Our property is dreamy, a lovely 5.5 acres of woodlands where deer and fairies alternate frolicking in our front yard, and by fairies I mean turkeys, the most magical of birds. But an evil encroaches upon us, and that evil is POISON FUCKING IVY.
Having been a child of the West Coast for my whole illustrious life, my encounters with poison ivy were similar to my encounters with the sasquatches, namely that I heard a lot about it and assumed it was out in the woods but that was the extent of my caring. Apparently that was warranted because there is no poison ivy on the West Coast.
But there sure is on the East Coast. Poison ivy everywhere.
We say very often around this house, “Jerry FUCKING Jones,” because the name of the person who sold us our house was Jerry Jones (not actually) and he did his utmost to turn this house into yuppie bait by painting all the walls grey (horrific) and cutting down all the poison ivy (nefarious). He also did a lot of DIY projects that really make me believe in myself, because he was so terrible at doing DIY projects that anything I do will be an improvement on them, and instead of thinking to myself, “I don’t know how to caulk a bath tub,” I think to myself, “If Jerry FUCKING Jones, old white man with too much confidence in his handy work extraordinaire, thinks he can caulk a bath tub, then so can I.”
But back to the poison ivy.
Our first year, we knew that poison ivy was out there, but we didn’t know where. The tipoff was that Dan came home one day and said, “Does this look like a welt?” and the next three weeks were an absolute hellscape of a continuous poison ivy assault that did not let up until I gave birth to our son, which honestly was pretty nice of Dan to figure out how to suffer as much as I was in my last three weeks of pregnancy and still cook me dinner with arms blistered and soul crushed.
We put the poison ivy out of our minds and enjoyed the idyllic fall and winter of Western North Carolina, but come spring, sinister leaves started appearing at the edges of our property. A jaunty stroll in the woods behind our house one day saw me standing at the precipice of a veritable sea of poison ivy, to which I said NO GOD PLEASE NOT THE DEVIL LEAVES PLEASE SPARE ME or something equally pithy and ran back home with my baby in my arms who was probably wondering why we didn’t get to grab all the leaves and did not thank me at all for saving his life.
I went home and evaluated my options:
Ask Dan to fix the problem - non-starter because he has a very bad reaction to poison ivy.
Fix the problem myself - non-starter because I don’t want to.
Get goats.
GOATS. How does one dispose of a devil plant? Get devil-worshipping livestock to eat it.
We have been preparing for these goats for a few months, and by preparing I mean pretending like the fence and shelter will build themselves and that we don’t have to do anything to help it along. That all culminated in today, when we were supposed to finally pick them up, and realizing we were not done with pretty much everything. I spent the day lamenting my existence and absolute inability to change the horrors visited upon me every day by the consequences of my own actions. Dan went and finished everything. Likely did nothing, as usual.
Finally, it was time for me to away to Rosman to procure my goats. The goat lady who was selling me her goats was the sweetest woman I have ever texted with and she told me they lived on Gray Fox Lane, which is an excellent lane to get goats from, so I made the familiar drive, following my GPS. Soon, the familiar drive turned into an unfamiliar drive.
Generally, the outskirts of Brevard are a pretty nice place, as far as living in the country goes. Rarely do I realize that we live somewhere that isn’t Beaverton, OR, because they look so ridiculously similar. But twice so far since living here, I have been slammed in the face with the understanding that we don’t live in flat stupid Beaverton, we live in the hills of Appalachia. Once was when I was driving the Baby around to take a nap and ended up driving up a street that turned into a road and then turned into the beginning of a horror film as the trailers got more dilapidated and then finally culminated in one trailer that was boarded up with a board that, I am not exaggerating, said, “WE ARE WATCHING,” in what I assume was a bid to tell people no trespassing, but I did not stick around to find out.
The second time was today. I turned out of Rosman and started heading up the hill, and the street turned into a road, and then it turned into a rocky outcrop that I would have been better served riding a mule up than taking a car. But it was the car that I was driving, and I encountered the sweet evidence of the denizens of this gravel track deciding to pave it themselves, and drove over six different stretches of slap-dash pavement until I arrived once again at an insanely rocky road that went straight up. The GPS told me straight up was my direction, so I also went straight up, and as the trailers thinned out and the sky got darker it occurred to me that I did not know these people at all and though they sent me pictures of the goats, they could have been anyone’s goats, and perhaps I was getting catfished by goats and actually I was about to be subsumed into someone’s hill cult.
Giddy with the idea of starting a new adventure, I turned onto their drive, and tried not to be overly disappointed when I was met with two very kind folks who just wanted to sell me their goats. But my disappointment at not joining a cult was overrode by the excitement of the fact that I was getting GOATS.
Allow me to repeat: GOATS.
Little tail swishing ear twitching satan-eyed sweetie pie goats!
So intoxicated was I by getting these goats that I gave little thought to what they were like. But once they were loaded into the car and we were on our way, I began to panic. I had not given much thought to how to make their ride more comfortable, short of some towels, in their little crate, but what sort of music do goats like? Obviously dogs like reggae, but I had no information about goats. The radio threw out “Shallow” by Lady Gaga and the goats laid down and seemed to chill out, which sent me into another panic, because did I really want Lady Gaga fans living at my house? So many questions I had forgotten to ask before getting goats. Why hadn’t I prepared?! I switched on Spotify, which was playing the soundtrack to The Newsies, and they seemed to also like this, which I decided was a good sign and drove the rest of the way home absolutely thrilled to have goats that appreciated forming scrappy unions as much as I do.
I released them into their little enclosure once we got home, and stood back and thought about how my ancestors farming goats in the west of Iran would be proud of me also farming goats, or else they would be excessively disappointed that I never figured out how to do anything other than farm goats. I immediately tell my ancestors to fuck off for being so judgmental and pat myself on the back for living the American Dream, which is apparently no longer two kids and a picket fence but one kid and enough animals to make you forget your participation in a capitalist construct that makes you want to die.
So my life is now goats, and this will be endless goat content, unless my super terrible fence doesn’t hold and they escape, in which case this will be the equivalent of a teenager’s Livejournal and will be nothing but me lamenting the consequences of my own actions, but with emo songs playing in the background.
Open Their Crate and Seize the Day! Don’t be afraid and don’t delay.
Congrats on the goats, but still a little disappointed you didn’t get to join a cult.