Free Sylvia's Farm by Sylvia Jorrin

route to the barn, blocking all exits from the house, necessitating climbing over them while carrying two bottle lambs and their formula, bales being hauled almost three hundred feet to the barn with me acting as cart horse, pulling them balanced on a toboggan and all the while the smell of that soup, enjoyed but not partaken of, permeating the kitchen as I prepared a bottle to tempt the lambs of the ewe who had not moved from her favorite spot in the corner?
    The hay is now moved and stacked. The animals are fed. The kitchen pipes, frozen for a day, are once more thawed. The new puppies fed three times. The water for the barn is drawn. The sheep can no longer make it to the brook, nor the culvert, for that matter, and eagerly wait the 150-odd gallons of water to be poured out for them. And, of course, all fires are kept going, and the wood for them brought in to fill their respective wood boxes. And the smell of that soup wafts through the house.
    Suddenly I remember that there are two lambs too many in themain part of the barn, and that if the ewe lying down (whose name is Daisy, by the way) really hasn’t gotten up, she must be terribly thirsty. So back down to the barn to give her water and find the mother of the two extra lambs.
    Daisy can’t stand up. I half lift, half drag her away from the bedding she’s fouled and put clean straw under her and give her water, a quart at a time, between feeding the others more hay. The water is given in intervals, in order not to shock the thirsty ewe’s system. Her ewe lamb, no matter how gently persuaded, won’t take more than an ounce from the bottle. I put everyone into the cozy dry part of the barn and suddenly hear the ewe struggling. She’s dying. Oh, no! I run to her and see her flailing her legs convulsively. I pull the ewe to her feet. She stands. Slowly she begins to eat the hay that was set before her a few minutes earlier.
    I tuck the lamb in a jacket, tie the sleeves, and carry her up the ladder, past the sixty newly stacked bales of hay, into the warm house with all fires glowing brightly. In the kitchen, where the soup is still warming, I take a silver demitasse spoon from a drawer and feed the lamb four ounces of milk, a spoonful at a time, go back outside, get some very sweet-smelling hay from the broken bale still lying on the front door stoop, and put the weak lamb, as well as the other two bottle-fed lambs, on to the hay. Then, noting that the clock is announcing the ninth hour after noon and the twenty-first hour of the day, take a ladle from the drawer and stir the soup on the stove, ladle some into a big blue-and-white cup, and sit down in front of the living room fire, legs over the arm of the overstuffed chair, and eat
potage tomato à la bonne femme
, tomato soup!

EPIPHANIES AND OTHER MOMENTS
    S UNDAY MORNING was a special time for me. My reward, in a way, for the year and especially for yesterday, an intense, tension-ridden, and nearly too-difficult-for-words day of shearing. It shouldn’t have been. I had hired a shearer who was a bit on the temperamental side. A prima donna, the Emperor of the sheep-shearing world. Or so he thought. All seventy-one sheep who were to be shorn and their lambs had been penned inside the day before, as he had requested. Shearing wet sheep is difficult. He had also requested that they not be fed or watered for twenty-four hours before he came. Since he would be shearing for at least eight hours, it was too much stress for my nursing and pregnant ewes, so I split the difference. And in they went for twelve hours. I made certain there was fresh bedding that they could nibble on. Hay, in other words. He would know they had eaten.
    Moments before the Emperor of Shearing arrived, a van pulled into my driveway. In it was a family sent to me by the nearby Hanford Mills Museum. The museum had canceled its Sheep to Shawl Day and sent me a family that had wanted to see shearing. They were speaking with me