It is the worst time of year on a farm. The waiting season. Waiting for the sun. Waiting for babies. Waiting for shearing. Waiting for green plants. Waiting. Waiting.
Spring is also dreaming season. Where to build new pens. How many lambs and kids each pregnant mom has. Dreaming of a perfect shearing, everything moving flawlessly. What will the fleece look like? Have we done enough to keep VM to a minimum? Do customers want these colors? Those dreams sometimes interfere with reality. Money for a new shearer. Money for feed. Family obligations.
So we gain practical experience in being patient. If experience is a teacher, I don’t know how much we’ve learned. If my math is correct, we will not have lambs until April. But it’s February, and I intently survey the pen every morning, every night. The sad fact is any lamb born at this point will be an abortion or too premature to survive. I know that. The logical side.
But waiting is an illogical, emotional experience, because what we are waiting for is an emotional experience. Life.
Life has made us wait before. Molly and I waited 5 years to be married. We survived long distance, college, student teaching, and moving in a horse trailer.
We waited 9 agonizing years for children. Waiting on test, doctors, approvals, loans. Then a message on an answering machine ended it all in a heartbeat.
An illogical, emotional experience. It is the joys of life after that phone call that make waiting so difficult now. I am impatient not because I want it to be over, but because I cannot wait for it all to begin.
Springsteen sings:” Sitting around waiting for my life to begin, while it’s all just slipping away”. Maybe that’s the lesson we need to learn. Waiting for lambs, focused on lambs, we miss the first signs of green. We worry about shearing, and a life slips away. When does life begin? What are we waiting for?
Life begins in so many ways. Lambing. Kidding. Sprouting. Deep breaths. Almost as many ways as it ends.