INTRODUCTION

 

                                      WHY I AM STILL RAISING GOATS

 

   After more than forty-five years, why am I still raising goats? Friend Bev asked that question in a letter she wrote me back in 1997, when we had each been raising goats for a mere 27 or 28 years. I thought about Bev’s question that morning as I sat down on the milk stand to milk. We had not yet built the new goat barn so I was milking in the decrepit old milk room with its refrigerator on a wobbly stand in the corner, next to a chair. I love sitting next to a warm goat rhythmically milking into a bucket. I even love the sound of milk hitting the bucket. Maybe that’s why I am still raising goats. But then…

   Monica decided, for reasons known only to Monica, to stick her head through the arm of the chair as she climbed off the milk stand. The crazy Nubian panicked and rammed herself further through the chair arm and into the refrigerator, threatening to send it crashing to the floor.

   That refrigerator, that chair, and that milk stand had been in exactly the same positions since long before Monica was born seven years earlier. She had been climbing up and back down for at least six of those seven years. Why she suddenly couldn’t find her way to the door without hooking the chair is a mystery.

   Why, indeed, do I keep raising these nutty goats?

   The card that Bev sent with her letter had a quote by a Renee Locks: “The wise woman is she who is too full of joy to be defeated by trouble.” Maybe that’s it. The joy we find in goats outweighs the annoyances… like goats sticking their heads through chair arms and nearly destroying themselves, goatkeeper and the barn refrigerator.

   We certainly don’t do it for the money. If we figured out our expenses, it might be cheaper to buy our milk.

   Well, there is the milk… Nothing could be better than fresh goat milk on my granola, goat milk custard, goat milk ice cream, goat milk yogurt.

   But it’s not just the milk; it’s the goats. They make my day begin and my day end. Sitting next to a warm goat on the milk stand as the rain pours outside (as it usually does most of fall, winter and spring in western Oregon) is a warm and wonderful feeling. …Until some stupid goat leaps off the stand and sticks her head through the arm of a chair…

   But I managed to get Monica untangled before she destroyed the place and, eventually, I was able to laugh at the idiocy of the whole thing.

   So, why do I stick with this crazy goat business? Beats me. For the laughs?