“The Music begins before you even hear a single note.” –Pete Clark

Greetings Dear Ones!

The sky canvas outside my shop windows is awash with deepening colors. The cycle of Endings and Beginnings happens swiftly these days. The pace quickens with the wind. “Yes, I can wait for you,” I tell a client who is running late at closing time, “but my animals are waiting for me, so if you are going to be more than a half hour, we will have to reschedule.” Breathlessly, she arrives twenty minutes later but it is already dark then. We do the fitting as quickly as we can. She needs to get home to feed her family and I do too—my animal family—the “fam-inals.” Together, we rush to the parking lot. I get to my car and realize to my chagrin that I have agreed to drop some pants for a customer on my way home, delaying me further. (“Um, perhaps you need to rephrase that,” says Prudence, ever the Editor-In-Charge.) This customer is one of my favorites but also one of the fussiest—literally bringing in a tape measure to check my work. It’s a good thing he has never inspected my car. He’d die! I hang his trousers, neatly hemmed and bagged, from the hook behind my seat. They hang, swaying slightly, directly above a foot well that is full of junk mail, damp hay, and a leather boot full of ram piss. It’s an inauspicious ending to another beginning, but there you go. Past Nancy has a lot to answer for!

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that into every vehicle must fall some poo. That is, if one is a farmer (or the current owner of a toddler). If one is very lucky, poo is all that will happen. Sheep turds are dry little pellets that sweep easily. Urine is a much bigger problem, as anyone who once drank five cups of tea and attempted to cross the George Washington Bridge during Rush Hour (which, with total hypocrisy, translates to Stand-utterly-still-for-three-hours) with only an empty yoghurt container for company can tell you.

It’s tupping season for the sheep. That means borrowing a tup, or ram, from a friend and bringing him home in one’s Ford Explorer. For the uninitiated, it goes something like this:

1. Make ready the back of your vehicle. You are going to need a tarp, some hay, and some towels. Start by emptying some of the crap you carry around that needs to be “Sorted Out One Day.” Put the tools in the tool shed, put the empty lunch containers in the sink, and put six inches of junk mail into the woodstove, or better yet, just leave it on the floor for now, along with your favorite pair of leather boots.

2. Put the back seats down. Realize that there is a gap between the back of your seat (the driver’s seat) and the top of the back seat because you are so short, you have to have the driver’s seat pulled forward as much as possible. Decide to fill in that gap with several layers of heavy-duty cardboard. Then put down the tarp, the towels (to absorb urine) and the hay. Hay itself is not very absorbent. Not having old towels between the tarp and the hay means the tarp is more likely to direct all the urine into the nearest cupholder, or worse, on to the carpet, making the car smell of sheep for the next ten years.

3. Drive to friend’s farm in a clean (ish) sweet-smelling vehicle redolent of summer hay and Hope.

4. Install yearling ram in vehicle. Tie his halter to the back of your driver’s seat so that he is not free to run around the vehicle, or worse, join you in the front seat and decide to drive. (He’s too young to get a license.) Make sure child safety locks are on the windows. You DON’T want a repeat of that time you loaded six animals into the car and one stepped on the automatic window button, let his window down, and jumped out while you were driving down the road.

5. Play some romantic music for the new guy, to get him in the mood—some robust Shetland Fiddle tunes perhaps, since he is a Shetland ram.

6. Drive approximately ten miles with your new companion, unaware that he is steadfastly rearranging the cardboard so that he can slip his body down behind your seat and hang himself from your headrest.

7. Pull over and loosen the rope so that his neck angle is less extreme. Ensure he can breathe. Decide to leave him wedged between the seats because he is calm and relatively happy there and his horns are wedged in such a way that he cannot possibly get into more trouble. Forget your favorite boots are beneath him. Drive another 30 miles.

8. Suspect him of drinking too much tea before he left his former residence. The windows are fogging up and you want to gag. Your good boots have become his yoghurt container.

9. Arrive home, unload, introduce him to his new harem.

10. *THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP* (We cannot stress this enough) CLEAN THE CAR!!! Clean every bit of it. Pull out the tarp. Recycle the cardboard. Compost the hay. Don’t just look at your boots and their contents and scream. Don’t think “I don’t have time for this; it’s dark and I need to make sure the pen for the ram is secure first…” then just wander off and have supper. Finish What You Start!! (We BEG of you!)

Ok. So we all know I did not do step ten. Go ahead. Judge me. No one regrets it more than I. “You know you can never sell this car now, right? You’ll have to drive it off a cliff and let it burn in a fiery crash,” a concerned citizen informs me. “It’s the only way to get rid of the smell.”

Instead, I got involved in the charm of watching the animals greet each other through the fence. The little ram is a sweet and super friendly little guy. He spent the summer as a pet at a girls’ camp in New Hampshire. As a yearling, he’s never been used for breeding and (so far) has only the purest of intentions for his new friends. He is shy, vulnerable, curious—like an innocent middle-schooler hanging out with Fast Girls from the Tough High School who think he’s kinda cute and want to offer him purloined gin and cigarettes.

The weather has been so unseasonably warm that the ewes have not been coming into heat yet. Sheep libido is stimulated by the seasonal drop in temperature (Christmas carols and Hallmark movies are strictly optional). The plan is to have this guy in a little pen adjacent to theirs, where they can touch noses through the fence but nothing else (like the courtship “bundling” ritual in colonial America) for about seventeen days. It’s also known as “teasing,” (for obvious reason). The theory is that all the females will synchronize their cycles and then conceive within 48 hours of each other when we set the tup free. With any luck, this compacts the lambing season—with all the lambs arriving close together and not dropping randomly for seventeen days (the length of the ovine oestrus cycle) next Spring, (during Prom Season!), which is chaotic enough.

Meanwhile, the darkness comes sooner and more fiercely each evening. The steers have lobbied to have suppertime moved to 4:pm. The dog is in agreement. So am I, actually. It is a time of hunkering and munching and turning our collars to the wind. The contented animals have no holly-daze looming, no shopping lists, no resolutions to fulfill before the stroke of midnight December 31st. They dwell in doorways and Moments, as ever, beginning new beginnings they don’t even realize are beginning.

There is so much wisdom in their innocence and almost none in my scheming. We know damn well that Prom Season and Lambing season are going to bring their share of stories, opportunities, and regrets, no matter what I try to encourage or avoid. (Glitter!!!) Life is going to happen. And it will be Joyous, Tragic, and Messy. So Be It. It’s worth the work of beginning.

Beginnings take a lot of preparation before they can begin. Before Advent, the season of Waiting, can begin, the preparations for the preparations must be done. I need to close out the old projects, clear the decks, and prepare for the next things I will create. I’m not ready, but I’m getting ready to be ready. Perhaps one of these days, I’ll even throw out my dear boots and clean that car.

Keep beginning, Dear Ones!

I love you Sew Much!

Yours aye,

Nancy