Lambsquarters Read Online Free PDF Page A

with age.
    The vegetable patch fought against the sugar maple in the back yard, a garden edged with raspberries, asparagus and rhubarb planted in the full afternoon shade of the biggest tree on the land.
    Lamb’s quarters sprouted among the raspberry canes, sheltered by the tangle of fallen leaves, went to seed late and proliferated. The canes trapped weeds in a leghold and produced more prickles than fruit. Finally I cut them down, dug up the rhubarb, moved the asparagus and started a new kitchen patch just south of the barn. In the spring the lamb’s quarters reappeared onthe grave of the berries. Smaller, less bold, pale against the yellow green of new grass. Their seeds hitched a ride on the east wind and moved closer to the maple, between its gnarled feet where the blade can’t go, around the doghouse in a palisade, against the fence.
    You’d expect lamb’s quarters to move in different circles, be a little exotic and frequent outdoor cafés. Cosmopolitan, erect, slender and lance-shaped, the mundane weed does a little goose step or a lamb gambol or a pigtail turn, holds its leaves at an angle, wears violet leafstick, and sports purple leaf-spots in spring. Like birthmarks on the newborn growing cycle, the spots harbinge the season and predict its mortality all at once. Liver spots of youth suggesting age. Irregular, deep hued or pale, these marks reflect the stalk lines, which feather the stem in subtle shading, mauve through purple to red. The lowly lamb’s quarters has a natural variegation, a May blush for the picking.
    THE LAND HERE was destined for sheep. And from sheep, lambs. Rolling, rocky, the fields and bog make perfect pasture, the cedar fencerows bountiful browse. When the grass thins and the sun wanes and the frost thickens on morning dew, the ewes gather around the ram pen, one or two or even three at a time, and make sheep eyes. The ram calls his throaty greeting, climbs front feet up the fence, schemes to get over, dreams like a ground-set lover with a mistress on a balcony. His hindlegs are strong from dancing under the apple trees—the early Macs, the late Russets and York Imperials. Unable to wait for windfalls, he harvests the trees himself, reaching up on his back legs in a comic dress rehearsal for the real legwork of breeding in November.
    His chance comes, the gates open and he pulls back his upper lip in a toothless grin, which serves, along with a chuckle and a sly ear nibble from behind, as his pickup line. He has little imagination or discrimination. The line is always the same. He is not subject to youth and beauty, coquetry and a down-turned lash. The ewes are all beautiful to him. He dances with them in turn, wanting each one to mother his babies.
    And five months later they do. The barn, housing mothers and babes in a giant nursery, fills with the sweet bleats of lambkins. Mothering-up pens range in perfect order against the walls. A woolly barracks. Lamb’s
quarters
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    When they leave the barn for pasture, the sheep find that gates and chutes lead to few choices for grazing, as this farm is not large. The standard hundred acres of the original tract was split early in the last century, and a quarter was severed off.
    Lambsquarters named itself.
    IN APRIL the renewing flock transforms the barn. Loose housing—big pens divided only by wooden gates—is rearranged every few days to accommodate thechanging configurations of new mothers and lambs.
    Sleep-deprived and short-tempered, I move slowly to that barn some mornings, stiff from kneeling over a difficult birth the night before, from bending under a ewe with a suckless lamb shivering from a midnight drop. I drag myself out of bed before dawn to check on my flock, help those in distress, feed the rest who are demanding their seasonal grain and molasses. The greedy ones brown their noses in the powdery sugar or choke on great mouthfuls of oats. The dog follows me to the Dutch door, hoping to slip into the barn where she will race