Secret Observations on the Goat-Girl

Over the weekend we went apple-picking, because I like apples, and because we needed to get out of the house before the weather takes a turn for the worse for good. We found a place near my parents' which was pretty much exactly what I hoped it would be, except for that I had no idea how many gazillions of apples they must grow in commercial orchards in order to sort through all the slightly blemished and mildly deformed apples to get to the perfectly shaped and shiny fruit that they then wax and send to the supermarket.

Personally, I like my lumpy and spotted apples better, because I picked them myself and ate them right off the trees, but we'll get to that tomorrow. Today, let's talk about my daughter, the Goat Whisperer.

I did not expect to see so many animals at the orchard, but there was a big barn there with lots of goats, geese, rabbits, and llamas, and you can walk right up to the animals to pet and feed them. It was pretty cool. My particular poison is wild animals, lions and tigers and bears and stuff, but you know what? Goats are pretty darned cool.

And it's not like I could have stopped her, anyway. Once Shae sees something she wants to do, she just goes ahead and does it. No idea where that kid gets it from.

Sometimes I feel bad for caged animals, because you can't tell whether they actually want to be touched by all these kids with their grubby little mitts and their pointing and their screaming and their not-exactly-gentle petting, but I think these goats were okay with it. For one thing, they live in a pen with geese, and hoo boy, those honkers are noisy and bossy! But I really think the goats like the attention from the people, because I swear to God, they posed for pictures.

I double-dog-dare you to tell me that goat was not looking directly into the camera. He totally was. It was weird. I can't get my kid to look at the camera, but I can get a glamour shot out of a goat. The mind, she boggles.

Anyway, our apple-picking adventure was an unqualified success, and that's before we even got to the pumpkin patch or rode on the Magic Topless School Bus to pick our apples, which was so much fun it almost made Shae's head explode. Tune in tomorrow!

(Oh yeah, not that you asked but in case you were wondering, I stole the title for this post from a profoundly odd and creepy Joyce Carol Oates short story that I read in my "Gothic Fiction" class back in college. It's kind of Halloween-adjacent, right? Man, we read some seriously disturbed stuff in that class. At the end of it I had to do my own writing, and I wrote a story about a woman who became obsessed with some dude at a bar, and she ends up murdering him in the woods while singing a Sarah MacLachlan song. None of this has anything to do with this entry. Perhaps you should disregard this entire paragraph, although if you enjoy Gothic short fiction, I do recommend "Secret Observations on the Goat-Girl," and also "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.)