The Girl Who Paid the Rent in Quarters

The goats

You need to know about the goats, or none of this makes sense.

Noelle had three Nubians. Biscuit was the oldest, a tan doe with long black ears and an opinion about everything. Clover was a yearling, red with white spots, and she was Noelle’s favorite, though she would never say so in front of the other two.

She got Biscuit from a family over by Orrville when she was eight, with money she saved from her birthdays and from pulling weeds for my mother. She bred her, and kept two of the doelings, Clover and the third one.

Every morning before school, and every evening, she milked. She did it by hand on a stand her father built her out of two by fours. She strained the milk through a cloth into quart jars and set them in the old refrigerator on the back porch.

When she was nine, she learned to make soap from a lady at the extension office. Goat milk, lye, olive oil, coconut oil. She wore my safety glasses and a pair of rubber gloves that went past her elbows, and she measured everything on a kitchen scale like it was medicine.

She sold the bars at the Saturday farmers market for five dollars apiece. Oatmeal and honey. Plain. Lavender, when she could get the lavender. She had a card table and a hand-lettered sign and a cash box her grandpa gave her.

The quarter jar

Here is the part people always ask about.

My husband’s father was a dairyman, and he did not trust paper money he had not felt the weight of. When Noelle started selling soap, her grandpa told her that a dollar you can hear is a dollar you remember.

So every Monday after market, her dad drove her to the bank in town, and she traded her bills for rolls of quarters. She broke the rolls open at home and poured them into a big glass jar that used to hold pickles at the restaurant where I worked when I was nineteen.

The teller, a kind woman who had known my husband since high school, used to laugh and ask her if she was saving for the laundromat. Noelle would say, very seriously, that she was saving for a milking machine.

By August the jar was about half full. She had already taken out money for feed and her fair entry fees and a new hoof trimmer. What was left, she had counted a hundred times. She knew the number without looking.