Car lights in the rain

From the top of my hill in the goat pen I can hear the cars and see the headlights through the trees on highway 92. It's only a two lane road but it's a major thoroughfare between Douglasville and Fairburn and on to Fayetteville, and it's always busy. On a night like tonight, in misty rain and cold, I remember traveling in the back seat of my father's Ford station wagon on roads like this to his parents' farm in east Tennessee. My eyes always glued to window watching the lights of houses shining through the trees, I speculated about what went on behind those windows. Was there a family? Were there children? What were they like?

In my childhood Christmas time was like this, cold and rainy, and travel happened at night. If I was lucky there would be reindeer lights on a rooftop or Santa outlined in lights on a lawn, sometimes a bright tree through a window. It was a ride of great anticipation. My brother and sister might be sleeping on the seat beside me, but I couldn't sleep.

No matter what time we got there, my grandparents would be awake and ready with hugs to greet us. There would be strings of lights around the living room windows and steaming hot chocolate on the stove. The next day we would walk out to the fields and find the perfect tree to cut and bring back to the house for decorating, maybe my grandfather would shoot mistletoe out of a tree with his shotgun. Presents would magically appear under the tree over the next few days. I spent days running through fields of cows and crossing barbed wire fences onto neighboring farms, knowing that if they saw me they'd know who I was and to whom I belonged, or climbing the split log walls of the old barn and playing in tall stacks of hay bales. In the evening I loved sitting on the basement steps to watch my grandfather shovel coal into the big pot bellied heater burning warmth through the house while my grandmother worked her magic at the stove with meat and vegetables that often originated on that farm.

Funny how car lights on a rainy road can sometimes bring back the best memories of your life.

No short pants

I never wear shorts on the farm, ever. Now I have another reason not to.

I've been a farmer for 5 years and had several reasons to not wear shorts. I used to live in shorts, flip flops and tank tops in the summer. I still wear tank tops, but between the snakes, poison ivy and a rooster that attacked my legs (now terminated), I don't wear shorts or flip-flops. Well,  until recently. I haven't seen any snakes yet this spring; the goats have almost gotten rid of the poison ivy and, as I said, the attack rooster is no longer with us. So on an occasional weekend afternoon, when I'm relaxing on the porch on a hot, lazy afternoon I may wear shorts and flip flops.

This evening I had planned to change into long pants before starting the evening animal chores, but it just didn't seem necessary. I did leave the flip flops in the house and wore garden shoes because, you know, there's just too much shit out there. Chickens, ducks and guineas got their evening grain and headed to their coops. The goats get a snack of juice bar scraps in the morning and evening when I milk Daisy - for which I am very grateful to a juice bar that will go unnamed lest they get in trouble and we stop getting goat snacks from them.

This evening I carried the bowls up the hill to the goat pen and started dividing them up. Two bowls for Quinta and Paco and a bucket for Daisy (she is the one producing milk, after all) into the main shed where Quinta and Paco eat in one room while I milk Daisy in the other. Sister has a pen she eats in. Spike and Dena eat outside unless it raining. If I don't separate them somehow, only a couple of them would get to eat. Goats don't like to share. When one is finished, he or she goes after the next bowl. You have to eat fast and be aggressive in goat world. I put Quinta and Paco's bowls and the bucket on a little shelf and then I feel tiny, scratchy, mousy toes on my ankles. Yikes! That'll freak you out a little in a mostly dark room.

There are mice that hang out in the goat shed because some of the goats are messy eaters and the mice get to clean up what the goats leave behind. I'm sure I just scared the hell out of the little guy; he jumped and accidentally bounced off of me on his way to safety. Honestly that was the first thing I thought, too, even though I couldn't see what got me. Then the second thing I thought was "snake?" and I jumped, a hair too late if it had been a snake. But no, it was tiny toenails. A snake would have left a mark. The only snakes we see are the non-venomous, farm-friendly varieties. I won't kill one, but I am cautious because I'm sure it would hurt to get bitten on bare skin. But even just to avoid tiny toenails in the dark, maybe long pants are a good idea.