HEAVEN from all creatures hides the book of Fate,

All but the page prescribed, their present state;

From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:

Or who could suffer being here below?

The Lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,

Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?

Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,

And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.

Oh, blindness to the future! Kindly giv’n,

That each may fill the circle mark’d by Heaven:

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,

A Hero perish or a sparrow fall,

Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,

And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

--Alexander Pope “Essay on Man”

Greetings Dear Ones!

Farmers are notoriously hard on clothing. So are carpenters, mechanics, arborists, and people who think their waistline is still what it was when they were sixteen. But farmers really take the cake. (And the poop.) As a seamstress, being friends with one is like being a dentist who hangs out with people who dine chiefly on candy. Recently, a rather elegant customer came into my shop, asking me to de-pill all her sweaters. She can’t bear the feeling of these things, tiny fibrous clots the size of tic-tacs, clinging to her garments. She shudders at the unsightly evidence of friction in her life. I can’t help thinking of one of my farming mentors who took a blunt knife, the one she uses to slice the twine on bales of hay, and used it to slash off her shirt at the cuffs. “I hate the way they flop and won’t stay rolled up. This is way better,” she says, waving her plaid arms as if they are graceful wings and she is now free to fly.

“Want me to take that shirt home and hem those ragged edges?” I offer.

“Naw…” she says, walking away. “It’s not like I’d wear this to the grocery store.” But she and I both know she will.

I love that my life is full of these charming and preposterous dichotomies—the subtle and unique pairings that result from humans in conversation about form vs. function and about what has value to our lives. Form and function are dance partners in the same way as Birth and Death.

I get to my friend’s farm Monday night just as her prized ewe is hard in labor and struggling to deliver a tiny ewe lamb with gorgeous markings. The neighbor kids are in attendance to witness this “miracle of birth.” Suddenly, it’s apparent that something is awfully wrong. The sac is so thick and strong that the baby cannot escape it. When we realize what is happening, it is already too late. The thirteen-year-old says in a voice aching with sorrow “Life is so cruel.” The six-year-old pipes up to correct him. “You mean Death,” she says. Meanwhile, the ewe, not liking so much attention, gets up and walks away. We corral her in a lambing pen and leave her in peace. That first lamb is so tiny; there is bound to be another.

My friend sends the kids home to supper. When we return to the barn, the ewe is pacing and pawing, in labor again with the twin. We wait. It takes a long time for her to get back to hard labor. I am just about grab the lube and go in after the lamb, thinking it too is dead, when it lands with an inaudible splop on the ground. He wiggles and breaths in soft tiny cries that have his mother swinging around to clean him off as quickly as she can. Everything looks good, though he is awfully tiny. Is there a third? We leave them to make each other’s acquaintance and walk up to the house. When we came back a short time later with a bucket of warm molasses water for the new mother, we find her lying down, contentedly chewing her cud, totally uninterested in her newborn. The baby is abandoned in a cold black circle not far from her.

My friend’s sunny face is a sudden thunderstorm on a cloudless day. “Grab a towel,” she orders. Quick as a blink, this spry eighty-year-old is over the gate and in the pen, scooping him up, slipping her pinky into his cold, grey lips. She swaddles the baby, who flops like he is made of rubber, and hands him to me. “He’s still wet! Get him up to the house and get him warm and dry, I’ll be along in a minute.” I turn and run to the house, feeling ice cold placental fluid soaking into my shirt as I go.

As soon as he is warm and dry and snug in a basket on a heating pad, we return to the barn. She holds the ewe’s head while I do my best to milk out the colostrum at the other end. This is the crucial “first milk” all newborn mammals need to survive. The mother does not appreciate my anxious groping and pinching. She kicks and hops. She has not bagged up. There is no milk. One side is completely dry. The other gives just a few drizzles, less than an ounce. We go back to the house and mix up some formula to add to it. We need to get two warm ounces into him. I put the sticky liquid into a human baby bottle and trickle it onto his tongue. He swallows weakly but does not suck. No suck reflex. This is bad. “Should we tube him?” I wonder. His body is now warm but his mouth is still cold—his tongue, like a tiny minnow, flopping blackly. I keep trying. Across the room, my weary friend, who is still getting over her second Covid vaccine and has run three times back and forth to the barn by now (up hill, a distance of about a hundred yards) announces firmly from where she is sprawled in an armchair, “It’s up to him. He’s got to decide to live. We can’t force it.” It is a warning and a boundary I respect.

As I hold his head and drop milk and secret hopes into him, his pilot light continues to flicker and fizzle. A swallow. Another swallow. I can feel his tiny belly expand with breath. His ribs are the bellows. “Yes, Keep the fire going! Give it air,” I want to shout. I can feel his tiny spirit going in and out of his nose like an invisible hermit crab trying on a shell. Will he stay? Will he go?

He lies quietly in the circle of my palms while we talk about what to do with him. I volunteer, somewhat greedily, to sleep with him and feed him in the night. I have have no Farmer’s wish to cut off my cuffs and blithely accept my fate or anyone else’s. I am a MOTHER—“armed” with the science of powdered milk, ready to do battle with Nature herself. While I babble, silently, he draws in no more of this world, gives out no more of himself. His last breath leaves him and he does not take another. All that remains of the little Hymn (him) is the Poem—the discarded Biology one can dissect for form and meter, stanza, structure, and sinew. But the actual Music is gone.

From across the room, my psychic friend knows he is gone before I do. She hushes me with a Look. A sacred silence passes between us—a brief moment of Grace, as Grief and Relief take each other by the hand and walk gently towards a night of unbroken sleep. Now, the deciding and discussing is complete. My friend gets up to go to bed.

“Shetlands are such hardy creatures. In all my sixty-five years as a shepherd, I’ve only had to pull a Shetland [get in and assist at a birth] once, maybe twice. Their mothers know how to do this. There was something wrong with these two. They were so small. The sacs were too tough. There was no milk. The delivery was way too long… I’m adding it all up and thinking these were premature, though only God knows why that is... None of the other ewes look ready to go tonight. It just figures… She’s my grand champion…” She shakes her head sadly.

I can tell she is deeply disheartened even as she bravely accepts her fate with the faith of a farmer. We had enjoyed our giddy power, playing God, crossing pedigrees, choosing couplings-- now we are drenched in humility and surrender. So eagerly, we spent the winter anticipating the surprise of New Life—its colors, its bright eyes, its stiff-kneed bounces of joy. It never occured to us that the miracle of Life is sometimes the miracle of Death.

I continue to hold my tiny baby, unwilling to set him down or return him to his Real Mother, the Earth. My heart talks to his, adrift in our room, and thanks him for coming. I look with wonder at his hooves the size of my thumb print, the “wooly brightness” of his glossy black coat, the tiny eyelashes. This “infinity in my palm” does not even weigh three pounds. It is a holy moment. “Where mercy love and pity dwell, there God is dwelling too…” Such is the fate of English majors that we are never able to cup dead lambs in our hands without thinking of Alexander Pope or William Blake.

Little lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

…Softest clothing wooly bright…

Little lamb God bless thee…

To see the world in a grain of sand

And Heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour…

It’s been thirty years since I stumbled down the stone stairs of gothic Gladfelter Hall, in the little farming town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, clutching some Hope and a large piece of paper that said I am supposed to know a thing or two about poetry. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you—one doesn’t know a damn thing about poetry until one is a farmer.

I continue to hold the deceased lamb like a warm, damp poem against my thighs. I think of lambs and wool and spinning wheels and knitting needles and sweaters—even sweaters with intolerable little pills on them. I see the whole “circle marked by Heaven.” I see my tiny, disheveled, ragged-sleeved place in The Dance. This death is neither a bad thing nor a good thing, neither a great thing nor a small thing. But it was Some Thing—this calm, bland, anonymous messiness that took place in a corner, in a barn, on a farm, in a state, in a country, in a world the size of a bubble. A quiet, quivering Something—a choice, an opportunity, a teachable moment for those of us seeking to know the farmer or poet, chorus girl or costume designer, Shepherd or Lamb… or any grain of sand.

Off we go, my Dear Ones, to crop our flowery food and dance and jump and split our pants. Who knows what tomorrow brings? For Now, the air is going in and out of our nostrils. As the farmer says, it’s up to us to choose. Shall we Live?

Let’s keep Mending just in case!!!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy