Lawnmower Cow

The drought is finally over.  It’s September, and like every September, what we have at Maple Ridge Farm is unmown grass.

 Apart from picking, I don’t do much of the heavy work on the farm.  Howard has offered to teach me how to drive the tractor, but flying over fields with cultivators and ploughs feels dangerous.  

I do, however, mow the grass.  I like mowing the grass. I like seeing shaggy uneven grass transform into well-groomed lawns.  I mow about an acre each week. ( Well, I do when it’s growing.  Spring is tough because the grass seems to grow back within the day, but I have to keep at it lest it all turn to pasture. 

That was fine when  Bill Hurren, a local drover, used our barn as a stopping-off place for cattle and pigs to stay before their trip to the Kitchener Stockyards every Friday. 

 Every Spring, Bill would bring in an undernourished cow he’d acquired in his travels and tether it outside each day to fatten it up, telling us as a sweetener that it’d keep the grass down around the barn.  We always  dubbed the cow, “ Lawnmower Cow.” 

 One year, Bill brought in the scrawniest cow we had ever seen.    I remember him rubbing his hands together and smiling when he told us.  “ This one is pregnant. Two for the price of one. ‘   We didn’t know how far along the cow was.  he only thing I remember was waking up one morning, and seeing a tiny brown and white calf struggling to its feet and wobbling to its mother’s side.   

It wasn’t that good a deal for Bill or the cow.  Despite the abundance of grass, the cow couldn’t produce any milk, and Bill had to hustle to find a farmer somewhere up country who’d take the calf, which had to be bottle-fed.  Lawnmower Cow lost its appetite after that and, within a couple of days, was herded into Bill’s big truck.  After that, Bill lost interest in fattening up cattle, and I took up lawn mowing in earnest.