Shepherd’s Sight
A Farming Life
- Publisher
- ECW Press
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2024
- Category
- Mammals, Sustainable Living, Agriculture & Food, Environmentalists & Naturalists
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781770417656
- Publish Date
- Mar 2024
- List Price
- $24.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781778522918
- Publish Date
- Mar 2024
- List Price
- $15.99
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Description
“A joy to read. Compelling, wise, and deeply human.” — Helen Humphreys, author of Followed by the Lark
A restorative and resonant memoir of a year in the life of an aging shepherd
For 50 years, Barbara McLean has tended a flock of Border Leicester sheep on her small Ontario farm. Shepherd’s Sight shares the crises, pleasures, and challenges of farm life through the seasons. Now in her 70s, McLean faces a new problem: how much longer she can continue with the physically taxing work that is her central source of meaning and satisfaction.
Through her unsentimental gaze, we witness the highs and heartbreaks of delivering and rearing lambs, the shearing and spinning of wool, the wildlife in the woods (and occasionally in the house), and the garden produce moving from seed to harvest to table. Even after half a century on this land, McLean is still making fresh observations, and she shares them in evocative, elegant prose. As she moves through the calendar year, she also reflects on years past, offering a long view on climate, stewardship, and agriculture.
With its lyrical description and absorbing storytelling, Shepherd’s Sight offers an unforgettable glimpse of a life lived on the land.
About the author
Contributor Notes
Barbara McLean is the author of Lambsquarters: Scenes from a Handmade Life (2002). She lives in Grey County, Ontario.
Excerpt: Shepherd’s Sight: A Farming Life (by (author) Barbara McLean)
January
The loft is cold as the year turns over. A chilly draft seeps between the gothic windows and their storms, nothing quite fitting right. The peaked ceiling has just a thin layer of insulation between the paint and the cedar shingles, and the whole north end is glass. A chimney runs through the space, its parged sides stingy with the heat within, but some warmth wafts up the stairwell from the wood stove below.
The wood is wet this year. Soggy from a summer of alternating showers and monsoons. Wood that was stacked to dry, piled north-south so the prevailing westerlies would whistle through, instead sagged from so much rain. The fires are slow to start. They sputter and die down, the heat evaporating in the sap.
Mice inhabit the house. A tiny house mouse, fearless, runs along the walls of the kitchen, into the front hall, hides in the toy tractor shed made from a clementine box. A perfect Beatrix Potter house. He is part of a family. I hear them in the walls and the heating ducts, and in the mornings, I find their tripped traps, empty, safe still. My pantry is littered with tiny bits of foil, bitten off the tops of olive oil bottles. They prefer the first press.
Outside all is avian. Woodpeckers — hairy and downy — peck the house if I run out of suet. They suss out cluster flies from under the eaves and attempt to exhume the desiccated corpses trapped between the window panes. Goldfinches and chickadees are the January mainstay. Blue jays intermittently chase them off, then depart in frustration as the feeders shut with their weight.
The barn is quiet in January. Sheep are on maintenance: fed hay in the morning, hay in the evening. That’s all they ask. They are content to munch, ruminate, gestate, and stay outside in the courtyard, despite having access to the barn. Snow covers their backs, but wool traps their body heat. They begin the year placid and calm, undeterred by blizzards or sleet, sensing perhaps that they will be cared for. Fed and watered. Greenwood, the calico barn cat, lies curled like a comma in her straw nest under a feeder. We moved to the farm in January almost fifty years ago.
Young enough to weather the ruin it then was. It was storming as we drove the rented truck with all we owned up the snowy lane. I don’t remember the cold that day. Perhaps the furnace had been installed by then, but I do know there was no duct work yet, nor hot water, nor anything but basic electricity. Excitement and possibility must have kept me warm as we lit the wood-burning cookstove in the primitive nineteenth-century kitchen.
Editorial Reviews
“In a tightly woven skein of past and present, Barbara McLean relives her half-century on an old Ontario farm: the restoration of the buildings, the gathering of her flock of sheep, the exhilarations, the losses, and finally, the grief of knowing she can’t stay there forever. More than a memoir of farming or living on the land, McLean describes a life-arc we all travel in different ways, from the hope and energy of youth to the rock-hard decisions of advancing age.” — Merilyn Simonds, author of Woman, Watching
“Barbara McLean’s chronicle of a life spent as a shepherd in Ontario — tied to the urgency of tasks and the seasons — is a joy to read. Compelling, wise, and deeply human.” — Helen Humphreys, author of Followed by the Lark
“Shepherd’s Sight is a beautiful reminder that, for individuals and nations alike, it’s only natural for memories to change, for awareness to deepen. If the day that Barbara McLean fears comes sooner rather than later, let’s hope she can nonetheless continue writing books such as this.” — Literary Review of Canada
“Shepherd’s Sight is a rich book, full of the realities, both enchanting and difficult, of living life on the land. McLean brings a reminder of where our wool comes from and graciously shares her years of experience and wonder.” — Digits & Threads: Canadian Fibre & Textile Arts Magazine
“Explore the joyful highs and heartbreaking lows of life on a farm in this comforting and clear-eyed memoir...Shepherd's Sight is a deeply human, life-affirming book.” — Apple Books
