The Inevitability of Heartbreak

Mid-way through lambing season, I am snapping out of our off-season operating mode. We don't really take a season off, but the farm is relatively tame when the temperatures slow the growing process. All of the sudden, with the announcement of Valentine, our St. Valentine's day lamb, we were hopping off the bench and up to the plate. Or maybe it was a week earlier when I picked up 25 new layer chicks from the post office that it really began. Such young ones are inherently high maintenance.
Without much time to prepare, we were thrown back into a familiar schedule- a schedule dictated by a newborn. When our bottle baby came around last week, our days began to start and end with her. Just as I woke for Jack and May in their infancy, I woke for the lamb in her first few days when she took small, frequent feedings to get her bearings. Only, she wasn't in our room making her hunger apparent, she was in the warmth of our mudroom keeping hunkered in a straw nest. Being her only means of survival as her makeshift mom, I woke up without setting an alarm, way earlier than usual, knowing she was thirsting for the next 110 degree batch of lamb formula.
Unlike subscribing to the mammalian way of life, the baby chicks simply need a reliable source of heat and to be introduced a single time to food and water before they can help themselves. Of course we must offer them a proper, secure shelter...one of our responsibilities as their guardians. But bottle feeding a lamb for three months is a commitment that Rich believes only another mammalian mother can truly keep. Or maybe a doting father...our friend Dan brought a bottle calf to our farm, to keep her on her feeding schedule while on his delivery route. Maybe we all have an appreciation of the commitment that was made to us as young mammals.

I've read it from other farmers which reminds me of my good company: with the season of birth, comes loss. And despite the fact that we are in some control of life on the farm, inevitably each life is on its own trajectory, subject to the perils of existing on earth. We're seasoned to this now, having spent thirteen years seeing plants and animals come and go. We certainly have somber moments, like the days we brought chickens in from the pasture to harvest them and package them for market. We invited those birds to the farm as day-olds and dipped each beak in water to teach them to drink. We tended to their brooder, keeping them warm enough until they feathered out. And then we watched them flourish and enjoy running around the pastures, moving them to fresh grass each day. And eventually, their days came to an end at our hands, with the ultimate respect for them, what they contributed in their personalities, their nourishment for our soil, and eventually for the bellies of our community.
This late winter, a very energetic lambing season has been unfolding, with so much to be thankful for. With a full descending moon at apogee, an alignment which affects the tides more than ever, it seems that the bulk of the lambing happened at once. The ewes who lambed have recovered from their labors, we have an overflowing handful of lambs bounding around as the adults take their grazing seriously, and the conditions have been pretty fair to the animals. However, just as we human women tell tales of our labors, each ewe's is different. We've lost a few lambs, one whom we didn't expect to lose and, for this one, my heart broke. The inevitable motherly tendency to feel like I could have done more completely crushed my spirit, and I mourned the loss of a ewe lamb I expected to see grow old here. But this is the messy nature of life. And just short of keeping her in my bedroom, I offered her more than Rich thinks a farmer can justify.
Later that morning as I walked away from her burial ground, Rich relayed that there were triplets born. I've found that being needed can really assist in the healing process. A ewe can only adequately feed two lambs. With an un-licked, shivering runt on hand, it was immediately time to step in: colostrum replacement and a good cleaning off were in store. And so I bonded with another baby who is not mine. He was seeking his basic needs, and I was seeking a bandaid for my broken heart, and the chance to help another babe get on his feet.
Soon enough we will be seeding and transplanting in the field. Come next month the very first plantings will have a shot at prospering. And just as with the animals here, we have to mentally prepare for the inevitable loss that comes with heavy spring rains, deer trampling, freakish extended, late hard frosts, and on and on the possibilities go. We reseed, we air our grievances over dinner, and we move on. This is the way of life and so we hedge our bets when we can, and when that's not enough we hold onto each other. And when I see how my kids, who unlike me, were raised from birth on a farm, and how they mourn a loss and rather quickly accept the fate of life, I too move on.

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