I finally finished another book -- Sylvia's Farm: The Journal of an Improbable Shepherd by Sylvia Jorrin. One of my fantasy lives involves living on a farm and owning sheep, so Jorrin's book was right up my alley. Jorrin was in her fifties and the granddaughter of a farmer, but raised in a city and afraid of all animals. When she bought her property in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains in the 1980s she had no intention of having a working farm, but a neighbor talked her into sharing a small flock of sheep, and then he promptly quit the business. Jorrin discovered that she loved animals, and at the time of the book's publication, twenty years later, her farm was home to 120 sheep, 21 goats, 2 Jersey cows, 4 geese, 50 chickens, 4 cats, 1 dog, and a donkey. Every one of her animals has a name (but not "Bob" as in the shish ke-variety, like the sheep belonging to a friend of ours) and a story.Sylvia's Farm is a collection of columns that she wrote for her local newspaper. It is a chronicle of the ups and downs of those twenty years, the despair of bitter cold winters when the water froze continually, the joy of bottle feeding lambs, the struggle to fit in as a somewhat eccentric stranger in a relatively closed rural community. (This last piece was interesting: Jorrin does not drive, so she is dependent on the kindness of her neighbors for just about everything.)
In some ways, Jorrin reminds me of the children's author/illustrator Tasha Tudor, who has lived her adult life on a Vermont farm, dressing and living in a style from the mid-nineteenth century. Jorrin gets much of her farming wisdom from reprints of books from the early twentieth century. She is, however, conscious of her place in the newest millennium, and even has a chapter that is clearly written after the attacks of 9/11/01.
The language in this book struck my ear as somewhat awkward or old-fashioned, particularly the frequent use of the word "shall" as in, "I shall make a pear tart" or "I shall repair the pasture gate and paint it green." But that was a minor quirk, revealing much about her upbringing. Some of the chapters were very poetic. I was moved by one called This Is A Day that opened with
"This is a day the Lord has made. Those words are usually the first that come to my mind each morning when I get up."I don't know that I could live the life that Jorrin has chosen to live. The drama, the stress at times all felt overwhelming just to read, to say nothing of experience on a daily basis! On the other hand, I could certainly see myself living in that kind of a rhythm.
I shall say that I enjoyed this book.
