The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

"Helen Whybrow is a to-the-bone writer, and this is a to-the-bone book--beautiful, real, full of life."--Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

"Sheep have helped me become a good shepherd, not just to them, but to a place that is my sustenance and joy as well as my unending labor and worry."

In the heart of Vermont's Green Mountains, Helen Whybrow and her partner are presented with the opportunity to steward a two-hundred-acre conserved farm. Whybrow knows that "belonging more than anything requires participation" and radically intertwines her life with the land. Six months after purchasing Knoll Farm, they unload a flock of Icelandic sheep onto the field and Whybrow becomes a shepherd entering into "nature's constant cycle of life into death into life" and all its unexpected lessons.

The challenging and profoundly rewarding work unfolds for Whybrow in the everyday rituals of farmsteading and caring for her family--birthing lambs in the late winter, harvesting blueberries in summer, fending off coyotes and foxes, seasonal shearing--while instilling the lessons of the land in her daughter and caring for her mother. As life at Knoll Farm endures years both abundant and lean, she learns that true stewardship is about accepting change and adapting. She embraces a transcendent rhythm of blood and bone, milk and muck.

At once inspiring and brave, deeply felt and gorgeously written, The Salt Stones is a loving look at the world through a shepherd's interconnected ethos.

Helen Whybrow is the author of A Man Apart: Bill Coperthwaite's Radical Experiment in Living and Dead Reckoning: Great Adventure Writing from 1800-1900. She is also the editor of many anthologies, including Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place and Coming to Land in a Troubled World. Her writing has appeared in Cagibi, Hunger Mountain, EatingWell, and Orion. She has been a visiting faculty member at Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference. She lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where she shepherds a two-hundred-acre organic farm.