Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

The old saying “In like a lamb out like a lion” when talking about March seems to be applying itself this week. With a little sunshine, some melting snow and the ability to stand around outside for longer than a few minutes at a time each of us feels that we can now stretch off the long winter blues and prepare for Spring.

Spring was always an exciting time for a young man on the farm. By the time mid-March arrived we were almost through lambing time, an amazing and wonderful ritual that came every year to the farm. The bred ewes would be penned up in the barn lot for most of the winter and tended too most every day. When I close my eyes and think back to that time I can still see the brick of the barn, feel the concrete isle beneath my feet and smell the sweet smell of summer time hay and dust as it curled down from the haymow. On the far northwest side of the barn there were three stalls, built and perhaps meant for draft horses, but it was there under heat lamps in fresh straw that the newborn lambs would make their appearance into the world.

For those of you who have never had the privilege of living through a lambing season there is one important thing to remember. Weather changes everything. Lambs, it seems, were always born either right before a major snowstorm, or after a little warm spell. The kind of warm spell that makes you think it’s finally Spring before dashing your hopes one morning when you wake up and realized your overalls and gloves aren’t dried after you got a little cocky and left them on the back porch.

Although sheep, the sheep I raised, were always white as adults, when lambs are born they are black as charcoal. Every night there was usually one last late night trip to the barn to double check the heat lamps and to make sure everyone was settled, and then in the early crisp mornings I would bundle up and head out to the barn where I would find one, most of the times two and in that strange instant three newborn lambs on shaky legs standing next to their mother. Lambs much like calves take a little bit to get their land legs under them but soon they are up and running around, their long tails flopping off behind them.

New lambs were tagged, recorded, given shots and had their tails banded and the cycle of life continued along until the lambs were all here and it had just started to warm up enough to melt all the snow off the lot to the east of the house. Just as soon as the first green grass would appear the lambs would run and jump and play along those green pastures that I remembered so well from my youth. Lambing season now done, had given way to spring, much the same as it has done for hundreds of years. A dark lonely winter, a new birth, the hope for the new year and a special time around the farm.

See you next week...Remember, we're all in this together.