Kidding Season

I began to think differently about drinking milk the first season we milked our goats. When our does gave birth, I watched them lick dry the newborn twins, turning them from slimy squirming mounds to fuzzy bleating enchanting creatures, their eyes open and bright, their legs skinny and disproportionately long. The kids wobbled to standing only minutes after birth, nosing along their mother’s body. They never seem to know what they’re looking for until they find it—the teat hanging under the belly they just slid out of—they just invariably know to start looking for something. The does know to nudge their doelings and bucklings, lick them dry, shift to help these new little ones find the milk that will keep them alive.

Having watched that amazing scene of how life nuzzles its way into the world, I can’t take lightly the nourishing gift of milk. Once we started drinking the milk ourselves, I began to feel more like a kid than a farmer. It threw the farmer-livestock relationship on its head; before, I had been the one feeding, watering, and sheltering these funny creatures, and now they were nurturing me. To drink the milk from our goats, Doris and Fancy—goats I talk and sing to when I milk, goats with sometimes too much personality, goats that the C.F. curses with great vitriol when they squirm out of our grasp while we’re trimming their hooves—it makes a strange kinship to say the least.

Doris and Fancy are extremely pregnant, and are due any day now. I am excited for another kidding season, more cute baby goats, and the routine of cold mornings and evenings in the barn, milking in the light of the kerosene lamp.