Recycling through the Goat

            How it happened the goat ate my poetry records, some of my fiction records, and some of my newest writing is, we packed everything up and moved.

            I was a little bit weary, feeling scattered out with trying to do more than I thought I could do, and that contributed to being less alert than I should have been. I get tired of moving. I would like to live in one place the rest of my life. Probably, I will never own a place.

            As I get older, some dreams wither by circumstance. It is harder to earn enough money to buy a place than it was for our parents and grandparents, everyone seems to agree. That is the way it seems to go for me. Some dreams, maybe the loss does not make us smaller but opens up possibilities we hadn’t seen when we were preoccupied with dreams of material gain in a culture where ownership is everything, the substance of dreams.

             Losing some of my records, some of my songs, poetry and fiction and some stuff I haven’t even figured out what’s missing, apparently has made me more philosophical. Whether that is good or bad or just a fact of existence, I haven’t figured out yet.

             I felt a deep cavity, a yawning chasm when I saw the goat, Jewel, our brown, white, and black nubian-cross milk goat standing by the box, contentedly munching papers, with who knows how much stuff already gone. All I could think of to say was, “Oh no.”

            I ran from inside standing by the window, looking out into sunshine after rain had washed the day clean, to the goat pen. I rescued what was still in the box, more than half gone.

             Everything I had ever said to any writer who lost some writing sounded empty. I remember when I told Ansel, “What you lost when the computer crashed, it’s still in your mind. You can put it together again even better. Have faith in your own intelligence.”

            Out there at the goat pen, I fumbled in panic with the fastener, trying to get the gate open. I said, “Jewel, Jewel, stop eating my papers, please stop. Don’t eat anymore.” I finally got the lock to release, swung the gate open, ran through the gate in the spring day’s warm sunshine, pushed and pulled solid, almost immovable Jewel away from the box of papers.

            I remembered saying that to Ansel, and I wondered if I would have been much smarter to keep my mouth shut, just get out of the way, let him complete his agonized fury at what had happened.

            In the slow process of moving our possessions to our new place, I had carried a heavy box from my desk area out toward the pickup. The phone rang. I stuck the box into the goat shed for cover from the rain, and I ran for the house. A waste of time. Phone company trying to sell me some kind of a plan.

            Lightning and thunder flashed and roared all around us in our mountain forest, and rain blew heavily in hard wind. I filled more boxes inside the house until the sun would shine again.

            I thought the gate between the goat shed and the pen was closed, but it wasn’t. Jewel found the papers and happily munched.

            It could have been worse.

            Maybe it was worse. Jewel leaned against me, burped up partially digested papers, and chewed her cud, a mixture of very important literature. I said, “Jewel, my dearest darling, some people eat goats. I am tempted. I am terribly, terribly tempted.”

            She leaned against me like my very best friend and contentedly chewed her cud. She knew I always said a lot of dire stuff I didn’t mean at all. She knew if I hadn’t meant for her to eat the rich, organic papers, delicately flavored with soybean based ink, I wouldn’t have offered them to her in the first place.

            I looked through the papers left in the box, trying to assess. She ate where I keep track of what I have and where I’ve sent it seeking publication. She ate many poems. She ate some essays, maybe some stories. I’m not sure what I had before she edited that box of papers.

            It isn’t true that goats will eat anything, metal cans, shoes, all that stuff you see in the cartoons. Every goat I’ve known has been a picky eater, wants good, fresh, clean food. But those papers attracted Jewel, and she ate all she could before I got there and rescued what was left.

             We had dried Jewel off, knowing our move from one habitation to another would disrupt schedules and make it hard for us to get her milked every day. Dried her off means she was no longer giving milk and would have to be bred and give birth before we could start milking her again.

             What this leads to, I try to remember where I’ve already sent a piece of my writing. I send it out, wait six months (many small magazines, literary magazines are unconscionably irresponsible about how long they take to get around to reading submissions) and the editor writes, “Didn’t like it last time you sent it; still don’t like it.”

             So I mostly quit sending out poetry and essays and fiction I don’t have records for. I tried to see that change in the work I do as a silver lining, since I have more time to write now that I’m not using so much of my time trying to sell the stuff. But the new stuff I write doesn’t sell either, so the silver lining leaks rain.

             One advantage of moving not very far was, we didn’t have to do it all in one load. Least essential stuff, we moved first, while we went on living. Last thing, after we started living in the new place farther up the mountain, I cleaned out the goat pen. A garden is essential, and goat manure is some of the best fertilizer there is, so I raked it into piles, shoveled it into the pickup, transported it, and dug it into the ground at our new place, built a fence around the garden area before the ground froze solid in mountain winter and prevented digging postholes, left it alone over the winter, then started planting seeds early spring.

             Late June, we ate our first salad from our new garden, fresh lettuce, edible-pod peas, spinach, radishes, carrots, kale, green onions. Tomatoes, we bought from the farmers’ market in town because it’s too cold, this high in the mountains, to grow tomatoes, but everything else in the salad, we grew in our garden.

             After dinner, I started remembering. By dark, I had remembered almost every place I sent poems to and what poems and when. I wrote everything down, amazed at the way it flowed smoothly back into my mind.

             My daughter, Amanda, said, “I have a new song. Do you want to hear it?”

             We said, “Sure.” She sang. Beautiful song. It always amazes me that someone so young can create such beautiful songs, such beautiful poetry. In her song, I recognized some of my poetry that I hadn’t seen since the goat ate my papers, but the way Amanda put the parts together and her own additions, from the rich soil of her own young but very perceptive, very alive existence, and from the rich soil of the new place we lived, improved the original images a bunch, so I knew the song was hers.

             Laura, my wife, wrote a story that night and let me read it the next day. I recognized the basic plot and some of the description as very similar to a story I had been working on before Jewel munched about half a box of my papers.

            The new, upbeat direction Laura headed it in to come up with a conclusion based in hope, in a goldenly glowing view of the possibilities of life, made it all hers, so I didn’t say anything about the story I hadn’t finished and had forgotten about through the winter.

            We ate fresh vegetables from the garden every day.

            I wrote many new stories, essays, poems, and songs, filled with ideas and images I’d worked with before, but with new directions and new conclusions. I began to break free of the negative views I’d held for a long time without realizing how much I was bound in habit, in a narrow and pessimistic view of the world.

            As my view of the world broadened and lightened, I knew from my immediate experience the world around us tends to be the way we see it. For the first time, I realized much broader, more optimistic views were also valid, were creative, helped create a broader, more optimistic world around us.

            My appreciation for beautiful, clean grass, vegetables, clean, well-cared-for alfalfa hay, fresh, clean water, my appreciation for the freshness of each new, life-filled day permeates my new writing, leavening and infusing with hope my understanding of the human condition, of my own condition.

            I’ve learned something about goats, about humans, and about recycling. At first, I dreaded the move, but now, from higher up the mountain, we see much more of the world than we saw from our place in the foothills.