I had no idea I was being recorded. Or that I was being watched by anyone else besides Mary Jane Hetzlein’s goats.

“Go out and do something happy every week. Every day, if possible,” I always tell myself. “It doesn’t matter what. Just find something that feels joyful.” This is one of my solutions for warding off depression.
“You wanna come over and play with some baby goats?” Mary Jane had said in her email. After several days of rain and flooding, I finally grabbed my camera and the Wellington boots I inherited from my daughter, and drove the short distance from my house to Mary Jane’s. And there was the happiest scene I’d ever stepped into.

Later that night, as I transferred the goat pictures from camera to computer, the television was bursting with reports of the Charleston church shooting. Looking back and forth from the TV screen to the computer, I found I’d taken a hundred photos of field and dirt with an end of a goat’s leg or a tip of an ear. There were only three shots that did not look like blurry clouds racing off the picture. All the gentle goats prancing in the tall grasses, their sweet smiles, the baby goat that chewed on my shirt and danced with me as I backed away to focus on his face – all gone. It was now just a memory stuck in my head, disappearing quickly behind the television images of grief-struck people in Charleston.

What was I doing seeking comfort and joy in a yard of baby goats when people can’t even be safe in their place of worship? I wondered. Could I justify writing about goats when people’s hearts are breaking? And should I dare try to convey the silliness of being with baby goats if I didn’t even have photos?

I went to bed miserable, thinking of my poor photography skills, the floods, the people crying in anguish, madmen with guns, … and wished us all peace. Find something joyful, I told myself. The next day Mary Jane sent me eleven emails with photos of me dancing with goats.

What do you do to balance bad times with good times?