For Those Women Just Learning To Wrestle Sheep

Since yesterday was uneventful, I decided to bring back an oldie but a goodie. This was one of the two most talked about posts that I ever put on my blog and if you haven't read it you should. It explains a lot about me. (Originally posted September 2, 2011)

           The next day, intent in re-sinking my feet in the mud after the Spokane experience, and working out some of my aggression at the Dear Farmer (we will call him DF for short, just because I like the look of it!) I forced the kids through many lessons with sheep and pigs. The forecast called for the mercury to hit 100 today, so it seemed more therapeutic than crazy to put everyone through their paces simply because I was breathing and snorting like a bull over yesterday. The only thing keeping me from grabbing a bulldozer and plowing through the wheat field where DF was working was the fact that Brett had his first high school football game tonight. I could not wait for that! I think I’ve been waiting for this day since that kid took his first breath.

            He, on the other hand, apparently had not. As he sat over his breakfast, pushing eggs apart as if he were setting up the Nighthawks first play against Pomeroy I decided to continue my uncanny ability to tick off the men in my house by once again opening my mouth when I shouldn’t.

            “What’s yer problem?” I said looking down at him.

            “Nothing,” he said, shaking his head and gritting his teeth in a manner completely juxtaposed to the word used. “I’m just not playing. That’s all.”

            Okay, let’s just leave that one alone. You don’t want to know what I said to him anymore than what he said back. Let’s just say it ended with his bedroom door slamming and my front door slamming. I was done with him for a while. Now, onto the next victim.

            Now, I’m not sexist. When I’m hurt or angry, I like to share the love with everyone. As one of my ex-bosses once told me: when Amy has a good day, everyone has a good day, but when Amy has a bad day…. I was mad at him for a week over that little observation.  Since then, I have come to understand he was right. However, Summer and I had plans to wash her sheep this morning. It had to be done. There was no getting out of it since her 4-H leader was coming to sheer them the next day in preparation for the fair. In addition to that, Summer had been feeling intimidated by the sheep for some time now, so I knew that I had to change my attitude – or at least suppress it in order to get this done, because there is one other rule that is true about me as well. If Amy falls apart, everyone falls apart, and I was not about to let that happen to a scared insecure little girl.

            Therefore,  at 9:00AM, I walked a very reluctant Summer down to the barn to wash her sheep, Dude and Diva. Dude, the male, is about 125 pounds, and Diva, the female, is about 105.

            Now, I love pigs, as you can tell from the name of my blog, but sheep have been a different story. Pigs love you, they want to play with you, please you. They loved to be scratched under the jowls, and when you come to the barn they somehow manage to get their enormous bodies up out of their self-made mud hole and start running around before you even have time to pull out the first marshmallow treat. When you hop the fence, they fight to be close to you, they nip at your heals, and stretch their heads up to you when you pet them. They practically bark like dogs! Now, I’ve heard many rumors about pigs killing their owners and leaving no evidence left that they had done so, but with our pigs, I just can’t imagine. I love pigs!!

            Now, sheep on the other hand are a different story.  Sheep owners of course would disagree wholeheartedly, but in the three months since we’ve had these beasts it has taken everything I have to get close to them. They do not like us. They do not take marshmallow treats, which is just beyond my realm of understanding, and frankly when I look in their eyes they look back as if they would certainly eat me for dinner, given the chance.

            Now, the idea here, in case you have never caught a sheep like myself, is to catch them, hook their lead ropes on their halters, and then take them outside their poop-filled pasture, onto the nice warm grass, and wash them with a hose, baby shampoo, and a potato scrubber. Not to mention, that at some point in time, I will have to take scissors and cut the poopy dreadlocks from their bums. Regardless of the stigma of how dirty and smelly pigs can be, I have NEVER had to do that with a pig. 

            I try to hold onto my good attitude about this and attempt to stay in character as the person “in charge,” simply because I know full well that if I lose it, Summer will give up and walk away completely.

            Unfortunately, I think I should have meditated harder on my attitude, because immediately, things turn bad, as I predict they would. All it took was Summer unlatching the chain from the fence and the little devils start freaking out as if we are here to butcher them right now! I take a deep breath and coax Summer in the fence instructing her on speaking slowly, softly, almost lovingly. I can see little brother Jack climbing up the fence to get a box seat for the main event, as he does every day.

            “Let me do it, Mom,” he says. “I can get them.”

            “No Jack,” I croon. “They are scared. Not this time.”

            I step lightly and end up slipping sideways on a pile of dung. I curse softly about the pigs never leaving crap and realize that Summer has heard me.

            “Sorry,” I say, side stepping away from Summer so that we can box them in the corner. Immediately, the sheep turn and run, slamming their heads into the fence behind them. I take a deep breath as Summer rolls her eyes and gives me the “why-even-bother” look. I suppress the urge to tell her that she wanted to be different than her bothers. She wanted these stupid sheep.

            “Come on,” I say to Diva. “Come here, sweetie.”

             But, sheep are not like pigs, and no amount of coaxing is going to work here. They hate me, and I hate them. The façade of my liking them is shattering and we are now face to face with the reality of what is about to happen.

            A half hour later, I am sweating, the pigs are oinking like crazy from the pen behind me, Summer is almost in tears, and little bother Jack is whooping it up from atop the fence as if we are trying to herd cattle instead of ply a couple of angry sheep out of the fence.

            “Fine,” I say, throwing down the lead rope and gritting my teeth. “Fine. I’ve had enough. Summer, Do it.”

            “Do what?”

            She has a suddenly look of fear in her eyes.

            “Send her over,” I say, glaring hard at Diva. “Send her to me. I’m gonna catch her.”

            “You’re going to what-”

            “Do it!”

            Now, dear reader, you are really going to have to use your imagination on this one. There is a barn door up against my left arm and a gate up against my right. My feet are also braced against both. The idea is that she will run to me and then I will grab her around the neck with both arms and hold her tight. When I catch her – off-guard – she will freeze as these stupid animals always do and then I will call Summer over to put the lead rope on her and lead her out. Seems easy, right?

            I thought of my son, in his football uniform, standing across the line of scrimmage from his opponent, and crouched down into a catching position between barn door and gate. There is not even a hair’s width of room for her to get through. Summer slowly walks up behind Diva and I lean forward. Diva is staring at me, but I can see that she is monitoring Summer as well out of the corner of her bulging eye.

            “Push her button,” I say, referring to squeezing her tail and getting her to run forward.

            “You sure,” Summer asks.

            “Push it!”

            Summer does as she is told and Diva bolts for me.

            Now, I have always felt like I know what the pigs are thinking. I am NOT, nor will I ever profess to be, an animal person. Just ask anyone and they will tell you my rule: if you can’t eat it, it can’t be on this farm.  It’s a known fact that I am not a fan of taking care of poopy animals, but around here, it is also a well-known, and surprising fact that if there is a problem with the pigs that cannot be solved, I can usually solve it. I am not scared of them, they seem to like me as much as I like them, and somehow I seems to know their language without them even speaking. I’m like a pig-whisperer.

            Apparently, I should  have worked on that relationship more with the sheep before assuming that IT was a complete monotone idiot, and that it would just run into my arms and I would catch it.

            It only took me about 2 seconds, much less time than it takes for a bull rider to realize that he had made a big mistake, to learn the language of the sheep and realize that this animal was not as stupid as I had given it credit for. At some point between the button-pushing and reaching my arms, that sheep made an executive decision and I heard what it was thinking loud and clear.

            “I’m going to jump her!” It thought.

            For a moment I could see the truth about what was going to happen and I knew that there was nothing I could do.  And, for some reason that I cannot fathom, I was still hanging onto the stubborn notion that things might still go my way and my plan might work. It amazes me that you can think all of that in two seconds!

            All I remember are hoofs at my face, a warm body hitting my mid section, a gate rattling open, and the feel of two cinder blocks slamming into my back. It was then that I looked into the sheep’s eyes, just before it ran up and over the rest of me, and I realized that it was not only very smart, but very, very scared.

            The sheep was gone before I could even roll off the cinder blocks and frankly, I wished it would have kept on running. I could not breath, I could not move, and both of my children were staring stone-faced at me.

            Now, sometimes when people fall down, they will lay there for a moment and access the damage only to find out that they have had the wind knocked out of them and things were not as bad as they thought. That has happened to me on more than one occasion and I am always pleasantly surprised – especially after becoming a farm wife - to learn how much battering my body can actually take.

            I laid there for a moment, mentally scanning my body and attempting to breath, only to discover to my surprise that I really could not breath and I really could not move. Pain not withstanding, I went from amazement, to understanding, to downright fear as I heard my daughter say, “Amy, you okay?”

            I moved my head to the side and attempted to say, yes, but not much came out but a croak of air.

            This was strange. I realized that I might actually be hurt an the only thing I could even think about was the list of crap I had to do today and the football game I wanted to go to.

            I could see Diva out of the corner of my eye, she was huffing and puffing ans staring stone faced back at me. Poor thing, I thought, as I rolled off the cinder blocks. My second thought was that she was going to taste really good on my bar-b-que later that fall.

            No, just kidding. It turns out that for the second time in my nine plus years here, I was actually, truly hurt. Now, when I was working for the man, years ago, I would have relished an injury like this to put me on sick leave and get me out of that air-conditioned office and onto some much needed downtime. Since being here, working on the farm, raising kids, and writing, I have never once wanted downtime. I loathe it. I don’t want to miss a day of this, and I wouldn’t have time to anyway. After all, Alice doesn’t live here, so there is no one else to get my chores done, and these chores don’t wait for Monday. Peoples lives and bellies depend of what I do; therefore, as I rolled over and tried to get up, I started scanning my mental list in my head for what I could put off and what I couldn’t.

            By the time I got up, Summer had already sent Jack to the house to get the angry football player, and possibly an ambulance.

            It turns out I cracked a rib and bruised my lung and kidney. I didn’t tell my DF of course. Cranky as he was, it was none of his business. I was not about to end this silent treatment over something as little as internal injuries. No way. There was a point to be made here, and I was not about to let it go. I have a self-impossed rule on my farm, as my sister does on hers. If Caroline Ingall could do it, so can we!

            So, cracked rib, bruised lung, and bruised kidney, I showed my girl how it’s done on a farm and we caught that damn sheep and we washed them both. I even cut their butt-locks! That afternoon I dropped Brett off with his team and took the other boys over to wash the pigs. I never cried like a girl. I never called the ambulance or my husband. If Caroline Ingalls could cut into her own leg to let out an infection with a hot knife and the bible without Charles’s help, then by-goodness I could certainly continue my chores with internal injuries!

            That night, I carefully…very, very carefully went to Brett’s first football game. Wave was still on the combine, so Wave’s family came to the game as well. It only took one look from his mother, and expert in accessing my stubbornness, to figure out that I was in fact truly injured this time. I argued against it, but being equally as stubborn as I, she informed me that she WAS moving in tomorrow until the fair was over. No if’s, and’s or butts about it. And for the first time all year, I didn’t have the strength to argue.