Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
When she’s where she’s happiest, Dr. Rosalie Truong rises at 4:30 a.m., drinks coffee, surfs the internet, then begins washing 100-plus eggs. By hand, in her sink. Then she feeds her house rabbits (those she’s shorn in the past week); the Angora rabbits segregated in the barn (the pregnant ones can be cranky); a parade of chickens, ducks, and geese; the quail in the quail barn; the outside rabbits and Angora goats and four Anatolian shepherds who guard them.
I peer into one of the cages in the rabbitry. “Most of them are nice, but the otter-colored one, she’s very mean,” Truong says. The rabbit’s eyes are ringed in white, which makes her look startled at the insult.
In the next cage, everybody’s placid, white, and smooth except one baby rabbit; she’s as fuzzy as the ball on Santa’s cap. An Angora, she’s being fostered by a kindly New Zealand rabbit. Honeysuckle, the Angora next door, may not approve; she’s thumping a back foot, telegraphing something inexplicable, with one ear straight up and the other drooping.
An obstetric anesthesiologist at St. Luke’s Hospital, Truong lives with her husband and two sons in Lafayette Square, but she spends as many days in Labadie as she can. When she and her future husband met, she was in med school at Washington University—and renting a house so she could raise rabbits under her deck. Grudgingly, she agreed to downsize on the condition that she could someday have a farm. “Most people have prenups,” she says. “We had an animal contract.”
Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
A rabbit sits up, nose twitching, to inspect my palm. This one’s an agouti, tan shaded with gray, the color of a rabbit in the wild. But these are far from wild rabbits. “They’d get all tangled in the bushes!” giggles Truong, who shears each Angora four times a year, spinning 3-inch fibers into a yarn that’s lighter and eight times warmer than wool.
Absently stroking a rabbit, she smiles. “You know how ambitious you are when you’re young? At 18, I wanted to be the fastest left-handed shearer in the world, and I wanted to win the Nobel.”
After med school, she earned a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology. “It was awfully dry,” she says, “so the Nobel went by the wayside. But I’ve sharpened my shearing skills.” In 20 minutes, she can shear an entire rabbit clean. “They could jump down if they wanted, but they are so tame,” she says. “You go from tail to head, and then I flip them onto their back on my lap and do their face, neck and feet.” She loves how frisky they are when the weight of the wool is gone. “It’s a great time to mate them—they are not hot, they eat better, and they want to have sex!”
Soon she’ll drive to Portland, Maine, with 12 rabbits and do a “witnessed shearing” in hopes that they’ll yield enough wool to be registered as German Angoras. Afterward, they’ll all check into a La Quinta Inn, the bunnies in little coats she knits for them. “I go under cover of darkness,” she says dryly. “I’m such a private person, and people always have questions.”
Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
We drive up the road to her second farm, where she throws out hay for the nannies while their kids gambol and tumble and play King of the Hill. She didn’t expect these babies: She’d given herself a year off from breeding. “Two males broke into the female enclosure, and one female jumped four 8,000-volt electric fences to get to a male,” she says with a groan, “so I have four ‘oopsie’ babies and more on the way. It’s, like, ‘Who’s your daddy?’”
Feeding (she’s still not done) takes her “four times longer than anybody else,” she admits, “because I have to kiss and greet everybody.” When she’s at the hospital or in the city, a manager and a crew of teenagers take over. On weekends, her sons help. And her husband? “I think I wore him out,” she says with a grin. “He’s a city boy.”
Abruptly she goes still, pointing to a blue heron near the shore of the lake. Uphill, two white geese are silhouetted in front of the red barn, honking and flapping their wings. They’re so loud, we can barely talk, but this honking’s different from the angry blares she hears in the city, the sirens that slash the air while she’s dyeing wool in her Victorian summer kitchen.
Dyeing is where her chemistry background kicks in, as she gauges how various dyes will bond with the fiber; how iron will “sadden” goldenrod to green. “I’ve used madder root, which is the orange that is used in Buddhist monks’ robes,” she says. “That is not sad!”
Truong grew up Buddhist, daughter of two physicians, surrounded by 8 million people in Ho Chi Minh City. Petite and smart, she announced that she wanted to be a veterinarian. “The cows will trample you to death!” her father warned. Dutifully, she went to medical school. “And now,” she says, “my income allows me to be a gentleman farmer!”
What she’s learned (or rather, proved to herself) is that “everything has a balance. The ducks and geese and roosters eat the mosquitoes and fly larvae and snails—which carry a disease that can paralyze goats. The chickens scratch, and it aerates the compost. Their poop enriches the soil, and I grow worms for them, and adopt feral cats to hunt the barn mice. No chemicals!”
She gives a quick nod, and the sun glints in her dark eyes.
“Circle of life.”
