I know how Lurvy felt when he saw the letters “Some Pig!” neatly woven in Charlotte’s web.  “I’m seeing things,” I exclaimed, just like Lurvy had whispered, the day our blind goat without a doubt could now see.  His eyes went from being cloudy and white to clear and bright.  I should ask for a refund for the $30 our veterinarian charged us the day after the blind goat’s birth.  She had shined her penlight into each eye, and declared definitively,  “Yep, it’s indeed blind.  And there’s nothing to do.”   Not true.  Our kids reminded us that there’s always something you can do.  You can always pray for a miracle.

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You probably dislike being asked that as much as me.  I’d prefer not to be given a choice – just hurry up and tell me.  Research says most people want to hear the bad news first because people feel better getting the bad news out of the way and ending on a good note.  On the other hand, the same research says the deliverer of news is more likely to tell you the good news first.  You’re not here to answer for yourself, so I’m going to start with the good news.  Our once badly injured Nubian goat is now a mother to three beautiful triplets – two girls and a boy!  Now here it comes – the “but.”  The bad news is the boy is blind.  “Come on!” I cried when his lack of sight became clear.  We went through so much getting this mama goat through her pregnancy.  Now this.  How in the world are we going to raise a blind goat?  At first we decided that we’d leave his fate up to nature and see what happens.  But, mama goat knew immediately something was wrong with her boy, and chose to give all her attention to her girls, leaving him be.  Desperate to find a teat he would wander the pen with his neck stretched up and sucking at the air and anything he bumped into.  Mama would kick him away when we positioned him near a teat even though her udder was swollen with nourishing colostrum.  He wasn’t going to do well left to his mother’s care.  Our children reminded us of visiting Winter in Florida from the movie Dolphin Tale – an unbelievable true story about how Clearwater Marine Aquarium didn’t give up on a dolphin that lost its tail and fitted it with a prosthetic one.  Inspired, we agreed that maybe finding a seeing-eye dog for our blind goat shouldn’t be totally out.  In the end, there was no way we could let him starve.  So, we milked mama goat to fill the first of many bottles to come and my son named him Vitruvius after the blind wizard in The Lego Movie.  We still don’t know what we’re going to do with our blind goat.  Maybe you have some good news for me and you’ve been looking for years for a blind goat?

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My husband grew up on a dairy farm and milked twice a day every day for years.  So, I think we all can agree that he can call himself a farmer.  I wonder sometimes if and when I get to say that I’m a farmer or a rancher.  Is it a certain number of experiences or more the kind of experiences?  Or is when I log an exact number of hours spent doing what you think of when you think about farming and ranching?  Is it when I weep over the loss of a calf at birth?  Is it when I milk a goat twice a day, not just once, but for months?  Is it when I spend hours with a new mama goat so she lets her newborn babies latch on to her sore teats?  Is it when I unload fifty bales of hay or carry thirty bags of feed?  Is it when I know the exact cuts I want the butcher to do?  What about when I can back up a trailer into a narrow space (it’s harder than you think!)?  How many main and side dishes do I need to make from our food raised in our garden and in our pastures?  How many muck boots do I need to wear out before I can say I farm or I ranch (I think I’m on my sixth pair)?  Or is it simply enough that I’ve daily cared for horses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, dogs, and cats for several years now?  Yesterday, I separated a single sheep from our flock, which isn’t an easy feat on your own.  I could’ve used a border collie who knows how to herd…hint, hint (that’s a hidden message to my husband who’s still reading his how to train herding dogs book).  I then loaded the lone sheep onto our trailer without a hitch.  I knew my husband left for work not thinking I could do it.  So, I proudly texted before I started out driving our farm truck and trailer to meet up with him, “Who’s the farmer’s wife now?”  But maybe I could’ve left out “wife?”

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Darkness is settling on the franch.  I click on the flashlight.  “Where is…that…chicken?”  I’m tired tonight.  My eldest daughter beside me doesn’t mind that we’re still searching since its way past her bedtime.  The missing chicken has been nameless for a few weeks.  It was once called Jayda after my daughter’s sweet girl friend.  But, that was when we thought all the chicks in our latest batch were hens.  You see, we had mistakenly ordered a “straight run.”  For those of you who don’t know a thing about chickens, that means “just as hatched” and “not sexed.”  Or, to put it another way, ordering a “straight run” means you may be back at the grocery store buying farm fresh eggs when all your chicks turn out to be roosters.  Roosters don’t lay eggs no matter how much you spent on your trendy chicken coop.  We began to suspect that we had a rooster when the chick grew a big red comb and wattle.  When the crowing began three months later, we knew for certain.  We’ve never had a rooster and we didn’t want one – it was time to find him a new home.  It’s hard to give him up though – the new batch of chicks were a birthday present to our youngest daughter and he’s turned out to be really friendly.  He certainly does what roosters do.  He is very, very eager to start the day as early as possible.  But, I find the crowing peaceful – maybe I am made to be a farmer after all.  The only thing that really frustrates me about him is that he can’t find his way back to the coop at night.  I tell my kids that I don’t think he’s very bright.  My kids tell me he just needs a haircut.  He is a Polish Top Hat chicken with a very full bouffant of feathers on his head.  So, I must admit that he may keep getting lost simply because he can’t see through all those feathers.  But, come on, am I really supposed to give a chicken a haircut?  And, to make matters worse, ever since the rooster arrived, some of our older hens have chosen not to return to the coop for the night.  Maybe they’re all love-struck hoping for a late night rendezvous.  So every night lately we play a game of seek-n-find with our rooster and some hens.  Some nights they’re all over the franch.  We’ll find hens wandering the pasture in the dark.  There’s one hen that loves to hide in the overgrown asparagus bush.  Sometimes we find them all roosting in our peach tree.  Tonight, we finally locate the rooster and a few hens trying to sleepover with the ducks.  I tell my daughter on the way back from hand-carrying them to the coop that these searches remind me of the “Where’s Waldo?” books by Martin Handford that I liked growing up.  We agree that Waldo is the perfect new name for our wacky rooster!  I ignore my daughter when she mentions we should order one of those Waldo books from Amazon – I’ve had enough of looking for Waldo.

Waldo the Rooster

One of Waldo’s Lady Friends

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If you think your goat is not acting like itself, one of the first things you do is take its temperature.  Unfortunately, a goat doesn’t let you rest a thermometer under its tongue until the beep.  So, the only way to take the temperature of a goat is to lift up the tail with one hand and slide the tip of the thermometer into its rectum with the other.  Thankfully, my husband does plenty of rectal temperatures on people in the ER so off he went to the barn with a thermometer in hand when our goat seemed under the weather late one evening.  He returned shortly after with a worried look on his face.  “103.7, she’s sick,” he reported confidently.  For some reason, at that moment, I had a flashback to when one of our children was very sick with a temperature of 103 degrees F in the middle of the night and how we had flipped out – it’s a scary moment when your husband who is an ER doctor says we need to get to the ER.  I was thinking of that memory as he opened the refrigerator and read the labels of the bottles on the top shelf of the door where we store all the vaccines and medicines that help keep our animals healthy and happy.  Our sick goat was pregnant with twins so her babies were on our minds too.  He finally found the right antibiotic that could be safely used for pregnant does and gave her the first dose that evening.  Her fever didn’t break the next day.  My husband and I were worried about mama goat, our kids by that time were worried about the unborn baby goats, even the goat herself looked wary of all of this extra attention.  Early the next morning before he went in to work for his scheduled ER shift, he upped the cc’s of the antibiotic and injected her again after the thermometer gave the reading of 103.5 degrees F.  My husband is always subjecting his poor colleagues to his re-tellings of all the daily happenings on the franch – so, after one of his fellow doctors overheard the tale of the sick goat, he had said matter-of-factly, “Maybe that’s the normal temperature of a goat.”  My husband pretended to take offense, and gave him a hard time, “Don’t you tell me about my business of farming.”  But, my husband grew up with only cows and the occasional horse on his family farm and he learned only about treating people in medical school.  A temperature of 103.7 degrees F is indeed considered a fever for cows and people.  But, he had to admit that he had never treated a goat with a fever before.  So, he quietly asked Siri, “What’s the normal temperature of a goat?”  In less than 2 seconds, Siri responded, “The answer is about 104 degrees Fahrenheit.”  Our goat wasn’t so sick after all.

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It’s summer time!  It’s time for sipping lemonade in the shade of a live oak before lunch, lounging on a pool float during the hottest part of the day, and leisurely walking at the nearby state park in the cooler evening hours.  We do some of that every summer.  But, summer time on the franch is also a time our children can earn more spending money doing extra chores with their extra time.  How much more is up to them.  There’s a percentage of what they earn that goes to savings for college and another to give on Sunday mornings.  But, how to spend the rest is always theirs to decide.  So, they carefully write start and end times, rounded to the nearest minute, on self-made time sheets.  It’s sweet to see our kindergartener proudly write in her best handwriting, 10:08 – 10:23, for her time in the garden picking ripe cherry tomatoes.  Early in the summer this year our son lacked any real motivation to do extra chores until a trip to a pet store with my husband and a conversation with a clerk in love with bearded dragons.  He came home to tell me he was going to have a bearded dragon by the end of the summer.  An hour later, he dusted off his overalls and work gloves and asked for a list of chores.  Thank you, pet store clerk.  That’s sarcastic, by the way.  I mean, I’m certainly glad he’s motivated…but, even if this lizard is completely his responsibility, I really don’t want to think at all about yet another creature on our franch, and in the case of a lizard, in our home.  I know a good mother wouldn’t say to her young son, “How ‘bout saving for a toy?  Or a video game?  That way, you can throw it away when you’re done?”  Okay, I know – it wasn’t my finest moment.  And he’s only following in my footsteps, as I look at all the animals I’ve brought home to the franch.  When my son calculated the final cost to be nearly $300 for all the supplies and the bearded dragon itself, I did breathe a sigh of relief.  I figured by the time he earns that much, he’ll hopefully be on to some other thing – something that doesn’t breathe.  But, he’s really excited about this bearded dragon and getting closer to his goal every day and it isn’t yet mid-summer.  He has read four books from the library on lizards already.  He even came up with new ways to earn enough money like making my bed every day for a couple more bucks a week.  Well, I guess all I can do is leave some Lego catalogs open on the kitchen counter knowing Legos are his only Achilles’ heel in this situation…and start making my own bed.

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Living on our franch was, is, and always will be a family decision.  It’s not something we are doing to our kids, it’s something we are doing together with them.  It can’t be done without us all doing our part.  So, periodically, we approach our children and discuss whether they still want to keep livin’ the franch ways.  I even make the choice to instead start living a suburban or urban life very enticing.  I tell them how their life would be different.  No more early mornings with an alarm clock startling you awake to do chores before school.  No more heading out to the barn to do evening chores after a long tiring day off the franch.  No more sweaty brows from working out in the garden and repairing fences in the summer heat.  Instead, there’d be more sleep, more time for watching television and playing video games, more vacations, and less baths.  I make a life far away from the franch sound so good that I’m even tempted to start packing up.  But, every time, the children choose to stay.  Every time.

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Every year for the last several years, my husband has traveled on a medical mission trip to the mountains of Guatemala.  One of his fellow team members for the last two years has been our daughter, now 11 years old.  We, of course, hem and haw about letting her go each year, but know it’s an incredible opportunity for her at a young age to serve and love the children at an orphanage and its surrounding community in a place unlike anything she’s ever known.  We’re also aware there’s a world beyond the franch with it’s own life lessons to teach.  Even though our daughter speaks very little Spanish, she’s learned from all of our non-English speaking animals over the years how to show love and compassion in ways that aren’t verbal.  If you’ve ever witnessed a child grow up with an animal, you know what I mean.  Words can often get in the way anyhow.  It’s truly something how children can easily bond with other children even though they are worlds apart.  My daughter and these precious children smile and laugh and play within seconds of meeting.  My husband sends me what I call “proof of life” photos knowing I worry if he’s caring for her like I would.  And, it’s precious to see what a blessing she is to these children and what a blessing the children are to her.  From her perspective, the children she meets in Guatemala are happy and it brings her heart joy to be with them.  Unsurprisingly, it’s the so many skinny stray dogs roaming the streets that especially sadden her heart.  It became an unplanned mission of hers to feed as many strays as the leftovers from the team’s meals allow.  She expresses how happy they’d be living on the franch.  One day after her first trip, we were sitting outside on the franch together and she was deep in thought.  She broke the silence, “What direction is South?”  Random.  I reminded her where the sun rises on our property and she figured it out from there.  My heart smiled a few days later when she showed me a note she wrote to a new special friend from the mission trip.  It read, “Whenever I miss Guatemala, which is a lot, I look South.”  Words can’t explain how thankful I am that my daughter is growing up to love well way beyond the borders of the franch.

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I’m not talking about a dance.  You’re thinking of the jig – that popular Irish dance where you skip, leap, and kick.  Well, it turns out you might look like you’re doing the jig during that time of the year when chiggers are here.  You see, April showers don’t just bring May flowers in Texas.  Every spring, even though we’ve now lived where chiggers live for many years, we somehow forget.  The chigger is the larval stage of a mite that bites from late spring to fall in humid areas with thick vegetation.  And, it’s easy to forget about them.  They’re not visible to the naked eye.  In fact, they’re smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.  Chiggers infest your skin when you come in contact with them waiting for you in grassy fields.  The creepiest thing about them is that they crawl under your garments in search of the best place to do what chiggers do.  You can’t feel them so you don’t know they’re exploring your body.  You are left with intensely itchy red blister-like sores that take up to two weeks to heal.  One evening a few years ago, I gasped, “Chiggers!” when I was helping my youngest daughter, who was four years old at the time, change into her pajamas.  There were red bumps all along her underwear line!  I’ll never forget my daughter’s response, especially because of her age at the time, “Those bugs like my private parts, mommy! It’s very inappropriate of them!”  There’s actually a reason – chiggers have delicate feeding structures so they like areas of thinner skin and will seek them out once on you.  So, you often find bites in unmentionable places around the crotch and groin area.  Even though that makes sense, it certainly doesn’t make it okay.  Early in our years in Texas, when we didn’t know we needed to be on the lookout for things we couldn’t see, my husband went on a wilderness medicine overnight exercise and decided to sleep out under a stunning starry sky.  The next day, his heads, shoulders, knees and toes, and more, were covered in chigger bites.  For weeks later, people stared, refusing to shake his extended hand, questioning, “Is that contagious?”  Somehow, even the memory of that fades, and for two weeks in early spring of every year, our family looks like we’re practicing the jig as we itch and try not to itch.  We tally our sores and compare the score to see who will have the most sleepless nights.  For some reason, chigger sores seem itchiest at night.  And so, from that day on, we spray our muck boots and overalls with bug repellent whenever we head out to the garden or pastures.  Even though they’re out of sight, chiggers are again on our mind…for a time.

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It’s unlikely you have a spider the size of a penny prisoner in a Tupperware container on your kitchen counter.  Why do I?  We are holding the arachnid hostage until we know my daughter doesn’t have any reactions to its’ bite.  So far, there isn’t any inflammation around the two little pinpricks on the back of our youngest daughter’s leg.  Why the extra caution?  We live in Texas, which is home to the black widow and brown recluse.  Everybody who lives in the southern states knows the image of these poisonous spiders and thankfully this spider doesn’t fit their description.  There’s neither a red hourglass marking on its belly nor a dark violin-shaped marking on its head.  But, knowing deadly spiders lurk in the dark corners of Texas makes you suspicious of every spider you come across.  Some of you are so fearful of spiders that you won’t even the write the word spider on a piece of paper let alone capture and release or even kill one.  Even me writing “spider, spider, spider” irritates you and makes your skin crawl like there are hundreds of ‘em all over you.  I was once like you.  I could not have handled all of my spider experiences in Texas without having spent a summer with fellow undergraduate biology majors at a research station in the Rocky Mountains.  Willing to do anything to keep my 4.0 grade point average that summer, I volunteered when a professor needed help researching the mating behavior of Sierra Dome spiders in nature.  It turns out that the Sierra Dome lady spider is very smart, only choosing a mate that has proven himself to be a strong and vigorous fighter before her.  Boy spiders actually progress through a series of fighting stages with the final one being a full-on brawl, sometimes to the death of the weaker contestant.  I didn’t believe it at first myself.  But, I spent that summer alone in the forest with male spiders in petri dishes as my hiking companions searching for the dome-shaped webs built by the lady spiders.  Creating a rivalrous love triangle, I’d carefully position two Romeos on opposite sides of the web, pitting them against the other to battle for the chance at procreation.  If you think that the Mayweather vs Pacquiao was the “fight of the century” (before it actually happened, of course), then witnessing the incredibly entertaining fighting behavior of two Sierra Dome male spiders would be the “fight of at least two centuries.”   And, this one’s free – well, other than a plane ticket to Montana and some hiking books.  Having handled so many spiders in the lab and in the field so many summers ago, I can still now find the courage to capture and release and sometimes kill the spiders that trespass on the franch.  Most of the time, I let the spiders live as we all know the benefits of a spider’s life, even if we don’t want to admit it.  But, I’ve come face to face with creepy tarantulas and although I know they’re harmless, I still kill ‘em because I don’t want them making a home in our kids’ muck boots left outside the back door.  I wish I could say I never came across the dreaded black widow spider on the franch.  But, one evening late at night, I went out to the barn to check on all the animals with a flashlight.  Opening the gate to the cow pen, I decided to straighten their feeder, and as I approached it, the beam of my flashlight illuminated a black spider hanging upside down with a shiny red belly, on a thick, erratically built web between the feeder and the side of the pen.  I froze, staring at that hourglass like it was going to tell time.  Oh my goodness, it’s the black widow. “Don’t think, don’t think…” I repeated in my mind, as I knew what I had to do.  I grabbed a dusty bottle of insecticide from the barn shelf and turned on the outside barn lights.  Inches from the plump spider, I held my breath and started squirting it like crazy.  It fell to the ground.  And then, I anticlimactically finished it off with the heel of my cowboy boot.  One last squirt to its lifeless body and I started to breathe again.  Then, I screamed.  So, with that, you now understand why it’s no big deal for me to have a spider trying to crawl up the slippery sides of the Tupperware next to me as I prepare lunch.  Hours later, the pinpricks have disappeared on my daughter’s leg.  She asks me to let the spider go, outside.  It’s been forgiven.  The itsy bitsy spider is now free to go up the spout again.

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