This is a long one today. I originally published this in April of 2007 and since I can’t come up with a single idea for today’s post, I’m reusing it.
Born and raised a city girl, the only experience I’d had with cows was an elementary school field trip to a dairy farm. Those cows were huge but then I was little so of course they’d appear to be gigantic. Right? No. Cows are huge even for big people. They’re massive and stand on those smallish legs all day long. You just know they have to be big powerful evil beasts if those scrawny looking stick legs can hold them up all day long!
Mike’s a country boy through and through. Cows aren’t beasts at all to him. They’re gentle giants if that. His uncle had a farm with cows and pigs. His cousins, who he spent most of his childhood playing with, had a pet bull. They grew up wrestling with this bull and cared for him like I would my dog. Afternoons at the pond with their bull were a favorite thing for them. They’d start to wrestle him and then wait for him to bunt them into the pond. Mike always smiles the sweetest nostalgic smile when recounting those afternoons.
While Mike and I were dating I had several up close and personal experiences with cows. I still, today, shudder when thinking back and Mike still, ’cause he can be a jerk when he wants to, laughs hard when he brings them up.
Mike’s uncle had a shop right in the middle of one of his cow pastures where Mike fixed up old cars. This was out in the boonies and there was no bathroom in or around the shop. One Saturday afternoon I had to pee. Badly.
“Just go outside. No one will see you but the cows.”, he said.
“Over my dead body! You don’t pee outside like that!”
“You do when you’re out in the middle of no where and no one will see you”, he snickered.
“I can’t. It won’t work. There’s no way I could drop my pants and squat out in the open like that.”
“Ok, then go in the barn. No one will ever know.”
“Are there any cows in there?”
“You can’t pee in front of a cow either? Teresa, they don’t care. But no, there’s no cows in there. Promise.”
He lied. There was a great big brown cow in there behind a partition wall. I didn’t hear her, nor did I notice here until I was almost done. She was peeking at me through a hole in the wall that had hidden her from me. I nearly crapped myself when I saw her. Know what cows do when you scream at them? They moo. Loudly. I ran out of the barn with my pants down in fear for my life.
It was a month or so before I agreed to go back out to the shop with him. He needed some parts off an old junker that was at the end of a pasture (of which he said wasn’t in use) not too awfully far from the shop. I was sleepy so I sat in the driver’s seat of this junker as he worked. At some point I fell asleep. What woke me up was breath. Breath so bad it could only come from the bowels of hell. I opened my eyes and saw, just an inch or two from my face, the nose of a great big black Angus. He was curious, Mike later said. For a second or two, I couldn’t breathe. Fear, I thought, had paralyzed me. That’s when the Angus snorted at me. When his nasty spit hit my face, I screamed! He mooed right in my face and then nosed me. It’s a wonder I didn’t mess myself. Poor Mike nearly broke his neck as shot straight up when I screamed. He’d been sitting in the passenger seat taking the window assembly out of the door. He hadn’t even noticed that big mean looking Angus with the evil slanty eyebrows.
After shooing the cow away he tried to hug me. I wouldn’t let him. He’d been laughing so hard he was crying. That upset me to say the least. An hour or so passed and he asked me to walk up to the shop and get a special tool for him.
“No. There are cows out there.”, I said.
“Do you see any cows?”, he asked.
“No, but I know they’re there. I can feel them.”
“Teresa….”
“No. I’m not going.”
“Damn it, I need that wrench. If I have to go, then you’ll be all alone in the car with your Angus until I get back.”
I gave and started up towards the shop. That’s when it happened. With both the shop and the junker in sight, I was suddenly surrounded by a bunch of cows. They’d completely circled me cutting off any and all avenues of escape. Knees knocking, I looked up and saw, dead ahead of me, a bull. I screamed for Mike.
“Oh don’t pay them any mind. They’re just hungry.”
“OMG! HELP, MIKE! HELP!”
He shouted at me to start walking. Then he shouted that they weren’t going to eat me like I thought. I can not express just how frightened I was, but I did start walking. Amazingly enough, they parted and allowed me to walk past them. All they’d wanted, as it turned out, were apples. Mike’s uncle would feed them apples every evening as a treat and for some reason, they’d thought I was there to feed them. Still, when I got to the shop, I closed the big bay door and refused to come out OR let Mike in until he promised that we’d leave and go home. From then on out he didn’t take me back out to the shop without checking with his uncle to see what pasture the cows were in.