Let me just start out by saying I am not a night person. I have an active imagination and that,combined with darkness, is no good for a person doing chores and hearing strange noises. So I have made it my hard and fast rule to be done with chores and in the house before nightfall. Even if that means 3:00 p.m.in the wintertime. After all, I have dinner to make….
Except during calving season. It must be something about once a mom, always a mom, because when those little doe-eyed babies hit the ground, out comes my supermom cape and nothing is going to get to that little calf without first going through its momma or its surrogate supermom, which, of course, is me. After all, along with my cape I also have thumbs, which would allow me to open boxes of ammunition or, in this case, bring out Curtis’ Secret Weapon.
For a little background information, when I was a kid, my dad once caught me not picking up a nail or some similar act of prevention for future pitfalls. He took the opportunity to tell me about a time when he was a boy on the baseball team and he had rounded the bases and noticed a nail sticking up. However, he chose not to do anything about it and the next kid coming around the bases was injured by that nail as a result. An ounce of prevention…. A few years, decades maybe, later, Dad confessed that he must have made up that story because he was never on a baseball team.
Nevertheless, the story has its desired effect because, to this day, when I am running, I will pick up any nail, screw, chunk of metal that I see on the road so it doesn’t land in someone’s tire or in some unlucky runner’s foot coming up behind me. Who knows how many flat tires and hospital visits my dad has saved!
At any rate, that same lesson carries over to calving season. Last night while sleeping soundly, my internal mom alarm goes off when I am woke by the gentle “hmmmmooo” that cows do when calling their calves. It is not a full out “MOOOOOO!,” but a quiet, almost humming reassuring moo. Only a mother could have heard that. The proof was Curtis lying sound asleep beside me oblivious to the fact that there is a lost baby out in the dark where spooky critters with long fangs stalk any sweet, defenseless babies.
As I laid there in bed, considering my options of staying in the nice warm covers and denying ever hearing any commotion outside or doing the right thing, the nail lesson immediately popped into my head. There would be no living with myself if I had stayed in bed. While sitting on the edge of the bed putting on my socks and a sweatshirt, I tried to make as much movement as possible in hopes of waking Curtis up. Just short of jumping up and down in the middle of the bed, he amazingly only managed to emit a little“chkxsnort” and went back to quietly snoring.
At almost 48 years old, I figured it was time to get my big-girl panties on and go face the dark. First, I fumbled my way through the house in the dark through the kitchen. On the edge of the kitchen before going into the mudroom, there was a stash of “special” tools that Curtis liked to keep ready for emergencies. This little selection of items had kind of oozed over from the mudroom, where they should go, into the one cabinet area of the kitchen. This is where he kept several of his 007 devices. Usually, I cannot get too close to these. On the rare occasions when they come out, a look comes over his face that can only be described as, well like the look a 7 -year-old boy gets when he is hunting his big brother with his BB gun. His eyes glaze over, his tongue juts out the side of his mouth and he starts to tip toe.
But tonight, his eyes had a different kind of glaze, so it was my turn. I reached for the Weapon, the Ryobi Xenon High Beam 6000. This was every little boy’s, er, I mean cattleman’s best friend. I have heard that there are bigger spotlights but I think a 747 jumbo jet is attached to them.
I clicked the energizer battery, the one required with high-power hand tools, together with the Weapon and worked my way through the living room in the dark to the back door to get to the porch. Halfway there, it dawned on me that I had better make sure the battery I grabbed was charged so I squeezed on the trigger. At that moment, the house lit up like a chunk of the sun had been shoved into a mason jar. My once large pupils had instantaneously been insulted and were working their way to pinholes but couldn’t get there fast enough. I was blind. Great. Curtis is deaf and now I’m blind. I think there was a story like that once?
Note to self, “That was stupid.” Regaining my feeling my way through the dark skills, I made it to the door and stepped out into more darkness. Sensations flooded into my head. There was wind that I had not heard from inside. The neighbor is going to have kittens in a few weeks judging by the music those cats were making. The frogs were noisy and “hmmmmooo,” could still be heard. But my heart was not pounding in my chest and there was no fear of getting harmed, just fear of losing a calf. I love my supermom cape!
This time, I raised the Secret Weapon up with both hands and pointed it out towards the pasture. Instantly I could make out Snort, our horse with an attitude, as she looked up at me as if to say, “Really lady?!!!” I scanned the outer pasture where the pairs were and saw multiple pairs of eyes looking up at me from an obvious laying position. Nohmmmmooo out there. Then I scanned the other half of our front pasture where there were three “heavy” cows still waiting to have their babies and one first-calf heifer who had just calved that morning. “Hmmmmooo,” I heard and saw a cow standing and looking for her calf. I lit up the fences and couldn’t see what might be a calf on the other side. But that new momma must have seen something because she went running over to the side of another cow where I couldn’t see and the hmmmmooo stopped. I have to assume her calf had made its way over to another big, warm body to sleep by. Mystery solved.
To fully enjoy the moment and the power of the Secret Weapon, I continued to scan the pastures. I looked for the cats, who were obviously enjoying the evening (another batch of kittens brewing…) I saw another cat running up the lane. I saw the neighbors across the road had left the Wall Street Journal out on his kitchen table, oh! OOPS! Probably not the best place to shine the equivalence of a lighthouse in a hand-held device at 1:30 in the morning.
That was certainly a good time to get back in the house. They would think it was Curtis anyway. No one gets to handle the Secret Weapon after all! I fumbled my way back to the Secret Weapon stash in the cowboy cave and put things back where they should be. This time I went to bed trying not to wake Curtis up.
The night was quiet again. All is well. Looks like I am still picking up nails. And I would do it all again.
