Cows

The bovine witness stand:

"Look. We know how you did it. How is no longer the question. What we now want to know is 'Why?' Why now, Brown Cow?"



I can't remember where that one came from, but give Gary Larsen ("The Far Side") credit.

We took a trip to the Great White North over the weekend to do a little work in the field on Saturday (protecting my ash trees against the evil Emerald Ash Borer), drink a few (ahem) quick ones with my brother, and have breakfast with Mom on Sunday morning. The coolest part of the trip was the cows.

I grew up on a farm, and the farm looks little like it did when I was a kid. We got rid of the last of the cows around 1962, and a year later we planted the first of what would become many thousands of fruit trees. Over time, all the fences came down, and the farm became a wide-open space dedicated to growing peaches, apples and nectarines...and the clock kept ticking, and now the trees are gone, as is the '73 Ford pick-up truck in which I used to cruise the streets of Bellevue. Anyway, that's another story for another day.





But the memory of the cows lingers. Even after we were out of the livestock/dairy business, my grandparents to the west had cows. They were our next-door neighbors, and lived a quarter of a mile down the road. We would walk through the fields to visit them, and that meant walking through a cow pasture. I remember heading home one day, after raiding my grandmother's freezer for some raisin cookies, and the cows started to stampede. I had about 50 yards to get to the fence, and they were gaining on me, and it briefly occurred to me that I could be trampled to death by the cows. Then I remembered the secret to making cows stop dead in their tracks, and I was thus able to leisurely climb over the fence.


Upon arrival at the farm last Saturday, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my brother Thom had completed his mission of making repairs to the barn, installing a new fence, and bringing some cattle back to the farm. I hadn't seen cattle at this place in more than 40 years, and it was almost eerie. The sights, but more importantly the smells, transported me back to my youth. And I do not find the smell in the least bit offensive. It smells like a farm.



Here is the image. A field, a fence, dandelions, and cows. What I like most about this scene is the grove of trees in the background. That is the site of the Golden Hill Cemetery. Of course, growing up as a kid, I had no idea that the hill would become a cemetery, but it certainly makes a nice back-drop for the new bovines on the block.







It was a pleasant day on Saturday, but the weatherman was calling for lots of rain on Sunday. And those who live in these parts know that we got a LOT of rain on Sunday. And on the farm,we knew there would be rain without even having to listen to the weather report. Here are the cows about an hour after the other picture was taken. They knew it was going to rain, so they laid down.