It's going to be a good year for apples. the trees upstate were full of flowers a few weeks ago when spring started. spring which is now practically summer.
it's been a really chaotic spring/summer and I've barely hung on at moments, between the chaos of lambing and wedding season. At my worst I get resentful. When people ask me things and ask to come to the farm and ask for internships -- all things I want -- but there is not enough time. there's not enough energy. so i'm learning about urgency, and prioritizing.
Once someone said to me; "everyone wants to think they are a giver." I love that, I think it's so true. giving and taking. in my eternal quest for balance or some semblance of it I realize there is no such thing and that sometimes the scales tip one way, sometimes the other. I had a moment yesterday with sheep. i was eating a bunch of strawberries and walking up to the field. I found a little brown lamb, one of my favorites, and fed the ends of the berries to her. she seemed to like them so much. then I picked her up and held her for a while. she's one of the few small enough to hold. she sniffed around my face and put her mouth on my nose. her little mouth smelled like grass and strawberries. its was a moment where I felt immensely lucky.
what I need to do is write about vitamin b, tell you about her and remember what it was like to have this sick lamb and try to save her and then what it was like when she died.
to some extent I've avoided writing about it, not because it was so hard or maybe because it was.
we called her vitamin b because the first time i tried to give her an injection I put the needle right through and shot her fleece up with vitamins. the smell of the vitamins stayed on her for weeks and was still faintly there the morning she died. we have a few little black lambs and you could always tell vitamin b by picking her up and smelling her back. smelled like the softest biggest multivitamin.
i don't feel like writing about her yet, because i don't feel like crying and I can't really do this without getting upset.
but here's the thing - the most important thing in all of this that I realized yesterday that I want to share: you don't get to kiss a lamb that smells like strawberries without also having to witness one suffering and then die in your arms. that is just life. it's like a wave chart, up and down. the crests correspond to the troughs, they have to; its physics.
For me the challenge is to be equally present for both sides of that wave.
