Let’s face it. I’m a country girl and quite fascinated by these big old lugsome creatures. (Is lugsome a word? It should be.) Anyway … as a young girl growing up in Hancock County Georgia, I was always amazed by cows and their, well, lack-of-brightness.

Case in point. On our way to my school, we passed this beautiful green field with a gigantic red barn in the center of it. It belonged to Mr. McCroskie, a friend of my fathers.

Now, in this field were these beautiful brown cows. Now I don’t know the different types of cows, but these were big and brown and were always sort of standing around as if they were waiting for something to happen … like a circus, or maybe for one of them to get up and dance on their hind legs or something. I don’t know … they just always seemed as if something were ABOUT to happen and they didn’t want to miss it.

So one morning we drove to school and it was pouring rain. Sure enough, when we got to the pasture with the big red barn with the door flung open wide …. there were those cows, standing around the barn looking at it as if it were something marvelous. I was thinking all the while, “why don’t they just go inside and get out of the rain”? But Dad said that cows are so polite they’re letting the other ones go first.

By the way, when we came BACK by there after school, it was STILL raining and the cows were STILL being polite.

Anyway … when I was about twelve or thirteen, my cousins Ramona, Dennis, Jan and I all decided to walk to the store for Coca Colas in the little bottles and a Go-Go Bar (a shingle of gingerbread with pink icing on top). While at the store, it began thundering and lightening. We decided to cut across Mr. McCroskies pasture since we didn’t see any cows and assumed they were in another part of the field.

It was close to Christmas, and my cousin, Jan, had tied these little jingle bell things to her tennis shoes. Whenever she walked, they made this jingling sound that we all thought sounded pretty cool. We wanted jingle-bells on our shoes too. ANYWAY, so we were about half way across this field when we heard the thundering rumblings of many MANY large hooves. We turned around, and running straight towards us over the top of a little hill to our right was Mr. McCroskies cows .. all two hundred of them. It was like a galloping bovine rapture.

We took off running … leaving our GoGo bars and Coca Colas flying all over the place. And the harder we ran, the louder Jan’s shoes jingled and the faster those cows came at us. Finally, Dennis, realizing that it was Jan’s shoes they were after, screamed over his shoulder for her to “kick them jingles off”!!! She ran right out of those shoes and we safely managed to make it through the fence on the other side.

Now here is the interesting thing …. when we turned around to see how far back we’d left the cows, we were surprised to see all two hundred heads or so, surrounding Jan’s white tennis shoes with the little jingle bells on them. We surmised, since cows ALWAYS appear to be waiting for something to take place, that they were waiting for those shoes to get up and do something again.

I know for a fact that occasionally when we’d drive by the pasture, you could look across and see a cow or two still studying those shoes (which were never retrieved, by the way). I also know for a fact that later on we learned that Mr. McCroskie called his cows by using a big wooden stick with Jingle-bells nailed to it … that’s why they ran after us.

So anyway … that’s why I’m fascinated by cows. But only from a distance.

And no bells.