The View from Home

 

Older son asked for help to get him started on an English assignment last night. His class had studied Old English riddles and they were to go home and write their own. We talked about it for a while and this is what he came up with:

I am dry as a bone and wet like a fish.
I am solid as a brick,
But I wriggle like a worm.
I am cold then hot.
I am both ancient and modern.
I am loved by nerds and college students.
What am I?

Answer is in the comments.

In honor of International Talk Like A Pirate Day:

My pirate name is:

Dirty John Rackham

You're the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean -- not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network


Regular blogging to resume shortly. Aargh!

We are back from the islands and I am back at work. Our actual return was Sunday night. Monday started with Court hearings at 9:00 am 10:00 am, 11:30 am and 2:00 pm. After five days in the tropics the change of pace was bracing to say the least. Sunday morning I was ready to throw away the return tickets and stay on by hook or by crook. Now that we are home again I have to say it is good to be looking out at our own hillsides. The weather is hot and the more nimble members of the flock have hopped the cattle guard and are dozing under the tree in the front yard. We truly have reached the peak of summer when the sheep lying on the cool shaded gravel in the driveway refuse to budge and I have to drive around them. Perhaps our front lawn with its good grass and shade is the sheep equivalent of the picture above. If so, I can't blame them for not wanting to move.

This is not a note from a hillside farm. This is a note from a hillside (and beachside) vacation. I am writing from a rented computer in a little cafe on St. Maartens. Blogger is in Dutch. The ocean around is the impossible blue-green I had always assumed came from photo retouching in travel brochures. Getting to the hotel, we had a quick tour around the island as the driver dropped off tourists in a loop around the coastline. Strange mixture of overdevlopment with just plain folks. Sort of like West Virginia with an ocean view. Off the beaten path there are hillside pastures with cattle grazing. The fencelines are clear; scrub and low grass on the cattle side, tropical vegetation on the other. Roads are narrow, drivers are enthusiastic, potholes and speedbumps keep the overall velocity down, causing drivers to run their little hyundais like sprint cars. Dash here, cut there, brake, swerve, stop in the road to chat. The clock on the terminal is ticking so it is time to hit "BERICHT PUBLICEREN" and get back to the business of relaxing.

Two of our rams who (mostly) coexist peacefully were lowering heads and crashing into one another as I looked out this afternoon. Looks like breeding season is underway. Most of the year our gentlemen sheep walk slowly and eat far more than some of them are worth. This time of year they make their one contribution to our enterprise before returning to their accustomed role as mobile manure producers and living lawn ornaments. Here is one of the few sheep poems I have in my collection. Written by the late New England poet and folksinger J. B. Goodenough, it looks forward to the end of all our rams' labors:

Sheep On The Town Road

Fenced beside the road
Three ewes doze.
The seven lambs, sleepy
With the work of being born,
Lean together.

The ram, in his own pen,
With nothing left to do,
Stands heavy-lidded
In the April sun,
Counting people.

From Milking in November

I found my copy of the book for $1.98 at the Main Bookshop in Sarasota back in June. The poems are spare, with a bit of a bite to them. The book is out of print, but, from the prices listed here, it seems that others value her work as well.

Here is another from the book:

Inheritance

No rum-money
Slave-money
Whale-money,
My grandfathers
Were landlubbers all.

They left me
A tilted house,
A broken-backed barn,
And six fields
hung on the hill.

Fifty years
I thought I was poor.
But I learned this:
Good dirt
Is hard to come by.

What's in the cd player these days: Jan Krist. Her voice and songwriting seem to hit me where I have been living lately; music about grief and hope, confusion, faith and mercy. You can download live tracks at her website here and listen for yourself. Try "Wounded Me, Wounded You" or "Spirit So Big." About ten years ago she wrote a piece for the arts journal Image; "Mercy Me: Music, Art, and Real Life."

Yes, it's been a while. The farm, flock and family are still here, with the usual changes that time brings to us all. I turned 52 just over a week ago and my oldest child turns 18 in just under a week. No big celebrations are planned. Nonetheless, it appears that our birthdays have not gone unremarked. On the same day last week he got an envelope from the Selective Service System and I received a postcard from Beltone hinting that someone in my age bracket might benefit from their services. I will pass. So far my hearing is holding out fine, which comes in handy to hear the creaking in my joints or the rumblings in a digestive system that has developed strong opinions about the appropriate food choices for a man in his sixth decade. Life is good though, and any morning that still finds me on the right side of the dirt is not without its possibilities.

Another picture from the weekend. Younger son takes a break from wrestling sheep to the shearing stand.

A scene from the annual Memorial Day Sheep Shearing Marathon.

Someone has to be on top of things

Baby, it's cold outside

Things I Have Been Doing Other Than Blogging

Farming (see the picture) The lamb count is up to twenty-four with more expected daily. The weather service is making noise about snow and sub-zero wind chills coming up, so I'm sure the remaining pregnant ewes are already making plans.

Family Like almost every parent in modern America Susan and I seem to spend half our life in a car with a child going or coming from somewhere. Whatever happened to letting kids run wild through the neighborhood until dinnertime? Well, our neighbors are mostly four footed, so I can't blame the guys for wanting to engage in off the farm activities with other humans of equivalent ages.

Reading New in the mail: Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church by Metropolitan John Zizioulas and Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews by Marshall McLuhan.

I have also been enjoying a novel in manuscript (or the pdf equivalent thereof) by Steve "Methodius" Hayes, a blogger, writer, teacher, activist and Orthodox deacon in South Africa. He bravely offered his work to all would-be critics for evaluation and I have been dipping into it as I have spare time in front of the computer. The book is a sort of Charles Williams style supernatural thriller set in apartheid era South Africa and is worth your time if that sort of thing appeals to you. I will be forwarding comments after I finish, but will refrain from posting any here if any one else is interested in becoming a reader-critic.

Dancing Susan and I were back on the floor Monday night for the next lesson. I seem to be improving, but that has more to do with my partner and the instruction than any innate talent. Nonetheless, they may make a Rhumba man out of me yet.

 

The View from Home

Part-time farmer, lamb and llama on a Saturday afternoon

 

Our first snow of the year.

If you look back at Wednesday's post, I remarked on our flocks' ability to sync reproduction with the worst available weather. Well, the baby boom suddenly came to a halt for the past two evenings. I wondered why, and then saw these graphics for Sunday's forecast at the National Weather Service page for our area:

I will be getting the pens ready tomorrow.

I met Mark Khaisman while he was designing stained glass windows for a studio near Front Royal. Trained as an architect, Mark has worked in a variety of mediums; glass, paint, animation, classic Russian iconography and now these wonderful evocative works made of brown packing tape layered over a light box. His web site is still under construction, but check out Galleries Two and Three for his revisioning of film noir, telling single scene stories in a medium so impossible that you can only shake your head and smile at his achievement. More images and information are available here.

The lamb count tonight is fourteen. Traditionally our ewes choose the worst possible weather to give birth, ice storms a speciality. This winter has been unseasonably mild, so they have had to be satisfied with our recent cold snap with near zero wind chills. At feeding time the lambs hang back while the ewes press in towards the feed troughs. With fourteen to choose from, it takes a while to sort out who belongs to whom. They sort first by ear, the ewes and lambs engaging in a kind of call and response, high pitched lamb cries answering back to the lower voiced ewes. The real test though is smell. The ewe sniffs the lamb, sometimes from head to tail, before being satisfied that she has found the right one.

Susan decided that we should celebrate her getting back on her feet from the summer of surgery by signing us up for ballroom dance lessons. Parks and Rec over in Winchester was offering a six week session on Rumba and Salsa, so off we went. Susan studied dance in college before graduating as a P.E. major, so she was prepared by talent, temperament and training. I, by contrast, have so little rhythm and such a total lack of physical elegance that I might be the anti-Astaire, a veritable black hole of terpsichorean ineptness. It was not always pretty (at least on my side of the proceedings), but I did enjoy it. And I discovered that the basic steps were strangely reminiscent of much of the rest of my life. Quick quick slow, quick quick slow, step away, circle back, you hold each other, side step, side step, walk forward, walk backward, quick quick slow. Hold tight, look at your partner and with a little grace and charity it all comes together. Well, if I can live it, maybe I can learn to dance it.

In farm news, the lamb count was up to twelve at evening feeding.