Event Date: March 12, 1981

Event Date: March 12, 1981 Drafted: 2025-11-23

The day the St. Peter and Paul kindergarteners came to our farm was one of those moments when the world tilted slightly, and I suddenly realized that my ordinary life was extraordinary to someone else.

I was younger than the visiting kids — a little farm shadow darting between the barn, the machinery, and the animal pens. From the corner of the goat yard or from behind the old feed grinder, I would watch them invade my world with wide eyes and mittened hands, touching everything that was simply “home” to me.

There was a strange feeling in that — both pride and displacement. This is my yard. My goats. My machinery. My mud. But suddenly it was a field trip, an attraction. Kids were playing where I played. Climbing on the same rusted gears I climbed. Laughing around the goats I fed every morning, acting like they had discovered something wild and novel.

Mom loved it. She was radiant in those moments — showing them how to milk a goat, how warm a fresh egg is straight from the nesting box, how to shake a jar of cream until it turned into butter. She held a goose egg in one hand, a chicken egg in the other, explaining the differences like a natural educator, her voice gentle and sure. They adored her.

I felt shy, a little proud, and a little protective. I wanted to say, be good to the goats — they’re our friends, but I mostly watched.

This was life on a hobby farm in rural Wisconsin: rugged, muddy, real, and apparently exotic enough to be printed in the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Somewhere in that old newspaper photo is my family’s barn, maybe even a glimpse of the goat that once chased me around the yard.

It was the first time I realized that the place I lived wasn’t ordinary at all. It was a whole world — and people wanted to see it.