I went to bed last night and woke this morning with the same thought: in spite of loss, our life is overflowing. Out of the shadows of the trees, the shadows of this grief, abundance overwhelms us.

I find this in our orchard. In our harvest. There’s so much fruit, but not all of it is good. Bird pecks, bruises, imperfections mar much of the bounty. “Such a shame to throw it away,” we’ve said the past few years. “We need to figure out what to do with the bad stuff instead of just wasting it.”

So we began cutting…

And drying…

Scott and Oma pick our fruit. A son-in-law and his mother-in-law. Working side by side with their picking bags strapped like baby carriers to their chests. When I first brought Scott home as a nineteen-year-old boy, my dad said, “Why bring home a big, stupid jock? All he can do is play football.”

But Mom said, “I like him. He’s strong. He’s quiet. Let’s see what happens.”

Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined this would happen. These two in the orchard together. “What do you talk about?” I asked Scott the other day.

“You know your mom, she likes to visit,” Scott said. “We talk about fruit.”

“For hours? Just fruit?”

“No, we talk about our faith. About the boys. But ya, mostly about fruit.”

The conversation this year has been dominated by how to dry our fruit. Everyone agrees we’ve got to stop wasting the bad stuff and turn it into something good. Something useful. Something profitable.

We just need to be creative, which isn’t really a problem for our family, we are a creative bunch.

The back half of our shop is actually a dance floor where my sister-in-law Tari creates ballet in the afternoons for my nieces. Cruz has noticed. On the floor behind the boxes, he dances.

I want to dance, too. Through this life of shadows and light, grief and pain, joy and laughter. It takes one to really have the other. How would we know true joy without true sorrow? Real light without real darkness? If we didn’t have lemons how would we make lemonade?

Sundays are my favorite day to drink lemonade. Sundays are our one day off. The day we worship. The day we rest. The day we do Sunday dinner with Oma and Opa and try to do nothing else.

But this past Sunday I spent three hours sitting with my neighbor’s goat. My neighbor was out of town and worried about Dilly, her fainting goat. It wasn’t the fainting causing the problem. Dilly had a baby that morning and my neighbor friend was expecting a twin. She was worried the twin was stuck inside Dilly, which could lead to death for both baby and mama goat.

So I sat with Dilly and her one baby waiting for the other baby to arrive. But the twin didn’t come.

Finally the vet came and put on a long, blue glove. She reached inside Dilly looking for another baby. “My hand’s too big,” said the petite vet. She looked at me with her hand still inside Dilly. “How big is your hand?”

“Bigger than yours. I have big hands for a woman. Really big hands!” I assured her. In truth my hand wasn’t much bigger than hers, but I knew what she was getting at. If my hand was smaller, she was going to put that long, blue glove on me. I’d already spent two hours getting to know Dilly. I didn’t need to know her any better than I already knew her. My neighbor had already asked me over the phone if I’d ever stuck my hand in a goat. “No, I have never done that,” I quickly responded. “I am not the person for this job. Please call a vet.”

Now here I stood with the vet and Dilly and another neighbor woman measuring her hand against the vet’s hand. “Well, my hand is just too big to really get in there,” said the vet. “Yours is too big too,” she told the neighbor woman, then she looked again at me.

I tucked my hands behind my back. “They’re too big,” I insisted, deciding I now knew the reason they called these fainting goats. The thought of putting on that long, blue glove was making me feel light-headed.

The vet studied Dilly for a few minutes. “She’s still really fat, but I don’t think there’s another baby in there.” The vet ultimately gave Dilly a shot to put her back in labor and the neighbor woman and I sat there for another hour like goat doulas. Dilly didn’t seemed concerned with any of this, she chewed her cud, and liked me scratching her forehead.

I found myself relaxing there with Dilly. She wasn’t in any hurry to do anything. The sun was warm, a soft breeze blowing. I visited with the neighbor woman I’d never met before, a lovely lady who raised goats on a farm a few miles away so we talked about goats, and I cuddled Dilly’s tiny kid for awhile.

No twin ever arrived, so the neighbor woman and I said goodbye to Dilly and her baby, and I invited the neighbor woman down to my house to share some fruit with her. My mom must have taken the leftover fruit from the farmers’ market home because it was no longer in the refrigerator when we got to the shop, so the neighbor woman and I walked out into the trees and gathered peaches. Because this is what real neighbors do. They sit with each others’ goats and share their harvests, making the most of the good and the bad together.