The Neighbor's Goat
Day 75 — September 3, 2026
Wake-up feel: 7.
The questions were awake before I was. Being a foreigner. Family — far this morning, as every morning. Community. They come in that order some mornings, in another order other mornings. They do not knock.
What does a goat have to do with any of it?
The neighbor is out working today. When she is, she asks me to milk her goat for her. She asks, and I do it. Between neighbors this is nothing. For a foreigner it is not nothing. Fresh goat milk, still warm from the animal. I like it, and my body likes it.
The goat is an old companion in this country. At the year's dark turning the koza still walks from house to house on the plains — a mummer's goat that dies in the play and rises again, and where the goat walks, the old song says, the rye grows. Farther back and farther south, a she-goat nursed a god on her milk. Milk has been holy longer than books. This valley will come to the goat's feast in its own time.
Yesterday a short conversation with someone about being a foreigner. There are two kinds. The one who is foreign in a foreign place — that one has a name for what they are. And the one who is foreign among their own people, inside their own culture, and has no name for it. Thirty-one years in Germany held both at once — foreign by being and foreign by feeling, in the community, and at times in the family. I have lived both. I live both now. Behind them stands the older question: where is home.
Today the root — so counted by those who set the moon against seed and soil, sowing and watching through lifetimes, and by the herding people of these mountains long before them, who kept the same watch without a name for it. The strength of such a day sits low, the old ones say — in the dark of the soil, in what holds and feeds unseen. Milk taken on such a day feeds to the bone. The moon six nights past full, giving back its light, still climbing.
Then back to the questions of the day.
Day 75
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Journey | CC BY-SA 4.0
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