Afternoon

We finish cleaning the animals’ stalls and then lead the lady goat to a small field with tall grass. The other goats and the sheep wander the sprawling forest out back but she is too athletic, used to climb the low fences separating Tamer and Şadan’s forest from the neighbors and get them into trouble. So they have us tether her to a stake that we drive into a different spot in the grassy field each day, hoping that if we position her with a fresh view and unchomped grass and refresh her water bucket then she won’t bawl in loneliness all day. But she always bawls and the endless sound of it hurts Brett. We looked it up and the internet says goats aren’t supposed to be tethered and left alone all day. We are only here for two weeks, though, and can’t do anything about it like reinforce their fence with electrical wire, which the internet says is okay for goats.

Lady goat competes with the calves for hay

After we tie up the lady goat and the calves, who don’t mind being tethered so much except they would rather be destroying the fruit trees, it is lunch and siesta time, not necessarily in that order. Ayşe cooks vegetable and goat dishes in clay pots in an indoor-outdoor kitchen thick with flies. She sometimes rolls dough on a floured wooden platform into impossibly thin circles that she uses for börek pastries or gözleme crepes filled with cheese and spinach. I have tried to ask Ayşe for instructions when Brett or I can’t roll dough thinly enough or squeeze milk from udders. She encourages Brett’s apprenticeship and is endlessly amused by my willingness to do women’s work like rolling dough or wrapping rice in grape leaves, but she is too expert to know what she is doing and teach it. You haven’t gotten used to it yet, try again, is usually her answer. Ayşe learned by watching: when she was a little girl, she told me with Şadan serving as a Turkish-to-Turkish interpreter, she peeked in on her mother making börek and her mother caught her and chased her off. Her mother said that once Ayşe learned to make börek she would be marriageable and her mother wasn’t ready to part with her.

Şadan and Tamer’s son Can and daughter Oya live in İzmir an hour away and sometimes stay at the farm and feed the ducks. Can designs urban furniture, hand tools and sesame pretzel trucks and Oya is to her mother’s chagrin an international trade specialist: formerly frozen foods and now chemical cleaning products. Efe the goat, our favorite, will be served at Can’s wedding, now it seems delayed until next year.

Oya and Şadan henna Brett's hands

We nap and sometimes while we do Şadan gives a voice lesson to a male pop singer who drives from İzmir in a white BMW with a modeling agency advertisement stenciled on the side in gold letters. She was a singer and then university vocal teacher; eight years ago she retired and they bought the farm, at the time a pine forest full of scorpions. Tamer still works as a pediatrician, commuting an hour to İzmir most days, because the farm is still nowhere near self-sufficient or profitable.

Tamer and I work on the canal

Ram, with his cowed mate

After the worst of the day’s heat, we emerge from the guest room under the main house’s balcony and Şadan in her harem pants and hippy tunic assigns us work grooming her Fukuoka organic gardens or the grape vines or in the forest. Our favorite place to work is the forest, where there is shade and breeze and the goats keep us company. The ram is curious about us too but Şadan warned us not to pet his head because once you get friendly with him he will ram you. Ram’s favorite is Efe the goat. He stays close to Efe’s side all day and tries to mount him whenever given an opportunity. Once we watched as ram charged and rammed Efe, first in the side and then skull to skull with loud thwacks. Luckily Efe also has thick protruding skull bones for such encounters. Efe likes his skull bones and the back of his ears scratched and tilts his head in anticipation when Brett approaches him.

Efe

Our crowning achievement in the forest has been a canal that carries waste water from the animal stalls out back to a muck pit and then downhill into the trees through pipes that we unblocked. Manure will sit and compost in the muck pit and then be collected to fertilize the Fukuoka gardens. Fresh manure should not be used as fertilizer—one of the many basic facts we have learned.

Goats and ram lounge beside our canal