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.

We keep a close watch on the flock as the weather closes in. The rams are pretty self-sufficient. They have their shed, a round bale for grazing when the grass has gone dormant for the winter, and a daily ration of grain. The ewes and their lambs are more of a challenge. With hoses and outside faucets frozen, we hand carry water to new mothers in pens. Ewes persist in giving birth in the draftiest parts of the barn, or outside in snowdrifts. The weaker of a set of twins in particularly vulnerable in these conditions. The heat lamp is hung in the basement, ready for the next chilled newborn.

Buck Mountain in Snow



Days of light snow and freezing drizzle have converted our vistas to grayscale. Hogback and the ridgeline of Skyline drive vanished Sunday afternoon and haven't been seen since.

Withered by winter
the sound of the wind--
one-color world

Basho

(Trans. Stephen Addis)

I have started a new essay on my much neglected other blog, The Suburban Ascetic. I hope to survey the situation of Orthodoxy in the contemporary global culture, starting with a look backwards to the past. I cannot promise more than a paragraph or two a night (or every other night.) Nonetheless, if you are interested, stop on by.

Cold weather can mean hard times on the farm. Most of our lambs are born at night, in the shelter of the barn. Nonetheless, a sizeable few make a daylight arrival. No problem on mild days; in some ways it is better for them than the barn. On days like these though, it is a risk and a challenge. Our daytime temperatures have been below freezing, with wind-chills hovering near zero. A lamb born healthy can get pneumonia in minutes. A lamb that needs a little extra care may be frozen solid by evening when we check the fields one last time before closing the barn. We lost two lambs last week. One, a weak twin that never thrived after being born outside in a patch of grass not quite covered by snow. The second, I found frozen in the pile of leaves his mother had left him in while she came in for the morning feeding. As I took away the small bodies, both ewes were calling, crying out to their lambs, not understanding where they went, or why they wouldn't come.

A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled,
because they were no more.

The predicted snow never arrived, but the cold front that was supposed to be carrying it did, bringing single digit night time temperatures with wind-chills that literally take your breath away. I am getting over a bout with some seasonal virus, so took a shepherd's crook with me down to the barn to have something to lean on for a bit until my breath caught up again. I use an oak crook, cheap, heavy and shoulder high. There are better ones on the market, even a few high tech fiberglass and alloy crooks, but none that will stand up to a season with our big hampshire sheep like the old clumsy oak. As I walked, the ground was frozen so hard that the crook rang like a wooden bell as it struck with each step, my own semantron, calling to morning prayer.

More snow predicted for tonight. Today's picture is last week's snowfall, just an inch or so. It was dry and slick, more like cornstarch than frozen water. Down in the barn lot it mixed with bits of dust and soil desicated from sub-zero wind chills. Carrying the feed buckets for the sheep, I kicked up brown and white powder and watched float it in the cold air before settling again.

We are well into lambing. The barn is half full of ewes with their offspring. The intensive care ward is in its usual place under a heat lamp in the basement. This year a friend who lives nearby has taken in a few of the lambs needing bottle feeding. We gave her one to keep, and Susan tells me it is neatly diapered and living in the house. I refrain from comment, grateful for the big heart that takes some of the burden off of us as we try and get through this part of the farm cycle and still hold down off-farm jobs.

Today the Virgin gives birth to him who is above all being,
And the earth offers the Cave to him whom no one can approach;
Angels with Shepherds give glory,
And Magi journey with a star;
For us there has been born
A little Child: God before the ages.

Bethlehem has opened Eden, come, let us see;
We have found delight in secret, come let us receive
The joys of Paradise within the cave;
There the unwatered root has appeared whose blossom is forgiveness,
There has been found the undug well
From which David once wished to drink;
There a Virgin has borne a babe
And has at once quenched Adam’s and David’s thirst.
For this let us hasten to this place where there has been born
A little Child: God before the ages.

From the Matins service for the Feast of the Nativity
Translation by Archimandrite Ephraim

Why small dogs should really live further south . . .

Sheep have this unerring way of breeding to lamb in the worst weather possible. Since the average gestation time is 150 days, this shows a foreknowledge of weather that shames the best human prophets. When the storm hit, and no lambs arrived, we thought they had finally slipped up. Then Susan went to the barn this morning . . .

We had our first snowstorm of the season this weekend. Susan moved the sheepflock into the barn and we have been feeding grain and hay while the pastures are buried under a foot or so of white. I am writing this with a leg propped up between sessions with an ice pack. One of the ewes, a little too eager for her share of the afternoon's hay bale, took out my right knee with a body block that would have done an NFL linebacker proud. I will recover in due course, but, in the meantime, here are some pictures from the weekend's storm:

Sunrise and snow



Between Storms

Regular visitors here may be curious about the outcome of the election on November 4th. I was running as an independent candidate for Commonwealth's Attorney in my home county here in Virginia. The final results are posted here on the State Board of Elections website. As a first fling with politics, the results were respectable, if not all that we had hoped for. Looking back, I am amazed at the number of people who did come out and support a first time candidate with little money, no party backing and name recognition only among the circle of folks who keep track of doings around the Courthouse. My wife Susan performed heroically helping me go door to door and and handling logistics of getting poll workers out on election day. I am also grateful to the many friends who came forward and donated both time and money, freely, without being asked.

Since the election, I have been gratified by the number of people who have asked me to stay on in my current position, assuming the new Commonwealth's attorney (and my former opponent) is agreeable. I have some offers to leave public service and go into private practice, which I am also considering. For those of you who read this and are praying people, your prayers for wisdom would be appreciated!

We had a bit of wind yesterday . . .

This morning's weather report comes from eighth century China via some lines by the poet Du Fu:

Autumn window still colored by dawn,
bare trees, high winds that go on blowing:
sun comes up beyond cold mountains
river flows through last night's mist.

(Trans. Burton Watson)

Saturday Morning 10-19-03



There is no mistaking it, autumn has arrived. The first batch of leaves that turned were stripped down by wind and rain last week and scattered around the pasture. The survivors are turning more slowly, as if made cautious by the fate of their more impetuous brethren. We have had our first big frost, the fields white again, bringing back memories of last Winter's snow, and perhaps prophesying about the Winter to come. In between the extremes, we have had a few of those warm days where you wish for nothing more than to stretch out in the slanting afternoon sunlight. There is so little time to sit and watch it all. I have an election just over two weeks away, and mixing work with the campaign gets me out of the house at sunrise and keeps me away until after dusk. Our town and county may look small on a map, but they expand to continental proportions when you are traveling through one door at a time, talking to folks. Knocking on doors and asking for support is not something that comes naturally, but I do think that if you want your fellow citizens to vote for you and provide you with a living, you should at least have the courtesy to stop by and introduce yourself. It is at once invigorating and exhausting. Sometimes I think I have learned more about our hometown in the last month than I have in the last fifteen years I have lived here. Great works could be written on the different ways people decorate their front walks alone. So much love and effort spent to make a place in the world. I have talked to more people, shaken more hands, and spoken more in public these last few weeks than I have ever done before in my life. I will be glad when it is over, but I will also miss it a little. It is too early to predict the outcome of the election, but win or lose, the leaves will still change. Win or lose, it is time to get the barn ready for Winter and the lambs due to arrive in December.

I have re-posted an older short essay on icons over at my greatly neglected other blog, The Suburban Ascetic. Some new pieces are in the works, but may have to wait until after the election, when, one way or another, I will have a little more free time.

Isabel passed through our hillside farm last night. The overall damage is not as bad as the last big snowstorm, but we are still pretty impressed. In the field next to the house, the wind picked up a three-sided shed big enough to hold a dozen ewes and turned it over on its roof. The sheep who were in it are fine, apparently all having escaped safely before the big flip. A few looked a bit bewildered though by the unexpected change in their accommodations. They were standing in the inverted shed, hooves on the tin roof, casting uncertain glances up at the open sky. The rest of the purebred flock weathered the storm snug in the barn, which held up much better than the shed.

We lost electricity at half past eleven, about an hour before the center of the storm came through, so I am writing this from my office in the Courthouse in town. This morning, after checking the livestock and helping the in-laws get situated on the other side of the farm, I fired up the generator and ran extension cords to the chest freezer and the refrigerator. We got the Coleman stove off the camping supply shelf and moved the gas grill back out of the basement. The water supply is whatever is in the bathtubs supplemented by three cases of bottled water for drinking and food preparation. We should be good until the lights come back on, though a hot shower would be awfully nice right about now. I will upload some pictures when home internet access is restored.