text: dogs | spinningshepherd
  July 30, 2015 · 8:13 pm
  Almost Heaven, Wickford, RI…
  Two and one-half months in Wickford, RI! Finally this 90 yr. old house with a rather grown-up yard, is becoming an orderly place.
  I'm just inside after two hours of digging to plant only two perennials! Purgatory Road is nearby, as is a village called "Hardscrapple." These names now have great significance to me. In this two hours I collected over a gallon of rocks, and another gallon of sod, some of which is now in the bottom of the garden. I have a bright spot of golden black-eyed Susans (never could get those to grow in NC) and scarlet bee balm. I've selected perennials to entice my neighbors' bees over here to fertilize my cucumbers, tomatoes, sugar peas and peppers.
  The temperature here today was 84, and in NC, a steamy 91. Locals here think this weather is intolerably humid, but not to a new transplant from two days' drive south of here. We haven't needed A/C. Fans do the trick, plus strategically opening windows in the eve., keeping all fans going. It's wonderful, waking to a cool house. When the temperature is the same in and out, I close the windows, and this old house stays cool. I hope it will do equally well come winter.
  Dirk walks the dogs while I trim, cultivate, water, and plan what trees to delete, or how many branches that grow over the garage or shade the gardens. A magnificent maple tree reigns over the east side of the lawn. Turkeys (four large, seven small) graze bugs from the back yard and I gather long fluffy, striped feathers in the morning. Maeve, the Aussie, plops down on the deck, leaning over he top step, just watching them. Emily, the Great Pyrenees and guardian, eventually allows her curiosity to get the best of her, and creeps across the lawn, quiet and hesitant, to see what these odd intruders are. Ma Turkey fluffs and fans her tail, doubling her size, and Emily stops, uncertain. The turkeys vaporize into the woods. She then tentatively examines their trail, walking where they walked, sniffing. Then, satisfied they pose no threat, pops up her head and trots back up to the deck as if to tell Maeve and me, "See, maybe I have no sheep to protect, but I can still protect you!"
  She's less certain about the scrappy sea gulls that hang out in the evening at Duffy's Grille, near-by. They have to check out our yard for food, of course. The dogs prefer to duck, rather than fight. Emily once chased a gull that had grabbed her bone, but when the gull fought back, Emily thought better of it and backed off, her bone sailing into the trees. I wonder what the gull did with it—drop it on a breakwater?
  My pot garden is giving us vegetables, and next year will be in the ground, instead. All the kitchen compost goes into the gardens, and we're now finding the occasional earthworm. I do miss the sheep manure—a much faster way to enrich a garden.
  Through our church, I found two teens who want to work for a little extra money helping us around the yard. They have been a great help, and I now have two small gardens, one with perennials, and one with plants I brought from NC. I have three kinds of tea, a "beauty bush," and a holly there, and will add more in time. The tea I planted here last fall is still there, but not doing well, since it's in the shade. Soon I'll move it, but I still have things in pots to plant first. One of the teens took the hedge trimmer to the front privet hedge, and it looks much better. When the trimmer hit the extension cord, it shorted out the circuit, and ended their two hours of work here in any case. Dirk worked on it today, too, so now it's nearly done. "More to go," as always. I guess if we were going to name our new house, it would be something like that. There's no end to poison ivy, although there's much less, "weed-maples" that have shot up everywhere and are smothering themselves, and other interesting weeds that are obviously invasive, whatever they are, among them bittersweet, which is pulling down a tree in the back yard. It responds well to pruning, plus Round-Up on the cut stump, as I learned in a NC Forestry workshop.
  The RI Spinners' Guild went to Foster, RI,'s Old Home Week, and I had the privilege of sitting down with Earl Hopkins and hearing family stories about my Jordan and Boswell cousins, while his granddaughter (part-owner of Shady Acres Restaurant, where my father ate for many years) served up strawberry shortcake for the benefit of the Baptist Church. That was such a treat! Finally I'm back in home country. Dirk and I wandered the Town Green, checked out the 4-H sheep of many different breeds, the many food stands from a variety of local churches, grange, Masons, and others. It was a fine two days! Oh, and we ate clam cakes and "chow-dah!"
  Dirk is playing French Horn in both the LaFayette Community Band in Wickford, and in the South County Band in Wakefield. As a result, we have two concerts a week to attend, sitting by the water in both places, and I visit with friends whose spouses are also in band. I've been bringing Emily, the Pyr's, brushed fur and a drop spindle from a lapis bead along, and have now one large ball of washed, plied yarn completed, and am working on the next. The concert season ends in a couple weeks, so I'd better keep spinning, since her fur production is ahead of my ability to spin it all so far! She's getting combed regularly, as is Maeve, so even though we need to vacuum daily, most of it is captured in bags awaiting spinning. There are also Tues. eve. concerts on the Wickford Town Wharf, which are eclectic—I much prefer Dirk's bands! But the spinning comes along in any case. It's delightful to be comfortable sitting outside at a concert in the early evening. A NC friend said it sounds like Heaven—and, you know, it's close!
  Filed under Birds, climate, community, dogs, Family, Friendship, gardening
  Tagged as birds, climate, community, dogs, family, friendship, garden
  June 30, 2014 · 5:25 pm
  Suzie, our first lamb and 17 yr. old sheep, is gone
  Our last two sheep, Suzie aged 17, born here; Vanity a Shetland "loaner" here for past 1 1/2 yr.
  Vanity's new home, on a farm with llamas and Shetland sheep
  Vanity's not baaing with anxiety yet, but she's looking around for Suzie. Our first lamb, Suzie, born on our farm 17 years ago, is gone, leaving us without sheep. We called the vet early this morning. Suzie had been struggling for hours to get up and had rubbed the wool off her leg joints, the barn floor scraped clear of hay, and she still couldn't stand. When I helped her get her feet under her, she'd fall when I let go. I helped her get her back legs under her and propped her so she wouldn't fall again. She wanted to stand, and stand she did, right until the very end. She had an abundant last meal of all her favorite greens: three quarts or more of rose leaves, honeysuckle, catnip, mint tea, violets and strawberry leaves, until she just couldn't hold any more. The vet put Suzie down while she was standing, because that's how Suzie wanted it. Now the pasture gate is wide open, and the pasture is empty. Suzie is safe now- no more fears of not being able to get up and run, a basic need for a sheep. We hated to see her struggle, so gave her peace. And now we're off to the woodland cemetery to lay her to rest.
  The barn looms empty down the hill, as it was before we got our first sheep, 18 good years ago. We miss Suzie and Vanity, and our lives with sheep. Since Suzie was 17, very old for a ewe, she showed that we took good care of her, as we did our other sheep.
  I keep thinking I haven't checked Suzie for a while and look out toward the barn, see the open gate, and remember. One evening, at dusk, I thought I saw the white spot on Suzie's nose, saw her gazing at me from the barn door, where she liked to stand and look out across the pasture. It must have been the way the light reflected off a leaf, actually, but I'd like to think she had come back by to visit us. I teared up, wishing I could go down the hill and bring her a ginger snap, and scratch around her ears.
  Our sheep guardian, Emily the Great Pyrenees, will begin obedience exercises. The deer will continue to eat the rye grass, clover and vetch I had planted, and our night visitors, possums and raccoons, will have to watch out before leaving the trees to eat our bird feed. Emily, the Pyr, just had a bath and pedicure and now smells like a house dog. She and Maeve, the Aussie, can sleep together under the stars tonight, for the first time. For six years, they've been friends through the fence, because an Australian Shepherd cannot mingle with sheep. She would have run them to death. As Emily the Pyr showed us, when deer were eating the rye grass I'd planted for the sheep, one ruminant is about the same as another. She didn't chase sheep, and she was not about to chase deer, either.
  Sheryl, a spinning guild member who has had sheep for about a year, has brought Vanity home to join her Shetlands. Vanity was a companion "loaner" sheep from Elaina, another guild member who has a large flock of Shetlands, who had decided not to breed Vanity again, since her mothering skills left a lot to be desired. Vanity kept Suzie company for the past one-and-a-half years, since one sheep, alone, is usually an anxious and lonely sheep. Vanity will be Sheryl's first white sheep, happily running with the brown wethers in her new home. Dirk and I went through the barn and set aside a couple boxes of sheep supplies and tools that will come in handy for Sheryl. I dropped them off at their farm the next day, after a guild meeting nearby, an hour from our home. Vanity's remarkably comfortable around huge llamas! She seems to love the company of her new flock, and I'm delighted she has such a loving new farm to call her own.