Sheep Dreams

and some run-on sentences about farm animals

Yesterday, there was an available sheep.

Let me back up. The day BEFORE yesterday there was a thunderstorm, which is relatively rare here in the PNW. We’re protected by mountain ranges to the west and the east, and so such storms are uncommon. Animals get a little uptight about them. How can you blame them?

Photo by Erik-Jan Leusink on Unsplash

So it rains, it thunders, lightning flashes (yes, I know that’s scientifically out of order), and the sheep (Cocoa Puff, we now know) escapes from his home and is found by the local police department wandering the streets alone. They post his picture online, and many great puns ensue.

But then my wife sends me the picture, and when I say, “let’s go volunteer to take him home!” she fires back, “NO!” I think we can all agree that’s a classic bait-and-switch maneuver.

I know…

• Farm animals need space (I’ve got space)

• Farm animals need time (I’ll sleep when I’m dead)

• Farm animals are noisy (but not that baaaaaaad…. You had to see that sheep joke a mile away)

• Farm animals eat a lot (have you seen my garden?)

• Farm animals need someone to watch them when we go on vacation (okay, you got me there)

But.

Sometimes I have dreams of fluffy wool. I imagine the soft muttering of duckbills in water. I yearn for the sight of how chickens are all born knowing to stretch the wing and leg on the same side of their body and still balance perfectly on the other foot. Straw smells like home. I’m perfectly content to divide up the kitchen compost into edible versus inedible categories. Cow muzzles are SO SOFT.

Photo by Rebecca Campbell on Unsplash

And along comes Cocoa Puff, just begging for someone to take him home. It’s too good to pass up.

This happens to me all the time. Kittens in boxes outside the grocery store, Craigslist posts about “too many chickens,” the odd (but somehow still occasional) sight of someone walking down the side of the road with a goat dressed in a sign that says, “adopt me.” I’m drawn to these things. They’re drawn to me (cosmically).

I took a class on raising urban goats. I took another one on growing mushrooms. I went to grad school for a master’s in sustainable agriculture, half my backyard is an immense garden, there’s a downstairs closet turned into a pantry for mason jars full of preserved goods that got harvested from that garden, I look at weeds along my driveway to determine if any of them are edible, and if I could get the neighborhood rabbits to poop in the right place along the garden fence, I’d use that as compost directly in my greenhouse.

I

Am

Obsessed with this shit.

You’re thinking this is a phase. No, it’s not a phase. It’s a compulsion that is relentless. And it’s not just about cute fluffy things (but don’t judge if it is). It’s about some deep, ambiguous need to connect to animals and vegetables and nut and fruit trees, to grow stuff, to eat stuff (because, duh), to put things in jars for the sake of reveling in the color ALONE of pickled beets, to listen to flat molars chewing grass for hours on end, to feel the velvety damp nudge of a nose through a wire fence. I don’t even have a milking shed and my brain could spend the next sixteen hours nonstop figuring out how to design one, build it, paint it, and have it all set up for a sweet little Oberhasli to enjoy while I figure out how to make chevre.

Lemme slow down.

Cocoa Puff has a family already. They came and picked him up, thanked the local PD, and the story is over.

But just for a day, I dreamed of that soft wool under my fingers.

Photo by Jurgen Dekker on Unsplash

Your trans (farmer) friend,

Robin

---