“You’re okay, honey,” I said again.
For a moment, she was quieter, which I thought was a good sign, until I realized she was having trouble breathing.
“You’re fine,” I told her. “Perfectly fine. You need to just calm down. Just breathe.”
Of course, she wasn’t actually fine. But I knew a little something about not being fine, about how if you just kept going, taking one breath after another, putting one foot in front of the other, believing all along that it was possible for you to one day be fine again, that someday, things might actually be better. So I did my best to soothe her. I demonstrated how to breathe, slowly, deeply—in two, out two, in two, out two—and then the three of us—Mom, Alex, and I—huddled together in the driveway while Dad and David tried to come up with a strategy for humanely trapping the now-furious coiled snake.
Gradually, Alex seemed to grow calmer, her breaths longer, steadier, more sure. And then Eli called to us.
“All clear!”
The men had managed to capture the snake in the bucket, and they had pierced the bucket with air holes and covered it with a large, heavy rock. Just in case. The snake may have been injured after its fall, but if it lived through the night, David planned to relocate it the next morning. He put the bucket on the patio to the side of the house, out of sight. Good, we said. Fine. Still, we were shaken, and the incident had exhausted us all. My parents went home, and David, Alex, Eli, and I went to bed.
The next morning, David went outside first thing to check on the snake. I was reheating a mug of coffee in the microwave when he came back in. He stood in the doorway for a moment saying nothing, his eyes wide.
“What?” I asked. “What?”
“It’s gone.”
It was impossible, and yet it was apparent from the stunned look on David’s face that it was true, and my very first thought was that if we ever wanted her to visit us again, we could not tell Alex.
“Shh!” I said.
But it was too late. She had heard. She came running down the stairs.
“Did he say that snake is gone?”
“Now, there is no need to freak out,” I said.
“What the fuck?” Alex said.
Which pretty much summed up my feelings about the past two years: What the fuck. Just when I was becoming more comfortable here, just when I was starting to enjoy this place, a massive snake had fallen from the sky and landed practically on top of us. Nothing was the way I had planned. Nothing was the way it was supposed to be. The universe was out of sync. And now, apparently, that same snake had pushed a stone away and risen from a bucket, like Lazarus or Jesus. I couldn’t decide which.
I filled a mug of coffee for Alex, and we sat at the kitchen counter, sipping coffee and watching David through the windows as he gathered wood and carried it into the shop. Every now and then, he stopped to gaze up the mountain, his eyes scanning the hillside. But he needn’t have bothered. The snake was long gone, slithering, perhaps, along the creek bed, dodging salamanders and soothing sore muscles on the cool, smooth stones. Or perhaps it was winding along the Earlobe Trail, the feel of dirt on its belly glorious and thrilling and new.
Arugula Salad for a Snaky Picnic
This recipe is adapted from The New Blue Ridge Cookbook by Elizabeth Wiegand.
•3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
•2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
•1 fennel bulb
•1 large bunch arugula
•1/4 to 1/3 cup shaved Parmesan cheese
•A couple of handfuls of chopped, roasted walnuts
Whisk olive oil and vinegar together for dressing. Cut fronds from fennel bulb, and set fronds aside. Clean bulb thoroughly, and remove the end. Shave remaining bulb thinly with mandoline or cheese grater. Toss with dressing. Add arugula, cheese, and walnuts. Toss salad to distribute dressing evenly. Divide salad among four plates for serving. Serve reserved fennel fronds to your chickens, no plates required.
Chapter Sixteen
According to the website the Prairie Homestead, one of my online go-to guides, when the goat babies were two weeks old, it was time to begin milking. I liked this particular website because, despite her religious bent, the farmer, Jill, talked a lot about the value of homesteading skills and returning to your roots, and though she and her husband raised animals for meat, she also believed in raising them humanely.
Other than our one failed attempt at milking Maple, neither David nor I had ever actually milked an animal. But Jill made it all seem simple and straightforward. According to her, we should put the babies in a separate stall at night, then milk Ama in the morning and return the babies to her for the remainder of the day. That way, the babies would get plenty of milk—milk that was far better for them than any powdered, store-bought substitute—and we would only have to milk once a day. Both cows and goats needed to be milked at pretty much the same time each day, but if we milked only in the mornings, we would have more flexibility in our schedules. We could still go out in the evenings without having to rush home to milk. This seemed like the perfect plan.
In early July, when Conway and Loretta were exactly two weeks old, David divided their stall in half with fencing. The first night we separated them, the babies and Ama howled and cried, and the kids’ bleating was so mournful, I was tempted to let them back in with Ama. But we had read that this too was part of the process. Like babies learning to sleep in their cribs, they would learn their routine. It would get easier. And, for a while, it did.
Every evening, we fed the babies grain and hay in their section of the stall. At first, they nibbled disinterestedly on their food, but eventually, they figured out that these were things to look forward to, and they would run into their area and grab a piece of grain or hay and chew contentedly. At night, they slept curled together like kittens, against the fence. Ama slept with her body pressed against the babies through the divider. They could still see each other, smell each other, talk to each other, and sometimes I wondered if perhaps Ama enjoyed this brief break from her demanding offspring. Mother’s night out.
Separating Ama and the kids was the easy part. The hard part was getting Ama to cooperate during milking. I had just assumed that Ama would expect to be milked, that she would see it like I did, a fair exchange for room and board. It turned out this was not exactly Ama’s perspective. David and I had never had the same sleep schedule, and every day, for almost our entire married lives, I had gotten up and done the morning routine alone—taking care of the kids, letting the dogs out, making coffee, etc. Now, we woke at the same time, and while I had envisioned peaceful mornings watching the fog rise over the hollow with David while Ama happily ate her grain, the reality was more like a bizarre athletic event designed to test the endurance and emotional stamina of all the participants.
As in all other things, Ama preferred David to me, and when it came to milking, she seemed to somehow intuitively know which set of hands belonged to David and which to me. While she bucked and jostled both of us, she saved her most vicious kicks and thrusts for those times when I was crouched down, my head between her legs, trying to master the squeeze-and-roll-down technique. Granted, David was better at milking than I was. For one thing, he was more patient. For another, he seemed to instantly get the technique of massaging her tiny teats, a feat that required both dexterity and persistence. Still, the entire process was challenging. David had made a nice wooden milk stand, but it did not have a head grip, so though Ama jumped on the stand easily enough, the minute she started eating her grain, the clock started ticking. We had only a few minutes before she began kicking and jabbing us with her horns.
David sat in the chair on her right, his shoulder pressing into her side, just like Jill had indicated we should. However, Jill had demonstrated this technique on a Jersey cow, not on a Nigerian dwarf goat, so it was hard to gauge whether he was doing it exactly right. I stood on the
other side, leaning into Ama so that she was wedged between David and me. While I held the sterilized mason jar, David wiped Ama’s teats down, first with a washcloth, then with baby wipes. Then David put a lavender, hand-held human breast pump up to one teat. When the bottle was full, he handed it to me, and I emptied the contents into the mason jar while he left the milk funnel against Ama’s teat.
The trick, we discovered, was for David to never lose contact with Ama’s body. When that teat was completely empty, David and I switched places in a series of fluid movements. He glided around Ama’s side, pivoting around her rear until he landed on her left side. I dipped under his arm, swung around, then positioned myself to block Ama’s escape from the right. David had been a wrestler in high school, and his experience came in handy, since the whole process seemed a little like wrestling, a little like dancing, a little like giving a goat a massage.
If we ever forgot to use this technique or, say, slipped in the mud and lost contact with Ama’s body, she took that as a cue that we were finished and bolted from the stand to the fence where Conway and Loretta stood bellowing—three goats yelling and hollering and bleating and trying to squeeze between the gate and the fence at the same time. Meanwhile, in a far corner of the pasture, Willow and Holly languidly nibbled dry leaves. David and I sighed and held up the mason jar, trying to determine, based on our weekly totals, whether we had enough milk to make a batch of cheese or yogurt or whether David needed to chase Ama down and carry her back to the milk stand.
Most mornings, though, using our hand-on-goat strategy, we got about a quart of milk, including a thick line of cream at the top. When we were finished, we let the babies out, and they rushed to Ama screaming Mama, Mama! Butting their heads hard into her teats, they lifted her back legs completely off the ground. As soon as the milk let down, they fell silent, their tails vigorously wagging, their mother slowly lowered to the earth.
This was our new routine, the way we started almost every day. However, one advantage to keeping the kids with the mother part of the time, according to Jill, was that we could occasionally leave the kids in the stall with Ama overnight and skip milking the next morning. Never one to adhere to a rigid schedule, I loved knowing I could take a day off without affecting Ama’s milk supply, so one night a week, usually a Friday or Saturday, David and I planned a date night and left Conway and Loretta in with Ama.
Of course, we still had to go down to the barn to feed and water the animals and let them outside the next morning, but we could sleep a little later usual. David and I were thrilled with this arrangement since it gave us a brief reprieve. The babies were thrilled because they got to be with Ama. But it was hard to say whether or not Ama was thrilled. Perhaps tolerant was a better word. Sometimes in the evenings, Ama looked as tired and rundown as I remembered feeling when my kids were young, as exhausted as my mother looked in old family photos. Mothering was rewarding, but it was hard.
When I was in my twenties, I had three beautiful, healthy, boisterous, demanding children under the age of five and one stressed, overworked husband who was rarely home. Ama’s calm resignation to her kids’ incessant cravings reminded me how I had felt back then. Though I adored my kids, I was often exhausted, mentally understimulated, emotionally spent, overwhelmed by my own offspring. Who are these alien creatures? Why do they keep following me around asking for food and water, expecting me to open their juice boxes and the tops of their squeezable yogurts? I sometimes wondered. And where on earth is the grown-up who is supposed to be taking care of them?
As Conway and Loretta tugged lustily at Ama’s teats, I sympathized with her. Here her two kids were, hungry, fretful, in need of their mother’s constant attention, and now David and I wanted something from her too. She must have sometimes felt a little like she was being crushed, the very breath sucked right out of her. I watched the three of them for a minute, the exquisite, eager babies, the young, high-spirited mom, and then I headed to the house to sterilize the milk.
Of course, I knew all about the virtues of unpasteurized milk. It tasted better. It was full of good bacteria. It was easier to digest. And so on. But we were so new to the milking process that I wasn’t yet confident that it was safe to drink raw. Had we wiped Ama’s teats down thoroughly? Did we get it in the refrigerator soon enough? At first, I strained the fresh milk, then sterilized it on the stove and dunked it into ice before refrigerating. Later, I got braver. As soon as we finished milking, I ran to the house, strained the milk, and iced it. Some days, David drank it immediately. Other mornings, I saved it until I had enough to make cheese—which, with only one Nigerian dwarf in milk, usually took several days. When Ama was feeling particularly obstinate, it could take even longer.
Since I had already learned to make ricotta and mozzarella, I had a few basic cheese-making supplies—mesophilic culture, thermophilic culture, vegetable rennet, etc. Now, I was ready to make soft, cultured goat cheese. I began by learning the basics, such as the difference between curds (the solid that forms during fermentation) and whey (the liquid). Before I started making cheese, I had heard those terms, but my experience with them had been limited to knowing that an arachnophobic girl named Miss Muffet enjoyed both of them. It turns out what I had needed all along was the visual representation cheese-making provided.
One of the things I loved most about making cheese was the waiting, the anticipation. Making cheese, even the simplest kinds, was not like running to the mall to buy a new pair of shoes or ordering a newly released book online that would arrive at your front door in two days. You had to get a goat, figure out how to mate it, help her through pregnancy and delivery, tend to her babies, figure out how to milk her, collect all the necessary ingredients and equipment for cheese-making, and then, after you had introduced the starter into the milk, you still had to wait more than a day to have cheese. It was the ultimate deferred gratification.
Once I learned to make soft goat cheese, I tried many different flavor combinations—Italian herbs, garlic and chives, olives and pimentos, honey and walnuts, cranberries and orange zest. David and I would stand in the kitchen, sampling the various mixtures as if we were at a formal tasting. Five kinds of cheese. Three kinds of crackers. Wine or beer to cleanse the palette. “A little too much garlic,” we would say. Or “Not enough pepper.” We were reclusive, hill-dwelling connoisseurs.
Since each batch of cheese yielded a considerable amount of whey, we soon had a huge supply of large mason jars full, lined up in the refrigerator. I used it in pies, as a base for soups, to cook beans and rice and oatmeal. I no longer bought chicken broth or vegetable broth and rarely bought milk from the store. Now, though we were by no means living completely off the land, with the dozen eggs a day we were collecting from our hens and the fresh goat cheese and the few vegetables we were able to grow, we were actually producing enough food to provide some of our meals. Despite the fact that I often had less than twenty dollars in the bank, that we drove cars that were falling apart, that we were struggling to pay for health insurance and dental care, that we were still deeply, hopelessly in debt to the government, we still ate better than most wealthy people I knew, and some days, sitting down to feast on sliced homegrown tomatoes sprinkled with fresh basil and goat cheese or cheesy vegetable quiche or goat cheese ice cream or cheesecake, I felt immeasurably rich.
We ate the goat cheese on everything—bagels and eggs and salads and pasta. And then I moved on to goat milk yogurt and cajeta, a delicious, golden, caramel sauce that transformed our ice cream and cakes and fruits. How was it possible that I had lived close to half a century and hadn’t yet tried cajeta? Now, there were so many other things I wanted to make—butter, cream cheese, sour cream, goat milk soap, lotions, lip balms. I would never have to go to the store again. And then one morning, with no apparent warning, Ama decided she was finished.
Whereas before she had, albeit begrudgingly, allowed us to milk for a while, now she refused to go onto the stand at all, e
ven for her grain. She fixed her brown eyes at us, raise the hackles on her back, and double-dog dare us: Make me get on that stand. When David chased and cornered her and hoisted her onto the stand, she immediately butted and kicked. Though he had devised a wooden slat to keep her head still, one of us had to hold it in place. She quickly figured this out and repeatedly jabbed us with her horns. The minute we turned her loose, she was off and running.
When we did succeed in getting a little milk, she often kicked so hard, she threw dirt and debris into the jar. Sometimes, she knocked over the whole jar. Other times, though she clearly had some milk in her bag, we simply could not get any. And even though they were healthy and plump and almost old enough to be completely weaned, all the while, Conway and Loretta stood at the fence, screaming and egging her on.
“Stop that,” I told them. “You need to share!”
The babies were eating hay and grain and browsing some now, and they were getting stronger, so much so that they were occasionally able to shove past the partition in the stall and get to Ama during the night. Some mornings, David and I would get up early, sterilize all of our milking equipment, bundle in layers of clothes, and head down to the barn only to find the babies happily nursing, drinking what I had now come to think of as our milk.
Eventually, the trek down to the barn no longer seemed worth the effort, so late that fall, we gave up milking Ama and considered our other options. Our plan had been to mix the milk from Holly, Willow, and Ama, thus yielding plenty of good, relatively high-fat milk for cheese. In order to have more milk, though, we needed pregnant does. Holly and Willow were both from strong milking lines and would each, at their peaks, be able to produce about a gallon of milk a day, half a gallon if we milked them only once a day.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 18