them the way, they’re in big trouble ... basically because I’ve begun turning to memoirs myself in search of direction and encouragement. Just as Melissa and I aren’t preserved in amber at age thirty-seven, neither is the farm, and neither is our relationship. We’re slogging through both. And as for balance in my life? My muse took that with her when she left.

  I’m not thirty-seven anymore. I’m confused about what I want and where I’m going. I want to know if sheep are ultimately fatal to a relationship.

  One day I tiptoe right up to the edge of the abyss. I ask Melissa, “What do you suppose would happen if we sold the farm?” Her eyebrows totally disappear into her hairline. “Just kidding,” I say with a jolly laugh. I’m not interested in totally gutting Melissa’s life. Forget I mentioned it.

  I start cruising memoirs. There are travel and spiritual memoirs. I was hoping for one entitled, “Eat Pasture-Raised Lamb, Pray for Less Chaos, and Love Your Sheep.” No such book to be found. There are food and wine memoirs, but because our pantry still looks like a bottle recycling center, perhaps not. The “I will survive” memoirs deal with serious illness, pain, and death. I’m not ready for that yet.

  There are now a flock of “farm” memoirs about being enslaved by ducks or singing the praises of goats or loving llamas, about moving to the country and giving agriculture a try. Most of these farm memoirs deal with the farm’s beginning because that’s the most fun—things go wrong, the “farmers” make fools of themselves, people plant grapevines upside down. (Well, okay, that was just me.)

  Nowadays, new farmers not only write memoirs but star in their own reality shows like “The Fabulous Beekman Boys.” Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge, together for ten years, buy a huge New York farm that comes with a mansion, a herd of goats, and its own farmer. Brent’s upset because the tractors (plural—they need more than one?) aren’t neatly lined up in a row. Josh is upset because Brent is making him work too hard. Funny stuff. A Salon article trumpets the story of Josh and Brent: Can farming cure a midlife crisis? Of course it can’t, and the article comes to this conclusion: Even if you’re farming, your life still holds all the irritating things you want to escape—personality flaws, ego, financial woes. My advice to Josh and Brent? Don’t expect a farm to fix your life, for once the rural romance dims, you must still muck out the barn and stack hay bales and give that sick goat an enema. I’m guessing farming causes more crises than it cures.

  Farm beginnings are funny, w
hich is why people write about them and watch TV shows about them. The middles of farms? Less hysterical. Hopefully, a farmer gets better at what she does. (If not, that’s just sad.) She makes fewer mistakes, creates fewer disasters, and this is good. Although there are tons of stories about starting something new, there just aren’t that many about how to keep doing something, about how to slog through the middle when the going gets tough.

  Also, it seems that in any memoir I pick up that purports to be about one thing—moving to a large city, being laid off—there’s always a major relationship breakup buried in the middle of the book. Oddly, as if divorce were a spectator sport, some writers feel compelled to write about their breakups. Frankly, I’m more interested in avoiding my own.

  So while I tip my hat to the Beekman Boys, and all the other people fleeing the city and getting into farming, that’s not where I am. I suspect my raw truth is one we all face: Barring the sudden publication of a memoir written by another sheepish woman with patina, I must find my own way through the forest by weaving together the stuff of my life.

  Weaving requires two threads to create fabric. The vertical threads are called the warp. These threads must be the strongest because they bear most of the stress. My warp threads are farm stories. Stories, both good and bad, are the reason that people not only start farming, but keep farming.

  The horizontal threads of woven fabric are called the weft, or woof. Since I love dogs, let’s go with woof. These threads can be more fragile, but they create the fabric—its color and design. My woof threads are sheep and fiber stories, threads that will prove stronger than I’d imagined.

  PART TWO

  Telling Farm Tales

  To Sproing and Worfl

  Jumping for joy is good exercise.