Milque

I just now poured myself a glass of milk, took a drink, and was suddenly back at 722 drinking goat's milk. Yes, that's what today's glass of Kirkland milk tasted like, and I wondered if the dairy people ever slip goat's milk in with the cow's milk before sending it to the place where they pasteurize and homogenize it. Probably not.

Not that the milk tasted bad, just that it tasted like our goat's milk.

We had two goats: Cookie, a big, cantankerous alpine, and Carni, a chocolate brown Toggenberg with a gentler temperament. She was small and clearly not the alpha female. Cookie was, and a good milk producer, too, but she may have thought she was a billy, the way she acted like the boss of everything and liked to play ram tough with Paul.

We also had the Davises' two goats at our house, well, in the pen. Cookie ran their lives, too. And, incidentally, four goats make a lot of goat poop, if you'll pardon me. But that is a story in itself and will have to wait to be told.

Our milk was good or not so good, depending on what we fed our goats. We sought and bought the freshest, sweetest hay we could find. Sometimes hay was hard to get, and always it cost more than we thought it should. We could have thrown grass clippings over the fence; no doubt the goats would have eaten it. But we didn't do that, at least not very often. We were selling the milk and drinking it ourselves, so we were careful.

We had a nectarine tree and would give the goats a nectarine now and then, which they seemed to like a lot. We'd watch Cookie chomp the fruit and spit the seed out the side of her mouth. (How else, Carol?) She would bump Carni out of the way when we came with the nectarines, so we had to be quick and sneaky to get a treat to Carni. We didn't give nectarines to the Davises' goats. Why should we? By the way, we bought the goats from Phyllis Friend. She named them. We didn't.

Wayne built a couple of milking stands--he and Terry Davis did--which stayed on our patio. Every day, twice a day, we'd go down and drag those goats up to the patio for milking and try to get them there before they ate the peach tree we were trying to grow at the top of the slope near the patio. Terry didn't seem too concerned about that tree, seemed to think it was okay for his goats to eat it. Before long, we had to take it out, what was left of it.

We'd feed the goats oats with honey, which they loved, while we milked. We couldn't dilly-dally at it. Get the milking done before the oats were gone and hope the goat didn't step in the milk bucket. Then we'd weigh the milk, keep a record of how much our goats gave. I don't know why.

It started out that Wayne and I did most of the milking. I believe our children do not remember it that way. Soon enough they were all involved, and the only one who really wanted to milk was the one who couldn't. Ann. Too little. I think even Alyce milked sometimes. Not sure. But I'm sure of this. They all have their own stories about the goats, milking, drinking the milk, and so on.

We had to buy a new fridge, one without a freezer, so we could keep our gallon jars of milk in it. Goats were expensive, we found.

Sometimes the people who bought our milk just didn't show up, and we would have an awful lot of milk on hand, so to speak. I made cheese and more cheese. I made ice cream a'plenty, and goat's milk, with its richness and high fat content, made wonderful ice cream. But you can't make it every hour, you know.

About the fat. Fat particles in cow's milk are big, and they adhere to the body's mucus membranes and so cause allergies, ear infections, etc. Fat particles in goat's milk are very small and are easily digested. That is why doctors recommend it for babies and children who cannot tolerate cow's milk or who are having chronic ear infections. Which is why people bought our milk.

We took our goats out to Phyllis Friend's and had them bred. I say baby goats are the cutest animals ever. But we had no room for more goats, so we sold the babies, even though we knew the buyers were going to eat them. Don't think about it. Davises kept one of Carni's babies, Martha. Eventually, they built a new house with a goat pen and moved their goats down there.

But the day came when we had to give up the goats. We were not selling enough milk, and, as I said, people sometimes didn't show up, even after they had called to be sure we had their milk. I never understood that. What it meant was we had too much milk and could not afford to keep the goats if we were going to pour the milk down the drain, which we had to do now and then.

I don't remember who bought them. It was the end of what I always considered a good time for our family, one of those times when we all worked together on something. I don't know if they all see it that way. I'm pretty sure Wayne did.