Transitions

Home for the winter!

The sheep typically come home around Thanksgiving time. This year was no different. The weekend just after the holiday saw a significant amount of snow. Snow is a deal-breaker for me in the fall! The sheep can paw through a couple of inches, but any more than that and it gets harder for them to find grass, and harder for me to move fences. Heavy snow will weight down the nets, too, and I’ve had escapees because of that.

So, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I backed the van into the paddock, opened the back door, put some alfalfa pellets on the floor, and seven willing volunteers jumped right in. I caught three more as they milled about and guided them into the side door. That was enough for a load and I took them home. The holdouts needed to be corralled into the sheep-shelter-turned-catch-pen, tied to the rails, and led one at a time to the van. Not as easy, but it could be worse.

And then they were home. My daily life changed considerably. No more daily walks to the field. No 30-90 minutes of work moving fences, the shelter, water tub, salt bin, and charging wagon. Instead of heading to the field at 10 or 11, I do wintertime chores between 8 and 9 most days. It takes 10-20 minutes to pull armfuls of hay off the round bales out front and fill the mangers inside the barn, and barely a minute more to carry a bucket of water from the house to their basin in the barnyard. When it’s over 25 degrees, I can get water from the spigot at the back of the house. Any colder than that and I have to get warm water from the laundry room instead.

There’s time in the winter, time to hang out with the sheep, talk to them, and pet the ones that like petting. When snow covers the garden and the last jar is put by in the basement, there’s time for music, for art, for sewing, reading, learning, socializing, and sometimes even a jigsaw puzzle. I don’t mind the snow. I don’t mind shoveling; I love to cross-country ski. I take delight in the demise of the year’s biting insects.

By spring, however, I’ll be tired of this routine and itching to get back to the field and garden. That’s the beauty of the seasonal life of homesteading. I enjoy each phase and each season as it comes, and before I get too stuck in a rut of routine, it changes. As the English say, “Change is as good as a holiday.” I quite agree!