A1A South

I hope all the mothers out there had a lovely mother’s day spent eating delicacies at a fancy restaurant of their choosing paid for by their lovely families, receiving flowers, and otherwise being presented with tokens of their family’s esteem.

I intended to go up and do the same for my mother, but her electricity was out and she feared leaving my terminally ill stepdad alone with no electricity and a tornado watch in effect, so we have a raincheck to do it tomorrow or Tuesday, depending on the weather. I was going to kick back and relax in my La-Z chair, read a book, and wait for my children to worship me when I got a call from the sheep shearer. He was in town and could be at my house in about an hour and a half.

Book went flying one way, and I took off out the door because the barn was in a state of disrepair that only somebody that has rambunctious rams can appreciate. Gate posts were knocked down, gates were destroyed, and the whole thing really needed rebuilding. We had an hour and a half to get it done.

I say “we” because, for the first year in a long time, SwampMan went out to the barn to help me. This was nice, but……SwampMan believes in doing things right, whereas I can fix a lot of stuff with hay rope and cattle panels. I could have had the barn ready within 45 minutes but an hour and a half later, we hadn’t even gotten the gates up yet when the shearer came driving up. With SwampMan cutting off boards with the Sawzall and me whacking in nails and staples with a bigass hammer, we were done before much longer. SwampMan went into the house totally exhausted. I still had to get the sheep from the pasture into the barn, catch ‘em, halter ‘em, drag their wooly butts out to the shearer, put them back inside, and grab the next victim.

I love my sheep shearer. He comes down once a year from up north and without him, I believe all the sheep would be gone by now. Don’t get me wrong, I can shear and have done so in the past with way more sheep than I have now, but my back isn’t as young as it used to be. Plus I had kids to fetch the sheep for me. When I do it myself, I have to catch a sheep, drag him to where I want to shear him, shear him, turn him loose, then go catch another sheep. With a shearer, I get to skip the bending over and shearing the sheep part.

At 10:30 p.m., we finished. I came inside to find SwampMan asleep, and I had missed the calls from my adoring children. I don’t really feel like cooking or going into town to grab a burger at McDonald’s to celebrate mother’s day. Guess I’ll just take a hot shower to get the sheep smell off of me and head to bed.