I retired early last night thinking I’d have a lie in today to make up
for sleep I missed on Monday night. But I felt something in the early
morning light that woke me. And peering through the glass of our French
doors was a white wooly mammoth, about the size of a VW bug. He/she was
looking at me intently with a head the size of a pointed long
watermelon. Nothing I wanted to mess with in the early hours and nothing
I wanted munching unencumbered in my garden at first light. There were
about 15 of them on the side of the house and plenty more in our front
yard and eventually I got John up so he could put his gummies on and he
could do whatever was needed in his rather smart striped pajamas. When
he asked me to join him outside and wait at the gate, I thought,
hmmm…over my dead body, and so he ventured out alone. Although my pjs
were quite adorable, I didn’t fancy being outside in them directing
traffic as he veered closer to the house in one of our cars chasing the
lot of offenders that had escaped his trotting line to the top paddock.
They’d run onto the road and John did the nice thing and went outside
and looked for them. Meanwhile I sipped my tea and meditated. Although I
did get a few shots of those big sheep in the herd that had been eating
my front garden to their hearts’ content, those views paled in
comparison to what I encountered upon waking that I didn’t photograph,
since they ran away when we got up.
Eventually, John came home all
tuckered out because he went in the opposite direction from where they
went and he had to drive around a while to find the errant beasts.
Eventually,
we had our day. I finally got myself dressed and we proceeded to run
errands for several hours. Luckily, I grabbed a few average shots of
some other people’s sheep along the way but when I got home there were
some young lambs that posed for me without flinching or running away.
They are still in their cute babyish stage and curious about large
humans but were newly shorn and looked pretty strange without their
lovely wooly coats. Not particularly sheepish at all though, she stared
me down and I was the one to walk away. Silly human seemed to be what
she was thinking. Unfortunately, I agreed with her conclusion.