Happiness Isn't Happiness Without a Violin-Playing Goat*

A couple weeks ago, I kept hearing a baby cry. Like a brand-new, lamby baby cry. I heard it in the day time quite frequently, and sometimes even at night I would wake up hearing it, thinking it might be one of my kids, then realizing that it wasn't in our house, and besides, my kids are too old to cry like that.

I finally decided that maybe our neighbors upstairs (who have quite an interesting group living there) have a new addition to their family.

It was surreal, though. Close enough to make me very concerned about it, but far enough that I had no idea where it was coming from exactly or why no one was doing anything for it. Seriously - it was the kind of baby cry that would make one's milk come in. I started thinking I was going batty.

Then our downstairs neighbors starting complaining about the goat next door.

It hadn't even occurred to me, but sure enough, about the same time I was hearing the phantom baby cry, a goat had moved into the garden next door. Our neighbors are straight across from the garden, and we are up higher, so the cry was right in our neighbor's windows and a little more distant for us.

We live in the middle of Kiev basically, amongst high rises and business buildings, but there happens to be one (more or less) single family home right next door with an avid gardener who works almost constantly on her little plot of land. And she had a goat there. Who cried a lot.

We had even seen the goat on our way out of the parking garage before, and joked that they had needed a lawn mower, so they brought in a goat. But I didn't know my crying baby delusions and the goat were the same thing.

I wish I had taken a picture from our balcony of the goat and his keeper (an old guy who sat in the backyard in an office chair drinking kvas) before they went to graze elsewhere.

But they've moved on now and I have to say I kinda miss them. It's just not the same without the goat next door, even if he did push my mothering instinct buttons a little too often.

(*Do you know the painting and the movie my post title belongs to?)