Once upon a time we had sheep

1997

I am a spinner.   I make yarn from scratch on a spinning wheel.  When we moved out here we realized that we could raise our own fleeces.   It was a delicious, wonderful, romantic idea.   Forty acres in the country with our own flock of sheep.  How Cool Is That?

Deciding what kind of sheep to buy took a long time.  My sister-in-law had sent me a gift of several different types of fibers to spin.  One of them was Romney.  I loved it.  Romneys have long soft fleeces and they come in white and natural colors (e.g. black and gray).   They are also well behaved and good meat sheep, too if we were so inclined. 

We checked out the local sheep breeders associations but found their stock out of our price range.  So we put out  feelers through a local spinners and weavers guild and we finally heard about an annual Fleece Fair in Greencastle.  We decided to attend. [This has turned into the wonderful annual Fiber Event at Greencastle]

On good days the chicken came to visit

Soon after we bought our farm, we began raising chickens.  It was a battle of wits:  ours against every poultry predator in the county.  The predators won and soon we were down to one hen.  Our lone chicken was an incredible example to me of adaptation to one’s circumstances. Once on her own and ‘peer-less’, our chicken broke herself of the compulsion to cave in to peer pressure.  She tried new things, went new places, made new friends.

She quickly made herself at home with the sheep and the sheep seem to have intimidated any potential predators enough to prevent any further attempts on her life.  She found herself a new perch in the sheep side of the barn and began to put herself away there at night.  Eric didn’t see any reason to disturb her new routine.  She followed the sheep wherever they went for a while, then she decided that she wanted to explore the other side of the fence, where the sheep could not go.

Soon we would wake up in the morning to find her perched outside on our deck posts, eating birdseed out of the bird feeders.  She had found a way to get out of the barn by herself  in the morning and she had found a new feed source far superior to sheep feed.  It was fall by that time and I saw no reason she shouldn’t have free reign over the gardens.  All that winter she came up to the house for breakfast and then spent the rest of the day scratching around the gardens.  In the evenings, she headed back to the barn to her perch, where Eric would find her when he put the sheep away at night.

One day, Eric heard crowing in the barn.  Upon investigation, it turned out that our hen was trying to crow.   This brought up all kinds of questions about transsexual barnyard animals, but before we had a chance to contact the Guinness World Record people, she stopped.  Perhaps she was only exploring the nature of avian gender identification.

In many ways, this chicken reminded me of a woman who finds herself in a situation where her identity is not based on her relationship to her children, spouse or other family member.  She is unique, one of a kind, able to define herself however she wishes, free to do the introspection necessary to see what she has inside to cope with her situation.  She cannot depend on others to tell her how she is, because there are no others.  She decides herself what kind of chicken she’ll be.  Interestingly enough, though she experimented with new chicken behaviors (e.g. the crowing), I don’t think that she denied the basic being that she is:  a female chicken.  She still laid eggs, she still molted, she still scratched, she still loved birdseed.  Although she had sheep friends and associated very closely with them, she did not try to become a sheep.   She did not graze, she did not mate with the ram, she did not bleat.    Neither did the sheep encourage her to.

I think that is a trick that I would like to learn.  I want to be a person who does not depend on others to tell me what kind of female person I should be.  I want to try new behaviors, and associate with friends who are very different from me and whose perspective I can learn from, without feeling the pressure to be one of them.   And I still want to strengthen the innate talents or abilities that I already have.  I want to be a good mother, even if family isn’t a very high priority among my peers.    I want to be a good gardener and farmer, even if my colleagues think that it is a waste of my degree.   I want to be a good writer, even if no one reads what I write.

Experiments with Ducks and Chickens

Our current ducks

Our second spring here, we decided to raise more domesticated livestock:  sheep, chickens and ducks.  We got the ducks because our neighbor has a pond and wanted some.  We got the sheep because I am a spinner and wanted to raise my own fleeces and because it is very difficult to raise anything this part of Indiana except cows, corn, soybeans and tobacco and the state is trying to expand into other crops, like sheep.  We got the chickens because, well, this is a farm.  

We got the chickens and ducks first.  We had driven all the way up to Indianapolis to a place that advertised itself as a hatchery only to find that it was a glorified pet store that did none of the hatching, but got weekly, Monday, shipments of chicks from a real hatchery.  They still had a very small selection of breeds by the time we got there on Saturday and we were able to get eleven chickens of various types and five Khaki Campbell ducks.  We got our first lesson in fowl production on our way home.   Those cute little fuzzy balls stink.

Mistakes

I am by nature an insecure person and that insecurity, coupled with an intensity to rival that of a nuclear blast, did not, shall we say, make it easy for me to laugh at things in my life.  Laughing at things in my life would mean that I was laughing at myself and that would be to admit that I was human and therefore imperfect.  I would have to stop berating myself for my mistakes and start laughing at them.  I was also secretly afraid that if I took things more lightly, then I wouldn't learn everything I needed to learn in order to make fewer mistakes.  My whole goal in life was to Avoid Mistakes.  It was a strategy that wasn't working.  So, I started yearning for a sense of humor and low and behold, laughing at my life began to feel good.  Also, truly comical material increased exponentially in my life.

Sometimes I felt like I was living a comedy routine.  Slapstick.  And I was the straight man.

Moving to the Country - more things to think about

 A friend of mine is contemplating a move to the country and asked me about the pros and cons.   So I sat down and made a list – in no particular order.  Forgive me if some of this seems obvious.   In the end, it’s not really about pros and cons, but about how much of country reality can you tolerate.   We and our neighbors tolerate this stuff pretty well – we just wish there were more hours in the day to get everything done.

Horehound Candy

Marrubium vulgare: Horehound

I began studying herbs when I was in high school.  While other people were at football games and movies, I was in the library.  My taste in books was varied.  I read lots of murder mysteries and I loved books about plants.  Although I never planted a garden back then, I drew elaborate garden plans on old math papers and eventually all that planning practice paid off when I was a graduate student and found myself living in an apartment in an old house, the back yard of which had been turned over to me to ‘do something with’.   After considerable earth moving and wall building, one shovelful and rock at a time, I was ready to plant.  I planted an eclectic selection of herbs, annuals and perennials and some of those plants are still with me today, three houses later.   For the first time, I could look into all the gardening catalogs I had been acquiring and actually buy some of herbs I had been lusting over. 

That year my love affair with all things herbal began.  I have steadily increased the numbers of herbs in my collection and increased the size of my gardens to compensate.  My herbal experiments have become increasingly daring and my successes and failures have become increasing spectacular.

Take for example the first time I tried making hard candy. 

Socially Acceptable

On my way to deciding to move to the country, I slowly began to do 'country' things at my city home.  I use the word city here only as a comparison to the rural home I live in now.   Our nearest city is a university town, which ensures a lively mixture of people from diverse backgrounds and with diverse expectations and assumptions of what life is all about.   These expectations and assumptions lent great interest to our gradual transition to the country. 

Our first house in the city was on the not-very-fashionable, really-run-down-falling-apart west side.  You know, the area of the city where people pause and say, "Oh, Walker St.  Now where IS that?  Oh, yes, the WEST side."  Like we speak another language on the west side.  Our neighborhood was old and many of the people there grew up in the same area and remember when our house was built, in the 1920s during the depression.  While remodeling and ripping out wall plaster, we found that they had used what looked like horse hair in the plaster to help it go farther.  The insulation in the oldest parts of the house was either wool or cotton; it was black with years of dust and the mice had loved whatever it was.  The house had no foundation, but was built up on old limestone piers and blocks.  My husband said some of them had been carved on and looked like old used tombstones.  Since the crawlspace was about eighteen inches high, I took his word for it.  Our closest neighbor had lived right down the street when she was a child and remembered when our house had been one large square with four rooms, one room to a corner, each with a connecting door to the adjacent rooms.  She had come to play with the children living in our house and they used to run circles in the house from one room to the next, around and around until they were banished outdoors. 

Welcome

Towels on the loom.

We moved from town to the country in 1994.  I called our transition from a tiny town lot to 40 acres of aggressive wilderness 'rurification'.  We got to know the land, the birds, the trees [and the local health department really well since we had to put in a hugely expanded septic system right away.]  We raised sheep for a while.  We started our businesses.  We had two children.  I became a dyer and weaver.  In 1996, I started writing stories about our adventures and they've been saved on various generations of floppy discs and hard drives ever since, waiting to be read.   It's time to share them.  This blog is my adventure in sharing what goes on in my tiny corner of the rural south central highlands of Indiana.   Note: 'highlands' is a subjective term.  We Hoosiers take what little altitude we can find [800 ft above sea level max] and celebrate it by giving it lofty names.

My days are spent gardening, homeschooling, running a business, making fiber art of all kinds, and teaching.  I teach many things, at fiber festivals, the LYS, at my studio:  dyeing, weaving, spinning, crochet, color theory, and creativity    I write about everything. 

Make yourself at home, and feel free to comment and ask questions.