Her Side Funnies

This goat contemplates the last ride in Ken's car...(gurgle, gurgle).

Ah, today is a sad, sad day. I hauled the last four goats to the sale.

Yes, you did not mis-read this post. We are…(gulp)…goatless. The ensuing rodeo was more rich, somehow more mournful. The dog ceremoniously nipped at the heels of the wayward youngsters as we approached…(gulp)…Ken’s car.

This post, as irony would have it, is one day after the one which I confessed to damaging Ken’s truck – which I was grounded from using for a lengthy period of time – for having hauled one goat in it. Not wanting to risk getting grounded from driving the truck again, I did the only thing reasonable. I took his…(excuse me while I wipe a tear)…SUV. It has a plastic cargo tray, so I figured I was safe…relatively speaking.

The goats, sensing this was their last trip in one of Ken’s cars quickly emptied their contents all over the back of that car, but not before Mom had climbed inside and we were traveling too fast for her to leap from the vehicle. Now that she’s over 70, anything over 40mph and she stays inside. Go figure.
Did I mention that Mom wears perfume? Today she did not wear nearly enough. Ralph Lauren, with his expensive perfume labs, could not “Escape” (*Escape is, coincidentally, the name of her perfume) the powerful scent of four goats in a Honda Pilot.

Ben casually plugged his nose, hooked up the DVD player and became absorbed in the latest show, oblivious to the wretched smell engulfing the car. The only sign he made of discomfort was asking how long the 30-minute trip (which he has taken a thouand times) would take. Thanks to “our tax dollars at work,” we had ample road construction which made the 30-minute trip seem like a month-long sabbatical. Each time the little girl in the orange hat twisted her sign to read “Stop,” the goats expelled more refuse until we all thought surely we would slide out of the car, and onto the pavement below, in one gigantic pile of green stinky slop.

That’s when I became concerned about the interior of Ken’s car. I had pacified myself that we were not, technically, carrying any buck goats. They REALLY smell, and Ken’s grounding me was justified in THAT case. In contrast, we just had young doelings. Nervous doelings. Man how nerves can affect the digestive tract! And in my defense, that was unpredictable, despite Ken’s protests to the contrary.
When we finally reached the sales yard, I was moaning about selling Heidi’s goats while she is gone to Los Angeles, Mom was reassuring me that getting rid of anything that smells that bad is both justified and necessary, and Ben was asking if he could ride on the hood of the car for the return trip home.
An Amish Mennonite woman approached looking disdainfully at the back of the car, and asked about the dairy goats. It comes to my attention that Mennonites are NEVER dirty. She probably carries goat diapers in her purse for such emergency excursions, and an extra gallon of organic deodorant, which she made herself from homegrown apricots and biscuit batter, but I digress.

The long and short of it is that we unloaded the last of the goats, washed Ken’s cargo liner and left all the windows down for the return trip home. I believe I am off the hook, scott free.

Now, the house, the pasture, the neighborhood and the town seem unnervingly quiet.

The million dollar questions remain:

Will Ken notice?

Will I be grounded…again?

Will Heidi notice?

Will I ever pass for a Mennonite?

Will we return to the sales yard in the spring…in Ken’s car…to bring home replacements?

Anyone willing to bet?

Ken fears it’s another addiction. We are having several conversations these days that center around addictive behaviors versus new hobby interest. The cheese making started as an innocent hobby – then drifted for six years into intensive “hobby” material.

I’ll admit, there were stretches of time (four-and-a-half years) when every stool in the house was being used to prop up bags of draining cheeses and the house smelled pretty milky, but the end result was magnificent. Fine French goat cheeses that were the envy of foodies everywhere. Of course, success came at a price. Every friend who happened by got a spoonful of goat cheese stuffed in their mouths for their honest appraisals. I list this as introducing my dear friends to…the trials of fine cuisine. Ken called it a testament to the depth of my friends’ good will. It’s an addiction, he said.

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