My Jumbo Time Keeper

While I have had calendars in my office, mostly they are free gifts with pretty pictures or small desktop pop ups from the local bank, I don’t pay much attention to them.  Todd gave me a Sabra Field calendar for Christmas and I can see her lovely screen print of a winter night scene just in front of me.  The American Sheep Association sent one that is loaded with – of course – terrific photos of sheep in all kinds of weather, but in my head I know what day of the week it is and Google calendar keeps track of my commitments with friendly reminders on my phone, so relying on a physical calendar has never been my thing.  However, a few weeks ago a new calendar of sorts has grabbed my attention like no other. 

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In mid-October Marty delivered forty round bales of hay stacked as neatly as one can stack five hundred pound cylinders, two high, four rows deep and five rows wide. They sat there until the hard frost knocked out the grass and we moved to feeding the sheep the round bales.  And like crossing out the box on a calendar’s page with a fat Sharpie, the sheep have been chomping through each bale, one at a time and the giant calendar of plastic-wrapped white bales shrinks.  We turned the halfway mark a week ago and on Sunday my nephew Jake moved Round Bale #22 into the barnyard.  Each bale lasts about three days, so my calendar tells me we have fifty four more days left before they’re gone.  

I didn’t really think of the temporary oversized marshmallow sculpture in our front yard as a calendar until we were about a third of the way through, when all of a sudden, I thought, “this white plastic glacier is shrinking. Time is flying! The dark will be replaced by light. The subzero weather will end.”  Today may be 21 degrees, but the way we’re plowing through these bales, the end is in sight. As each bale gets chained up and carted to the barnyard I’m looking at three more days progress toward Spring.  From five rows we’re down to two full rows plus one bale. 

These round bales won’t hold us until the grass is green in the fields. We bought enough to get us just inside a month before lambing season when we need to switch to small square bales to limit the amount of hay our pregnant ewes eat.  Hay takes up a lot of space in the four stomach chambers of a sheep and when you add twins (or triplets) in there, let’s just say the innards can run out of room and force parts to prolapse.   My point is, I don’t care that my oversized calendar won’t get me to warm weather. I just need it to get me to the action! When that last bale gets finished off, we’ll be about ten days away from shearing day and shearing day is when they’ll all get rolled on their butts for their hair cut and we’ll likely see which udders have begun to swell, which means we’ll know who’s pregnant and then a whole new crazy, nerve-wracking, exhilarating clock kicks in!  We’ll have more deep freeze, hopefully more snow, but bale by bale, the season is moving along, three days at a time.

Peggy

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