In the fog of a frosty fall morning, I trudge across white crusted grass, brushing past ice-laden mugwort leaning into the path, on my way to the barn. The milkiness of the air seems replicated somehow inside my brain, as I try to break through the hangover of my COVID booster vaccination. For some reason I have reacted strongly to these shots, which makes me both lousy with malaise but happy at the silver lining that my immune system has been so effectively stimulated.

As I trudge, it occurs to me that malaise with a silver lining was a familiar theme this week. Election Day I was dismayed to see a Republican electorate so energized, and swing voters so swingable in their direction, while my beloved but politics-wearied Democrats stayed home. How could we have lost Virginia, let alone even more resoundingly the town council races here in Germantown? Could it have been massive voter fraud? The evidence of fraud was just as compelling as in Republican complaints about last year’s Presidential race (the evidence being “my side lost”). Why was nobody raising an outcry?

Bummed as I was, the results contained some silver linings for me. Yes, the election revealed that we’re still a closely divided country in which the main motivator to vote seems to be antipathy to the “other side” of the cultural divide, hardly the sign of a healthy political system. But there was no movement to, as my Washingtonian friend Arthur calls it, “Shtup the Seal.” This says to me that the public recognizes the basic integrity of our electoral process, revealing the Trumpian Big Lie for what it is. Also, that Republicans have seen themselves doing so much better with Trump off the ballot than on suggests that he is less likely to be their 2024 nominee. In the interim, the 2022 midterm elections are more likely to be defined by a booming Biden post-COVID economy than by current voter malaise. All silver linings, in my view.

These political musings that occupy my trip to the barn are displaced by an entirely different train of thought when I arrive. Though it, too, arrives at a silver lining.

The barn seems a cold and uninviting place on this miserable morning. Why? In part, because it is larger and more cavernous than its cozy predecessor, a repurposed fruit packing barn that burned in 2019. It was designed to accommodate a growing herd. I didn’t realize I would soon decide to shrink the herd down into the teens. (It’s now at 24, but three young ewes are being sold to a cheese-producing farm next week and the three young rams are going to slaughter weeks later.)

In larger part, though, the barn feels cold because of its concrete floor which I have been diligently working to uncover. All through last winter, when the sheep were being fed on hay, the barn floor became covered, perhaps 5 to 6 inches deep, with a muck consisting of bedding straw, waste hay, and sheep poop.

As the detritus congeals and decomposes, it releases heat. Indeed, sometimes when I am forking out a deep layer of muck I will find that it is smoking underneath. One has to prevent too much build up or the floor can become a fire hazard. On the other hand, a couple of inches of such matter on the floor acts as insulation from the cold concrete, soft bedding for the sheep to lie on at night, and almost as a heating system. Especially with the barn doors open to catch the south and east light, on a cold winter day the barn, filled with warm bodies of the sheep ruminating, can feel quite cozy.

Because it is hard for me to put a full or even half day aside to muck the barn, I decided this year to incorporate daily muck removal as a 10 minute add on to chores. Almost every day, I fill a wheelbarrow with muck and trundle it out to the now mountainous compost pile north of the barn. It has taken from Spring until now to finish the job.

The downside of completion of the mucking is that it has coincided with seve