HALLS — Carl Haskew, 61, hired a flock of sheep to clear the poison ivy off his back slope so he wouldn’t have to go out there, and he has been out there since, unfolding chairs.
The neighbors found out the first weekend. A family from down the road came by around ten to look at the sheep, then some cousins of theirs, and by early afternoon there were eleven people on his patio and a boy who had been told more than once not to give them his juice box.
“I hired them so I could stay in the house, and I’m out there more now than when I did it myself,” Haskew said. “Yesterday I had a woman asking can she bring her mother Sunday, and I said ma’am, they’re not mine, they’re rented, and she said well can you ask. I don’t know what I’d ask. The man just brings them.”
The flock belongs to Gil Strunk, who has run it through the neighborhood since spring and does not promise customers a day. “He wanted a day on the sheet, so I put Tuesday,” Strunk said. “They don’t know it’s Tuesday. They went to the back slope first, which isn’t what I’d have done.”
Haskew’s wife, Judy, said the ivy is about half gone and that he has not looked at it, because he is usually facing the street. He said he has asked several of the visitors to go on home, because he has the game on in the house and can’t hear it from the patio.