The Meaning of Cows

This is how I feel today. Like a hefty old farmer pulling an extra-heavy load when the damn cow oughta be walking by herself. Crimenies. Some cows are too lazy for words.

Not sure what cows mean to me subconsciously and I should give contemplative thought to the meaning of cows since my last post featured a Heifer spry enough to jump over the moon. I have files of cows on Photobucket because cows make me feel good and maybe that’s because I won a cow-milking contest once. Dad told me last week that his mother could out milk the farm boys with her left hand while baking whole wheat bread with the other.

No, you didn’t really want to eat my grandmother’s bread. Anything that wasn’t breathing went into the dough. “Gave it substance”, or so she said. Grand kids used to whisper around the table about which leftovers we could spy in Grandmother’s bread and ya honestly don’t want me to explain further. Let’s just say it was strange eating toasted spaghetti.

To be honest, I didn’t ‘win’ the cow-milking contest. Cow-milking was only part of the contest. The main challenge was proving your worth in the kitchen where my deliciously perfect cherry pie outdid my competitors. I hear tell judges were flabbergasted by my sour yet sweet filling with cherries so plump they made a grown man’s eyes water. My secret ingredient was Western Family-in-a-can which wasn’t against the rules ‘cuz I checked before buying two. They didn’t ask, I didn’t tell, and that evening I was crowned the FFA Queen (Future Farmers of America). It was a heady night for a farm girl, feeling my oats and all. And I figured once the word got out that my pie was to die for and my milking skills good enough, I’d never lack for weekend dates or proms. My future was secure.

Well now, that took fifteen minutes to write. My good friend Louise prioritizes thirty minutes and writes on her blog every single morning (unless her Internet service is down). I can’t imagine it.

I think there are real writers in this world as in naturally born-to-write; and there are writers who are writers by nurture as in learn-to-write. And there are some of us who are imbued with a little bit of both. So when a horrible, absolutely traumatic thing happened, my silent inner ‘writer’ gene was turned on like psychologists say happens with bipolar disorder. You’ve got it but you don’t know you’ve got it until something terrible happens and you do.

Many of my fellow bloggers say they never realized they could write until they felt so silenced by the narcissistic experience that writing saved their sanity. We’re compelled to express ourselves that much I know for sure. And since friends and family don’t wanna hear about our trauma more than three times or five if they’re generous, writing connects us to others and to ourselves. It’s therapeutic. In fact, what you write doesn’t even have to make sense when you write it. Those are the best ‘journalings’ because at some point, maybe that afternoon when your hands are immersed in pastry dough and Western Family pie filling is sitting on the counter, you’ll figure out why you were writing about cows and the sudden realization will make you smile.

Hugs,

CZ