Sylvia's Farm Read Online Free PDF Page A

ordinary, worlds that exist in imagination far more easily than in reality. He evokes the distinctive longing that accompanies spring, whether of gray or blue sky. We all have experienced it. My neighbor found a newborn lamb in my barn last night while I was at work. Tiny, wet, loud, born to a 14-month-old. She called for instructions. The mother wouldn’t nurse it. I told my neighbor what to do. I was so far away. I felt so helpless. Instinct tells me it has only a slim chance of making it. This morning’s report, heard while I was still at work, included snow. On the daffodils. The lamb’s struggle seems entwined with this spring’s, trying to get a toehold on life.
    This winter was not as brutally harsh as the one before, though certainly far more relentless. The sheep and I had begun to forget that grass would ever grow. I’m about to order a book once more from the library. It is called
Food in England
, by a historian named Dorothy Hartley. My daughter-in-law tracked it down for me once, but its price was too dear and I still haven’t bought it.
    The English cherish a tree we view as a weed, the thorn apple, and one of the things they value it for is the first new green tips of the leaves. They eat them, sometimes rolled up jellyroll fashion with thin slices of bacon in a kind of bread. Supposedly it is a tonic and is looked upon as a wonderful first green thing to eat after the brown and orange of winter-stored vegetables. A kind of restauratif, for lack of a better word, for the winter body, starved for green.
    My favorite and much-longed-for early spring food, besides asparagus, is dandelion leaves. Once available, I eat them every day at my noontime dinner, boiled potatoes, bacon cooked till crisp but not hard, taken from the pan then drained somewhat of fat, a clove of garlic, well crushed, two handfuls of washed, chopped dandelion leaves thrown in, wilted. A splash of cider vinegar, bacon returned to heat slightly, and all tossed with the hot boiled potatoes. Suddenly longings cease and all becomes right in the world. I love the morning chores in springtime, tending to the flock trimming feet, mucking out the barn, only to come into the kitchen, warm from the woodstove, potatoes boiling, dandelions washed, all ready to prepare and assemble that familiar salad of the French countryside. In a sense I’ve created the longing that anticipates spring within my own environment, and its satisfaction as well.
    My flock and I are ready, quite ready, for the dandelion greens.

SHEARING PAST, SHEARING PRESENT/OF COURSE, YOU SELL THE WOOL
    I T IS AN April day this May 17th, damp, raw, and rainy. The colors of the trees are pink and wine and claret and willow green and cream. The kitchen was a startling, but not unexpected, forty-six degrees when I came home early in the afternoon, after bringing my fleeces to the wool pool in Norwich.
    I’ve made coffee and started the fire and eaten some of the strawberries I bought on the way home. Today is a day off for me, of sorts. One of the three I’ve had this year. I’m reluctant to change into barn clothes; I’d like to hold on to the slightly altered perspective just a little longer.
    Today, the annual spring ritual was repeated. Sheep, relieved of their winter coats a couple of weeks ago, spring forth across the brook and up the hill to pasture. And all shepherds embark on what is for most a longish journey to the Collecta. Vans and trucks and pickups all join in the long, slow line to unload bags of fleeces onto a table to be sorted and tossed into great wheeled wooden trolleys, rolled and lifted onto a scale, tipped and dumped onto the floor, pitchforked into piles, and pushed into a press. Which is then hand-cranked to tightly fill the huge burlap bags. Gone are the days when they were packed by people jumping into them. Noticing the repeated glitches in the working of the press made me wonder once more about the true efficacy of some