Calling The Cow Home

Apparently the time changed on us a couple of weeks ago. But do you know who doesn’t get the memo on such events? Livestock. Not a single rooster has heeded the new schedule, not a single goat, and certainly not Miss Mabel.

I’m not even that sure that we, as a family, have fully embraced this seemingly arbitrary event. Making that shift proves complicated when the two sets of beings your day often revolves around – animals and children – couldn’t possibly care less about the concept of Daylight Savings Time. So, like most years, we are falling into earlier mornings and later nights and a whole lot of time outside.

But this late milking thing means one evening we all got to go out and call Mabel in for milking. Joshie, Ruthie, and I watched from the pasture fence as Daddy and the boys enticed her to the barn with alfalfa cubes. As usual, Annabelle was somewhere in the action.

The Mabel-Stanley saga continued as separating these two through a barbed wire fence meant he found one way or another to nurse for at least a week. Thankfully the Lord brought us to a solution to that which, after many other tactics, has proven successful.

So at the end of a day of these two bellowing back and forth at each other through the fence, she ends up in the barn… and so do a lot of the rest of us. The three oldest children have made herding goats from the other pasture and into the barn for the night to look like some goat version of running with the bulls.

And then Daddy brings Mabel in and does the milking. Most nights I am frantically trying to finish up the day’s dishes or get a cheese going before the milk comes in and we strain it into gallon and half-gallon jars. And the day ends late, according to some clocks, but that doesn’t seem to bother Mabel one bit.