One of the latest joys of living in this largely rural island paradise is that my house smells like a barn. A barn full of sheep. I don’t even know if sheep actually spend time in barns. Do they? Aren’t they supposed to be out grazing the meadows and hillsides in all kinds of weather, rounded up seasonally by border collies way smarter than I’ll ever be? 

I’m just guessing here; we had very few sheep in the apartment building in New York where I grew up. I delivered the newspaper to subscribers in our building every evening, so I figure I would know if there were sheep roaming the halls, you know? I do remember lots of smells as I dashed from floor to floor slinging papers: pasta sauce, hot frying oil, steamed stuffed cabbage — which stinks at least as much as sheep, actually. It’s really ugly.

Where was I? Oh, sheep. Yeah, I’m pretty sure there were none. 

Yet now their perfume, their earthy fragrance, their oily wooly stench of sweat and poorly digested vegetable matter, permeates our home. Why, you may ask? Yeah, me too. So, former ace strategic planning analyst that I once was, I naturally scrutinized the source of this problem and it appears to be…um…the woman-lately-known-as-my-wife. 

That’s right. You see, she is English. As near as I can tell from the sketchy evidence before me, the English have a dominant gene for close association with…sheep. (I mean no disrespect.) They raise them, they graze them, they shear them, their dogs chase them and, of course, they eat them — but not, of course, until they are cooked to the consistency of roofing shingles. The precise reason why these rheumy eyed, fluffy coated, perpetually pooping, hopelessly skittish quadrupeds hold such fascination for the English is a mystery. They are, after all, and by a wide margin, the dimmest animals on the planet. I refer, of course, to the sheep. 

Maybe it’s as simple as this: Even if you’ve completely lost your British Empire, you can still look pretty bright when compared, side by side, to a sheep.

Don’t get me wrong: We don’t actually own any sheep. This is largely because we have no land. If we did, I’m almost certain we would have sheep. Call it genetic determinism. No, what we have is sheep fleeces, which is better than sheep feces, but not by much, at least in the smelly department. We have fleeces — bags and bags of them — because, here in this largely rural island paradise, it is sheep shearing season. I would almost certainly have missed this muscularly pastoral moment entirely were it not for the fact that the woman-lately-known-as-my-wife has taken up the art of felting. 

Felting is a way of making fabric and textiles from wool fibers. This art dates back far into ancient history and continues today in places like eastern Turkey and former Soviet republics like Kyrgyzstan where, let’s face it, they don’t have many shopping malls. To make felt you need a type of wool called “roving,” which is a good word because that’s pretty much the story of a sheep’s day, really: roving and munching and pooping. That, and bleating plaintively. You’d be forgiven for thinking them chronic complainers, at least until you remembered something important: A sheep has no brain. Thus, nothing to complain about.

Let me hasten to add, if only to save my own skin (pelt? fleece?) that the woman-lately-known-as-my-wife is an extremely talented and imaginative felt-maker, as indeed she is in all matters artistic. Her work — scarves, handbags, hats — sells out immediately. But here’s the thing I’ve discovered by means of stealthy Googling: you can buy wool roving online, smoothly and neatly carded and dyed into a myriad of colors. What this means is that you don’t actually have to have piles of the barnyard-fragrant, straw, grass and, no doubt, vermin-infested, wool in your TV room and spare bathroom.

Then again, the woman-lately-known-as-my-wife has been a resident of this largely rural island paradise for many, many years (though still not enough to matter to the “lifers”). And I think it’s getting to her. She’s too much of a Londoner to fall as low as Birkenstocks, but the back-to-the-land-but-not-too-far-from-the-Big-City Vashon thing seems to be seeping into her bones.

A while back a spinning wheel showed up in our living room. I began to fear we were slipping back into the 17th century when I figured it out: She was preparing, as all of us have been recently, for “The End of the World.” She was preparing for the Apocalypse. They got the date wrong, and now I think it’s scheduled for October. Whatever else may be destroyed, at least we’ll still have sheep because of course they won’t even notice things have changed. Which means we’ll have wool, and felt, and spun fiber to keep us warm.

Very far-sighted and thoughtful, I make it … unless, you know … we all end up Down There.

— Will North is a Vashon novelist who is allergic to wool.