Goat Musings, Part 3

Drama queen? maybe

One day I threw my boots against the bedroom wall. I had boots. That part surprises me. But I did, and I threw them. My husband witnessed this; it was for his benefit that I threw the boots. The act punctuated my anger. I didn’t usually yell or throw things, but the moment seemed right for such behavior, although now it doesn’t, and when I tell why I did it, you will likely think it silly.

We had those goats in the pen Wayne had built for them. He and our friend TD built milking stands. At first we had the milking stands up on our patio, but later Wayne built a shelter down near the pen and put the milking stands there, so we no longer had to drag the goats across the lawn and up the hill to the patio for milking, and so that TD’s goats would no longer eat the new peach tree I had planted near the patio, but it was too late for the tree already, and that’s not the part that made me mad.

We had our two goats, but the D family kept their two goats at our place, too, because we had a pasture to build the pen in. They had no land and there may have been a city ordinance prohibiting them from keeping goats in their back yard.

The reason I threw my boots: four goats eating hay make a lot of goat poop and it accumulates faster than you might think. Mucking out is a chore on any farm. You go into the barn or wherever the animals are kept and muck out their waste. But nobody mucked out the goat pen. I kept asking Wayne to do it. He kept not getting to it. You know how that is, and he didn’t or wouldn’t (don’t know the right word) call TD and ask him to come and help muck out the pen.

The not getting to it went on for a long time until, eventually, the level of the ground in the goat pen rose to the point where the goats would soon be able to step over the fence and walk away. And I’m not kidding. I had already experienced trying to catch an animal that had walked over a fence—that big steer of ours just walked right over on the snow—and I wanted no more of that. So one day, I got mad, put on my boots, laced them up, and went out and started shoveling goat poop while the four goats looked on. I may have spoken to them, maybe not, but they knew to stay out of my way.

My poor husband didn’t.

When he finally learned what I was doing, he came out and began shoveling, telling me to go on in the house, but I was too mad even to speak to him. Before very long, TD showed up in boots with a shovel and began working, too. Wayne had called him when he saw me out there. Soon I was persuaded I should quit, and I went in the house.

What do you suppose they said when I left?

It was afterward, when I took off my boots, that I threw them and yelled at my husband. I am sorry to say it. In a few minutes I had calmed down. I don't know if my children knew what had occurred.

It’s unfair of me to write this, I know, because Wayne is not here to tell about things I did that would have made him throw his boots, if he had been the kind of guy to do such a thing. But I've written it anyway.

By the way, when all our goats had babies, that was one crowded pen. We sold most of the babies to the Hispanic folks who somehow heard about them and just showed up. They told us baby goats make for good eating. You probably didn’t want to know that. But even so, for a while, we had six goats in the pen. No need to make further mention of mucking out.

Eventually the D family built a house with a little land and moved their goats down there, and some time later we sold our goats. That was a sad sorry day, actually.