Last week, when I made it home after a three-hour drive through a treacherous snowstorm, I breathed a sigh of relief, shook out the knots that had been tightening in my shoulders, and said a big thank-you to my dad.

When I was learning to drive, my dad took me out in all kinds of conditions.

Occasionally, he’d even reach over and give the wheel a tug, sending the car swerving off into an unexpected direction, just to teach me how to react and compensate. While it was an absolutely terrifying experience at the time, it has paid off over the years, and on Saturday, all of those lessons paid off, as I could hear my dad’s voice in my head telling me exactly what gear I needed to drop into and which way I needed to turn the wheel to keep the car on the road.

That’s how a lot of my dad’s lessons went: He put you directly into the soup, and then let you either figure out how to get out of it or talked you through making the right decisions.

Growing up on the farm, there were plenty of opportunities to get into things over your head. My dad wasn’t a lifelong farmer. He had just sort of fallen into having livestock, and looking back on it now, I realize that he was just as much in the soup as I was.

Sheep shearing was a perfect example. He was probably about 35 before he’d ever sheared his first sheep, and he’d learned how to do it by going to a three-day seminar that had been offered through Penn State.

Somewhere, he’d also procured a large wall chart that clearly demonstrated every single swipe you were supposed to take with the shears, and every position you were supposed to put the sheep in to make your job easier.

As his designated helper, it was my job to make sure that he had access to the chart at all times, in case he forgot what came next. My job also included minding the shear cord, keeping it from getting tangled in any stray legs or fleece, and grabbing the shears in the event that the sheep got the upper hand and had to be subdued.

After the shearing was done, I had to bundle the fleece, following a very strict protocol, and sweep off the old Army canvas that we used as a shearing floor. There were a lot of jobs for one small person. It was a good lesson in multitasking and establishing priority. When an order was issued, I knew it had to be executed immediately, or things could get worse fast.

Frequently, things did go badly. For one thing, it took a few years for me to get really proficient at all of my jobs. For another thing, when you only do something a few times over the course of a year, the process doesn’t really settle into your muscle memory, and we basically started from scratch every year. And, finally, let’s not forget that we were trying to impose our will on a sheep that really wanted no part of getting shorn.

Oddly enough, for how difficult it was, sheep shearing was something I looked forward to every year. Maybe it was the vocabulary lesson that came with it. My dad would run through every curse in the book before we were through, and even invent some new ones. To say it was colorful was an understatement. My dad wasn’t a person to talk to animals, but eventually, he’d become so frustrated, he’d grab the animal by the snoot and start lecturing it.

Over the years, I became the shearer and he became the assistant. There were a few years where we took turns. He’d shear one, I’d shear one, but ultimately, the shearing became my job. Although he didn’t grab me by the snoot, there was still plenty of lecturing going on. I didn’t realize just how ingrained his lessons became until many years later when I tried to enlist the Wonderful Husband as my new assistant.

“You know you sound just like your dad,” he shot back at me as I started to lecture him.

Recently, while pondering how to be a better, more effective parent, an old friend told me to just do what my parents did, because I didn’t turn out too badly.

I laughed because one of the first things that came to mind when I tried to think of exactly what my parents did was sheep shearing and all the lessons that went with it.

Today would have been my dad’s 75th birthday, and while he’s no longer here to celebrate it, I am so grateful for all of the lessons, sheep shearing, snow driving and the million others that were his true gift to me.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.