Lambsquarters by Barbara McLean

tails and tagging their ears, I stood holding each animal while Thomas performed the surgery, tears pouring down my face with the pain of it all, and determined never to circumcise a son.
    In the house my wheel whirred with the sound of spinning lambswool, which I knit into bootees and sweaters and shawls. Tiny clothes from our farmstuffs, all ready and waiting. Bags woven for diapers, blankets shaped on the loom. Dark greens and deep browns,natural greys and pure whites. Not a pink or a blue to be seen. Deep colours, for the depth of my commitment, the well of my hope.
    AND SHE FILLED them all, my beautiful daughter. So pink and round and perfect at birth. Too big already for some of the clothes I’d made. She filled our arms, our lives, our home. This country baby, homegrown baby, created without skill or knowledge, who came with love of her own. And the daffodils bloomed for themselves that spring, for there was no depression.

SHEARING
    THE WINTERS IN GREY COUNTY beg for heavy wool. Snow drifts right over the fence tops, piling pompoms on the posts when the wind is down. Gates disappear under crisp white hills. Just getting to the barn can be a chore, with fresh powder thigh deep. Only snowshoes keep me aloft. But except during the worst blizzards, I feed the animals outside.
    I take my baby daughter with me. Mobile and toddling by her first winter, she heads out to the barn encased in her snowsuit, a complicated braid of knitted cables in grey handspun. Wonderfully warm, it allows her to move freely, where nylon or Gor-Tex or whatever would not. She stands among the ewes, or sits in their midst on the snow, and they mill around her sniffing, recognizing, protecting. She is a part of their lives, and they of hers.
    There is a courtyard by the barn, a sort of sheepesplanade. Stone walls cut deep into the bank-barn on the north and also mark the eastern edge. The sheep have access to the stable on the other side, but throughout winter they choose to be out. To dot themselves inside the stone walls. Small white humps in a bleached land. Flakes of snow on fleece on snow.
    Before feeding them, I pick my daughter up, a fresh bundle of giggling wool, and place her in the playpen made from hay bales or hurdles or whatever’s handy. Keep her safe and happy and warm near the lambs, if there are any yet, the chickens if there aren’t. I toss sheaves of hay from the mow out to the courtyard, where they punctuate the white with green wind-scattered dots as individual leaves escape the bale. Late harvested timothy sticks like velcro to wool, so each year I hope the grass was cut and baled before it headed up. If I try to pull the timothy heads out of the fleece, a million seeds scurry deep within it for survival. To protect the fleece from chaff, I use square wooden feeders that prevent the sheep from climbing right into the hay and garlanding themselves like Florizel in
The Winter’s Tale
. Small bites will dangle from mutton chops, though, and the odd ewe will drag her dinner across another’s back.
    A tangle of protection: I guard the fleece from contamination while the fleece shields the sheep from the elements. The snow is the best indicator of success, for in the worst storms my ewes will lie snugunder their thick snowy blankets. Their fleece insulates them completely; not a ray of warmth escapes to melt a flake. With their feet tucked under their bulging bodies, they silently ruminate, growing lambs and wool.
    Wool is the guiltless crop. Nothing dies in its harvest. If left on the sheep, the fleece would eventually shed, pull off in patches on brambles and briars. The sheep would go bald in patches, trip over its own tresses. A sick sheep will shear itself. Illness causes a break across the fibre, which loosens it until the wool falls away in hanks. Left to grow too long, the fleece fills with chaff and dirt, parts along the back with rain, weighs the animal down. If a woolly sheep turns turtle, it will die. A sheep stuck on