Early on Wednesday morning, I put on my best sheep-welcoming outfit. This consisted of my least holey T-shirt, worn over an ancient merino thermal thingy which is covered in cat hair, and my least muddy and sheep poo-smeared Kmart track pants.
I was waiting for the much-anticipated return of sheep to Lush Places.
Our paddocks have been empty, with the exception of our three now-elderly pet sheep, since Miles the sheep farmer sold his flock of milking sheep and retired at the end of May.
An empty paddock might be the saddest sight in the world – a sentence I could never have imagined myself writing before we moved to Lush Places eight years ago.
People sometimes ask if we miss Auckland. The people who ask are always Aucklanders. People from the Wairarapa never ask that question because they could not contemplate missing Auckland. Auckland, they reckon, is beneath contempt. It is that place congested with cars and road cones and people obsessed with property values. So, no, we have never, not for a moment, missed Auckland. What I had been missing was seeing lots of sheep – or any other animals for that matter – in the paddocks.
I wrote recently that I was contemplating getting a milking cow. Sue, from the Manawatū, emailed to say: “Don’t even consider a cow. You want a nice dairy goat in milk that could carry on milking for many years without being mated. The amount of milk would be suitable for a two-person household. Plus they are small, easy to handle, poo is not messy and great for the garden (nanny berries). They are as loveable as sheep … It would be helpful to provide a buddy which could be a wether goat.”
A wether goat, or so the internet tells me, is a castrated billy goat, and is very good company, like a “big, friendly puppy dog”.
I would love a goat, or a pair of goats. I once met a goat called Stephen while on a country road trip with my friend Janet. We saw the dear little black and white thing in a paddock and we stopped the car, got out and called, “Hello, goat.” This set off a farmer’s dogs and he and his family came out to have a look at the weirdos calling out “hello, goat” at their goat. We apologised and they said, “Come and meet Stephen.”
He was jolly good fun and very naughty. They had found him on the side of the road and adopted him. He still took himself off for jaunts. Goats do that; that is the trouble with them. There is an old country saying that if you can chuck a bucket of water through a fence, a goat can get through it. But I would still love a goat. I asked Greg if I could get a couple. He said no.
So no goats for Lush Places. But at last we now have lots of sheep again. Our nice neighbour, a proper farmer, has leased our paddocks. When I saw him and his pregnant ewes on that Wednesday, I shouted to Greg: “They’re here!”
We ran out and gingerly approached them. They gingerly regarded us. They are romney crosses. We were used to east friesians which, being milking sheep, were used to people. They were sociable and easily tamed. They liked to be patted. They were my friends. I miss them.
It remains to be seen whether you can make friends with romney-cross sheep. They have friendly faces, like teddy bears, but I looked at them as if they were creatures from another planet and they looked at me as though I were a creature from another planet. They seemed astounded, too, at the sight of my cats in the paddocks and playing up trees.
On Wednesday afternoon, just before the light faded, I looked out the kitchen windows and saw sheep grazing, under the winter-bare pear trees. The daffodils are out and the tūī are making music in the willows. We will have sheep in our paddocks again, and lambs in two weeks’ time. The natural order has been restored at Lush Places.
