Canada: Shepherd’s Sight: A Farming Life
A restorative and resonant memoir of a year in the life of an aging shepherd
By Barbara McLean
ECW Press
(March 19, 2024).
The memoir is a restorative and resonant year in the life of an aging shepherd. For 50 years, Barbara McLean has tended a flock of Border Leicester sheep on her small Ontario farm in Grey County, called Lambsquarters. In Shepherd’s Sight she shares the crises, pleasures, and challenges of farm life over the course of a year. Now in her 70s, McLean faces a new problem: how much longer can she continue with the physically taxing work that is her central source of meaning and satisfaction.
The book is looking back and reassessing half a century in agriculture. In a time of world turmoil from global pandemic to climate emergency to political upheaval and war, McLean wants to bring herself and the reader back to a more simple life, one with its own pitfalls and disappointments, but that is fundamental to the basics of food and shelter. With its vivid description and absorbing storytelling, Shepherd’s Sight offers an unforgettable glimpse of a life lived on the land.
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