The Salt Stones
“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.
Like this book? Sign up for occasional updates
Helen Whybrow
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.
Praise and Prizes
You Might Enjoy
“Offering a deeply necessary, clear-eyed look at who we are as flesh-and-bone bodies during the climate crisis, this is a book that searches and finds meaning in both the hard truths and the value of wonder.”—Ada Limón
In this luminous collection of…
The Eighth Moon is at once a search for how to live in a place and an enigmatic lesson in a new kind of seeing—one where everything is connected, and all at once.
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Robin Wall Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons.
Milkweed Editions and Little Free Library launch new partnership
A locally grown collaboration with national impact: Indigenous Library Steward-sustaining Partnership
Chris La Tray placing his book Becoming Little Shell into the new Indigenous Little Free Library at Red Lake Nation College in Minneapolis.
Milkweed Editions and Little Free Library are excited…