Getting them nearly killed me. We traveled up two states to bring home two baby goats in the back of my husband's  perfect forester subaru.  He wanted the goats. I didn't. He'd spent years whipping our child up into a frenzy wanting them.  He and she had to have them and they finally found a place to get them.  

On the day we left, I had a tick bite, a swollen knot of a thing. I decided to grate a clove of garlic on a bandage and put this germ fighting poultice on my leg. It burned - pretty badly.  I kept thinking as we went down the road, "this hurts," but I just kept driving. I couldn't drive far or fast enough to leave my husband's ugly, mean talk somewhere down the road.

It was a harsh trip. When I got where I was going... there it was, what I had done to myself. A big heart shaped blister, popped and burned many layers down.  Oh, it really was hurting. Everywhere. Every part of my life felt like this blister, raw, oozing, caused by a powerful concoction of earth medicine and my own stupidity.  I had done it to myself.

As I walked up to our goaty destination, looking to my right, I saw a solid white peacock fully spread - like liquid light in the most beautiful form. Then I saw the fields, fences, goats and their keeper.  This place was magic and I felt like I had met the goat goddess and her land. I felt the peace of thousands of years of shepherding animals in my blood.

McGoat Goddess showed us her fields, my granddaughter and I. We saw billy goats, nanny goats and milking goats, lots of chickens, dogs and even a great big snake in the pitch black night. I milked a goat and experienced the clear joy of a mother's milk coursing in my hands.

After camping out on McGoat's hillside, we got our two baby goats in a little wire cage stuffed with straw and took off back down the road.  It got ugly in that car for the next 10 or so hours. And smelly.  My leg hurt like it had caught almighty fire and my marriage was crumbling into nasty, goat pissed on straw flying down the highway.

It was the worst trip ever. Really it was. And my marriage was over.  

We got the goats in the yard right before dark, but we didn't trust the dogs in the fence with them. One left, obedient as usual - GD is his name. He was named for the entire reason we had taken this disastrous trip - Goat Dog!

His brother, a dog of a different color, was slinking around and not coming out. I didn't trust him one bit and I went looking for him.  He's probably between 60 to 80 pounds.  I found him and we were going towards the gate when he turned around and began running fullspeed back the other way. Right into my left leg, he ran; his head battering my shin. I crumbled on the ground, clutching the leg. It is dark by now and I was in too much pain to get up. I laid there, reikiing my leg and crying. 

My left leg, the same leg my heart had blistered its tattoo onto just a couple of days before was throbbing in the rhythm of my sobs and the earth. I laid there convulsed in pain - soul, mind and body; before I finally somehow got myself in the house.

To his credit, my husband was kind. He helped me with ice, medicated me and left me to our bed where I continued to wail and cry for approximately two hours. Maybe more. I felt a hemotoma type swelling that melted into a bone fractured lump of calcium. 

Welcome to my goatz journals, fellow travelers.