I do know that was not the best blog post earlier today. I was postponing the inevitable, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought there was no way to combine a post about my high-on-the-mountain-top experience at Squam with the painful experience on coming home. I'm going to just get it out now and then concentrate on giving you my experience at Squam in a day or two.
About two hours after we returned to the farm on Sunday night, my precious Olive died. I have cried more than I thought possible for an animal. It feels especially heavy because it is due to my negligence that she's gone. She had done a stellar job raising a set of twin lambs, so I can only assume that she was a heavy milker. She had gotten quite thin and I debated on pulling the lambs off before our trip, but decided it would only make things more complicated around here while we were gone. I opted to wait until we were back from New England. As we left the Cincinnati airport parking lot and headed toward home, I received a text from our farm sitter saying #1016 was acting very lethargic and not eating. At first, I didn't even realize that it was Olive because I never even look at her number. She had done what she could to make Olive comfortable, even calling another veterinarian for advice. When we got to the farm, we went straight to the barn and found Olive very weak, lying in front of the fan. I gave her a dose of a nutritional drench and tried to coax her to eat and drink, to no avail. And then, just like that, she was gone. I still can hardly believe it. I don't know if the heat from that day stressed her or if something else was going on. We decided not to take her to the diagnostic lab for necropsy, so we will never know. In any case, the end result is the same. She is gone.
As we always do, when we have a rare trip away from the farm together, Mike and I spend a lot of time talking about how complicated our lives are and if we should be trying harder to simplify things by not having so many animals, a smaller garden, a smaller farm, just less to take care of in general, etc., etc. Frankly, there are times when we both feel overwhelmed and it's nearly always in the springtime when everything is more labor intensive. We spend most weekends working away trying to keep everyone and everything healthy and feeling like we are just not doing enough. This sad event has caused us to begin that discussion again. Right now, I'm specifically feeling like a failure as a shepherd. It's very hard for me to lose an animal, though I think after all these years of raising sheep I can be fairly pragmatic about the cycle of life and death on the farm, but losing one that I've bottle raised and grown so attached to feels too painful. So, lots of soul searching going on here.
I promise the next post will be all about how wonderful Squam was and it will make you all want to start saving your money so you can go next year.