The Glowing Shed

This spring, there will be lamb.

There comes a time in a woman’s life when thoughts lead to sheep.

It’s inevitable. You’ll be minding your own business, leading a perfectly respectable life and it hits you. You’re out walking the dog and a brisk wind makes you pull your scarf a little tighter. Your fingers grasp for a crook that isn’t there. You stare into the middle distance, thoughts slide into white static, and you picture yourself wearing tweed on some forlorn moor as your flock grazes on a distant hill…

There was a time when all I could think about was becoming a shepherd; and I was not of tweed-and-moor age, people. I was in my early twenties and I should have been at a discotheque, but I have been 40 since I was 9 and fate is fate.

To me sheep meant freedom. Because any woman that has sheep in her everyday life—especially any woman that was not raised in a sheep-rearing household—has made a very specific series of decisions to get her there. And in my not-yet-fully-formed 22-year-old brain I had convinced myself that if I could ever get to the point where I had my own sheep on a hill, misery could never touch me.