Sylvia's Farm Read Online Free PDF Page B

importance. And once in a while a pair of customers, coming together, will gleefully say, “Smell the bread! Isn’t it wonderful?”
    No one was saying, “Isn’t this wonderful!” aloud today, but that feeling was in the air. A lot of us had experienced the comment, “Isn’t it wonderful! You must sell the wool,” from the many people who feel obliged to comment about our occupation, followed, inevitably by the words, “but I couldn’t bring myself to sell the lambs for meat.” And now here we all were. Shepherds. With our fleeces. All under one roof. Maybe that feeling of joy and hope in the county fair building was contributed to, in part, by all of those little sparks of joy we’d experienced in people’s eyes while saying, “Oh, you sell the wool.” For, indeed, yes, of course, we sell the wool.

THE FIRST DAY OF SUMMER
    I T IS FIFTY degrees this morning deep in the mountains on this the first day of summer. I slept with extra blankets, but they were not quite warm enough. The wind was blowing fiercely all through the night. I’d half awaken to the sound of it, convinced that it was raining. I’d fall back asleep to the sound of my own voice inside my dreams saying, “I knew it would rain today. No hay.”
    Hay is being cut today that is earmarked, in all probability, for me. Last winter I bought hay by the week, delivered, on occasion, to my front doorstep. The snow had made it impossible to drive a truck to the barn. The effects of all events here have a tendency to linger. My lawns are still scarred from the plow’s valiant attempt to move six-foot drifts, both blown and packed. And the effect of carrying those 150 bales each week on sleds up the hill to the barn has lingered as well. Acceptance has its grim side. Sometimes, the process I’ve developed in winter of shutting down my thoughts, or not protesting, “just doing it,” can be a little unwise.
    And so I sit in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee, wearing both a sweater and a jacket, looking out at the sky that is pristine and blue. A breeze blows through a screened-in window, lifting the edges of the white linen tablecloth.
    Samantha, my new dog, as contrasted with her mother, Steele, my old dog, both neither quite new nor quite old, is allowed, this morning, a rare time in the house. Steele stays with me, and Sam stays out. Don’t ask me why: I’ve forgotten the rationale. Samantha isthrilled to be in the house and rejoices, as only a six-month-old puppy can, leaping and barking and wiggling all around me. She went right to the stove to see if there were any crumbs left from yesterday’s baking. There were. And now there aren’t.
    I love her very differently from the way I love Steele. Steele was treated, before she came to me, with an odd mixture of severity and love. And it shows. She used to disobey her last master on occasion, and he’d throw his hat into the air, jump up and down, and shout at her. She would then make some very irritating and unfortunate maneuvers.
    It has just occurred to me, knowing as I do the intelligence of this fine animal, to wonder, was she attempting to train him? Of course! The rationale was, if you yell at me and never allow me to go into the house in the worst of winter and persist in feeding me generic dog food, I’ll sometimes run the sheep (he had four hundred) in the exact direction that you don’t want them to go. Until you learn not to yell, stomp your foot, and throw your hat. He didn’t. I was more easily trained. Steele came one April day to begin her new life with me. She never looked at the truck when her prior owner drove away.
    We went out in the meadow together that first day. I tested her, saying, “Home.” She went straight to my back porch and stood at the door. I opened it and in she went.
    When Jim, her original owner, came to tea one day several months later, Steele sat on