The day we moved into our house in Bronson was beautiful. It was one of those really nice days where everything feels like it might actually cooperate with you for once.
Then that night it got cold.
We had somehow missed the fact that natural gas wasn't included with the city utilities, which meant we needed to have it turned on separately. Of course, we discovered this on a weekend. There was nothing we could do until Monday.
So on our very first night in the new house, we dragged all of the mattresses into the big family room and laid them out across the floor. Brent built a fire in the fireplace, and we all slept in there together. That's where we stayed until Monday, when we could finally get the gas turned on and use the heaters. t
It wasn't exactly how I'd imagined our first weekend there, or the best way to celebrate Charlie's first birthday, but honestly, it feels pretty fitting now.
We were going to spend a lot of the next few years figuring things out as we went.
The move itself hadn't exactly ended on a high note either. The people who bought our old house had allowed us to stay an extra week so we could finish moving everything, and on the last day I called to tell them we had the house cleared out and they could come clean if they wanted to.
There had apparently been a misunderstanding in the paperwork about the washer and dryer. They thought they were staying, we knew they were never supposed to.
What should have been a simple misunderstanding turned into an awful ordeal, eventually ending with the mothers of the couple who bought the house standing on the patio screaming at me over appliances.
By the time we left that house behind, I was ready to be done with it. So maybe it was the ending that needed to happen.
Our new house wasn't perfect. It was outdated, there were some foundation and flooring issues, and apparently the previous owners never imagined that someday people might want to move actual furniture through the 32 inch doorways (most of them were 28 inches). So getting boxes, furniture, and appliances inside was an experience on its own.
But the house was ours.
Outside, there was fenced pasture that needed some TLC, but it was in good shape. There was a little barn - although calling it a barn might have been generous. It was really more of a shed, and it was absolutely packed with used lumber, guttering and other leftover construction materials. Most of it was actually in decent shape, which would eventually turn out to be pretty useful.
There was a well with electricity run to it out in the pasture. There was a decent little pond. There was already fencing.
There was potential everywhere we looked.
We had actually owned more land at the previous home, so this wasn't some long-awaited moment where we finally got a piece of land of our own.
What made this place different was Brent.
For the first time, I was standing on a piece of land with someone who looked at it and saw the same possibilities I did.
I didn't have to convince him that we should use the pasture. I didn't have to explain why I wanted livestock or why any of this mattered to. He wanted it too. We didn't know exactly what we were going to put out there yet, but we both knew that land wasn't going to sit empty.
It was exciting. It was terrifying.
And somehow, it still felt like we'd finally made it.
For a while, though, we did absolutely nothing with the pasture.
We talked about it. We looked at it. We tossed ideas around. We knew we wanted livestock, but we weren't sure what kind made the most sense.
Eventually, we landed on sheep. Sheep seemed easy enough right?
That sentence is probably responsible for a lot of questionable homesteading decisions.
We went to the livestock auction in Yates Center, and I quickly discovered that I had absolutely no idea how to buy an animal at an auction. I could barely understand the auctioneer, the numbers flashing across the screen confused me, and I was terrified I was going to raise my hand at the wrong time and accidentally buy something by the pound without understanding what I just agreed to pay.
Then they brought through a mama sheep and twin babies.
They were being sold by the head.
That, I understood.
Brent had already had to leave because Charlie had become unmanageable, which meant I was sitting there alone when I decided to go for it. And just like that, we owned sheep.
We brought that mama and her babies home, and for the next three or four months I tried to convince myself that I liked sheep.
I didn't.
There wasn't anything particularly wrong with them. They just weren't very friendly. I wanted animals I could interact with and build some kind of relationship with, and our sheep weren't especially interested in having one with me.
So I did what any reasonable aspiring homesteader does when her first livestock experiment doesn't work out.
I put them on Craigslist.
It didn't take long when a man contacted me and asked if I would be interested in trading my three sheep for three goats.
Brent and I talked it over and decided, sure. Why not?
A few days later, a really nice minivan pulled into our driveway. Inside were the man, his wife, a bunch of kids....
an three goats in the back.
We traded animals, stood and visited for a while. Then as they loaded up to leave he said to me, "Good Luck".
I remember thinking that was a strange thing to say.
It wouldn't take long to understand.
Goats have absolutely no respect for fences.
There is a reason people joke that fences have to be goat high. They can stand there looking perfectly innocent one second and seemingly launch themselves over a six-foot fence the next.
Brent and I spend a ridiculous amount of time putting goats back where goats were supposed to be. We argued about it sometimes. It's funny now. It wasn't always funny while we were chasing goats.
But despite all of that, I liked them. There was something about goats that felt different. And maybe that shouldn't have surprised me.
Growing up, Abilene, KS had a program called pioneer camp that we attended every year during the summer. We learned to live like the pioneers did. One summer day, a news crew came out and interviewed some of us.
They asked me what my favorite part of pioneer camp had been.
My response, "Milking the goats". I was seven. I couldn't have known then that all those years later I would be standing on a little farm in Bronson with goats of my own. But I have thought about that little girl many times since.
Maybe some dreams don't arrive in our lives all at once. Maybe they get planted long before we understand what they are. Several months after we traded the sheep, I was scrolling Craigslist when I found a Saanen dairy goat for sale, in milk. Something in me immediately wanted her.
We had chosen goats partly because we weren't sure our property was really suited for cows, and a dairy goat seems manageable. I had milked a little in the past, I'm sure I could relearn. So I went to get her.
Unfortunately, I made it all the way to Oklahoma and realized that the pen I had brought was too small. But I wasn't leaving without the goat. So I put an adult diaper on her and she road in the back seat of the truck with me all the way home.
And that's how my dairy journey really began: driving home with a full-grown Saanen wearing an adult diaper.
Brent built me a milking stand out of scrap lumber, because if it could be built, he could build it.
I didn't have a milking machine yet, so I milked her by hand. Or at least I tried to.
She kicked, she stepped around, she kicked the bucket over. I learned how to tie her legs and how to position myself and the bucket. I learned all of those little things that eventually become second nature but feel completely impossible when you're first starting.
And oh boy do I remember crying. I remember sitting there thinking I made a huge mistake. I'd wanted this. I'd gone and bought the goat. I'd brought her home in a diaper for crying out loud! And now I wasn't sure I could do it. But I kept milking her.
Eventually, my hands figured it out. I figured her out. and somewhere along the way, something that has felt overwhelming started becoming normal.
Then I got a milking machine. And Brent kept building.
That little shed of a barn started changing. He built me an actual parlor. He built stalls and overhead watering systems, complete with agitators in the tubs to keep them for getting nasty. I'd come up with another idea, and Brent would start figuring out how to make it work. It wasn't just my dream anymore. It was ours.
I think about Proverbs 16:3 often:
"Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established. "
I've carried that verse with me through a lot of this journey. Because when you're living through something, you rarely get to see the whole picture. At seven years old in Abilene, I didn't know why milking a goat at pioneer camp stuck with me. Sitting on that milk stand crying because I thought I'd made a terrible mistake, I certainly didn't know where any of this was going.
And when Brent was out in that little barn turning scrap lumber and whatever else we had into the things I needed, neither one of us knew what we were building toward. We were just working with what we had.
Learning what we didn't know.
Changing direction when something didn't work. And building it together.
The goats aren't the end of our story. As it turned out, they were just getting us ready for what came next.
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