Abbie

In Which the Sheep Get Naked

This photo of me is evidence against a picture being worth a thousand words. In this photo, I appear relaxed and competent. In control. I am none of those. Within ninety seconds of this photo, the photographer has to drop the camera and rescue me, as I realize that my arms are too short to reach the hind end of the wiggling sheep. So this photo simply creates a debt requiring nearly a thousand words to correct it.

It is almost true that the shearing begins with me looking skillful and the ewe looking docile. I am prepared. I have watched a man shear a sheep at Plumpton College, East Sussex, UK, gentle in both his British accent and his handling techniques. He shears the sheep in less than five minutes. By my seventh viewing, I am standing beside my computer, pantomiming his movements, learning the choreography I need to perform by this evening. When the cat wanders over, I set her on her rump, tuck her right foreleg behind mine, and shear her brisket with imaginary clippers.

I arrange things in the barn. Plug in the clippers. Oil them. Flip the switch. They are much louder and heavier than they looked on the video. To get the feel, I lift my pant leg and run them up my shin. They buzz on my skin. Fiddling with the angle, I trim my winter-long leg hairs.

When Andrew gets home, I am ready. We wrangle a reluctant Rhubarb from the pen. I inform Andrew that I will hold her and shear her, as this approach will give me the best access for efficiency.

“Then what will I do?”

“Take pictures,” I say.

All I need is to get Rhubarb alongside my legs, facing my right. Then, while I turn her nose towards her side with my right hand, I lean over her, reach my left hand under her belly for her right hind leg, and…I cannot reach her leg. The year’s worth of wool makes her too rotund to get my arms around her in any direction. I grunt around on the mess of woolly sheep for a minute, then Andrew helps. When Rhubarb leans quietly against my legs, Andrew hands me the clippers. He stands back and takes the photo.

My arms feel too short and weak. My back seizes within minutes. I nick her skin, once when she wiggles and once when she doesn’t. Trying to protect her skin, I shear off the pad of my left ring fingertip, run down to the house, drip blood across the kitchen floor, get woozy in the bathroom while Stella cries because she wants to see it before I bandage it, reassure her with my head between my knees, bandage it, and run back to keep shearing before I lose my nerve because there is our sheep with a third of her fleece dangling from her, waiting on her rump in Andrew’s arms.

None of my memorized choreography works for me. I realize that a smallish woman with large sheep cannot expect to work the same moves as a large man with a smallish sheep and untold hours of experience. Kneeling beside Rhubarb, I talk us through it. “You’ll feel so much better afterwards. Just a little more, then this wool will be gone. You will be just you.” Ha, I think. Ewe.

After an undisclosable amount of time in the menacing clipper drone, we all three stand, panting. Rhubarb—naked—rejoins Parsnip, who now looks enormous. My adrenaline dissolves, and I could fall asleep in our late supper of leftover spaghetti. Parsnip will wait until tomorrow.

The next day, I find another tutorial—How to Shear a Sheep in 20 Steps—similarly impossible looking, but better matching my ergonomic realities. We handle Parsnip more smoothly, despite her more feisty behavior. The shears balance better in my hand. I swear only once, at a single nick on her leg, and sustain no injuries myself. In half the previous time, Parsnip is nibbling hay while Rhubarb sniffs her in disbelief.

Watching them, I feel that disbelief too. We did it. The photo is not a complete deception; it is worth something. It is a reminder for me. The story is always more messy than a single frame can describe. Our thousand words are more complicated and compelling, more engaging and relatable, than one glance at someone’s life. It is always worth listening.

Note: This is the wool of one sheep. One.

Snow and the Painted Ladies

Thirty-nine inches of snow fell one day in March, towering into drifts along our house and over the fence. Inside, I had gone dormant, curled into smallness and slowing myself protectively. The blizzard, though, dragged me outside. Wind blew the snow into our eyebrows. Crusts froze on our hats and shoulders, but shoveling warmed us. It felt good to have something to fling ourselves against, together.

We started by the road and worked our way towards the well-buried cars. One foot after breakfast. One foot after lunch. Another foot late afternoon. Always revisiting the pile left by plows along the road. Each time we lifted the snow higher at the edges. In that blizzard, and the next few snows, adventure leavened the work.

March ended, though, with snow on the ground, less like a lamb and more like a dead fish. April’s snows have been a series of small betrayals, echoing my experiences in the past several months. Quiet months. I have been quietly resting and working.

At work yesterday, I euthanized eight animals. I took one dog’s shiny black face in my hands before I pushed the syringe. She released her head to me. My thumbs stroked her ears. Good dog. Sweet baby.

When someone is dead, they are dead. The excruciating effort of finding life after death is for the living, not the dead. Easter brings one of my favorite seasons because the old stories seem fresh; there is awakening and unfolding. Even the large snow patches do not stop water from rushing down the ditches. Buds fatten on grey branches. The hens and ducks race around outside again, pecking and dabbling. My legs exalt in striding between the barns unhindered.

Once last spring, I followed a hen to her hidden nest in the barn. As she crooned and postured, I spent twenty minutes with my camera focused on her butt fluff, waiting to capture the shiny wet egg escaping her body. I am that kind of optimist. But she decided to wait for more privacy to reveal her daily miracle.

This morning I am tending the improbable butterflies. A gift. Over thirty painted ladies, emerged from their chrysalides. Many of them sit folded. They seem too still. I refresh the cotton balls in honey water and move them to a warmer spot. I watch the painted ladies open and close and stagger over each other to find sweetness, uncoil a proboscis. I wonder if they will die the moment we release them, or fly off in subtle, fragile glory—allowing us our illusions.

More likely, they will do neither. They will remain—motionless in the cold spring—poised at the edge of death and life. And we will continue to wonder.

Flight Distance

Sunlight soaks my old red sweatshirt, melting me into the sofa. One degree outside, but I close my eyes and could be back on Andros Island, Bahamas. Minus the biting insects. Minus the salty breeze and bathing suit that spent the week damp, never out of the water long enough to dry.

We flew over one-thousand miles South to the Bahamas for Gascho family Christmas. Distancing ourselves from cold for a few days. For the last leg, a six-seater, 1976 Piper lifted us to Andros Island, with Sam in the co-pilot seat.

Fresh Creek—a briny estuary—surrounded the yellow rental house with its blue spiral staircase up to our bedroom. Fish schooled under the house. Shells littered the sandy bottom, visible through crystal water. A rope swing lured the kids to kayak to the nearby mangrove.

Surrounded by heat, I remembered that I have never outgrown flopping around in water. At every chance, I swam. The salt water held me so I could roll onto my back and loosen my muscles and float. I swam from the deck into the creek, from the beach into the ocean. With the kids and alone. In blue holes hundreds of feet deep. Over coral reefs near the surface.

Out on the reefs, a snorkel and mask made the surface disappear. Electric blue fish slipped behind purple fans of coral. Triangular angel fish wove among snub-nosed parrot fish. A big-eyed squirrelfish peeked comically from below brain coral, which looks like it sounds. I swam towards a three-foot long, torpedo-shaped fish. Close enough to see prominent teeth. My mind said, “big” and “silver” and “predator.” I swam just close enough to align our bodies, for size. Not close enough that it cared. Not close enough to chase it away.

Everyone has a flight distance. Move within that invisible boundary, and they will move away, regardless of your intention. The flight response—and the distance that provokes it—is instinctual. And learned.

As I swam up to the boat, our guide joined me and said, “I was watching your face with that barracuda.”

“That big guy?” My mind had not actually said, “Barracuda.”

“Yep. I was waiting for your eyes to get big, but your face stayed relaxed. If your arms had gone all stiff and your eye wide, I knew we had problems. But you were calm.”

I was calm because I was underwater, being held. Maybe I would have been wiser to name and recognize the possible threat. Or maybe I was safer not naming it. My own fear playing through my mind and body would have been more dangerous than the rarely aggressive barracuda. Our flight distance is instinctual and learned.

The last morning on Andros, I woke in the grey light. Put on my suit. Slipped into a cool, choppy Fresh Creek. Swam across to the southwest edge of mangroves and waited for sunrise. The pink-gold clouds welcomed me—illuminated, cumulus. I was ready to leave for our farm and Upstate New York’s below-zero temperatures, where the snow will hold me until spring.

Home now, we plunge into frozen water powder, backstroking angels on the ground. Sunlight on snow refracts into Bahamas-worthy colors. There are ripples and waves. Sleds are our kayaks. At noon, I need sunglasses to hike our hill—a great dune of snow—and the evening blues of sky and snow echo the Caribbean.

Sewn Together

*Five years ago this week: Sandy Hook Elementary School, which should have been enough. This post contains gunshots. And sewing. With love.

For reasons I do not completely understand, I am sewing a small sleeping bag, by hand.

First I cut a pattern from the large brown paper filler in the shipping box. I hold it up to the doll, who is blinking her eyes closed, lying still in her box. Her shiny two ponytails come to the waist of her cargo capris, which meet her wooly socks. She wears little pink hiking boots but can switch to even pinker crocs, presumably around the campsite in the evening. All eighteen inches of her will fit inside the sleeping bag.

For two dollars, I bought a yard of robin’s-egg blue satin. It was the closest thing I saw to whatever slippy material makes sleeping bags. This mini mummy-style bag will be extra silky—prom dress meets outdoor equipment. My palms smooth the satin onto our card table, and I pin the paper pattern onto it, as if I have done this before, but I haven’t. I also bought a lime green zipper, as if I know how to install it. Without consulting You Tube, my fingertips bend the satin along the zipper. I want to feel my way through this pretty, frivolous project.

I can sew. Last Sunday, I spent two hours sewing together the muscle bellies, then the skin on the underside of a dog’s chest. As I cleaned hair and dirt from deep inside the wound, I thought about the path of the bullet—perpendicular to the dog, grazing the sternum. My curved scissors trimmed away singed-grey tissue to reveal pink. We flushed and flushed the wound crater, trying to wash away what contaminates a body. Gunshot wounds are ugly. I imagined emergency doctors facing a person with such wounds—or, as has become frequent, many gunshot people in one event.

Gunshots in life—more abrupt than this wound alongside a holiday sewing project. Now it is bright blue satin and a camping doll for Christmas. Now it is flesh inverted, blown open. Our hearts bleed. We race towards the wounded. Then, when we could change the rules to help, we look away.

I understand that a gun can be a tool—a device held in your hand to perform a task. It can send a single bullet through a single deer in a field behind our house. In this animal, I leave the ugly wound, and we trim away the flesh for our freezer. We do this together, quietly, with mixed feelings. Even here, the gun is a tool for ending life, nothing else.

When do we need tools for killing? What do we gain from the freedom to have tools that destroy many lives, in moments? We gain people dying en masse, while learning, dancing, praying, gathering for music. Why do we cling to the right to inflict ugliness, when there are so many tools to create beauty?

For reasons I do not completely understand, I am bent on sewing this doll sleeping bag, so needlessly warm and sturdy. I pour hours into it, as if one person can mend everything by making something lovely.

Snow falls outside, and I watch the needle dipping in and out of prom-worthy fabric, not so different from satiny pink muscle. A needle is a tool for pulling things together, trailing a strand that will stay behind, holding. The edges draw closer. With time, the muscle will heal, and the fabric will thin—our brief lives, in some small way, sewn together.

Grass on my Pajamas

Something about using our giant weed eater makes me feel competent. It is easy to use, really. I do not even need to wield it with my arms, since it rides on a harness-belt thing. I am sporting a safety-first helmet with attached face shield and ear covers. My right index finger holds the safety trigger while my thumb revs the motor. Grass flies, flecking my thin flannel pants. I am in my pajamas.

I am moving our sheep to fresh pasture. Rhubarb and Parsnip, our two ewes, announced their disdain for the current pasture by escaping and nearly joining the kids in the car on their way to school. Unable to secure the sheep long enough to change into jeans, I am wearing my softest clothes. The weed eater zips a line though tall grass for the electronet fence. I move the white netting, then drag their little shelter, freshen the water, rattle some grain to entice them inside. All this before coffee.

Later, folding laundry after coffee, I notice that my socks say Darn Tough, which seems reassuring. I am glad to have these on hand. There is no promise of each next day being the same as this one, with problems I can solve.

In the evening, I scoop chicken feed into a bucket, but on my way to feed the hens, I am arrested by the ducks. Their gabbling and waddling captivates me—holds me captive—for fifteen minutes, which I do not regret, against the orange-for-now trees and dry cornstalks.

The ducks never let me touch them, but the hens relish a good scratch. They croon and sidle up to me, then hunker down, lifting their shoulders and tapping their feet. It is their receiving-a-rooster posture, so I know it is not a display of specific affection for me. But I pretend it is.

After chores, after supper, Stella and I return outside in time for waves of wild geese to pass over our heads. Hundreds of geese fill us with their brassy calls, coming across our field, our house, towards our neighbor’s large pond and sloped field, where they will cover the ground tonight. Among the raucous noise, Stella is yelling, “Over there! On that side! So much geese. So so much!” Then only four geese fly quiet and close overhead. We echo their silence and hear the rhythmic squeak of their wings.

This one day does not make much of a story. There is no real plot, just characters and—when all goes well—mostly repetition of other days. Tomorrow morning, the kids will resist crawling out of bed. The animals will need to be fed. Some days, though, carry too many stories, and I need those Darn Tough socks.

Today I have the grass on my pajamas, the hen feathers under my fingers, my six-year-old’s arms spread to the sky in rapture—so much.