Today it is snowing. Like crazy. We woke to snow swirling outside the window, and Swee and I snuggled on the couch for a while, hoping in vain that the wind would die down a bit before I started chores. Sadly, it did not, and when I ventured out to see the chickens around 8am, the drifts were over my knees and the powder sifted into my boots. It’s still snowing and blowing six hours later, and may continue for the next twenty-four hours. So today we are hunkering down, taking care of indoor projects while Mama works, and hoping the power stays on.

But yesterday? Yesterday we played with baby goats.

Basil, Pepper, Jumping Jack and Sleepy Sally were born earlier this week, and our sweet friend and fellow homeschooling mama Melissa graciously allowed us to come for a quick visit in advance of the storm. Her five human kids gave us the grand homestead tour, each of them excited to tell us all about their critters. My girls loved the bunnies and the chickens (…even though we have sixteen of our own. go figure), but the standout winners for me were the brand new babies. They were so incredibly soft, not coarse like goats I’ve met in petting zoos, and had the heft of a human newborn – all except Mr. Jack who was a whopping ten pounds. Ooof! They have another expectant mama who will likely kid today in the snowstorm, and I’ve been refreshing Instagram to see if there’s a baby announcement yet.

As we talk about expanding our own homestead, we frequently toss out phrases like, “what about pigs?” or “we could put goats down under the pine trees,” though truly we have no idea what we’re doing. I like giving my girls all of these experiences, seeing farms and meeting animals, but they’re also exploratory missions for my own education. Could we manage goats? I don’t know. I think so, but there’s so much necessary infrastructure we don’t have yet, and I don’t have an end goal in mind other than brush clearing and the fact that I think they’re fun. I’m not sure that’s enough to warrant committing to a herd of animals.

Still, it’s encouraging to see how well Melissa and her family are managing, especially knowing that they didn’t have livestock at all before moving to town two years ago. And those babies sure are cute.

I had intended to share this experience before our road trip, but in the hustle of packing, and booking hotel rooms, and filing taxes (gah!), it just didn’t happen. But oh, what a fun time we had!

My littles and I spent Valentine’s morning on a working dairy farm. We pet the big girls as they ate lunch, each of us getting snuffled and slimed in turn. The girls successfully hand milked a very patient cow whose name I have since forgotten, and visited with a newborn calf, umbilical cord still dangling. We shook a little cup of heavy cream down into butter, and spread it on thick slices of brown bread before gobbling it up.

It was such a fun experience for all three of us, and marked our first foray into anything organized specifically for homeschoolers. We signed up for a field trip organized by Homeschoolers of Maine, and met up with other families for a guided tour of the barns. It was nice to let someone else do the planning, and just show up when and where we were supposed to. My big girl had some good questions, and I was pleased that she wasn’t shy about asking them in front of the group. It did make her sad that the calves are separated from their mamas so soon – she knows a baby needs its mama – but even that led to some good conversation on the way home.

Homeschooling families! How did you go about finding a co-op or group to join? What do you see as the benefits? Drawbacks?

Truly, the last month has been a bit of a blur, and I’ve been feeling fairly lost.

We took a road trip at the end of February. I’ve been feeling the need for my girls to connect with my grandparents, and with a dear sorority sister getting married in Philadelphia, we made it a family adventure.

My children explored the same house and yard where I spent so many of my early years, playing with the same toys and bells my grandparents let all of us play with. Their home even smells the same. We rolled down the one-way street of brick row-houses where I grew up, cruised through my elementary school’s parking lot (“You didn’t live far from school at all, Mama!”), and went out to the church where their Daddy and I were married twenty-nine years after my own parents, in the same chapel. We visited my maternal grandmother, gone now thirteen years on Groundhog Day, and planted some mini daffodils at her headstone. We saw the park where we watched fireworks each July, the vet where we took our dog Sadie, the Super Fresh that is now a Planet Fitness. I drove my own little family along all the roads where my dad taught me to drive, and gave them the five dollar tour of my childhood.

I grew up in the heart of suburban Philadelphia, attending a mega high school surrounded by subdivisions. Heading into this trip, I was mostly prepared for the busyness of the region, the shopping centers and manicured lawns, the way the houses and people are all on top of each other, and only curtains and blinds keep you from seeing into your neighbor’s bathroom. But actually being there? The sensory input was really overwhelming: all the lights and signs and cars, and it surprised me to see the way the sky was orangey-brown at night with light pollution, rather than inky and dotted with stars.

I wasn’t prepared for the awful sense of loss. I didn’t expect to feel so bereft at the sight of the familiar, or so very, very sad at how lonely the cemetery looked in the rain with no one left on that side of the family to visit. We put forth an extraordinary amount of effort and coordination to make this trip, and I didn’t anticipate that I would be so mournful about how long it had been, and how long it might be again. I wasn’t aware how much I miss my family and my roots – how much I miss having roots. And I didn’t expect to feel so certain and so sad about the fact that we will not move back. Nor that I would be so tearful now trying to find the words for all of those feelings. I didn’t know I needed to mourn a place and time, even as I consciously and gladly work to make a new place my own.

So hi. I’m still here.