The photograph for this column was supposed to be a portrait of my pet ewe, Elizabeth Jane, frolicking with her newborn twin lambs. I confidently predicted she would deliver them on September 13, my birthday. Miles the sheep farmer, who might know a thing or two about sheep, having bred them for 25 years, said she would have the lambs on September 16. Determined to prove him wrong, I have been out in the apple-tree paddock massaging Elizabeth Jane’s enormous belly and scratching her back. She enjoys this enormously, but thus far refuses to produce any progeny.
I say: “Where are those damn lambs?” She shrugs and wanders away to eat grass. Sheep are very accomplished at shrugging. This shrug says that she will have her lambs when she is good and ready.
Lambing season is fraught. It’s about life, but it’s also about death.
I asked Miles the sheep farmer about twin black-and-white lambs whose mama is a white sheep. They have weird legs. They were otherwise hale and hearty. Miles said they just came out that way. He expected them to die. But here they are. Frolicking happily and growing fat in our paddock.
He calls them “the spider lambs” and they do walk like strange woolly spiders. They are also very good-looking. A black-and-white lamb is a joy to behold. They look like very small clowns.
There is a tiny white lamb in the orchard paddock. And she, too, is healthy.
Elizabeth Jane was the smallest lamb born in her year and was rejected by her mother. She’s now an enormous sheep whose affectionate rubs against me threaten to knock me over. That these new lambs are alive and thriving is, like Janey, some sort of miracle. If you believe in miracles.
Miles sent a text: “Those you think will die don’t. Those you think will live don’t.” That is pretty much the philosophy of farming.
I weep when a lamb dies. Does the joy when a lamb survives make up for that? I think so. There is nothing as joyous as seeing a lamb leap, often sideways, into the air. It reminds you that it is thrilling being alive.
For my birthday, Greg gave me a book called Twelve Sheep: Life Lessons from a Lambing Season. It is by John Connell, who grew up on a sheep farm in rural Ireland and, later, restless, travelled the world, making films and being an investigative journalist. Eventually, he came home and worked on the family farm and had years of what amounted to a breakdown of spirit. He realised he needed to properly connect to the land and that he needed to do it through sheep.
This came to him while doing the Camino, the walk of pilgrimage in Spain. He was raised a Catholic, lost his faith, but has come back to it. He planned to go to divinity school, but while walking the Camino, he realised his calling was to be a shepherd.
He believes in signs, known in Ireland as “aislings”. On the Camino, he kept coming across sheep and sheep icons. Returning home, he bought 12 sheep from his parents. There are, he writes, 12 apostles, 12 signs of astrology, 12 months of the year.
His book is really more of a philosophy of humans than it is about sheep. As he points out, sheep are just busy being sheep, which involves eating grass and shrugging. It is a beguiling book about the relationship we and sheep have with the land. And about what it means to deliver a lamb.
I have delivered a lamb, Becky. Was it spiritual? It was terrifying. Becky lives here at Lush Places. I feel a connection to her. She is a rotten bully and butts the lambs. She is a terrible sheep. Delivering her was somehow magical.
