Our homesteading experience began when we had two hours to kill between the nuptial Mass of two friends and their wedding reception. We headed to Home Depot, and loaded the car up with four hundred feet of fencing and T-posts. The next day this became our first one hundred foot by one hundred foot goat pen, and a few weeks later we brought home several goats inside my Honda Element. About a month after that, my father-in-law transformed an old firewood shed into a chicken coop. Meanwhile, I lay in bed recovering from an infection that didn’t respond to normal antibiotics. It was my first lesson in my own inadequacies as a homesteader. When I recovered, we moved the chicks from our basement to what is more rightly called a chicken mansion. (This was pre-plague, when lumber was cheap. Now we mill our own wood.)

Our children know quite a bit about the miracle of life, actually. They’ve witnessed goat labor, and it looks exactly as you might expect. They were in the pasture with my wife and me as one mama goat gave birth to three kids, one of which came out with the sac fully intact, spraying amniotic fluid and breaking only upon hitting the ground. They know the entity growing in a womb is a baby: a baby goat when in a goat womb, a baby human when in a human womb. They both kissed their mother’s belly once it started showing that their baby brother was inside. They also know that not all newborns make it. One of our lambs was born with the sheep equivalent of cleft palate, making him unable to nurse at his mother’s teat. We hadn’t built our barn yet, so we brought him into the house to bottle-feed. Shortly before dinnertime, he died on the dining room floor. We didn’t talk too much about it, but also didn’t downplay it. We hoped the experience would convey something of the goodness and the fragility of life. The children knew that we had done what we could to help that lamb, but also that there are limits to what any of us can do. Many people fear and deny death (and, in a different way, birth), but for now our kids seem unfazed by both. They have seen more birth and death than I did in my first few decades.