The Exchange

About a year-and-a-half ago, Fin and Rye bought a pair of Nigerian dwarf goats named Midnight and Flora. Penny and I loaned them the money to make the initial purchase, with the understanding that we would be repaid in milk and from the sale of offspring. There were some initial stumbles – stillborn kids, challenges breeding back, arguments over whose turn it was to fill the feeder, and so on – but the boys have stuck with the program, and despite my initial reticence (let’s be honest: nothing says “hippie” more than a couple of milking goats. Not that there’s anything wrong with that), I gotta admit, I like the little buggers. I’m talking about the goats, not the boys, although I suppose the sentiment and terminology could apply to either.

But mostly what I like is the combination of animals, children, responsibility, and experience. I like watching Fin and Rye with our animals; I like watching them connect with the critters on our farm, and I like that they understand in no uncertain terms how essential these animals are to a living, breathing farm ecosystem. They know about birth and death and meat and slaughter, of course, but they also know about shit and nutrients and planned grazing. They know how to size a day paddock for a given number of animals, and they know that what happens beneath the surface of the soil is more important than what happens above it. They know that keeping animals in the manner we do – which is to say, for milk as well as meat – demands a level of commitment to time and place that atypical of the contemporary norm. They understand that we are exchanging something – the freedom to come and go as we please – for something else, which might be described as the freedom that comes of not being able to come and go as we please. I realize that might not make sense to anyone but me.

As I’ve mentioned before, I sometimes think about the things my boys aren’t learning by spending their days in a classroom, or the ways in which they probably lag behind their schooling peers in the sort of memorized information that is so much a part of that curriculum. Not all of this stuff is superfluous, and they will need to learn it. I get that.

But I also get that there is so much they are learning for having been granted this freedom. On Monday, watching them tend to Rye’s doe, Flora, while she gave birth to twins, I was struck by the simple fact that under different circumstances, they could have been in school at that very hour. And I knew with absolute certainty that there was no better place for them to be than crouched in the hay in our barn, watching new life come into the world.