The Savior of the Lambs

Recent conversation with my Mom on Easter:

"So, I didn't get the lambs."

"What?" This made no sense to me what-so-ever.

"How long has it been since I talked with you? Well, remember how every year Emigration Market brings in baby lambs at Easter?" She was referring to live lambs opposed to the shanks I was in the middle of preparing. The local neighborhood market sets up a sort of seasonal petting zoo.

"Yes, I remember you were excited about taking the dogs to see them." Its a ritual to take the dogs to see the lambs or at Thanksgiving, the turkeys, just to see how they react. Off hand note: those turkeys are way bigger than Scottie dogs.

"Well, I never got the dogs there. But, JT had 4 baby lambs brought in. The mother wasn't well enough to produce her own milk and I was there when they arrived. I helped bottle feed the runt. Oh he was so cute! He didn't know how to work the nipple and his tongue kept sliding around it, but he finally got the hang of it."

"You fed the lambs?"

"Well, JT needed help. They were all scrawny. I don't know how he was planning on managing all 4 lambs at once since that mother was no help at all. So I offered to take a couple if he needed me. You know, I would just put them in the dog crates, set them up in the kitchen, and sleep on the couch until they said, 'maaawww,' and then I would go feed them." This is something my mother would completely do. When she was little, Mom was known for her odd group of pets including Henry and George the ducks who got imprinted on the vacuum cleaner and would follow it around every time Ginny spruced up the house.

"The kitchen?"

"Well, yeah. I didn't think anything of it, but then one afternoon JT called. He was going out of town and needed me to take two of them for a couple of nights. He already lost the other two the night before, including the runt. He said that he already took them home and bathed them in the bathtub. Boy that mirconium really is sticky stuff." This broke my heart. We always had a soft spot for the runts. My first dog, Henry (perhaps named after the duck), was the runt.

"Well, when I told your father he got very quiet. The tv wasn't on, no computer, nothing. He just sat quietly for about 30 minutes." I began to laugh. He is typically quiet, but there is always something on.

"Finally, he came to me and said I was crazy. But I was thinking that if you were still in your old house, we could have put them in your basement and then I would have slept in the spare bedroom when they said, 'maaww.'" Ok, so this is probably something I would have done too, pre-marriage. I'm still getting used to consulting with another person when I want to do something that seems totally reasonable like take in orphan farm animals for a sleep-over.

"What did Ginny say?"

"Well Ginny said she would take care of them if I could sneek them up to her condo." I could actually see my grandmother with her oxygen and dowagers hump trying to bottle feed the lambs while they ran all over her condo, even though they don't allow animals.

"And what did my brother say?" After all, he might help as he is living with them.

"Well, he didn't say anything, but I'm guessing he thought I was crazy too. So I called JT and told him that my husband couldn't do it. And I guess it was a good idea. After all, we did just get the hardwood floors refinished in the kitchen." I tried to imagine knobby kneed lambs sliding all over the new floors. My father would have had a fit. "JT understood and ended up shipping them back to the ranch early."

My Mother: Attempted Savior of the Lambs.