Life’s not easy for a woman alone, especially when she works full-time, has two young adult sons who are determined to give her a stroke, and a large yard on the banks of a small bayou surrounded by swampy woods and snakes. Those were my circumstances about 15 years ago and I was always coming up with ideas that I thought would make my life easier to manage.
One of my great ideas came out of a desire to fight back the jungle that my yard was becoming. Prior to his heart attack, my dad came faithfully and cut my grass with his riding mower every two weeks, but things change. I couldn’t afford a riding mower, my push mower had died, my boys were off on their own misadventures and I was living in fear of stepping on a moccasin every time I stepped out of the house. That’s when I decided I needed a goat.
It only took a couple of days to locate a billy goat large enough to do the job and cheap enough for me to buy. He was a big ol’ fainting goat with horns to match. The only condition was that I had to catch him and haul him myself. That should have been a clue. A couple of my nephews were up for the game, and soon we had startled the beast into falling over in a dead faint, hog-tied him and carried him home in the back of their daddy’s old truck.
I had two fences. The outer fence enclosed the entire 5 lots except for the side that bordered the bayou. The inner fence surrounded a small area around my house. All of it was sturdy, 4 ft chain link with strong gates and no holes, well at least that was true until the goat came. He had escaped the outer yard before morning and was wandering the neighborhood. I coaxed him home with carrots and was feeling rather proud of myself for managing the situation so easily. I repaired the fence and all seemed well.
The next evening, he decided that the outer yard wasn’t big enough for him, so he pounded his way through my inside gate, leaving it hanging on the hinges. I only discovered this when I opened the front door to go outside and the smelly devil shoved past me into the house. I managed to find a card table with its legs folded to use as a shield to force the monster back outside. I tied the gate back into place with rope and hoped that it would hold. It did for a while.
A couple of weeks later, my neighbor across the bayou wanted me to come over and have lunch with her. When I returned home and pulled my skiff back up onto land I was suddenly faced with one angry critter, the goat. For some reason he was really mad at me and we did several rounds around the skiff before I finally managed to find a burst of speed that got me into the house before his horns got me in the behind.
I immediately called the lady I bought him from. She said she couldn’t give me my money back and I replied that I would pay her again if she would take him off my hands. She declined the money but did agree to take him back. My next call was to my big brother who is always my rescuer when it comes to the crunch. I thought I was going to have a bit of fun watching him wrangle my tormentor. I was wrong.
The stupid goat took one look at my brother and my 3 nephews who had also come to help. He hung his head and walked peacefully to the pickup, a defeated foe. When they went to hog-tie him, the stupid creature fainted, so the whole process was quick and easy and really not much fun to watch. My youngest nephew was appointed to sit in the back of the truck with the goat, and I was asked to follow them in my car.
About halfway back to the goat farm, the hog-tied meanie revived. He started kicking and thrashing and my nephew couldn’t get out of the dumb animal’s way fast enough. Since I was their rear escort, I had a front row seat to watch my nephew dance and jig before finally climbing on to the truck cab. Thankfully my brother pulled over and let the boy scramble over into the car with me. We finally got the goat back to the farm with no harm done to me, my nephews, or the goat. My brother did threaten bodily harm to me if I ever came up with another lame-brained scheme to go into goat landscaping.
Don’t tell him, but now that I am on my own again since my parents died, and I now have four wooded acres to keep up with, goat farming is beginning to sound like a plan —- just not big ol’ fainting goats this time. I do have to admit in the couple of weeks I had that crazy goat, my yard was much less of a jungle.