I remember the first time I stood in the barnyard, looked at an animal, and saw food.  Growing up, I saw the livestock purely as animals.  I stayed away when it was time to load them on the truck, mentally left the room when my  parents, aunt, uncles and grandparents talked about the price per pound, slaughterhouses, and auctions.   But as an adult, one afternoon while out in the barnyard (I think I may have been pregnant for Saoirse at the time….I remember being quite hungry) , I watched a pig, munching contentedly on his supper.  He turned his back to me for a moment, and I saw a fresh ham with cracklings, studded with garlic and herbs.  He turned again, and he was a beautiful pig with ears drooping just slightly over his soulful eyes, relishing his repast.  

While I never entertained plans to become a butcher, I recognized something important in my ability to shift my gaze.  To carry on my family’s business, I needed to practice both ways of seeing — the beast gaze and the feast gaze.  The beast gaze let’s me view the animal as a creature of this earth entitled to care and respect; the feast gaze let’s me clearly see what sustains this farm, pays the taxes and keeps my family fed.

I’m using my double gaze this afternoon.  Saoirse and I have come down to the farm on our way to get her second Covid vaccine.  Pop Pop was able to get four lambs scheduled with the processor, and he needs help loading them on the truck.  

Saoirse, Ula and Corey are on the farm daily with these animals, but I am here only sporadically.  So as I look out at this crop of lambs from which we get to choose, I’m delighted.  

Lamb is truly our centerpiece at Sap Bush Hollow.  We were sheep farmers before anything else.  And the steep hillsides and frosty valleys seem to love these animals.  We’ve carefully selected from generation after generation of ewes which ones to keep to breed back that will best thrive in our microclimate.  The result is lamb with extraordinary flavor from hearty beasts able to endure the hardships of a West Fulton winter. 

Pop Pop joins me in the pen and we stand together, drinking in his legacy.  They’re beautifully finished.  There’s not a single animal in there that won’t make for exquisite meat.

Saoirse and Jenn climb in with us, and Mom stands outside, watching.  

As the sheep move before him, Pop Pop reaches out and pulls one from the flock to load, a jet black ewe.  Saoirse and Jenn begin walking her toward the gate.

“She’s one of the black ones!”  Mom exclaims.  Pop Pop turns and looks at her quizzically.  “And a EWE!  No!  We’re not processing her.  She’s beautiful.  She should be kept as a replacement.”

Replacements are young ewes that are selected from the lamb crop to join the permanent flock as breeding stock.  

Pop Pop let’s her go.  I climb in and look around again.  I see a beautiful ram lamb and begin to reach for him. 

“That’s got a white tag,” Pop Pop says.  “You can’t take anything with white tags.”

Saoirse and Jenn wait quietly while Pop Pop looks through and makes another choice.  We load that lamb on the truck.  

I reach out and grab another lamb. Once more there’s a white tag on his ear.  I let him go.

“Why do all these castrated ram lambs have white tags?”  I ask.

“We can’t sell those,” Pop Pop says.  

“So we can’t eat them, and we can’t breed them…What’re they here for?”  I’m the numbers person.  I want to know what I’m paying to feed that isn’t producing.

“They’re for Cornelia,” Saoirse offers.  Cornelia is my neighbor and good friend.  She runs Panther Creek Arts.

“Cornelia didn’t order any lambs.  She would have told me.”  I get no response.  “What’s going on here?”

Jenn looks out at me.  I can tell she knows something.  She looks down at the ground and moves toward the back of the flock.  

Pop Pop won’t make any eye contact whatsoever.

“They’re the Forget-me-nots!”  Saoirse finally shouts.  “They’re friendly, so if Cornelia has her arts fair in the park this summer, we can bring them down for kids to meet them.  We can’t process them.”  

The Forget-me-nots was a group of lambs born late last spring who, for various reasons, couldn’t be raised by their mothers.  Ula bottle-fed all of them.  Because Cornelia is my good friend, she’s being used as the justification for their indulged lifestyle.  I’m not fooled.

“So all of these are Ula’s pets, and therefore we can’t process them?”

They keep wandering through the flock.  No one will make eye contact.  

“So nearly every lamb here has a white tag on it,” I observe.   How am I supposed to make payroll if I can’t sell any of this beautiful crop of lambs?

“This one doesn’t,”  Pop Pop says.  He pulls a third and we load it.  

We go back into the pen and I grab the fourth.  Another black ewe with a white face.  Her fat cover is gorgeous, and there is no white tag.  

“NO!” Screams mom again.  “Not her!”

“She’s really friendly!”  Saoirse exclaims.

I let her go.  

“What here can we eat?”  I’m growing exasperated.  “And when did we open a petting zoo?”  

“That one!”  Mom shouts definitively and points to a tall ewe that stands head and shoulders above the rest.  Pop Pop and Jenn launch for her.

“But she’s really nice!”  Saoirse calls over the tussle.

“Saoirse, she’s got really long legs.  She won’t be able to carry lambs through pregnancy,” I’m grasping at straws.  I’m being gruff.  But someone here has to keep the business running.  I open the gate on the truck and we lift her in.

I look over and see my kid wipe away a tear.  I draw a deep breath.  

“Wait.”  We all stand still as I make eye contact with my daughter.  “We don’t have to do this,” I relent.  “I can go grab the other one we just had.”

“No.”  Saoirse sniffles once.  “Do it.  It’s fine.”

“Truthfully, the black one with the white face had better finish,” I offer.  

“Yeah, but she’s really sweet, too.  It’s okay.  I’ll be okay.  Do it.”

So we walk away from loading and we drive to Oneonta for Saoirse to get vaccinated.  

We are strangely elated as we greet each National Guardsman at the vaccination site.  They are positioned to move us through efficiently and at proper distances.  Where soldiers and needles both would have incited fear and caution at any other time, in this moment we are giddy.  Bob and I completed our vaccinations last month, Corey got his second shot this morning, and now Saoirse gets hers.  She thinks about what lies ahead of her, all those things that had to go on pause for the past year:  play rehearsals, meeting up with friends, travel, wearing lipstick instead of a mask while working at the espresso bar.   She gets to be a kid again. 

She receives her injection and we get in the car to drive home for Sunday dinner.

And then she starts to cry again.  It’s about putting that lamb on the truck, she tells me.  Before long, her few tears turn to wails and sobs.  

“I hate this! I hate this! I hate this!”  She screams at the windshield.  “I don’t want to do this to them!”

I let her call the farm to see if Pop Pop can pull the ewe off the truck.  He’s already gone.  It is done, and there is no turning back.  

And she can’t stop crying.  And I don’t have words for my child.  

It is as though we drove to that vaccine site and she was a farmer who had to make difficult choices that day…Just as every farmer must make every day.  

And she got that vaccine and saw a glimpse of the waning days of her childhood that she surrendered to the pandemic.  

The curtain of Covid fell, and my girl became a woman.  She pushed aside her dreams to sing on stage and stepped in with the sheep.  She hauled meat boxes and chicken pens and water buckets and packed orders and shoveled shit.  She loaded animals on the truck for slaughter.  And she swallowed the emotions of the daily hard choices and just moved forward.  She did it for her family and she didn’t think about herself. 

And there’s no doubt in my mind that I saw joy in her face every day.  Indeed, there is often no greater joy than knowing you are part of something that matters, that you are needed. That the survival and well-being of the whole is more important than any individual choice.

But with that one little injection she is vaccinated against Covid.  And individual choice returns.  

These are all the things flying through my mind as we drive down the highway toward her future.  She weeps for the sheep.  I think she probably weeps, for the first time, for all that she has faced down in the past year.  

What is a mother to say?  I’ve been through this, sure.  One of my very first memories is watching lambs hung for slaughter on a farm up the road, their viscera in a wheel barrow swarming with flies.  It is a brutal experience.  And yet I chose it as my way forward, the best way I knew to fix carbon in the soil, protect the hedgerows and the wildlife,  and to keep my family whole and healthy.

This past year, Saoirse did not have a choice. 

But now she does.

So I just hold her hand as she cries.  I don’t want to lecture her how “this is the way of things.”  She’s too raw for me to explain the importance of switching between the beast gaze and the feast gaze.  And I don’t want to push her away from this business.  But I also want her to recapture some of that youth she surrendered when the pandemic hit. There is too much to say, and nothing more to say.  So I settle for gratitude.

“Thank you,” I tell her.  “Thank you for everything you’ve done and everything you gave over this past year.   And I know that it hurts, but feeling the way you do is right.  If you stopped feeling, you wouldn’t care for the animals as well.  It sucks. I’m sorry for the pain, and I can’t take it away.  But…. I’m so damn thankful for everything.”  And I cry with her.

Her sobs recede to whimpers, and the whimpers to sniffles, and the sniffles to deep sighs.  And we drive home, hand in hand, neither of us knowing what lies beyond the next turn in the road.