Mom's letter circa 1950 about naming the sheep

Oh you would have laughed. The other morning Elton was getting ready to go to work.  It was a howling rainstormy day but he needed to make sure his boom was intact.  While he was sitting in front of the fire putting on his logging boots, Barbie crawled over, picked up one of his slippers and threw it onto the porch.  Then she came back for one of his socks and threw it out.  It wasn’t until she was heading back to the door with his second slipper that he caught her.  My, I did watch with pleasure.

I am so excited, the new log house is finished and I am helping Jimmy pull down the old kitchen. It’s fun. He takes the shingles off and ties a rope around the corner uprights, I hold the rope, he keeps weakening things, I tug, and soon I tug the whole thing over.  What a collapse - I feel like the Almighty or something.  Jimmy takes some credit but I hog most.  We pack shingles and scraps away and get the mess cleaned up.  It lets a lot more light into our new place already.

I love our house now.  It needs a lot of fixing mind you, but I’m anxious to get started.  Even the old part of the log house is not properly done inside and I see many hours of hard work ahead but that doesn’t frighten me. 

The new kitchen has the same mammoth wood stove facing all who enter and Jimmy is in the process of building me a whole wall of cupboards and counter.  The sink has a large window above it so when I wash dishes I can look out at our garden.  Boy, I’m going to fix it up so much with some flowers and bulbs – maybe a rose or two. 

Jimmy is coming in, he can keep his eye on the kids for a few minutes while I do my favourite thing – see if I can bag myself a raven.  Our sheep are having lambs and none has died but I have been guarding them from the ravens.  Ravens just sit around and watch for a chance to grab the afterbirth; often in the process, they kill a lamb.  I dash outside every little while with the .22 and sometimes I see nothing in the trees but I shoot in that general direction and the black curses fly out.

 I’m almost ashamed to say that I have names for most of the sheep, which is most unfarmerlike.  We have nine lambs now, out of six sheep, and two more to hatch yet.  The lambs came unexpectedly early, the sheep usually are put in the yard when nearly due but two went missing before we got them in.  Jimmy found one of them, the Dowager, way up in the bush with one lamb.  They’re both all right but it’s easy for the lambs to get stuck under logs and things.  There is one particularly scraggly sheep that we named Popeye and she was still missing, then last night Jimmy yelled out, “There’s Popeye,” and the old devil was hiking down the cat road with a lamb beside her.  Jimmy hurried out to open the gate and she came full speed baaing her head off.  All the other sheep with families ran to meet her, they gathered around looking at her lamb and she ran from one to the other giving their lambs the once over.  It was like parents comparing children on the first day of nursery school.