What is it about cows, anyway?

What is it about cows, anyway?
Something about their lumbering grace
Their propensity for grazing on the
side of hills, or just outside the fence.
Their limpid curiosity, or the hint of feistiness displayed
in a bit of a buck and a running start
to where?
Another patch of grass. The watering hole.

Is it a barnyard full of pungent muck?
Is it the way their great tongues would deftly scrape up the
chop my dad laid out for them
on the flatbed trailer in wintertime?
Is it tiny calves riding in the
passenger seat to the vet in Ogema,
with me in the middle?

Is it old Bossy and Lulabelle (a hard milker),
cows I never knew, but they lived on the farm before I did,
they called the same view home and
they were acquainted with my dad
long before I was ever thought of,
and I feel like I know them personally?
Their names live on at the farm, even with the barn long since burned down.
Their spirits must be here too, still.

Not our Bossy, this is another Boss, a Jersey from Arvid’s place, one of the last known milk cows within a 50 mile radius.

Is it that dairy barn in northern Iceland? Full of those Viking cows all
jostling together in an overwhelming mix of manure,
clattering hooves,bellows, and improbably, gallons and gallons of
rich, white milk that made the best
butter and cheese I’ve ever tasted?

Is it that time I drove into Alberta on the back roads,
nothing but me, the open graze land, the cattle, and the road?
Was it that time I was rambling (with permission) through
a badlands pasture when some skittish Black Angus steer
decided to spook and set the whole herd thundering away,
so that I’m sure I felt the ground shake?

Is it that time in rural eastern Quebec,
close to the border with New Brunswick
when traffic on the highway was halted while
some naughty runaway cattle were chased back home?
Or how about that time south of Val Marie when I had to slow
to a crawl behind about fifty head, two ranchers on ATVs
and their Border Collie (who rode on the ATV)?

One of Stacy’s calves.

Is it all the times I went with Dad, sometimes just me and him,
other times Janelle and Mom crammed into the
maroon Ford pickup too, up to old Joe’s pasture
to check on the cattle, when it always seemed to be
the golden hour and we bumped our heads on the roof of the truck
as it rumbled and crawled over those southern hills?

Is it how when I was a little girl they were always there,
part of my life and the landscape as much as the sun or stars?
Is it because they were the “moos,” as Janelle called them,
and you could hear them day and night
going about their lives, just out there in the barnyard
(still called that even though the barn was 15 years burned?)

A Hereford bull somewhere in the Big Muddy, seemingly relaxed.

Is it that vague memory I have of a golden morning years ago
before school when some neighbours did a roundup and the cows
went galloping past the farm, down the road and in the ditches,
urged on by horses and riders wearing cowboy hats?
(that really happened, didn’t it? Or was it a dream?)

Is it Charlie, the black and white Holstein,
or Friendly, the good-tempered Charolais,
or perhaps all those curly forelocked red-coated Herefords,
or the calves I named after my cousins,
that made up our moteley herd?

I don’t know what it is about cows, but there’s just something, isn’t there?

A well-tended herd with a well-developed capacity for curiosity,