A MOO-VING EXPERIENCE

(THE FLAMING BORE AS A COW GIRL)

The highlight of my childhood summers was spending a week on the farm with my great aunt and great uncle, Ethel and Jobe. They had an 80-acre spread about nine miles south of Fredonia--wheat, vegetables, chickens, and, my favorite, dairy cows!

There were only about a half-dozen or so of them, but I loved perching on the iron barnyard gate, watching them saunter in single file from the pasture pond, dawn and dusk, like clockwork, ready to be milked. Jobe had names for them, mostly borrowed from relatives. Of course, my favorite was Nancy Cow, a fat black heifer with big brown eyes.

Although Jobe taught me the art of milking, squeeze/pull, squeeze/pull, I wasn't strong enough to be of much help. I mostly just stood around and watched and talked to him as he squatted on his three-legged milking stool and went about his work. His cows preferred being milked from their right side. Approach their udders from the left and they went into a snit.

Ethel, the saint that she was, was in charge of manure duty. She would stand by with a shovel, ready for that first sign of, well, you-know-what. Her goal was to catch the cow poop before it landed on the barn floor, thus preventing Jobe from being spattered by it. Now, I don't know the weight of a fresh cow patty, but it looked to be pretty heavy. Sometimes she could scarcely hang on to the shovel before making her deposit outside. I always thought she must really love Jobe. Why else would she literally be catching shit for him?

Jobe had been a career Navy man and had seen the world. Ethel followed him around the country to various naval bases for twenty years. When he retired in 1945, after World War II, they returned to their roots and settled down onto their little patch of Kansas. They had no children, just a dog, so I'm sure my summer visits were a bit of an intrusion, but they made me feel welcome and I always looked foward to packing my bags and heading out to the farm. Unlike my brothers and sisters, the cows never picked on me--they just stared, mooed, and contentedly went on their merry way.