Archive | March 2026

Goats Go To Hell

Mar25
Kathy holding one of the baby goats.

The bright sun blinded me when I stepped out the back door of the farmhouse to go to the goat pen. My big brother who was keeping me company said, “Spring is here to stay. From now on it’ll get warmer, and then it will be summer.” I could hardly remember what a warm summer day felt like. I was so young that I was not allowed to wander around outside without an older sibling with me. Recently, the weather had been either cold and rainy, or mild and windy. The piles of winter snow in our yard had melted away. Our driveway looked brown, with gooey, muddy ruts.

As my brother led me toward the orchard, I noticed that the brown lawn behind our house was turning green and dotted with small yellow flowers. I wanted to go see the goats because Daddy told me that two of our nanny goats had babies last week when it was so cold that it rained slush.

The goat pen surrounded several of the apple trees in the orchard. As we approached, I could hear the deeper bleating of the big goats and the tiny, high-pitched calls of the kids. The babies were clambering around their mothers, stopping occasionally to suckle for a few moments. My brother opened the gate to let me in. I immediately scooped one of the inquisitive kids into my arms. It didn’t struggle as I hugged and kissed it.

Daddy kept goats on our farm for many years while I was growing up. When he wanted to breed the nannies, he hooked a small trailer to the car, and we visited a man who lived beyond the bridge which crossed the Big Eau Pleine River. I loved riding along with him to this interesting, magical place. The farmyard was near a cliff overlooking the river and was surrounded by lush trees and bushes. After loading the man’s billy goat in the trailer, Daddy and the man talked while I sat in our car. From under shady trees, behind banks of flowering bushes, I heard the spooky calls of peacocks and other exotic birds that the farmer raised.

The white billy goat we borrowed from the man smelled terrible. When he was at our place, Mom was reluctant to hang our laundry on the clothesline near the orchard, for fear that our clothing would take on the billy goat smell. My brother told me the male goat peed on his beard. I believed him because the animal’s beard was a dirty yellow.

I loved the goats because they were so affectionate when I played with them. Their strange, slit-shaped pupils made them look intelligent. These beautiful animals were curious and loved to climb and nibble on everything. Daddy provided a wooden ladder and stacked wooden boxes for them to jump on. The borrowed billy goat was so feisty that when Daddy went in the pen to milk the nanny goats, he would rear up onto his hind legs in a threatening way.

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Obligatory Meals

Mar18

Niki arrived just as I finished vacuuming. She walked into the house holding a pan and asked, “Do you have room in your refrigerator for this? It needs to be baked, but not until an hour before we eat.”

Joining my daughter in the kitchen, I explained, “My refrigerator is pretty crowded, but maybe I can move things around, so it will fit.” We spent the next five minutes moving things around on the shelves. Dozens of half empty jars of condiments crowded together on the top shelf with a box of milk, a large bowl of Jello and a bottle of wine.

On the next shelf down were three or four mysterious, long- forgotten boxes of leftovers. I couldn’t remember what was in one of the boxes, so I threw it out. The other boxes looked more recent. It felt wrong to throw them out because they weren’t moldy yet, so I put them back. Closer to the front of that shelf were boxes of newer, still somewhat appealing leftovers. To the far left was another cluster of half-empty jars of relishes, pickles, jars of dried vegetables, fruit, and nuts, as well as chia and flax seeds.

The next shelf down contained two dozen eggs, a rack of ribs waiting to be roasted, a box of fresh vegetables, and a precariously balanced pan of apple crumble. It didn’t look like Niki’s pan would fit. My refrigerator is a cluttered mess even when I’m not hosting a family potluck gathering.

Taking a step back, I shrugged and suggested, “It’s cold enough today that we can use my unheated front porch as a refrigerator for a few hours.”

Managing the contents of a refrigerator is hard to do. Sometimes leftovers get forgotten on the backside of a shelf, in a true case of, out of sight, out of mind. It doesn’t help when the leftovers weren’t enjoyed very much when they were fresh. Another problem is that every family member seems to like different condiments. Every member of the family has an aversion to being the one to not eat the last pickle, olive, or forkful of kimchi.

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Droplets of Blood

Mar11

I had one thing on my mind that morning: to write my article early in the day for a change. Spending the evening in my office writing when I should have written much earlier wasn’t the way I wanted this day to end. I expected to have a calm morning and afternoon working at the computer. Murder and mayhem were the last things on my mind.

Sitting down at the desk, I checked a note pad on my desk for writing topics. The two white and black feline siblings with whom I share my home jumped onto my lap. Sadie licked my hand and almost touched her nose to mine. Jerry decided that he didn’t want to share my lap, so he pushed Sadie aside. His unspoken message was clear. Sadie jumped down and Jerry quickly positioned himself on my left arm and shoulder. I looked down at the cat and informed him, “Jerry, you know I won’t be able to type with you there.”

I noticed two small dark-colored splatters on the screen when I opened my computer’s Word program. Although small, the spots looked like splashes. I took a Kleenex and wet it with glass cleaner and what I wiped off turned the Kleenex red. Startled; I suddenly leaned forward. Jerry slid off my shoulder and landed on the floor. “That looks like blood! Where in the world did it come from?”

Finding random splashes of blood in my office was unnerving. I frantically pondered, “Whose blood was it? How did it happen to be shed?” Only one thing was certain, the blood wasn’t mine! I would have noticed if I had sprung a leak and unexpectedly began spurting blood! I didn’t see any more drops of blood, so I got down to work on my next article.

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The Call of a Dead Chicken

Mar4
SQUAWK!

Snow no longer thrilled me, especially the kind we had now that it was March. No longer soft and fluffy, snow from December and January lay in hateful patches of slick spots in the driveway where it had been packed down by car and tractor tires. On the back lawn old snow lay in dirt-stained, sodden drifts of grainy ice-pellets. The melting weather last week had reduced a snowman I’d made earlier in the winter near the backdoor of the farmhouse, to something that resembled a tree-stump made of ice.

I loved Saturdays because I didn’t have to go to school, but this morning I had a case of the late-winter blahs. We hadn’t had fresh snow for a couple weeks. Snow we had earlier in the winter was half-melted away. When I went out to play in the yard, not only did I get cold, but I got muddy, which I hated! The sticky mud was horrible. I stared mournfully out of my bedroom window at the farmyard below.

My apathy disappeared instantly as I noticed ice-ferns had grown in the corners of the windowpanes during the night. I reached out to touch the tip of one feathery fern. My warm fingertip melted a small round spot. I admired the beautiful, frosty designs. Then I realized that if we had a cold night, the mud in the farmyard would be frozen. I decided to bundle up and go outside.

Walking across the frozen mud-rutted yard made me wobble and almost fall the way I did when I tried to walk over a rockpile. My first stop was the barn. Daddy would be doing his morning chores. I loved to follow him as he worked. He was using a hay fork to put hay from the mow in front of the cows. The cows were conversationally mooing, snorting and flipping small tufts of hay with sassy tosses of their heads. The barn felt comfortable, but I knew there was no furnace. My brothers told me that all the warm animals in the barn made the air warm.

When Daddy left the barn to feed and water the chickens, I followed him. The chickens were funny to watch, but they didn’t fascinate me like the cows did. It was also my opinion that chicken manure smelled worse than cow manure. Sometimes the birds picked on each other. That morning Daddy found a dead chicken. He wasn’t sure why it had died.

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