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On being Ken
I play him nice, but stupid.
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[11/23/99]

To the diaper man, with love
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[11/19/99]

If at first ...
A marriage dies and is, after 35 years, resurrected.
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[11/19/99]

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By Kimberly French

Nov. 24, 1999 | "Can we have meat for dinner?" my older daughter asked late one afternoon.

"We have fish sticks or tuna," I replied.

"There's nothing for me to eat!"

"Well, that's all we have, but we can plan to have meat another day soon."

"We could kill one of the chickens," she proposed, not skipping a beat in her negotiation. I was stopped cold.

We live on three rural acres, which we share with our 14 animals. In our current menagerie, we have four laying hens and two roosters, all used to being held and petted. This summer my two girls and I took our gold Polish rooster to the local pet show and took the blue ribbon for "prettiest bird," over bright-colored parakeets and lovebirds.

Lamb Stew with Garlic-Vinegar Sauce A succulent preparation for a lamb of any name, including Dinner

My young daughters show none of the romanticism toward farm animals that I grew up with, even though they love those idealized children's books with obsolete images of "farmers" who have a few chickens, a cow, a pig, a sheep. (These fantasy farmers look at lot like us, who are not farmers at all but hobby homesteaders.) My 6-year-old would like to eat meat a lot more often than the once or twice a week that her parents have it, preferably chicken, hamburger or her favorite, lobster.

Unlike my children, parents and grandparents, I grew up in the suburbs. My family ate meat at every meal, just as my parents and grandparents had done when they were growing up on the farm. As a child I saw no contradiction between the way we ate and the passion I felt for my pets. The disembodied act of buying meat in a supermarket felt quite ordinary -- until I started trying to make the pieces of my homestead fit together.

I've always been nutty about animals. A few years ago, at one of those workshops I normally hate -- this one for parents on moral values -- a minister asked the group to list 10 nouns that described who we each were. At the top of my list I wrote "animal lover."

As a kid I'd loved dressing up my dog and dragging her to my hideaway atop a shed. I'd stifled my allergic sneezes and sniffles rather than give up playing with cats and riding horses. As a young adult, I'd worked on my landlord until he said yes to a dog, then moved out when my housemates said no, and found another landlord who would say yes. I'd bristled at the suggestion of one of my housemates that my love for animals was actually an unsatisfied yearning for the children I hadn't had yet. Two kids later, I still bristle.

Then I moved to the country. Year by year the animals came -- two half-tailed kittens dumped across the street with an open can of cat food; peeping day-old chicks delivered to the post office; a frisky dog in need of a new home. And, after another campaign on the home front, a few woolly sheep.

"What do you do with them?" everyone asks me. I know what they mean is "You don't eat your sheep, do you?" At first, the answer was no.

From the beginning I hadn't ruled out eating lambs I raised. I had eaten meat all my life. Where was the logic in buying meat when I had healthy lambs in my backyard?

And so my little wool-producing flock grew, with new lambs each spring. In my third summer of sheep raising, with two adolescent rams mounting everything that moved, the time had come to face the question dead-on.

Roger Jackson (not his real name) became my henchman. He kills animals for a living. One Labor Day weekend I took three sheep to his small custom slaughterhouse. I made three trips, each time with one sheep stuffed into a large dog crate, bleating the whole way.

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