“You know the longest way around is the sweetest way home,” Sanford used to tell me all the time.  My eighty-plus-year old farming friend would  tell me that when we’d climb into the upper pastures to pick blackberries, using that maxim as an excuse to amble a bit farther afield, checking the water lines and the fences on our way back.  He’d call it out to me as he observed my preference to arrive and leave on foot, preferring the one mile walk each way to accepting a ride between our farms.

That pace of living left an impression on me.  It led me to homeschool my children, to choose this life where I’m in control of my time.  I resent any pressure in my life to push beyond a speed limit.

At the same time, I’ve struggled with the number of hours in a day.  There is so much I am driven to pack into my life — the cafe, the farm, knitting, my family, hours in the woods, writing, reading, music, friends — that I’ve made a life study of time-saving efficiencies.    I’ve learned to make pre-mixes of the doughs I’ll need to bake in the cafe on Saturday morning; I am a master of the delay bake feature on my oven, the timer on the instant pot, the slow cooker.  I’ve arranged the tasks for the days of my week into protocols — Menu planning, marketing and outreach protocols, weekly bookkeeping and inventory protocols, monthly bookkeeping and inventory protocols.  

And no sooner do I find a way to make more time in my life, then I find a way to cram something else in.  

Every minute of every day.

I think I get it from my dad.  Years ago I began observing that he’d complain about being too tired.  Mom would complain he was working too hard.  So we’d sit down to try to figure out what was happening on the farm to cause the strain, what could be simplified or streamlined.  And inevitably in the course of those conversations, the dialog would turn to what else we could do — enterprises we could try, marketing possibilities we could explore, products we could develop.  He could never consider dropping something without picking up twice as much. Like me, he wants to pack a lot into life. 

But it’s hard now, as we battle Mom’s recent decline in health.  Especially for Dad.  The doctors appointments are endless.  He’s fortunate in that he has someone on the farm every day of the week to handle chores, freeing him to drive Mom where she needs to go, but that doesn’t stop him from wanting to handle each lamb, from finding reasons to check up on the newborn piglets.  

Those are just the challenges he faces in the daylight hours.  Mom’s had  a couple scary night events, and I think they leave him fearful of going to sleep, of what troubles may arise in the night.  My household is, literally, a few miles removed from this.  I get to rest easier at night, but I’ve moved all business calls to my cell phone, reserving the landline outside my bedroom for him, so he can call at any hour.  

I watch him care for Mom, and I watch his ongoing work on the farm.  I suppose we could swoop in and take on everything, leaving him and Mom to do little more than read books and go to doctor’s appointments.  But I think that would be the end of him.  At 77, he still scrambles over fences, pushes round bales, climbs up and down from the tractor.  He stays on top of the latest research, reading avidly.  Thinking about the livestock and the business of farming stimulates him, keeps him engaged with life.  It gives us all something we can love together, and the continuity of the life cycles is heartening as we face our own mortality.  

But like me, Dad is forever pushing against time, trying to squeeze one more thing into the day.  And the demands on him now are wearing.  

I hear the girls asking about the pile of round bales he has stacked in the third bay of the barn.  Dad bought in extra hay over the winter.  The quality was good, and he felt the price was worth stockpiling and getting ahead.  But that means the third lambing bay still has hay in it.  And we need it for a mixing pen, where the ewes and the lambs are released once Mama and babies are stable and no longer need to be in private lambing pens. 

“Pop Pop, are we going to fence out that hay?”  They ask.

“I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” he tells them.  He needs to finish tasks, move on to the next thing, get to the next appointment. 

“Pop Pop, are you sure you don’t want us to just get some hog panels around the bales?”  I don’t know why he refuses again.  Maybe he doesn’t want to spend money on more hog panels.  Maybe he doesn’t want them doing it without him there.  Maybe he really feels like it isn’t necessary.

The lambs are in total agreement with Pop Pop. The hay mountain goes halfway up to the roof of the barn.  As their little legs grow strong, they test them, running and leaping and bounding, playing king of the hill while their mothers snack on bales from below.  From outside the barn, their fuzzy white bodies look like popcorn as they hop around on them.  

And it’s not like we all don’t have a million other things to do. 

So we let it go.

And then the land line rings after dark on Saturday night.  I run to answer it.  I hear tears in Dad’s voice.  

“I need help!”  He shouts into the phone.

I fear it’s mom, but it isn’t. “I’ve got a ewe and lamb stuck in the hay bales and I can’t get them out!”

All four of us pile into the car and speed down.

To be honest, it’s not the ewe I’m worried about.  

It’s him.  I don’t want this to be the moment.  

I don’t want this to be the moment when he says, “I just can’t do this anymore.”  And it’s not because I think retirement from farming should be banned.  But this is his love.  Our love.  And if we’re all here together, we can all stick with it in whatever capacity we can.  

We pull in and find him on the tractor, staring into the wide-open barn.

“Where’s Mom?” I call up to him.

“She’s asleep,” he calls down.

He points to the left side of the mountain of hay.  “I was thinking we might move the sheep and then move all the bales to get them out,” he explains.  

The barn is in total chaos.  Ewes and lambs are bleating, calling to the ewe stuck with her lamb up in the bales, calling to each other, blatting at us to do something.  

The barn has been fenced off into three different bays.  One bay holds the lambing jugs for the newborns, one bay is a mixing pen for the week-old lambs and mamas, and then there’s this bay, for the two-week-olds and their mothers.  To pull off what dad suggests, we would have to make sure nobody got out into the night.  We’d have to herd the one-week olds in to the bay with the lambing jugs.  Then we’d have to herd the two-week-olds into the one-week-old bay.  Then we’d have to start moving round bales.  Then we’d have to put the hay back, then move all the sheep back.

It would take all night.  And like Dad, I find my time is precious. 

So rather than agreeing to that idea, Bob and I climb up over the hay and find them, stuck in a gap between the bales.  We pluck out the lamb and send it scampering down the mountain back to the barn floor.  Then Bob drops down into the gap with the ewe.   The girls climb up around us.  Bob tries to shimmy her up as I pull from the front.  Dad watches from the bottom, eyes glassy with hurt, regret, fear, frustration….you name it.

And there’s a voice in my head:

Don’t let anyone get hurt.  Whatever you do, make sure no one get’s hurt.

I look down at Bob in the hole.  I know he sees himself as strong as ever, but the hormone suppression drugs from the cancer have wreaked havoc on his body.  I consider the position from which I could pull.  I am certain it will give me a hiatal hernia.  I look at the girls.  They’re stronger than most men I know, but we’d be in even worse shape if one of them were incapacitated. And I consider the ewe.  I doubt we could get her out without breaking a leg.  It occurs to me that we might have to shoot her.

And I know that would take Dad to the brink.  

That’s when I hear Sanford’s words back from when I was a kid. 

The longest way around is the sweetest way home….

Maybe this isn’t about time.  This is about the attitude.

I look at my girls.  If Pop Pop weren’t upset, if there wasn’t an animal in danger, they’d be having a blast.  This would be a source of merriment.  A game.  Chasing sheep in the dark, plucking lambs up and passing them to Mamas, playing on hay bales.  I look down at the ewe again.  Other than being stuck, she is unharmed.  

I stare down at her for a moment longer, and I think hard about all this….

Mom not being well.

Dad wanting to keep farming.

Our livelihood and our passions. 

And some things just suck.  It sucks that my mom is sick.  It sucks that we’re all not as strong as we used to be.  

But we’re all still on this wild and varied adventure of life. There continue to be highs and lows, even if there are things happening that we don’t want to happen.  

And sometimes, if we’re paying attention, we get hit with a moment like this: where we can choose between tragedy and comedy.  

That choice can make all the difference. 

How I pick up my head from studying this sheep and make eye contact with my dad is going to define what kind of night this is.

I draw a deep breath, think of rambling through the pastures with Sanford, think of how the girls laugh every time we have to move the baby lambs, and think that this could be one of the most magical nights this spring.

And with those thoughts on my mind, I find my Dad’s gaze.  

“Let’s take the long way, Dad!”  I call.  And we all spring into action, moving fence panels, shuttling ewes and lambs.  Then Bob and the girls scramble onto the hay bale mountain, studying each one, figuring out the order things have to be moved so that there isn’t a cave-in.  Dad watches as they point to each bale, figuring out where to pick it up and put it down.  It’s like they’re playing a combination of Rush Hour and Takaradi. They’re having a blast.

And I see a big smile on Dad’s face.  

The night has turned into a grande escapade of shuttling sheep and hay bales, then building a proper barricade to keep it from happening again.

At last, everyone is back in their rightful places.  We give another feeding of hay to signal to them that it’s time, once more, to eat and settle down. Bit by bit, the bleats and blats drop away, and the spring peepers can be heard throughout the farm valley.

Dad goes inside, and we scramble into the car to head back up the hill, exhilarated from our adventure.  

And in the morning, Dad will have a funny story to tell Mom.  And we will all be left with a memory.  It was a night where efficiencies and shortcuts were sacrificed to the the need of the moment….But the surrender resulted in such loveliness.  Sometimes, the longest way around really is the sweetest way home.

 

If you enjoyed this, please share this podcast with friends & family to get the ideas to spread.  Better still, you can help make the magic happen for as little as $1/month by hopping over to Patreon and looking up Shannon Hayes.  Or, if it’s easier, you can also donate to support the podcast by sending a check to Shannon Hayes, ℅ Sap Bush Hollow Farm, 832 W. Fulton Rd, West Fulton, NY  12194.

And that’s a really important thing to do, because all of this— the podcast, the blog, the books and the creative recharging that happens over fall and winter—   are a result of the support of my patrons on Patreon.  This podcast operates much like public radio.  It is freely available to all, made possible by the gifts from our patrons.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Theresa Zeman and Annette Varady.  Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you! 

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