It’s not always easy to accept, the aging thing. Barbara McLean is experiencing that as an older shepherd, managing her small flock near Holstein, on a farm that took a lifetime to reclaim, restore and rejuvenate into the pastoral perfection it is today.

The writer, professor, farmer, doctor’s wife and mother has many roles in her life but it’s shepherding that she clings to. Is it stubbornness or determination? Or is it identity,  something all farmers can relate to … that connection to land, place and animals that gives a life purpose and passion.

McLean explores all these themes in her new book, Shepherd’s Sight, a 12-chapter reverie following the “shepherd’s calendar”. Each month, she records with a writer’s skill what is required when you manage 18 ewes and a thick-headed ram in a bank barn complete with a greenhouse loft.

“Now that I’m in my seventies, I realize I’ve been catastrophizing for years with each new crisis in the barn, each potential illness in the house,” McLean wrote in the chapter called January. “I fear losing my sense of self if I can no longer shepherd my sheep.” She references a neighbour named Fred, from whom she purchased her first ewes 20 years before, sharing that he had come over for tea to tell her he’d decided to sell his flock. “He was in mid-eighties. A former Mountie, a powerful thinker, and still a big man, he no longer had the stamina required to carry on. I fear that day.”

That’s the thread running through the book, woven through stories of chores, barn improvements, walks thrilling to the rhythms of native mammals and birds, and connections with neighbours in rural Grey County.

Farming was not the end goal given she grew up in a “bourgeois” home she called “suffocating and claustrophobic” with heavy expectations and a degree in literature. However, she escaped to rural Ireland after a time roving from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and found a cottage to rent where she “craved to settle” and learned to “bake bread, make jam, knit socks and have animals.”

She found her calling; an affinity for sheep and wool, green hills and a cozy home. Things to do. Life to write about. It was her husband, Tom, who brought her to Grey County. He came as a young doctor, becoming the county’s coroner before retiring. Fifty years later, the couple love their farm, called Lambsquarters. They have kept the character of the yellow brick home, added a bright sunroom and are training an adorable black labrador puppy for his future role as a guide dog. I am fed homemade maple cookies and tea in their country kitchen and get a tour of the home, right up to the bedroom with a special nook where McLean both writes and spins wool from her own sheep.

Shepherd’s Sight, published by  ECW Press, isn’t McLean’s first book. She did quite well with her first book, Lambsquarters:Scenes from a Handmade Life which was published by Random House two decades ago. It took 20 years to write another and she’s not sure if there’s another book in her but never say never!

It’s the sheep though, that seem to make McLean’s face light up. You can see it on the cover of this magazine; a joy that radiates. McLean has 18 sheep now, down from 25, a concession, perhaps, to sore knees and stiff joints. She does chores twice a day and manages the herd. Husband Tom is the “hired hand” and cleans the pens with a loader. When she first started raising sheep, she had Suffolk-Hampshire cross but she wanted a breed with finer wool, and switched to Border Leicesters, a long-wool breed.

Lambsquarters’ wool is now prized among local spinners and after shearing day, when the fleeces have been tossed on a table, skirted, bound and bagged, the wool sells out in 48 hours. The wool from her black sheep is particularly valuable, coveted for the contrasting colour it adds to sweaters and other handmade goods.

It’s all part of the vision Barbara kept from those days in Ireland. “It bring everything down to the level of nature where we have calm, beautiful animals which we feed and take care of. I can do it all from delivering a lamb to spinning the wool it will one day provide. To have that skill is a wonderful thing.”

I think McLean is amazingly spry, credit to daily walks in the morning, done partly to keep in shape but mostly to “see what’s going on.” On the trail that morning she says “the raccoon was out and about, walking slowly. The coyote was also out, walking quickly.”

I was quite thrilled with this interview. Her use of words and the house! I love that when the couple redid what Barbara describes as a “brick tent’ with no bathroom, no heat and no hot water, they took their time and honoured its history and its personality. The home is filled with antiques, flowers, wood and light. The windows are wavy, the stairs creak and it’s so cozy you wish they rented it as a Airbnb.

The book, too, is lovely. There are flowery passages: “From snow flurries to sunshine, spring weather rushes in with a flick of a calendar page. The cruelness of April morphs magisterially into the darling buds of May. Even everything changes.”

There is sex! “Louis, though calm, is clearly enjoying his time among the ewes. They vie for his attention, all but batting their eyelashes as they sidle up to his neck. There no serious risk of anthropomorphizing when I witness some of their antics. If an ewe is interested in breeding, she squats down and urinates in front of the ram. Louis finds this attractive; he curls his upper lip, raises his nose, and deeply inhales the offered pheromones. The ewe might coyly move away before squatting again in an ongoing mating dance until she decides to acquiesce and stand for him. He chuckles and approaches, sideways at first, rubbing necks, lifting a foreleg against her flank…” and on it goes as found in the chapter called December.

There are also deep questions about loving and raising lambs that will go to slaughter. She writes about shipping day and catching the lambs by hook or crook. “It’s a difficult day, no matter how easily it goes. But it’s gratifying work to produce a good product, to take pride in the work, and to look forward to the cheque later in the week,” she writes. “After all the years I’ve been doing this, it has not become any better. It fills me with regret, year after year. And yet, I am an omnivore. I eat meat.”

Poetic, thoughtful and in many ways a guide both for how to care for sheep and how to age gracefully, McLean’s words strike home. I have animals too and McLean’s struggle coming to terms with her age and the realization that one day the sheep will have to go makes me ponder my own situation. I have horses, chickens and 20 years of youth on McLean but how will I process the day when the gate is closed for the last time?

Perhaps I will also mourn and write an ode to a life well-lived. Or hang on, as McLean as doing, for yet another spring, another lambing, another story to tell.  ◊