No Hot Wire Required

We have a new calf here on the farm. She's a scrapper I tell ya. If you drive along the fence and she happens to be there, she will dart in the opposite direction as if you were coming for her. Then she'll whip around and look at you as if to say, "Can't touch this!"

Her birth was exciting because this is the first calf to actually live past the three day mark in a couple of years.

Calving is funny business.

I was so glad (oh, so glad) to note that the new calf was a "she" and not a "he". If you don't know why...well...let me just say that steer are not born that way. It's not genetics.

Ahem.

I always feel sorry when there is only one calf. It's so lonely. The calf wants to run and play! The other, older cows just want to be left alone to chew the cud. Literally. The calf will make several attempts to engage someone, anyone to play with her. It usually ends up with her getting kicked or nudged aside.

Poor little thing!

But that's farm life. It's either kicking you or nudging you into doing something you don't really want to do. Like fix a fence or move the cows. Farm life is not for the weary of heart or the weak of hand. It's all work. All the time.

It was also a great place to raise the kiddies.

But the kiddies are gone now. Beloved, who has been farming since he could walk (truly, just ask him), has had enough. He takes no joy in the sweetness of a new calf. For him, it all means work after he's returned home from his day job. Bucking hay has lost it's appeal.

Not that it ever really had any.

I know I'll miss the silence and the sound of the wind whispering through the trees. I'll miss the distance between neighbors. I'll miss the long walks down a country road. I'll miss picking blackberries out in the back pasture. I'll miss the warm afternoons sitting on the patio. I'll miss the large parties we've had with friends, where we spilled out into the yard and watched our children play bad mitten and bounce on the trampoline.  There were good times here.

Good times.

Yet, I'm looking forward to a home that doesn't require an electric fence. It will be a place where the buffalo do NOT roam. I think it will be swell.

That's if we ever get to actually move.