When You're Feeling Kind of Small

In the early morning, when I'm the only one awake in the house, music dances and coffee brews and a candle in the corner of the sitting area that faces the farmyard flickers.  Before sitting to read, I wrap both hands around my warm mug and stand looking out over the back field.  Some days it's barely visible through fog, and some days it's canopied by the chalky pastels of sunrise.

Do you ever feel kind of small?  Like the world spins, and days come like clockwork and zoom way too quickly, and who are you in this great big world?  Do you ever feel like the things that matter to you shouldn't matter so much, because in the scheme of things, they are probably minor? Your hopes and thoughts and wishes and worries... maybe sort of first-world, sort of not-that-worthy of making a big deal out of...

When I'm tempted to feel that way - small and unseen - a mama doing ordinary mama-stuff every day, I stand in my window area, coffee in hand, and I look at my goats. That may seem like a super-weird thing to do.  (It may seem super-weird to have goats in your yard in the first place, never mind to look at them when you want to get perspective on your value in this world, but trust me here...) And then I look down the hill at our orchard. And I remember that the God whose great big power spoke the entire universe into being, the one who thunders and splits the sea and stills the storms, that God sees me.  And He cares about the small places of my heart.  And yours, too.

See, as long as I can remember, I've sort of secretly wanted to be a farmer and have goats and an apple tree.  Lia almost lost her full mind laughing when she was about middle school age and I told her this shocking thing.  She'd only known the acrylic-nail, high-heel, dressed-up mama who didn't own flat shoes or a yard that one could even try to fit goats into.  So we laughed together at the absurdity of this dream.  And life went on.

But three years ago, we moved to the farmhouse.  I walked through the yard, and while standing under the umbrella of apple tree branches shielding me from the summer rain shower that had begun,  I looked up and all around, and I realized that there had been an apple tree tucked into the corner of my heart for years - since my grandmother sold her old house with the apple tree - and God had not only seen that tiny dream, He did me one better.  Well, twelve better, to be exact.  I had longed for an apple tree, and God gave us a little orchard with thirteen trees.  Kind of no big deal, right?  I mean, I know that God's not a wish-fairy or some sort of genie in the sky, but He loves us, and He delights in shining that love into our lives in all sorts of ways that might not mean anything to anyone but you or me.

And then there are the goats.

My husband and I went to a way-cool marriage weekend with our Sunday school class back in October, and the whole thing was a total blast.  One of the things we talked about was the concept of Love Languages.  When it was time for a quick break between sessions, Selden and I scurried to the car and drove a short way to a coffee shop to caffeinate, and on the road we discussed our love languages.  I wondered out loud if "livestock" should be added to the current list of options.  Because the most romantic surprise I've ever received was my baby goat, Tucker, whose little itty bitty goat-face popped up from behind the steering wheel and bleated, "maaaaa-maaaaa" to me while Selden beamed with pride at having pulled off the ultimate romance move.

Since you can't have just one goat, we have four.  They're a bit like shoes.  A girl can never have enough.

I love the story in the Old Testament of Elijah, the prophet, when he was despairing and in a really tough place emotionally, and he went into this cave to sleep, knowing that people were trying to kill him as they'd done the other prophets (makes me feel sort of lame complaining about having a rough day).  And God tells Elijah to go stand on the mountain, because the Lord was going to pass by. So Elijah's standing there...

"Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire." (1 Kings 19:11, 12 NIV)

And this is the part that always makes me smile....

"And after the fire came a gentle whisper."  (1 Kings 19:12b)

The God who controls the fire and the thunder and wind that can tear and rip through mountains and  who can make the whole earth shake in his presence... That big, powerful God - He sees you and me, feeling small, feeling like we need a break, feeling like we're not sure if what we're doing or dreaming or fearing is really that worthy of anyone's attention, let alone His.

And He knows us well enough to know when we need Him to use a whisper.  Or a goat.

I'm learning to listen for the whispers.  When things aren't going the way my control-freak, type-A personality wants them to, when I'm freaking out over trying to sell our beautiful old house in the next town over, at the worst time possible because who's house hunting throughout the holidays anyway, during heating season, and nobody has gone to look at it, and I'm picturing myself being old and gray and paying for this house until the second coming... I'm learning how to stand on the mountainside and know that God is there with me, and it's going to be all good.  For me, the whisper of God's love often sounds remarkably like four goats screeching "Maaaa-maaaaa! Maaaa-maaaaaaaaaaa!" at the top of their lungs at all hours.

How does the whisper sound to you?

Those Things We Can & Cannot Control

I'm sort of bumming out today, because Selden and I did our usual thing and voted absentee.  But this is the first Presidential election year we've lived out at the farmhouse, and we didn't know that just like in every other way, Orrington is also charming on election day.  We may go down and walk around the parking lot surrounding the town office building that is housed in an old, quaint New England church building. We don't want to miss all the excitement - it sounds kind of like a tailgating party!

Today is interesting.  Not because I shocked all who know me by not wearing my Ben Carson hat or t-shirt or a combination thereof.  But because it's a day full of what we can and cannot control.

It's important to have not one, but two, of this exact t-shirt...

I've never really been very interested in politics, but 2016 has been full of adventure.  I saw my grandmother, who usually walks while holding someone's elbow, sprint at a speed that might have left my daughter (who has received several athletic scholarship offers to join college sprinting teams) in the dust, in order to secure a front and center seat to see her "boyfriend Ted Cruz" in person.   My husband and grandmother and I all were Republican  state delegates, and wonder of all wonders, I was super-pumped to be surprised by Ben Carson speaking one morning, because he wasn't on the agenda!!!  I might have hollered louder cheering for Ben than I did in 1991 when I saw the New Kids on the Block in concert. Yeah, I'm pretty sure of that... And my hair was less wide than in '91, so I'm winning on all fronts.  My 2nd grade daughter developed a remarkable Donald Trump impression, and got to see him speak, which was underwhelming to her.  She felt that his choice of power ballads playing during the pre-speech minutes was objectionable.  But we all remarked that his hair was much more normal in person.  Well relatively speaking. Who'd have thought?!

Ted, appearing very much like he is about to plant one on Meem.

Ben, trying to talk over my shouting and applause.

Meet, the great unifier.

We're super fortunate to live in a country where we can participate in choosing our leaders.  I've prefaced too many remarks to count with "Well, since Ben isn't on the ballot." I didn't get to vote for my favorite candidate, but I did vote for the one I felt most closely representing the things I feel are important.  That was all I could control.

Today is one of those "it will be what it will be" sort of days.  I've joked about moving to Texas to secede (was I joking? Or was that just an excuse to shop at Magnolia Market in person....?).  And there are things I'm concerned about that definitely aren't to joke about.  I think everyone on both sides of the aisle feels that way.

One of the saddest things I've witnessed this year has been the unkindness among friends, the judgmental words especially from one Christian to another.  That's been heavy to watch.  Social media makes it so easy to dialogue or to argue viciously. I've been reading the Chronological One Year Bible this year (so love!!), and the past bit of time I've been reading the Gospels and it's been all about Jesus' life and time on earth.  And I love about him that he is so good at knowing how to avoid useless arguing and so good at knowing how to clearly explain things when someone wants to actually know something from him.  Sometimes I'd read and be all, "Ohh, that's probably something I need to do better..."

My dad often has said, "It's not what happens to you, it's what happens in you in response to what happens to you that counts."  (He's wise as well as adorable.  That's just a killer combination.  And don't forget the Irish accent.)

I hope that tomorrow morning when we all wake up and feel whatever we feel about the next president, something good and powerful will be happening in us in response to that.  Once we've cast our vote, we've done what we can for this election, but we can control a lot about our country even after tomorrow, no matter how it all comes down.  Granted, we may need to drive to northern Maine to look at the smiling miniature sheep my father-in-law just told me about today (and which I obviously need to have at the farm) to lower the blood pressure.  But after that, we move forward.

This election is winding to a close.  We cannot control the White House.  We cannot control terrorism.  We cannot control the economy.  There's a lot we can't control.  And the important thing tomorrow is that we don't get stuck in that part of the truth.  I want to stand alongside my people - the ones who see the world like I do and the ones who don't - and I really want us to be for each other.  What happens in us in response to what this election says is happening to us is our power that nobody can take away.  It's our truth.  It's a gift we give ourselves and one another.  

The Letting-Go's of Motherhood and the Sisterhood of the Hot Mess

Change and the unpredictable give me anxiety.  There's a morning routine I obsess over: two cups of coffee in a preheated mug, while sitting in the cheetah chair, reading.  I love my routines. Every evening, when the children are upstairs, Selden and I have dessert on the couch and watch an episode of a show. (Or we scroll through Netflix's suggestions for us, which indicate they need to hire a new person to come up with some computer program that picks out suggested shows, because besides being incredibly predictable, I'm also incredibly averse to being scared, so I cannot understand why Netflix keeps telling me I would probably love "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."  Or Bob Ross's painting show. Although his hair is sort of epic.  Is there no middle ground?) 

Letting go is not my favorite thing either.  I have a box in the garage full of things that I am keeping for sentimental reasons: a coke wrapper from our trip to Ukraine, the top I cut off a pizza box that selden wrote on and left for me on the porch swing at the old house when we were first were getting to know each other, a puzzle Selden made for me years ago. And I think I've kept every single drawing the children have ever made.  I just can't get rid of them.  I even have my grandmother's old dining room table in my garage, because I feel too nostalgic about it to have seen her give it away when she downsized.  And maybe in 5 years Lia will want it at her house, right?  I mean, parking in the garage is so over-rated.

In no other endeavor are change and letting go more inevitable than in mothering.  I can remember  when Sage was born, and I was so thrilled to have her to look at and hold,  but also I had a twinge of sadness that she was not going to be with me, in my belly, everywhere I went, twenty-four hours a day.  I'm over that now, because the fact is that even when they're born, they're with you most of the time.  Especially in the bathroom, it seems. I might build a fortress around my claw-foot tub, because another routine I cherish is my evening bubble bath, and part of the loveliness is the aloneness, which my daughters seem not to have gotten the memo about. 

One of the things my girlfriends and I group-text about more than almost anything else is mothering.  We usually don't know if we're doing it right, and we encourage each other with the fact that all the rest of us are pretty sure we don't know what we're doing either.  We remind each other to rock on, because we're all just winging it, but at least we're winging it together.

(For my 30 days of heart-monitor-wearing last spring, however, I also texted frequently about my fear that someone at the grocery store would call homeland security on me for looking like a homegrown terrorist-housewife strapped with a bomb, since I had all these electrodes and wires all over the place... Or that perhaps someone would think I was working undercover with the FBI.)

The thing we mostly don't know how to do is the letting go, and wouldn't you know it, that's the thing we can't help but keep having to do.

One of my girlfriends is taking her little baby to daycare for the first time this morning.  

Another friend is heading to a preschool open house this week, because she sends her littlest one off to preschool soon.

And I'm trying alternately to stop time and to just not think about time, because my oldest is starting senior year, and I can barely imagine what it'll be like to come home to a house without Lia next August.  It will be way too quiet, way too tidy (oh, is that a thing?), and I don't really remember life without her in the house anymore. Plus she's the only one here who has an appreciation for my 90's hiphop.

It's kind of weird how just when your kids are turning into these really cool adult people who you want to hang out with a whole lot, that's when they move out.  If it had been up to me, I'd have sent Lia to college at about the time she was in The Eye Rolling Stage, and I'd definitely want her to be back right about now, because she's pretty cool.  

And as soon as we're done getting used to Lia being off, Eli will be heading off himself.  And I don't know what I'll do when I don't have shoes the size of party barges to trip over in the entryway or "Big Francis," the seafoam metallic Mercedes wagon from the early 90's - the really cool style with the backward-facing seats - that he looks so sweet driving, parked in the driveway.  

There's nothing like being powerless to remind me that I'm powerless.  (Being able to control stuff is right up there with loving my routine and being alone in the bathroom.) But I'm powerless to slow time, and I'm powerless to keep things from changing.  And part of the job description of being a mom is the letting go, because they aren't even actually mine to begin with.  Each of these kids, when they were teeny, we dedicated to God. We acknowledged they were His and that we were being trusted to raise them to know the Lord and to hopefully not mess them up more than what some decent counseling would be able to fix. 

I'm sitting here thinking about this, wanting to have something profound to say, and I don't.  I've got nothing. The only thing I know to be true, besides that time keeps moving and we keep having to let go of one season to enter the next one is this:  I've never been ready for the next thing until it's time for the next thing.  And every time, God's grace has met me at the point of change, and it's always been ok.  

The above photo is a misrepresentation of my Republican Primary allegiance, but Ben Carson was no longer running, so I did caucus for my grandmother's "boyfriend" Ted.  But in real life, I actually still frequently wear my Ben Carson hat. And t-shirt. But I digress.

And in the moments leading up to the being ok, when I'm still feeling like a hot mess, I'm so thankful for the girlfriends who will admit to sometimes feeling like a hot mess too, who will sit around Mexican food or lattes or too much chocolate froyo, talking and laughing and walking together through the days we can't control and the ways we have to let go,  who point my heart back to the God who has promised that He knows the plans He has for us and that they are full of hope and a good future.   Because as good as the season is right now (except for the bathroom company part), the next season is going to be good as well. 

When life is overwhelming, don't forget the other chickens on your roosting bar.

You can't have just one goat.  I don't mean it like the old potato chip commercial that claims you can't eat just one (not that you would eat a goat). Or that they're addictive (though that is a fact).  I mean, you cannot have just one goat. You will hear nothing but a lonely (and LOUD) "Maaaaah! Maaaaah!" on constant replay, and it will break your heart (and be very annoying to listen to). Goats need a friend.  Donkeys do too, which is how we came to have Dottie, our free-goat-with-purchase when we bough our mini donkey Maddy.  Donkeys usually have a donkey friend, but I think Maddy believes Dottie to be a donkey, so it works out really well.

When I look out the window from my cheetah print coffee drinking chair in the mornings, I watch our baby goats, Marky (named in the car on the way home, because the blue disinfectant dye from where he had been banded - if you are not into goat lingo, that's when they castrate him via rubber band - was literally making marks all over my arm as I was holding him.  Also I loved Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch in 1990), Moxie (named for the grossest Maine soda that my husband and mother both love and for the fact that it means she's sassy, which is so true), Tucker (the most romantic gift I've received in all my life - after refusing baby goats over and over, my husband pulled up to the door in his truck one day last April and asked me to help him unload some stuff.  I was about to pass this job off to one of the older children, because I love child labor, when a tiny head popped up and a teeny little "Maaah!" was bleated, and then I did a very awkward-looking happy dance while shrieking.  My husband knows how to rock my world. Tucker is an Oberhasli goat who thinks he's a golden doodle, knows his name and loves to give kisses) running around in their field.  They're inseparable.  God made them to be most happy when with friends.

I'm learning a lot of things about God here at the farmhouse.  In part because the Bible seems to have millions of spiritual truths are relayed with agrarian examples, and until now I didn't have a single clue in the world what they REALLY meant.  For example, God tells us that we can hide in the shadow of his wing and that he gathers us like a hen gathers her chicks.  Pre-farm I pictured God's wing like a gigantic airplane-bird that left a shadow as it soared powerfully overhead.  And I hadn't the foggiest about the chicken thing.  I just thought chickens seemed creepy.


Last spring we had a little hen who hid another hen's eggs in a hole under our coop and sat on them.  I thought Peanut, the egg stealer, had been surely taken by a fox.  I think I may have cried.  (Normally I cry over chicken tragedies.)  Then one day Sage said, "Oh, there's Peanut!"  And one evening Selden came in holding a baby chick he'd seen running for its life in the chicken yard.  Eli named her Squoosh, and she lived in a brooder in the basement for a day, crying for company (you also can't have just one chicken).  The thing about baby chicks is, where there's one, there are more.... So I went and put my face down to the ground and peered under the coop and couldn't see anything, because Peanut is extremely adept at hiding herself and other hens' eggs it seems.  But eventually I heard a peeping, and I felt around blindly and found the next chick, Squirt.  I pulled out a few eggs (one was peeping inside - isn't that amazing!?), and I took Peanut and her little brood and chirping egg and put them in a dog kennel and watched her hatch and take care of those babies.

Usually we raise our chicks in a brooder, which is gross and high maintenance and requires lots of icky poo-cleaning and water changing and so forth.  But Peanut raised those babies herself, and it was super cool. We let them loose out in the yard and she cooed a sound I'd never heard her make, and those chicks scurried to her from wherever they were.  They knew her voice, and they loved to hide under her wings, with just their little itty faces peeking out.  When the big chickens would be nearby and looked menacingly at the babies, Peanut ran at them and then her babies scuttled over and tucked under her wings.  Now when I think about God, I picture him meaning he does that, like Peanut.  It's not a big industrial impersonal wing like on a fighter jet.  It's the soft, cozy, cuddly wing of a mama hen who knows how to call us from danger and shield us from fear and keep us warm and safe and loved. It's tender and personal. It's cozy.

God made all of us - not just goats - to need community, to need friends.  When we moved to the farmhouse, I had no idea that not only were we going to have a new home, we would have a whole precious community.  We have parents who are all growing as friends with each other just as our kiddos are building friendships at school.  In fact, truth be told, lots of times I plan play dates just because I want to hang out with MY friends!!!  (Isn't that why we have kids? That and the child labor?)

Our church has a Sunday School class of young couples (Selden jokes that he is pushing the limit on us being in a "young" couple class) called Life Together.  And our whole focus lately has been about how to really form friendships and build community and share each other's burdens and be people who really DO life together.  A group of husbands, Selden and some of his good pals, have formed a non-incorporated and not publicly traded company that makes no money called "Minimal Damage Movers," who, although they resist my efforts to dress them in matching muscle shirts with logos, have become super close dude-friends as they've worked alongside each other over the years, helping to move all different people from one place to the next (while endeavoring not to damage MUCH and while taking frequent breaks - it's in the contract).  We all need friends.  Goats, girls, dudes.  All of us.  It makes the load lighter and the trip more fun.

I was reading this morning in the book of Numbers, and granted I've normally not found the Old Testament to be riveting reading, but I've also never read it chronologically (highly recommend the Chronological One Year Bible!!).  So Moses has all these Israelites in the wilderness.  He's gone through all this drama with Pharaoh to let his people go.  The Israelites have been very high maintenance in the wilderness.  And the coolest thing of all is to see how God has this desire to come down and spend time with Moses talking with him and listening to him and being not only his Leader but his Friend.  The God who parted the sea and poured out plagues on the Egyptians who were oppressing His people and whose very face no person can see and even live.... This God finds imperfect Moses to be someone whose heart is humble and pleasing to him, and God wants to be Moses' friend. He's mighty and he is also tender. Don't you just love God to bits!?

So I smiled as I read this section where all the people are griping about the Manna (the food God provided daily) and they were all discontented and moody and full of complaining about eating the same old thing every single day and were not satisfied at all.  And the thing that I really enjoyed was seeing Moses talk to God about this.  Moses was basically hitting the wall emotionally over all these griping Israelites.

"... Moses was troubled.  He asked the LORD, 'Why have you brought this trouble on your servant? What have I done to displease you so that you put the burden of all these people on me?  Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth?  Why do you tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant, to the land you promised on oath to their ancestors?.....I cannot carry all these people by myself; the burden is too heavy for me.'" Numbers 11:10-14 NIV (italics mine)

How many times have you or I felt that way?  Like we want to say, "Really God?!  Seriously, I cannot even handle this!  It's too heavy.  It's too much for me.  I just can't carry this load by myself!"  Moses was considered a friend of God, and he talks to God as a friend.  He's real and shares his heart and his frustrations.  I think that's what God wants us to do, too.  He is big enough to handle our big feelings. He knows us more intimately than anyone, and he sees how our human hearts have limits and how we can become overwhelmed by the circumstances in life and how things can get really heavy.

Jesus, in the New Testament, tells us that his "yoke is easy and his burden is light."  He, God in flesh, walking here on this earth, understands our limitations and promises to help carry our load.  So often he does that through friends.

God cared about Moses, and he heard his heart's cry for help.  Even if the delivery was a bit dramatic (it was honest, though, and that's what God loves for us to be when we talk to him). So God told Moses to gather these certain guys together and to come to the tent of meeting.  "I will come down and speak with you there, and I will take some of the power of the Spirit that is on you and put it on them. They will share the burden of the people with you so you will not have to carry it alone." Numbers 11:17 NIV (italics mine)  God gave him helpers, and God personally equipped the helpers to carry the specific load Moses really wanted them to share.

It's easy to hear stories of Moses and think he's this spiritual giant who is way out of touch with all of our human frailty and weakness, and that's not true.  That's not the case for any of the people we read about in God's Word.  The Bible is so personal and so relevant and so for us today.  God loves us in our limited emotional resources and in our limited understanding and in our fear and in our high maintenance moments.  He gives us his Spirit and he also gives us friends.

Goats, donkeys, chickens, people... we are all created to be with others who will walk alongside us in the sun and also in the dark places.  When it's cold in the winter, my goats curl up in a pile, so they can keep each other warm, and the chickens fluff out their feathers to trap heat, but they also squish together on their poop-covered roosting bar, and they sleep happily next to their best friends.

When I'm feeling overwhelmed, I text my girlfriends (repeatedly and with many many words and plenty of drama) or I invite myself over (thank you to all of you who love me even though I'm an inviter-of-myself) and spill my heart.  Or I wake my husband up in the middle of the night to snuggle me because I'm feeling worried or afraid.  Or I call my parents and have an emotional breakdown over the phone.  And I also tell God about how this is all too much and I just can't handle the weight.  And He reminds me that I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.  And that I'm loved beyond measure.  And that I'm not walking alone.  He is with me, and so is my whole "flock" of girlfriends and family and husband.  And that he's sent them to me to help carry the load, so it doesn't feel so heavy.  He doesn't take the hard stuff away all the time.  Sometimes he does.  Sometimes he doesn't.  But he gives us what we need to carry it, and usually that looks like the people I'm doing this life with.  And sometimes I talk to the goats, too.  They are amazing listeners.

I'm hoping that as I'm sitting in my cheetah chair, watching sleet falling on the farmyard this morning, that you know you are not carrying your heavy things alone either.  Or if you are, that you don't have to.  I'm praying that you'll feel encouraged to talk to God just like you would a friend, and that you will see the people around you who will help you bear the weight.  I'm praying for you to know you're loved and that you're not alone.  Life is so much more fun when you have a whole crew of friends to fluff out your feathers with and squish up next to on the poopy roosting bar of life, when things gets hard.

Welcome to the Farm

On a winding road along the river, in a small town in Maine, there's a 200-year old farmhouse I hope will survive my family's years in residence. It would be a shame for it to have stood proud for 200 years only to have one family (and by family I mean my 3 children) do the whole thing in.  A farmer's porch looks out over our little pond and apple orchard, where once upon a time our ducks Gideon and Lois (may they rest in peace) used to swim happily when not waiting for the school bus to arrive (true story).  It felt like a fairy tale coming true to me when we moved into the farmhouse, and honestly, it still does.

My husband - besides being hot as heck in a plaid wool coat and chainsaw chaps, which may actually not be the name of the chaps worn while chain-sawing - keeps this old place running, cuts and splits a million cord of wood by hand like a boss, makes the chicest farmtastic decor I've ever seen, spoils me with way too many boots (an obsession of mine), and once in a moment of outrageous romance, a surprise baby goat.  (Every girl has her own idea of romance, ok!? There should be a sixth love language, because livestock is totally mine.) Our three kids are so unique and fun to watch growing up (into people who we hope will one day live in their own houses somewhere nearby and come to visit all the time).  They're 7, 16 and 17, and it's like we are living in almost every stage of parenting simultaneously, which is awesome and sentimental and sort of schizophrenic-feeling.

I'm obsessed with talking at great length with my girlfriends, without whom I could not even survive. For real.  The volume of my emotions and daily word count are by far and away too much for any male person to contend with alone.  I think my husband appreciates my girlfriends almost as much as I do.  Occasionally when my feelings get REAL big, he cautiously glances at me and suggests, "maybe you should call a girlfriend..." They encourage me, pray for me, make me laugh until I almost pee my pants (or is that from being close to 40?! Lord help me), and bring food when when something crappy is happening.  Because Jesus and food can fix basically anything.  The whole back of the farmhouse is windows, and there, looking out over the paddock and the farmyard, are two cheetah print chairs, where my husband and I have coffee on weekend mornings and my girlfriends and I sit and solve the greater mysteries of life over tea many an afternoon.  One of my sweet pals gave me a sign that says, "Friends Gather Here," and it sits perched atop the window sill in that little sunny corner. Because it's so totally true.

We have goats (as previously noted while discussing romantic gestures);  a miniature donkey (I did not know about this animal existing before my husband found ours online and we went to get her and drove her home in a dog crate, people!) who came with a free-goat-with-purchase which is the hands-down best free gift with purchase ever; two pot belly pigs - one of whom we rescued after he had been returned twice to a Humane Society two hours away because disgruntled former adopters disapproved of his hesitancy to do flights of stairs and his disinterest in sitting on the sofa watching tv (a lot of nerve that pig has, right!?) -  a bunch of chickens, one of whom lived in the house for a couple weeks while her frostbitten toes healed, so we could sit together watching tv while she soaked her weird-looking chicken-feet in epsom salt and warm water (can I tell you how much my husband loved that...?); and a golden doodle named Rigby, who cuddles at a moment's notice, loves to fetch and usually doesn't torment the chickens but frequently torments us by shoving his doodle-snout under our hands, irrespective of whether we're holding hot coffee, because he's obsessed with being patted on the head.

Seriously, there is something so incredibly therapeutic about the farm.  It's a place we see God's goodness constantly.  From the way the sky looks different over the paddock every single day to the little goat kisses I love so much, to the rainbow of eggs we gather and watching mama hens raise their fluffy little chicks out back... Peace, grace and goodness (and goats) abound at the farm.  I've had various blogs before, and I'm starting this one new, because I think the farm is about fresh beginnings and new stories being written, and I'm hoping to share it with you (along with many random stories, told in a stream of consciousness fashion and filled with lengthy run-on sentences, because we're chatting and not writing essays, for Pete's sake). If you can not-judge me for the chatter, and for wearing elastic-ankled sweatpants that may verge on the side of looking like Ralph Macchio's did in Karate Kid, but less high water, far too often at home, the door is always open. (Unless you stop by unexpectedly in a vehicle I don't recognize and knock on the door.  Because in that case, my wierdo-phobia will be in high gear, and I will be barricaded inside, planning my escape and possibly texting my girlfriends a description of the vehicle so the police will know what to look for if I'm suddenly missing.)