You Know You Live in the Country When...

National Cow Week starts today!

I confess I completely forgot about it until ten or twenty minutes ago. Shame on me. Anyway, since it's late, and I have things to do, I'll just copy the cow story that started it all from my post on Embracing Insanity.



The morning began quiet and peaceful like most mornings, and, like all mornings, I was on the computer catching up on all I missed in my virtual social life during the seven-and-a-half hours I slept. In the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of movement out the window, and behold, I saw my pony galloping down the pasture. Indeed, all the horses were agitated, snorting and bobbing their heads as they stared intently, ears pricked, at something in the woods.

I mentioned this to my mom, and we went to the window and peered out to see what the horses were looking at. It was a windy morning, and wind tends to induce friskiness in horses, so I wouldn't have thought much of it except that there was apparently a specific object that had excited them.

And then we saw him--a man, clad in overalls, meandering through the woods at the back of our property.

I was a little creeped out. I'm a rather paranoid person, with an extremely morbid imagination, having watched a few episodes too many of First 48 and American Justice and the like, and I was thinking, This guy's a serial killer. He's a serial killer and what we can't see for the darkness of the forest is the body he's dragging and he's going to see us in the window and come into the house and carve out our bowels slowly with a samurai sword and my dad's going to come home from work to find my small intestine strewn across the house like party streamers.

Yeah. Like I said, I have a really morbid imagination. And then the guy started running. And I was thinking, Okay, no body. He dumped it somewhere and he's running from the police...

He turned and ran toward the street, so we hurried to the front windows and waited for him to appear around the corner. Instead, a herd of cattle came trotting down the road. A moment later, the man followed after them, chasing a few stragglers who cantered back to the group.

We were rolling with laughter. This wasn't a murderer, but a farmer collecting his runaway cattle!

There were ten to fifteen of them, and they turned onto a sidestreet and paused in someone's backyard. The farmer caught his breath a minute, then they continued into the neighborhood and out of sight.

You know you live in the country when a herd of cattle stampedes in front of your house.