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of our labor-savingdevices. The long row of coarse bags holding the wool stacked against the wall looked amazingly similar to drawings I’ve seen in old books.
    We all watched the bags being emptied out onto the table. Arthur Hillis did most of the lifting and organizing with a spirit of willingness and cooperation, a very arduous job. We watched and talked some and watched again.
    A few years ago, before any idea of owning sheep ever entered my mind, I wrote a research paper about wool. Mediaeval English wool, to be exact. I had both a personal and professional interest in the subject. As I was bent on becoming a mediaeval historian and needed to learn how to research, it was a perfect fit. How perfect, I wasn’t to learn for some time. David Bernstein, my history professor at Sarah College, helped me design the research project as part of my conference work in his class.
    The Cistercians, in 1131, settled a barren area of Yorkshire laid waste and depopulated some decades earlier by William the Conqueror. The handful of monks brought with them sheep, primarily to shear to produce the wool needed to make the monks’ white habits.
    I embarked on the task of researching the history of these monks, with specific interest in learning about the development of their use of wool into an industry. Its subsequent renown and amazing impact on England continues today, where the current economy remains substantially buttressed by the sale of wool and clothing made thereof. Never dreaming that I should ever “farm it,” ever raise sheep or have fleeces of my own, I started a most delightful and somewhat dusty journey.
    The most fun was when I read about the old methods of training one’s “dogge,” how to shear the sheep, roll fleeces, wash and clean them, obtain lanolin, and skein yarn. Of the sheep, nothing was lost. Of course, this fit perfectly into a corner of my Yankee soul.
    Shearing and the handling of wool is not very different today from in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The principal difference seems to be in the shears. Few still clip with the hand shears used for centuries. The biggest change is that we waste more, use less, and work as much. We may even have fewer of the attendant pleasures.
    I had expected little from this year’s shearing. I was uncertain if the yield would be worth the trucking. Two fleeces were from five-month-old lambs, three were from ewes that had rubbed theirs nearly off, and I held back two from which to make pillows. But the letter from the wool pool was encouraging, and I packed the sixty or so that were left. I must be lifting too many fifty-pound bales of hay to judge how heavy twenty pounds is. The sacks of fleeces all seemed like ten pounds to me. So that yellow slip of paper given to me at the end of the Collecta held a surprise. At first I thought the number representing my earnings was the weight. There must be some mistake. But no. The sheep shall pay for their own shearing this year.
    It was a time to smile and strike up conversations with people never encountered before or perhaps seen only once or twice a year. A time to tell the truth or to lie, the truth too disheartening, sharing stories quietly and slowly. The stories all seemed to be infected with a kind of almost imperceptible joy.
    There remains a quality about newly shorn wool, however, that defies explanation. And this quality, a kind of very quiet, very basic satisfaction, has a kinship similar but not identical to the sights and smells and pleasures of the bread bakeries that exist in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side of New York and the seventeenth arrondissement in Paris. The customers have an air of subdued expectancy, culminating in an equally subdued but observable satisfaction. They glance at each other from the corner of their eyes, a trace of a smile around the edges; the selection between the breads from the trays and the wire bins assumes a monumentalseriousness and