Lambs in Winter: Sketches of a Vermont Life Through Seasons of Change

Finding hope in a small farm, an engaged community, and an age-old connection to the earth

After half a lifetime spent moving from place to place, Alexis Lathem at last settled down with her husband on a small farm near Vermont’s largest city. The lyric essays of Lambs in Winter take readers through the seasonal cycles of raising sheep and hens and growing fruits and vegetables while confronting the challenges of winter storms, summer floods, invasive weeds, and pests and diseases.

Ever conscious of her place in a historically colonized and ecologically degraded landscape, Lathem wrestles with ethical questions that come to many rural dwellers who--following Thoreau--set out to ＂live deliberately,＂ in a time of climate crisis, persistent racial inequity, and growing economic inequality. Likewise, she grapples with the moral complexities of small-scale animal husbandry. Through her efforts at self-provisioning, without holding illusions of the self-reliant individual, Lathem finds herself deeply embedded in the community and reliant on others, especially as her region deals with repeated catastrophic flooding brought on by climate change.

Through elegant prose and insightful investigations into pressing contemporary issues, Lathem evokes the world of her farm and the surrounding countryside with a spiritual awareness of the human journey on this earth. Living in place, attuned to the unfolding changes in the world around her, gives her much to grieve, but the pages of Lambs in Winter are luminous with moments of joy and beauty.

ALEXIS LATHEM is an essayist, poet, journalist, teacher, activist, gardener, and craftsperson. She is the author of the poetry collection Alphabet of Bones and two chapbooks, and holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Arts Council, the Black Earth Institute, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Marble House Project, and the Chelsea Award for Poetry. She has worked in food and environmental justice organizations for many years and reported widely on farm policy and environmental conflicts in Indigenous communities. Her essays and poems have appeared in About Place, AWP Chronicle, The Hopper, Hunger Mountain, Gettysburg Review, Solstice, West Branch, and elsewhere. She lives with her musician husband on a small farm in the Winooski River Valley, ancestral land of the Abenaki.