Who said the countryside was quiet?

I hit my workshop this morning and  was about to sit down when I realised I could hear the sheep. At first I thought they were the ones in the next field but they sounded awful close. I closed the lid of my laptop and tried to pry my mind from the latest book – it’s getting to a good bit – and wandered outside to work out what the racket was.

There in the chicken pen was…

a sheep.

Huh? I thought.

That’s a sheep in the chicken pen…

I looked at Meg. “What’s that about?”

“Dunno,” she said.

Then I noticed that the pen was lacking something… Fences. You see the storm damage has been bad. This winter has seen practically every fence collapse. Now that the weather is sunny and not raining, for the moment, Dad is fixing them. The problem is that he has taken the old one down and is now putting up the new, but there has been a gap between the two.

This has resulted in Mrs Sheep being in the paddock, Mr Sheep being in the chicken pen and Baby Lucky in the goose pen. That means that my quiet countryside has become very noise. Still I am ignoring it and trying to work through the noise.

And yes, Dad did put them all back in the paddock but judging by the building noise they have gone wandering again…