Isabelle

Farm life has a rhythm. Some days it’s a quickstep of chores snapping at your heels, with no time even to pause for lunch. Other days it’s a slow, steady heartbeat you can feel deep in your bones. Feed buckets clanging. Hoofbeats in the barn aisle. A rooster who thinks 4:37 AM is the perfect time to practice his solo.

It’s a never-ending list: animals to feed, fences to mend, family to care for. But underneath the bustle runs an older, quieter rhythm—one that’s been here since long before any of us. Life. Death. And everything in between.

I learned that rhythm young, on my Aunt May’s farm. Nobody needed to explain the birds and the bees—it was all there, right outside the back door. Birth, death, beginnings, and endings, all folded neatly into the seasons. It wasn’t frightening or tragic. It was simply life as it was meant to be.

We like to think of birth as a beginning and death as an ending, and we label one “good” and the other “bad.” But life on a farm teaches you pretty quickly they're both part of the same circle, chapters in the same book. Sometimes, though it hurts, death is a kindness—the gentle closing of a gate when the pasture becomes too steep. If you keep livestock, you will one day have deadstock. That’s just the truth of it.

This week, we said goodbye to Isabelle—one of our first ewes, and one of my dearest.

She was never the flashy sort. She didn’t leap fences or demand attention. She was quiet, but her presence filled a barn in the way sunlight fills a doorway. Isabelle had a way of looking at you—right in the eyes—as if she were reading your soul with her soft brown gaze. Not judging. Just seeing. All the way through.

Her last lamb, Lambchops, was born this past February. A bold little spitfire who keeps us laughing. So Isabelle’s story doesn’t truly end—it runs on in the woolly mischief-maker bouncing across the pasture, joy on four legs.

Still, the barn feels different now. The rhythm a shade slower.

We will miss her. We will remember her. And when the wind moves through the pasture grass, we’ll hear her footsteps in its whisper and know she's still here.