Nearly 40 years ago, my first husband and I bought a weekend house in “the country,” about 2 ½ hours north of our Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. The impetus for this purchase was a picture our three-year-old son had presented to us one day.
“Tell me about it,” I said. I had read the parenting articles: Never, never ask your child what it was or proclaim “What a beautiful doggy!” when what they had depicted might actually be a skyscraper, and then, not only do you know nothing about art, but you’re a bad mommy, as well.
“In the country, I could like to walk out by myself.”
Three years old, and he was already an expert in guilt-tripping.
We spent the next two years daydreaming about “our” house, looking at real estate ads in The New York Times (way before Zillow or realtor.com were twinkles in anyone’s eye), and, finally, setting out on day trips up the Taconic State Parkway to the area we had zeroed in on, Columbia County, New York.
We bought our fixer-upper for—and I cannot believe I am typing this figure– $35,000.
A few years later, we left the City for good, and became full time residents of Craryville, a burg of one blinking light, one firehouse, a small farmer’s market (which years later, when city people came in droves and bought up all the farmland, became a trendy gourmet emporium), a gas station and an ice cream parlor.
My progeny became “country kids,” I took a job at the local newspaper, got a column and a by-line, and my husband became a stay-at-home dad.
The following is reprinted, with permission, from the May 19, 1983 edition of The Roe Jan Independent.
Here Lies Blossom, A Goat
Our goat, Blossom, died last Saturday. If life were a happily-ever-after affair where major events went according to schedule, she should have lived to the ripe old age of nine or so, provided us with many gallons of milk, and numerous kids. Instead, after suffering painful, recurrent udder infections for a fifth of her life, she had to be humanely put down at the age of 15 months, after delivering her one and only kid.
Blossom and her mother, Shortcake, came to live with us a year ago. In addition to the four humans in our home, we also share the domicile with a dog and a gerbil, but the goats were our first “country” animals and they became very dear to us. In what we refer to as “reverse chic,” we turned a dilapidated cottage on the property into a barn (we have yet to be featured in the Home section of The New York Times), my husband built a milking stand, and Shortcake proceeded to provide us with more milk than a family of four could drink (I soon learned to make cheese…sort of). Blossom was merely adorable and delighted us with her antics. She was an affectionate creature and we returned her affection in kind. The children took on new responsibility with goat ownership, and the funny four-legged creatures made their transformation from city children to country children complete.
Last month, Shortcake presented us with twins, a male and a female. The children named them Beezus and Ramona, after characters in a favorite book (even though said characters were both girls), and several weeks later, Blossom gave birth to one sweet little male kid, who we named George, after our vet.
When George and Beezus were sold and delivered to the Catskill Game Farm, my city-raised children learned what their country counterparts have always known: You can’t keep every animal born on the farm (especially since we didn’t really have a farm) and if we kept every kid, in a few years we’d be overrun with goats.
On Saturday, they had to learn another painful lesson: It’s better to end an animal’s life than to have it suffer needlessly. We don’t use euphemisms with the (human) kids. We didn’t say “put to sleep,” which could induce going to bed problems and nightmares in young children. So, we told them just what was going on. They were sad, we were sad, but there seemed no other way.
They wanted to bury her body, but since neither my husband nor I have particularly strong backs and really couldn’t face transporting a dead goat back from the vet, we explained our decision to have the body cremated.
“But Blossom doesn’t want to be burned!” wailed my daughter. When I explained that Blossom wouldn’t be alive any longer and wouldn’t know what was happening to her remains, my daughter countered, with a six-year-old’s logic, “But the bones are more used to being buried than burned!” My nine-year-old son was bereft, but realized that this was something a “country boy” had to go through.
We did have a funeral service for Blossom. The children made tombstones from scraps of sheet rock. My daughter drew a picture of a goat and painstakingly wrote the words “Blossom We Love You” on her work of funerary art. The tombstone my son constructed read “Here Lies Blossom, A Goat. We thank her for the love and joy she gave us when she was young.” The children laid a single tulip by the tombstones under the apple tree, we all talked about how Blossom had enriched our lives and how much we would miss her, and we all cried. Then we went about our daily business.
It was a day that started in sorrow, but it was a day that saw some special milestones, as well. After several hours of mourning, my daughter decided the training wheels had to come off her bike…immediately! Her father acquiesced and, with some pointers from her big brother, our little girl was riding a two-wheeler as if she’d been doing it for years. Her joy at her accomplishment soon eclipsed the sorrow of her loss. And her elation was boundless when, just before bedtime, she discovered her very first loose tooth.
Happily, some things happen right on schedule.