Till the Cows Come Home

No,  no, say it’s not so,  it can not  be morning already! Didn’t I just fall asleep? Waking up is hard to do. Momma, please turn off the bedside lamp.  Gen, stop being so positively Unbreakable Kimmy, even if we girls are as tough as h…ll.…I can not take a cheer leading Rah! Rah! Never Say Die Attitude in the morning.  I am grumpy.  Let your Leader Sleep. No fair, no grooming me.  You know how I like that stuff. Between you and Momma, it is hard for a dog to get the rest she deserves. I drift back to sleep remembering my dream so like a story Momma told me.

Now Momma really did not live on a farm when she was a kid. I mean, can you count some hens, a couple of cows and a pig (sometimes), a farm?  The hens were just a nuisance, although, Momma could abide them when they were peeping chicks or they laid an egg in the nest for her to find.

But what is it about cows?  Momma could not connect with them. Even when she tried to bribe them with fresh clover as a treat, they would chew their cud and flick their tails in disdain, at her feeble attempts to nurture them.  Getting them to move was like dancing with a Douglas Fir Tree.  They went when and where they wanted, at their own pace.  And so behind their backs Momma called our two cows, Bossy and Pansy, Dim and Dimmer.

Maybe it was Momma.  Maybe they saw her sitting on the fence, admiring the neighbors’ sheep and horses who contributed nothing to her well-being. The cows felt under appreciated.  They gave their milk, from which came cream, yummy homemade ice cream, and butter. In return, Momma gave them attitude.  However, no matter how many times Momma looked in their eyes, set so far apart, they always appeared devoid of any emotion, unreachable by human contact.

Another thing, it seemed nigh to impossible to keep those two cows in a paddock.  They lived for the Great Escape to Greener Pastures.  Or maybe Grandpapa bought the wrong color cow lick…if it was a blue; they went in search of a pink cow lick…or was it the other way around? Whatever it was, Momma could not tell you how many times she and her Sister would go out to the field, to take them back to the Halfway Brook for water and they’d be, like Gone. Baby. Gone!

Now, they were big, they were clumsy, how they got the fence knocked down and plodded down the long gateway, without anyone noticing, is still a mystery. But they would be off, roaming across the two lane highway, with cars, swerving to the left, to the right, to the centre, to avoid them.  I mean, who wanted to tango with a full-grown cow. Imagine the damage to the car, not even taking into consideration that it might be the driver’s unplanned ticket to the Pearly Gates.  When Bossy and Pansy turned  into Runaways, bent on a Suicide Mission, Momma’s family would invariably hear car horns, and someone yelling, “Sacre Bleu, Tabernac”, so they would head in that direction to round them up and bring them home, dragging their tails behind them. On other occasions, the cows went to the woods, ending up catching their horns on the thickets.  Their continuous ‘Moo’ was a great GPS locator. More often than not, they took the back road to the alley and plodded on, stopping for an occasional feed of grass, to sustain them along the way.

The only thing Momma liked about cows was the possibility of a calf.  Now Bossy was a good-looking orange brown cow but all the years of battling to load her in the truck, getting her in to the Bull’s pasture, was just for naught.  She was just so ornery that no bull, even on Viagra, was getting close to her. Pansy was smaller, more even-tempered, a black and white cow with pansy shaped splotches. She stepped smartly in to the truck, let the bull do his thing, once she was in his field and came back with calf.

At Pansy’s first twinge of labor pain, instead of going back to the barn, she managed to jump a fence and took off, deep into the forest. She had not been anticipating the kind of pain that this particular birthing caused. Once Momma’s family saw she was missing, the search was on.  Poor Pansy was too weak to moo.  After two days of searching, she was located, laying down in a clearing, dwarfed by massive trees, chewing her cud, a set of twin calves, one moving around on unsteady legs, the other no longer living, by her side.

It was quite the ordeal to get Pansy back to the barn and interested enough to let her calf, Willie, suckle.  Since the Local Farmer‘s Bull who serviced the neighbor hood cows, was getting up there in years, Willie was sold to the Farmer once he was old enough, to continue the ‘family’ business.  Also, it was decided that Pansy would be retired – no more trysts with the Bull.  Pansy had more than earned her keep.

One day Momma’s  parents decided to just give  up the farm.   There would be no more melt in your mouth, egg yellow, rich homemade to-die-for ice cream. That ended the day the hens, the (sometimes) pig, along with Bossy and Pansy were put out to pasture, to live happily ever after in the green field at the Local Farmers’ homestead.

You know, I could have herded those cows for Momma. I got a way with cows (and hens). Like Lady Ga Ga, I was born that way! I long to get back to my roots  to visit an Animal Farm and outfox all those in subordinates. I’m game, as long as it is not before nine o’clock in the morning!