The View from Highland Ranch
By John McCormick
Home for the Holidays
Flowers bloom in the spring. Store discounts bloom in the holiday season. It's just a fact of life.
People with kids begin feeling the spending pressure about the beginning of November. That's when the new crop of toys hit the stores and ads for them start sprouting in those incredibly bad Japanese cartoons where 20 still drawings substitute for real animation. I REALLY miss Tex Avery, Mel Blanc, and toons with plots.
Here on the ranch we have a different crop this year. Lambs! Some of the rams were feeling independent around July 4 and started humming "Only Ewe," followed by a visit to the females.
As a consequence, this year we are getting the first "spring" lambs in November.
We don't have kids (or goats) but, if we did, I bet they'd be more interested in these bouncing bundles of wool than in Saturday cartoons, although I bet visions of toys would still be dancing in their heads.
With the leaves raked and the pastures in no more need of mowing, this is my favorite time of the year. Of course the current season is usually my favorite time I just like the change of seasons.
For example, I couldn't live in Southern California which only had one season the time I stayed out there - too hot, too dry, and too polluted, not to mention too crazy. Here the change of season always seems to come just when I have had enough of the last season.
The arrival of winter probably annoys most people. I love it. Frozen ground isn't mud!
The other wonderful thing winter brings is new lambs. They usually start to arrive around the beginning of February. This gives us something to look forward to other than Groundhog Day when we abandon town to the tourists.
The normal onset of lambing seems intended by Mother Nature to come just when winter's cold and snow are getting us down.
Despite our neighbors' warnings, we haven't been snowbound yet but we might not notice anyway since, running an Internet-based business, we don't leave the ranch for weeks at a stretch in the winter. Also, we have everything we want here.
We feel very much as farmers must have at the turn of the last century when daily runs to town were out of the question. Of course we aren't isolated the way they were we do it by choice.
Phone service is good probably due to the installation being fairly new. We have good dial-up access to the Internet and the fact that we're on top of a hill means we can pick up Pittsburgh and even Ohio television stations with a small antenna. There's also an old C-band satellite dish, but we've cut back on the number of channels we regularly watch lambs are just too much fun and an inexpensive X-10 wireless camera in the lambing stalls means we can watch them from the house.
Winter's also the time to read books we got over the summer.
The early lambs were a big surprise but there's another change we'll make this year.
We're eating ham for Thanksgiving. Somehow it just doesn't feel right to have bird on the table after I spent so many wonderful late summer afternoons watching a flock of 35 wild turkeys eat their way through the front yard every day.
Their numbers are a bit reduced what with hunting season and all, but there's little shooting near here so we have lots of feathered visitors and, unlike deer, which are just competition for our grazing animals and a threat to the garden, playing host to wild turkeys doesn't have a downside.
Copyright 2003, John A. McCormick, Inc.
