I was wrong.
Rounding the corner of the garage this morning and spying the absolute disaster that was the goat pen, I stopped short. Emily (still sipping her morning tea on the deck) avoided my pointed stare.
"Well," I growled, "it looks like Dad has struck again."
"I'm sorry, Mom!" She shrugged apologetically. "I couldn't stop him..."
Warily we approached the tangled jungle overtaking the ordinarily-tidy fenced pen in the driveway. Huge mounded piles of thorny weeds, scattered by hooves, sodden from the night's rain and intermingled with piles of goat droppings - chucking these over the fence would add an extra twenty minutes to the morning clean-up. Men!
My husband means well, really - after all, he sees me picking weeds across the road for the goats; I have even brought home bags of weeds from other people's houses. The difference is, however, that I bring the goats weeds that they like, while Mike brings them weeds he thinks they should like. I have shown him exactly the things they eat - oak leaves, but not sweetgum, crabgrass (but never yard grass), black-eyed susans, these tall weeds, this brush, none of the purple stuff...yet like the parent determined to coax a child to eat brussel sprouts by repeatedly serving them at every meal, my dear husband hauls vast quantities of unacceptable weeds into the goat pen, leaving them for me to dispose of the next morning, after the goat boys have rejected them and stomped them into a messy pile.Once he even bagged all the grass clippings while mowing and dumped them, mini-haystacks, in front of the shed. After all, he reasoned, goats should eat grass...that time I made him clean up the mess.
Need a shed built? Fencing installed? Goats held down for hoof trimming? My husband has no equal. I guess when it comes to weeds, though, some things just take a mother's touch.
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