If I said I wasn’t looking forward to this Monday morning, I’d be lying…..like a rug. I told My Loving Spouse last night, “You know I love you and the kids? Tomorrow morning, you will all be gone and well, …… I am sort of giddy with excitement at the thought!”. The house all to myself, albeit a dirty house, but a quiet one! Oh, come on you mothers that are rolling your eyes! It has been six weeks since I had a quiet morning and my sanity left a long time ago. I had a plan. Dusting, laundry, bill paying, weeding around the pumpkins, watering and quiet, quiet, quiet. It was a beautiful thing… then a strange car pulled up with an older lady in it.
“Is that your big black animal in the road?”
“Excuse me?”
“Down by my house, I live down the street.”
Oh, I thought, one of Our Friend the Farmer’s heifers has gotten out.
“Oh,” I said, “A cow?”
“Yes”
“Oh, no it is not mine, but I know who it belongs to. I will go try to put her back in the pasture. Is it number 203?”
“Well, I didn’t really get close enough to get it’s name”
She looked at me a bit oddly, thinking I might be a bit odd as well, since I knew the name/number of the cow, but not as odd as I thought of her as she’d obviously lived here a long time and didn’t know that the ‘big black animal’ was a cow. I thanked her again, and told her I’d handle it. I figured I’d either get the heifer back in and then let Our Friend the Farmer know she’d gotten out again, or I’d not be able to get her back in and let him know she was out again.
I grabbed a long shovel, because it is a good tool to encourage cows to go where you want them to, or protect myself, in case the heifer didn’t like my ‘attitude’. Our Friend the Farmer always has a shovel with him. I could have saddled my horse to wrangle the heifer, but that could take too long and I didn’t want her to get hit on the road. I would have jumped on my ‘bike’ (quad/4 wheeler), except we don’t have one. Our Friend the Farmer is always saying, “Pat, you need to get a bike.” So, I jumped into the only available vehicle I had, a tad ‘non-farmy’, my jaunty, cute, red Lexus and drove off down the road to wrangle the heifer.
Cattle like to do three things, eat, drink and poop. The cow/heifer that manages to get out of the pasture is not actually the smart one. It is sort of the dumb one, because it not only leaves the place where there is food and water, but it usually cannot figure out how to get back there when it wants to. My plan was to open the gate to the pasture and then get behind the heifer and ‘encourage’ her in the right direction, I’ve seen this done and usually they are so happy to get back into the pasture they sort of take off at a run as soon as they see the open gate. Just as I got to the wayward heifer, one of Our Friend the Farmer’s Top Men was there doing exactly what I’d planned to do, darn it. I didn’t get to be the cow ‘hero’, but I did get to go home to a quiet house.
I hope you at least got to put up your feet for a few minutes to enjoy the solitude. So Glad you made it through the last few weeks!