Dear Folks,

Things change so fast at this time of year, I thought you might enjoy a serial letter chronicling spring as it unfolds, rather than an end-of-the-month summary. So here’s installment number one.

Last weekend it got up to 60 degrees and the sun was overwhelming. We watched the huge piles of snow shrink away. Clear patches of ground appeared in the windswept spots and on the south-facing slopes. I stick spring flowers on the south side of the house, and as soon as the snow disappeared we could see daffodils and tulips poking up, already an inch high. The back roads turned into morasses. The sheep sank up to their ankles in the barnyard. It was flat-out Mud Season.

The juncos came back that weekend. We could hear their metallic trills before we could see them. And the first lambs were born — white twins to white Rosemary, both boys, up and dry by the time Don found them in the early morning. Heather named them Brown Knees and Pink Nose.

There’s a wonderful release of tension during lambing season. It’s like Christmas; you finally get to see what’s in all those bulging packages. I wake up early and pull on barn clothes and boots and get out before I’m fully conscious. When I come back from Dartmouth in the evening I head to the barn before I even change clothes. On days when I stay home to write, I pop out there every few hours.

The first thing you do as you’re walking toward the barnyard is count heads. There’s Wally the ram, and let’s see — one, two, three, .. six, seven, eight, woops, only eight, where’s nine? Who’s missing? If there’s a missing one, you head straight for the back of the barn, where you may find her in labor or, more likely, sheltering her newborns and stamping her feet at you as you approach.

You take one look to see that everything’s all right, and then go back to the basement to get clean towels to help dry the babies and a bucket of warm molasses water for the Mom. You come back, spread clean hay in a stall, put the molasses water in it, go out with the towels, rub down the lambs, pick them up and back them slowly into the stall, keeping them down near the nose of the anxious mother. If you’re lucky she follows, bleating a low sound that she makes only for her own lamb. The lambs pipe back and bring her along, up the ramp and into the stall.

You get the family settled and check the babies all over to be sure everything’s fine, and then you usually hang over the gate for awhile, watching to be sure the kids find the spigots. They always do. Amazing that they always do! Within half an hour a fellow who’s still wobbling on his four long legs nuzzles under in the right place, and suddenly you hear a lip-smacking noise and the little tail starts wiggling in ecstasy. Connect! Another life safely launched! Once they get that first colostrum in them, their skinny tummies round out, and they’re unstoppable. Within 24 hours they’ll be skipping all over.

If, when you go out, there are no new lambs to deal with, you check the older ones, to be sure they’re OK. You peer at the rear ends of the new Moms to be sure there’s no discharge, no infection. You check the bags of the Moms-to-be trying to figure out who’s next and approximately when. Don and I have running bets on who’s next, most of which Don wins.

Two days later we had another set of twins, to good old Dahlia, who has never failed to twin. Boys again, both black as coal, one with a big white spot on his forehead.

The warm weather turned into the rain I was dreading, and the waters rose. Blow-Me-Down Brook turned into a wild river, just grazing the bottom of the bridge. Our pond down in the pasture overflowed onto Daniels Road; one morning we had to drive out through a shallow lake. But as ice-breaking floods go, it was a mild one. The brook went right back down when the temperature dropped and the snow came.

Right, another big, wet, sloppy snow. These late ones are heart-breakers. They cover up the daffodils. The ruts seize up, and you know you’ve got another melt and Mud Season to go through. As the open ground disappears the feeders are jammed with newly returned birds — house finches, purple finches, goldfinches, bunches of juncos, starlings, cowbirds, tree sparrows. The cardinals come at the crack of dawn, astoundingly red against the white snow.

Somewhere in the middle of that snow, Brownie the idiot had a big, single, black ramlet. Brownie was the yearling who bummed her first lamb last year, until Don and Sylvia stanchioned her and got her to accept it. This year, faced with her second lamb, at least she knew what it was, and she rather liked it. But she didn’t know enough to follow it, and me, into the barn. She panicked and dashed all over looking for her lamb, which was in my arms, bawling for her. Sheep in general do not win a lot of points for intelligence, and Brownie is definitely in a low percentile. I finally left them outside, since the lamb was big and strong. He knew enough to follow her, even if she couldn’t figure out how to follow him. Later Don got them in a stall with a grain bucket.

We had several more days of gray, cold, winter. Finally today the sun is beginning to come out, and the snow is retreating again. There are bunches of robins all of a sudden. We had more twins this morning, to brown Paprika, one white ewe and one white ram. (Wally, their father, is white. The genetics of sheep color are not straightforward.) Everyone is fine. This lambing is unfolding slowly, a few days between each birth, and, so far, no problem presentations, and, so far, lots of twins. That’s the way it should be!

Don and I chopped the tails off the five older lambs this morning. Sorry to share that in a family newsletter, but there’s no point in prettifying farming. You have to chop off those cute wiggly tails within a week of birth, because the market will not accept sheep with long tails. They say the tails attract flies and interfere with lambing. I find that dubious, since sheep got along fine for millennia with the tails nature gave them. But I take a deep breath and cut them off those poor trusting babies (who, rightfully, never trust us again), so I can sell the lambs. They give one yell and then it doesn’t seem to hurt them any more. There’s a special cutting instrument that pinches the stump and reduces the blood flow to just a few drips. Within a day the stump is all healed up. I still think the practice is barbaric — but it’s done in the name of civilized agriculture.

Last Friday I went to a debate at the Vermont Law School between David Brower and Ron Arnold. Those of you who know the characters of the environmental movement will recognize that that’s a set-up equivalent to a Davis Cup tennis match, or the boxing Bout of the Century. Ron Arnold is the founder of the Wise Use movement, the inspirer of my anti-environmental friends on the Pemi. I just had to see him in person. The audience, which was heavily weighted to the environmental, found him deeply disturbing. Several people said they they’d just seen Hitler, alive and well and disguised in a white beard.

I knew what to expect of Arnold, so I just tried to figure out what makes him tick. Not easy to do. His eyes are veiled and hooded. He has a resonant speaking voice, which expresses strong emotions, none of which are reflected in those eyes. He’s articulate, intelligent, and, I think, evil. Brower was his usual mountain-man self, reeling off his usual funny lines. (“A corporation is an entity that by law has all the rights of a person, but hasn’t a person’s conscience.”) He’s eighty now and really not vigorous enough to take on Arnold point by point. But it was a thought-provoking presentation. Environmentalists have a lot of thinking to do — Arnold and his movement are not going to go away.

April 11, 1993

New twins on Easter morning! To Tulip, both black, both rams. We now have 8 ramlets out of 9 lambs. I’ve never seen a ratio like that and I’m kind of mad about it, because Wally is a nice ram and I’d like to keep more of his daughters. We have two daughters from last year, which may or may not now be bred to their father — yearlings don’t always breed. Looks like I’ll have to keep Wally one more year, which is fine, because he’s a true gentleman, but that means for sure I’ll have to breed him to those two daughters.

Such are the thoughts of the shepherd toward the end of the lambing season. Who to keep, who to cull, now that we’re beginning to see what we have for this year’s flock. We still have one surely pregnant ewe out there and three possibly pregnant ones (the yearlings and Forsythia who, uncharacteristically because she’s usually our best Mom, shows no signs of pregnancy). But we’re far enough along that Sylvia and I have begun plotting. The breeding and culling decisions are the most important ones of the year; they lay out the genetic lines into the future.

It’s a warm, rainy morning. Snow remains only in the shaded spots, on the north sides of buildings and in the woods. The whole countryside changed in a week from white to brown. The crocuses and eranthis and snowdrops are in bloom. The mornings have gotten noisier as new songs appear — song sparrows on Thursday, phoebes on Friday, and yesterday I thought I heard an indigo bunting. I dug the first parsnips this week, but they broke off halfway down, where the ground is still frozen. The firstborn lambs dash in a pack around the barnyard, kicking up their heels, jumping onto the big rocks. We stand out in the yard in the evening and watch them. It’s the best show of the year.

It seemed like a perfect week for sap run — hard freeze every night, bright, warm sunny days. I went over to Jim Taylor’s sugar house with two empty gallon jugs, but no one was around. Later when I called Jim he said production is only 30 percent of last year’s. The spring is late, and now it’s warming up too fast.

Heather found a lot of colored eggs scattered around the house this morning, and a chocolate bunny, and some new magic markers. Narayana is visiting, taking a break from his last term at UVM. Sylvia has the day off from her job at the horse farm. John is over at his new girlfriend’s house and will be embarrassed that I even mentioned that in this newsletter.

I’ve had a frustrating writing week. My environmental friends are furious at the article I wrote about the Pemi, because, I guess, I put too little of the blame on the nefarious property rights conservatives (who were indeed nefarious) and too much of the blame on environmentalists (and implicitly on myself, because I would have behaved the same way they did). I’ll try to do a rewrite, not one that comes out exactly the way my friends want it, but one that comes closer, I hope, to representing the dirty tricks they were up against, their frustration, and the fact that they are not unique in failing to prevail against fear and fascism.

I’ve also been stuck on my textbook. I’m finally back to it, after months away, but I can’t get going. The thing is so damn daunting! It takes me a week or so to stop resisting and get my mind into it, and this has been that week. I have to go back through the 500 pages I’ve already written, rewriting as I go, remembering what I’ve said and where I intended to go next, getting my momentum up, and trying not to see that there’s at least another year of work ahead. I gratefully let any little thing interrupt me. I get up every fifteen minutes and pace the hall. By three in the afternoon I can’t sit still any more. Anything to get away from that humming, expectant computer screen. One page at a time, I tell myself. One word at a time.

I’ve been through this before and I know that the only way to make it pass is to sit there and do my best to concentrate. But it’s hard not to get down on myself. It’s hard to realize that I’m not the only writer in the world who has this trouble.

April 18, 1993

We had one more lamb this week, a white ewe, to Pansy, our dark brown yearling. Thanks to the dogs I got to watch it be born.

We’ve been having fox trouble; they’ve been getting into the chicken coop over at Ruth’s next door, where Sylvia keeps her flock of Dark Cornish chickens. Ruth says she’s seen a fox march past her kitchen window in broad daylight, a Cornie in his mouth, looking at her insolently. Don managed to shoot one of the foxes, which was nearly hairless with sarcoptic mange. (The Fish & Game officer came to look at it and told Don he’d done the fox a favor by ending its misery.)

Anyway, some creature out there, probably a fox, got the dogs to baying at 5 in the morning. The dogs sleep in my bedroom, so when they bay, I pop upright. I let them out to go tree whatever they heard, and I mumbled out to the barnyard to check on things. A little white head was coming out of Pansy. Being a yearling and new to the business, she didn’t let me come near, as the older ewes would. Instead she panicked and ran out into the barnyard, whereupon the lamb slid out and landed in a limp heap on the ground. I held my breath and watched from a distance. It lifted its head, shook it, and let out a little bleat. Whew! Step one accomplished; it’s breathing. Pansy, in total confusion, let her instincts take over. She sniffed the strange, interesting bundle, and suddenly, enthusiastically, started licking it. Step two, check — mother loves it. I watched long enough to get through step three, the first suck on the nipple, and came in to breakfast, the sun just rising, the birds announcing the glory of a new day. There are times when this old farm seems bathed in magic!

It has been a gloomy, rainy, warm week. The snow is gone. The brook is still high, but not flooding. The first daffodil is in bloom. The towhees are back, singing “drink your TEAheeheeheehee!” Yesterday was a blowsy day, alternating between bright sun and sudden showers. I spent most of it outside Tidying Up. That was all I could do — the garden is too soggy to till, there’s too much ice in the soil to fix fences, the greenhouse isn’t yet up. So I pruned lilacs and raspberries and roses, dug Jerusalem artichokes, cleaned out the barn and got it ready for shearing, cleared brush, took apart an old strawberry bed and used the cement blocks that had been lining it to build a new compost heap. Don helped me pry up the blocks, and Heather pounced upon the worms underneath and put them in a bucket to take fishing with her dad. Heather hasn’t got a squeam in her; she’s used to births and deaths and beetles and snakes, and she loves worms.

Gosh, it was fun! If I could just spend half of every day piddling around like that, this farm would begin to look like something!

The writing went better this week. The textbook is in motion again. I’m finding the concentration and the resolve to put it at the top of my priority list, where it’s going to have to remain for a long time. I really do get excited, when I get into it.

I’d like to wait one more week to send this letter off, to escort you fully from a white farm to a brown one to a green one. The green is just peeking through now, in the grass on the front lawn. There are tiny green leaflets on the gooseberry bushes; there’s a lot of green where I planted winter rye in the garden; the maple trees are in their expectant phase of red and pink, ready to unfurl blossoms. We’re still waiting on three possibly pregnant ewes, waiting for the shearer to come by, waiting to hear the first white-throated sparrow. John is going to put the greenhouse up today. The spring is still in its reluctant phase, it hasn’t yet accelerated into the rush of May.

But next weekend I will be in Oklahoma visiting my mom, and then in Dallas for a conference of the Council on Foundations. So I’d better get this off to you while I have some breathing space.

Happy spring. Many daffodils and birdsongs to you!

Love, Dana

P.S. April 19, on the way to press, a late-breaking bulletin. White ewe lamb born to Camomile this morning, mother and baby doing fine!