PROLOGUE

 

Astute readers may have noticed that my second book in this Goat Lane series was published in 2000, yet many of the stories I’m reprinting were written before that. So why did they not appear in More Life in the Goat Lane? The reason involves a duck and an especially astute reader…

 

A DUCK IN THE MILK ROOM

 

        In the fall of 2005, a reader called to ask what month and year a certain Kidding Pen column had appeared. She said the column was about a duck in the milk room. I had absolutely no memory of such a column.

        "The duck came into your milk room and scared the goats into dropping grain on the floor," the caller prompted. "I thought that was so smart for a duck."

        I remembered we had ducks at one time. But I remembered nothing about one in our milk room.

        "Are you sure," I asked her, "that I wrote it?"

        She was sure. Her son-in-law was thinking about getting ducks and she wanted him to know how intelligent they were. She remembered my story of the smart duck in my milk room and wanted to give him a copy of that column.

        I didn't remember a thing. And, frankly, I did not believe I had ever written such a story. If I had ever owned a duck smart enough to write about, surely I would remember it.

        But I promised I would look through my computer and clips to see if I could find anything. And I did look. But I did not find it. The computer only had the previous several years’ worth of columns because of hard drive crashes in the past.

        But I had all my columns clipped out. Somewhere. Or at least I thought I did. They should have been in a box in my office. I went through all of those but none had anything to do with a duck in the milk room or elsewhere.

        And then I forgot all about it.

        Fast forward to February, 2006, when I was sorting photos on top of the photo file cabinet in my husband's study. I was trying to empty that room so we could tear it apart and rebuild from the ground up. The floor underpinnings had disintegrated and the file cabinets had been leaning at a heart-stopping angle. Any moment, I had been sure, they would keel over.

        So I moved the cabinets upstairs to my office, which is over a part of the house where the floor is not atilt. Before the photo cabinet could be moved, though, the foot-deep pile of stuff on top had to be sorted. In that foot-deep pile I found one United Caprine News issue. Only one. From November of 1993. Why it was there I had no idea. Since reading old columns is more fun that sorting, I stopped to read what I had written so long ago.

        To my utter amazement, the Kidding Pen story in that November, 1993, issue was about a duck in the milk room. "Clean-Up", as I apparently called her, learned to quack to make the goats throw their grain on the floor so she could eat it. I remembered it all clearly then: the duck that routinely snuck into the milk room whenever I opened the door, the quacking, the startled goats and the cascade of grain as they threw their heads up. That duck had even learned to quack at the door to be let back outside. But I never would have remembered without rereading it.

        California goat breeder Laura Donham, (for that is who the caller with the incredible memory was), had read the story twelve years before and remembered it in detail.

        My memory, I confess, is so poor that I have to look back through my last several columns to see if I have already written about a particular incident or not. Next time, I vowed then, I would just call Laura.

        After finding the lone UCN, I stood beside the file cabinet looking around to see if there were more of them somewhere in the vicinity. Next to the file cabinet location is a floor to ceiling bookcase. Well, the bookcase is not quite to the ceiling. The top shelf is open and, as my gaze went to the top, there they were: stacks of forgotten United Caprine newspapers, patiently waiting to have The Kidding Pen cut out and filed in the upstairs clipping box. They were yellowed and dusty. Obviously old.

        One could easily have fallen and landed on top of the photo cabinet and been subsequently buried under other stuff. But why that particular issue?

        I called Laura.

        "You're not going to believe this," I told her. "But I found the duck column."

        She was delighted. And asked for the month and year. She must keep the columns somewhere handier than I do because she said she would be able to find it by the date, although it "would take awhile". (I'll bet not twelve years.)

        After locating all the long-forgotten columns on top of the bookcase, I thought I might be able to put out another book. Although I swore I would not put out another book until I could tell about my new barn. I wanted a picture of my new barn on the cover: the new barn I had been talking about for ten or twenty years -- that I still did not have in 2006.

      And probably would not have, I realized, for a good long time: a tree fell across our well house that winter and smashed the roof, moving rebuilding the well house to #1 on the list. My falling-in house had moved down to #2. (But I still had high hopes of at least emptying the rooms that needed to be rebuilt.) The new barn was a distant #3. I was not sure a new barn was on my husband's list at all.

     Fast forward to 2012, the year we built the new barn. The well house that we rebuilt in the summer of 2006 was made of split-faced concrete blocks. I thought it was beautiful. So beautiful that I insisted on a foundation above-ground of split-faced concrete blocks for my new barn. And so it has.

     Our house is still falling apart, but I have a beautiful new barn. And, when I started this Still Life in the Goat Lane book project, I discovered, after reading the duck story, that I still had that stack of old United Caprine News papers on top of the bookcase. So this book contains some of the columns from that long forgotten stack, columns pre-new goat barn, columns that should have found their way into the second Goat Lane book.