Easter on the Farm 2008

Did you eat lamb at Easter? We didn’t. We finished up what was left in the freezer before Christmas, I think. We never have any new lambs big enough to eat by Easter – and our lambs are especially small this year as the holiday was so early. In order to have lambs ready for the dinner plate by Easter, we would have to convince our rams to end their summer vacations early and set to work about mid-August. And it’s pretty difficult to convince lambs to do anything in the heat – even that.
We heard that someone down the road managed to convince their rams to work in August, however. I wonder what their secret is. Perhaps they provide an air-conditioned space for the conjugal visits.
Most of our lambs are sold through the sale barn to Muslims planning their menus for Eid al Fitr - the grand feast at the end of their Ramadan month of fasting – or Aid al-Adha, the Islamic festival that falls in November - December.
Speaking of feasts, we had a grand one ourselves this year. We justify the excess by blessing the hands that made it (my husband is a skilled and imaginative cook – thank the Lord, because I am NOT), and making sure that none of it goes to waste. We have a “starving college student”, several extended family members and one or two hard-working farm dogs who are always happy to take leftovers.
I am not a true farmwife in the traditional sense. I can cook, and I do cook, but I don’t enjoy cooking. I have no patience for reading recipes, measuring ingredients, and standing over the stove, stirring a pot. I like dishes that take five minutes to throw together, and cook themselves. My slow cooker is my favourite piece of kitchen equipment. I can’t even wait for a cheese sandwich to grill before I’m wandering off to look out a window or check my emails. The sound of the smoke alarm means “Dinner’s Ready!” when I’m cooking.
Therefore, if there are any pies cooling on my windowsill, they came from a box. Or my husband baked them.
I wish I could cook. I certainly like to eat. But, truth be told, if I liked to cook, it might lead to disharmony in the Fisher household. If I wanted access to the oven, I would have to venture over to the inside of the kitchen island. And everyone knows that is Farmer Fisher’s space. I wander over there every once in a while to see (taste) what he’s cooking, but I don’t wear out my welcome. I know a good situation when I see it. He likes to cook and I like to eat. It’s all good.
We do eat lamb from time to time, along with our own chickens, ducks and turkeys, when we have them. Before meeting my husband, the only lamb I had had was at a Greek restaurant or in Australia. I find that many people don’t really know how to cook lamb, so they steer clear of it. Lamb also seems to be an acquired taste, and some find it a bit strong.
Thankfully, we don’t have to process our own lambs, so other than seeing them off to the sale barn, where they are auctioned, I don’t have to make the connection between the cuddly wee things springing around the barn and the lambchop on my plate.
Of course, I haven’t had lamb for a few months now, so I can’t say I will feel the same way about it the next time it’s on the menu.
For now, the only lambs I want to see are the ones that come at me four at a time when I climb into their pens with baby bottles for the evening feed. They nibble on my hair (perhaps they are trying to tell me something – it’s becoming rather straw-like?), climb on my back and suckle on my fingers, competing for the milk in the bottle. I have already named one Buddy (a mistake, for sure, the Farmer says…) and distinguish between the rest of them by their black or pink noses and black or white feet.
Many of them recognize me and welcome my presence. I wonder if they will remember me when they are released to the barnyard. Will they still come to my call? We can keep the females for years – some of ours are ten years old. The males will be sold at auction, however, so I am trying not to get too attached to them. Unfortunately, they seem to be the friendlier of the sexes.
I wish Buddy wasn’t so darned cute.

Seasonal Miracle on the Farm - Feb 08

If you have greeted me on the street these past two weeks and I have stared right through you, I apologize. I’m in a state of suspended shock. I am still able to conduct business, drive a car, write a story…but my mind is a bit preoccupied. All I can think about is sheep.
I knew it would be a physically exhausting experience, but I didn’t realize how emotional it would be. The ewes mill about, enjoying their time in their steamy resort where the food and water is brought to them and they are treated to a handful of sweet corn twice a day. Then, suddenly, one of them will either lie down in the middle of the pen or put herself in a quiet corner, and her water will break. I usually come along when the lambs are already lying in the hay, being washed by their mother. In most cases, they were born in the last few hours before dawn and by the time I am introduced to them, they are already dry, fluffy and well-fed, ready for their close-up.
In some cases, however, the ewe behaves as though she isn’t willing to admit to the birth. “Who? Me? I have no idea where that came from. I didn’t do it.” These are probably the same idiot sheep that, during the mating season, kept right on eating while the ram went about his business. I imagine one of these sheep turned her head to her neighbour: “Martha, did you feel something? My goodness the mosquitoes are big on this farm.” These particular sheep are in complete denial of the whole process. They are probably the ones who will one day announce with glee that they are “going on vacation to the land of sweet corn and molasses!” when being loaded on the truck, headed for the sale barn.
Most of our sheep have very strong maternal instincts, thankfully. One proud mother of triplets watches my every move as I fill her water bucket and move about the barn, bringing hay. If I get too close to her lambs, she stares me in the eye and stamps a warning with her hoof. I tell her that she is “such a good mama”, and that her babies are beautiful.
The season started on a Sunday morning and continued with about two ewes a day, each one birthing an average of two lambs. I usually go straight to the barn after work, and one day Annie and I arrived to find a ewe calmly eating hay, with just the head of her lamb protruding. I panicked. “Ah! He isn’t breathing! His eyes are closed. I think he’s dead.”
Annie took a closer look: “He isn’t dead, Mom. He’s just stuck. You’re going to have to get in there.” IN there? In where? I left Annie sitting in the hay, talking to the ewe and I ran back toward the house, where my husband was just changing out of his university professor clothes and morphing into Farmer Fisher.
“Where are you going?” he asked, meeting me on his way out to the barn. “I think I have the wrong gloves on for this job,” I muttered. “There’s a lamb with only his head sticking out.” I must have looked wild with shock. Hair full of hay, flying about my head like the coiffure of a crazy woman. He put a calming hand on my shoulder and turned me around to face the barn. “Come on. Let’s go.”
My husband is amazing. He delivered the lamb by gently pushing the head back in and finding the feet. While looking around in there for the hooves, he found another lamb. “Oh. He’s got a brother.” Oh brother. I watched as the farmer gently maneuvered the lambs into position for birthing. The whole time, I couldn’t help thinking that his sleeves were getting awfully dirty and that I would have to wash that shirt the moment it came off him. Like I said. State of shock.
The ewe was haltered to the post for the event, and I put my arms around her neck. She leaned into me and made an almost human “hmmmm” as her offspring slid out one after the other and were placed on the dry bed of hay. We untied her and she quickly set to work, licking her babies dry and nickering a greeting to them. The one whose head was stuck has a slightly swollen noggin now, and we have named him Mr. Bighead as a result.
It isn’t the difficult births that distress me the most: it’s the ewes that are lacking in milk and/or any semblance of maternal instinct. There’s nothing worse than seeing an otherwise healthy little lamb failing because his mother has a hardened udder or hasn’t developed much of one at all. The farmer has milked a healthy wet ewe on her birthing day and fed the valuable colostrum to the “orphaned” lambs with a dropper. After getting that liquid gold, the weak lamb gets a burst of energy that is an amazing thing to witness. But that is just the beginning. These little fellows have to learn to steal from the other ewes in the pen in order to survive, and they run the risk of being butted aside once their identity is revealed with a sniff from the host ewe.
We have milk replacer and baby bottles for supplementary feedings, but these little guys need to feed often or they won’t make it through our cold winter nights. I hope these unlucky ones make it through the next six weeks, when they will finally be weaned and let out to graze on the new spring grass.

Rambi and the Ladies

Our one-year-old ram was placed in a holding pen for his own safety a couple of weeks ago, because he had been found in a rather violent tête-à-tête with the senior ram. I asked Farmer Fisher how long “Rambi” had to stay in purgatory.
“You can let him out if you like. We’ll see if he has cooled off at all.”
In the time that it took us to feed the ewes and walk out of the barn, Jr. and Sr. Ram found each other and took up the fight again. Farmer Fisher divided the battling sheep with a long cane, then grabbed Rambi by his curly horns and dragged him off to the barn again. The older, larger and wearier “Rambo” gave his head a shake, announcing his triumph with the ringing of his halter bell. I wondered what might have happened were we not there to break it up. Rams will continue to fight, in their deadly head-on collisions, until one of them bows out or is unable to continue.
I didn’t see how locking Rambi up was teaching him anything, and the farmer agreed. Apparently that was only stage one of the plan. The next day, Rambo was led into the 4” x 6” pen with Rambi.
In that limited space, the two prisoners didn’t have room to ram each other. They held staring contests, danced each other around and around in a holding pattern, or pinned each other up against the wall. But they didn’t smash their skulls together.
“There,” said the farmer. “Now you have to work it out together and learn to get along.”
The two rams had been sharing barnyard space for over ten months with no incident. Why they decided they needed to battle for territory now was a mystery. Perhaps the young one was just coming of age and beginning to feel his oats. Or his corn.
Whatever the reason, he felt compelled to challenge the senior ram-in-residence at every opportunity.
Once locked together in the pen, however, Rambo’s girth gave him the advantage. He would corner Rambi and body-check him against the boards, holding him for up to a minute until he baa’d “uncle”.
After a few more days in their shared cell, Rambi seemed to have gained some respect for his superior. Which was a good thing, because the ewes were beginning to show signs that they were nearing the end of the gestation period, and we needed the pen.
We spent most of last Saturday preparing our eight smaller and two larger lambing pens for the impending birthing season. My daughter’s boyfriend Pat volunteered to help us for the day. My job was to clear the heavy lace of cobwebs from the ceiling. It’s amazing what barn spiders can create in the off-season, with no one around to bother them. The dust from the corn-sprayer had settled on some of the larger webs, creating these incredible works of art that looked like huge icy snowflakes. I swept them all down from the beams with a broom, and filling the air with dust.
By the time the men and the sheepdog had corralled all of the lumpy ladies into the barn, my eyes were puffy, red and itchy, and I had mascara running down my face. I went back to the house and found a face mask leftover from the SARS era in Taiwan. That did the trick, and I was back in business.
The sheep were gathered at the end of the lambing room, and the farmer flipped them onto their bottoms one by one so that he could assess their udder development. Then he would tip them back up onto their feet, and call out “big pen”, “small pen”, or “let ‘er go”. Pat and I would try to steer the sheep into the correct pen as it ran at us, which was tricky because a sheep never wants to go toward a person. You sort of have to eliminate all of their other options in order to get them to go the way you want.
As the sheep were released and directed toward their pens, they each gave out a strange garble that could only be translated as obscenity directed at the farmer and his helpers. We decided not to take it personally.
Once the ewes were all safely sorted and penned, we had to fill their buckets from the hose and pitch hay into all of the feeders. While we were busy doing that, one of the sheep demonstrated that if she stood on her hind legs, braced herself on the edge of the pen railing with her front legs and stretched her neck out, she could just reach the edge of the corn bin with the tip of her tongue. It’s a good thing we saw that before we left the barn, or she would have bloated up like a puffer fish from too much grain. The farmer made a barrier to keep the sheep out of the corn, and we took one last look around the now steamy lambing room. Forty-five pairs of sheep eyes looked back at us, expectantly. Once in the pens, sheep that would normally bolt away at your approach will actually put their noses right up to your face, to nervously smell your breath. It’s as if they know they will need our help in days to come, and they have decided to trust us.
The farmer and his two rookie helpers trudged back to the house along paths that Annie had mercifully cleared for us with the snow blower. We ate a bit of lasagne, drank a glass of wine to toast the ewes, and crashed on the couch. We were in bed by nine, wiped out from our busy day. I can’t believe the farmer used to do all of this by himself.
I sincerely hope that the weather for the rest of February and the beginning of March is kind to us. The lambs can come any time now. We’re ready for them.

In Memory of Larry

Well, we knew this day was coming but we didn’t know it was coming so soon. Over the last five months, we have spent as much time with Dad as possible, making sure that he knew how much we loved him, saying all that needed to be said, and hugging him (and each other) as much as possible. We are grateful that we were given time to say our goodbyes. Dad enjoyed his time laughing over memories with old friends who were able to visit. And he cherished the time spent with his children, and grandchildren.Dad didn’t fear death. Even at the end, he was such a tough guy. Such a fighter. But he also tried to make us laugh, through our tears. He was a softie at heart.Everyone who has sent such caring, loving messages, everyone who came to visit Larry one last time, and everyone who was able to come today has their own special memories of times shared with our father. But we would like to share some of ours with you today, so that you will have greater insight into the man who was our hero.Diana: Dad originally wanted to go into medicine. But he was concerned that he would have to deal with patients. So he became a science teacher instead. Dad loved teaching. And he was good at it. If you stayed in his class, you learned something. He would pace the floor, writing and drawing diagrams on the board without ever looking at a textbook. He made science interesting, and inspired many of his students to go into teaching. We were his students too. More than once in Dad’s class, I cracked under the weight of all that silence, and broke into a giggle fit. When I did, I would hear, “Leeson! Get OUT!” When we got home, he was just Dad.Cath: Even though dad was a well respected teacher, at home he was a different person. There were many times when I had a class with him and I thought how can people be scared of this guy, if only they knew him at home. I remember once, in my teenage years, my home work was interrupted by a knock on my door. I opened it to find dad dressed in nothing but a carpenter’s belt, a red bandana and a silly grin. He matched the Chippendale of the month on my calendar on the wall. That was the dad I knew…sillyDiana: Dad was punctual. He didn’t mind being early, either. If he had to wait in line somewhere, he’d pass the time watching people. If we were planning to go somewhere, Mom would ask him what time he wanted to leave. If he said 7 o’clock, he’d be out in the car, revving the engine and honking the horn at 6:45. Cath: Dad was a neat freak. To this day I can’t leave the house without my bed made and my room tidy. He loved when the carpet was freshly vacuumed and hated to see footprints in the carpet. You had to wear slippers in the house…year round. And there were rooms you just weren’t allowed in….they were for guests only. We had a beautiful bay window on our house on Johnston Road, and I used to like to curl up with a book in chair in the sunshine. I remember being ushered out of the room many a time by dad and then hearing the vacuum going as he got rid of my footprints in the carpet.Diana: Dad was a giver. He loved surprises, and he loved to shop for the perfect Christmas gift for us. Those walkie-talkies were the best gift ever. If we needed something, he’d find a way to get it to us, whether it was a bit of extra cash, or a car to drive (he bought me the car I’m driving now right after I rolled his truck! Now that’s love). Cath: Dad was a goof. He loved to play practical jokes on us. Eventually we caught on to “does this smell funny to you?”…many a time we ended up with something on the end of our noses. And he used to love to surprise us …one minute we’d be watching TV, the next he’d pounce on us, pin us to the floor and lick our faces….he’d delight in our squeals of disgust of having cigarette breath washed over our faces. Diana: Dad loved the great outdoors, in any season. We spent many great summer vacations at Bon Echo Provincial Park. Dad would want to make the most of the day, so he would pull Cathy and I out of bed at about 4 am and put us in the back of the station wagon. We pretended we were asleep the whole time, because we liked being carried by him. He sure knew how to spend quality family time and make some great memories. Dad would spend hours giving us and our friends waterskiing lessons. Never once did he complain about the cost of fuel. Cath: Dad loved animals. We have so many memories of dad lying on the floor nose to nose with a dog. If you had a dog…he knew its name….he might not remember your name, or your kid’s name…but he knew your dog’s name. He believed that if you were going to have an animal you’d better be ready to have it for its lifetime, not just for as long as it was convenient for you. Diana. Dad was my rescuer. I ended up at a party at the flats near Merrickville one night, and it got a little out of hand. The next thing I knew, kids were running around whispering: “Leeson and Murphy are here!” Dad’s policy was to rescue first, ask questions later. I appreciated that attitude many times in my life. Cath: Dad was never one for talking on the phone. When you called home and you got that deep gravelly “Hello”…you knew mom was no where around. He wanted to know what was going on in your life, but was happy to hear all the details from mom. Lots of times I would come home for a visit and by the phone there would be note paper with my mom’s short hand with all these little scribbles interspersed with a name or a word …and those would be her notes of our phone conversation so that she could tell dad all about what was going on in our lives. Sometimes I would call and make dad stay on the phone and listen to me babble on about one thing or another….a little bit of torture for him…and then later on in the evening when mom got home…I’d get the call back from her….dad’s retelling of our conversation must have been lacking in detail.Diana: Dad wasn’t always the easiest man to live with, as you might imagine. He had a short temper, especially if things weren’t working the way they should. He’d get madder than Hell at inanimate objects. I remember him installing a screen door on the back of the house on Johnston Road. One minute he was attaching the handle, the next minute he was bashing the handle to smithereens with his hammer. We spent the next 6 years opening the door by putting our fingers through the handle hole.Cath: Dad had “two footitis”. Sunday afternoon drives are dangerous for someone with this affliction…inevitably I’d get a call from mom saying that they went for a drive to just look at boats and ended up buying something…just a couple of feet bigger than the last one. If there was any time that a snowmobile needed servicing, and dad was in a shop for more than an hour…he often ended up with a new snowmobile too.Diana: Dad had a saying for every occasion. Most of them crude. But all of them funny. And he used to delight in teaching his grandchildren his rude little rhymes when their Mother wasn’t around. I suppose we’ll let them say them now, in his memory. Dad taught two generations of students at North Grenville in his 32-year tenure, and most of them will remember that to him, “arsehole” was a term of endearment. If Dad ever stuffed your mouth with paper towel, put chalk up your nose or hung you on a coat hook, I apologize on his behalf. He just wanted your attention. Cath: Dad had it pretty rough, raising two daughters and then having 3 granddaughters. When Riley came along he was happy to have someone to instill his love of hockey. He enjoyed talking hockey to my 7 year old and was always delighted when Riley was knowledgeable and passionate about a player. Diana: Dad wanted to walk me down the aisle. I’m so grateful that he was well enough to do that, last August, after recovering from surgery. I’m glad that he got to know my new husband and stepchildren, and that he approved of our decision to get married. In fact, just four months after Jim and I started dating in 2006, Dad jokingly asked when Jim was going to “take Diana off his hands”. Cath: One of our favourite things was to watch Mom and Dad dance. They started dancing together when she was 14 and he was 17. They would go to The Lighthouse, a dancing club on River Road near Osgoode, sometimes three times a week. After forty-plus years with the same partner, you get pretty good. We tried to dance with Dad a few times, but only Mom knew how to follow his lead. Diana: In recent months, Dad has been napping on the couch. During those naps, he would dream he was in the sleeper cab of an 18-wheeler. Trucking was his other love. He drove trucks for the Kemptville Truck Centre during school holidays, and after his retirement. He hoped to drive long-haul some day. Mom wasn’t crazy about that idea, so he dropped it, but we think he would have missed us too much anyway…We laid Dad to rest in his favourite Ottawa Senators T-shirt, his boat shoes and cargo pants, and his Truck Centre jacket. He’ll be well dressed if he wants to go on the long haul now. Cath: Many couples worry about empty nest syndrome after their kids grow up and move out. Mom and Dad were never in the nest long enough to worry about it. They planned long trips with friends on their boat or snowmobile, and they were rarely apart. They set a good example for the rest of us, on how to be best friends and keep love alive.Diana: We all have our own memories of Larry Leeson. Some will make us cry, but most will make us laugh. And that is what Dad would want most of all. Laughter. I thank God for letting us have him as long as we did. We love you, Dad. Always.