Lambing Season

This morning I was in the greenhouse, listening to a top 40 countdown country radio and drinking black coffee, working on moving some tomato seedlings into six-packs for a farmer up the road. The doors were closed against the chill gray morning, but I heard some commotion, faint at first, but growing louder. Sheep bleating. The dog barking.

Half the herd was out in the dirt road, milling about near the chicken coop. In the process of getting them back to pasture, we noticed that two more lambs had arrived in the night, both white, a boy and a girl. Babies have been dropping all week, in ones and twos almost every day, in shades of brown and black. This new pair looked impossibly wobbly and pale. One stood apart from the others, still smeared with dirt and sticky afterbirth, shivering pathetically and struggling to stay on its feet, while his sibling nursed by the mother’s side. When I picked him up he felt cool and limp, light and bony in my arms.

We herded all three of them into the greenhouse and put them in a small enclosure, where I took these pictures. Within a few hours, the weaker lamb had warmed up and figured out how to nurse, and looked a whole lot cleaner as well. I look forward to watching them grow.