In the tradition of James Herriot, Sylvia Jorrin tells her story of unexpectedly becoming a shepherd in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. When Sylvia Jorrin first moved to upstate New York, she had no intention of becoming a farmer. Raised to fear animals of all shapes and sizes, she only wanted to create a life for herself and her friends and family in her twenty-five-room shingle-style house. After a neighboring dairy farmer suggested they use her eighty-five acres of hay fields and woodland to start a farm together, she contacted the South Central New York Resource and Development Center, and they applied for and received a grant of nine free sheep. They soon bought ten more. Then her partner quit. It was the coldest December on record in the Catskill Mountains. Faced with eighteen pregnant ewes and a ram determined to grind her into a stone wall, and equipped with neither practical nor theoretical knowledge of farming, Sylvia gradually learned to be a farmer, both taming the sheep and conquering the elements. Fifteen years later, this dairy farmer’s granddaughter has a flock of 120 sheep, twenty-one goats, two Jersey cows, fifty Buff Orphington chickens, four Toulouse geese, one house cat and three barn cats, one dog, and a donkey, Guiseppe Patrick Nunzio MacGuire. “Sylvia’s Farm” is the tale of a life on the farm, and all the hard and important lessons it teaches. Told in short vignettes that span a decade, it is a journal of growth, persistence, and the unexcpected joys that a new day can bring.
