I remember a neighbour of mine observing how surprised he was that I was still raising sheep after ten years. “I really didn’t think you would last a winter here,” he said. “You sure had me fooled.”
It’s now more than 30 years with the sheep and 40 with the farm itself. I am just about the oldest shepherd in the community. I started off as a weekender and made the two-hour commute from the city for a number of years before I married and brought my wife here to live year-round in 1987.
It’s difficult to predict whether and how a person will adapt to life on the farm. It isn’t a life for everyone. When I bought the property I was dismayed to discover that the primary purpose of a weekend place is to be looked after. The forest dearly wants to reclaim this bit of the Niagara Escarpment and there was a danger that every weekend would be gobbled up in an endless routine of lawn mowing and brush cutting and repair projects on my dilapidated farmhouse.
There was so much work to be done that a person could easily forget to enjoy the place. I had seen this happen to other people. The drive and the chores and the endless assault of rodents, cluster flies, frozen pipes and snow-choked roads took their toll. It wasn’t long before a ‘For Sale’ sign appeared on the gatepost and they were gone.
I decided early on that the trick was not to allow yourself to work so hard at a thing that you became resentful of the task and the place. I had already fallen into this trap as a journalist and a government speechwriter and I did not want the farm ever to become a place of drudgery.
So I trained myself to putter. I would work away at a thing until I tired of it and then put the tools down and walk to a neighbour’s kitchen or drive down to the diner in the village to join the conversation about lost dogs and corn prices. As the years went by my affection for the farm did not waver. In fact, I found it more and more difficult to drive away from it on a Sunday night and join the stream of cars heading back to the distant lights of the city.
When my wife came to live here she had some difficulty coping with the way I could stop in the middle of a wall-papering job and say, “Well, that’s enough of that!” She was raised on a sheep farm and cursed with a Protestant work ethic that compelled her to stay at a job until it was done. She and her younger sister spent every summer afternoon with hoe in hand, hacking weeds out from between turnips and onions. If they were very, very, bad the two of them were sent back out to the garden after supper to pick beetles off the potatoes. If they were very, very, good they were allowed to stay in the house and help with the pickling. She has callused spots just below her kneecaps, which she absolutely loathes. “Just like a goat,” she says crossly, rasping them down with a foot-long file. Her goat bumps come from countless hours spent on her knees on hard ground in the garden as a young girl and the experience coloured her thinking about vegetables for life. She loves growing flowers but vegetables are something she looks for in a supermarket.
She is very fond of sheep and that is something else she picked up as a child. She loves their patience and their resilience. She admires their mothering and flocking instincts. She likes the smell of them and the feel of them and the sight of lambs on pasture every spring. It is more than coincidence that she has had sheep around her for about 25 years longer than I have.
It has taken thirty years of gentle conditioning to change her views on work. She has never learned to putter herself but she has become more tolerant of those who do.
And that is the lesson here. Our ability to make it through a winter on the farm and return to our gardens and fields every spring is determined much more by affection than any particular skill or knowledge. In the end, it is liking that connects us to the land and to each other and assures us we will still be around come spring.