goats – Lowerpondfarm

Justine Becomes a Mother

It was March, 2020, spring break of the last semester of my career teaching composition in a community college. As a nation, we were in the early stages of the COVID pandemic, isolating ourselves, trying to figure out how to scrub packages left on the front porch by UPS, learning how to make masks because there weren’t many available for purchase, and watching the residents of tall apartment buildings in large cities cheer health-care workers as they trudged to and from the hospitals where they were trying to save as many lives as they could. The death toll mounted.

I was sitting in my home office one afternoon about two o’clock, working at the computer, trying to get all the materials for all of my classes ready to go online. That included all lecture notes, overhead slides, assignments, assignment instructions, quizzes, discussion questions, everything. Literally, everything that I would normally deliver and explain in class had to be written out, formatted, proofread, and uploaded into empty course shells so students could access it from home. It felt like a Herculean task, especially considering that it was for the last two months of my career.

Vanessa opened the door and said, “I’m heading to the barn. Justine’s about to deliver.” She was excited. Vanessa, I mean. I’m not sure how Justine felt about it. Confused, I suppose. Justine was a two-year old La Mancha dairy goat. This was her first delivery. She had always been a skittish goat, a wall-flower, last one to the feed bowl. Now, she was big, very big, and she was especially wide. Earlier in the afternoon we had coaxed her into the barn from the brush yard, a distance of about fifty yards, by offering handfuls of grain every three or four steps. It was a slow process, and not entirely linear: step, step, step, pause, grain; step, step, step, pause, grain; then a random noise or quick motion would scare her back several feet, and we’d start again; grain, pause, step, step, step….

A few minutes later, I followed Vanessa to the barn. Our barn was almost new. We had built it just a few years earlier. It was divided into three roughly equal parts: one side with a gravel floor for the tractor and related implements; the center, with a concrete floor, for a workshop and grain storage; and one side with a dirt floor and hay for animals. The latter section is what we called “the barn,” or when we needed to be more specific “the barn part of the barn.” Using T-posts, wooden pallets, and bailing twine, we had fashioned a make-shift pen in the barn part of the barn for such events as goats giving birth.

When I arrived, Vanessa was already in the pen with Justine, and a little caramel-colored hoof was just starting to emerge from Justine’s backside. But just one, which was not a good sign. We waited for the second hoof to appear, but it didn’t. We waited some more. When it still didn’t, we waited some more. And then some more.

Vanessa had already helped deliver many baby goats, and she had read THE BOOK several times, so she knew what to do. She washed her hands, soaped up, and slipped her fingers inside Justine to get the second hoof in position. This job fell to her because we both acknowledged that my hands are way too big to fit inside the rear-end of a goat.

This was one of those moments we truly missed having Jordan, our youngest daughter, at home. Jordan, who had moved to North Carolina a couple years earlier on the pretense of starting a life of her own. had the perfect combination of gifts for this situation. She’s small, patient, agile, quick to strike, and fearless when it comes to working with animals. She was a champion chicken catcher, sheep wrestler, and goat midwife. She has the hands of surgeon—thin, nimble, and precise. For years, whenever I dropped a screw or a nut into the dark crevice of some contraption I was tampering with, the first words I uttered were “Jordan! Where are you?” But, alas, she was three hundred miles away, so I looked at Vanessa and sighed, all the while secretly thanking my lucky stars for having hands the size of a personal pan pizza.

Vanessa was working. My job was support. “You’re doing great,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster as she carefully searched Justine’s cervix with the fingers of her right hand. “I can feel it in there,” she said, her eyes half closed in concentration. She winced and then closed her eyes completely, in order to focus, I assumed, sight being completely useless or even a distraction in this moment. “I can almost…” Another pause. “I can…”

Then suddenly, she opened her eyes and withdrew her fingers, and just as suddenly there was half a goat baby sticking out of Justine’s posterior. The kid—soft, white with beige trim, covered in a kind of slimy, graying goo—just hung there, half in and half out, as if having second thoughts about the wisdom of this journey. It was alive, occasionally opening its grey eyes through the mucus and membranes. Pretty. Confused. Vulnerable. In shock.

Justine continued to contract, and with every contraction, the kid emerged a little further into this world, until she eventually spilled out onto the hay and lay there while Justine turned around—the placenta bag dangling between her hind legs like a balloon half-filled with water—and started to clean the baby with her tongue, as goats do. We named the baby Blossom, and we thought we were done. Dam and daughter in the manger. All was well with the world. Or at least the small one right in front of us.

Then, however, we saw another caramel-colored hoof peeking out of Justine’s caboose. It didn’t take us long to realize this was clearly not a spare hoof in case Blossom had a flat; it was attached to a whole other goat. Worse, it was upside down. That could only mean one of two things: either it was a terribly deformed goat, or it was a rear hoof and this was a breech birth. Then a second upside down hoof appeared, and Vanessa, sweaty, tired, and smeared with goat blood, mucus, and the veiny membranes of afterbirth, looked me squarely in the eye and said, “You might want to go get the book.”

I did as she asked. I knew the book would tell us what to do, but mostly I just wanted to get out of the barn for a moment. I took my time walking to the house, checking on the dogs, making sure the toilets weren’t running, doing anything to stretch out this break as long as I could. As I was strolling back up the hill toward the barn, book in hand, I heard Vanessa yell, “Help! Help! Help!” I picked up the pace, and when I got back to the pen, I saw Vanessa standing behind Justine, this time, with her hand up Justine’s backside all the way to the wrist. At that moment, it looked sort of like Justine was trying to suck Vanessa inside of her through some sort of Caprine Uterine Witchcraft, and I wondered, briefly, if I should grab Vanessa’s ankles and hold on for dear life.

Vanessa, on the other hand, had a much more realistic view of the situation. “I’m trying… to turn… the baby… over,” she said.

“And you’re doing great!”

She wasn’t really doing great. She was doing her best, but the kid wasn’t cooperating, and Justine seemed to have no idea of the drama being acted out behind her. After a few more moments of closed-eye, intra-uterine, woman-goat midwifery, Vanessa pulled her hand out of Justine’s backside, for the last time that day, I hoped.

Now, we were back to tiny, caramel-colored goat hooves peeking out from the thick curtains of Justine’s cervix, She was still contracting regularly, and on each contraction, the hooves would come out a little, then retreat. Then they’d come out again, then retreat. “Hang in there,” I said, again, stuck in my role as cruise director, “You’re doing great.” This time, Vanessa’s response was a stone-cold stare.

At some point, I suggested tugging on the hooves a little with each contraction. I was thinking that maybe we could coax the little guy out gradually, like we had coaxed Justine into the barn earlier. We worked on it slowly, together, taking turns, and after a while there was a second goat baby in our midst. A male. We named him Pat, after a female friend. We were done, we thought, at last. It was dinner time. It was past dinner time. We were hungry, we were dirty, we were tired, we were covered in various forms of goat muck. It was dark outside the barn.

But then, somehow, in a Coronavirus-induced fog, a third baby goat appeared. At least partly. I won’t describe the actual birth because I don’t remember it. What I do remember is clearly thinking, This baby is not going to make it. He struggled to breathe, we were holding him and bouncing him, and Vanessa stuck her finger down his throat to clear the passage, while I wiped away mucous and blood and afterbirth. All this time, Justine was cleaning Blossom and Pat, and looking at them as if trying to decide which she wanted to keep.

The third one—we later named him Buddy—never made it, never really had a chance. Justine never gave him the attention he needed; she never tried to lick him to life, as she had instinctively done for the others. Perhaps she knew there was something wrong in Buddy that was beyond our ability to sense. Try as we might, and we did try, Vanessa and I were poor substitutes for a willing mama. As I recall now, two plus years later, he died within twenty-four hours wrapped in a towel on our bed.

Blossom and Pat, on the other hand, were fine. Within an hour, they were both up and wobbling around the pen, nosing for nipples, taking naps and waking up, taking in their surroundings as serenely as baby goats do. A couple of days later, we opened the gate and introduced them to barn, and, not long after that, the barnyard. And the world was a little larger for it.

Adapted from a FB post from March 20, 2020

Meditation While Digging a Goat Grave

The small ones go in the garden. I find a corner somewhere, the end of a corn row, or in between the wire cages of overgrown tomato vines. My favorite spot is at the bottom of the garden, near the compost piles, but that whole area is getting full now, so I’m forced to expand the location of my plots—a sort of grim urban sprawl.

I dig a hole, taking care that it is at least six to eight inches longer and wider than dimensions of the carcass and deep enough that the remains won’t be disturbed by other animals or the tines of my old, rusting-red tiller. The first burial is traumatic enough. Then I lay in the chicken or the duck, back when we had ducks, in a pose the looks reasonably natural. I don’t want an animal that I’ve known, that has given us food or pleasure, or even one that hasn’t, to spend eternity with its neck twisted at some odd angle, gazing up at the annual succession of corn roots, the bottoms of carrots, or the bulging growth of sweet potatoes. I know that it doesn’t really matter to the animal, but it matters to me.

Along with random chickens and ducks, which generally die of old age or the occasional predator, on average we lose one newborn goat or lamb per year. Generally, that happens with young dams and multiple births. This year, for instance, Justine, our two-year-old LaMancha dairy goat, gave birth to triplets. It was her first birth, and she seemed a little uncertain about the whole process. She’s always been reticent. The first two births went fine. Within a few minutes the kids—a doe we named Blossom, and a buck, Pat—were up on their feet, searching for teats. We thought Justine was done. Then about twenty minutes later, we saw another caramel-colored hoof emerging from Justine’s posterior.

The birth went fine, but the kid refused to thrive. It tried to climb up on its knobby legs, but kept stumbling. Even when we held its still-wet body up and tried to get it to latch on to a teat, it made only a half-hearted effort. For reasons she keeps private, Justine refused to help—refused to lick this one to life. Perhaps she counted teats (goats have two) and counted babies and decided to keep things even, or perhaps there was something wrong with this kid that with our limited senses neither Vanessa nor I could perceive. This one, posthumously named Buddy, took up a corner just outside the compost bin. Eighteen inches by two feet, a spade and a half deep.

The spring after we first moved here, we ordered a batch of chicks from a very reputable hatchery in Nebraska. Twenty-five was the minimum order because they ship them through the mail, in a cardboard box, and the chicks need the mass to keep warm. Newly hatched chicks can live three days without food or water. This box, however, got left on a loading dock one cold night in Minnesota. We were tracking the package and expecting the worst, but when it finally arrived all but one chick was alive. We put them in a large tub in the bathroom, dipped their beaks in water to teach them to drink, gave them some feed, and hung a heat light, hopeful that they would survive, but every time we checked another one or two had dropped off. We ended up losing about half of them over the next twenty-four hours. I buried them in a small, mass grave near where we would later plant cucumbers, and we waited for the replacements.

Larger animals present more complex problems, for various reasons. First, they take up too much real estate to put in the garden. You want them in a quiet spot, not constantly trampled. There’s also the possibility of odor—you don’t want to smell a rotting sheep corpse while you’re picking green beans or suckering the tomato vines. Besides, any odor will draw wild animals as well—we hear coyotes at night, and we don’t want them foraging our garden or lurking around the barnyard. Finally, for whatever anthropocentric reasons, we get more attached to larger animals—they’re mammals, they are generally around longer, and they have more personal identity. Except for the occasional oddity, chickens don’t get names. Goats do. Sheep mostly.

So the larger animals go further out. I usually try to find a place on a hill somewhere, someplace with decent drainage and a view. Fortunately, we have twelve hilly acres and, also fortunately, we don’t lose that many larger animals. In the past six years, I have buried two dogs, three full-grown sheep, and two goats. Digging the holes is always the most demanding part physically. It takes a big hole to receive a hundred-and-fifty-pound sheep, and they generally die during a dry spell.

Clara was a particularly difficult loss. She was one of the original four goats we started with in the spring of 2014. We bought her and Buck together from a one-legged goat breeder in East Tennessee. Nice guy—we had met him at the annual goat show at the Wilson County Fair the year before. Good goats. We brought Clara and Buck home in a dog crate in the back of our Subaru. They were twelve weeks old, and we bottle fed them for another month. They trusted us like dogs. The bond, once established, doesn’t break.

Clara was our main milker—she could produce a quart or more a day for us and still have enough milk to feed her off-spring, usually twins. She had great teats—nice and long—and a large udder. She was also bitchy and dominating. She’d headbutt the other does and stand at the barn door, keeping them out with her icy stare. That way she had all the hay to herself and her kids. We learned early on that it was easier to work around Clara—haying the other goats outside, for instance—than it was to continually confront her about her wickedness. She never responded well to shaming or to righteous indignation. Though I could overpower her, and sometimes had to, forcing her to let the others in the barn during a rain, the moment I left, she resumed her role as the Bitch Queen.

We’ve always been on an annual cycle with the goats. Clara would give birth in April. Early on, the kids took most of her milk, but as they started eating hay and other solids, we would take more. By June, the kids would be weaned, and we (meaning Vanessa) would continue milking until around November. Last year, however, she stopped giving milk in July. This year, June.

She started getting sick in July. Her udder got hard, and she became languid. We called the vet and scheduled a farm call. Dr. Bates came on a Tuesday, checked her out, said she didn’t think Clara had mastitis and gave her a broad-spectrum antibiotic and a shot of fever-reducer. She also gave us a vile of the fever-reducer, for daily injections, and an additional syringe of the antibiotic to administer on Sunday.

But Clara didn’t make it to Sunday. By Friday, she was barely eating or drinking, stumbling, incoherent and getting glassy-eyed. We called for an emergency farm visit. Dr. Townes arrived at noon, while I was working on the fence at the front of the property. It was one of those muggy, humid days, and I had soaked my clothes with sweat. I caught a ride up the drive with him—windows down—and Vanessa met us at the barn. Within a minute, Dr. Townes diagnosed Clara with sepsis, and told us the most humane thing to do was euthanize her right now.

“She could live a couple of days,” he said. “But she’ll be miserable.”

It was that quick. It was also the most humane thing for all of us. Vanessa had been worried all week, fretting, not sleeping, watching this animal that has been such an integral part of our lives for six years, that has given us a dozen offspring, barrels of milk, occasional joy, and has shown us the limits of our own notions of “proper behavior.” Watching this animal decline, we were suspicious that she was suffering more than we could know.

Then we had to deal with the body. Dr. Townes said that the public landfill in Smith County (not far from where we live) would accept dead animals. “It’s privately owned,” he said. “You don’t have to live there. You just have to pay.” He said he knew of people that had taken cows and horses there. I thought about it while I finished the fencing work that he had interrupted when he arrived. I weighed the advantages of loading her up and driving to Carthage versus the difficulty of digging a hole the size I would need, but in the end, I couldn’t just toss her onto a garbage heap like a worn-out piece of furniture.

So, I found her a spot in the swale near the front of the property. It’s a low-lying area, so she doesn’t have much of a view, but it’s under a grove of black walnut trees, near a spot where she used to graze when we moved the herd to the front. Honestly, I chose the spot as much for myself as for her. It was in the shade—I didn’t want to be digging a big hole in the sun—and I was hoping that there would still be some moisture in the ground. I got the shade, but not the moisture. It took me about an hour and a half with a shovel and pick-axe to dig a large and deep enough hole. Then, while Vanessa was out picking up a few groceries, I dragged Clara out of the barn and carried her down to swale in the scoop of my tractor. I was a little worried that my hole wasn’t large enough, though I had been careful to take my measurements. It was about three in the afternoon by the time I got her covered with soil and topped with large, flat pieces of limestone—to discourage digging—and I was hot, dirty, grimy, and stinking. As connected to life on the farm as one can be.

Christians believe that the eternal soul lives on after the body passes, and that the fate of the soul after death depends on the actions, attitudes, and beliefs of the individual in the temporal life. I’m not sure if Christians believe that goats have eternal souls or not—I never heard that topic taken up in any Sunday school group I’ve attended—though I think many contemporary Christians believe that dogs have souls, or at least their dogs have souls. Good for them. But I am not Christian, and for me it’s enough to know that Clara is and will always be where she has always been, where she belongs.

The Length of a Buck

Every October, like clockwork, Buck Henry starts showering himself with his own urine. Buck Henry is a six-year-old, long haired LaMancha dairy goat. Bucks (male goats) have a long, pencil-like penis, which they can aim quite accurately. Buck Henry aims for his beard and fires off a round or two. He’s constantly pestering Mr. G., his lifelong companion, sniffing him around the hind quarters and rubbing up against him in all manner of inappropriateness. Mr. G. just stands there, looking on, inscrutable—I can never tell if he’s waiting for it to end or if he likes the attention. The smell of urine-saturated goat beard, however, is unmistakable and apparently irresistible to the does, housed about fifty yards away. When they go into heat, they run to the nearest fence and bleat and bleat and bleat. Young bucks can jump a four-foot fence practically from a stand-still, and when that happens all sorts of chaos ensues. Buck, however, is getting arthritic and can’t jump anymore, so he likes to rub his cheeks and his perfumed beard on my trousers at feeding time, not so much out of affection (though Buck is an affectionate animal), but out of habit and a perpetual sense of ownership.

—

It’s just before dawn, late in February, and it’s raining for the fourth day in a row. The temperature is in the mid-thirties, and my rubber boots have developed a small crack along the ball of my left foot. As I slosh across the ever-deepening mud-field, carrying an armload of hay for the sheep, cold water seeps into my boot and soaks my sock.

—

I am sitting on the back stoop of the barn, watching the sun set. Orange light filtering through a layer of burgeoning storm clouds in the distance and an old hackberry tree a hundred yards away gives the scene a lonely, exotic look, like I am on the Serengeti or the edge of the Outback. It’s early summer, just after evening feeding, and I am taking a short break. Four baby goats are using me as a playground. I feel their hooves tap my shoulders and arms. Their mothers, Clara and Clover, also LaManchas but short-haired, stand nearby, watching, serious. I smell like hell—soaked with sweat and coated with grime, I’m wearing my third t-shirt of the day, but a shower and a beer await. I can’t recall ever having been this happy.

—

First, I have this thought: We have way too many animals. They’re expensive, they suck up an enormous amount of time, energy, and cash, and with the exception of some eggs, goat’s milk, and the occasional plate of lamb chops, they don’t produce much. They are way more trouble than they’re worth. We should get rid of them. Then, I have this thought: We need a llama.

—

It has been a long, strange spring, the longest and strangest of my sixty-six springs for sure. The pandemic, the ever-impending collapse of the economy, the shenanigans of the president which are no longer amusing even to the most cynical and sardonic among us, the ever-widening chasm between everybody and everybody else, the emerging difference between what we thought we were and what we actually are, the wearing-of-masks or the not-wearing-of-masks, the navigating of side glances either way, the continual hand-washing, the brutality of the police, the outrage of the mobs. It’s all background noise. Deafening, but definitely background.

—

In March, just three months before I was scheduled to retire, the college administration decided we would not be coming back from spring break, but would instead finish the semester on-line. Right then, my teaching career developed a slow, fizzling leak. I had worked at the college for thirty-one years as a teacher and academic administrator. For some of those years the college was the one stable part of my life—through a divorce and several resulting moves, through remarriage and a couple resulting moves, through the ping-pong years of sending my own children off to college and taking them back in for a few weeks, or a few months, or a year, sending them off again, taking them back in, etc., through being stalked by a coworker who truly believed I was the Second Coming of Jesus while simultaneously having a secretary who thought I was Satan Incarnate, I had work. I had friends and colleagues, I had confidants, I had papers to grade and classes to prepare, I had meetings to attend and decisions to make, I had projects to complete, reports to write. I had a paycheck every month, insurance (good insurance), I had stability and seniority. I had the knowledge that unless for some reason I decided to commit a felony or have an affair with a student (neither of which are in my character—since I’m way too much of a coward), none of that was likely to go away.

—

And then it went away.

On the farm, every day is everyday. We feed animals, we work in the garden, we mow and we mow and we mow, I work around the pond, Vanessa collects eggs (way more than we can ever figure out what to do with) and tends the chickens, we work in the other garden, we make lists, we take turns checking things off those lists, we make new lists. Everyday is every day.

—

Periodically, generally under stress, Vanessa convinces herself that I’m going to die and leave her to deal with all this on her own. Her fear is not unfounded—I am six years older than she is, and her first husband did, in fact, die of colon cancer in his mid-forties. So, I grant that she has reason for concern. But there’s nothing I can do about it because in every scenario, I’m dead. “It’s easy for you,” she says. “You’ll be gone. I’m the one who will have to deal with twelve acres and all these animals.” Over the years, I’ve figured out that making the argument that death has its own drawbacks doesn’t carry much weight when she’s in one of these moods.

“I’m the one who will have to deal with all this shit,” she says. “I don’t even know how to put the… the… the thing on the tractor.”

“Which thing?” I say. “A lot of things go on the tractor.” (The things are actually the point of having a tractor.)

“You know… the… oh, never mind…! If… If I die, you’ll be fine.”

“I won’t be fine,” I say, trying to be supportive and understanding, but sounding, I’m sure, impatient and condescending. “You’ll be dead. How could I be fine?”

“You know what I mean!” she says. “You can do everything around here. I can’t.”

That’s true. I can do just about everything on the farm and in the house—all the house work, all the animal care, all the heavy lifting. My bread making skills suck, my cooking is not a tenth as interesting or imaginative as hers, and my sense of tidiness borders on her sense of chaos, but I do have the upper body strength, I know which gas can fills which gas tank, and I can put the thing on the tractor.

—

There are the chickens. Currently, two flocks. The older flock (diminished to fifteen hens and Arthur) lives in the chicken coop—an old board and batten shed that we converted to a hen house when we bought the place. The young flock (thirteen hens who survived the shipping) lives across the property in a smaller, separate coop and run. The plan had been to move the chicks in with the chickens and let them assimilate. We do that by moving them at night—when they are docile and night blind. That strategy also takes advantage of their small brains. When they wake up, they think they have always been where they are.

Except this time, they didn’t. Every night for about a week, we moved five or six chicks into the larger, older chicken coop, and every afternoon when we let them out to free range, they hopped fences, skirted across the barnyard, raided the garden, and made their way home. Eventually, we gave up.

—

My knees are starting to give out.

—

There is the food: eggs, goat’s milk, yogurt, cheese, butter-milk pancakes. There are radishes, green onions, a variety of lettuce. Our two refrigerators, one in the kitchen and one in the barn, stay stuffed with bags stuffed with greens pretty much all spring, and again in the fall. We’ve had lettuce in the fridge as late as Christmas, still fresh and crisp, picked a month earlier. There is a crop of raspberries in June, and another in September, wild blackberries growing along the perimeter fences in July. New potatoes and summer squash by solstice, sweet potatoes and winter squash by Halloween. There are all the herbs—basil and dill and oregano and sage and rosemary and thyme and mint and mint and mint. There are tomatoes, half a dozen varieties—green and fried, ripe and sliced, in sandwiches, on plates, drizzled or salted or sprinkled with basil and olive oil, tossed into a salad or stir-fry, canned, or parboiled, skinned, seeded, and simmered into sauces for the coming winter. Sometimes they don’t even make it out of the garden—picked and eaten, unwashed, right off the vine.

—

Or fed to Buck across the fence—the beast nibbling right out of the palms of our hands.

—

The thing is, I have not lived in the same house for more than six years since I graduated from high school nearly fifty years ago. From the age of eighteen to thirty-six, I made major moves every three years: from Texas (U.S.A.F tech school) to England (U.S.A.F. duty station) to Maine (starting college), to Missouri (finishing college), to California (graduate school) to Japan (first full-time teaching job), to middle Tennessee, where I have lived for thirty years. Even here, where I secured a tenure-track position and quickly jumped the canyon between paying rent and paying a mortgage, every six years has brought a move—upgrading to a larger house, or a divorce, or a remarriage—something that required moving. It seems to be in my blood. I get the seven-year itch.

—

When we got the original set of goats—Buck Henry, Clara, Clover, and Mr. G.—in the spring after we bought the property and started building the farm, in my own mind, I committed to being here as long as they were living. The length of a Buck, I thought. Now they are getting old. We are no longer breeding goats, no longer milking. Clover, the sweetest and most affectionate of them all, but who was never any good on the milk stand, has gone to live with friends three counties over. Buck has suffered a string of maladies that brought vet out in the past couple of years. He’s been under general anesthesia twice, all hundred and seventy pounds of him stretched out on a blue-tarp under a hackberry tree in the buck-yard, tongue hanging out like a cartoon. Clara has recently started what could be a long, slow decline. She’s not eating much, not pushing the others around and bullying them, not her usual, dominating, bitchy self. Only Mr. G., a wether (castrated male, kept as a companion for a buck), seems to be sliding into old age with any grace and dignity.

And I’m starting to feel jumpy again, as if there’s something just over the next hill that will satisfy, some image not yet in focus but begging to be seen, some tune not yet made into a song, some Lebowski rug that will pull the room together. The elusive call of possibility against the bitter-sweet refrain of the every day.

—

Yet, the thing is, we do need a llama.

Control of Nothing

This was one of those days when the universe reminds me that I am in control of nothing. After feeding this morning, my “plan” was to write for an hour, then do some grading, then leave at 9:00 for school and listen to “On Point” with Tom Ashbrook, my favorite radio show, on the way to school. I had meetings at 10:30, 11:00, and 1:00.

I took the dogs to the barn for one last whizz about 8:45, and that’s when I saw the pig-that-is-not-our-pig in barnyard, and all the goats and sheep standing around the fence-line with a horrified look, like someone had just farted in church.

Then the pig-that-is-not-our-pig took a big whizz, and I realized, judging from where the stream originated, that she is a he–assuming that pigs have roughly the same anatomy as other barnyard animals. I looked around and found where the pig-that-is-not-our-pig had gotten through two fences, patched those holes, got some grain and opened the pasture fence to coax the pig-you-know-what-I-mean back to Ramshackle, where he/she belongs.

As soon as I opened the gate and shook the grain, all the sheep-n-goats darted for it. Two full-grown does, two four-day old kids, and three very pregnant ewes stampeded. The pig was still whizzing.

That’s when I saw that Clara, one of our does, was about to give birth. I waved goodby to Tom Ashbrook for the day, and got out the electric fence to bolster the regular fence, since I didn’t want the pig-etc-et-era to get back into the barnyard and possibly harm the new kid or at the very least freak out the sheep-n-goats.

It took about twenty minutes to set up the electric fence, during which time Clara went from having drippy stuff, to having a foot emerge, to having a full fledged kid on the ground. If humans were born that easily, there would be 30 billion people on the planet.

But now it was 9:45, and my 10:30 meeting was toast. I came to the house, tried to call the person I was supposed to meet, and finally got voice mail. I went back to the barn, tried to dry off the new kid, and go to school, but I had goat afterbirth on my jacket and pants (you gotta love the farm) and thought, “It’s just a division meeting.”

Back and forth to the barn two or three times, cause I’m worried about the pig breaking out and terrorizing the sheep-n-goats, and it’s getting later and later. I call and move my 11:00 meeting to 12:00. At 11:05 I’m ready to go when I see that Clover (one of the goats) is hiding in the trees, afraid to go back to the barnyard because of the pig.

I tell her about the electric fence, but you can’t reason with a scared goat. It’s starting to rain, and goats hate rain, but she’d rather suffer rain than the possibility of a pig. I take out my cell phone and show her radar images of approaching thunderstorms from Weather.com, to no avail. Finally, I say, “Okay, you’re on your own, dammit.”

I trudge to the house, feeling bad about leaving Clover, though she can get to to barn any time from where she is. It’s now 11:20, and I will be 5 minutes late for the meeting I already put back an hour. When I get in the truck, I look down and see that I’m still wearing my afterbirth jacket.

I have control over nothing.

Accepting that, I feel better.