The chickens are pooping all over the front porch again, and my wife is a very special woman.

Almost every week, at some point or another, Carolyn says how happy she is to live at Rancho Cappuccino, surrounded by the wildlife and the livestock, steeping in nature’s own exotic brew of life, death, struggle and ecstasy.

Sounds great, you may say, but the chickens are pooping all over the porch. The geese are pooping all over the lawn. The manure in the sheep pen is two feet deep right now and  the pasture where the cattle are grazing, well, it’s a cow pasture. Talk about your exotic brews.

The cow is a virtuosic defecator. They poop more, larger, wetter, deeper, noisier and more often than anyone else on the farm.

But all God’s children leave their mark.

The chickens leave theirs on the front porch.

My wife’s friends are revolted. Who can blame them?

But my wife is a very special woman.

We’ve tried solutions to the chicken problem. We tried fake snakes. The chickens ignored them, then killed a real snake and left it there, next to the fake snakes on the porch, to express their disdain I guess. This really happened. No kidding.

Then we created a barrier of silk flowers in little buckets. The chickens steer clear. Guests have to step over them.

Of course the chickens still do their business all over the sidewalk and the drive way and the lawn.

I’m acutely conscious that there are very few roommates who would put up with this, and almost all of them are men. If you think I’m being a sexist,  you have an invitation to come help me clean the sheep pen. Then we can talk about my prejudices.

I figure if Carolyn decided to divorce me, I could either move to town or be single for life. I try to think of some other attractive woman who would be willing to join me at the Rancho. I can’t. Even some of the best sports I know can’t hide the little grimaces that say, “How can they live like this? How can she live like this?”

So here’s to Carolyn, with all my gratitude. I’ll make sure I take my boots off every time I come inside. Promise. Unless I forget.

A few weekends ago, I found myself at the equivalent of a livestock tailgate party. I was in the thick of the Schaghticoke Poultry Swap — a shindig that happens every spring. It's quite an event. What started as a small gathering to trade and sell chickens has evolved over the years into a parking lot festival of sales and bartering. Since the swap’s inception, the stock has expanded well beyond chickens. This year, there were ducks, geese, quails, rabbits, lambs, kids and more (I swear I walked past a box of puppies). And while it wasn't on the roster — had someone walked through the fairgrounds parking lot with a horse — I wouldn't have blinked an eye.

I was there with a short list. I needed some new laying hens to replace birds that passed away over the winter, nothing drastic. But I was also there hoping to find a very specific animal. I wanted to drive home with a young goat kid, hopefully a spunky buckling. I had been researching pack goats (goats trained to help carry gear on hiking trips via panniers or saddlebags), and if the stars aligned I planned to take home my own backcountry prodigy that same day.

The circumstances had to be perfect though. I wanted an Alpine, a breed known for its trail-hardiness and loyalty. I also wanted an animal that could be bottle-fed and hand-raised, learning from its earliest stages to follow and depend on me. (A job I thought would be endearing and simple ... not a strict regime of mixing milk replacer at 4:45 a.m. But you pay as you go in this world. And I had plenty of time to learn how much would be involved in my first goat.) Consequences were not on my mind. I was about to buy a goat.  

When I arrived at the goat pen, I melted. I watched the dozen kids and lambs romp in the back of the truck and then leap out into their grass-lined pen. You haven't seen adorable ’til you've seen a pile of two-week-old goats trying to decide who gets to drive the truck home. They butted and leaped, ran circles and bleated up at the sky. They pretty much terrorized the tepid lambs and loved every second of it. I was one of dozens of people hanging around the pen, laughing and smiling, but unlike most gawking at the show, I was shopping.

"Do you have any bucks?" I shouted across the pen to someone with a clipboard, trying to sound like I knew what the hell I was talking about, "I'm looking for a buckling I can raise for draft work?" They didn't point and laugh at me. My confidence grew.

"Just that one!" The man in charge pointed to a small brown pile of hell leaping out of the truck bed, crashing into a random siblings, and then getting up to do it again. Uh oh. Maybe this goat business was a little more than I could handle? After all, my sheep don't mosh for kicks. But it was too late. He noticed a sucker in the crowd, shook his big floppy ears, and looked up at me with his childish brown eyes. This guy was going home. Might as well clear off the front seat of the car.  

I paid the enabler and quickly found out my new adoptee was half Alpine and half Toggenburg. Two breeds known for their mountain savvy. He was mostly brown with white stripes across his face and along his underbelly. I carried him over my shoulder like a toddler. As we made our way back to the car, I heard more than one person say, "Well isn't he cute? Better her than me!" My confidence waned.

I drove back to Cold Antler with new laying hens in the back of the station wagon and a new kid curled up in the front passenger seat. I could not get over how calm and small he was in the car. He slept like a lamb on valium the entire ride. Goats, huh? What could be easier? I named him Finn.

As it turned out, many things are easier. Most things are easier, actually. Since Finn's came to my farm, he's been a delight, but he's also been a nonstop source of trouble and trickiness. There have been the highs of feeding a suckling darling in my lap on the cabin porch during a soft morning rain — and the lows of screaming at him to get out of the lettuce patch when he broke into the garden (several times). Guess what? Goats can learn to climb chain-link fencing. Over the past few weeks, this kid has gnawed on my last nerve, and yet still managed to brighten my worst days. It's hard not to laugh when you watch a young buck jump and twist in the air or headbutt a rooster. The highs are high.

I'm lucky to have a job that lets its employees bring pets to the office. So, while Finn was being bottle-fed we'd show up at the grind together. He'd wait in the car in a big dog crate until lunch and then run around the company lawn, picking play fights with Labradors or doing some landscaping around the building while we ate out on the picnic tables. Welcome to Vermont, where everyday is bring-your-kid-to-work day.

My hope is that Finn's pack training will be the ambassador I need to discover the great outdoors again. Before I had a farm, you couldn't keep me out of hiking trails and National parks. Now, if enough free time from the homestead reveals itself, I'm too whipped to hike. Free time is currently spent in hammocks or playing the banjo on the porch — never on the trail. But that's all going to change, and soon. As summer rolls in, the garden is planted, and all the young animals are maturing, you'll find me out in those Green Mountains from time to time. A girl and her goat, paying as they go.

P.S. If you want to keep track of Finn, stop in anytime at http://coldantlerfarm.blogspot.com

Photo by Tim Bronson

Tim Posey lived in a former barracks bought surplus from the U.S. Army at Fort Bliss, Texas, and moved a few miles into the dusty, unpaved village of Anapra, New Mexico in the late 1950s. Most of Tim’s 10 acres was devoted to his business – the Posey Trailer Park. But at the center of his property, surrounded by the trailers and the sand hills, Tim Posey’s homestead teemed with life. Milk goats bleated under a shed. Chickens scratched in the shade. Miraculously, two dozen kinds of vegetables sprung in abundance from the sand behind the horse stable. Past middle-aged, heavy and stiff with arthritis, Tim spent most of his time on a kitchen chair under one or another of the awnings he had built against his barns. He watched the animals, sharpened his tools and visited with his tenants when they stopped by. I remember him in dark sunglasses. I almost never saw him indoors.

I was 9 when Mr. Posey “hired” me. I lived a quarter-mile away with my family. The livestock and the garden drew me like magnets. Once I was certain he wouldn’t chase me off, I started spending nearly every spare moment there. He asked me if I wanted to learn how to milk the goats. Then he asked me if I was willing to do it every day. He paid me in produce, eggs and goat’s milk. My dad paid me cash for the food. It was my first job, and I loved it.

There are places on the continent more barren than the Chihuahuan desert, but not many. Creosote and mesquite bushes dot the sand hills. Most of the plants have spines or thorns. We called the surrounding landscape hills, but they were more like dunes. If you leave a junked car on the downwind side of a hill there, it will disappear under the sand in a few years or a few months, depending on the weather.

Mr. Posey boarded horses. He raised chickens, guineas, milk goats and honeybees.

I don’t know how long he had been moving manure from the chicken pens and horse corrals into the vegetable garden, but he had created a marvel there. Watermelons grew huge and dark green in the tangles of vines. On the ground between the rows of corn was a kind of moist wonderland of dappled light buzzing with insects.

It’s hard to describe the emotional impact of encountering all that life in the context of our garbage-strewn village in the middle of the desert. One person had taken a small piece of land, raked out the broken glass and old bleach bottles, added manure and created a small, earthly paradise. It captured my heart.

I helped Mr. Posey mix a potent fertilizer from chicken manure and water, a slurry that could be mixed with the irrigation water he pumped into the garden. I gathered the eggs. I milked the goats. I don’t remember many sweeter moments, in my life, than walking from my home to the goat pens in the cool early morning, smelling the creosote bushes, then the goats, then the sugary aroma of cracked corn and the warm, delicious odor of new milk. Sometimes we let the goats out into the open desert where they browsed blue gramma grass, mesquite beans and acacia leaves. I loved watching them shop among the plants for those they found most appetizing. The technical term for the way a goat eats is “browsing,” and it’s a perfectly accurate description. They are like shoppers in a supermarket, and even in the desert they seemed to find plenty of goods. While the goats were out of their pen and the gate left open, the chickens and guinea hens moved in and, scratching and clucking, found a feast of their own. I could never tell exactly what they were eating. They probably found scraps of grain and alfalfa, maybe tiny insects attracted by the animals and the manure.

From the chicken pen to the garden to the watermelon; from the mesquite beans to the goat’s udder to my breakfast cereal, I became an eye-witness to an alchemy that struck me then – and strikes me now – as magical.

I thought of Tim Posey as a sort of magician, a magus whose rituals of feed, fertilizer and irrigation catalyzed mystical transformations. I wanted to learn how to practice that magic.