The Improbable Shepherd Read online

  Sylvia Jorrín is, quite simply, a national treasure. In this era of 10-minute news cycles, disposable luxuries, and soulless “personalities,” Sylvia’s stories are as refreshing and priceless as a cold glass of elderflower water on a summer afternoon.

  The lessons of Sylvia’s farm are not just applicable for those who dream of living the rural life. They’re universally instructive, and joyfully addictive. One would be hard-pressed to deduce whether they were written yesterday, or 100 years ago.

  For those unfamiliar with Sylvia, discovering her stories is like stumbling into a fully loaded wild blackberry patch—impossible to rush through, sweetly fulfilling, with an immediate longing to return to them again and again.

  —Joshua Kilmer-Purcell,

  The Fabulous Beekman Boys, www.beekman1802.com

  Excerpted from Sylvia’s Farm: The Journal of an Improbable Shepherd and featured in Farm Aid: A Song for America …

  “Farmers are dreamers of the first order. The most romantic of dreamers. Feet in the soil, head in the clouds, backs bent even in today’s tractors. They are most wishful of all of those who have inherited the earth as their legacy and work with their bodies as well as their minds. Who else depends so strongly on the unknown and goodwill of the unexpected as a farmer does? The impending birth of calves inspires dreams of the calf being the right calf and growing into being the right cow. The planting, the haying, even the milking, all being controlled by forces within the realm of knowledge and experience and yet controlled by a force far stronger than one can even begin to imagine. There are years when only steadfast grim concentration can carry one’s step to the barn. And days when all goes so well that life is as close to perfection as is possible on this earth.”

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  The Improbable Shepherd

  Text copyright © 2013 Sylvia Jorrín

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN: 978-1-57826-471-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-57826-472-8

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Cover photography by Chris Lopez.

  Cover and interior design by Cynthia Dunne.

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to

  my daughter, Justina Jorrín Barnard,

  my son, Joachim Jorrín

  and

  John D. Hillis, the man in the blue truck

  who told me to write it.

  With all my love,

  Sylvia Jorrín

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With gratitude

  I offer thanks to

  John D. Hillis

  Arnold Brickman

  Stephanie Carter

  Susan Daley

  Andrew Flach

  Steve Gross

  Chris Lopez

  Valerie Razavi

  and

  my wonderful editor

  Anna Krusinski

  You have each in your own way made this book possible.

  With love,

  Sylvia Jorrín

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  The Great Blue Heron

  Letter to a Friend

  Arrivals

  Names

  Fly Flannagan

  Persephone

  Bubbles and Edna

  Rugosa Roses

  Rooms

  Small Increments

  The Extra Mile

  The Penhaligan and Merriman Sisters

  My Story

  The Pattern

  Weeding the Wildflowers and Other Stories of Adventure

  Lady Petunia and Lady Pansy

  The Familiar Time

  Hopes, Dreams, and Wishes

  The Silence

  The Thaw

  The Icy Path

  Alive

  The Kids

  The Tragedy

  Autumn Cooking

  The Beauty of October

  Priscilla Skipworth or Patience Skipworth or Comfort Skipworth

  Lambing

  Envy

  The Newest Lamb

  The Kitchen Farm

  Small Details

  The Adventure

  The Party

  As Ernest Lay Dying

  The Sick Day

  Roses

  Shades of Elizabeth David

  The Two Dog Chair

  One Step at a Time

  In the Beginning

  To Be Ready for a Miracle

  Wuthering Heights

  Because of Rose Brickman

  The Cousins

  The First Moon

  New Year’s Day

  Postscript

  A Note on the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  I HAVE THE privilege of living my dream, here in a valley deep in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. Orange day lilies, double-flowered, rich in their intensity, are framed by the great stone pillars that demarcate the windows of my outdoor living room. There are five such windows, each framing still another view of the lovely hills that surround my farm. I had a stone floor laid here some time ago, the autumn before I began to farm. It is built over a huge, deep stone cistern, which keeps this room cool on the rare day that summer becomes too hot. My dog Samantha lies at my feet on the stone floor this morning. She is nearly 12, and beginning, just beginning, to prefer to stay near me rather than race with my young Border Collie puppy, Fly Flannagan, who, instead of chasing her, is attempting to catch the barn swallows circling his head.

  The morning fog is thick today. We are enclosed, all of us. My sheep, crowding in the cool shadow of the barn this summer morning. The goats, one staring out of the open door of the carriage house loft. Is he watching Fly racing toward each swallow who chooses to dive toward his head? Fly is the enemy, you see, and has been known to bring me one, still shivering and afraid, only to be released upon command. “Fly, bring it to me.” The chickens, recaptured after their most recent breakout, are safely (or is it the Savoy cabbages I am so carefully nurturing now the safe ones) ensconced in their outdoor duplex portable chicken coop, once again. Once again.

  It is lovely here, this early morning. Not beautiful. Beauty is reserved, in my mind at least, for grander vistas, but it is lovely. The paradox, of course, that lies in all things is how to keep what is not from spoiling what is. How to keep the knowledge that heartache is inevitably included in life on the farm from intruding on all that is truly beautiful in that life, and in that, spoil it.

  I am a farmer, and am most of what that means most of the time, and all of what that means me rest of the time. I have farmed it in these hills for many years. And shall continue to farm it for the rest of my life. This was not my first dream. My first dream was to live in a beautiful house, and I do. A Connecticut River Valley shingle-style house, set by accident or design, far, far from the river and far from the Long Island Sound of my New London childhood. The farm became a new dream, born in these hills. It still surprises me. There are moments when it is my greatest despair. And moments when it is a most silent and profoundly peaceful joy. But it is always my dream. And I live it.

  THE GREAT BLUE HERON
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  THE GREAT BLUE heron soared over the length of the brook, then gliding to the pond, settled on the gate post of my long wooden fence surrounding June Grass Pasture. They have become a symbol here on my farm. Were I to create my own coat of arms, something quite unprecedented in these hills, I’d choose the heron, wings spread, carrying a lamb tied in a ribbon. They Soar would be the motto. They Soar. As do my dreams.

  I watched the Heron before me and my flock surrounding me as they grazed the round bale I had just opened for them. Baleage. Sweet smelling with a faint hint of malt, and yet keeping the breath of summer, white plastic peeled away, six hundred pounds of second cutting hay. A joy to both this farmer and my sheep.

  I took armfuls to the goats. They are living in the lambing room for the moment, neat and quite tidy. Fairly content, except for the moments when they, for no explicable reason, attack one another. With a vengeance. Goats fight. Sometimes. Sheep fight rarely. Except as today when two very pregnant ewes decided to face off and butt heads, the sound shaking the rafters, until the sound of my shouting diverted one. Not the other. And the exercise lost its interest.

  My wood room is nearly full of firewood. It is one of the biggest rooms in this house of many rooms, a story and a half tall, L-shaped, surrounding my farm office. The wood in the foot of the L is stacked eight feet high, eight by eight by six and a half, 416 cubic feet. Nine weeks worth, I hope, of firewood to burn in January and February. If I seem committed to a fascination with multiplying numbers it is because I am. All farmers are. Protein ratios and total digestible nutrients and selenium content are the things with which all farmers are obsessed. I don’t milk, except occasionally some of the goats and so I don’t have to figure out protein levels and somatic cell counts. But when I milk, I do weigh both milk and grain and enter neat tiny figures in my daily journal. But the amount of wood in the wood room, the summer kitchen, and the pile on the lawn still to be brought in under cover, influences how much work I shall have to do, subzero afternoons, and how much suffering shall have to be endured here this winter. I burn 30 face cords a year, a fire in the fireplace or one of the wood stoves each month of the year. This year there shall be more than enough for the first time in a long time. I’ve been stacking it myself, and proudly show it off to anyone who will put up with me. It is almost perfectly neat, and is divided into classifications. All nighters, big, heavy unsplit wood for the fireplace. Slab wood, thin, hot burning, good starter wood for the fireplace as well. Limb wood for the blue enamel Vermont Casting Defiant stove in the kitchen, to keep it going, in theory, all night. Round cardboard bins of pine cones, still damp and tightly closed. Split wood of varying lengths to accommodate each of the three stoves and one fireplace I keep going all winter. One more stove to be added when I get the chimney cleaned.

  My son, Joachim, shall help me put up the storm windows. In this house of over 70 windows, that is a task. We won’t get to them all. And he shall help me worm the sheep and goats before they are put in the barn for the winter, where they are certain to pick up parasites from one another. The problems of proximity. Worming is essential to the wellbeing of this flock of pregnant ewes and soon to be bred does.

  I am a farmer. It has been an evolution of sorts, a demand, rather, because I had never intended to become one and had no background to sustain this way of life. It was the farthest thing from my life experience imaginable. I had been raised in an overprotected environment where cautionary tales about the dangers of all creatures having four legs were instilled in me from the time I noticed a puppy existed in a form other than that of a stuffed toy when I was six. It was of great sadness to me that I was not allowed to even pet the horses that were living next door, let alone even dare to be taught to ride. I spent much of my childhood bedridden, making paper dolls and their clothes and inventing stories about their lives. My favorite had auburn hair, green eyes, and lived with her uncle. Shades of The Secret Garden. That I would grow up to sleep sandwiched between my Border Collie, Steele, and her Border Collie cross-daughter Samantha, winter nights, was inconceivable to me. Sometimes it still is. The tiny puppy who has now enlivened my farm would have been equally inconceivable. Fly Flannagan. Border Collie pup. Male. Seven weeks old today. Fly, Fly Flannagan. Fly.

  The thick sweet smell of baleage filled the air as I bundled some to take to the carriage house flock. They are a combination of newly acquired black Finns, two less recently acquired dairy ewes, and a Horned Dorset purchased last year. As none of them were born here, they don’t exactly know the rules, and consequently have given me something of a hard time, and having led the flock once too often to the neighbor’s, are now locked inside. Less freedom for them. More work for me. They too needed baleage.

  I’ve walked, of late, with great regularity, across the June Grass pasture to the small pond the beavers have made in part of the brook. My task is the opposite from theirs. I tear out a niche in their dam nearly every day to lower the water table so it shall not flood my pasture. They patch it each night to raise the water table so it shall flood my pasture, enlarging their home pond. The heron fishes the brook and now the new pond as well. He would not be deprived of fish were the pond made lower, but the beavers would be deprived of their needs. They’ve cut most of the trees and shrubs from the length of the brook up to the sheep crossing. Marsh grass is beginning to invade the pasture. I tether the goats to the wooden fence and let them graze it down, I hope to extinction. I love that little walk and the vehemence added to my day when I toss branches, mud, and sedge with wild abandon from the dam back to the pasture.

  The sheep have had their fill of the sweet malt flavored round bale of second cutting and drift away. I gather still another armful for the carriage house sheep. And the great blue heron soars.

  LETTER TO A FRIEND

  THE SHEEP GAVE me a gift today. All 152 of them. Instinct born of experience told me they were going to try, en masse, to escape to the neighbor’s across the road. Oh, they had ensconced themselves nicely, as a matter of fact, last evening, in the enclosed barnyard. Almost all of them. The few remaining outside stayed immediately around the barn. Still in close proximity of each other. They go in quite on their own. Nearly dusk. As night falls across these hills and the stars appear, one by one.

  Sometimes I sit with them on the stone stairs leading down into the barnyard. They look at me. And, one at a time, the ones who need to, come to be petted and fussed over. Staring into my face. Intently. We are together in those moments. And I am well aware of my place. I am the one with less clarity. I work for them. They are because of me. But I am the servant. Willingly. They give more than I, I only give my labor. Every day of the year. My heart, most times. My strength. Every day. My determination. My will. Always. They give me peace. Theirs is the greater gift. And they keep me in my place.

  I have my favorites. And feel guilty saying so. This year I love the Raggedy Ann and Andy–looking ones. Funny faces. Charming. Winsome. A little amusing in their aspect. And intelligent. The winter’s lambs with freckles, or the fly away airplane ears of the East Friesian crosses. The ones with black eyelashes. How could that be? “I know your grandfather,” I’ll say when they come to me. One little pretty-faced eweling has developed across her nose the triangle patch of freckles of her late lamented great-grandfather, Noah Saltonstall. And then there is a pair of chunky twins who weren’t expected to be born. I was given their mother. To save her from being turned into dog food. “She can’t be bred again,” I was told. “The vet said she couldn’t freshen safely again.” I took her. I always do. While I sell ram lambs for meat, I’ve not sold any adult ewes for meat, ever. Once they are chosen to stay, they live out their lives here.

  One day, mid-winter, I was putting the sheep back in the barn. They had gone out for half an hour to exercise. I suddenly heard amidst the flock (had over 100 lambs born this year and a hundred or so adult sheep), a little tin horn sound frantically piping. A newborn! But where among the many sets of four legs, racing to the barn? I
saw it. A perfect, square, blocky little thing. About five pounds. And there, equally frantic, was the big old ewe who wasn’t supposed to survive giving birth. She barreled her way through the crowd and found the lamb. I went back outside to secure the door when I heard another little tin horn. Alone in the snow. I became the frantic one. There, out on the sheep path to the brook, was still one more lamb. As wet as the first. A newborn. I scooped her up and raced to the barn. The big old sheep looked relieved. I penned the twins and their dam in the lambing jug bedded down with fresh straw. She had lambed easily, with twins in less than 20 minutes. Outside. In the snow.

  Those two lambs are now nice blocky, young creatures. Square. Tall. Looking like their mother. Their lines please me. They lack the delightful quality of the ones with freckles and fly-away ears. But they, too, shall live their lives out on my farm. They shall not be sold as a starter flock. They gave me joy one wintery day. And again last evening watching them in the barnyard.

  The pastures are getting low again. Part of the fence here is still down from the Great Flood a few weeks ago. The sheep found a breach leading into the brook. The line fence is still down in that section. The entire flock went through it to the neighbor’s. I got them back but had to keep them in an over-grazed pasture until the fence is fixed. The south pasture has thick grass that I have saved for September. I decided to leave the gate to it open in case they needed to graze it. The southwest wall is stone. Five feet high. Shoring up the road bank. Across the road is a large open meadow. Owned by a city person who has it cut but who has never farmed. He has no patience with sheep.

  I woke this morning shortly before dawn. “They’re going to go to the neighbor’s,” I thought. “Now.” I jumped out of bed, got into some corduroys and a sweater. Catskill summer morning; called my puppy and ran outside. Swirls of mist rose in the air. I was on an island, surrounded by a great white sea. Other islands of dark green emerged and disappeared. Parts of the hills that surround this farm appeared for moments and then receded into the fog.