This week, a sheep arrived in a box. Not the whole sheep, which is still, I hope, grazing happily in a pasture somewhere in northeast Washington State. Only its fleece. I've raised many animals but never sheep. My dad, who raised them as a farm boy, left me with a vicious prejudice against them, and the only sheep I saw as a boy did nothing to counter it. They stood — a dim, ghostly flock — in a grove they had denuded entirely of grass and undergrowth. It occurs to me now that this was the fault of the farmer, not of the sheep, who have no more interest in eating bare dirt than I do.
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I bought the fleece because I've been away from the farm for a couple of months and because it's just the right amount of commitment. No feeding, no herding, no vet bills; no wondering: What have I done? If I were home, it would have been all too easy to drive up the road, pick up a few lambs and turn them loose in the pasture — the beginning of another trial-and-error episode in livestock management. These episodes get easier and easier because the pigs, horses, chickens, geese and turkeys have taught me so much. Still, none of them are sheep.
I set the box on the kitchen table, opened it with a knife and folded back the newspaper inside. The scent of sheep rose like a genie from a bottle — a genie who used a lot of lanolin. This was the fleece from a Cheviot sheep, sheared only a few days earlier. I will sort it, wash it and dry it. What then? Then I'll look at it and contemplate adding sheep to the farm. Perhaps eventually I'll give the wool to my sister-in-law, who hand-spins yarn from wool.
I can feel my dad's old prejudice weakening within me, for whatever you may think of sheep, wool is wonderful stuff. So are the words that come with sheep, like "suint" and "britch" and "kemp" and "gimmer." I may well add some sheep to the farm just for the vocabulary, for the richness they will bring to the herd of words I'm already raising.
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