As soon as I got to work Friday, a small lady showed up at the door. I knew immediately who it was. I opened the door. “I’m Lou,” she said.

“You’re here to shear the sheep,” I said. I yelled down to Michele and then went outside to see if I could catch them. They were all the way up at the barn, so Michele and I put a little grain in a couple of buckets and walked through the pasture calling, “Sheeeepers!” The two new ewes popped their heads up from grazing and eyed us warily. Lily, the old matriarch was all the way on the other side of the barn, though, and didn’t notice us until we got much closer. “Lily!” I called, and she finally heard us, spotted my bucket, and came cantering over, her little black lamb in tow. With Lily following us eagerly, the other sheep came too. We walked all the way back down through the pasture, put the buckets in the little sheep pen, which all the sheep willingly entered. Michele wrapped a rope around Lily, but she probably didn’t need to, because Lily gladly followed the bucket she held in the other hand.

Lou had set up her stuff on the lower deck, out of the wind and dirt. She turned Lily on her back and started scraping the wool off her with her monstrous clippers. Michele and I were happy to see Lily’s big belly emerge from beneath the wool, as Lou had complained that she was too skinny last year. When she was almost done with Lily, Lou told me to get another sheep. I decided I would lead all of the sheep out of the pen to the back deck with my bucket, but when I tried to catch the newest ewe, she was too heavy and strong for me to hold on to. All of the sheep ran away, and Michele and I had to coral them back into the sheep pen. Michele grabbed the ewe again with a lead rope, and tried to manhandle her back to the lower deck. She did not want to go, so I grabbed a handful of wool from her back and pulled her along. We managed to get her down there, where Lou was keeping Lily down until we got back. Lily didn’t need any manhandling to get back to the pasture; we just let her go and she ran back to her home without us asking.

Lou sheared the new ewe, which Michele has started calling Jonquil, and Michele and I went to get the last ewe, the one of the pair she bought last August. At the time, Stephanie noticed that one of them didn’t pee right for a girl, so Michele sent the kids out this spring to figure out which one was a male, which she slaughtered and put in the freezer. Michele wrapped the lead rope around the sheep’s head again, and we started the slow process of getting it down to the deck. The sheep dug in its heels, and would not budge forward with Michele pulling its neck and me pulling its wool on its behind. It tried to go backwards, so I spun its butt around and we pushed it backwards for a while in the right direction until it caught on. Then we tried to go forward again, then backwards. Finally, we discovered we could make pretty good progress if we pushed and pulled the sheep sideways. Lou was almost done with Jonquil, but she showed me where to put one foot to hold the bottom leg and how to hold the other foot while she finished up the sheep’s back.

Lou started on the final sheep. “Do you know about this weather?” she said as she shaved its belly. It was pretty windy that day, and we’d been getting alternating snow, rain, and really warm temperatures.

“Oh,” said Michele, looking at the sheep’s lower belly. “I do now.” That’s when I realized Lou had said “whether,” which is a castrated male sheep. So both of the “ewes” Michele bought in August had been boys. But this guy’s wool was the best of all of them, so I think he may escape the freezer.

In the meantime, I put Jonquil back in the pasture, where she was very willing to go. Her lamb was baaing pathetically, but when Jonquil went up to her, the lamb ran away. She didn’t recognize her mother without all her hair! In fact, Snowdop, Lily’s lamb, didn’t recognize her mother either. The two lambs clustered together while their mothers called to them. The little lambs kept baaing in their high pitched voices calling, “Maa maa!” Their mothers replied in their deep bleating, “I’m right here, baby!” The lambs would answer, “I don’t know who you are! Where’s my mother?!” This went on for at least an hour. When we let the whether in with the sheep, they all gathered around and sniffed him, saying, “Who are you?”

I ran and got the checkbook to write Lou a check. She asked for ten dollars a head plus a little for gas. She raises sheep for a living, doesn’t shear them.