Lambsquarters Read Online Free PDF

up the stairs and send the cats to the top of the mow in a flurry of fur motes. The rooster crows-in the dawn, optimistic testimony to the morning’s certain arrival, and summer pastures seem a distant wish, hiding under snow or muck or the pervasive grey of winter’s end.
    But May brings changes. Greening and preening, everything gears up to escape trapped winter spaces. Grass spears through the mud, legumes unfold, tree buds swell with juice and pulp until finally they burst, unfurl and test their fronds like new wings limp from the chrysalis. Early migrators land, hibernators wake, the tomcat misses meals. And young lambs, who’ve never even dreamed of grass, get their first taste. Like artichokes in balsamic vinegar, or asparagus in butter, the grass melts in their mouths, sparking virgin taste buds, calling perfect miniature hoofs to travel over this quarter farm to test out the endless salad on fence edge and borderline.
    Weeds near rail fences have the best odds for full-gloried growth. If the rails are closely stacked, lamb’s quarters can hide just out of the flock’s reach and sprout between the posts. Occasionally a sheep will find enough room between the rails for its nose, then space to put its head through. It will munch its way to the pillory, get trapped and rarely think to retrace its route along the rails. Stuck in the stocks, it will tug and pull, dig in hind hoofs, shine the rail smooth with a lanolin neck, and bleat pitifully. The only way out is the way in, back where the rails were further apart. A handful of fresh greens will lure the sheep to freedom. Led by lamb’s quarters to danger and back.
    The ram, penned all summer in a paddock of his own, bounds to the garden gate on weeding days, begging for the mallows and grasses and lamb’s quarters that I cull from the vegetable patch. With anchorous taproots, mallows are chained to the ground like Houdini. They break at the stem when I try to pull them out. Rarely do I turn the right combination and bring them up whole, but when I do, they’re a feast for the tup and a triumph for the tiller. Twitch, crab and quack grasses have underground runners that travel over continents without stopping. But lamb’s quarters, peppering the potato and pumpkin plants, are easy prey. Their roots are delicate and fibrous, and they jump out of the soil into my hands and into my ram. They leave friable earth in their wake; I can see where I’ve been.

TENACITY
    A MOTHER HEN FUSSING, a hawk roosting, a dog with a bone. We expect animals to stay on track, to focus, to concentrate on survival. Attention deficit disorder is disallowed. Darwin in the barnyard.
    My twin lambs are a combination of proton and electron, positive and negative. Named Alpha and Beta, called App and Ben for short. App is accepted, the lamb of her mother’s life; Ben is bunted, marginalized. I look at him and think of the
Messiah
. For him the sad role, de-spis-ed, re-ject-ed, a lamb of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
    Neither called nor answered, Ben wanders alone in a nursery of radiant mums and jubilant lamblings. If he approaches his mother’s teat he is abandoned. She walks away, looking for her first-born, the darling. Afraid he will starve, I prepare a bottle. I expect to find him hunched, hungry, cold. I expect he will have givenup, that he’ll be pining from the abuse.
    But Ben is tenacious. He is focused on eating, primed for surviving. If he is vigilant, he can approach his mother from behind to suck, but only when App is sucking from the front. I have never seen this configuration before. The attentive ewe, nuzzling the forward lamb, ignoring the backward. Can’t she feel the pressure on both teats? Does she really not know?
    For the milk to let down in a ewe, the lamb must bunt the udder. Not with a mere nudge, but with a vigorous punch from the pate. A large lamb will lift its mother right off her hind legs with the force. So Ben’s backward move is not subtle. First he