Dear Folks,

It’s changed a lot around here since the last time I wrote.  The transformation from March to April is hard to believe in this North Country.  One month ago everything was white and frozen.  Now the snow is gone, the grass is beginning to green up, and the forests have taken on the subtle pinky-brown color of the maple bloom.  The crocuses have already gone past and the daffodils are opening in the front garden.  Every night the peepers sing down at the pond.  Back in the barnyard, where there were eight great swollen ewes a month ago, there are now eight slimmer ewes and eleven little black lambs.

The lambing was good.  Of the six older ewes, five produced twins and the sixth a single, all without problems.  Eight of the lambs are rams and only three are ewes — I wish that ratio were a little more even, because ewes are easier to sell for breeding and bring a higher price.  Ram lambs are nearly all destined for meat, which is fine as far as farm finances are concerned, but if I had my way, all my lambs would go off and breed on other farms and be immortal, and none would become meat.  The disposal of lambs, however, is one of those little aspects of the universe in which I do not get my way.

Yearling ewes often produce trouble in lambing, and there we did have trouble this year.  Charity needed help getting her lamb out, and as I delivered it, even before I could see the whole lamb, I knew something was badly wrong.  It was grotesquely misformed.  I guess it was what would be called in humans anencephalic — without a fully-formed brain.  Its head was all misshapen, though the rest of its body was perfect.  It couldn’t possibly live, and it didn’t.  In nine years of lambing, I have never seen a malformed lamb before.

The really sad part is that now I have to get rid of Charity, because I suspect this will happen again.  Two years ago I kept a ram lamb from our own flock, Polka, as an experiment, to be my breeding ram.  I did it because he was so beautiful, and because he was from Dot, my best ewe and a line I wanted to dominate in the flock.  Polka was the father of last year’s lambs, and last year was a bad lambing.  No malformations (though last year I was expecting it), but a lot of singles and late lambs and difficult deliveries.  So I traded Polka for Caspar Weinberger, who is the father of this year’s lambs.

Charity, born last year, is the daughter of Dot and Polka.  Got that straight?  Her father was really her brother (sorry to bring up matters like this in a family newsletter).  She is perfect herself — in fact she is gorgeous, with a thick chocolate-brown fleece and a fine gentle face and a well-formed body, which is why I kept her.  But I guess genetically she is likely to have continuous problems.

You’d think I would have known that, and of course I did.  I told myself the story of the Hawaiian kings, who consistently married their sisters.  They produced a lot of malformed children, the story goes, but the flip side of the genetics was that they also produced a lot of magnificent children.  The good genes sometimes lined up together, just as the bad genes did (this is the story of all genetic improvements in crops).  Since apparently the Hawaiians had no trouble doing away with the problem children and continued to inbreed the terrific ones, they became a wonderful race.  So with my flock, I thought.

Ah, but there’s such a big difference between a nice, rational concept and a real, living experience.  One malformed dead-born lamb is enough for me.  I don’t have the mental toughness of the Hawaiian kings.  Beautiful Charity, all charged up with the hormones of the birthing and quite certain that she had produced a lamb, spent two days crying for it and trying to find it.  She’s calmed down now and is fine, but I’m not.  So after the shearing I will take her to the Thetford Auction (she will almost certainly not be bought there by anyone who wants a breeder).  The consolation is that Dot has produced another beautiful daughter this year out of Caspar, and I will keep her.

The second yearling, Faith, whom we brought in from another flock and who is not inbred, shows no signs of being pregnant.  It would be fine with me if she didn’t breed this year — yearlings are not quite full grown and often have lambing difficulties.  She might yet produce a lamb a month or two late — it’s hard to tell under all her wool what’s going on.  She acts like she’s still a lamb herself.  When all the little ones get going in the evening circus (for some reason right at dusk all the lambs get wired — they go careening around the barnyard, leaping and kicking and having a high old time), she forgets her dignity entirely and joins in.  It looks pretty silly to see eleven little black lambs hopping and jumping, along with one big white ewe.  She’s spring-loaded, can go three feet into the air from a standing start.  Keeps right up with the gang.  Cracks me up every night.

In about two more weeks the pastures will be grown enough to support the flock, and we’ll shear them and put them out for the summer.  The excitement will be over.  After a month of having my attention always half out in the barnyard, watching for signs of lambing, finding warm, wet, wiggly newborn lambs, making sure everyone is nursing properly, docking tails and tagging ears, giggling at the twilight antics, I will find the barnyard very lonely.  But then we’ll plant corn in it, to soak up all the droppings the flock has been accumulating there over the winter.

I’m finding it hard to get into the pace of farm work this year.  We’re already several weeks behind — the chicken house still isn’t cleaned, the grapes and raspberries aren’t pruned, the chickens aren’t fenced.  John has just left with Brenna to spend Easter week with his sister in upstate New York, and Kate is in California for two weeks, celebrating the fact that she finally got up her gumption and resigned her job as manager of the Upper Valley Food Coop.  She has a new job, doing nutrition education for the much bigger and more businesslike Hanover Coop, and she’s very happy about it.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling you all this is to say that there are not many helpers around and I feel panicked.  I always do at this time of year — after a somnolent winter suddenly everything outside goes into overdrive, and I begin to realize that all my winter dreams about managing the farm perfectly for a change are only dreams.

The result has been a series of minor explosions within this normally peaceful little community, which usually start with my listing all the things that need to be done and asking who wants to do what.  That produces a lot of resistance and excuses and everyone goes off to do something else.  Either I end up doing the jobs myself, seething with marvelously righteous resentment, or the jobs don’t get done.  Then I accuse everyone of being suburban yuppies who should never be living on a farm in the first place, and the conversation degenerates rapidly from there.  Yes, folks, life in this heavenly rural commune is as full of foolishness as life anywhere else.

The truth is that everyone who lives here is unusually helpful and cooperative and we get quite a lot of work done, pleasantly and without much fuss.  And the truth is also that everyone, including me, has legitimate, understandable major commitments elsewhere.  The farm is fourth or fifth on everyone’s priority list, except mine, where it’s third, after the column and the Balaton Group.  Another truth is that the farm is by no means being used to its potential, and parts of it (mainly the buildings and fences) are deteriorating.  We’re all suburban yuppies, really.  If we weren’t, we couldn’t afford the farm.

I haven’t figured out what to do, but I am furiously figuring.  I am thinking thoughts that I normally find unthinkable.  The place needs an experienced, full-time farmer.  The five of us plus Brenna just don’t add up to that.  We could try to find one to join the community.  We could hire one.  We could sell the place to one and move to the suburbs where we belong (as Dennis says, “why hire someone to farm for you?”).  I could kick everyone out and try to find new people who might put farming up to second or third priority.  Or I could scale down my expectations, let the place go back to the forest it was when we came here, just grow a little garden, and gain a lot of peace of mind (this is the solution favored by everyone except me.)

Or we could wait around for awhile, till this early-spring mood of mine passes.

Stay tuned for further bulletins, but don’t expect anything nearly as dramatic as what’s going on in my head.

How’s the column going?  Well, in terms of sales the column is in the doldrums and I have to get cracking.  Three of my editors have changed in the past few months (in my experience, the average op-ed-page editor lasts about 11 months), which means I have to keep selling just to keep the old papers on my list.  I’m beginning to appreciate what syndicates do!  These last three changes have resulted in two papers using the column more frequently than before, and one using it less.  I sold one column (the one on Presidential candidates in New Hampshire) to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which was an enormous breakthrough both in terms of the size of paper I can now claim to sell to, and in terms of per-column income (the Inquirer pays $100).

Thanks to help from readers of this News Service, openings have been created with editors in Champagne, Illinois, and Madison, Wisconsin, which might turn out to be sales (sounds good so far, anyway).  And I sent out introductory packets and am now sending weekly columns to ten new papers (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Detroit Free Press, Des Moines Register, Little Rock Gazette and Democrat, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Denver Post, Indianapolis Star, Quincy Mass. Patriot-Ledger).  Most of these are very low-probability targets, but the success with the Inquirer gave me the chutzpah to reach out to papers like these.

We shall see.  I am waiting to be able to present a list of 20 solid customers, one or two of which are big papers, and then I’ll go back to the syndicates again.

Time to sign off and go prune the raspberries, without resentment.

Love, Dana