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CLIMAX — See Ginnie Tate, “The Goat Lady,” and you can tell something’s wrong.

She still gets around pretty well. She climbs into her golf cart, with her two rat terriers, Ben and Jerry, and checks out her cheese-making operation beside the twisting roads of northeast Randolph County.

But her speech is slurred, her hands are frail, her muscles are weak, and her sing-song voice is a tiny, breathy squeak that rises and falls like an ebbing tide.

A month ago, she started using a voice amplifier. It helps. She doesn’t get as tired, and people can understand her better.

And that’s a good thing because, at age 68, Ginnie knows her days are numbered. She’s battling amyotrophic lateral sclerosis , a neurodegenerative disease better known by its dreaded acronym: ALS. It’s the disease that took baseball legend Lou Gehrig. And Ginnie knows it’ll take her.

Soon, she’ll lose the ability to speak and to swallow. In two weeks, she’ll get a feeding tube inserted in her stomach to help her eat. But she won’t get a respiratory tube inserted in her throat to help her breathe. She doesn’t want it.

That’s what she told her doctor at Duke a few weeks ago. Ginnie picked up a pad and wrote 10 words that Steve, 57, her only sibling, will never forget: “I’ve had a good life. I’m not afraid to die.”

Don’t give her pity, she’ll tell you, and don’t make her sound altruistic. But do give her respect. She’s grown goodness here in central North Carolina, and she’s shown many of us how to dream.

Look at her background. She’s a farmer’s daughter from Illinois who chose a career track when women usually chose a family track. She became a nurse who worked for 40 years at hospitals from Chicago to Greensboro.

Look at her business. She created one of the first goat-cheese dairies licensed in North Carolina. People told her she couldn’t do it. But she did.

Then, look at her. This tiny woman in a golf cart.

A decade ago, she survived breast cancer and threw herself a “Goodbye to the Boob” party. Now, she’s handling ALS the same way — head-on with humor.

“Do you want to look at my funny-looking tongue?” she’ll ask you, sticking out her tongue. “The muscles are dying. They twitch.”

But she does have her moments. “OK, I don’t really say, 'Why me?’ I don’t really deny it. …”

She stops, squints her eyes shut and opens them. Then, she continues.

“I’m very lucky because I have family.”

Does that help?

Yes, she nods.

Fourteen years ago, she really cranked up Goat Lady Dairy when her brother Steve and his wife Lee left their jobs in Minneapolis — he was a counselor, she was a kindergarten teacher — to build the business.

Her mother, Norma, came in 2001. She became the pie-maker, the mail-getter, and together, they built Goat Lady Dairy into a thriving business with 130 goats that grosses $300,000 a year.

Norma died in March 2006. She was 86. She collapsed on the kitchen floor, across the road from the barn in the home she shared with Ginnie.

And that’s what Ginnie wants. To die on her own terms, in this quiet place where the church-like chime of a Seagrove-made bowl is the only sound you hear, even with the slightest wind.

She came to this place in 1984, driving an LTD, with her pet goat named Nubie standing in the back.

Back then, locals called her “that crazy Yankee lady with a goat.” She bought 40 acres of overgrown weeds and ramshackle houses for $65,000 and won over the local community by giving local carpenters and electricians a job.

She put out the word at local gathering spots that she needed help to turn an 18th-century log cabin with little electricity and no running water into a 20th-century place.

It happened — in five years . For months, she slept under blankets, cooked on a wood stove, relieved herself, if needed, out the back door and showered at the Greensboro YMCA when she came to work as a nursing administrator at Moses Cone.

She first started making goat cheese in her kitchen. Her farm now sells 35,000 pounds of goat cheese every year.

Along the way, she became a fun-loving fixture at the farmers market, always in her straw hat. There, she turned what she calls “yuckers” into “gushers.” They love her goat cheese.

But she can’t go anymore. She’s too weak.

The first signs of ALS cropped up 18 months ago. She dragged her feet, and she couldn’t get the mucus out of the back of her throat. Then, last spring, she got the diagnosis.

That settled her mind. Now, she knows. And now, she lives.

“What else are you going to do?’’ Ginnie says from the barn kitchen, stirring marinara sauce for the lunch-time spaghetti. “Two years ago, I was milking goats five mornings a week. Plus doing other stuff. Now, I do what I can. Something’s always going to kill you.

“I just hope I die when I’m walking. That means I wasn’t in the bed.”

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com