Catherine Friend

This is the best "adult" (as a children's librarian, I read mostly children's literature) nonfiction (I'm a die-hard fiction fan) book I've read in ages. Part 1, "The Muffins Go Farming," was so hilarious that I laughed until I cried. Subsequent parts were funny, yet more informative and fascinating. Catherine Friend is a true writing magician, with the ability to make readers laugh and cry, wonder and anger, hope and be happy with life. I can't wait to read her other books, and I hope she show more keeps writing for a long time. show less

Catherine Friend was a decently successful children's book author with two books and a handful of magazine articles published, when her longtime partner Melissa announced that she wanted to use the money she'd inherited from her namesake to buy a farm. The two women, then in their late thirties, bought a 53-acre parcel with erosion problems and no structures, built a house, planted a one-acre vineyard, and populated the remainder with two goats, a handful of laying hens, a chicken tractor show more full of broilers, fifty sheep, and a guard llama.

Over the course of the next rocky four years Catherine and Melissa would learn the hard way what their books and classes had omitted about farming – lambing complications, tractor accidents, coyotes, livestock stubbornness, veterinary medicine overdoses, the realities of breeding, and the difficulty of taking your first homegrown animals to slaughter – all while dealing with Catherine's anxiety and Melissa's undiagnosed chemical imbalance.

They have to learn what all livestock farmers have to learn: the zen-like concept that all the little lives you have under your care are transitory; that you must make their lives happy and carefree even though they may be short, and that you must fully appreciate them even though you will be responsible for their death as much as their birth. But they also have to learn how to live with each other while caring for all these other lives – how to maintain or modify their pre-farm roles without Catherine losing her writing career or Melissa working herself to death.

I tore through this book in a day. It has what you really want from a farming memoir (or any memoir, really): ups and downs both poignant and hilarious featuring people with whom you can easily identify and, best of all, a happy ending (the farm and the couple are still holding up ten years later). And it didn't put me off the idea of having my own sheep someday. show less

Interesting, amusing, and occasionally educational anecdotes about sheep farming, becoming a “fiber freak,” and trying to be a writer while still being the “backup farmer.” I laughed out loud at several points, and annoyed my husband by reading the especially funny parts out loud to him. “We can all love sheep, of course in an entirely healthy and platonic and non-gross sort of way.”

Oh I love this. Not only is it about cute sheep and their shepherds and the other animals, but it's a memoir about Friend's ability to say mea culpa and to learn to be a better person and 'citizen of the world.'

For example, she first thinks of people who make their own sweaters as Fiber Freaks since they could just go buy one, but over time becomes a knitter herself and a strong advocate of wool, over microfiber and other synthetic oil-based fibers of course, but even over cotton, show more especially heavily-treated 'wrinkle free' cotton. (Yes, of course she's biased. But she's also right.) (The best way to get new clothes is to buy used. Even better is to avoid getting new clothes by making what you have last as long as possible. Tips to do so avl. upon request.)

She shares lots of other ways that sheep can help the planet, for example mentioning the weed control they did in Carson City that I remember from when I lived there. Wonderful program.

"The EPA considers many textile manufacturing facilities to be hazardous waste generators."

"There are more breeds of sheep than of any other domestic livestock mammal."

"Cattle farmers and ranchers expect sheep to act like cattle, so when they don't, a sheep is suddenly stupid. This wrongheaded idea came from our history. Range wars...." Sheep are very good at doing what they want to do to take care of the themselves and their lambs... and they can recognize up to about 100 faces.

"Our lives are fashioned by what we pay attention to."

I love the quotations she uses to open the chapters, too.
"We are are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love."
Author unknown.
"After you've done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. And after 10 years, throw it away and start all over. "
Alfred Edward Perlman
"Weave me a rope that will pull me through these impossible times."
Tim Finn
"A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak."
Michael Garrett Marino

Unfortunately there is no bibliography nor are there notes.
Fortunately Friend has written other books for me to enjoy. show less