Goats Grow Old Too

I have two folders of goat registration papers. One is thin and slowly growing thinner. But goats grow old.

The thicker folder is filled with papers of goats who have died. These papers go back over the forty-six years I have had Nubian dairy goats. I rarely look through these papers.

goats grow old and I remember Nubian doe Patty
Written due dates are often on the mark. Then there are the does who come early or late or the goat keeper gets sloppy. However it happened, when the goats came in one evening, High Reaches Miss Patience better known as Patty wasn’t with them. I checked the usual places and finally started walking up the ravine. It was getting late. I’m not sure why I kept going further than I thought she could possible be, but I did. And she was there backed against a fallen tree guarding her new triplets still damp and struggling to their feet. Newborns are small enough I could pick up all three. Patty followed me in complaining I had her precious kids.

On occasion I need to look up a pedigree and sort through these old papers. I read each name and try to pull up memories of each goat. It’s easier to pull those memories up if I look through my pictures of goats from the past.

Even seeing the pictures often doesn’t trigger memories unless there was something special about that goat. High Reaches Jennifer was my very first goat. I wrote about her in “For Love of Goats”. High Reaches Miss Patience was standing far up the ravine, much farther than I thought the goats ever went, by a fallen tree with her triplets.

High Reaches Isabelle went down with a bottle jaw from anemia from worms and had to be drenched with our special fortified liquids. She was five months pregnant and I pulled quadruplets. All of them survived. She lived for years after that.

More often I am so involved with the day to day of goat care, I don’t stop to remember. But goats grow old and make me remember.

goats get old and Nubian doe Trina has done so
High Reaches Daisy was a long suffering mother goat. Her kid Trina was a handful. Her favorite napping spot was on top of her mother even when she got too big. They looked a lot alike. both were excellent milkers, friendly, gentle goats. First Daisy grew old and died. Now Trina is old and has gotten thin. She still tries to keep up with the herd, even lead them from time to time. After she is gone, her daughter High Reaches Trina’s Flame will be in the herd for a time.

High Reaches Daisy’s Trina has been in my herd for many years. She has grown from a rambunctious kid to a mature doe and is now thin. She was never a herd boss, but is now the bottom goat lagging behind the herd as they go out and come in.

Goats grow old and so do people. How many times do we think about the people of the past? They too disappear into memory snapshots.

Those goats now in my herd are the last. As these goats grow old and die, my thin folder will empty. And I will be left with my thick folder and memories.

Hazel Whitmore’s class does a class project writing about the soldiers who died in various wars, many of them almost forgotten, in “Old Promises”.