Awe and Amazed

I don’t read fiction as a rule. Reason being: life is better.

Filing this under “Can’t make this stuff up” …I swear, when I traded microphones for writing utensils God must’a said, “Give the girl material…The rest is up to her.”

In case you missed my earlier blogs, I lost my little goat Heff last weekend...

Ok. So technically, “lost” isn’t the right word. I decided to grow up and do things the farming way and yes, sent the little guy to auction, in hopes maybe someone might somehow spare his little goat life while I worked to establish a new bloodline amongst all his kin (which is to say, basically every goat but Charlie-goat, born on these premises over the past year and a half).  As a gracious favor, my goat tradin’- real farmer mentor offered to help with a solution as old as the hills (as if we can swap our babies around like chattel). No sooner had I let Heff go, I felt just awful….Cause trade or no trade, Heff was in for an abrupt change in his life; up till now he’d lived a pretty pampered one.

Just when I thought I couldn’t feel worse (lesson learned: I was never selling a goat again unless some sweet grandpa out there wanted one for his grand babies), my neighbor shows up at the end of auction day/ Saturday with bad news: Heff had jumped the gate and was roaming the great outdoors along the hillsides of Carthage…no doubt, never to be seen again.

Let the record reflect, I spent my Sunday in Carthage, Tennessee out of pure guilt. It was not for Hefner’s sake,  but for my own that I opted to give the day over to goat-tracking. The pill was mine to swallow. I had made a faulty decision (in the name of girl goats all over the place who didn’t need their daddy being their babies' daddy) ramifications of which had left me guilt-laden and depressed.

Catholics have rosaries and priests…I had ink in my printer and gas in my Jeep. Everybody’s gotta process guilt in their own way. I opted to process mine posting fliers and trying to explain to those I talked to, just why I let my goat go to auction in the first place. (Reasons for which defied my being there now.)

To be clear, I had no delusions about the situation: Hef was a goner.. As I made the decision Sunday morning to drive an hour and a half away and spend my day in Carthage, I had accepted it was not for the outcome…Rather, it was for the guilt in my veins that needed processing. Driving to the scene of the crime—MY crime—seemed a proper penance…the least I could do.

Back home Sunday evening, I collapsed.  What energy I had left I used to pull weeds from my garden. I read something spiritual. I hugged on all my remaining goats and apologized profusely.  I resolved to let it go....hopefully learning from this little lesson, just how better to be a goat mama, after all, Heff was rendered useless against the elements because I had made him that way.

Fast forward to today. 6:45 am to be exact. That’s when the first call came from the nice gentleman who said “I think I have your goat.” Seems Heff left the wooded thicket he was last seen sprinting to, and returned to civilization…to a person’s house…with a basement door cracked open. Leave it to Heff to find digs similar to home (only minus all the girl goats he had left behind).

The man was heading to work; as was his wife.  He gave me the address and said, “Feel free to come around back.” The rest was up to nature/God/circumstance/me… Any and every combination of which reminding me all over again how precious little I control…after all, what are the odds, a goat, left untethered (for the guy couldn’t catch him; neither could the dudes at the auction from which he bolted) would be anywhere near by the time I got there? On top of this, Heff was Heff.  I called a friend and said “You be Ethel. I’ll be Lucy. There’s probably not a chance in heck he’ll be anywhere near by the time we get there, but I gotta try.”

In an instant that can only be described as a God moment, I pulled behind the house of a total stranger (with said stranger, not home, as predicted) when what is the first thing I see, but Heff…standing by his lonesome...confronting a glass door. First he looks at me...then back at himself, no doubt thinking he’s finally found one other goat as lonely as he is. (Try to imagine this. It’s key. Heff is dehydrated. He’s skinnier than I’ve ever seen him. He’s this side of delusional. But he’s standing at this glass door, all glazed over…just staring at the goat looking back at him …which is him…I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.)

I get out of the Jeep and carefully, slowly, move in his direction.

Heff, not being too keen on people right now, flinches. But then he spots our universal language …the Triscuit box! And then he hears the familiar sound of me shaking goat chow in his red solo cup…(Reminders of home!)

He lowers his head as if to say “Mom? Is that you?” But he’s not going to let me get too near (after all, I'm goat- Judas…I can’t blame him.) I drop to my knees….laying cracker after cracker…goat chow pile after goat chow pile.

We enter a dance…and within an hour (with the help of my friend, other neighbors in the area who have now likewise come to know Hef, and oh, let's not forget--delirium) we manage to get Heff into a crate. One loud squeal and he surrenders …Somewhere in his little goat psyche he has to know that his only hope of getting home is to let himself be taken.

Peaceful, yet exhausted…we are finally homeward bound.

I’m not sure whose faith is greater this night…Mine for having been given a second chance at being mama to one very rank male goat…Or Heff, for having trusted his mama to bring him home once and for all…

Back at the farm the girls come racing. One squawk from the Jeep and they know instantly what’s occurred, and despite all their head-butting and dodging the guy for his  less than gentlemanly ways, they raced to him... circled him, rubbed on him and basically recommitted themselves to a life of polygamous goat living, just happy to have their guy back home again.

As for me, I end this day exhausted, but in awe.

The sequence of things that had to transpire “just so” for this to be our outcome, is nothing short of miraculous. Yes, there were fliers, yes there were phone calls. But no better than I was at at anything of a control nature…No better than Heff is for staying in one place for hours on end…with nothing to keep him there but his own reflection in a door...All I can say is God must’ve wanted him home (or me to get some rest). As God is my witness, Heff not only will live to see another day, he’ll live out all his days doing what Heff loves to do so long as I’m here to take care of him.

As with gardens, so with goats. You can’t fight nature.  Heff shall resume his life doing what he loves to do (which is how he got his name in the first place) and I shall invest in a new fence to keep his daughters safe from harm.

Here’s thanking God for keeping his eye on the sparrow and on other innocent life forms despite our human tendencies to interfere. That Heff made it home just in time for Father’s Day seems only fitting.