Lambs in Winter
Sketches of a Vermont Life Through Seasons of Change
Alexis Lathem’s enchanting essay collection Lambs in Winter celebrates simplified living on the small farm where Lathem raises sheep and cultivates vegetables with her husband. Their rural three acres in Vermont structure their lives, enabling them to foster a relationship with wild creatures and perceive what it “means to live as a human being inside a greater community of life.”
Thoughtful personal reflections on Lathem’s complicated childhood in Brooklyn and the challenges of bottle-feeding lambs during New England cold fronts populate the book, which also acknowledges urgent global issues like the mistreatment of migrant workers and the “climate chaos” that becomes inevitable as countries, including Mexico, lose their farms to drought. But as populations increase and climates become less hospitable, Lathem asserts, subsistence farming could be a source of flexibility and resilience. Humans, she reminds her audience, were “part-time farmers” for thousands of years, prior to modern industrial farming.
This nuanced text resists romanticizing pastoral life. It notes, for instance, that bottle-fed lambs often grow up to be aggressive and is forthright about the sadness of a favorite ewe’s death. While Lathem favors vegetarianism, she notes that plowing land and clearing trees for agriculture is another kind of violence to the earth. She also observes that healthy, biodiverse grasslands, while more resilient than industrial agricultural monocultures, may be “overrated” as a climate solution.
The prose is lovely and compelling, as with the description of a new trail in the woods as beautiful “in the way a poem is especially beautiful on a first reading.” Elsewhere, it suggests that recognizing that all animals have mysterious inner lives is akin to admitting “wonder into our daily lives…alive with consciousness and empathy, language and music.”
Lambs in Winter is a luminous essay collection about rural life and honoring the natural world.
Reviewed by
Kristen Rabe
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
