Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [93]
“Funny you should ask,” Jennie wrote back.
That was not what I wanted to hear. “How loud is she?” I wrote.
“I’d say she is about as loud as a non-power lawn mower, maybe a bit louder, but not nearly as loud as a gas-powered mower,” Jennie replied.
I read the e-mail to Mark. “That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said.
“We don’t have a lawn,” he said. “And I don’t see why we need any mower at all.”
I found an Oberhasli breeder four hours away in Fresno, made an appointment, and drove down one morning. I willed myself not to look at the paddock of grown does. I pointed to a coltish two-week-old beauty. And that is how we ended up with Natalie.
When Natalie arrived, both she and Peppermint moved into the yard, where they have stripped every last leaf from every last shrub and tree and started in on the bark, peeling it away in strips. I had a few small fruit trees growing there and one day I watched Natalie put her feet up against the side of a plum and push and push until the crown bowed to the ground under her weight and she could eat all the tender leaves. Before I could get to the hardware store for wire to protect the other trees, she had moved on to the chocolate persimmon and the Bartlett pear. There is no longer a trace of the would-be orchard.
They were a lot of work, especially in the beginning. I tried, with moderate success, to enlist my human kids to pitch in. One afternoon a few days after school let out for the summer, I heated the milk for the goats and filled their baby bottles. “Would you please take these out and do the feeding?” I asked Owen, who was lying on the floor, drawing a Transformer.
“You do it,” he said.
“You do it?” I replied.
“Yes, you do it.”
“Did you just say, ‘You do it’?”
“I always do it,” he said.
“That is not true.”
He said, “I did it last night.”
“And I did it this morning.”
“Because I was sleeping. Besides, you like getting up early.”
“I do not like getting up early.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“So I can feed the goats! So I can do the laundry! So I can make you breakfast!”
“You like to cook,” he said. “Making breakfast is fun for you.”
“JUST GO OUTSIDE AND FEED THE GOATS!”
Owen stared at me in shock. He shouted, “You want me to be a SLAVE for you! Summer was not invented so kids could be SLAVES for their parents.”
“Actually,” I said wearily, “it was.”
There were no exchanges like this in the Little House books, ever. Owen went outside. A few minutes later, I heard him singing.
But for all the hassles, goats have been the most rewarding of pets. We have only to step out the back door, for the two of them to come running, bleating jubilantly. “They’re like paparazzi with us,” said Owen. They don’t want to sleep in their molded plastic goat hutch, they want to sleep jammed up against the house, under the eaves, right beside the door in case one of us might open it and they can push their way in and join us on the sofa to watch Fringe. I built a barrier to keep them out of the vegetable garden and they broke through. I reinforced. That very afternoon I was leaving to take Isabel to her dance class and the goats came racing toward us as we stepped out the back door. Their eyes were shining, and they were nickering. “Hi, guys, we areso glad to see you. The weirdest thing happened, after we got through the hole in the gate last time? Well, it’s blocked now! But we figured out how to get past it anyway so everything’s okay. What’s up?”
But what about the milk? When they were eight months old I took our goats back to the farm where I bought Peppermint to be bred. You learn something about the earthy roots of the English language when you spend time around livestock. You’re idly observing chickens one day and suddenly a lightbulb goes off about some phrase you’ve thoughtlessly used all your life: rules the roost, pecking order, henpecked, flew the coop, clipped her wings.
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