FINALLY…
After 16 years of living in our house, this past Sunday, we’ve officially become part of the neighborhood… and how exciting a milestone is that? When I say the neighborhood, of course, I don’t mean a neighborhood where the houses sit right next to each other. Our closest neighbors are about ½ mile away. I mean the ten or so square mile area where everyone seems to know each other. It’s funny how people who live in a rural community still call it a neighborhood. I don’t know how else you’d describe it, though, so I guess I don’t blame them.
So how, you ask, did we officially become part of our neighborhood?
Well the answer is simple of course… you officially become part of the neighborhood when you have a farm animal… in our case, goats… discovered wandering far from your home, and through a phone-chain, the neighbors are able to figure out who the farm animal… in our case, goats… belongs to. Yes, you heard it hear first… Naughty and Heath the now world-famous Brown Road Goats in Coats, who had not once, in five months of living with us, ever left the property, roamed away and were discovered about three miles away by a nice lady who was able to round them up, lock them in her fenced pasture, and wait until their delinquent owners came to retrieve them. Being concerned country folk, she asked her husband to start making phone calls and after several links in the phone chain it was determined that they belonged to us.
This particular Sunday was one of those lazy days when not a lot was accomplished around our house. About 5:00 p.m. after having already taken one nap during the day, I went upstairs to lie down in our room. My son was in our bed watching a movie and I figured I’d just relax there with him. Just as I was falling asleep for nap #2, my wife comes running upstairs and says “we have to go get the goats, a couple of neighbors just stopped by and they are over at a farm on the corner of Buckhorn and Cotherman Lake roads.” “What?” I replied, “how in the hell can they be all the way over there?”
We got in our van, drove over to this farm and saw Naughty and Heath grazing in one of their fields. We parked along the side of the road, got out and the moment they recognized us, they started bleating like crazy and running towards us. Yes, apparently goats are quite smart and can recognize their owners. I suspect they were saying something like “oh, thank god you guys found us, we got lost and we couldn’t find our way back home and we thought we were going the right direction but we just kept getting more lost and then there were cars flying by us and then this lady came out of her house and locked us in this fenced area and we thought we were going to have to move again.” A frightening moment in the life of a goat for sure! We threw them in the back of the van, drove up to the beautiful old farm house on the property, knocked on the door and a very nice, sixty-ish woman answered. We thanked her for rescuing our goats, chatted for a few minutes, then left and drove back home.
That’s the nice thing about living where we do… people are friendly and look out for each other. If we had been living in say, Chicago and our goats had roamed away from our apartment building, perhaps gotten on a subway, or started walking down Lake Shore Drive… boy, I hesitate to think what might have happened to them! Surely we would never have seen or heard from them again… and that would have been a sad day. But no, we live in a place where farm animals can roam away and neighborly folks will figure out who they belong to and how to get them back home. We have not been able to determine how exactly they were able to walk that far away. Our initial theory is that they got through a small opening in the fencing that lines the back side of our property, and not being able to figure out how to get back in they continued to roam in the opposite direction. One of our neighbors suspects maybe they followed a guy that was jogging in the area, and once they got far enough away they could no longer find their way back. Since our goats don’t speak, I guess we’ll never know.
In any case, we are happy our goats were found and safely retrieved and all is well again in the neighborhood. The shiny new I.D. tags for their collars are on the way!
The Brown Road Chronicles 
So, I guess you guys are no longer the new kids on the block, huh? I’m glad they were found and are safely home. That was not the case recently in our area for a roaming pet/farm pig that was eluding capture as he tore up gardens until he was finally shot and baconated. You can always count on someone to have loaded rifle out here in ruralandia.
YIKES! Poor piggie… but yes of course, lots of weaponry around us also.
If a neighbor was to refer to your place, would they call it the “Goat Place” or would they use your last name, or would they have some other descriptor? We used to live in a small town, and every house was referred to by the last name of the people who lived there just before the current residents. If our name had been Smith, and the previous owners were Jones, then when we moved into the Jones house, we were known to live in ‘The Old Jones House’. The house we had previously lived in was called ‘The Old Smith House’…
That’s a good question, the folks that know us would probably by now use our last name, but as it is the only house on our road, I suspect there are still many that would call it “the Brown Road house” or some variance of that or with some reference to Ralph Brown who the road is named after:
https://brownroadchronicles.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/so-why-is-brown-road-called-brown-road/
Goats and pigs were animals we never had on the farm. Turkeys, ducks, chooks, sheep, cattle, dogs, cats, horses: no goats or pigs.
I am glad your goats were found. Name tags – wow – that might be a bit modern for the rural world, might it not? 🙂
I’m glad Naughty and Heath are back home. Nametags are a good idea!
We’ve lived here for 2 1/2 years, and still don’t know many of our neighbours, except for some of the parents of Hope’s schoolmates.
Wendy
Wendy, it’s a different world these days meeting neighbors. We don’t live in the kind of front porch society that we did 50 years ago, so it seems harder to get to know people that live near you. We have connected with a couple of our neighbors, but as you said, most of our friends are people that we have met through the schools.
No surgically implanted ID chips for the goats?
I’ll bet complete strangers wave at you when they pass you driving on the country roads where you live. That’s a phenomenon that has always facsinated me about the country. Try that in my hood and you might get followed home and shot!
Yeah, definitely lots of waving going on around us!
That was very cute! Are you sure your goats don’t talk?
Must admit- when I step into the piece of land that houses our farm animals- they all come storming!! I sometimes wander if I should run in the opposite direction. It can be quite overwhelming- 3 sheep, 2 goats,a pig and 12 geesegalloping in your direction. I don’t think it has anything to do with knowing we are the owners, but that we potentially have awesome treats like fruit!!
You really must post a pic with the jerseys!
Xx
I think they do eventually start to recognize you and would know you if you were in a different environment that at home. But yes, treat are definitely what they are after. What do you do with all of them when you go away, do you have someone that watches and feeds them? That’s our biggest concern about getting horses, what to do with them when we go on a vacation.
Sounds like the goats were tired of waiting for you to carry some baked goods around to meet your neighbors! You got it done without messing up the kitchen.
You made a great lifestyle choice with your community. I live the burbs, a bedroom community 45 minutes north of Toronto, Canada. The only times of the day I even lay eyes on a neighbour is at either end of the commuting cycle. I see them esconced in their cars backing out of their garages in the am and rolling back in in the pm. I don’t know anyone’s name. I might be able to which kid (not goats) belongs to which house. We never talk or visit … an occasional head nod hello. Oh, and I’ve been living her for 9 years. Sad state of (suburban) affairs, eh?
I only have a dog, and while dogs are undoubtedly in existence on farms, I don’t think they truly qualify as farm animals. Yes, they’re more than happy to eat any horse shit they can find, but in my yard there is only dog shit. My father owns emus and goats though. I think he could be happy in your neighborhood. Sometimes I wish I had the room for a cow.
Hilarious post!
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