The Lambs in the May Snow
A surprise spring blizzard moved thirty-one newborn lambs into my mudroom, and one of them learned to open the refrigerator by dawn.
In southern Colorado, spring is a rumor. You can have eighty degrees on Monday and a foot of snow on Tuesday, and the old-timers say the only safe way to plant is to wait until the lilacs bloom and then wait another week. I know this. I plant anyway. I like to gamble.
The May storm came in on a Thursday night. I had thirty-one newborn lambs in the lower paddock, and the forecast, which I had trusted, said light rain. The folks at CSU Extension publish great advice on late spring storms and lambing, and I had read it twice. By two in the morning, I was standing in the yard in my pajamas and a coat, watching eight inches of wet snow bury the fence.
So I did what anyone would do. I carried them inside. All thirty-one, in three trips, in a wheelbarrow lined with towels, into my mudroom and kitchen. The dog was horrified. The cat left in protest. By four the lambs had arranged themselves on the rug, the couch and the oven door, and I had a mug of coffee and a certain feeling of being a very large mother hen.
Around dawn I heard a noise. I walked into the kitchen and found a lamb named Dumpling standing at the open refrigerator, looking into it with the focus of a man picking a lunch. She had worked the handle with her nose. The shelves were bare. I did not see the cheese. I never did.
The snow melted by noon. The lambs went back out, and the lilacs bloomed on schedule, a week late. I have a standing rule now that anything under three weeks old gets a place on the couch in a storm. My daughter says I am soft. She has a point. I told this one at farm.FM last spring and a listener from Wyoming wrote to say that her sheep also know how to open the refrigerator.