Springtime

It is springtime.  Here in Las Vegas, that means temperatures in the 96–105-degree range.  That is about the only difference. My poor, confused roses bloom in February.  I can’t plant a garden; the summer heat will kill anything in minutes.  We must put our hand on the sidewalk to determine if it is safe to walk the dog.  Spring and summer blend into fall and winter here, with little change except the air conditioning bills.

                What a difference it was living on the farm in Minnesota.  Spring was a blessing, a reward from God for surviving the coldest and most miserable months of the year.  Spring was a promise.  It was also a warning, hurry, hurry, before you know it, fall will be here.

                Dad used to tease Mom, “You look like the first rose after a long, hard winter.” 

                He usually said it when she was tired, covered in dirt, and cranky.  I thought it was a compliment until I asked Mom what it meant.

                “Think about it.  That rose survived the damn winter, the first one to try to bloom is tough, mean, and ugly.”

                I asked Dad what he meant by the first rose after a long, hard winter.

                “A sight for sore eyes.”

                Communication skills were not a highlight in our family.  We were suspicious people.

                One of the best things about spring was the smell of newly turned earth, the wet, black dirt furrowed by the plow.  The smell of the earth promised life and growth.  Dad always did the plowing, though, since he didn’t trust Donna or me with making straight furrows.  I suspect he had known all along that we read books while driving the tractor.

                I was wearing my cranberry-colored scrubs when I stopped to see Mom and Dad after work. Dad was in the far west field of what is now Tubby’s farm. I had worked a rare day shift and looked professional and proud in my scrubs.

                As I drove past, I saw Dad in the field, close to the fence line.  It looked like he was almost done plowing.  It also looked like trouble. The tractor’s front end was dangling in the air, the exhaust blowing clouds of black diesel smoke.  Dad was sitting on the seat like a bronc rider, hanging on for dear life.

                I considered driving past.  It was the fear of being seen by Dad that stopped me from going home.  If Dad saw me and I drove past, my life would not be worth living.   I turned onto the field road.

                “I got this damn thing stuck,” Dad told me.

                The furrows were holding water at the bottom.  I couldn’t see the plow; it was covered in mud.  The only part above ground was the hitch and the hydraulic pump attached to the tractor. I matched my father’s lack of concern.

                “Little wet yet, huh?”

                “I think I got a little close to that swampy part there.”  Dad gestured to the cattails growing two feet away from the tractor.  “You think you can pull it out with the Russian?”

                I hated that Russian tractor.  Almost as much as I hated pulling a tractor for my father.  The Russian would hurt me physically with scraped ankles and bruised legs.  My father’s yelling would wound my soul and follow me to my grave. As much as I dreaded it, I knew my role.

                “I’ll go get the Russian.”

                Hours later, I had discovered all my apparent weaknesses as well as a few others I had not yet been made aware of at that time. I was deaf and blind.  This was not an issue, however, as I apparently had my head up my ass and thus my handicaps were a moot point.

                “This cocksucker ain’t coming out.  I’m gonna have to get Tubby out here.”

                Dad had used the C word. Not the one others often think of, but the one He used when he was very angry and frustrated.  I didn’t have time to be shocked; I knew it was coming. 

I was celebrating within myself at the magic words: “I’m gonna have to get Tubby out here.” Those words meant I could tag out on this round.

                Tubby and I had argued for many years over who had to help Dad.  Tubby said Dad was more careful because “you are the baby”, and I would give my rebuttal, “but he actually listens to you, I’m a girl and the baby, I don’t mean shit to him, he's got a spare daughter.”

                To me, hearing that Tubby would be brought in gave me a delicious sense of freedom.  I would no longer be held captive by loyalty to my father.  I was free!  Free to escape the endless and impossible task.  By this time, my white Nurse Mates shoes were covered in black mud, and my scrubs were muddied up to the knees.  The white socks were a disaster and would be tossed.  But I had come through relatively unscathed.  Unless I counted the emotional damage.  But no one in our family could afford therapy, so there was no point in keeping count.

                “Here, help me get this hydraulic off,” Dad ordered.

                Wait.  What? 

                “If I leave it out here, somebody will come and steal it.”  Dad continued.

                Dad was at the stage in his life when he blamed everyone else for anything that went wrong.  Including the mysterious thieves that took things when, in truth, he had forgotten where he left them.  He had been at that stage since I could remember and would continue to be at that stage until the day that he passed away.  But I liked to pretend that it was just a stage of a man getting older, scared of a world moving too fast. 

                Hydraulic pumps are filled with hydraulic oil.  Hoses connect to the tractor so that, with the tractor levers, the plow raises and lowers.  Dad had been grinding on the levers for hours now, trying to lift the plow from its grave.   The hoses connect by pressure.  Push in and then pull sharply back.  Nice concept that probably worked when the connections were new.  Dad’s connections had been through a few rough winters and smashed around more than once.  One connector looked like it had been run over by a tractor tire and then, somehow, by brute force, shoved into the pump.

                On top of the pump was a rubber hose with four connectors.  Dad must have had to lengthen the hose, so instead of getting the right piece for the right part, he improvised.  There was a connector going straight up, connected to another metal connector going at a ninety-degree angle, a third one to bring the angle upward again, and then one to connect to the tractor.    The number of connectors on that plow’s hydraulic system was the reason my parents couldn’t afford a college fund.

                I looked down at my pretty cranberry scrub set, my destroyed white socks, and my abused white nursing shoes.   I could ask permission to go to the house and find something else to wear.  I knew how that conversation would go.

                “It's not gonna take that long.  You could be done by the time you get there and back.  What’s the matter?  Are you afraid of getting dirty?  It will wash out.  It's just mud. Quit bitching and help.”

                I was a grown-ass woman.  I had a job, a car, and an apartment.  I paid for my own groceries and bought my own dog food for my pets.  I was recognized by my friends and peers as intelligent and articulate.   Even people who didn’t like me very much say, “she’s a ball-breaking bitch.”    I stretched out to my full 5’10” height and stepped firmly into the mud up to my knees.  By the time I managed to wrestle the hydraulics, my scrubs were completely ruined.

                If you were a farm kid, you would understand. If I were eighty and my father a hundred and twenty, my response would have been the same.  The work must be done, and you never ask questions when given an order.  Drill sergeants may have limits to the amount of verbal abuse they can employ.  A frustrated farmer has no limits.

                Spring meant digging out the plow annually.  It was a ritual.  Some cultures may offer gifts or sacrifices to the gods for a bountiful crop.  Ours offered plows. Dad’s casket was metal, the color of brand-new plowshares.  It seemed fitting to my siblings and me. Dad would bury one last plow with him.

                Spring also means new green pastures and fencing, moving cattle, and fording swamps and creeks for newborn calves.  It also meant chasing cattle. 

                “The job ain’t done until someone catches hell,” Mom would say.

                Spring means the arrival of babies on the farm.  Chickens that would magically appear from the feed store.  Lambs bouncing around, little furry plush toys of energy and warmth, just waiting to be cuddled.  Newborn foals, stumbling on legs that were too long.

Baby piglets, sneaking out of the pig barn by themselves, to explore the big world.  Walking around the corner of a shed, I would be greeted with a dozen or more curious eyes and snouts.  “Schnoork,” they would shout at the sight of me and run back to the safety of their mother. 

                I loved the baby animals, so soft and cuddly.  It was the machinery part of spring on the farm that was torturous.  Dad would bring out the mangled remains of a plow, disc, or spring tooth and announce, “Looks like this needs a little work.”

                Tires rotted from the snow and ice, rust corroding each bolt, and the pieces bent from last spring all had to have a “little work”.   What they needed was last rites. But no, Dad was never ready to give up. 

                “Run to Olsons and get a couple of these bolts, three of these, and one of that.”

                Each spring, I had the opportunity to spend quality time at Olson’s farm equipment shop in town.  The mechanics knew me by sight.  They knew my father by reputation.

                “Oh yeah, you’re the one who looks just like your cousin Karen Baumgart.”

                “What did he break this time?”

                “They don’t make those anymore, can’t get them, try this instead.”

                I didn’t mind spending some time in the shop. Anything to avoid going back home to help Dad rehabilitate the machinery he had crippled the year before. A man who thinks ahead would repair the machinery and ensure it was in working order before parking it for the year.  Dad never mastered the art of foresight.  He held the implements together for the season and then, with a sigh of relief, parked it and forgot it.  What was broken would be fixed the next spring.  Rotted tires were also a problem each spring.

                Tires were a priceless commodity on the farm. When tubeless tires came out, Dad’s magic kit for tire tube repairs was retired. Even Tubby’s tire tube tester from Thiede’s was forgotten. I thought it was wonderful. No more prying tires off the rim with tire irons, being yelled at, “Be careful, don’t tear the tube,” and then shoving the repaired tube back in place.

                The “don’t tear the tube” warning was redundant.  “Yeah, because you are such a nice guy about it when it happens,” Tubby would be heard to mutter. 

In addition to living in a world where random thieves stole and returned his stuff, Dad had a belief that his children were inherently evil.  We were created for nothing less than destroying Dad, emotionally, socially, physically, and financially.  The joke was that Dad was doing his damnedest to do the same for us.

The end of the era of the tire tube meant no more cheap, generic dish soap used for sliding the tube out of the tire.  The smallest hands would reach in, covered in oil and soap, and gently pull out the tube.  My hands were the smallest. 

                As I pulled the tube, Tubby, Donna, Dad, and sometimes even Mom would hold the hard rubber tire open with the flat end of tire irons.  If one tire iron slipped, my hands would be trapped against the steel rim and the solid rubber. My wrists are curiously flat, making me question how many times this occurred before I could hold it in my memory. 

“Don’t pull on the damn valve stem, you’re gonna tear it off, and then the whole damn tube is worthless!”

I was too young to know my multiplication tables, but I damn sure knew what a valve stem was on a tire tube!  I only got that one wrong once.  If you pictured this procedure on a car tire lying flat on the ground, you are partially correct.  When a tractor tire had to be replaced, the process was done with the tire still on the tractor. The difference with the tractor tire is that the tube is so much larger that Tubby and I would both have to dig inside the tire.   

Like two panicked amateur obstetricians, we would plunge our soaped and greased hands into the inside of the tire.  Then, blindly groping around, we hoped that we were both pulling on the tube in the same direction.  The goal was to gently compress out any remaining air, fold the tube into an envelope, and push it out from the rim.  If I grabbed too much tube, thus interfering with Tubby’s section, my hands would be smacked by my angry brother.

Faces scrunched against the tire, up to our armpits in the bowels of a tractor tire, my brother and I carried on our own dialogue. Underneath my father’s continuous directions and Mom’s warnings to be careful, Tubby and I muttered with clenched teeth and grimacing faces.

“Stop it!  Let go, dammit, Tubby would hiss.

“That’s my piece.  Now you pulled it back!” I hissed back.

“Watch what the hell you are doing!” Tubby always had the upper hand, being older, he could set me up to take the fall, “she doesn’t know what she is doing”. 

“Let Tubby get it.”  Mom would tell me.  See?  She always lets him win.

Yes, the disappearance of tire tubes made our lives easier.  It didn’t make our lives easy, but slightly, somewhat, and in a minuscule amount, a bit easier.  But tires, those damn tires, haunted me each spring, with or without tubes.

There was the spring I got run over by a tractor tire.  Yet, I stand here today, alive to tell the tale.  Something that not many people can say for themselves.  You know what they say, “What doesn’t kill you, makes you suspicious, sarcastic, and have a sick sense of humor.”

I was in my early teens during the spring of the tractor tire hit-and-run.  Those lovely early teen years of acne, obesity, and hair that is either tangled or greasy, depending on the moment.  I wore coke-bottle-bottom glasses held together with strips of silver duct tape and black electrical tape.  Not taped artistically but taped desperately.   My clothes were “chore clothes”, polyester pants, and a baggy T-shirt.  Mom said they didn’t make jeans in my size, so I dressed like a bingo lady who had fallen on hard times.  Let’s just say that twelve going on thirteen was a rough time in my life, even before the tractor tire ran me over. 

The attempted assassin was one of the back tires of Dad’s old Cockshutt tractor.  Founded sometime in the 19^th century, a small company named Cockshutt produced machines and munitions for the World War II war effort.  After the war, they introduced a line of tractors, as they had become successful. 

Expanding into producing tractors, these tractors were sold under Co-Op.  Yes, the very Co-Op label that was on our family heirloom refrigerator and our generic groceries.  The name on the bag of every Christmas present I received from birth to age twelve. The first word I traced out with pencil and paper. My good old friend, Co-op. 

Dad just called his relic of a tractor, “the cockshot”.  I didn’t try to correct his pronunciation, even a fool learns to keep their mouth shut occasionally.  The Cockshutt was a color optimistically called “cream”.  It was just plain ugly, with giant fenders and a square front end.  The dual clutch/brake combination required me to stand to produce enough pressure on the foot pedals.  If my foot slid slightly, it would get trapped between the two hard metal pedals, requiring me to scrape the skin on my ankles to free it.  I always forgave the cockshut because it was the first "big kid" tractor I got to drive after moving up from the even older John Deere with a hand clutch. Before Dad bought the Russian tractor, the Cockshutt was the farm’s workhorse, reliable, steady, and durable. It was also safe, even with Dad driving it; it rarely tipped over.

I innocently walked outside one spring morning, my teen mind probably occupied with the injustices of the world.  Entering my teens, I had taken teenage brooding to a new and hitherto unseen level.  I was uninterested in what Dad and Tubby were doing.  I did notice the Cockshutt up on a chunk of wood under its axle, with a tire lying beside it, disemboweled from the rim.  It looked like a lot of hard work was about to commence, so I turned to go back into the house, not wanting to get involved.

“Pooch!”  Dad bellowed across the yard as soon as my hand touched the screen door handle.  “Come here and give us a hand.”

Caught, I turned around slowly and shuffled my way over to where my father and brother stood, hands on their hips.  Sometimes, if I moved slowly enough, I could arrive at the scene after most of the work was done. Having learned this trick, I repeated it as often as possible.

“There ain’t no fixing left in this sunnabitch,” Tubby announced, kicking the tire.

Dad lifted his foot and, pressing down on the tire, peeled a swath of rubber away, revealing a gaping hole.  Even I could see the prognosis was not good.

“That’s not even the biggest rip,” Dad said, sadly.  “Wait, didn’t we get some old tractor tires at that auction last summer?  Where did we put them?”

Dad’s purchases at auction sales were eclectic.  He needed it, might need it, or just felt sorry for the seller seemed to be the impetus to bid. He usually dumped his treasures in the grove behind the house and promptly forgot about them.

“They are up there, on the hill past the pig pens,” Tubby pointed out.

“Well, go get one; they should work.”  Dad directed to the air.  The Lord and Master of all that he surveyed had spoken.  Now, as his minions, his children were to respond.  I avoided eye contact, hoping that if Dad didn’t catch my eye, I would be overlooked.

“Pooch, go get a tractor tire,” My brother and my dad’s enabler ordered me.  As the Prince, Tubby was very familiar with the concept of “shit rolling downhill”.  As the lowest-ranking member of the family, I was doomed. 

I walked up the dirt path to the edge of last year’s corn field.  Passing the pig pens, my worn-out tennis shoes with knotted and flopping shoestrings kicked up the dust.  Another unfair task to add to my brooding about life and the world’s injustices. 

I had learned years before that if I had a knot in the shoestrings of my gym shoes, I couldn’t “play” for physical education class until my shoes were secure.  I could stretch it out, untying knots in tennis shoes, for an hour or more.  It became my personal style to have several knots in my laces, with the ends frayed and flopping around my feet.  (This becomes relevant momentarily).

                Lying in the trees and brush were four worn-out giant tractor tires. The weeds and brush had grown around the tires and greedily held onto them as I pried one out of the ground.  Dragging it out to the path, I knew there was no way I could drag this tire the endless miles back to the yard. I was just grateful that the way back was downhill.

                Bending over, I stood the heavy, solid rubber tire up.  The tire was huge, towering over me by more than a few inches. Above my head loomed hard rubber tire tread.  Piece of cake, I thought.  Gravity will take the tire down the hill; all I need to do is steer.  Sadly, I hated science class, so I hadn’t paid attention to Newton’s Laws of Physics and motion, inertia, mass, velocity, and all that other boring stuff.

                I wiggled the tire to the center of the dirt path, aimed directly for the yard.  As the tire leaned down onto my shoulder, I realized I might need to provide support and more than a little bit of steering. Wiggling the tire in the soft dirt, I pointed it directly down the hill and gave it a little bon voyage shove.

                The tire moved a few inches, then started to flop over to one side.  Fortunately, I was able to catch the hard rubber edge of the tire with the tender part of my shoulder and neck.  It was easy to see where I had gone wrong.  Remembering old photos of children rolling hoops and running along, steering the hoops with sticks, I realized I needed to walk with the tire and guide its descent.

                I gave the tire a hard shove as I stood to the left for support.  The tire now had momentum and gravity to maintain its path.  The whole rolling hoops game must have been about constant movement.  My job was to remain on the tire’s left side and gently guide it along the path.

                The tire took off rolling down the hill like a scared rabbit.  I trotted beside the tire. I had not figured rocks into my equations, and the tire flopped dangerously with each rock in the path.

                It was a combination of a rock in the path, the loose dirt, the steep hill, and the flopping shoelaces that was my undoing.  The tire wobbled.  “No!” I yelled sternly, running beside it and shoving to the right.

                A rock pitched the galloping tire back to the left, the loose dirt stole my traction, and my right foot stomped on my left shoelace.  “Shit!” I remember screaming into the air.  My feet were bound together as my right foot suddenly stopped my left foot from moving. I was running, and the sudden stop pitched me forward.  I fell on my face across the path.

                Twenty tons of solid rubber hit my shoulder and the back of my head.  Face down, my mouth open to scream, I ate dirt as the tire continued its merry way. The tire didn’t even bounce as the giant treads ground me into the earth.  Fuck the tire, I didn’t care anymore.  I had lost the last remaining shred of my dignity, sacrificed by my father and brother. 

                Standing up, I didn’t bother to try to brush off the dirt. The tire lay in the yard just a few feet from the tractor.  Dad and Tubby were bent over, twins in bib overalls, laughing hysterically. 

                “Did you fall?” Dad asked needlessly.

                “Oh, Pooch,” Tubby gasped between guffaws, “You should have seen it, that tire went right over the top of you.”

                I started the stomping walk of shame down the hill.  Dad was wiping tears from his eyes, and his hands were on his knees.  The two of them were clearly amused at my misfortune.  Plus, the tire had been delivered.  Nothing like a tire and a show!

                “Did you have a nice trip?”  Tubby asked.  “See you next fall?”

                I stomped past them to the house, not willing to give them any more fuel for their sick humor at my expense. It took weeks for the tire tread bruises to fade from my shoulder, neck, and, curiously, under my ear.     

                Spring meant “borrowing" the 15R tires from the hay racks to put on other equipment.  Knowing that I would have to take them off and put them back on the racks as soon as the hay was cut.  I loosened the bolts and jacked up the back end of the hay rack, having decided that the bald back tire seemed to be the healthiest of the four.  Plopping down on the ground, my trusty cross-shaped tire iron in my hands. 

                I felt something weird happening to the hay rack.  Above my head, the hayrack was slowly rising.  Inch, pause, inch up, pause. 

                “Hey!” I yelled.

                “Jesus Christ, Pooch, you scared the hell out of me!  What are you doing?”

                “I’m borrowing the tire.  What the hell are you doing?”

                “I need this tire.”

                I had lifted the back underbody of the hayrack only as far as necessary.  I had not put my tire jack under the rack itself, knowing it would require twice as much work.  I would have to raise the rack to three times the necessary height to get the wagon off the ground.

                Dad, on the other side of the rack, and using the implement-sized jack, did not have such worries.  He was perfectly willing to jack the rack into the clouds.  Safety was not a concern in my father’s world.  He plowed on through life with steadfast single-mindedness.  He was also not aware of his surroundings and didn’t realize I was sitting on the other side of the wagon, “borrowing” a tire as well.  

                I had brought blocks to set the wagon axle on, so it wouldn’t sit in the dirt, which would make it harder to replace the tire.  To Dad, blocking up the hay rack wasn’t a concern; after all, he was unlikely to be the one to have to replace the tire. 

                “What are you getting the tire for?” 

                “I’m gonna put it on the disk, that one is shot!”  I told Dad.

                “Well, sunnabitch, that’s what I am doing.”

                At least Mom wasn’t walking by to laugh at the two of us arguing over who was going to get which tire to put on the disc.  Mom called Dad and me “the pit crew” each spring for our swiftness in moving tires from one piece of machinery to another.

                “I think we’re gonna have to get us some tires,” Dad announced.

                This meant driving through Sebeka (population 600) to Nimrod (population 69) and up into the pine woods north of the village. There, an enterprising old farmer had set up a tire business.  His sons had moved to the “cities” years before.  Seeing the opportunities in the junkyards of Minneapolis and St. Paul, they would bring up pickup loads of scavenged tires from wrecked cars.  These tires had already been in an accident, greatly reducing the value and integrity of the rubber.  The family business became reselling old tires from car wrecks to the local farmers for ridiculously low prices.

                The used tires were scattered about the farmyard.  With a few scrawny dogs following us around, Dad would look at each tire and rim. 

                “Whatcha think, Pooch?”

                Dad would kick a tire and ask my opinion.  He only asked my opinion to appear thoughtful as part of the bargaining process.  Dad would buy what Dad was going to buy, regardless of my input. Sometimes, though, the defects were obvious.

                “It’s got a pretty big patch of rubber hanging off on this side.”

                “Well, we gotta find something better than that.  It’s not too bad on the rest of it, though.  Remember which one it is. If we can’t find something better, we can get this one.”

                Hunks of rubber were ripped and hanging loosely on some of the tires.  I always wondered what happened to the people in the accident.  Some of the wrecks must have been spectacularly dangerous, given the torn chunks of rubber off the tire.

                The most difficult part was finding faults in a tire that would initially look solid.  I am not saying the old farmer super-glued some of those tires together.  But there would be hairline tears that were nearly invisible on the dirty black tires.  If not inspected carefully, those tires were the most dangerous.   15R was a generic-sized tire, used for everything on the farm, “borrowed” from machinery to pick-up to wagons and back again.  Eventually, those hairline tears and cracks would give out.

                Fortunately, all of us were aware that one of our family mottos was: “Never trust the brakes”, so no one drove any faster than fifty-five miles an hour.  No matter what you were driving, though, it was disconcerting to suddenly drop down and lean to the right or left.  Thump, thump, thump, bump, bump, bump meant that the hairline crack had caused a chunk of rubber to fall off.  With each rotation, the car would jolt suddenly, trying to tear the steering wheel from our hands.  Kaboom and whoosh meant that the entire tire had disintegrated in mid-drive.

If you were lucky, your drive consisted of a thump and bump and not a whoosh.  A whoosh meant it was time to change the tire. Unless you were Dad.  Dad always bought “good rims”, or so he claimed, that he could and often did drive for miles after a blow-out. There went another five dollars, “shot to shit” as Dad liked to say.

Spring also meant that the baby animals migrated to the house.  Mom, who hated animals in the house, would be overwhelmed.  Baby chicks, running around under a heat lamp on a carpet of used newspapers, cheeped at us all day and night.  Those beautiful little balls of fluff would live in a corner of the living room for the first days of their life. Then, after a careful inspection and a newspaper change, they went into exile.

“It’s time to move these dirty chickens to the chicken coop,” Mom would announce.

“But they are still little babies,” I argued, unsuccessfully, each spring.

I had already cuddled and named most of them.  Indistinguishable white blobs of incontinence to Mom, each chick had a personality and sentient awareness to me.

"They need more feeders, little Bonnie Blue keeps getting pushed back, and Fritzi in the corner there? He's just a bully. You gotta watch him, or he will peck at the others. They don't even have a mama to sit on them to keep them warm!" I would tell mom, gesturing at fifty identical white baby chickens.

“They are gonna be fine with a heat lamp in the chicken coop, it ain’t that cold at night now,” Mom would tell me, having the final word as always. 

It was just as well, with our freezer to be their destiny, cohabitating would only allow me to become even more attached.  Mom was aware of Dad’s rule of not slaughtering any of the baby’s pets and knew she had a short window of time to sever the emotional bond I was forming.

Bottle lambs were different. Even Mom would agree they were cute. From their upright little ears full of curiosity, their dark aware eyes, even their little soft fuzzy knees, baby lambs are teddy bears come to life. Putting a black rubber bottle nipple on top of an old Coke bottle, I would feed them every few hours. 

The milk had to be warm, “You don’t want to hurt their tummy,” Mom would warn me. Mom hated sheep, but she was a softie when handed a baby lamb.

Orphan bottle lambs are also a highly successful birth control method.  No woman raised on a farm with bottle lambs thinks having a baby is all sunshine and rainbows.  The warm bottle every two hours during the day is cute and sweet.  Being the “Mama Sheep” at 10 pm, midnight, 2 am, 4 am, and 6 am is exhausting.

“Baa,” It would start.  I could hear little hooves shuffling on their newspaper carpet.

I would squeeze my eyes shut and try to go back to sleep.  Maybe, if I didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, the lamb would go back to sleep.

“BAAAAAA”  The lamb would get louder, more demanding, throwing itself against its large cardboard prison. It was impossible to sleep.

Exhausted, I would get up, fill the bottle with milk, and warm it in a pot of water on the stove.  Testing the temperature on my wrist, I would fight the nipple onto the bottle.  What was an easy task in daylight hours became impossible at 2 am. The lamb’s frantic screams of hunger only increased when it saw me preparing the bottle.  Sometimes the lamb would either jump over the cardboard fence or push it down to escape and come to “mama”.  I would stand at the stove, testing the milk temperature while a baby lamb enthusiastically sucked on my ankles. 

If the ewe doesn’t release the milk for a lamb, the baby lamb butts their head against the ewe’s udder.  If the human foster mama doesn’t warm the milk bottle fast enough, the lamb becomes frustrated and butts the back of their knee. 

The lambs were soon big enough to tear down their cardboard box fence. Each spring, a new lamb would run across the linoleum and slam into the back of my knee. My knees buckling as I waited in the days before microwaves, I would start to plot the lamb’s removal and return to the herd.  My attachment was to an infant bundle of soft wool; I was not attached to a teenage ruffian who destroyed my sleep and knees.  

Not soon enough, I would hear, “It's time to get that damn sheep out of the house!”

Spring must have been tough on Mom.  She never believed animals belonged in the house.  Yet each spring, “ever since we got you”, we had a nursery of “Pooch’s critters” in the house.  Dogs, cats, a crow, a jackrabbit, a fox, a chipmunk, a squirrel, pigeons, orphan chicks, baby sparrows, lambs, ducks, geese, and a piglet, just to mention a few.  All were carefully sneaked into the house with Dad’s assistance and placed in a box for a crib.

I still idolize spring, the smell of green grass and fresh dirt.  The warm sunshine and the feeling of renewal each year.  I never understood why Dad and Mom were so cranky and unappreciative of springtime. To me, each spring day was like seeing the first rose after a long, hard winter. It all depends on the definition of that phrase.