‘Til the Cows Come Home…
“We’re taking the cows to auction Monday.”
“What?!”
Mom’s voice kept going, but I didn’t hear her. The price of hay, the work involved – all sensible reasons to sell what has become a very small herd, but I still feel crushed. I feel like that door that I’ve been struggling to keep cracked open has slammed shut, and I’m left outside, watching the wind swirl dust-eddies over a beloved landscape and turning my back on an old, sacred place in my rough-and-tumble heart.
I’m a cowgirl, a ranch girl, a wide-open-spaces girl. Sometimes it’s harder to see, hiding in my shorts and flip-flops and love of Espresso and tanning. I think I had this crazy idea that I still had a way back home, back to dust on my jeans and the familiar scents of alfalfa and old leather – if only everything stayed the same. But my horses were gone last summer, and now that our tiny cow herd is headed out as well, I feel… adrift.
It’s not so much these cows, in particular, that breaks my heart. While several of them had long and illustrious 4-H careers, and I will definitely miss the loppy-jawed cud-chewing and soft, pettable hair and big brown eyes of my personal favorite – I’m enough of a country girl to know that they are livestock, here for our use and stewardship, and it’s only right and sensible that we let them go when common-sense dictates.
What bothers me is the proverbial slamming of the cracked-open door. The realization that I’ve made choices and built a life, and it has nothing to do with ranches and horses and cows and old leather. Now I know that there’s not some Black Cowboy of Doom who’s now relegated me the white-bread boredom of Surburbia, just because my folks finally sold off the last of the cows. But there’s still a little dreamer in me, who fears the fencing in of the free land and the selling of the herds, who relishes long, dusty summer days and perfect starry winter nights, navigated through on corral poles, with long talks, and on horseback, tearing up mountain trails.
I’ll miss them, our little herd. I’ll miss knowing that they’re there, with their misty breath on winter mornings and their tiny calves in the spring. But then again, life has to go on… and that’s what second chances are for.
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