Cow-boy

I never said I was a farm girl. I lived in the country for a while as a young kid, and I liked climbing trees and playing in the creek and doing the kind of things that some girls wouldn’t. But a farm girl I am not.

My husband, on the other hand, was born in a barn. Well, almost. He was actually raised, the majority of his life, on or near his family’s dairy farm. He worked in the barn and helped milk the cows and did the FFA thing-the whole nine yards. It wasn’t until we’d been married many years that I discovered by chance that his favorite animal is a cow. A cow? Seriously?

I decided I wouldn’t let that kind of information sneak up on me again. I figured if I was going to raise a couple of boys, I wanted to know up front what their tendencies were going to be, at least regarding the world of animals. So I started paying attention and doing my part to sway them to my way of thinking.

We’ve always had dogs, since the boys have been around. Our first dog was a give away and Randy never gave her much thought, other than to name her sweet “Lucille” after the show-stopping character in his favorite movie Cool Hand Luke. But after her untimely death and my near devastation, it was his idea to get our second pet, Bessie, a registered yellow Labrador retriever. (For some reason, being registered seemed to make her more desirable to my bovine loving hubby.)

We loved her to death, but her playful nature demanded that she be presented with a playmate. And that’s when we got Shelby, the slobbering, digging, a little on the healthy side Lab that was a bit more of a snowball than her sis.

When the boys came along, the dogs were all they knew. Oh, there was a cat or two that used to hang around the place. We’d feed them so they’d stay and chase off the mice, but I would certainly never call them pets. But of course kids are curious; they want to see and touch and hold everything that intrigues them, so they had to learn the hard way that cats have claws and hissing is what they do when you pull too hard on their tails.

I figured with incidents like this, (and subliminal messages about Mad Cow Disease piped through their bedrooms while they slept) it would be a definite that they’d take after their mom and be dog-lovers for life, forget those smelly ole fly-magnets that could kill you in an instant if they ever had the want to.

However, and to my dismay, I think my oldest son could be the first to prove me wrong. It never fails, on trips to Mamaw and Papaw’s, he is the first one to rush out to the barn and beg to be given a chore to help Uncle Billy with the milking. Whether he’s taste-testing the feed, or just crouching down to get a boy’s-eye-view of the automatic milkers, he seems right at home in the middle of all that smelly mess.

And he has no qualms about drinking the fresh milk right out of the tank. He’s not afraid to let the calves eat out of his hand, and when it’s time to go home, he loves to get up on the stool in the kitchen and watch that rich, milky cream turn to butter.

It’s strange how some things just seem to come ingrained in our children. Very seldom do we get to that milk barn, and it is definitely the only time we are near or around cattle, but Cooper is right at home, every time. Just like his dad.

Brisco’s still a bit small to be too excited about a huge ole heifer, so maybe there’s hope that he will be a dog lover like me. I don’t know, though. Seems to me “dog-boy” has a little less appeal than “cow-boy”. Maybe I’ll concede the loss and give in…just this once.

And that’s All in a day’s work!