Repeating Seasons. And More Goats.

With the kids' return to school, my mind--dismissing the still-90-degree temperatures--shifted to fall. I've been considering the purchase of a little wreathe made solely of tiny metal ghosts, and it feels nearly time for pumpkins, cornstalks, autumn-scented Yankee candles, and baking. (Admittedly it also feels time for baking, and/or coaxing Daisy to bake [you should taste the little thumbprint cookies she’s been making lately], in winter … and spring … and summer … and on Sundays, so that may not be the best indicator of ... feeling fallish.)

But, this consideration of fall has come with a startling realization. It is simply this:

We are repeating seasons! Here! In this little rental!

Part of me has felt that this place would remain novel and new and all firsts ... forever, I guess. But last year we put up little orange lights and hung the homemade witches (like my mom's from Germany) in this very same house. We lit jack-o-lanterns on the porch and looked for a new neighborhood to trick-or-treat in. Soon we will be squishing in a Christmas tree again! In this very same place.

It's a marvel to me somehow that we are cycling back around to things we've done before here. (This time I even have my very own pumpkin plants planted out front. Never mind that not a single pumpkin has begun to grow on the vines and there will be nothing at all to harvest. It's still something that we have been here long enough to have even thought to plant pumpkins.)

And perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised in this realization that we are already doing our second round of holidays up here. There are plenty of other evidences that we have been here for some time after all. One of those evidences might be that we bought several pygmy goats a few weeks ago (recall that our Boer goats were all sold at the fair) and it seemed such an ordinary thing that it did not even occur to me to take pictures until a week or so later. We must be getting pretty used to this new life to not even find owning goats a novel thing!

(These goats we will keep. They technically belong to Penny, Hans and Starling. [As those three didn't get to raise fair goats.] But Mette and Summer are already talking about buying their own pygmy goats with some of their fair money. It looks like I am beginning to keep the promise I used to idly throw about when my kids would ask for any type of indoor pet and I would wave the request away with, "You don't need a pet. You can have a goat when we move to the farm someday.")

Hans named his goat Emily. Starling named hers Sunflower (and did not agree when we suggested we might call it Sunny for short). And Penny (who tries not to be a farm girl but who the farm naturally loves) has yet to settle on a name. Abe has been calling it George Washington in the interim.

Starling is crying because Sunflower, in only a week's time, got bigger and wrigglier and harder to hold. 

Mind you we still do have one indoor pet. (Beyond the cats who are forever trying to sneak in.) Skittles. Who Summer recently told me appeared to be trying (but failing) to die. Skittles must toil on.