In Vermont, although it is only early August, we are way past the halfway point of summer. We have been experiencing heat and humidity that makes this the one time of the year that we run a fan in our bedroom at night. Despite the sweat on Paul’s brow and desperation in his eyes, I fight this because it causes me to wake up several times during the night mistaking the roar of the fan for the hiss of rain. It is the late summer subtleties that really tell the tale though; the angle of the sun has begun to change and as I head outside to hang clothes I notice that the slant of the light on our deck is different. My plants are beginning to have that tired look; still beautiful although they are fatigued by our heavy downpours one day and blistering sun the next. Their slight droop says “I give.”
Our garden begins to donate with several crops of peas that, when we don’t eat them all standing in the garden, we have for dinner with butter, a sprinkle of sea salt and mint. We have cut the massive Hollyhocks that were once the beautiful skyscrapers of the garden and have begun kneeling down to peek under leaves to find stringy green, purple and yellow beans hiding there. Bulbous sweet peppers next to long, thin, jalapenos and bananas. Raspberries are long tucked into the freezer although our dog Sam, loves to find stragglers to gently pick and eat. We wait, sometimes patiently sometimes not, for the bowling ball-size spaghetti squash to mature, while daily checking for Zukes, hoping to avoid them growing to the size of small babies, that we try to give away to unsuspecting friends and customers.
Here and there you see the leaves beginning to change on stressed maple trees. I annoy passengers in my car by pointing out colorful leaves each and every time I see one.
Our new chicks are no longer peeping but, like all teens, are experiencing the changes of puberty including their voices changing. I hear them begin to try out their new found clucks in conversation with the big girls who, being older and more popular, ignore them.
We wait for the call to hay. We know that one of these days in August we will receive a phone call from Hillard telling us, in quite simple VT farmer terms- “Come get your hay.” We’ll prop up the hay elevator, load up the trucks and head to the fields to come home loaded down with bales of sweet smelling hay. When we finished we will be sweaty, dirty and itchy from but the storage will be full and so will we. Like the squirrels gathering nuts, we will feel full of satisfaction that the winter feed for our sheep has been tucked into the spacious, dry hayloft.
We have wool headed for processing and beautiful checkered, queen-size wool blankets for sale. I stand and lift them, out of their box and admire their beauty, durability and warmth. As I hold them and look at the colors of my ewes, I think back over the process that it takes to come to this place. I try to count in my mind the number of times I take the sheep up and back to their summer paddocks. How many evenings find us changing paddocks for rotational grazing as the sun sets, using a flashlight to set the final fences as the light fades. Farming has given me a new appreciation for the work that it takes to bring food to people’s tables or wool blankets to their homes.
Holding the blanket or sleeping under the one blanket that I let us keep for ourselves makes me able to see the cycle of purposefulness in it all; the garden work ultimately bearing food, the managed pastures growing grass to feed our sheep who, in turn, both help us to grow the pasture and share their coats with us. Our dogs who help with the chores of our sheep and we who, as night falls, lay with proudly calloused hands, under the warmth of our own wool blanket waiting for the sun to rise and the seasons to change so that we can begin it all again.
Melissa Perley
We invite you to visit our farm, family and wool blankets on our new Etsy site listed under Too Fewe Farm.