As I was exiting the local hardware store the other day, the owner called out my name from across the store and flagged me down. I re-closed the door and stepped back inside, curious to see was important enough to beckon me from an entire store-length away.
The store owner had a grin on his face and approached me like he had a good joke to tell. But the joke was on me.
“Does it work?” the shop owner said. His grin grew wider as he saw the genuine look of perplexity on my face.
“Does what work?” I replied, now a bit suspicious.
“Singing lullabys to your sheep. Does it really put them to sleep?” He couldn’t keep in his swelling laughter.
As he explained it, a week prior he had been in the woods north of our farm, and as he sat in his deer-stand just before dusk, he was serenaded by an unwitting farmer for quite some time. And that unwitting farmer was me.
I enjoyed a good laugh with him, and admittedly felt a bit embarrassed, as I’m sure the color in my cheeks indicated. Who’d have thunk one doesn’t have a little privacy while singing out in the middle of a field without anyone in sight?!?
Then a few days later my neighbor dropped in, and a grin appeared on his face as he asked me how my sheep were doing. I immediately knew where this was going.
“So you’ve been singing to your sheep?” my neighbor said, thinking he was telling a side-splitting joke.
“So you’ve been to the hardware store,” I replied.
He laughed and said he had just been at the hardware store and had just been talking to the shop owner. I laughed along with him (it had to be pretty funny to hear me singing in the pasture) but it was again mildly embarrassing to know that an old man dressed in camouflage had been listening.
And it was because of my modest embarrassment that I had decided not to make either the shop owner or my neighbor privy a small detail. But I’ll share that detail here with you:
I do not, in fact, sing to my sheep. I sing when I tend to my chickens. And it’s nobody’s business if I do.
Thanks for reading!
Farmer Andre (Baritone)