Mission Accomplished

Note: Before reading this post, you might want to skip down and read the post for March 17th.

Well, Blanche is sheared.

During the course of the ordeal, I resolved to travel to the ends of the earth to find a sheep shearer next year.

By the time we were finished, I considered the three hours well spent; I had experienced a deep communing with my sheep. Blanche and I are now more emotionally bonded than ever.

If my girlfriend Nathalie hadn’t of generously volunteered to spend her Sunday morning helping me, the task would have never been completed. On Thursday, I had made a stab at shearing Blanche; but was not able to make her stand or lay still by myself . . . and Blanche outsmarted me by escaping.

At dinner that evening, I mentioned to Nathalie about my unproductive morning. She volunteered to help. I had plied her with an aperitif. I graciously accepted her offer and told her to wear old clothes.

An hour before Nathalie was scheduled to arrive, I went out with two buckets of grain to seduce Blanche and S-D into the little sheep cottage where Blanche had lived as a baby. I got Blanche into the house, and S-D was entering when Cirq the cat showed up and Soixante-Douze decided that she would rather go play with Cirq than eat corn . . . very strange behavior for a sheep. Then Blanche took off, because she can’t be parted from S-D. The two ewes ignored my lame pleadings, and my rattling of the corn in the buckets. I decided on the course of action that always worked best during my child rearing years: I ignored them. I acted like I could care less if they went into the sheep cottage.

After a half an hour of wandering around the yard, eating the struggling hydrangea bushes down to stubs, the sheep showed up at my kitchen door looking for me (tune in next week to see the photo). Now that they wanted me, I was able to wave the buckets in front of their noses and get them to follow me into the sheep cottage. I locked them in. Blanche gave me a forlorn, why have you forsaken me look, but didn’t bleat. I walked away feeling badly that I had to trick them.

Nathalie looked as if she hadn’t been awake very long. I felt just a teensy bit guilty, knowing that she didn't know what she was about to get herself into.

I wielded my new English sheep shearers. Nathalie used a pair of large fabric scissors. Nathalie is an accountant and so she is much more focused than I am. I wasn’t getting much wool off, but Nathalie made a lot of initial progress, taking a wide swath off of Blanche’s back. When her scissors became too blunted. I handed her my shears and went to the house to get the knife sharpener.

When I returned, I used the scissors, and since Nathalie was getting the hang of the shearers, I let her keep them. My little neighbor, Céline, showed up to watch. I had another pair of garden hand clippers lying around and she took an unattractive patch out of Soixante-Douze before I noticed and could stop her. S-D’s wool wasn’t very long, and I figure that she can wait until this summer to be sheared. I want my husband to experience the joy of shearing a sheep.



Soixante-Douze behaved bravely and admirably, staying close by Blanche, even though S-D doesn’t like to be around people. So it was quite the cozy scene in the little sheep cottage – the three women snipping away at Blanche while S-D stayed glued to the side of Blanche that we were ignoring for the moment.

I was worried about Blanche, because she was breathing so hard. Nathalie snipped her skin three times. She felt badly. I sprayed antiseptic on the shallow nicks. Hopefully, the flies won’t find the wounds before they close up. The antiseptic is a bright blue. When we were finished with Blanche, she looked as if she was a Picasso creation . . . cubist and blue.

Past the outer crust of dirt and grime, Blanche’s wool was long and the color of pale yellow cream. It’s a shame we had to take it off in little snippets. I would have loved to have cleaned it and knitted a sweater out of it. (Of course, I wouldn’t start learning to knit until after I’m done with hand-stitching my king-size quilt, putting in a garden, building a chateau with my pile of rocks, and painting my upper hallway in the manner of a fifteenth-century Romanesque church.)

Blanche and I were both worn out. I took a hot bath and postponed my walk with my neighbor until tomorrow morning. Blanche and S-D went to their hill and immediately fell asleep under their bushes.