I am always careful to point out that Maria and I are not farmers, we are a writer and artist who live on a farm, and that is very different. In sense, we straddle the two worlds, the farm world and the other.

Like the farmers, we have numerous issues relating to land, fencing, water, animal care, vet bills, hay, water, aging barns, and pasture management. And our lives are often bounded by ritual, some of it ancient and timeless – farriers, shearers, wool skirting.

Women have been skirting – cleaning – wool for centuries, so that it can be used to make clothes or sent to mills. We have 10 sheep, the older ones are shorn once a year, the younger sheep twice a year.

Soon after shearing we carve out a space to “skirt” the wool, that is, to pick through it carefully and remove caked feces, hay or grass. We don’t put jackets on our sheep, like the serious yarn people do, so we have to go through it pretty carefully.

We usually do this together, although Maria doesn’t trust me to be as careful as she is to pick the small bits of grass and hay out of the wool. The mill we use likes clean wool, and we wish to honor their needs, as there are few mills and it takes many months to get the wool cleaned and spun into yarn.

This year, we moved the skirting to the back porch, we sat together and teach took chunks out of the big plastic bags where Maria stored the wool during the shearing. It matters to me that people have been skirting wool for many centuries, it’s one of those things – like shearing and the trimming of donkey hooves – that reminds us of the life we chose.

I love watching Maria’s agile hands pull the wool into long and thin threads so she can pick the junk out of it. I did okay myself, it only took us a couple of hours.