“To me they are as beautiful as anything I know,” Georgia O’Keeffe said of the sun-bleached bones and skulls she found in the desert. “To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around…. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive …”

Lil Jester, the Story

I did know this little guy.

In 2011, I flew from LA to CNY to see my house for the first time (I bought it the month before, sight unseen) and to stay with my neighbor, Tim, who first posted the picture of the house on Facebook.

This was Mother’s Day weekend.

On Mother’s Day, Lil Jester was born, there were twins but one died and this one survived, barely. The mother rejected him, so Tim and I hand fed LJ for the first few days of his life.

There is another story where I was in charge of him and he disappeared and I thought he’d been swallowed by a coyote or ferret and I cried inconsolably, but I’ll save that retelling for later.

Anyway, by the time my house was being renovated in July 2011, he was a handsome young goat with nubs where his majestic horns would be.

In the country, not all goats are created equal and boy goats do hot hold the same rank as a girl goat, a girl can be milked and bred, a boy can be annoying and eaten when he is of the right age.

This was the fate of the little boy goat.

His bones were left in a field behind my house, I knew not where until spring 2013 rolled around and I was on one of my long walks through the mud.

Spring mud pushes bones to the surface that Winter stripped clean.

There he was.

I brought him home.