Not A Typical Jersey Girl Weekend

We are pleased to welcome our first guest blogger – Peg’s sister Eileen Lambert…

Who knew that a Jersey girl could find paradise the last weekend in April on a small farm in Vermont: perfect weather of cloudless skies, seventy degree days, chilly nights and the heavenly scent of the warming earth flooding the air.

I’m a school principal. My life is not calm; nor is my personality, come to think of it, so my job and I are generally well matched. But every so often I go off in search of an inner zen I suspect isn’t actually there, and lately I seem to find it at Savage Hart Farm, but this weekend was really something else.

I already mentioned the weather. Jersey doesn’t seem to have ideal weather; it’s too hot or too cold, or too rainy. Or just too too. We like extremes in the Garden State.

Saturday morning broke in lazy sunshine that held endless promise. I lay in bed and just listened to the silence and reveled in the sensation of laziness, also mainly alien to my personality, which is primarily characterized by ‘hyper.’ The smell of coffee made by someone else is the Song of the Siren to me. I long ago gave up the idea that anyone would ever bring me coffee in bed, so I know it requires motion: getting dressed and getting downstairs. Peg and Todd, already nose deep in the paper make a person feel welcome, but with no expectation for social performance. Suits me to the ground.

“Wanna go feed the sheep?” That was the question I was waiting for. I fight back the ‘yes!yes!yes!’ and produce a ‘sure’ with a shrug. I slide my feet into the extra pair of mudboots they keep in the garage. Sheep dip, while clean smelling and clumpy, is not really suited to my standard weekend footwear of Dansko clogs. We schlep the grain and set down the troughs; I am a pro, by the way: tossing a handful of grain into the far trough, and stepping around the stamping ewes with the grace of a Bolshoi dancer to pour the rest into the remaining troughs. I see it as a sheep IQ test to see if anyone catches on to my act. Hilary is always on to me. Way to go girl, nothing gets by you.

Daisy is suspiciously not part of the stampede, choosing to remain in the barn. Ewes only miss feeding for two reasons as far as I can tell: death is imminent, or they’re going into labor. We were at the latter.

OMG. Boil water; get towels; alert the media: we’re having a baby. Well, a lamb actually. Little side note here: when you are the mother in labor, which I’ve been twice, you don’t notice how much standing around waiting is actually involved in assisting at a birth instead of giving birth. We stood and waited. The water sac appeared; we glanced at our watches; half an hour after the water sac appears you should see a lamb emerge or things aren’t actually going all that well. Twenty minutes: a hoof appears at the height of contraction, only to be pulled back into the canal. “only one hoof?”, which would obviously signify a problem; no species is born sideways. Next contraction: two hooves. Good news. Time is passing; each contraction brings the sight of the hooves only to have them withdrawn again from view. We’re at the thirty minute mark. We’ll assist.

I would not like to refer to us as the ‘halt, the lame and the blind’ relative to lamb birth, but I think it is safe to say that we were damn close. Peg grabs the hooves at the next contraction; Todd is calming mom; I am prying open the opening with my fingers. It’s not working. Todd abandons mom’s head and comes to pull on the legs  with his superior strength while Peg reaches into the canal and I keep trying to widen the opening. We each think the unsayable: this lamb is dead.

“Anyone know how to perform an episiotomy on a ewe?” No time like the present for figuring it out. I am sent to the house for a sharp knife and a needle and thread. Twenty yards from the barn a voice calls: “Come back! We’re okay” And we were; and as surprisingly, so was ram lamb number one. No time to gloat; towel him off, tickle his nose with hay to make him sneeze out whatever mucus is in there and get mom to lick him and bond. No problem; we are all so calm. Baby ram lamb number two starts on his way into the world, and appears with a narrower head and much less drama. Now we’re pros: towel him off, get mom to bond; start teaching them to suckle because they don’t seem to get the hang of it.

By 10:30 in the morning an eternity has passed, but we were the proud foster parents of twin rams born at Savage Hart Farm, the fourth and fifth lambs of the season.

We went to town to run an errand midday and stopped for lunch so Peg and Todd could pick names for this season’s herd of five: three rams and two ewes.  Todd proposes: “three rams? Crosby Stills and Nash, of course.”  Of course. Keeping with the musical theme the two ewes are Jewel (Martha’s brown baby)and Ella (Daisy’s dark brown twin to Nash). Daisy’s twins are Crosby (lamb number one) and Stills (lamb number two). I don’t know who’s going to teach Ella to scat, but she’ll get the hang of it, I’m sure.

I checked on those two lambs all day as if I had invented them myself. Peg and Todd had been at the birth of the previous three, but I was here at this moment to witness fragile life come to a corner of paradise in an otherwise pretty rocky world. Not too shabby.

Sunday we went hiking with a repeat of a perfect day in paradise.

I admit, that much as I love hiking, I wanted to get back to check on Crosby and Stills; they still seemed so thin to me, a school principal who didn’t know one end of a sheep from another but now felt connected to the fragile innocence of two lambs, like I’d been waiting for them for years.

Maybe what paradise really is, is perspective. I certainly got a healthy dose of it here this weekend at Savage Hart Farm. I hope I can bring it back to Jersey; it wouldn’t be wasted.