Cow in the road

This weekend, Trifecta challenged us to respond to this picture

I spent my childhood chasing other people’s cows. The farmers who rented our fields were supposed to keep up the fences, but they never did. And the cows never got out during the day. No, they escaped at midnight or two AM, so that we all had to scramble out of bed looking for feed when someone banged on the door. And I slept downstairs, so I always heard the knock.

I hated those cows. I wanted them to die. But, especially once we bought the house and land, a wreck would have been on our insurance. While Mom tried to raise the cow’s owner, I tramped up State Route 286 in my nightgown chanting, “Come on cow, stupid cow, gonna get us both killed cow.”  And then she’d join me in the car, and we’d herd the bovine slowly down the road, me leading the animal by the halter with a feed bucket, her following with the flashers on.

We lived in a sharp curve. Drunks regularly got tangled in our trees. (One memorable fellow actually knocked one over. Broke his own neck, too, that night. Worst neck break the hospital had seen where the victim walked away six weeks later.) So I watched for headlights behind me as I paraded backwards down the street, the cow and my mother following.

When I was twelve, I used to sleep in only my underpants. So when I went to answer the man pounding on the door at oh-dark-thirty, I actually managed to humiliate a neighborhood father with my breasts, which were far too large to be called ‘buds’ at that point.

By the time I was twenty one, all the roles had swapped and swapped again. My sister drove and I walked. Only, where Mom followed slowly with the flashers, Amye zoomed past in her Mazda, slammed on the brakes and screamed a 360 before coming in behind the cow, her red eyes haunting behind the wheel as she pursued us to safety.

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This post came easy. It’s the first one all week that has. Of course, ‘easy’ for me is always relative. Anyway, when I saw the picture Trifecta posted for our photo response this weekend, my mind went home. The only difference here is that the little girl in this picture doesn’t seem to care, or even notice, that the cow is walking down the road. Perhaps she’s in a country where such is common. I always cared. I always hated.

About jesterqueen:
Jessie Powell is the Jester Queen. She likes to tell you about her dog, her kids, her fiction, and her blog, but not necessarily in that order.

Comments

Cow in the road — 35 Comments

  1. Stupid, freakin' cows!! I have never been around them much actually, but I am having an empathy attack. You told the story really well, and I find myself really annoyed at the cows 🙂
    My recent post Trifextra Writing Challenge – Saving Annie

    • You’re not missing much. Mom swears that when I was a baby, I adored cows, used to make her stop the car so I could go pet them. I must have been a really naive baby.

  2. Great story. I was a "city" kid in Omaha. Embarrassingly, I didn't see a cow close up until I was in my late teens.
    My recent post Letter to The Man I Didn’t Know – for Father’s Day

    • I know lots of people who didn’t. I envy them. On the other hand, ‘not-being-a-vegetarian’ is an easy choice for me. I look at cows today and think, “You are my lunch. You are my dinner. You may be my breakfast, too, but I can’t quite decide.”

  3. "Pursued us to safety" – love that! I think I'd rather have mom following behind me 🙂
    My recent post Green Grass and Happiness

    • Very much so. Very very much so. There was always the distinct possibility that she’d run out on me. I never really feared that she’d run me over, but she would gun that engine to try and move the cow along. (The cows never responded.)

  4. great piece, Jessie – but the challenge was to use only 33 words. Hope you can change it to fit the challenge. 🙂

    • oooops – go back and READ the directions, moosie!!!!! my bad. Sorry, Jessie. I am sure you wrote 333 exactly. 🙂 (and it’s STILL a great entry)

      • Haha! It IS a bit unusual for them to choose either 33 OR 333. Given my druthers, I’ll always take the longer route. I am terrible at twitter for this reason. My stories just take longer to tell.

  5. I loved your story. We used to have a donkey and ponies who escaped at the drop of a hat, so I know the sleep-deprived anger!

    • And there’s that initial anxiety…what if the bloody thing didn’t go to the usual spot? What if I DON’T find it in time?

  6. I had a pet cow when I was little. 🙂 I loved this story.

    • Mine was a pet pig! It’s funny how things work when a herd animal becomes a member of the family.

  7. Nicely done as usual, JQ. I love your descriptions.

    • Thanks for the heads up. I might recast the material a little bit, though to make a scene rather than a narrative about the scene.

  8. Very good story told in a friendly voice. I like your use of language like oh-dark-thirty and screamed a 360. Well executed memoir.

    • And it describes her so perfectly. She typically wound up facing the same direction she had come before swinging a (slightly) less ambitious U turn.

  9. Super believable story!!! Well done….love that “gonna get us both killed, cow!!!” 🙂

    • Ohhh yeah. I lived it for years. Hated those things. But hey! Anything that can be mined for writing….

  10. That this story was based in truth makes it all the more endearing. I can easily imagine how much you hated those cows, but this reminded me so much of my grandparents and their own pinked nosed cows.

  11. Loved oh-dark-thirty and you true story about living in the country. No experience with cows here but you brought me to the farm with you. Stupid cows!

  12. My Nana used to say oh-dark-thirty…so you brought me home with this, too. Great work!

    • Oddly, I didn’t learn it until I was an adult, but then I realized I’d been hearing it all my life!

    • Ugh – I always seem to remember having backup of SOME variety. I’d have been a mess doing it alone. As long as I was part of a team, I was competent.

  13. Until the comments, I didn’t realize this was fiction! Very fun. Chasing cows is a great metaphor for writing… BTW I got a Liebster award, and you are one of the lucky ones I’m passing it on to. Do with it what you will… 🙂

    • It’s memoir 🙂 Nonfiction all the way! I think the other comments are talking about how I could go about fictionalizing it.

  14. Thank you so much for linking up to Trifextra this weekend. The challenge this weekend will be judged by the community. So please come back to the Trifecta home page and click the stars next to the three posts you most enjoyed. You only have until Monday at 8 am EST, so hurry!

    • Oh those are lovely pictures! I was expecting more farm life. My favorite was the little girl whose brothers are autistic who had gone to sleep on top of a hill of rocks.

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