Seasons of Change
We lost Jen’s Dad, Rodney Croft, this past December. While we know that the mortal coil waits for all of us, as the first of our four parents to leave us (and far too early, at the age of 76), Rod’s sudden death was a real gut punch. Given our line of work here on the farm, we spend a fair amount of time contemplating life and death. Both are ever-present companions to the life we’ve chosen to lead for the past quarter-century. For my part in particular, given my decidedly privileged background and upbringing, I was always grateful that our now-adult sons were raised in a childhood environment distinctly different from mine, with the rhythms of procreation, birth, life, and death all absorbed somewhat organically. That having witnessed those events repeatedly when they were little boys, they would have a more solid grounding in understanding our mortality as just the natural course of things, not something to be feared. By contrast, I will always recall the first time I realized my parents were not going to always be around: I was somewhere between the ages of 5 and 7, and it shattered me. Now, as we grieve the loss of a parent in actuality for the first time, the emotions feel less raw, though in many ways, the pain is not lesser, it is just processed differently. Miss you, Rod.
In alpaca farm news with a decidedly lower level of existential dread: we weaned the entire 2022 birth class about 10 days back. This means that the Main Barn, where both the male and female weaners were taken, has temporarily — as is the tradition — become a decidedly whiney place. As ever, the boys are more vocal than their female peers.
While passing through the Arena last Sunday, I remarked with a chuckle to our Farm Manager, Arlis, that the dams that had their crias weaned from them seemed decidedly less worked up than their offspring down the hill. The general vibe of the adult females left in the A1 feed group where the oldest of those crias came out of, in fact, seemed rather…chill. It was time. As for the adorable and fluffy little whiney-butts: they have each other, and they had in almost all cases, been effectively weaned by their mothers weeks or even months beforehand. This is to say that the resulting stress is likely 99% separation anxiety. So maybe just a little bit of existential dread?
In the weeks ahead, Arlis and yours truly will begin to halter-train the newly weaned juveniles. I also have at least one particularly naughty yearling male, whom I will be working with a lot, in hopes of him not having a repeat performance from last fall. CCNF Solaris felt that the fine art of standing still in the show ring only applied to others. Oh, the joys of working with a hormonal teenager. Hope everyone’s new year is off to a fine start, take care, and we’ll be back with more shenanigans in the not-too-distant future.
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