Sometimes, my husband has the best ideas.
But I often don’t see it that way at first.
He wanted to move from Texas to Alaska, and I was dead-set against it. It took me years to come around to the idea (okay, okay, it was pretty much when the moving truck arrived to get the boxes, but I DID come around!) And we moved, and I love it here. Who’d have thought it?
Then, he wanted chickens. I did not. But fine, go ahead and get a few. So he built the cutest red chicken coop and bought some fuzzybutts and soon we had fresh eggs. We didn’t know then that chickens are gateway livestock… When he decided he wanted quail too, I actually cried. Please, please, no more poultry! But we got some quail and had fresh quail eggs for a while also.
The craziest thing he came up with, though, was getting some dairy goats. We’d been buying fresh raw cow milk from a man a few towns over, but when he closed up his business, we still wanted raw milk. We don’t have room for a cow, so that means goats. Honestly, I didn’t think it would work, and I kept putting him off. At the time, I was teaching sewing classes and met a lovely woman there who was moving out of Alaska (to Texas, no less!) and had two goats to sell before leaving. One was her own goat, and one was the companion goat she had borrowed from a friend to keep hers company. I talked to her about it, and yes, having goats on our property could work. We went to visit her goats and decided they were the ones for us.
Husband wrote a check for Chloe, the registered Alpine, and I bartered sewing supplies for Zipper. At first I was a little jealous that my goat was plain and yellow, and his was flashy and colorful, but I need not have been jealous at all. Zip and I became the best of friends. She changed my life. She loved me and I loved her. She was the best barter I ever made. When I lost her last spring to pregnancy complications, I grieved harder and longer than I have ever grieved for anyone before.
Those first two goats were the start of a love affair with all things caprine. The goats provide all of our milk, ice cream, soap, and significant portions of our cheese and when I feel like skimming cream, they provide butter also. A nearby You-Pick farm picks up the manure three times a year and gives us credit for produce, so the goats provide about a third of that as well.
This isn’t the life I envisioned for myself when I was younger, but now that I’m here, I can honestly say I’m in love with this life. And I’m in love with my goats.