Convention, Character and Boredom

I love the old house that sits on a bluff overlooking my Home Pasture.

Built in 1906, it has lots of windows, natural light and wallpapered ambiance.

But it isn’t for everyone.

Cell service is spotty and internet is nonexistent. Visitors need four-wheel-drive in the winter.

Apprentices have used it for the past two summers, but I don’t have an apprentice this year so I decided to rent Grandma’s House.

Lambing season is winding down and the weather is warm enough that the pipes are not likely to freeze so I put an ad on Craigslist.

After all, I work more efficiently with a deadline.

A woman emailed to ask if she could look at it the next day.

That note created a tight deadline.

Too tight.

I put her off for three days.

After all, I have orphan lambs who need a bottle every four hours and a flock of sheep who need attention so I don’t acquire any more orphans.

My first priority was to repair the porch where the cows had found shelter during a winter snowstorm.

Next, I hooked up the water lines, fully expecting cracked pipe joints to show me where the leaks were.

For the first time ever, all of the joints held.

Now I could clean up the winter’s dust.

Anxiety overwhelmed me.

I am not a good house cleaner.

Most of the time, I only spot spiderwebs hanging from the ceiling as I look over a guest’s shoulder.

My go-to strategy is to gently steer the guest away from a potential Black widow.

In the farthest recesses of my mind, a clean house signifies good character.

Civilized, conventional, upstanding people have clean houses.

As I swept and wiped, the recesses of my mind rapidly moved forward to overwhelm my executive frontal lobes.

Then I paused to reconsider.

I laughed at myself as I took time to feed the bum lambs.

Maybe it isn’t successful people who have clean houses. Maybe only bored people have clean houses.

I have far better things to worry about than a clean house.

The next morning, a young ewe stood over her newborn dead lamb.

She was frantic and devastated.

She also was valuable to me for her potential to have lambs for years to come.

A sheep that doesn’t raise a lamb this year doesn’t get a second chance next year.

Mopping Grandma’s House would have to wait.

I picked up the dead lamb and led the ewe into a small pen.

She waited impatiently while I skinned her baby and made a new coat for one of my orphan lambs.

I wasn’t sure I could trick the ewe into believing the orphan was her baby, but I had to try.

If the ewe was convinced by the smell of the coat, maybe she would ignore the miracle of her baby rising from the dead.

The ewe nuzzled the orphan lamb.

The orphan wasn’t quite sure where the new faucet was located, but with a bit of my help he nursed as if he had been starving for days.

The ewe stood still, allowing him all he could gulp down.

I watched them for as long as I could before trudging up the hill to mop.

The potential renter would arrive in an hour.

Convention, character evaluations and boredom wrestled with one another in my mind as I implemented my tried-and-true trick for my Clean House Judgement Day.

I added a little Pinesol to the mop bucket, gave the kitchen a lick and a promise, hoped the house would pass the smell test and went out to check my sheep.

I didn’t even look for spiderwebs.

After all, convention is overrated.

Boredom is far more dangerous.