Some of our sheep are a little more colorful than others. Here is a brand new Harlequin lamb.

We are freezing here on our hillside. Oh, the house is warm enough, but outside wind chills are driving eight degree temperatures into the sub-zero range. If any of you are checking in from overseas, the pre-wind chill temperature is minus 13 degrees Celsius. I'm sticking with Fahrenheit. Eight degrees is cold enough. I have trouble wrapping my mind around minus 13 even on the Celsius scale. The sheep are packed into the barn out of the wind, but the temperature still drops enough to put an inch of ice on the water buckets by morning. With one or two lambs a day coming now we cross our fingers and hope they make it through the weather. Tomorrow, snow.

Gentlemen at breakfast

This is the view from home this morning. Last night clouds moved in and left snow swirling around the house at midnight.

SNOWY MOUNTAINS

A sudden snowfall comes in darkness,
black clouds hang, heavy and somber.
The mountains also can get grey hair:
don't be surprised that their sides are turning white!

Tsung Ch'en (trans. Jonathan Chaves)

Lambs and Liturgy

I missed church today, not an uncommon occurrence during lambing season. One of yesterday's twins had wedged itself under its mother's water bucket and greeted the morning too chilled and hungry to stand on it's own. When I found him, the fifteen minute morning feeding turned into an hour of first aid, followed by some additional care for his sister back at the barn. By the time everyone was back in their place, it was too late to get to mine. Traveling to church means an hour and half drive to St. Mary's, my home parish. This can be tough with farm and family commitments. Lately I have been attending the Greek Orthodox church in Winchester, about forty miles closer to home, just down the road by rural driving standards. Either service required a head start I just didn't have today. The Greek church has been a new and interesting experience, and I find that being there is valuable for more reasons than proximity. Although I can read only a few words of Greek and speak none, it is enough to follow along and pray together with the rest of the flock. I say "flock" with no pun intended (or at least no pun of mine) as in fact in some services the gathered Orthodox worshipers are referred to as the Lord's "rational sheep." Well, this morning was spent with God's irrational sheep attending a gathering of a different sort of flock, which I hope was nonetheless acceptable to the Shepherd over us all.

I've cheated a bit by back dating this entry. The reason is that my usual end of the day blogging time was spent checking in at the sheep barn. We have been expecting more lambs any day. Since the first part of the week was beautiful, unseasonably warm and altogether pleasant, we knew the sheep would hold off and wait for the inevitable return of bad weather. Sheep have an instinct for this sort of thing. Sure enough, the end of the week brought a cold front behind an inch of rain. Temperatures today did not get out of the thirties, and tonight will drop to 21 degrees. The damp ground is freezing iron hard and every little breeze bites. Of course, three ewes chose today to go into labor.

An hour before sunset, we spotted a ewe in the field with brand new twins, dry, but still wobbly on their feet. While we were getting her and the twins settled into a pen, a second ewe already in the barn went into labor. We put her in the last open pen and I held her head while Susan pulled out a single enormous lamb. Just before 11:00 p.m. I walked down to check up on the new arrivals, and found another ewe standing in the middle of the barn over a new lamb still wet from birth. Part of the birth sack was glued over his head and mouth and it was struggling to breath. Once cleared away, he came around quickly; breathing well and starting to move. I rigged a temporary spot between two other lambing pens, which should hold them until morning. The project for tomorrow; rearrange the barn and set up more pens!

Mother and son

The view from home 1-13-05

Sometime last week I ran across a post on Hugh Hewitt's blog about a PR company offering passes to screenings of a new movie, In Good Company to bloggers in exchange for discussing the movie on their sites. O.K., I say to myself, someone is willing to cover the movie half of dinner-and-a-movie with the wife because I write the odd paragraph about scenery and sheep and would be willing to throw a movie review into the mix? That hit high enough on the whimsy scale to be worth an e-mail or two. I got a prompt response from Emily at Grace Hill Media with notice of the time and date for a showing in Bethesda, Maryland Tuesday night. Susan had early Wednesday morning appointments with schools in Maryland so was planning to spend the night in the city anyhow. So, on Tuesday I left work early, finished up the farm chores, checked that older and younger son were settled in with the in-laws and headed the blue pick-up into the city to meet up with Susan.

It was a great evening out on the town with my beloved, and as a bonus, the movie wasn't bad either. Now we are not talking Citizen Kane here, but it was a cut above what passes for a comedy these days. Most remarkably, it is a film for grown-ups. Sure there are young stars who get a fair amount of screen time, but the heart of the film is Dennis Quaid's character, a 51 year old ad sales manager whose life is turned upside down when a corporate takeover finds him demoted and playing second fiddle to a 26 year old. Quaid has aged wonderfully and hits the mark as a decent man holding on to his values as his world inverts around him. There are perhaps too many plot lines running at once here and everything doesn't always hold together. But nonetheless, when was the last time you saw a film with a little drama, a little farce, some sharp satire and a bit of romance that ultimately comes down on the side of hope and fidelity as the keys to a good life? Like any other modern artifact, pieces will fall off if you shake it too hard, but it's well worth a watch.

The very first post to this weblog, back in March of 2002 ended with a quote from Flannery O'Connor. Now I find that some kind soul is blogging on her behalf: If Flannery Had A Blog... which describes itself as a "blog of quotes about and by the great Catholic author Flannery O'Connor." Here is a sample:

I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

Apropos of the ongoing discussion about the lack of popular support for contemporary poetry, this article, City Journal Autumn 2004 The Classics in the Slums by Jonathan Rose, is a revelation. Here is a key comparison between pre-war (WWII) literacy among blue collar folk in England versus contemporary Americans taken as a whole: Even more impressive is a 1940 survey of reading among pupils at nonacademic high schools, where education terminated at age 14. This sample represented something less than the working-class norm: the best students had already been skimmed off and sent to academic secondary schools on scholarship. Those who remained behind were asked which books they had read over the past month, excluding required texts. Even in this below-average group, 62 percent of boys and 84 percent of girls had read some poetry: their favorites included Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, Blake, Browning, Tennyson, and Wordsworth. Sixty-seven percent of girls and 31 percent of boys had read plays, often something by Shakespeare. All told, these students averaged six or seven books per month. Compare that with the recent NEA study Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which found that in 2002, 43.4 percent of American adults had not read any books at all, other than those required for work or school. Only 12.1 percent had read any poetry, and only 3.6 percent any plays.

Is the problem in our poets or in ourselves?

(via Gideon Strauss and Arts and Letters Daily )

The lamb count is holding steady at four, two singles and a set of twins. All are looking good, but we are expecting many more. Lambing can be difficult, as witness the sight that met me yesterday. In a corner of the barn a ewe had left premature triplets. By the time I arrived, she had gone and there was no way of knowing whether they were still-born or just too early to survive outside the womb. The line between life and death can be very thin here on our hillside.

I am still working my way through The Best American Poetry 2004 anthology I mentioned below. So far I have read nothing worth quoting, though I still have a ways to go. However, after reading this review, I do not see much cause for optimism.

Nothing tops off a good sweet feed brunch like a little alfalfa in the feeder.

Luncheon over, the ladies leave.

At the buffet line.

Sunday Brunch at the barn.

Since our new arrivals were not interested in posing for a portfolio, I would suggest that you head over to the photoblog at A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania for your rural photo fix. Beautiful work.

More new lambs today. These twins came in from the field with their mother, healthy and very active. In fact, they didn't even want to sit still for a picture.

Besides regular blogging, I made two other resolutions this New Years. The first is to lose weight. I hit the half-century mark this summer, so the project is "back to 160 by 50." The second is to rein in my caffeine habit. I am one of those rare people who actually like the taste of coffee. I drink it black by preference, and am not adverse to straight shots of espresso. I will finish a meal at Cafe Sofia with a tiny cup of turkish coffee, basically grounds moistened with a little hot water. I think it is just great that coffee houses are springing up around every corner, even in a town like Front Royal. Stashed in and around various cupboards and counters at home are a french press, an espresso machine, and an automatic drip coffeemaker. All have seen heavy use in their time. There is something about that first cup in the morning; the aroma opening your senses while that first jolt of caffeine opens the brain's blood flow and starts the heart pumping fast enough to bring you awake at last. So, why the change? It is all National Geographic's fault. The most recent issue has a cover story on caffeine, which includes some brain scan photographs showing, quite graphically, that a heavy user's brain literally doesn't function properly without it. Hence my grand ambition to reduce consumption to a level which doesn't turn one's brain chemistry into a home science experiment.

I do not plan to give it up altogether, but rather to enjoy at a more moderate level, for as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it, "no century from now on will ever manage without caffeine or jazz ." So, tomorrow morning I plan on brewing my small pot, mostly decaf, with a little of the real stuff thrown in, and listen to Stan Getz playing tunes from Antonio Carlos Jobim on the stereo. Maybe I'll even read a little Brodsky before heading down to the sheep barn. Life is good, even with a little less stimulation in the cup.

Apropros of the previous post, Al Kimel at the Pontifications weblog has provided links to each step of the Mere Comments discussion here. Pontifications is well worth a read in its own right. The Rev. Kimel, an Episcopal priest, is simultaneously exploring the depths of Christian tradition, surveying the current Episcopal trainwreck, and encouraging a wide ranging dialogue in his comments section. The discussions are usually courteous, often passionate and always interesting. (I realize that theological discussion as a spectator sport is right up there with watching paint dry for some folks, so I should say, always interesting to me, and to you too, if you like that sort of thing.)

David Bentley Hart, a personal favorite of mine among contemporary Orthodox theologians, wrote a piece recently for the Wall Street Journal responding to the question of where God was during the Indian Ocean tsunami. The Mere Comments weblog has been hosting an exchange between Hart and some critics. The end of the discussion can be found here. Links to the full discussion can be found here. If you follow the "trackback" link at the end of each post, it will lead you to further discussions spilling over on other weblogs, particularly here, where one of Hart's original respondents provides further thoughts on his own web page. While there is quite a bit of talking past one another, there are also intriguing forays into issues of evil, grace, sin and the nature of the universe.

If you check the archives of this site, you will find a number of classical Chinese poems translated by my friend Jonathan Chaves. Not being a speaker of the language myself, I rely on scholar-poets like Jonathan to give a taste in English of one of the world's great literatures. Even the best English translations can be misleading though. The Chinese classics come to us in English as free verse, tightly compressed, with striking images. What we monolinguals miss is that the Chinese originals were written in formal schemes of rhyme and word stress suitable for singing, in accordance with rules sometimes dating back a thousand years. While there are great translations out there, there has been little effort made convey this side of Chinese verse in English. Jonathan has been quietly working on more "formal" English translations of Chinese poems with the goal of expanding our experience of this great literature. As part of that effort he has been flexing his skills by writing light verse and topical satire, sort of a poet's warm up five finger exercise. At times though he takes on more serious subjects. It was traditional for Chinese poets to combine painting with writing, and the poem written in response to a painting (often inscribed on the painting itself) was an important part of the cultural dialogue. Jonathan has taken a step towards bringing this tradition into a western setting with Four Poems in Paint; a series of poems displayed together with the paintings that inspired them on the website for the online journal Praesidium.

I am a reader, and occasional purchaser, of contemporary poetry. That puts me in a group no larger than holding capacity of your average college stadium. Now if you wanted to gather the people who write poetry together, you would probably have to lease every facility in NFL for the weekend. But those of us who simply read, without being "in the business" as it were, are a vanishing small minority. If you doubt it, keep in mind that the average press run for a volume of new poems is in the range of one thousand to three thousand copies. The current estimated population of the United States is, as I write this, 295,186,847. You work out the percentage of the American public which can be expected to buy a new work of poetry. Nonetheless, poetry is one of the things I love, and I do my best as a reader and book buyer to support the work of living poets I admire.

The reason I bring this up is the book sitting on the top of the bedside reading shelves, The Best American Poetry 2004, courtesy of the local library. Every year, I helplessly pick up the latest installment in the series, drawn like Charlie Brown to Lucy holding that football. Every year I end up sorting through line after line of solipsistic nonsense by folks who seem actively hostile to the sound and rhythms of speech in English. Ah, but hope springs eternal. I will let you know how it goes with this year's volume, and will follow up with a list of a few contemporary poets I do enjoy.

In the meantime, you could do worse than spend some time with Dana Gioia's website. Beside being the current chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, he is also a fine critic and poet in his own right. While you are there, be sure to read his 1991 essay, "Can Poetry Matter?"

The tragic reports and film footage coming in from the countries bordering the Indian Ocean serve as a reminder of the unexpected power of moving water. Right before Christmas, we had a line of thunderstorms accompanied by "significant wind gusts." What you see in the picture was our reminder of the unexpected power of moving air. While Susan watched, a pocket of 50 mph winds picked up the sheep shed and flipped it on its roof, taking out a big chunk of our fence in the process. No harm was done beyond the obvious damage, for which we are grateful.

The first lamb of the season. The mother behind him is not actually possessed, though she is a little irritated. Lighting is tricky in the barn and the digital sometimes needs a flash fill when shooting in the dimmer corners. Unfortunately no one seems to have an automatic sheep "blue-eye" removal setting.

Sheep in Afternoon light

Yesterday was a beautiful day, unseasonably warm and just right to finish the job of taking down the old barbed-wire fence. After much delay and a few attempts to sneak back to the new video game, I finally got older and younger sons motivated and out by the long drive leading to the in-law's house. The wooden posts for the new fence were already in the ground, waiting for new wire mesh to be stretched tight from post to post. The old fence was a scraggly ad-hoc affair consisting of four strands of rusting barbed wire on short metal posts. The sheep had taken to going though it like ghosts walking through walls. Like ghosts, they had also taken to appearing in places where they were neither wanted nor expected. Hence the new fence. We took down a few individual strands to save for later use, but there was more old wire than we wanted or needed to salvage. The oldest started rolling strands together in a ball as the youngest and I unclipped the wire from the old metal posts. The further he rolled, the larger it got, until he was struggling behind a waist high ball of barbed wire, like a snowball from some metallic storm. The last post came out of the ground with the sun setting over Hogback mountain. We drove up to the in-law's house, old posts rattling in the back of the farm truck, tired and hungry and ready for my mother-in-law's New Year's Day dinner.

"So I wrote you a long letter. . .
I filled it up with love from start to end.
You have always deserved so much better,
so it's a letter I could never send."

Bill Mallonee
"Long Letter"
"Dear Life" Outtakes

I am usually not one who makes New Year's Resolutions, so it is with some trepidation that I announce my intention to post at least once each day for the coming year. 2004 was a Dickensian year in that it could best be described in that famous opening from A Tale of Two Cities; "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." There was so much that needed saying that the accumulated weight left me all but speechless. A quick look back shows that this blog was silent three hundred thirty one days out of three hundred sixty six last year. I resolve to do better and commit to leaving no trivial opinion or observation unrecorded if needed to fill space. Perhaps a little depth may come out of the increased volume.

Over the last couple of years Gideon Strauss has been propagating an exercise whereby people list fifty things they love. I propose to give it a try. Since I need material, I intend to drag it out one item a day over the next fifty days, in no particular order, with a little commentary for each item. For those few of you still checking in, thanks for dropping by and I'll see you in the morning.

If you are a visitor from Bishop Seraphim's Live Journal, greetings and welcome. I started this weblog on a rainy Sunday afternoon in March of 2002 and have been posting with varying frequency ever since. In recent months the ratio of writing to photographs has tipped heavily towards photographs. If one picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps I have kept up with my earlier intentions after all. The photographs, with very few exceptions, are my own, taken here on the farm with my trusty, but now obsolete, Olympus D-400 1.3 megapixel digital camera. Some of my favorite pictures are now scattered in the archives available on the right hand side of the weblog. I have two other web projects, both far more neglected than this one. For a while I double posted weblog entries over at this live journal site. It has been dormant for a while and I am deciding what to do with it. I also have a second weblog, The Suburban Ascetic, which I use for occasional longer pieces on Orthodoxy in the modern world. (By "occasional" I really mean "once in a blue moon.")

Please feel free to stay a while and browse. If you see a picture you like, you are free to use it. Just give me a credit and/or link back. By the way, clicking on any picture will take you to a larger version.

Sheep in the yard take a break after a hard morning's grazing.

More llamas

Sheep and leaves

Llama against an autumn sky

Morning Cloud and Fall Color 10-22-04

Who says that poets love the mountains?
Mountains, mountains---
            I'm tired of writing about them!
Thousands of peaks and thousands of ranges
            seem to throw themselves at me.
I have to rest three hours for each hour of climbing.

When your desk is piled high
            Where can you put another book?
When your stomach is full,
            How can you go on eating?
I have no use for more green slopes
            and mountain mists---
I'll wrap them in a package
            and send them to my city friends.


YANG WAN-LI "AT AN-LE TEMPLE"
(Trans. Jonathan Chaves)

Morning 9-23-04

Alma

Skyline Drive Sunrise 9-14-04

ram: n. a male sheep
v. to strike with violence

With dusk changing rapidly to darkness, we were down at the barn trying to herd sheep by the single light shining out into the middle pen. A gate sprung open, our eight rams had mixed in with a dozen or so ewes in the barn lot. This is not good for your breeding records, so the younger son and I were thrashing around in a waist high mob of wooly backs in a half-lit barnyard. Like some sweat-soaked, near-sighted, anti-Noah, there I was frantically trying to divide male from female so they would not go together, two by two. The sheep were being sheep, that is to say, that they were not cooperating. I was not happy and said so. At length. Using a full and varied vocabulary gained from sixteen years working with cops and criminals. We finally got the impromptu ovine singles mixer to move into a smaller pen where there was more hope of catching the rams and giving them the bum's rush back out into the upper pasture without their new girlfriends in tow. I had my back turned trying to close the gate when February, until then a favorite ram, slammed me squarely in the back. With Newtonian inevitability, I in turn slammed into the gate, throwing it back open. The younger son, faced with the sight of his father hopping around like Quasimodo and hollering like Homer Simpson showed maturity beyond his years by neither fleeing nor dissolving in laughter.

Later, when the aspirin kicked in and I stopped wondering how much freezer space the offender would take up as mutton chops, my wife assured me that it had just been a love tap. If he had been really serious, he would have hit me much harder.

It has been a while since I updated this site. If you are reading this, thank you for still being interested and stopping by. I will endeavor to be more regular in my postings over the next month. In the meantime, here is a poem from Wallace Stevens that captures many of my evenings of late:

THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

This, believe it or not, is the site approved by the outgoing town council for the location of our new Wal-Mart. The Shenandoah River flows behind the trees at the edge of the field. I once described the folks in my neck of the woods as "conservatives with something left to conserve." Less and less it seems.

Sunset over Skyline Drive July 7, 2004

Sunset on Buck Mountain July 4, 2004

James H. Bell: June 5, 1932 - June 6, 2004

After the rain; sunset, moonrise

Today the feast of Pentecost is celebrated in both the Eastern and Western Churches. The intricate cycles of the Gregorian and Julian calendars for calculating the date of Easter rotated into agreement this year so Rome, the Protestant denominations and Orthodoxy have shared a rare season of liturgical unity. We Orthodox observe the feast by kneeling at prayer in Vespers, both rejoicing in prayer at the gift of the Spirit, and returning again to the spirit of repentance that, if never completely forgotten, has been overshadowed these past weeks by the joy of the Paschal celebration.

David Melling has an instructive meditation on the prayers of Pentecost at his website. The full services are available online in a translation by Father Eprhraim at his site here.

God, great and eternal, holy and lover of humankind, who have counted us worthy to stand at this hour before your unapproachable glory to hymn and praise your wonders, be gracious to us, your unworthy servants. Grant us grace to offer you without conceit and with a broken heart the thrice-holy hymn of glory and thanksgiving for your great gifts . . . Remember, Lord, our weakness and do not destroy us with our iniquities, but in our humiliation show us your great mercy, so that fleeing the darkness of sin we may walk in the daylight of justice; and having put on the weapons of light we may persevere unassailed by any assault of the evil one, and that with boldness we may glorify you for all things, the only true God and lover of humankind. For indeed, Master and Maker of all things, truly great is your mystery: the temporary dissolution of your creatures and after this their restoration and repose to the ages. We give thanks to you for all things, for our entrances into this world and for our departures, which through your unfailing promise betoken for us beforehand our hopes of resurrection and unending life. Would that we may enjoy it at your future second Coming, for you are the author of our resurrection and the impartial judge who loves humankind of what we have done in life, the Master and Lord of our reward.

The preceeding is particularly appropriate as we in the United States remember those killed in conflict on behalf of their fellow citizens this Memorial Day weekend. We give thanks to you for all things, for our entrances into this world and for our departures. Memory Eternal.

Sheep for the shearing

Friday Morning, the view towards Hogback

Friday Morning, Buck Mountain

Thursday Afternoon

As our sheep friends have noted, I am in the midst of a gala spring blog redecoration project. The new layout adds some complications and it will be a while before everything is sorted out and all links are back in place. I have left archived posts in the "classic" Hillside Farm format and they are now sorted by day (hence the absurdly long archive links at the bottom right of the blog). Let me know what you think!

Still not done?

Watching and Waiting . . . Is the new look finished yet?

I am experimenting with a new service provided in conjunction with Blogger. Since this is only a test, here is a vacation photo from the family's great Hawaiian adventure in February. Click on the picture for a full size image.

The view from home 5-17-04

Go here for more amazing photographs and a "virtual" tour of the Gracanica monastery, one of the beleaguered Orthodox holy sites in Kosovo.

Yes, I'm in the yard and yes, the grass is better in here and no, I'm not moving.

Morning Fog

After a series of blog decorating disasters, I am now back to the old appearance, outdated links and all. Spring cleaning is not over yet though!

Young sheep, particularly when under the influence of the lushness and abundance of spring pasture, will do odd things. They jump straight up, all four legs like pistons, and run off at full speed in random directions. They stick their head through gaps in fences and find themselves stuck like prisoners in stocks. Even the older ones get in on the action. Some shed years and play like lambs. Some drop dead for no discernible reason, as if they just felt like doing something new. In that same vein, I have decided to adopt their brave spirit of self-destructive irrationality and make some changes to the "look and feel" of this weblog. Please bear with me until the fit passes and I make peace with the new blogger interface. If there are any designers out there who feel pity for an html and CSS challenged lawyer/farmer, drop me a line!

My Town on an April Morning

Two views of Main Street






Royal Avenue



Courthouse

Here is the morning view of the mountains. Yes, that is snow dusting the ridge line of Hogback Mountain. April's sweet showers are falling as flakes in the higher elevations. Tonight the temperature drops into the twenties with high winds driving it down even further. The National Weather Service gives us the following special weather statement: WIND CHILL READINGS ARE EXPECTED TO FALL INTO THE LOWER TEENS ACROSS THE OUTLYING SUBURBS AND MORE RURAL VALLEYS...AND INTO THE SINGLE DIGITS ACROSS THE HIGHER TERRAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS. The sheep are safely tucked into the barn and I am trying to remember where I put the hammer I use to chip the ice off the water troughs.

Morning Clouds 3-31-04

We are now well into Lent as well as Spring, past the halfway point with the Paschal celebration in sight. As usual, I have accomplished less than intended, kept the fast less well than I wanted and live no less comfortably with my many faults than I did before. Still, without the annual discipline, what state might I be in? I don't have any deep thoughts about the season. For that I would recommend a work like Alexander Schmemann's Great Lent. There are great treasures in the services and the disciplines of the Fast. Still, for me it is more like one of our more mundane chores here on the farm, walking the fencelines. Sheep, like my thoughts, tend to wander off from their own pastures with small respect for boundaries or even their own health and safety. We fence them in with posts and fence rails, mesh wire, barbed wire, old stone walls, whatever is available. Some things work better then others. Even the best fence fails sometimes. Tree limbs fall at inconvenient places. Gullies wash out under wire fences leaving escape tunnels for fugitive sheep. Every so often, we need to walk the fencelines, repairing a tear here, removing a fallen tree there, piling rocks or logs to close a gap under the fence. It won't keep the sheep from trying. It won't even keep a few from succeeding in sneaking through. But, with luck and a little grace, it does keep us from waking up and finding the entire flock chewing it's way to town down either side of the blacktop. Likewise, the disciplines of Lent may not have made much of a dent in my own wayward nature, but they do remind me of where the fences are.

We are now a week into Spring, and the only signs so far on our Hillside Farm (besides the flock of disgruntled robins hopping around in last week's snow flurries) are the green spears of new grass in the pasture. The equinox is a time when light and darkness are in balance. Our weather is oscillating between warm and cold, dry and wet, perhaps seeking a balance of it's own, a kind of climatic equipoise.

Gideon Strauss put out a call last week for "Manifestos", those great declarations of principle and purpose that signal some person or group's intent to shake the world. I am, I confess, not a manifesto kind of person. Between a law practice and farm chores, I have enough to keep me busy. If you add in an ongoing effort to absorb 2000 years worth of Orthodox teaching and spiritual life, it leaves me hard pressed to figure out how I can fruitfully meddle with anything I am not directly responsible for. Since I have no crusade of my own to charge off on, here for Mr. Strauss' reading pleasure is a Manifesto from one of my favorite authors:

Manifesto:
The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

It has been well over a month since my last update. We hover on the verge of spring, warm days see-sawing with cold. Lambing is not quite over. The Hampshires in the purebred part of the flock are still greeting us with surprises in the barn every few mornings. I had intended a gala blog update on Sunday, but discovered that one of our ewes had presented us with not one, not two, but three lambs. Some ewes can raise triplets on their own, but by and large, sheep who can count to three seem to be a rarity. This ewe presents a particular difficulty. Only one of the two teats a sheep comes naturally equipped with is functional on her. With three customers, demand clearly outstrips supply. We left the largest lamb with her and fostered the other two out with a neighbor.

In a break between winter storms, the temperature rose above freezing yesterday for the first time in weeks. The snow and ice in the barnyard melted, turning the ground into a kind of brown soup. I like changes that the seasons and the vagaries of weather bring to our place but I have to confess that having the evening feeding turn into the retreat from Moscow is not one of my favorite things. The temperature dropped back quickly after sunset and the rivulets of water on top of the melting snow flash froze into little beads of ice. Disturbed by my passage, they cascaded down the hill in a shower of tintinnabulation, tiny bells ringing over the refrozen snow.

Each morning, before putting the coat and tie that mark my role as lawyer and public servant, I dress in my hand-me-down Carhart coveralls, pick up a fifty pound feed sack and walk down to the barn. This morning I put the digital camera in a pocket next to the hoof trimmers and baling twine. It's a different crowd than you find in the Courthouse, but some days just as troublesome. This morning was a good one though. A ewe managed her first lamb without help sometime in the night and I found it strong and warm in a corner of the barn. When I was able to get mother and child together, the two of them went into a pen out of the weather for the next couple of days. The sheep pictured below are checking for the last bits of grain before heading out to the field, the llama looking on like a courtroom bailiff. The new arrival was a little camera shy, but one of the older lambs was willing to stop and pose. The ewe whose eartag proclaims her as Number 1 was not interested in modeling, but kept in a corner of the picture in case the small box I was holding turned out to have something to do with food.

Hogback Returns



High winds at dawn, first sun in days.