Friday, February 9, 2007

How I came to be a Cowgirl


At the request of Beemoosie, I shall take a slight detour from the two Storm girls outside and amuse you...confuse you?...with the tail tale of how I became a real cowgirl.


You see, I am the granddaughter of dairy farmers. On Sunday mornings my parents would get my sister and I up and haul our lazy bed heads off to church. After that, we'd come home and clean the house. And after that we'd drive to Grandma and Grandpa's house where I would desert my family and head straight for the big red barn full of farmgirl wanna-be fantasies. I'd catch wild kittens and rope day old calves with bailing twine (then wonder how in the world I was going to get it off of them!) I'd climb the ladder to the hay mow and survey the world around me; hills and trees and mountains as far as the eye could see. And dairy cows...lots and lots of dairy cows.
When 4:00 rolled around, it was time for milking. That meant Grandpa, Uncle Larry and myself would walk down the road to the summer pasture and gather up the cows. This was back in the day when a traffic jam in this county meant milking time, as all the farmer's walked their cows from pasture to barn and back again.
I, however, was blessed with a ride back to the barn. Grandpa would call up the herd, then lift me up onto the back of one of his trusted Bossies for the journey back home. And that's where I learned to ride; bareback, astride a Guernsey milk cow. So you see, even if I'd never learned to ride a horse, I would always have been my Grandpa's little cowgirl!


No comments: