Letter from Harrisburg

Every year, my husband, Paul, of the great ideas and endless ambition, asks the children if they want to raise lambs again this spring. Of course they all say yes, so Paul calls the Oregon State University sheep barn and arranges to pick up a few “bummer” lambs, whose mothers aren’t able to care for them.

And then, every year, right on cue, I, of the limited energy and patience, dull the shine on their enthusiasm by announcing, “If you want bummer lambs they are YOUR responsibility. I have paid my dues with getting up at night with babies and I am NOT going to feed them for you and I DON’T want that milk replacer mess in my kitchen!”

They all say, “Yes Mom. Of course, Mom. We know, Mom.”

They go to the sheep barn and come home with two long-legged lambs each. Names are carefully chosen, heat lamps are set up and the first batch of milk is mixed in my 1-quart Tupperware measuring cup.

I spend the next month fussing about sticky milk residue, wet black nipples and milky Coke bottles on the kitchen counters and asking myself why we do this, is it worth it, and what exactly were we thinking.

Paradoxically, at the same time, I fall in love with Calvin and Piggy and Puddleglum just as thoroughly as the children do, because there is nothing quite like a lamb, and in my heart I know exactly why we do this every year.

That is how it’s always been done, for the past 14 years. But this year, everything was different.

Paul had mentioned getting lambs again, but hadn’t yet called the OSU sheep barn. Then, at suppertime one day, 14-year-old Steven told me worriedly that there was a newborn lamb by the pasture fence next to the garden, and it had been there, alone, ever since he came home from school.

We tied up the dog, thinking he might be scaring the mother away, but hours later the ewe still hadn’t showed up, and the lamb was too weak to stand.

Paul called the farmer that owns the flock in that field. “My husband’s already in bed,” said his wife. “We’ll just hope the lamb is still alive in the morning.”

Paul hung up and repeated the conversation. We looked at each other: Steven, the formerly motherless child; Jenny, his tenderhearted little sister; and me, their mom. Were we going to leave an abandoned lamb out in the cold? We were not, and that was that.

So Steven brought it in, still crusty and with a fresh umbilical cord stub, and put it in a laundry basket with an old rug. I found a Coke bottle and last year’s nipples and mixed up my best guess at milk replacer. Steven fed the lamb, and soon it perked up enough to climb out of the basket and trot around the kitchen.

So we found a plastic bin with higher sides and put it in the bathroom with a heater. We all hoped we would get to keep it, even I of the stern speeches about bummer lambs not being my responsibility.

Steven fed it at 2 a.m.

Paul talked to the farmer the next day. He said we could keep the lamb, and Steven named it Homer. Paul bought a large bag of powdered milk replacer.

By 4 weeks old, Homer was living with the chickens, galloping around the fescue field, and playing happily with Steven and Jenny.

Since this story had such a happy ending, Paul suggested we call about some bummer lambs he saw advertised on Craigslist. “Yes!” said the children, and Steven thought we should get seven of them.

We are not getting seven more lambs, I said flatly. Maybe five.

It turned out that these were the same people from whom we got Homer, and who have flocks and herds all over the valley like Abraham the patriarch had. They offered the lambs for free since they use our water all summer. But only four lambs, because “Sarah” didn’t think the fifth one would last the night. “The others should be OK,” she said.

“We have never lost a lamb,” Paul told her.

“You’re very lucky,” Sarah said.

Soon three white lambs and one black one were lying in plastic totes in my kitchen — four lambs who were the most pathetic-looking specimens I had ever seen. Limp, sad, quiet; two of them runny with diarrhea. No baaing, no scrambling to get out of the totes, no nosing around for milk.

We moved them out of the kitchen and turned on a heater. Jenny, oblivious to their state, decided the black one was hers and fell in love with it as only Jenny can fall instantly in love. She walked around in a happy daze, making a list of possible names when she was supposed to be setting the table. “Pierre, Elli, Nibbles, Mistrey, Midnight, Frosty …” She settled on Nibbles.

We tried to feed the lambs, but they didn’t seem interested. Paul and I began to give each other desperate looks that said, “What on Earth have we gotten ourselves into?” — the same sort of looks we gave each other back when the first baby wouldn’t stop screaming, the first child needed surgery and the first daughter got hormones.

After supper Jenny went to give Nibbles some love and attention, and wept horrified tears when he didn’t respond.

They had only a few sips of milk at 7 p.m.

It all got worse and worse. The stillness, the smells, the hopeless despair, the daughter’s tears.

Subdued and quiet, Paul and I would glance at each other — “Is he  …?” A quick shake of the head, “I don’t think so. It won’t be long.” After a while I pulled on rubber gloves and palpated the black bundle in the tote. It was stiff and unyielding. “He’s gone,” I told Jenny. Blinking tears, she went upstairs to be alone.

I woke up at 2 a.m. A light was on. I found Paul in his blue bathrobe in the back hallway, bottles in hand, feeding lambs. Despite his diligence, another lamb died that night.

The other two survived. One has joined Homer in the chicken coop. The other is still indoors, his prognosis iffy despite the penicillin injections I give him and the loving care from Jenny.

“Doesn’t it make you wish you hadn’t gotten lambs at all?” one of my older daughters asked me on the phone.

This is the strange thing about this experience — while I wish Jenny could have been spared her anguish, I can’t bring myself to think we should not have taken in the lambs. Despite all the trouble and money and bother, all the smells and messes and sticky bottles on the kitchen counter, I don’t regret it.

I hope my children are absorbing the most important point in all this — that what is true for lambs is even more true for children. They are worth all the risks and uncertainties and costs and noise and disappointments and midnight feedings, an orphan cannot be left out in the cold, the weak have as much value as the strong, and for our little flock we would do all of it all over again.