It has been 145 days since the buck (in all his smelly glory) began his yearly Thanksgiving visit at the farm. This means, impossibly cute goat kids should have hooves on the ground any minute now. I should be savoring these last few minutes of quiet before the wild ride of spring kids, milking and cheesemaking begin, but it is just so hard to wait.
Elsie spent Easter showing labor signs and then deciding against it...many times over. She along with 8 other of her goat friends are due this week. There should be some action in barn, and yet, all we can hear on the baby monitor is a riot of peepers. I begin to wonder if the first person to say “crickets” when faced with a long silence void of all the things one might expect to hear was a goat farmer awaiting the start to kidding season.
I imagine if I could find something to do it might make the time go faster, but in my insane nesting of the previous three weeks, I have done every scrap of laundry, cleaned out closets and even taken to filling the ruts in the road left by winter with heavy wheelbarrows of dirt and rocks. I’ve run out of even the least desirable jobs and so I wait.
Today when my impatience filled me to the top, overflowing in a grouchy mood, I went out to the pasture. I sat in the grass, warm for the first time since September. One by one the goats came over -- Chianti put her forehead against mine. Go Go leaned against my right shoulder. I scratched their chins, leaned in and closed my eyes. I’m not sure how long the three of us sat that way. I know I wasn’t worried about rushing ahead towards the next thing, but instead swam deliciously in the sunlight of NOW. As I get ready for bed, listening to the peepers on monitor, I try to imagine what I would have given for this moment in the cold months of January. I remind myself to enjoy the richness of possibility 16 pregnant goats hold without needing to rush forward. In this moment I am luckier than I ever dared dream I could be. If you had told my younger self I could sleep over on a farm, I would have turned inside out with excitement, now this is my life. I’m not sure I’ve changed much. As I lay in bed I am giddy with what the morning might bring, but content to slip between the moments into a quiet space filed with the hum of possibility and contentment.
