On their honeymoon, driving south from Cincinnati through Kentucky to the Smoky Mountains, my parents stopped to watch a pair of Nubian goats gamboling in a pasture along the highway. Ten days later, on the way home, they stopped again and bought a young doe. Back on their hilltop farm above the Ohio River, they realized that the goat was not happy. It must be lonely, they decided, and the solution was to go and get another, a young buck. So it was that my mother started her herd and her family at the same time. Within a couple of years, she had a daughter and the first of five sons. In 1939 her Nubian doe, named Midnight, set the world record for milk and butterfat production. When I was growing up I heard about this triumph often enough to know how proud she was of the achievement and to realize how much it shaped her life. There must have been times when she had to choose whether to comfort |