“Do you want to come over? It’s muddy, don’t wear nice shoes.” 

This feels like my motto the last couple months. Before you jump into this:

imagine pulling up to a wire fence with wooden posts that have seen better days, covered in trees in some places, dried out vines in others, and a black mailbox that is slightly dented in the middle. The gate is open and you see a dirt path but no visible house and it all looks kind of… forgotten. Being the adventurer you are you decide to pull in, you wonder if that twig is gonna scratch your car, then you round a little bend and see signs of life… a kid tractor, a swing set, bikes, flowers that recently froze over and a house that someone started painting but didn’t finish. Your skepticism dies down a bit because your friend could probably live here. A cat sleeps on the front porch with no intention of looking for or killing creatures (minus the occasional venomous acorn, (he’s a vegan) and when he’s done with said acorn he will place it in your shoes you left outside because they were caked in mud). He opens one eye at you and wonders if you too are going to hold him upside down like the smallest person in this household does. No? Ok great, you may proceed. In you come, Welcome! It’s not as forgotten as you thought. They must have tried hard. Coffee? “Always!” you say because all the good people say that.

“Oh wow I haven’t seen a stove with coils since my childhood,” you think.

This feels like your grandma’s house a bit, in a good way. And then we sit down to chat. 

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How do I recount a year where we changed everything? Rob calls this change our mid-life retirement because it feels like retirement compared the pace of life we were stuck in before this. I’m going to miss a lot of pieces, as my mind likes to hold onto random bits and send more logical pieces to the scrap pile. I pulled out an old CD case on one of our drives from Midland to Dripping and y’all I knew EVERY SINGLE word to 47 songs from my jr. high and high school days. Now when I try to recall something important it’s like, *icloud is full* but without the option to purchase more storage. Good thing I know the whole third eye blind album from ‘97 though …  just in case.

On June third we drove away from Midland. The same morning, the lady I had set up to clean the house that day called me and said, “I can’t clean this, there are too many people here working, and trash and dust everywhere.” The contractor led us to believe that he was done with the floors, fireplace and paint. He was not. And so we moved into an actual disaster area. (Note: my mother-in-law and her sister are saints and cleaned as much as they could before we got there) And more fun than paint and dust was a cricket infestation, broken shower and kitchen sink. Rob unpacked the uhaul and went back to Midland where he would work during the week until October. The kids were with my parents for the first week and so I joined the work crew painting mostly. “No Miss, we do it” False. Give me a paint brush. People were in and out for most of the summer.  I finally just said I would paint the rest so people would be out of my house. 

We joined the YMCA or as Johnny calls it the “Wyatt See Eight” and started a daily rhythm of “mom works out for an hour in hopes of being too tired the rest of the day to lose her mind”  followed by an hour of pool time where I got a new sunspot on my face.  We walked the land a lot, I found my pear trees and my hope that this was all gonna work out somehow. I began the endless rounds of cleaning construction dust from the walls and floor just to wake up to a new layer that had settled in. I would find myself standing barefoot at the bathroom sink at night with my toes curled under me. Unconsciously, my body was telling me this place couldn’t be trusted, it was trying to keep itself from the dust and hidden creatures waiting to suddenly appear. The worst thing about crickets is not that they are terrifying but that they jump and scare you. There was one in the girls’ closet and Nora stayed up almost the whole night for fear that it would “get her.” Another night Nora was thirsty due to her, “awake too long due to bug and lizard fear (oh yeah there were geckos all over the house too)” and I told her not to turn the lights on, just walk down the hall and grab her water. I went down the hall minutes later and realized by God’s grace she hadn’t noticed the THREE crickets in the hallway. After a couple rounds of pest control the crickets ceased to jump in our faces unexpectedly. That’s when the ants showed up.

We have a vaulted ceiling in the living room with a wooden beam down the center. It was infested with carpenter ants. You could see them come out during certain times of the day, thousands of them turning the brown beam black in little rippling pools as they crawled on top of each other. We cut the trees back away from the roof. Pest control came back out, and sprayed them. Then inevitably, what goes up must come down. Ants fell and covered my window sills, kitchen table, piano, and occasionally landed on people. The kids would come to ask me a question and I would act like I was lovingly playing with their hair while actually picking out little ants. We treated the beam over and over. It took months to get rid of them. 

 

Summer:

Summer ended. We went to meet the teacher night and by God’s hand we met exactly the right people. Rob said hello to a worship leader at another church, whose wife then introduced me to a neighbor of mine, who then introduced me to another neighbor of ours. All of the sudden I had people again. I was invited to little gatherings from generous Christ loving women over and over, and with that gratitude I started to invite people over, over and over. To my surprise everyone said yes. I would push the newly fallen ants behind the piano, vacuum them off the rug right before they got here and prayed no one would find surprises in their hair when they got home. Midland taught us that community is everything. It’s the whole reason we moved really. To bring that kind of community to Dripping Springs. And that meant letting people into my mess of a property, my sky-diving ant infested mess of a house, and my skittish of new people heart. 

I cried when I dropped the girls off at school. All dressed up and brave walking into a new place. 

I dropped Johnny off too, shocked at how well he just walked right in and didn’t seem to mind watching me leave. Suddenly the house was quiet again and I had seven years worth of work to begin. I decided to clean up the leaves that had piled around the house and flower beds. I didn’t get too far before a new shock of country life hit me. I pulled back a pile of leaves and disturbed a bed of baby snakes that then exploded in every direction. I called Rob and asked him to bring back some baby cats. Little did we know that boy cats are not the hunting kind. Here we enter Bubbles and Kevin, brother cats that have no purpose other than entertaining our children. Welcome snakes. You are safe here.

And so a new normal began. And church began again. Never have I been with a group of people so consistently that all had the same goal and dream: to bring hope and Jesus to a community. We gathered just us (and our 11 children, now 12) and dreamed and prayed together and then opened the doors and have since just watched God move. It’s been a thing of beauty to watch a new church unfold. New people come in that you introduce yourself to and then talk with and then have dinner with and then cry with too.  It’s been amazing to watch Rob walk away from oil and gas and live out his God given gifts of leadership and music. He’s just so naturally good at it. We’ve gotten to sing together consistently for the first time in 9 years. He’s written some amazing songs already. I could not be more proud of him saying, “yes” to a very different life for himself and for his family. Pictures below are him leading worship and baptizing the girls a couple weeks ago.

I still like to underachieve. But now I see it as a personality trait called “You must fail… but just a little bit.”

Exhibit A: I led worship at Redeemer Round Rock and it was one of those times where I was like man, that went so well. The Spirit was there and I was unhindered by my own nervousness. I got in the car and realized I had scratched a bug bite and had blood smeared very visibly across my entire calf, just below the hem of the dress I was wearing. 

Exhibit B: You know when you are trying to get a pony tail just right? You grab your hair up, nope that's not it, new grab. Ah! That’s the money grab! Cute pony-tail self. Your gray stripe looks so cool too, great job, go meet those new friends with your cutie hair. Again… get in the car afterwards and realize the cutie hair also included a very long rat tail hanging out the back. 

Exhibit C: I had three large babies, and with that came large bulging varicose veins. I finally got them fixed and all went well. How can you fail at this Danielle? Well, let me tell you. First the compression sock you must wear post procedure for 3 weeks comes with little plasticy grabbers at the top to keep it from sliding down. Wouldn’t you know that I would be allergic to those little plasticy bastards?! So not only does my leg feel 500 lbs but I also have 500 bright red hot spots on my thigh that burn like fire. Easy fix: just wear it inside out… and have it slip down your leg, all day every day. But wait there’s more. This year I figured out I was under-eating. And so I began to eat like I should have been and ta-da I felt a lot better and ta-da I gained 10 pounds, which is fine with me except it was not fine with my jeans. Especially already too tight jeans with a demon compression sock under them. We have one great clothing store here in Dripping so I set out on a mission to find some new jeans. Now if you haven’t worn a compression sock, one, good for you and your eternal youth genes, two, you must know getting one on is enough to make you sweat, get a side cramp, and say some bleeped out words. So here I am in the dressing room and I’m like I can’t try these jeans on with this sausage leg stuffed in a sock! So I take it off to try on pants. All is well, I go up a size and they fit like magic. But now I am in a tiny dressing room with a CURTAIN not a door and I have to shove a swollen bruised leg BACK into the demon sock. Do you remember Swiss Family Robinson where they fight the giant snake in the water? That was me with my leg in that dressing room. My foot was coming out and kicking around under the bottom of the curtain into the walkway as I wrestled that beast of a leg into sock submission. Bless those that had to see that foot thrashing around Lord God in your great mercy. 

Fail. Just a little bit, it keeps you humble. 

If you have made it this far, we're best friends now. Please come over and see us and I’ll show your kids all of our creatures and tell you my garden plans whether you want to hear them or not. Bring shoes you don't care about, it will be fun. You can stay in the tiny house (that will be on air bnb sometime soon). It all feels like home these days, my feet are flat on the floor now. I’m wearing my footsteps into new patterns and more intentional rhythms of life. There’s a lot of peace at the Goatstead, whether it be on the porch or in the middle of the forest and I know it’s not just for us. It’s for you too. You are welcome here. 

Songs/Albums of Year:

Medium Tempo - Rob Goates

Anywhere With You- Mat Kearney

Dreaming in Electric Blue - Dave Barnes

When the lights Go Out- Patrick Droney

It’s our time- The Light the Heat

Weatherman- Wild Rivers

Most listened to Album:

Anywhere with You- Mat Kearney (seriously every song is good)

Books Read:

The Old Testament 5/5

Messy Minimalism 4/5

The ruthless elimination of Hurry 5/5

The God of the Garden ⅘

Take Back Your Family ⅘

Water From my Heart ⅗

Good time Charlie 5/5 (My Dad wrote this book!!)

Books still reading:

Atomic Habits

Habits of the Household

The Call of the Wild and Free

Raising Worry Free Girls 

How to Heal Your Metabolism

Books read to Kids:

City Family Farm Family

North or Be Eaten: Wingfeather Saga

Willodeen

Looking forward to:

Wally the Golden Retriever puppy gets here in January! 

Cutting off the rest of my colored hair, Natural Janet all the wayyyyyyy

Kitchen and Master Bath remodel + whatever else we can manage

The Goatstead Garden

Chickens?

Dates with Rob on Friday mornings

Time outside 

When you come visit me 

Reading the New Testament (Bible recap reading plan starting Jan 1 - Join me!)

Pears.

I love pears. The taste, the shape and color, but the trees most of all. I’m not sure there was ever a deciding moment but I have always felt myself reach for them at the farmers market, marvel at a new color variety at the grocery store and drawn toward the still-life water color paintings of them. 

My mother-in-law was telling a story of a long past relative with the surname Perry. I was pregnant at the time and it hit me that Perry should be her name. I went home and googled the meaning and it said, “One who dwells by the pear tree.” Our little pear tree dweller was born Christmas Eve of that year with vintage prints of pears on her nursery walls.  

I’d heard a story about an old man planting trees that he’d never see grow for the people that would come after him and it has always stuck with me. So with a mix of my pear love and that story I had the urge to mark every house we owned with a pear tree. In Houston there just didn’t seem to be the right spot. In Midland house #1 there was no grass and no water but two doors down was a master gardener with a gigantic pear tree. My kids ended up naming him Mr. Pears, and he brought us pear butter each October.  Midland house #2 seemed to be the perfect start to my made-up tradition but time moved faster than I had planned and a year had gone by with no tree planted. Then we decided we would be moving the next year and so we soaked up every minute with our people and traveled back and forth between our Dripping and Midland home often. “Should I plant one before we leave?” I’d waited too long. Lucky for me (and the would be tree) that I never got around to it because it was a mean hot summer with no rain and it surely would have died. 

   

    The move was made during that mean hot summer with 80 days in a row over 100 degrees. I was by myself with the kids most of the week, Rob still working in Midland on weekdays. And as change tends to do, it started to unsettle and unsteady me. I began to doubt our choice to move, the choice to change practically everything we’d worked toward for the last twelve years. I doubted the vision of the home we’d bought. It was too much work, too big a mess, too many creatures, and too close to the highway. My only choice was to remember how God had already moved, how He had called us, and how He had started the series of events we could trace years before. I prayed hard, unceasingly, out loud and in silence, in tears and in the car, “Show me this is what you wanted for us. Show me this house is not a mistake, show us your goodness in this place”

    We have a couple acres, much of it wooded and unkept for at least the last ten years. One weekend about a month after we moved Rob came home and Perry asked if we could have a family adventure. So one bright hot Sunday morning we tucked our shirts into our pants and pants into our boots and headed out into the trees. We saw fox dens and twenty year old vines swooping through the massive oaks, old paint cans and things to add to our eternal list of to-dos. We had made it to the edge of the property when my lover-of-the-earth-Perry said, 

“What’s that?” It was a tiny tree, with tiny fruit on it. 

I kept looking and just beyond this tree were two more like it...

 that were not so sickly … 

and FULL of pears. 

    I cried then and I cry when I tell this story because God's goodness is real, and tangible and timely. To answer my prayers for confirmation of this home and move, He started my tradition of marking our home and future with the three pear trees I’d wished I planted. 

Goodbye Midland Part 1

In 2020, we started to feel restless (much like the rest of the world) but restless in our souls. Midland didn’t feel like the city we were going to stay in, despite our amazing community. Rob started writing songs again and I mean like 5 songs a week. Some he’d write in the car on the way home from being an engineer, some would take longer… written in the minutes he’d rehearse and re-write every night while he monitored bath time. With these songs came a question. “What are all these songs for?”

I could feel a shift coming. I started to have dreams about fire. Fire that did not burn up or destroy, but that got my attention, commanded me to watch and follow. Fire in a Christmas tree, fire shooting out from a light above a dining table, fire moving from one room of my house to the next.

“Prepare the way, He’s coming through. Ready or not our God’s on the move” -Bethel

God was prepping our hearts for a big ask. We knew James at church was prepping to church plant and one day without knowing yet where this church would be located he asked Rob, “What if you came to be the worship leader?” Rob came home and said, “What does it mean that I want to say yes?” We prayed, and I prayed specifically that the church would be in the hill country, a longing in my heart for country and land from a dream decades before. Over dinner some weeks later, James told us it would be Dripping Springs, and we knew in our hearts we must go. 

We knew we had a year to prepare. Looking for houses in Dripping feels much like looking in Austin. Sticker shock palooza. We went back and forth, should we build? I prayed that the Lord would help me let go of the “country living” dream if I needed to, if this was not the time, and I felt him gently say, “do not give up the land.” One morning a property pulled up and its l just knew it was it. We made an offer unseen (and unsmelled), went to see it, fell in love with the vision of all that it could be, lost it, and then got a call the first people backed out. 

We bought it in November and immediately began to paint over the many shades of green and brown to update it as quickly as possible to rent out. We met with the owners Kenneth and Janelle (these will surely be the names of our first goats) They were 80 year old masters level biologists. They left tags with the names of many of the plants so we would know what they were and let them grow. (You can see one hanging from the tree in the first photo) They also hadn’t cut down anything overgrown or dead… in a LONG time. She talked to me a long while about her dog breeding and grooming business, and her desire that we feed the deer. Kenny showed us how to throw dog food all over the front porch for the raccoons. Neat. 

There’s so much work to be done inside and out … for our house, the new church, for our hearts, but we’re saying “yes” to all of it. 

For more before and afters and real time updates follow my on instagram @thehousegoat and see the "goatstead" highlight! 

before paint

after paint + a new fan

This dog grooming house has been turned into a tiny house aka "the Goatel" for guests! 

Goodbye Midland Part 2

Picture of the girls when we moved into our first house in Midland 2017

Goodbye Midland Part 2 ... The last two moves I have written letters to my homes, but not this time. My sweet friends, YOU have been my safe place to land and so this letter is to you.

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Dear Women of Midland ... For 5 years now I've lived in this desert town and the weight of leaving you all feels like I swallowed a heavy rock that is lodged in the center of my chest. At church this morning, James preached on Psalm 84:4

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“Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you.”

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He commented about when you have God dwelling inside you people want to be near you, and also when other people are dwelling with God you want to dwell with them too. There began the weight in my chest as I started to recall all the women in my circle. I started my Midland journey with 2 friends, one from childhood and one from college. They took care of me, invited me often, watched my kids and took me out to dinner. But you know what is more amazing than that? They dwell with God. One is going back to school to learn sign language because God called her long ago "to use her hands to speak." The other started a non-profit after school program to educate children in the WORD. (You two are what I pray my children find in friendships)

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Then as Midland does, it sucks you into community, my circle began to grow and I learned what it meant to see people often, to know their stories and their hurts and to meet each other where we are on a regular basis... and I have grown to love you for all you have done for me and for others, but more than that... you dwell with God. 

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+One friend gave up her house to live in a tiny home (with three kids) to establish a village for the homeless 

+Many give up weeknights and many random hours to spend time with and meet the needs of teenage moms 

+One runs a school for disabled children 

+Two are fostering children they may or may not end up adopting

+One is fighting for the rights of the sexually abused in a courtroom 

+Three are teaching children the gift music 

+One is driving 45 min to church every week to sing her heart out to lead us in worship 

+One is praying for my family whom she has never met 

+Many have adopted children out of a broken system and are willingly fighting battles they inherited 

+One is showing me how she still seeks the Lord in the midst of postpartum depression 

+One who is watching her two boys deteriorate with a genetic disorder as they age and is still praising God

+One who is using her medical knowledge + natural medicine to heal in a real way

+Two who are counseling and walking into the hurt with others

+All the single ladies serving their hearts out, you inspire me

+One who made my family a full Christmas dinner while we quarantined and spent the holiday alone

+One who dreamed big creative thoughts with me and entertained ideas with excitement

+My community group girls who showed up (and with the best food) week after week, year after year, because of the commitment to community

+So many who are walking in motherhood open, honest, and struggling right alongside me

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These are just a few of the many. Thank you for being vulnerable with me, for porch drop-offs, for watching my kids and all the snacks associated with that, for answering phone calls with a crying me on the other end, for so much encouragement, and for letting me be part of your stories too.

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If I am ready to run the race of the next chapter of our life in ministry it is because you have been my jogging partners. If I am untangled from the traps of this life it is because you have cut the ropes. If I am sharp at all it is because you have been my iron. You are all my heroes, my great cloud of witnesses and I absolutely love each one of you in a way I didn't know I could. 

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Hebrews 12:1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us 

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Proverbs 27:17 As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.

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See you at the Goatel