Many of you know that my husband and I are in the midst of moving. We have been purging, scanning, shredding, and packing for a month now, and frankly I’m bored to death with it all. The keyboard is calling me, so before it, too, ends up taped up in a box, I’m ignoring the TO DO List in favor of some reminiscing.
Early in my brother’s foray into 4-H, Dad bought him some sheep–Cheeko, Meeko, Peeko, and Baa Baa. Mine was Baa Baa. (NOT the sheep pictured here. These two were Ophelia and Isaac Hayes from several years later.)

We spent nearly every Sunday afternoon that summer, clip, clip clipping the sheep’s wool in an attempt at 4-H perfection. They probably still had a good two inches of wool on them by the time the county fair rolled around in August. Back then it was all about “blocking.” For some reason, they wanted the sheep to look square.

In later years, shearing was popular, to the point of some sheep being barely clothed for their parade around the show ring. Probably a sign of our decaying society.

One summer, the sheep shearer had had a few belts before he put shears to sheep and we weren’t sure if we wouldn’t be better off just taking them straight to the slaughter house, since they were nearly cut to ribbons anyway.

Poor Dorcus Hines.

That was the sheep that developed kidney stones. We took her to the vet, but he was getting ready for some wing-ding of a barbecue, so performed emergency surgery right there on his lawn. I was appalled at this inconsiderate violation of my lamb, who was none too happy about it herself. And the vet’s wife was livid. He was getting blood and yucky stuff on the grass. She did not recover from this ordeal, and Dad ended up having to shoot her a week or so later to put her out of her misery.

Dorcus, not the vet’s wife.