“The other night I saw Brayan run out of the kitchen after dark with a knife…” my mom, a suburban hairstylist from Texas visiting her Honduran grandkids for the first time, said as I interrupted her — “Wait. I’m going to write all this down,” so I took out my laptop and began typing as she talked. The ensuing conversation went like this:

Mom: “So the other night I saw Brayan run out of the kitchen after dark with a knife, so I instinctively ran after him to see what we were doing.”

Me: “Ok, then what?”

Mom: “The two young milking goats [attached to short ropes because they are notorious for escaping] were wrapped tightly around a couple trees in the yard. In Brayan’s mind, cutting them loose was the perfect solution, but obviously he skipped the afterthought of what rope we would be able to use afterward to tie the goats. So I figured out how to unwind them by looping them in and around each other, and I carefully handed Brayan a rope in the palm of his hand [mom taps the palm of her hand several times for emphasis, eyes wide to communicate the focus involved], so that he had the first goat. But that worked for half a second, if that. As he was intently watching me unwind the second goat, he forgot he was holding goat number one.

And when I looked up, there was a goat running away.

So then the goat race began.

…So I didn’t know what I was doing pulling those goats by their horns.”

[Me: laughter]

Mom: “Well I didn’t! It was dark and they were scared! And make sure you mention they were really spindly trees! I had to jump them back and forth, back and forth.

And mention that I had no head lamp, and there were no lights out there. And there have been known to be poisonous snakes out in that grass.

…So I ended up herding two goats and Brayan all the way to the shed.”