No writing today . . .

I read a blog last week (I wish I could remember who, because it was good) about how often real life interferes with best laid plans for adding a few thousand words to the WIP.  Today was one of those days for me. Tomorrow at our farm, it’s lamb-marking day.  Essentially that means all the lambs are vaccinated for deadly diseases and the ram lambs are neutered.  So today my husband and I moved the ewes and lambs about a kilometre down the stocklane from where they were grazing.

It was warm and some of the lambs were only a week old, one indeed was born last night.  So a kilometre was like walking a million miles.  The recently birthed lamb struggled, his mum constantly shepherding him, with the remains of the afterbirth not fully expelled.  So we walked them all terribly slowly.

It’s a noisy business, because the ewes and lambs loose each other. Some bounce ahead, some dawdle and some squeeze through the fences into other paddocks and we have to fetch them.  But eventually, with the stragglers in the trailer, we have them all in the farmyard where they can mother-up again overnight, feed, the ewes can water and eat the fresh spring grass and all will be well for tomorrow when the lambs will be removed from their mums for a couple of hours. The noise at that point is excruciating but once all is done, the way those mums pick up their babies again amongst a couple of hundred other bubs is amazing.

Whilst my husband organised the shearing shed and set the gates in the yards, I took my horse to the barn and we spent quality time stripping out his winter coat.  There’s still a lot to go and I’m waiting for a calm warm day to wash him which will be the finishing touch.  But when I’d finished today, there was a carpet of hair on the straw and I just know it will be re-cycled by the birds who live in the barn as they make their nests.  Already the swallows have fashioned horse-tail hair around the outside of their nest on the back porch.

So that’s what this writer does, amongst a million diverse other things, when she doesn’t write.  But it’s all grist to the mill. Experiences stored, images remembered.