Humor

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Kitchen Field Trials

Author Unknown

  A few winter’s past my English Shepherds Bunkie and Doodle had to babysit for Pdcute (pretty darned cute) a baby goat kid born on my farm in the middle of December, and pretty near death as the thermometer dipped below freezing on that cold arctic day.

   Because the kid’s mom found it impossible to lick her dry in these deathly icy elements, I brought the little kid into the house and revived “Pd” with a hair drying and warm bathes. Once she was warm and alert, I couldn’t bear to return her to that polar goat shed, so I decided to keep her in the house with me and the dogs. Pd’s Mom wasn’t too enthusiastic about maternity at this point either, and didn’t seem to mind the disappearance of her kid.

   PD was quickly litter box trained, and once she realized there were other creatures about… the Bunk and the Doodle… oddly enough she felt right at home. To the dog’s surprised, they had immediately become her adoptive parents. Pd sidled up to them, and from her point of view, it was love at first sight.

    

   How she loved those two dogs. And, from that time forward they soon realized there was no avoiding her. Each time the dogs went out, PD was right with them. When they would lie down, Pd would curl up and find a means to snuggle while gazing loving up into their eyes. It was a match.

   Although badly outnumbered, and even while in the house, Pd was overjoyed to be herded by those farm shepherds playing up and down the hallway and sometime into the bedroom and across the bed. What a fun romp the three of them would enjoy daily.

   In the evening while I was flopped on the couch watching television, the trio would nestle in on the couch with me, and Pd would get a good grooming from her foster mothers…including a good ear washing.

   Then again in late December, and the weather still quite severe, two more little ones were revived with my trusty hair dryer and curative bathes. Bleat and Blatt join the house-herd on a below zero wintry morn. Bunk and Doodle were even more delighted with the challenge of mothering as their nursery grew.

   When I had to leave for work, the menagerie was left to their pursuits and endeavors in the front yard. And, what a circus that would become. The neighbors would often comment that it was a site to behold watching the “kids” and the dogs playing in the front yard.

   Of course the dog game called “nip your heels” would be immediately returned by a goat game called “raise up on my hind legs and butt you in the head”.

   It took the dogs a long time to figure out the rules of the goat game, and they never really became very proficient with this type of folly. From the goats point of view, nip your heels was also fun because “moms” were never very sincere in their effort to retaliate in the goat scheme of things, although as the games progressed, the parents became more adept at dodging the head butts.

   Some early evenings I would come home from work and stand in front of the living room window just laughing myself silly over the antics comprising these canine/ ovine Olympics. Goat kids can be so silly and frustrate even the most athletic of parents. The score usually tied, although it appeared the parents had to exhaust a whole lot more effort to compete.

   But as the chill weather warmed and the vernal season beckoned, the “field trials” in my kitchen became more animated each evening. It was becoming sadly apparent that the old homestead could not long endure the torture, or the stress of the “animal house” activities. What a shame. What a pity.

   The only saving grace was that I am a confirmed bachelor and abide alone. It is safe to surmise that no sane…or perhaps not even an insane… woman would ever endure little goats nicking the paint off the wall while being chased by two masterful herding dogs literally throughout the house—from the kitchen sink, down and under the dining room table, cross to and top the settee, along the hallway to the bedroom, over the bed and past the bookcase, and then to the study and over the desk, topple the chair…and dash away, dash away, dash away all.

   Bleat and Blatt have joined a petting zoo in the Western part of the state and now Pdcute resides in the goat barn during the day. Each evening she comes out through the garage to join Bunk and Doodle for a romp on the neighbor’s lawn.

   Yes, the house is a little worse for the wear, but to this very day ghostly laughter, along with phantom yips, howls and bleats still echo down the hallway and resonate into the empty yard.

   The Bunk, the Doodle, Pdcute, Bleat and Blatt shall never really parish, but will forever live in lasting memory of joys past, reveries sublime, pure innocence, trust and goodness that somehow escape our everyday frail retentions, but will forever survive  in the  ethereal theatre of gossamer  blessings.