Cow Tales Introduction

Cow Tales

Introduction

Life sure is interesting.  We spend our childhood years wondering what we will be when we grow up.  We long to be older, impatiently waiting for school, then high school, then yearning for the day when we can drive a car, graduate and go to college or get a job, marry a beautiful woman, have a family, travel.  We have no idea how things are going to turn out, but if we think about it long enough, it makes us feel sort of confused and frightened.  We wonder what we’ll be doing ten years down the road; twenty years; thirty years.  Will we be married?  Will we have children?  Will we have money?  Where will we live? What will our occupation be?  

By the time mid-life rolls around, all those questions have been answered.  For many of us the path we walked was very different from anything we imagined.  Yet on the other hand, the path may have been much like we wanted, because we have choices.  Without thinking about it, we are always looking ahead to the next phase in life.  From childhood on, it doesn’t change.  We still wonder - ten years from now - what will we be doing?  Where will we be?

Having said that; it also does us good to look back sometimes and reflect.   What should we have done differently?  What did we do that we are very thankful for?  

As I look back on all the years of my life experiences, I can think of some pretty standout periods that I wouldn’t change for the world.  First were the young years, spent on our small family farm on the banks of the Ottawa River – better known as ”Hog Crick” to the locals.  It was a wonderful place to enter the world and to be educated in all things important.  Then, there were the family moves that weren’t easy, but added experience and character.  The teen years were a time of trying to figure out who I was and what in the world the next steps in life would be.

At the young age of twenty I married my high school sweetheart, and we began our own family.  For the next ten years we were a young growing family with three kids – too busy - and settling too soon into a steady cycle of daily doldrums.   Get out of bed, go to work, come home, play with the kids, work around the house, juggle the budget, back to bed for the night.  Do it all over again the next day.  Same job, same people, same everything.  Not that there is anything wrong with that - it is a wonderful blessing to have those things - but my childhood dreams of exploring, pioneering, living off the land, and conquering the vast unknown, were still nagging at me, and it was a frustrating feeling, thinking I was locked in.  So I walked away from my programming job of ten years and began working in a welding shop, because I needed change.  There I was paid to learn the art of welding.  We repaired farm equipment for the most part.  It was an interesting job, and the experience was about to come in very handy - I just didn’t know it yet. Within a year of that change, we learned of another opportunity, and took the next step, moving to a dairy farm far from home

Perhaps it’s a foolish thing to share the events of many years past, because our memory has a way of making things bigger than life.  On the other hand, time gives us a chance to let the important memories and lessons rise to the surface, and remain there as old friends that we can revisit as often as we wish.

The events recorded here are snapshots of our family’s experience – moving from our Amish/Mennonite community in Northern Ohio to the Appalachian portion of Southern Ohio - from neatly manicured lawns and gardens in rolling Wayne County to a ruggedly hilly place.

After many years of reminiscing, I’m compelled by my own need to relive those days and write about the experiences.  Those were some of the best days of our lives, and if only for my own enjoyment, I write these stories as they happened.  For the sake of my friends I have excluded last names.  Every detail is true as I remember it.  The only subjective material is the recounting of the conversations.  In some cases, I can’t remember everything that was spoken word for word, but make every attempt to capture the essence those exchanges.

As for a title, I originally planned to call this series, “Cow Tails,” because of how appropriate it would be.  So much of a herdsman’s time is spent at the back end of a cow - calving, inseminating, milking, medicating, and cleaning up the stuff that comes from there.  It’s earthy, I know, but true.  Eventually the title morphed into “Cow Tales – A Greenhorn Goes Farming.”

Be prepared to hear it the way we experienced it.  If you think farm life is all about cute little calves bouncing around in the pasture, and perfectly clean cows on lush green meadows, mooing softly as they lay calmly chewing their cuds, think again.  This happens sometimes, but the story is much different most of the time.

So get dressed in your everyday clothes, pull on your rubber boots, and come along with a greenhorn who learned some important life-lessons on a dairy farm in Southern Ohio.

We dedicate these stories to Jay and Donna, Matt and Noreen, Lisa, Jim and Ann, Phil and Ellen, and the many friends we still have in Gallia County.