Isabelle

Farm life has a rhythm. Some days it’s a toe-tapping jig of chores and coffee. Other days it’s a slow, quiet beat 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 fix, family to care for. But beneath the bustle, there’s always the steady pulse of something more ancient than the to-do list: Life. Death. And everything in between.

I learned that rhythm young, on my grandmother’s farm. Nobody had to give me a talk about the birds and the bees, it was all right there, outside the back door. Birth, death, beginnings and endings, all folded neatly into the seasons. It wasn’t scary. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just how it was.

We tend 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 that they’re both part of the same story. The same circle. And sometimes, though it hurts, death is a kindness. A closing of the gate when the pasture’s grown too steep.

This week, we said goodbye to Isabelle. One of our first ewes. One of my favorites.

She wasn’t flashy or noisy. She didn’t jump fences or demand attention. But she had a quiet sort of presence—the kind that fills up a barn without saying a word. Isabelle had a way of looking at you, right in the eyes, like she was sorting through your soul with her soft brown gaze. Not judging, just seeing. All the way in.

Her last lamb, Lambchops, was born this past February. A little spitfire who keeps us laughing. So Isabelle’s story isn’t over, not really. It lives on in that woolly mischief-maker bouncing around the pasture like joy on four legs.

Still, the barn feels a little quieter now. The rhythm a little slower.

We’ll miss her. We’ll remember her. And we’ll keep walking the path she helped us build—one muddy bootprint at a time.