Bjartur of Heart Rock Farm

half a flock (the ladies)

A few years ago, I came across a book that piqued my curiousity. It was published in 1946, helped its auther win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and then quickly disappeared from print for several decades before being rediscovered by the literary world...and eventually me.

The setting

Independent People tells the bleak and beautiful (but mostly bleak) story of Bjartur of Summerhouses, a sheep farmer, poet, and father stubbornly trying to eke out a life for himself in early 20th-century Iceland--self-sufficient and beholden to no man. To be honest, reading this book was a bit like Bjartur's life--an endless slog through a rough, snow and ice-covered landscape. Though, in a good way, if that's possible.

A handful of sheep snacks makes
for one photogenic ewe.

Which brings me to the topic of today's post: my brother, who lives with his family in his own tiny little Iceland, in Erie County, just Southeast of Buffalo, NY. He, too, lives on a farm of sorts (dubbed Heart Rock Farm), has sheep of the Icelandic variety, is independently-minded, strives for self-sufficiency, and lives in a really cold and snowy part of the world. However, as my brother--who is not actually named Bjartur--is neither brutally stubborn nor an epic poet (his wife is the writer), that's about as far as I can carry the comparison with the fictional Bjartur.

In addition to the 5 human residents (my brother, sister-in-law, two nieces, and a nephew), Heart Rock Farm is home to about a dozen of the wooly buggers, with names such as Nora, Thunder, Cassie, and Rainbow, in addition to a whole bunch of chickens, a couple of cats, a rabbit, a dog, an old fashioned tractor, and a wooden cider press. There is a small stream, full of salamanders, that runs through a forest on the hill just beyond the barn and sheep pasture.

Scary, evil-looking rams (made possible by
cool special effects on Picasa)

I don't recall there being salamanders at Summerhouses.