For many of us, joy starts in the darkest part of winter, when the night is at its longest, rain goes from being a kiss to a slap and the barnyard becomes a pit of deep, boot-stealing mud. It begins with a lamb.
“All young animals are appealing but the lamb has been given an unfair share of charm,” wrote James Herriot, the Yorkshire veterinarian and bestselling author in his memoir All Things Bright and Beautiful.
I think of that quote every year when it’s time to band the lambs. I don’t know why we keep sheep. We’re cattle ranchers. We don’t raise the fluffy little clouds knitters dream about – we have tough, tall, black-faced meat sheep bred to withstand the steep hills and sideways rain. They’re dumb and stubborn and shearing them is an annual battle. Their wool isn’t worth much of anything. But lambs…
If there’s one thing our giant Suffolk cross ewes are good at doing, it’s having babies. While our wool-gathering colleagues play midwife in the rain and dark, our hardy mamas do what they need to do with hardly any fuss.
And so begins the best time of the year, the weeks before and after Christmas when the barnyard is full of the tiny bleats of the babies and deep rumbling replies of the ewes. If shearing is the worst job of the year, docking the lambs is the best. I grab them and tuck their tiny legs above their heads so Dad can apply the bands. While he’s working I have just enough time to marvel at them, the way their coarse nubbly coats slide over their ribs, their speckled floppy ears and waggling tails, the milk-sweet smell of their heads and breath, the way they snuffle like puppies. You can forgive anything from a lamb, even when you have to slide in poop to grab them, or they pee all over your new Carhartt jacket.
This year, as we were banding the lambs, I was thinking about Becky Giacomini. I had spent the morning sitting in a comfy chair at the blood bank, looking up at her smiling face on the wall next to the other multi-gallon donors. I’m not particularly squeamish about donating blood, but sometimes I struggle to set aside the time. On those occasions, I ask myself what Becky Giacomini, who’s on more committees than I can count, would say.
Probably, “Don’t go running after lambs after donating blood.”
I was holding the last lamb in my arms when I was struck by a terrible stomach pain, then the conviction I was going to pass out.
“I’m just going to sit….right here…” I told Dad, handing him the critter and sliding gracefully to the muddy ground.
I revived, walked across the corral, slid to the ground again.
“Oh jeez,” I said. The lamb, banded and freed, began his siren.
“Maaaaaaaamaaaaaa,” he said.
“Baaaaaaybeeee,” wailed the ewe. I lifted my legs in the air, black spots appearing behind my eyes.
“I’ll get you a chair,” said Dad, walking slowly to the truck shed and coming back with a plastic lawn chair.
I sat in the chair but my vision continued to fade in and out like an old television set.
“I’m going to pass out, I think.”
“I’ll get you some juice,” said Dad, disappearing toward the house.
I laid down on the sheep-poop covered ground, my new jacket cushioning my head, my feet up on the chair. Freed from supervision, our corgi mix Charlie began eating lamb poop with abandon, returning occasionally to lick my face. From the corner of my eye I could see the bunched huddle of ewes, sniffing their babies and plotting revenge.
It took a long time for Dad to come back bearing a soda and a jar of blackberry jam. It gave me time to ponder my life and how I’d ended up in this particular place, inverted on manure with an audience of sheep. I recalled how we’d given my boyfriend’s son the opportunity to name a lamb last year and he’d come up with “Bill Murray.” I thought about my great-aunt Ticki Romanini, who passed in 2013 and who — when asked by her son why she put on makeup before going to the barn — replied, “So the sheep will recognize me!”
When I gathered enough strength to leave the plastic chair in the middle of the corral, I did so with a flock of curious, glittering eyes following me. The lambs, their trauma forgotten, had begun to nuzzle for milk and play lamby games again. Why do we keep sheep? I still prefer beef, but I think I’m getting closer to an answer. There are some things you can’t do in front of a cow, you see. They’ll judge you.