A Saga in Six Days of Life When You Live on a Farm: Featuring Boo Radley and the Unexpected, Day 4

Cows in the herd Boo Radley chased off through the woods

Day 4:

the brown bull

dropped its head

ready to charge

I felt surely in my

soul I was about to

witness Boo Radley

being trampled

and killed

because

though he is small

he is tenacious

ten times the size

of that monstrous bull

in his inflated mind

what happened next

was a viral Tik Tok

never to be seen

except in my own memory reel

Boo Radley

charged the bull

zigzagging

cutting left to right

back and forth

front paws

low to the ground

cussing the bull

for all he was worth

edging up to the bull

its dropped head

meaning nothing to Boo

from the corner

of the house

I could see

its nostrils flare

I covered my eyes

and peeked through

two fingers

A Saga in Six Days of Life When You Live on a Farm: Featuring Boo Radley and the Unexpected, Day 3

We have all kinds of animals trying to move in – here, a neighbor before he attempted to halter the leader of these two (it didn’t work)

Day 3:

In farming communities

not a week goes by

that some animal

doesn’t try to make

a break for it and

has to be herded

back to the home pasture

every new day brings

a Facebook Post –

pigs loose on Reidsboro Road

donkey running down Highway 362

goat with a red collar on Hollonville Drive

my favorite was the baby camel

someone reported

running down Concord Road

(the Sheriff’s Department went to

investigate and found it was

Nellie LaBerge’s Lllama)

you never know what you’ll

see in the country

but last week,

Wayne’s entire herd

of cows was loose

in the woods

between our farms

two bulls

among the herd

I was thinking

of lovely handbags

my husband was

thinking of

perfectly rounded cow

patties (dried cow poop)

(this isn’t out of the ordinary ~

just a few weeks ago we’d

had donkeys trying to

move onto the Johnson

Funny Farm

and my sister in law and

I joined in the chase

with other neighbors

to wrangle these two

asses and lead them

back home)

when Boo Radley

saw the herd of cows

eating his grass

the next day

he protected me

and our blades of grass

the black and white

bull turned tail and

ran into the woods

the milk and dark chocolate bull

stood its ground

Boo charged it

that’s when the brown bull

dropped its head

ready to charge

I felt surely in my

soul I was about to

witness Boo

being trampled

and killed

because

though he is small

he is tenacious

ten times the size

of that monstrous bull

in his inflated mind

Actual donkeys who tried to move onto the Johnson Funny Farm

A Saga in Six Days of Life When You Live on a Farm: Featuring Boo Radley and the Unexpected, Day 2

Day 2:

that one’ll make a lovely black and white

leather purse, I thought

of the bull grazing inches from my

bedroom window at midnight

on the Funny Farm

when our neighbor’s cows got loose

then I felt guilty

for thinking such a thought

next morning, my husband

called Wayne

turns out

another bull had gotten

into Wayne’s pasture

and their fighting

brought down the whole backside

of the fence bordering our farms

his entire herd was wandering

in the morning, cow poop

was everywhere

it’s just fertilizer

my husband reasoned

pointing to a

rounded one

the size of a dinner plate

that one’ll make a perfect

cow patty

Here are the two bulls ~ there were 8-10 cows in our front yard that night!

A Saga in Six Days of Life When You Live on a Farm: Featuring Boo Radley and the Unexpected, Day 1

Photo by Kristin Vogt on Pexels.com

Day 1:

around midnight

over the sound machine

something woke me

I heard it ~

the bumping

at first

I thought it was

in the attic

(a squirrel? raccoon?)

something bigger than

the occasional field mouse

so common on our farm

but then

it was at my

head, behind the wall

my husband

heard it too

sprang into action

flipped the switch

floodlights revealing

a herd of cows

grazing in the grass

inches from our windows

two bulls

one black and white

one milk and dark chocolate

matching my leather purse

from White Oak Pastures

in South Georgia

my husband gave me last Christmas

I’d heard closer than usual mooing

from Wayne and Janice’s field

right at the fence line

behind our barn

earlier in the day

It’s okay, I told him~

probably Wayne’s cows

we’ll call in the morning

right now it’s a win-win

they’re cutting the grass

their midnight snack

we settled back in

mended our broken sleep

Special thanks to Two Writing Teachers at Slice of Life