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.