I’ve learned so much from writing this column and needing to work within a limit of 650-675 words. Most weeks, the column is much too long when I finish the first writing, and the winnowing of my word count is almost always the longest part of my editing process.
Looking at the details I thought were essential to a story and discovering they aren’t necessary after all, is humbling in a good way.
After a decade of writing this column though, I thought I had the process down to a science, which is a cliché way of saying I didn’t expect to be surprised by writing it anymore. Of course, that is a delightfully appropriate cliché to use because science is always changing its opinions about the nature of reality, and so apparently am I.
The last month or so of writing has been challenging because I often had too much to say, or, just as often, was having feelings so big I didn’t know how to fit them into words.
Last week, in particular, I wrote about troubles with the flock, and I had to leave a lot out. When documenting our struggles with Border Disease, a virus that can cause stillborn or severely deformed babies if a ewe gets infected at a vulnerable time of gestation, I didn’t mention that while most of the lambs born with the disease died within hours or days of birth, one survived.
Ironically, she was the tiniest and weakest among them. The others were deformed and weak, too, but they were able to get up and suckle. This little one wasn’t even able to stand, let alone nurse. She was the smallest lamb I’d ever seen, barely more than a handful. When it became clear she wasn’t going to come around, I gathered her floppy, motionless body to my chest and carried her to the house, assuming she wouldn’t make it through the night.
For almost a week, she slept swathed in fleece blankets. Her body wasn’t able to create enough heat, so I kept her swaddled even during the August afternoons. She also was too weak to drink, so I coaxed milk into her by the dropperful, wondering if it was enough to keep her alive. Every time I checked on her, I expected to find her dead. She never stirred from her blankets, lost in a world of dreams.
Then, during one of her midnight feedings, she suddenly awoke and began to suck. The next day she took her first steps. The day after that she was running. She was ready to join the flock.
But by then, we’d learned lambs that survive Border Disease are “persistent infectors.” Their bodies replicate the virus for the rest of their lives, spreading the disease indefinitely. Moreover, if they survive their birth and early days, they still usually die before weaning time. So this tiny warrior of a lamb will probably not live longer than the next few months, and if she does, can never be around the other sheep. My heart breaks anew every hour because of this.
Today, my good friend, who is also a writer, told me of a ranching family she interviewed about the wildfires that are ravaging southeast Montana. This family has already lost 130 cattle, and they expect they will need to put down more of the injured in the coming days.
Unbelievably, two of the cows that were saved from the fires are named Hope and Faith because they were formerly sickly calves the family nursed back to health.
Our sickly lamb is named Eudora, which means bringer of gifts. She is romping across the yard with the dogs as I type this on the porch, for now, full of life. And here’s the thing about faith and hope — they are the gifts that are born from difficulty, from heartbreak; they are the gifts that bring a peace that surpasses all understanding. They are the reminders that even in times of lamentation, there are reasons to rejoice, and that is a story worth telling, no matter the length.
