...Like a Hair in a Biscuit

By Carol Williams

She was a bona fide city girl and a seasoned public school teacher, until she made the move to the country. Now her days consist of outsmarting egg-laying chickens, battling Mother Nature, shooting at varmints, and milking uncooperative goats. Like a Hair in a Biscuit chronicles the birth, quite by accident, of Piggy's Gentle Goat's Milk Products. The country relatives were taking bets on whether or not she'd stick it out. She's hanging in there, though, just like a hair in a biscuit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781643002187

Book preview

Foreword

I made the city to country transition and had been jotting down some of the crazy things that had happened thus far. On one occasion, I had put some eggs in the incubator and was showing them to my college-age son. I explained to him what types of chickens all the different colored eggs would hopefully hatch out to be.

How do you know all this? he wondered. I explained that it was just all trial and error, observation, and an awful lot of looking stuff up.

You should write all this down, he suggested.

When I told him I didn’t need to because I just knew it now, he paused and said, You need to write all this stuff down—for us. I told him I had a lot of funny stories so far, but that I didn’t think it was enough for a full-fledged book.

Put them together with all the stuff you’ve learned then, he said. Your pound cake recipe, how you make dog food, the things you’ve learned about growing vegetables, how you learned how to milk goats and make soap with it, and how you started a business. Stuff like that. That way, he said, we would have something special to keep forever.

So this is for you, Steven and Colleen.

Sunset on the farm.

Introduction

My husband, Steve, and I met in Miami, where I was born and raised. He was working as an aircraft mechanic at the time, accumulating flying hours in his quest to become a pilot. I was teaching in the public school system. I moved into the apartment across from him, and the first time I was washing my flashy little sports car in the parking lot, I immediately caught his eye. For my part, I was intrigued by a guy who really seemed, well, manly! He could fix anything and was very self-sufficient—a true country boy. I had had enough of city guys who couldn’t use a power tool, change a tire, or get themselves out of a sticky situation without using a cell phone to call for help.

We went out on a date, and the rest was history. After we married, we moved around the country as he climbed the ranks in the airline industry. Eventually we settled in Naples, Florida, where we raised our two children over a twenty-year period.

We bought farmland in 2005 just outside my husband’s hometown in Southwest Georgia. We began making regular visits there on school holidays, and my husband often spent his days off there, adding fences, barns, etc. We knew someday we’d like to retire to our little place in the country, and after our kids graduated from high school, we made the move.

Both kids ended up attending Florida State University, which put them only an hour or so away from us, enabling them to make regular weekend visits, usually with a carload of city friends who wanted to see what the country is like.

The transition from city to country hasn’t always been easy for me, but I’m usually up for a challenge, which is good because there have been plenty. I love my new country home, though, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m just hanging in there, like a hair in a biscuit.

Chapter 1

Chiggers and Cows and Potty People, Oh My!

Nope, She’ll Be Outta Here in Six Months

There’s no doubt about it. I’m a Miami girl, born and raised with my toes in the sand and baby oil liberally applied! I spent twenty-five years there, until I met the man who would take me away from it all—a small-town, Georgia guy. (How I want to say peach, but I guess that doesn’t work with men! What do you call a guy from Georgia anyway?)

We’ve lived all over, and about ten or so years ago, we bought some farmland just outside my husband’s hometown in Southwest Georgia, complete with a few cows, a broken-down shed, and a single-wide mobile home. We’ve doggedly added improvements over the years, and then we made the move there permanently.

The relatives were taking bets on whether I could make it in a small-town, rural setting. Well, this is my mantra: No matter how foreign or challenging the lifestyle is, I’m determined to make a go of it. I had spent a great deal of time there, but in a couple of months, it would be my home (imagine that last word said in a booming voice, with an echo). I’ve already figured out a few things.

There Are Lots of Different Kinds of Critters in the Country

It’s not that we didn’t have chiggers in Miami. I’m sure we did. I just never met one. You know, up close and personal, like all over my skin and in my underwear and…. Well, you get the image. Imagine a steamy day in Southwest Georgia. I was riding in the truck after some intense work ripping out soaked insulation from our single-wide mobile home, after the bathroom faucet exploded from the summer heat and water shot onto the ceiling and dripped down the walls for what apparently was several days. The insurance company declared that trailer a total loss. We disagreed. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, the itching started on my back and spread basically everywhere. I was baffled—how could a mosquito have gotten in there and done that kind of damage? Fleas? Ants? The Georgia relatives took one look and declared, Them look like chigger bites. They recommended covering the bites with clear nail polish. Seriously. All of them.

Hubby had them too. Now that was a memorable night. We stripped naked and painted each other with nail polish. Both of us had the same horrified face that you have right now.

Now, we weren’t living in the country full-time yet. So after returning to the city, I just had to hear what a real doctor had to say. As I sat in the examining room wondering how to explain the seventy-five shiny clear spots on my body, I heard the nurse in the hall tell the doctor in a loud whisper, She said she has these bites on her, something about tiggers! Luckily the doctor grew up in a rural setting and not only knew what they were but also pronounced the nail polish treatment a good call. Smothers them, you know.

I was angry at the chiggers, and I looked them up online to see if there was any kind of torture I could inflict on them, besides the smothering. Heat? Ice? Apparently they are resistant to everything, including being seen. Has anyone ever actually seen a chigger? I don’t think so. And those festering bites took about a month to completely go away. Disgusting.

Oh, and here’s a fun fact: I learned that chiggers often reside in that drippy green moss that you always see in those photos of idyllic southern landscapes. Now I have a completely different perspective about that stuff. When I pass by a majestic, sprawling old tree with the hanging moss, I shudder and say in a hushed tone, Chiggers!

Lots of Different Kinds of Critters

Our assortment of animals is slowly increasing. We have horses, goats, chickens, cows, and one angry donkey, all of which require food, in addition to hay or grass, which requires a place to store the food. A small feed barn fit the bill, so we ordered one from the nearest big box store. Did you know that those people then contract out the job? And in our case, a really nice Amish couple made the shed and delivered it and set it up. And they drove a big truck to do it and used power tools for the setup. Both activities I thought were not allowed among Amish people, but I digress.

The feed barn was the perfect home for all the bags of feed, so perfect, in fact, that all the rodents in a twenty-mile radius apparently got the email about it, because they began visiting pretty much nonstop. Rat poison seemed like a good solution—to city folk anyway. It would have to be a pretty stupid rodent to eat poison when it’s surrounded by one hundred pounds of perfectly good feed! Then the spilled seeds mixed with the poison, and when it was swept out the door, the chickens got into it. Now that was not a pretty sight.

Back to the drawing board, what do you use to get rid of mice? I watched enough cartoons to know that one. We installed a mini swinging door on the feed barn and got some cats.

A side note: Since at that time we weren’t on-site full-time yet, we hired someone to look after the place. We gave him the nickname Mr. Haney after the character from the old Green Acres TV series who does a little of everything. After only a short time, Mr. Haney called and said we needed to order more cat food. Those cats must be pretty fat to have gone through forty pounds of food already! Can they even fit through the kitty door? Maybe they have worms? Hmmm.

Now, my husband is the boy taken out of the country; but well, anyway, he figured out that something was coming in and eating the food, so he decided on one of our visits we should set up a live trap.

The next morning, the trap held a very angry (and very fat) raccoon and the next day and the day after that. About twenty raccoons later, the kitties were able to stand their ground and take their food dish back, for the most part. Now and then, a coon still comes in; and if there’s not food in the dish, it goes into a frenzy, pulling things down from shelves and tossing things about. I’m told that they’re just like bears, with a temper. I always thought they were kind of cute, but the ones on TV don’t in any way resemble the snarling, snapping thing you find in a live trap. That’s for sure.

Yet another prisoner.

Raccoon, a Delicacy in the South

My husband swears this story is true. He was, by all accounts, somewhat mischievous as a boy and on one particular occasion decided to engage in a school prank that utilized a raccoon.

He was in the habit of trapping coons and selling them for pocket money. I didn’t want to know all the details about the trapping, but suffice it to say that the critters didn’t make it out alive. It’s a far cry from the live traps we use now, and it’s my insistence that we transport the raccoons—gently—to the creek a few miles away. Oh, if he could only see into his bleak married future back then!

He and some of his friends took a raccoon and ran it up the school’s flagpole, which wasn’t the part of the story that could be called the punch line. He said a ruckus ensued between the janitors, to see who could take possession of the prize, because they intended to take it home and eat it.

What’s for dinner?

The Neighbors That Went Away

Well, technically I guess they were dragged away. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

At the far end of our property, we had a front row seat for viewing the daily activities of our neighbors. There were three trailers on their five acres, rented out to various individuals. We never really got to know any of them, although we amused ourselves by using clues to figure them out. For example, we knew when one family was moving, because they hauled out all of their furniture one night and set it on fire in the yard, to avoid having to take it to the dump or do anything else with it. Classy.

We could also figure out a lot of their likes and dislikes by examining their trash. You can find out a lot about a person by what they throw away. We didn’t really have to do any digging (that’s a joke; you’ll see in a minute) to find out about them either. That’s because they scooped out a big pit right next to our fence and that’s where they put their garbage every day.

I knew there was a big family living in the trailer closest to our property, because there were lots of kids and a very ticked-off mom who came home every evening and proceeded to bark commands to the young ’uns before she had even gotten out of the car completely (she could open her mouth really wide to yell and not drop that cigarette either).

We had a slight run-in with that family once, when some of those adorable kids threw beer bottles on our side of the fence and, as they were watching, we threw them back. I was sure we were secretly being filmed for a reality show that day.

We also figured out when their plumbing wasn’t working, because of all the holes they dug in their yard, filled with…. Okay, I know I’m just a city princess, but really? Is there anyone that thinks that’s okay? The mysterious moving toilet out in the middle of the yard was a dead giveaway. We learned later that in addition to their plumbing going out, their heat was on the fritz too and that they used the oven to warm the trailer.

The row of pines we planted to block the view just wasn’t doing the job, and we were about at the end of our rope when lo and behold, the property came up for sale. We’ll take it! we nearly shouted. Problem solved. Well, almost.

The potty people didn’t want to leave, because I guess they had nowhere to go. Well, they did have somewhere to go, but now that yard belonged to me. I never knew how much of a fan I was of indoor plumbing.

After a couple of ugly scenes and some intervention from the sheriff, the tenants got out of Dodge. Now came the real work and a small surprise.

About two weeks later, my husband rented some dumpsters and began the cleanup process. When he opened the door to one of the trailers, he heard a yowling and discovered that the potty people had left a newborn kitten locked in the trailer, no food or water in sight. How it had survived we’ll never know.

The tiny wisp of a boy kitten was black and white, with a strip of black that wrapped around his chin, effectively giving him a handsome beard. When he met our dogs, he sauntered around, unafraid, and in no uncertain terms told off the Doberman. What to call him? A guy with a beard, talking trash with swag—why Fidel, of course. Fidel Cat-stro’s his full name. It’s a Miami thing.

Fidel Cat-stro.

Sir Loin, Not the Eating Kind

Early on in our marriage, I told my husband I wanted to someday own a cow, a black-and-white one, that wouldn’t run away when I wanted to pet him. As a city girl, I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t just stand still when I tried to walk up on one. I was a prime target for believing the cow tipping tales. My extensive collection of cow creamers sufficed for a while, but I still longed for the ultimate pet Holstein.

It was a rainy day when we left for the stockyard to pick up some goats we had purchased, to help with brush clearing. I stayed in the truck while they were loaded, and when we arrived home, my husband asked if I wanted to get out and see them. They’re really cute! he promised. I opened the side door of the horse trailer and was greeted by a freckled nose and a long tongue. It was the perfect calf, black and white.

Apparently my husband had been at the auction and saw a woman sadly holding the leash of this black-and-white calf, which was sucking on the woman’s thumb. She explained that she needed to sell him and that he had been bottle-fed and loved, but tough economic times demanded that he be sold. My husband told her that he would buy him and not to worry and that her baby would live out his life in luxury as a pet.

We christened him Sir Loin and had him castrated and horns removed upon the advice of the vet. (If she’s gonna be huggin’ him, don’t want that head to come up and stick her!) Sir Loin thinks he’s a dog and hangs with ours when they are in the pasture, helping Laddie, the yellow Lab, as she digs for rodents in the scrap metal pile. Hugging him isn’t an option for me anymore, since when I stand next to him, I can’t see over him! But I still brush him and rub his brisket and tell him he’s gorgeous. He wraps his gooey tongue around my arm, smelling like grass and cow saliva, and I think he understands.

The famous Sir Loin.

Chapter 2

We Know Where You Live (and What You Did in the Woods)

Don’t Offend the Locals ’Cause Now You’re One of Them!

It has become glaringly apparent to me exactly how small my new hometown actually is, in terms of permanently losing your anonymity. In the big city, you battle in traffic with obnoxious drivers. You fight hard for a parking spot. Shopping alone is, well, a solitary experience. Not so anymore!

Let’s start with driving. I’ve learned that there are all kinds of rules about driving in the country. First, you always drive with one hand on the top of the steering wheel, so you can raise a finger in greeting to the opposing driver (this applies to two-lane roads only). Unless you’re a female and the opposing driver is a male, then your friendly intentions might be misconstrued. Guys always