They put her out to pasture and forgot all about her. Tall grass towering over her shoulder. And when the rains came, she was like a huge sponge, staggering up to the fenceline looking for her lost kin. She was suffering from an identity crisis, with a none of her own nearby to comfort her. Not even a bleat. She gazed forlornly at nothing in particular. She had a job, she was on loan, they expected her to clear the hillside all by herself, a lone, sheep. Clearly they don’t know about spring bloat, my great-grandfather had to plunge an ice pick into their guts to let the gasses out when they overate. She got down to the business at hand, thoroughly cropping the tender grasses down to the roots, not knowing this is why cattle ranchers hated the arrival of her kind, her ancestors triggering range wars. She had no upper teeth and could crop the grasses right down to the roots on the fragile prairies. Erosion soon followed. The native grasses were unable to withstand such close scrutiny. There is so little left of our native grasses and plants, gardens pruned and tended with exotic imports. Like the sheep and the cow, there are is a little room for native species. Yet we don’t have a shortage of deer. And we continue to plant houses like flocks of abandoned sheep, cropping down the grasses so that the foreign British lawns may grow. The sheep doesn’t care whether it’s a fine lawn or a rough pasture. She industriously nibbles, shaking clods of dirt from the roots, edging her way up the hillside with her eye ever on the horizon. Desperate for kindred creatures, and she sidles up to two llamas haughtily looking down their long noses at her as if she were beneath contempt. Maybe she should consider another career, perhaps writing. I think I shall call her Flannelly O’Connor.
4/22/2004 Writers‘ Group
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