I guess Leah and I had a lot of Andrew Wyeth-ish visions in our heads when we decided 15 years ago to sell our house in urban Seattle and move out to the idyllic Puget Sound countryside, to plant a garden and eat food we grew ourselves, and to keep farm animals. I’m pretty sure we didn’t spend much time considering that the animals would eventually die.
We are fully aware that we’re not real farmers, that the critters we keep are pets and not produce. Our now senior citizen chickens stopped laying eggs long ago but we keep the ditzy dames around and spend a ton of money feeding them because we’re soft hearts and could never kill them. And our sheep? Well at one time we’ve had as many as five Shetlands and each spring we've had them sheared and Leah and her creative friends have used the wool to make scarves and the like.
One by one our sheep have grown old and died. In recent months we’ve been down to just two elderly fellows, Jupiter and Smokey, and in the past couple of weeks Jupiter -- you see him as a baby in the 13-year-old snapshot above -- became quite feeble. He wasn’t able to get around very well though we gave him medication for arthritis. Two days ago he couldn’t get to his feet but he still happily ate grain and hay while nesting on his tummy in the barn. Yesterday morning I gave Jupiter his hay and he ate it from his nest, but Smokey looked on and seemed to know that something was amiss. Jupiter died in the afternoon.
We buried Jupiter on our property last evening, and now, because sheep are said to be social animals, we’ll need to bring in a buddy for Smokey. Despite the occasional heartache, not having critters in our pasture simply doesn’t feel like an option.
