Color of Hay: Maramures 2
The Stina, Breb, Maramures, 2000
Families keep six to twelve sheep for their wool and cheese. However, a dozen sheep are too few to justify a family member’s undivided attention, and sheep are defenseless when grazing in the high pastures. Accordingly, after the lambs are slaughtered for their Easter feast, families band together to hire a team of shepherds and amass their the sheep into a flock of one to three hundred. The shepherds will watch the animals, milk them twice a day, and make two flavors of sheep cheese. To know how to divide the collective cheese production, they hold a ceremony shortly after Easter to measure the contribution of each family’s sheep to the combined milking. It is a day where the children are let go from school, feasts are carried into the mountains where the shepherd will live, a band plays under the trees, a priest blesses the flock against wolves, and a small amount of sheep envy passes unmentioned.
