Today was a rich and full Bedlam Farm day.

It began with a sick sheep I almost shot, but Maria saved.

I had to go to a hospital for a Covid test and spent two hours waiting in line. (I’m spending a night in the sleep lab at the hospital Thursday for routine sleep apnea testing, and a test is required).

When I got home, I nearly froze, walking out in the pasture to take photos as a frigid cold system comes in for tonight, temperatures far below zero by midnight, fueled by driving winds.

I spent a wonderful hour meditating to the music of Leonard Cohen in a silent room in front of a roaring fire with one small dog in my lap and one snoring at my feet.

Friendly people have been writing me all day wishing me to be safe and commiserating with the ordeal and danger of extreme cold—shame on me for giving the wrong impression about how I feel.

I love the winter; I love the cold, all of it. I knew when I came here that I was not headed for Arizona or Florida. The cold is defining, challenging, makes me feel alive, frightened, vital.

Winter leads us to the most beautiful Spring imaginable, one complements and defines the other, the season of color and light. The winter pasture is a thing of great beauty and an immense creative challenge.

I am pretty safe up here, I’ve been here for 20 years and made it through much cold,a hundred spills on the ice,  and no one made me come or made me stay. I wouldn’t be anywhere else, in case I didn’t make that clear.

No one needs to worry about me because there is ice on the ground. That is something to be aware of, not to fear.

I have a good friend who moved to Florida, and an alligator ate his beloved Chichua soon after they arrived, and two weeks later, he was bitten by a snake and nearly lost an arm.

Worry about him, not me.

(P.S. I’m familiar with cleats and spikes on shoes, I’ve had many. They don’t work on farms with mud, manure, and ice. They are, in fact,  very slippery on farms and in pastures.)

And then we made dinner together, continuing our remarkable love affair with health and tasty food.

I stopped in Saratoga Springs on the way home from the hospital to bring a treat to dinner – two giant Alaskan crab legs and a can of jumbo crab meat from Thailand. This is not in the Mayo Clinic food plan.

To this, I assed a stir-fry – rice noodles and six different kinds of chopped-up vegetables.

I wrote about rice noodles the other day, and I didn’t mention that there are 45g of carbohydrates in every serving of rice noodles. This angered and displeased a reader who said I was misleading my readers by suggesting my new diet mainly was free of carbs.

She was further outraged by my blowing her off and she ended up lecturing me on the responsibilities of a writer. She’s gone away.

There, I came clean; Bedlam Farm’s Watergate is over.

But perhaps the biggest story of the day was our sick sheep Pumpkin. He’s seven or eight years old, and for the past week or so, has been foaming at the mouth and eating erratically. Saturday, he stopped eating at all and regurgitated more and more foam.

When we went out to look at him this morning, he seemed disoriented and was wandering off by himself, a danger sign whenever a sheep does it.

Maria was apprehensive about him; I thought he had another one of those sheep diseases from which there is no relief or cure. Sheep owners have a motto – sick sheep suddenly die – which is undoubtedly true in my experience.

The giant animal vets don’t understand sheep and have little to offer them when sick. And they are costly. I feel it’s my responsibility to put sick sheep out of their misery; this is humane as far as I am concerned. It is not fun, but it is my responsibility.

Pumpkin wouldn’t let me or Maria get near him; he ran away at the sight of us. I went and loaded my .22. I was concerned that he would wander off by himself in subzero weather and die an awful death.

I went into the house and called Jack Kittel the vet. He suggested Pumpkin had ruminitis, a disease of the gastrointestinal system. Our large animal vet Jack, an old-timer, suggested giving him Pepto Bismol twice a day.

It was worth a try, but first, we had to catch him and couldn’t. We tried a half dozen times.

I had to leave for Saratoga and my Covid-test; I called Mike Conklin for help catching Pumpkin, and failing that, for use in shooting him humanely. If he couldn’t be treated or detected, I saw no other way out.

A few minutes from home, Maria called, there was something triumphant and proud in her voice. “I got him in,” she said, “I got him into the barn by myself. I knew I could do it.”

She explained how she decided to be patient and keep trying. Sheep are not fighters; they are creatures of flight or fight. If they get cornered, they surrender and accept their fate. But you have to be patient and intelligent, and Maria was both.

I wasn’t sure she could do it, but I was very proud that she had. And know she knows she can.

Maria is so much stronger than she thinks she is. There is very little she doesn’t handle quickly and satisfactorily.

Our farm has taught us both much about life and death and reality. Mercy is not always keeping a suffering animal alive. Often, it is helping him or her leave the world painlessly and quickly and with some dignity.

When I got home, Pumpkin was in a stall by himself in the barn, isolated, easy to treat, and safe. He is clearly improving. Maria had put out some bedding from old straw, and Pumpkin had begun to eat. There was still foam on his mouth, but much less.

Jack Kittel said he should be all right in a couple of days.

I can’t move quickly on all that ice, and I can’t even be out for more than a few minutes in a subzero cold like tomorrow.

That’s frostbite weather and I have three frost-bitten fingers to remind me of it. They still hurt when it’s cold.

I’ll have to bite my ego and stay inside all of the day and blog and read.

Oh, well.

Pumpkin and the farm are in good hands.