Milk Cows

A milk cow was a family necessity back in the day. Here are three little stories featuring a milk cow.

One of my great-grandmothers grew up in the late 1800's in a hilly wooded area of southeast Missouri. The nearest neighbor with children her age lived over the hill. When she was a young girl the livestock ranged freely. In the mornings, after milking the cow, her father turned it out to graze on whatever it could find to eat. In the late afternoon it moseyed back to the barn because it wanted to be milked again. Other families' livestock often mixed with theirs. She and her girlfriend over the hill would leave notes to one another tied to the cow's horns. Telephone. Telegraph. Tell-a-cow.

There was nothing great about the Great Depression. Just ask anyone who lived through it. My mother's uncle tells about his widowed mother raising six kids during the Depression. Everyone had a few chickens and grew large gardens to survive. In their small town, only one family remained who maintained a milk cow. Much like the above scenario, the cow was milked in the morning then released to graze at the edge of town. On the west side of this little burg was a deep gully. In the afternoon it was the prefect spot to take a pail and lead the cow out of sight to be milked. My great-uncle said half the town stole milk from that cow, but not so much that she wouldn't give any milk at all when she went back to the owner's barn for the evening milking.

I once interviewed an elderly lady whose family homesteaded near me. She and her brothers were mere youngsters when the family pulled up stakes back east and trekked to central Kansas in the early 1880's. By that time the buffalo herds had been wiped out and the wind-swept prairie was littered with their bones. One of the jobs given to the children was to collect the sun-bleached bones and pile them in the buckboard wagon. When the wagon was full, her father would make the two day round trip to the nearest railhead at Larned to sell them. From there they were loaded on rail cars and shipped to eastern states to be ground into fertilizer. 
While father was away, the bored, or perhaps liberated, children devised their own entertainment. Finding an unused board, the boys thought it was about the right size to slide around on if only they had some way to pull it. Using their imagination and the few resources available, they tied a length of wire around the middle of the board and the other end to the cow's tail. One must assume they made certain the wire was long enough to keep the cow from kicking them in the head.
After solemnly promising her brothers she wouldn't tell their father, or mother, the fun commenced. She said they were having a pretty good time taking turns sitting on the board, taking a cow-powered ride around the farmstead. Until...  The front of the board snagged on something in the ground. Her brother rolled off at the sudden stop but was unharmed. However...  The sudden stop produced an opposite and equal reaction when their milk cow kept going. The end of her tail was jerked off.
No amount of threats or coercion could keep this disaster hidden from their father. The punishment? Follow the cow around all summer and keep the flies away.

Nothing ever happens at my house.

I've lived in the same sparsely populated rural neighborhood for over 40 years. Depending on whether you go up the road or down the road, it is five miles to the next farmhouse. Neither of those two families have any reason to drive past my house. About the only people besides the mail lady who use our road are other farmers checking on a field in the vicinity. I see as many tractors as I do pickup trucks. An abandoned farmstead lies approximately one and a half miles southeast from my house as the crow flies. The owners moved away about 20 years ago. It is surrounded by trees and apparently very inviting to dopers who want to get out of the weather while they cook their meth.

The first time I heard that it had been raided (about eighteen years ago) was in the context of a local character who thought the Feds were after him for drinking and driving. When he saw a string of official looking cars bearing down on him, he had visions of being incarcerated for open container, driving under the influence, possibly expired tags and no drivers' license. He was just a good ol' boy taking a leisurely Sunday morning drive while he drank a six-pack of Bud. The guys in the white space suits (bio-hazard personal protective clothing) paid no attention as he threw his beer in the ditch and scrambled for some chewing gum to disguise his breath. 

We heard that the woodwork of the old house was permeated with highly flammable residue from the illegal meth kitchen. Curious neighbors were warned to stay away. Don't light a match!

 A different neighbor who lived off thataway discovered evidence of an outdoor meth lab in his pasture.

In the meantime, crystal meth labs punctuated the evening news. Over-the-counter cold and diet medications containing Ephedrine or Pseudoephedrine were ordered to be kept under lock and key the same as prescription drugs. Clerks at convenience stores received instructions to never sell more than 2 packets to a customer and to keep an eye out for strings of customers coming in to purchase the same product. Especially if they had rotted teeth.

During the same time frame, two counties north of me, hard-to-track mobile meth labs climbed to the top of the national statistical charts. Law abiding folks in the area were looking askance at vans with Barton County plates.

Nearly two years passed from the first time we heard about the meth house in the neighborhood. One evening we answered the phone and it was the sheriff telling us not to open the door to strangers. Law enforcement had raided the house again and a suspect took off on foot. The first thing we did was turn on all outdoor and perimeter lights and turn off all indoor lights. We wanted to be able to see out while no one else could see in. When the coon dogs started barking our daughter freaked out.

We called the sheriff back and he sent a deputy who was there within minutes. He and my husband, both armed, investigated the garage, chicken house and other outbuildings. Finding nothing suspicious, they decided our dogs could probably hear or smell the activity taking place at the raid. A pair of dogs had been brought in to track the suspect. Unfortunately, they lost the scent after a few hundred yards. My husband told them anyone who has ever been coon hunting would know the dogs are useless as soon as the temperature hits dew point.

In the meantime, they were waiting for the airplane with infrared detection equipment. When it arrived we could hear it for hours as it searched the area for the escapee. Eventually, we learned that the suspect was apprehended the next day. He had run twelve miles to town. What good practice for a half marathon.

Life settled down. Every once in a while we noticed a vehicle, a white van, stopped in the road south of our house. Maybe it belonged to a land owner. Maybe our road had turned into lovers' lane. Whoever was in it, they weren't bothering us. One day my husband noticed the plain vanilla van had Barton County plates. Recalling the news about all the mobile meth labs, he called in a report to our county sheriff's office.

The next day all the deputies were laughing about the suspicious van. We weren't the butt of the jokes though. Another agency in Barton County drives unmarked vehicles. This outfit sent an agent to keep an eye on the meth house, but he was to remain inconspicuous. Our sheriff was riled that the KBI was conducting a covert operation in his county. He was amused that a local citizen had turned them in for suspicious behavior.

No, nothing ever happens at my house.

Daddy Was Watching Her

My daughter loves cats. She has since she was a toddler.

Honestly, I don't remember how this story starts. My minds' eye doesn't see what I was doing or where her older brother was. He is strangely absent. This particular memory starts and ends with my husband 'keeping an eye on' our daughter while I did something in the house.

About twenty minutes into his voluntary duties, my mom 6th sense told me to go look in the garage and see how he and the three-year-old were doing. They were still alive. He was fiddling with something mechanical and she was sitting on the floor against the wall singing. On the garage floor, where it wouldn't have surprised me to see spiders. The garage floor, which truly wasn't clean enough to sit on. The garage floor, where I saw something that definitely didn't belong.

"Hey! I thought you said you'd watch her."  I whisper/hissed at him.

"Everything's fine," he insisted. "She's just sitting there singing to the kittens."

"Yeah, you're right. She's singing to them." I grabbed his arm and forced his full attention toward his adorable daughter. "Did you not notice that she has broken the necks of all four of them?"

I went over to her and gently removed a limp body from her tight little fists and placed it with the other three unfortunate kittens.

She had made up a lullaby to sing to her kitties. Since they needed to be rocked to sleep while she sang, she had taken them one at a time in a death grip about the neck and swung them back and forth.

How do you explain to a three-year-old that the kitties aren't going to wake up and play?

We took the kittens and a shovel into the trees and had a solemn cat funeral. We had a lesson about stroking kitties and not squeezing them so hard. We talked about never picking an animal up by the neck.

I would have been mad at my husband, but I have to confess that once when I thought she and her brother were playing nicely together in the yard, the mayhem led to my daughter getting eleven stitches.

Parenting is a learn as you go process. What a lot there was to learn.

Like the time I told the eye doctor my son didn't need shatterproof lenses.

It was a dark and stormy night....

It was a dark and stormy night...  What a trite phrase. It calls to mind campy old movies featuring fearful, defenseless women trapped in a spooky house while the thunder crashes and the knife-wielding murderer slashes.

When I was in high school, I worked part-time at the same restaurant as my mother. It was a pretty good setup because we only needed one vehicle to get back and forth. On a Saturday night, we headed home from the regular 5-9 shift. It was probably 9:30 by the time we left, having everything cleaned up and put away leaving the restaurant ready for the breakfast crowd. 

A fierce storm has blown up, and we drive with extra caution as the wind buffets the car and horizontal sheets of rain beckon us to follow them off the road. At home, the rain has intensified. 

We are faced with a 30-yard dash through the deluge. This involves a Herculean leap over a large puddle where water pools on the slab in front of the garage because over time the cement has settled some. Up one shallow step, through the gate, and a mad race up the sidewalk under wildly whipping tree limbs while nonstop lightning illuminates our path. The biggest challenge is right before the steps up to the door. During my entire life, the gutter has never had a downspout attached to it. The opening is at the corner of the house and water pours out of it onto the sidewalk. Even in a gentle rain a lot of water rolls off the roof. On this night, the cataract resembles the release of floodgates at a reservoir.

I splash behind the curtain of water, which is shooting clear across the walkway. Water is two or three inches deep because it can't flow away from the house as fast as it is gushing out of the gutter. Efforts to avoid puddles have been in vain as cold water floods my shoes. I take the steps in one stride and yank the door open. Mom is right behind me with her head down, clutching her purse and the strings of a plastic rain bonnet protecting her hairdo. Up two more steps and into the kitchen where we stand dripping on the spotless linoleum.

Mom kicks out of her orthopedic support shoes that waitresses and nurses everywhere wear while I toe my soggy white tennies off.  Shivering, we blot our faces and arms on kitchen hand towels, and I help Mom with her zipper as she shrugs out of her sodden uniform. I am reaching behind my back for my own zipper when

BANG BANG BANG.

Someone, disregarding the torrential downpour, is beating on the outer storm door.

Mere seconds have passed since we got out of the car. Our driveway is half a mile long. There were no headlights behind us. No strange vehicles lurked in the circle turn-around in front of the garage. I glance out the window over the sink trying to spy another car, but it's raining so hard I can't even see the garage.

Mom is in her slip and pantyhose, and I read headlines of murdered women in her expression. Thoughts of the Clutter family streak through my mind. A shriek escapes my lips before she shushes me.

Not only is a storm raging; we are also all alone. My father and brother left earlier in the day for a weekend fishing/camping trip. Her horrified expression scares me more than the racket outside. Lightning, followed by another deafening clap of thunder that rattles the windows, reveals two indistinct shapes on the steps. The kitchen wall facing the door is all windows, and my first instinct is to turn off the light so whoever is out there can't see in. Adrenaline surges through my veins as my body prepares to defend itself.

Pasting on an expression that says whatever is out there should be more afraid of her than she is of it, Mom flicks the switch for the outdoor light and yanks the kitchen door open just in time to witness my dad and brother trying to squeeze through the storm door at the same time.

"I knew it was you!" she yells at Dad as he elbows onto the landing in front of my little brother and kicks off his boots. "No self-respecting burglar or rapist would have knocked on the door."

Turtle Tank

When you were a kid, did you have a critter collection?  Did you catch lightning bugs and put them in a jar?  Or capture baby bunnies and try to keep them alive?  Ours were always dead the next morning.  Something about the shock and trauma of being caught and handled.  Did you fill a bucket with toads?

Our house is not at our farm.  We were lucky to find a habitable dwelling in the country, much less one that was handy to where we worked. That being said, if we needed an item at our house, it was a good bet we could come up with something at the farm and drag it home with us. That is how we got a small stock tank in which to keep the kids’ menagerie.

It was about 4 feet across, and if you propped one side up on a couple of bricks, you could have a pond on one side and dry habitat on the other. A maple tree provided plenty of shade.

My kids were always on the lookout for box turtles. The best place to find them was when they crawled across the country roads.

“Stop the car, Mom!  Can you get that turtle for us?”

One must assume the average person knows why you would never, ever bring a turtle inside a vehicle. If we were close enough to the house, good ol’ mom would apprehend said turtle, roll down the drivers’ side window and proceed to the hacienda holding the creature as far from the car as her arm would reach. Just in case you haven't ever held a wild turtle, they STINK! The turtle itself probably doesn't reek. Its self-defense mechanism is to emit a foul smelling urine that seeps into your hands and takes two or three days to wash off. The safest way to pick them up is from the top and hold the side edges of their shells. Keep your hands away from the tail!

Into the tank it went, while said youngsters raided the refrigerator for pieces of lettuce or carrot tops. It was nothing unusual to have three or four turtles in the tank during the summer. The kids diligently caught hop toads and added them to the menagerie, but they kept jumping out. This mom didn’t know toads could jump that high. Did you know toads also pee in reaction to being picked up? Their urine doesn't smell so bad, although I think that's why dogs don't bother them after one experience. It must taste terrible.

One day, about this time of year, I was rotor-tilling the garden plot with the Massey-Ferguson in preparation for spring planting.  It was cool and the toads were still burrowed in.  I unearthed one and hollered for the kids to come and get it.  My four-year-old daughter came running and took the new find to the tank.

Suddenly, I could hear her screaming over the noise of the rotor-tiller.  

What the heck?  Did a wasp sting her?

By the time I ran to the tank, not more than 20 yards away, the toad was in pieces and my innocent daughter was in total melt-down. Four turtles equal four toad limbs to tear off. Did I forget to remind the kids to feed their turtles? 

The carnivorous turtles were released and the stock tank returned to the farm where we never used it to corral wild animals again.

As God is my witness, I thought all those other toads jumped out.