THE DAY I SAVED THREE BABY GOATS AND FINALLY UNDERSTOOD MY MOTHER’S LAST WORDS
I never planned to stop at that roadside auction.
I was just driving home from Mom’s old place—clearing out the last box of her sweaters, trying not to cry into the steering wheel—when I saw the sign:
“FARM SALE – TODAY ONLY.”
Something in me hit the brakes.
The place smelled like dust and diesel and old hay. I wasn’t looking to buy anything.
But then I saw them—three tiny goats, huddled in a corner pen. One brown, one white, and one mottled like some half-drawn sketch. Shivering. Way too young to be separated from their mother.
The guy running the pen told me they were “unsold leftovers.” Meant for feed.
That word—leftovers—hit like a slap.
You see, the night before my mother passed, she’d looked at me through her oxygen mask and whispered something I couldn’t make sense of at the time:
“Don’t leave the soft things behind.”
I thought she meant memories. Or maybe her dog.
But standing in front of those three baby goats, barely more than a bundle of bones and trembling fur, I heard her voice like thunder in my head.
So I did something wild.
I scooped them up—literally, all three—and said, “I’ll take them.”
I had no plan. No farm. No idea how to raise goats. Just a backseat full of blankets and a trunk full of grief.
And as they nuzzled into my arms, bleating like they already knew me, I realized what she meant.
“Don’t leave the soft things behind.”
She wasn’t talking about things. She meant moments like this. Lives like these.
I didn’t have a farm. But I had a chance.
So I—
I drove home with three tiny passengers, wrapped in Mom’s old sweaters, their little hooves poking through the knit.
I named them after her favorite flowers: Daisy, Violet, and Clover.
At first, the nights were rough. They cried for milk. I cried too. But every bottle I warmed, every corner of my tiny apartment I goat-proofed, brought me closer to something I didn’t know I was missing.
Peace.
Grief is a strange thing. You think it lives in the past—old photographs, empty chairs, the smell of sweaters in a cardboard box. But sometimes, it shows up in the present, soft and shivering, asking to be held.
I didn’t leave the soft things behind. I brought them home.
And in saving them, I think maybe—just maybe—they saved a part of me too.
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