Week 5 Lynda
Flocker. Transitional. Pun-isher. Aliterate.
Lynda is not a typical knitter. Or a crocheter. She grows sheep. This was never part of a life plan. She fell into it, as you do, because her partner likes trains.
Lynda’s current work is learning how to use a drop spindle. She knows how to do this and tells me that she is learning how not to drop them. I am perplexed, isn’t that the point, you drop them? Yes, she says but they should not bounce.
Lynda used to belong to a knitting group in Sydney. The women would gather to craft as an excuse to drink; women need an excuse to drink in a pub, says Lynda. You can’t just stand up at the bar. Various relatives had attempted to teach Lynda how to knit, and crochet, when she was a child but she never got far. Elma, a member of the pub knitting group, taught Lynda as an adult. Elma made it look easy and she enjoyed it, so Lynda thought she would too. She would arrive at the group and her sister in law would spot a mistake twenty rows before and frog (unpick) so Lynda could reknit from the mistake while solving personal problems and the problems of the world. Lynda tells me she always left the group with less on her needles than she arrived with.
Elma showed her how to crochet. The granny square, when finished, looked like a ‘bath-bomb’. It was frogged. Lynda tells me, with pride, that she did finish a shawl she gave to her mother. Now she spins.
Like most of us, Lynda had a loose plan of what her life would look like in its latter half. A property had been purchased in Broke, NSW with an eye to retirement. Lynda and her partner Paul did not dislike their lives in Sydney. Paul likes trains…a lot! Both big and small (miniature). With this in mind they squeezed a viewing to a train station for sale in Taralga while visiting a friend in Goulburn for a weekend in 2015. The following weekend a brother and sister and a friend with special pest inspector skills also visited the train station. They were not going to buy it. That weekend was spent chatting with the locals; it is not a town where conversation stops when strangers walk into the pub. Lynda and Paul returned for the auction. They were not going to buy.
No-one wanted to buy the train station with three platforms and 25 acres. The auction price dropped below the reserve. Lynda nudged Paul and they made an offer. A little negotiation followed and they bought a farm. From there everything just fell into place: a friend paid cash for their property in Broke, Paul got a job in a local school, Lynda spent weeks in Sydney and weekends in Taralga until she took a redundancy. They both developed a love of sheep. They now have a business, Fleece, Flock and Fibre. Lynda tells me that she went to buy two sheep but bought twelve sheep on impulse, followed by two railway carriages. The sheep more costly than the carriages.
They now have 66 sheep, all with names. I tell her it must be impossible to kill and eat a sheep you have named. She agrees, she would not eat any of her sheep, except Kel. She hates Kel. Kel, Kath and Kim were triplets born on the farm each a different colour. Kath and Kim are docile enough but Kel is large and has a mind of his own. Having spent some time in a small farming community in the UK I think all sheep are stupid. Lynda tells me they are not stupid, no sheep would ever vote for Trump, or Dutton, but on the whole she feels they may be Teal voters. I have put my name down for some of Kel when he is turned into hogget.
I ask Lynda about the best thing she has ever made and she feels this is yet to come. She knitted a tea-cosy for her knitting mentor Elma who appreciated it. She is working on a cardigan with wool from Spidey one of her sheep.
The flock Lynda and Paul have built up are mainly coloured sheep. They have a number of Finnsheep, a small, coloured breed from Finland. They are the only registered Finnsheep stud in NSW. This breed has multiple births each year, one of theirs having quintuplets last August. Glynis, one of the mothers, produced Trout and Pout, named for their Kardashian type lips. The computer tells Lynda and Paul they have 66 sheep but sheep are hard to count and they fall asleep when doing so.
The 25 acres and the station are taking on a shape. One of the buildings is now an Stayz place, with added sheep pats thrown in. The garden grows flowers and vegetables, there are two dogs in the yard. There is a He-shed, with small trains, and a She-shed with spinning wheels, aircon and a calm feel.
Lynda’s house is also the place of possessions that have come to her through her family. Some of them treasured but mostly she feels an obligation to hold onto the stuff. One exception is a photo album she bought her mother as a place to keep the collected family memories. The album was given to her mother with photo corners and a white pen so the figures in the photos could be named. This is the thing that would be saved in case of fire.
Lynda is reflective about this life she did not plan but chose. Days can be long with many things to attend to. It can be cold (-10C) and hot. There is always something to be done; a never ending list of jobs, but it is a good life that has given her many new contacts and friends, a new interest and a shared love of the property and the animals with Paul. A good example of, to misquote John Lennon, ‘life is what happens when you are making other plans’.
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