MEET THE SHEPHERDS: The Before OR IF WE CAN, YOU CAN

Four years ago, if you had told me that I'd be sitting at a computer working on my first web pages ever, I'd have questioned your sanity.   Especially web pages about sheep.  What God has planned... This is where we were:

My husband, Tom, was suffering from a bad case of downsizing at his job - anyone who's experienced this will relate to the feelings of anger and fear and (sometimes) despair that attack a person's ego.  We are indeed a "throw away" society, but it doesn't build self-confidence to know that you're the "garbage" being pitched today.  More demoralizing was the company "fix-it" of "work three months, lay-off two, work three months, ...".  There is no closure, and no "movin' on".   Emotions run high, savings run out, and "where do we go from here?"   included (on really bad days) leave the farm to the Bank and move somewhere else.

I was  employed at a local cheese factory, but I knew my days were numbered.  I had suffered a serious injury to my right arm and shoulder which became chronic as I used it day after day.  It  became apparent to me that I would never heal unless I found a less repetitive job, but the question was, what?  At the time, I couldn't even open a jar of pickles or stir a batch of brownies.  Who wants to hire someone with those qualifications?  The worst part was my feeling of worthlessness/inadequacy - if you're an over-achiever, you'll know what I mean.   Nothing quite like negative emotions feeding on negative emotions:  Tom and I were quite a pair.

Add to the mix our middle son, Buddy, who was the Poster Child for "laid back".  It seemed that he was going to make a career out of Playstation 2 and Sleeping In - neither of which pays very well.  "What do you want to be when you grow up" never got a response; he had no idea what he wanted, and maybe had no intention of "growing up".    Since he rarely showed his face upstairs except at meal times, and never added to the family turmoil, we just resigned ourselves to having a large child living in our basement forever, sort of like a feral gerbil.

One of the reasons that we weren't concerned about Buddy is that we weren't concerned about much of anything any more.  Since we hadn't made up our minds whether or not to keep our property, we just stopped doing things around the place.  In hindsight, I'm not proud of this, but at the time it didn't make sense to put a lot of work into a place we weren't going to be at to enjoy.  We let the fences go, stopped chopping weeds, filled the barns up with junk, let our neighbor use our paddocks as a dead car graveyard, and withdrew into a useless state of misery.  It may be true that things can always be worse, but to live without Hope is as close to the bottom as you can get.

Meanwhile, out in California, our Silent Partner (Jean Hayden, my fabulous mother) was worrying about the state of the union (ours), and wondering when we were going to get it together.  After seven years on The Coast, she was looking for a way to be more involved with her Family, who all live in the Midwest.  She asked me if there was any reason why our acreage wasn't paying for itself - "Because we're all in a blue funk of depression," didn't seem like a good answer, so I told her I'd do some research online to see what types of small livestock might generate a decent return.  She said, "Let me know."  You know what happened next; at least you think you do.

This is the part you know:  I saw Icelandic sheep on the Internet.  I went to the ISBONA website.  I read enough about the breed to become interested, so we contacted a "local" breeder, and took a long Sunday drive to meet the creatures face-to-face.  Let me say that March in the Midwest isn't the best month to view Icelandics for the first time.  The scenery is gray and dreary, most barnyards are wet and muddy, and most flocks have been shorn for lambing, so you don't get the full effect of an animal "in the fleece".  In spite of all this, it was love at first sight.    The first thing that struck me was the size of the animals.  I thought, "Wow, I could handle one of those by myself if I had to!"  This should be a major deal to you ladies out there that may be the primary shepherd.  The second thing I thought was "Wow, look at all the colors !"  This was a major deal because it dawned on me that these sheep had a marketable product growing on their backs - I had never raised sheep for fleece before.  The third thing I thought was "Wow, those horns are AWESOME, just like a Dall sheep!  I could do some cool stuff with those horns!"   THEN I saw a day-old Icelandic lamb, and I knew I just had to have some of my own.

Contents

The After