Once we had the goats and I had finally figured out how to milk them without crying, I ran into a problem I hadn't really thought about.
What in the world was I supposed to do with all this goat milk?
As it turns out, goat milk is a pretty niche market.
There are people who absolutely love it. There are people who specifically seek it out. But finding enough of those people, consistently, was another story. I tried. I really tried.
I started making goat milk soap, and honestly it was really good soap. I was proud of it. The local meat lockers were kind enough to give me places to sell it. I had soap at the Bronson Locker, the Moran locker, and even their store in Iola.
But it just didn't sell very well.
I still make it today. I still keep some around, and some of my current milk customers buy it. But eventually I stopped trying so hard to market it because the amount of work I was putting into making and selling soap just wasn't paying off.
So naturally, I moved on to my next idea.
Cheese.
Surely I could make cheese.
The experiment taught me something else about goat milk very quickly. The second I warmed it up, my entire house smelled like a goat. Maybe there is some magical cheesemaking secret I never discovered, but I couldn't do it. I couldn't even stand the smell long enough to convince myself the finished product might be worth it.
My daughter, meanwhile, apparently had completely different taste buds. She thought the goat milk was fantastic. At one point she declared it made the best glass of chocolate milk she'd ever had. So at least I had one satisfied customer.
Unfortunately, one kid drinking chocolate milk wasn't going to keep up with what the goats were producing. The milk kept coming.
And coming.
And coming.
I froze it into cubes to use later for soap. Then the freezer filled up.
There was milk everywhere, soap that wasn't selling fast enough, and me constantly trying to figure out what I could make next. Looking back, I can laugh about it now. At the time, though, I was beginning to realize that learning how to produce something was only half the battle.
You also had to figure out what to do with it.
And then, just when we were trying to figure all of that out, something happened that made the extra milk in the freezer seem pretty insignificant.
We lost the barn.
We were burning the pasture that day. Brent was watching the pond dam on the south pasture, and I was on the north side of the corral burning the tall grass that had grown up along the fence.
I watched the fire carefully as it worked its way down the fence line. When I got about three feet from the barn, I stomped it out and sprayed everything down with water.
It was out. At least I thought it was.
I went over and sat with Brent while he watched the fire around the pond dam. Then, for whatever reason, I happened to look back over my shoulder. The barn roof was smoking, all of the goats were inside.
I yelled at Brent. He took off to the barn on the side by side while I ran straight for the barn. and opened the gate, and the goats came running out. All of them except Phil.
Phil was our meat goat, and instead of running from the fire, he stood petrified in the corner. Brent ran into the barn, grabbed him, and threw him outside.
Then he disappeared again into the black smoke and flames and started trying to save anything he could. He grabbed my milk stanchion, the feed totes, anything he could get his hands on.
When he tried to leave and back the side by side away from the barn before the fire reached it, he got high centered. On What! Phil had apparently decided that underneath the stranded buggy was the safest place to be during a barn fire. He had crawled underneath it.
So Brent had to drag him out.......again.
By then there wasn't much we could do. The barn was fully engulfed. I called 911, but the call went to Allen County first (the neighboring county). They had to transfer me to Bourbon County. I remember telling them that by the time anybody got there, it would probably be gone. And I remember thinking, why is everything working against us right now!
We stood there and watched something we had worked so hard on disappear.
Afterward, we started going through what we'd lost. And every time we thought we had remembered everything, we remembered something else. All of the PVC we'd installed for the overhead watering system. Feed Supplies. Extra building materials we had stored in the rafters.
The things you don't think about when you look at a barn because they're just part of it. Things collected slowly over time, one project and one trip to the store at a time. But there was one loss that couldn't be replaced at a hardware store.
Brent's deer sheds that he had spent more than 30 years collecting. Walking miles and miles finding them. They were stored in the loft. Every one of them was gone. As if they had never existed. Over three decades of collections, gone in one afternoon.
There wasn't anything we could do except start figuring out what came next. And, of course, the goats didn't care that the barn had burned down. They still needed milked. So Brent set me up a temporary milking area in the garage.
That's one of the things homesteading has taught me over and over again. Life doesn't stop just because something went wrong. Animals still need fed, water still needs carried, and goats still need milked.
In the weeks that followed, we filed the insurance claim and started taking inventory of everything we'd lost. Then we started talking about what rebuilding would look like.
At first, I think the idea was simply to replace what had been there. Build the barn back. Put everything back where it belonged. Get things back to normal. But somewhere in those conversations, the plan started changing.
If we were going to rebuild anyway, why rebuild exactly what we'd had? Why not fix the things we wished were different? Why not give ourselves more room? Why not build something that could handle more than what we were doing right then?
Slowly, the loss started looking less like an ending.
There was still a black patch of ground where our barn had stood. There were still things we could never replace. And if you'd told me while I was watching that roof burn that I would someday see anything good come from it, I probably wouldn't have believed you.
But sometimes the thing that looks like it's destroying everything you've built is actually clearing the ground for what you're supposed to build next.
We weren't just going to build it back.
We were going to build it back bigger.
Looking back now, I can see that the fire wasn't the end of something. It was the beginning of something we couldn't see yet.
At the time, all we could see what what we had lost. A barn. Equipment. Years of things collected and saved. Hours and hours of work reduced to ashes.
But there, standing in the middle of what was left, we made a decision. We weren't going to quit. We weren't just going to replace what we'd lost and put everything back the way it had been.
We didn't know it yet, but we were about to build more than a barn.
"And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations." Isaiah 61:4.
To be continued.........