Erin, our first farm apprentice

Juniper Moon Farm is fixing to go through a growth spurt and it seems like the right time to take on a new apprentice. We’re looking for a someone willing to commit to at least a six-month stay, although a year would be better.

What you’ll get: In addition to room and board, plus a small stipend, you will gain experience and proficiency in all aspects of the yarn business. You’ll learn to give vaccinations, pull out a stuck lamb, fix a broken fence and trim hooves. You’ll watch lambs and kids come into the world and take their first shaky steps, something that still leaves me speechless after seeing it a hundred times. You’ll get to know the personalities on the farm and will be able to tell when something is wrong, just by looking.

If you want to learn to shear, we’ll send you to shearing school. And after the sheep are shorn, you’ll learn to wash fleeces and dye the yarn.

You’ll leave JMF with confidence in your abilities to run a farm- your own or someone else’s- and with the knowledge of exactly what you are capable of.

What you’ll give: Some days are ridiculously easy. Some days are so hard that every muscle in your body will ache. Most days are somewhere in between. You’ll average about 8 hours a day, including some weekends. Many nights you’ll go to bed exhausted, but it will be that good kind of exhausted, when you know you’ve done a hard day’s work and kicked some ass.

What you’ll need: Experience isn’t necessary. Just a strong work ethic, a desire to learn and a healthy curiosity. You’ll also need a good pair of boots, rain gear and warm clothes for winter, sunscreen and a hat for summer. A good pair of work gloves is highly recommended. A car in not a necessity but would make your life a lot easier when  you want to get off the farm.

If you’d like to apply, please send a resume and cover letter to susie AT fiberfarm DOT com with Apprentice in the subject line. All applications will be carefully considered and telephone interviews scheduled with likely candidates. Please pass this post along to anyone you think might be interested.

I watched a new lamb come into the world today. It was exhausting, amazing, and miraculous.

Isn’t he lovely?

Welcome to the world Peregrine.

Sorry I’ve been quite for so long. Life has been a bit overwhelming lately and I needed to step back a bit for a few days. I’ve got lots to tell you and I’ll try to get caught up tomorrow.

My latest Huffington Post blog post is up and it’s about a subject near and dear to my heart- Chicken World! You can read it here. If you like it, please re-tweet and share on facebook using the tools provided on the post.

Thanks!

Today is your day so I will refrain from telling the whole world you exact age, but it’s mighty tempting. Why? Because you are the best looking, most interesting, healthiest sixty-something woman I know. How many people’s mamas take up dancing in their sixties? Or go to the gym five days a week?  Nevermind. Nobody would believe me if I told them anyway.

You are such an inspiration to me. You want to experience everything and you treat life like it’s one grand adventure. I hope to be as fearless as you are someday! And to look as good in jeans.

For your birthday, I am sending you a box of homemade jam. (I didn’t quiet get it in the mail yet, but it’s coming. I promise!) I’m also sending you 100 birthday wishes and an IOU for  dinner at Joe T’s and coconut cream pie at the Magnolia Dinner the next time I’m in Fort Worth.

Wishing you the best birthday ever, Mama. I love you.

A few weeks ago, my sweetie took me to a friend’s birthday in Washington D.C. I didn’t know anyone and ended up talking to a nice young man who had just found out he had been accepted to an Ivy League architecture school. He was really excited and very, very earnest and eventually got around to asking me what I do.

Now, you might think that over the past seven or eight years, I would have come up with a good way to answer this question. I mean, it comes up a lot. The thing is that whatever answer I give just tends to lead to more questions, and for some reason, the questions make me uncomfortable. Sometimes I say, “I’m a farmer” which is perfectly true, but doesn’t ring very true to me. I think because it brings to mind crops, or cattle or something. I have a huge amount of respect for farmers, but I don’t really self-identify as one.

Sometimes I just say something vague about being in the yarn business.  Non-knitters don’t really have anywhere to go with this, which is fine, and knitters look at me like I’m made of cake, also fine. I’m happy to answer questions about my flock, my farm, my lifestyle. But, in all honesty, the ‘business’ part of “yarn business” doesn’t ring altogether true, either.

What I want to say when people ask me what I do, what I like to say and what feels like the most true answer is, “I’m a shepherd.”  And the only reason I don’t usually say it is because every time I say it to a man- and I mean every single time- the gentleman smirks a bit and asks, “Do you have a crook?” To which I reply, “Yes. I do.”  It’s annoying.

The fact is that most people have never met a shepherd and the idea seems sort of silly or precious. But shepherding is just the opposite. It a noble and serious profession dating back more than 6000 years. Being a shepherd means being responsible for the care of a flock and being a good steward of the lands they graze. It’s about surrendering yourself to the rhythms of the seasons, slowing your life down to match the the pace of the animals and being ever watchful, ever vigilant. It’s about putting the needs of flock first, doing your absolute best for them, and then worrying all the time anyway.

I’ve never felt like I became a shepherd when I got my sheep. It was more like I always was a shepherd and I didn’t know it until the sheep found me. They instantly gave my life a purpose and they’ve continued to do so every day since then. I am a shepherd to my boots. It isn’t glamorous or sexy or easy to explain, but it’s all I want to be.

So, when the earnest architect-to-be asked me what I do for living, I looked him in the eye and said, “I’m a shepherd.” And he surprised me. He smiled sweetly and said, “That’s really great. You should have business cards made and put ’shepherd’ on them.”

I didn’t say anything. I just pulled one out of my wallet and gave it to him.

So it turns out that I suck at convalescing. The last three days have been incredibly boring, frustrating and restless-making, as I have been almost entirely confined to my bed in a darkened room, wearing an eye patch and sunglasses. The one time  I did get up ended in disaster. Turns out it’s a really bad idea to use a beneriner when you have one eye covered with a patch. Something about the loss of depth-perception, I think. Live and learn. Now I have a lovely bandage on my middle right finger that goes so beautifully with the one over my eye.

My eye does seem to be getting better but much more slowly than I had anticipated. I leave for the TNNA Trade Show tomorrow and I hope that all this ridiculous resting will pay off in the form of my being able to remove this stupid eye patch by the time I get there. I do not want to be the girl at TNNA with the eye patch.

In other news, we have absolutely lovely farm stay guests this week. Ruth and Claire are sisters down from the Hamptons, and, although I haven’t been able to spend too much time with them, I am really excited that they are here. Maggie has kept them busy helping with chores and building fences. Claire even brought her gardening gloves after reading about my overgrown flower beds.

It has cooled off a bit this week- Thank God!- and the flock is so much happier. At least I think they are. My eye doc advised advoiding the barn and pastures until my eye heals, so as not to expose it to manure or anything else that might be lingering near the animals.

More tomorrow, from Columbus.

• home, but only just
• exhausted
• inspired by my week at Squam
• suffering from some kind of weird eye infection
• so excited about all the new friends I made at Squam and all the old friends I re-connected with there
• going to post lots of pics and stories tomorrow
• afraid I may be coming down with something because I cannot be coming down with something
• going to take a hot bath and go to bed immediately

Night, y’all. We’ll talk tomorrow.

I really, honestly planned not to post until I got home on Sunday night, but I have something really sad that I need to tell you and I figure it’s better to get it over with. There’s no good or easy way to tell you this: we lost our sweet, tiny lamb today.

Rushworth had been growing and thriving and becoming such a big little lamb that this caught me, and Maggie, and I suspect all of you, completely by surprise. We have all invested so much in Tiny, so many emotions, so many hopes, so many prayers, and I honestly can’t bear the thought of you all reading this.  I am just more sorry than you can know.

Here is what I need to say.  Rushworth came into this world without much chance of surviving for even a day. I tried to be brutally honest about his chances, because I was quite sure he would be gone by morning. Please don’t misunderstand me- I did every single thing I know how to do to save his life, but everything I know isn’t always enough to save a dying lamb.  The time we have had with Rush- every single moment of his short life- was a gift. Every single moment.

It is a cruel fact of life that the animals that have my heart, the ones that I know and am closest to, tend to be the broken ones. Rushworth survived so many things. Because I know you will be curious, the vet suspects that it was heat exhaustion and dehydration that took his life.  It is a another cruel fact of life that terrible things tend to happen when I leave the farm. Lucy was hit by a car while I was in Fort Worth and I was incredibly anxious about leaving the farm for six days to attend the Squam Arts Workshop. Not because I think the farm can’t survive without me, but because I hate for anyone but me to feel the terrible weight of responsibility when things do go wrong.  I want to be very clear about one thing: my absence from the farm today had nothing to do with Tiny’s death today. There was nothing that I could have done that Maggie didn’t do to save his life. Not one thing. Maggie would have moved heaven and earth to save that lamb, and she is hurting right now something fierce.

There’s a quote that’s sometimes attributed to Dr. Suess that I try to remember at times like these. “Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.” So I’m asking you, please, don’t cry because we lost him; smile because we knew him. How lucky we were to have known him.