The Weekend

Friday, after I load the truck for market, I make sure the sheep have minerals in their feeders, that their water tubs are clean, the electric fences are up and pulsing and that they have enough grass  to last them until at least Monday, because after a Saturday in New York all I want to do on Sunday is to hang out with them for an hour or so.  Then I'll ride my bike, read a little, but mostly daydream and listen for the presbyters of the village who ring the church bells congregating their flock.  Sunday mornings are as promising as Sunday afternoons are sad.

Monday I usually move one or more of my three groups of sheep, either the rams (25 hd), the ewes (300 hd) or the lambs (225 hd) born in April of this year to an adjacent paddock with fresh grass which has re-grown to about 10-11 inches.  The sheep will be moved from there when they've grazed it down to 3-4 inches; the pasture needs time to grow and recover and that will take about 3 weeks in mid-summer.

Saturday, after the stand is set up and the staff is there to serve you, I sit at a table in the park, before the  statue of Charity, a drinking fountain, by Karl Adolph Donndorf done in 1881 which is directly behind the truck and read.  My current book is Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.  I'm enticed  by her stream of consciousness style, a form of free indirect discourse, that she uses so interestingly. I love the kind of sentences she writes; they're long, complex, full of dependant clauses with noun and verb phrases that are conditional or subjunctive and  always wandering through, while talking about, the internal adventures of the characters in the novel.