The Years in Between

December 13, 2024

I often refer to spring as our busy season, but really, we don’t have a non-busy season. Our life fluctuates between busy and extremely busy as we try to keep up with whatever each season has to offer - or throws at us. I’ve begrudgingly come to accept the fact that schedules are like closets – they just magically fill themselves up.

Wintertime, as marked by the first snow and consistently freezing temperatures, is always a bit of a relief as our life calms down to simply “less busy” and that is about as slow as it ever gets.  There is a quietness about the world when there’s snow on the ground - as if that blanket of snow is tucking us in for the winter. Oh, if only! We may not be as busy as we were a few months ago - or as crazy as we’ll be a few months from now - but there’s still lots that needs to get done, and the weather makes it just that much harder to do.

There is hay to haul and frozen water troughs and lines to deal with. And until we have a solid base of snow on the ground, the bears will still be out and about trying to find, or kill, the 20,000 calories they need each day to pack on the pounds for their winter’s torpor. Lambs are easy prey and keeping all our fencing electrified enough to discourage a marauding bear is in itself a full-time job.

In livestock farming, one season just seamlessly rolls into the next. There is no intermission, no half-time, no break in our schedule, it just fills up and moves on. Springtime is by far the busiest time of year, with sugaring, lambing, farrowing and shearing. Summer is busy with fencing, grazing rotations, the Farmers Market and putting up the hay we need to feed the sheep all winter. Fall is busier still with getting ready for winter, collecting leftover pumpkins and corn and dividing the animals into breeding groups. As simple as that may sound, it actually takes a lot of fencing to keep “the breeding group” from the “non-breeding-but-would-really–like-to-be-breeding” group.

 There’s a roll of barbed wire fencing at the edge of our farm, left over from when my grandparents had cows on the property. Whenever I walk the fence line, I see it and wonder who left it there. My grandfather, perhaps, or his “hired man.” I wonder what distracted them and why they never returned to put it away. It’s been rusting there for a hundred years and it looks like it could keep rusting for a hundred more.

I have my own abandoned roll of fencing at the other end of the property. I use electric fencing combined with welded wire to keep the bears and coyotes out and our pigs and sheep in. Whenever I walk by my roll, I think to myself “I should put that away”- but I never do. I rarely have a free hand and there’s always something more urgent to get done.

The two rolls of fencing are bookends of my grandfather’s and my lives - and for the land we have both truly loved. They mark two moments in time with 100 years in between.  My grandfather’s barbed wire seems so antiquated to me now and he could never have imagined the “electrified” fence I have come to rely on.

Though methods of fencing have clearly changed these past 100 years - the demanding and seasonal rhythm of farming really hasn’t. My grandfather was a successful businessman, a gentleman farmer and an adoring father of eight, but he was also no doubt a lot like me. It was the farmer in him, and his love for this land, which meant he was probably never without a list of things to do – and an equally long list of things that’ll just never get done.