Wow, so that title sounds like I’m about to give instructions on how to butcher a cow, huh? Have no fear, I’d be the last one to know how to do that. I eat meat, but I don’t like myself any more because of it. No… in this case, the word meAt is simply a play on words. Cute, huh?
Last week my mother, 2 1/2 year old daughter and I spent 6 days in rural Kentucky. We were visiting my grandmother. She lives in one of those adorable towns with no traffic lights, one church, one bank, one mechanic, one not-so-shiny-and-new grocery store, and an intresting mix of farms, small rinky-dink homes, trailers with cars on blocks out in front of them and beautiful old estates. Everyone knows everyone, and my grandmother, at 92, is both the go-to historian and a kind of local celebrity.
Oops. I’m telling you the way it used to be in Union, Kentucky. Times- they are a’changin. Big business has swept in and changed the landscape quite a bit, obliterating most of the quaint little farms along the way. A traffic light was even added three years ago, at an intersection which has done just fine without one for more than 200 years. Comically, there is a large government-issue sign posted at this intersection now. It reads, “Traffic Signal Light Under Review for Removal”. Turns out, the light probably wasn’t necessary.
So we had a great time as we always do. We took my daughter to Big Bone Lick. No lie. It’s a state park where mammoth bones were once found. Now it is home to about 80 bison. A Bison Sanctuary. This day, the bison were hiding, but most days you can walk manure-lined dirt roads to a shady grove where the bison all hang out and make manure all day. See, ‘Big Bone’ reflects the archeology findings- big bones. The ‘lick’ part refers to the natural saltiness of the area, and the fact that these animals came to lick it. In the mid 1800’s, Big Bone Lick was a mecca for the wealthy, who traveled here in stagecoaches to stay in fancy lodges and ‘take the waters’ of the springs. After about 1870, people must have realized that this place was pretty smelly and muddy, because they stopped visiting and the lodges began to close, one by one. As far as the bison, I don’t know how they came to live there.
My daughter was hankering to meet her some buffalo, and they were nowhere to be found. Never one to disappoint my child, I decided that if we couldn’t meet a buffalo that day, we would at least meet some sort of large animal. Should be easy enough to do, right? So after an hour of playing at the Big Bone Playground (now doesn’t that sound like a lovely place for your kids to spend an afternoon?), we went off in search of a farm animal.
Now I have no problem asking for things when it seems reasonable, and asking farmers if my daughter could meet their animals seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Our first stop was a beautiful horse farm with rolling green hills scattered with frolicking horses. I drove up the long driveway, behind the huge farmhouse to the huge stables. I was greeted by a very persistent little Jack Russell Terrier who was determined to let me know that I was infringing upon his territory. “Bark. Bark. Bark. Bark. Bark. “, he said. After a failed attemp to befriend the chubby little terrier, I made my way into the stable. There were horses everywhere. I was expecting to find a charming, overly-friendly horse farmer. Instead, I soon met up with a very flustered, petite little woman with what I believe was a Swedish accent. She saw me and stopped to see what it was that I wanted. As I explained my mission to her, she kept looking over her shoulder and averting her eyes. I couldn’t help but imagine that I had walked into a freaky novel and she and her buddies were cloning horses or engaging in some other sketchy horse activity just behind the stables. She explained to me that this was ”zee worst timing eever” and that they were “receiving stallions only at theese time and for todays.” In a heavy accent, she told me that this was breeding season and that all of the horses were “velly teensioned.” Okay, so the horses are really focused on getting some action, and apparently this makes it a bad time for a two-year old to meet one. Moving on.
I soon found a dairy farm and pulled in the drive. Nobody was home. My grandmother then explained to me that “they sold all of the cows when the old man took the cancer“. Okay. Moving on.
I found a sign for a cattle farm and again pulled into the driveway. This one looked like a winner. There were about 30 young cows in a pen by the road and they moo’ed in response to our arrival. No one answered at the door to the house, and I soon learned that shouting “Hello, is anyone home?” is enough to cause a minor stampede. I got my daughter out and held her so that she could moo at the cows from about 20 feet away. They weren’t coming any closer, and I knew that she’d want to stand there all day so I decided to put her back in the car and leave these people a note. I quickly scrawled a note and left it in their mailbox. I explained that my little girl wanted to meet a cow, that we would be in town until Wednesday and left my grandmother’s phone number in case they would allow us to return when someone was at home.
Well, call they did. The call came while I was out running an errand, but from the way my mother tells it, the conversation went a little something like this.
cow man “I got yer note in my mailbox about the little girl wantin to meet a cow. Now I’ve afraid we don’t got the right kind of cow. Them cows your granddaughter saw in the corral were some heifers we’s raisin’. We don’t got no milk cows.”
my grandmother,” well, that’s shame. My granddaughter really wanted to meet a cow. Too bad you only have the young heifers.”
cow man, “Well, they’s welcome to come round and look at the heifers anytime if they have an inklin to, but I don’t rightly know of no one who’s got any milk cows.”
my grandmother, “well, that’s alright. Thanks anyway. It was nice of you to telephone us.”
cow man, “My pleasure, ma’am.”
Okay, notice that both people seem to think that ‘young heifers’ don’t qualify as ‘cows’ in the mind of a two-year old. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that to my daughter, a cow is a cow is a cow. They all moo and they all (in her opinion) make milk. Also, I find it odd that my grandmother never got a name from this person, and the person (although welcoming us to stop by anytime) never offered it up.
So I get back from my errand and hear about this and am quite baffled and a bit annoyed. Of course, it’s hard to be annoyed at my 92 year old grandmother for too long. So, the next morning I got my daughter dressed and off we went to meet a cow!
We got to the farm and this time, we didn’t see any cows in the corral out front. We parked and knocked on the door to the farmhouse and there was no answer. As this is rural Kentucky, I quickly consult my internal “Kentucky ettiquette information cache’ and decide that these folks would not think it at all strange for us to help ourselves to a tour of the farm, and hopefully meet a cow in the process.
Well, we did meet a cow. Several of them in fact. And the strangest thing? My daughter never noticed that neither the ‘young heiifers’ nor the older beef cattle we met grazing in the pasture were the ‘wrong’ kind of cows. She loved them! To her, they were black and white and gigantic and mooed and swished their tails and flicked flies off their ears and chewed happily on clover and ‘made honey’ (her version of what was happening when the cows went tee-tee). She was thrilled. So, we fed the cows some clover, watched them take turns ‘making honey’ and mooed at them and she was delighted. We took some pictures. We made some memories. We met a cow, and it was absolutely wonderful.
