Next thing, they’ll be studying for their learner’s permits

Today they turn one.

It’s nothing like the bittersweet when you watch your friend’s children, or your own children, grow beyond your hold. They’re just goats, after all.

Even still.

How could they have gone from this to this in just 12 months? They did it so incrementally that we barely registered the changes, the way H came to be taller than I am, the way the grass goes from winter straw to “If you don’t mow it now the yard will become an unrecoverable jungle!”

What else has happened in those 12 months that I didn’t notice, and that’s now irretrievably lost?

Oh, best to avoid that particular rabbit hole today, when I’m thinking about Mother’s Day and having just listened to Roz Chast’s moving interview on Fresh Air about the loss of her parents.

Nope. Won’t do that. Won’t think that.

Instead I’ll think about how gorgeous those little goat girls have become; how Doris loves to have her head scratched just behind those horns; how Darcy hangs back, like a shy girl at the dance, but is all in for a cuddle once you crouch down in the straw with her.

I went out in the May sunshine and told them the story of their birth. They didn’t give a darn about that, but the treats in my hand held their full attention. I sang “Happy Birthday.” They gave me that goat look, the one that says, “We love our humans, but we’ll never really understand them.”