Three super-sized weekend farmers market in a row with seven human kids in tow. Exhaustion setting in hard.
We got home only to discover our few-day-old newborn goat kids were missing. Somehow their mothers had managed to lose them out in the wilderness of our property. We found one doe’s singleton fairly quickly asleep in a shed.
The twins of the other doe were nowhere. We searched for over an hour. By then I was at my lowest point. Light fading fast. Body exhausted. Heart exhausted.
I prayed and prayed.
“Lord… why this again? Why can’t we just have one day where we come home and there isn’t some kind of disaster waiting?”
Giving God everything I have and still somehow being asked to give more. My mind drifting back to someone who needed me earlier the previous day. One of those strange moments where I knew somebody urgently needed help before I even knew who it was.
I was near tears. Then I made one more plan. I asked Ben to help me find the lawn mower keys, which were “missing” in the deeply mysterious way that farm keys often are… meaning they were exactly where they were supposed to be.
He found them and I set off. Into grass so tall I usually avoid it entirely. Over pits. Up sandy banks. Around uneven hills.
Then I found tracks.
Tiny little newborn goatling tracks in the sand…and dog tracks…And something else.
Honestly, it looked like an entire woodland war council had marched through there. At least five different species and about twenty separate goat track lines crossing everywhere in hurry.
I checked the hay shed.
Nothing.
At that point I nearly cried again.
Then I heard it.
Mama goat.
Calling her babies home in a serious way this time.
And I prayed again.
“God, please let them obey her. I can’t do this anymore.”
And He heard me. The babies heard her too.
She bleated so loudly that the twins screamed back loud enough for me to hear them across the property. Ben was actually physically closer than I was back at the house, but somehow he couldn’t hear them.
I could. And I’m half deaf. So I hung up on him, climbed back onto the mower, and drove faster than I ever have before. Past the shed. Past another section of absurdly tall grass. (Remind me later that I really need more tractor practice with Ben so I can start clipping some of this myself.)
And there they were. Tiny, safe, very annoyed and doing what all little things do naturally.
Complaining loudly at their mother.
“But Maaaaamaaa, we don’t WANT to go home yet!”
“Tough bickies! That lawnmower will eat you faster than the whole herd can eat the grass. MOVE IT.”
The two very lazy, very forgetful does are back in their pen with fresh wire to close up the holes in the fencing that they made. (Thanks Ben for your patience as I tried to cut #8 wire in the dark)
Sometimes I think this life is held together with a combination of baling twine, number 8 wire, duct tape, prayer and sheer stubbornness.
And sometimes that is just enough to keep going another day.
~The Mad Herbalist