Meanwhile back at the ranch
Day two on The Farm and I’m apparently no longer on holiday. The Matriarch gave me some chores she wanted done by the time she returns home from work. Dutiful daughter that I am, I set right to it.
Job one was reattaching a few decorative things to her front deck. During a not-so-recent storm her dangle and her tinkles were damaged. That’s what she called them. I suggested a urologist might be better equipped to help her but she insisted and you do not argue with that woman. So I reluctantly accepted despite knowing that I am not exactly an accomplished repairer of wind chimes.
I acquitted myself fairly well, however, getting her wind diva re-hung with relative ease. It was the chime that would prove to be my downfall. What initially seemed an easy task, use some fine fishing line to tie the chimes to the ring from which they had once hung, proved to be a little more complicated than I had first thought. They had to be threaded using one long line per chime through a horizontal ring which kept them equidistant before being looped over a vertical ring and then fastened somehow. After a morning peppered with words I’m glad the Matriarch wasn’t here to disapprove of I finally managed to strip a twisty-tie of its plastic, wrap the wire around the improvised fishing line and use pliers to pin it as tight as I could.
My next task was to re-plant her pots. I’d already been given detailed instructions as to which pots were to be re-planted. We don’t re-plant the begonia pots. The begonias die back in winter and then come away again. Hooray. That still left something in the region of three hundred pots. Or maybe ten. It all feels about the same.
She’d kindly informed me that there were some rubber gloves in the tin shed that I could use to shield my fingers from bugs. I like bugs less than I like dolls. Dolls, traditionally at least, don’t move of their own volition. So I went to fetch those first before making my way to the front of the house to begin re-planting.
To my dismay right in the middle of the front garden, chewing contentedly on the Matriarch’s prized cabbage tree was one of the four or five cows she’s grazing for her neighbour. Bugger. It spotted me and decided to move on, choosing to gnaw on a fern by her fish pond instead. Probably better than the cabbage tree but not by much. I decided then to take some affirmative and decisive action. I went straight for the phone and dialed the number the Matriarch had left in case of emergency. It went straight to voicemail.
“Hello mother, I suspect you know your own number so I won’t bother with that. I was just wondering, you know those creepy over-friendly cows I commented upon yesterday, well, one has decided to come and say hello up close. How exactly do I get it out of the front yard? Love you.”
I went back outside to discover the cow had decided to go around the side of the house, my activity perhaps spooking it. It skirted the back deck then paused to have a lick at the leftovers I’d put on the back lawn for the birds at the Matriarch’s instruction. I yanked an orange off a nearby tree and turfed it at the beast, fearlessly yelling “Those are for the *birds* you useless creature” or something to that effect.
The projectile sailed harmlessly over the beast’s back but fortunately every animal ever to set hoof upon The Farm’s hallowed soil has developed something of an addiction to citrus. It lumbered after the tiny projectile for a short time before losing interest when it rolled under one of the overgrown shrubs in the back yard. It then mooed mildly, a sound suspiciously similar to the friendly greeting the cows had given me yesterday upon deigning to acknowledge my presence on the front verandah. Bollocks. As I looked on in dismay a second beast was wandering through the back gate which must have somehow come unchained.
Outnumbered I decided a strategic retreat might be in order. She who fights then runs away lives to fight another day. I withdrew and circled the house. To the first cow’s surprise I emerged from a spot it was entirely not expecting and, in its horror, it retreated through the gate and into its paddock, frightened but not wanting to give me the pleasure of knowing as much by keeping its pace excruciatingly slow.
That left only me and the ginger cow. We eyed each other across the top of the shrub concealing that orange. It was a Mexican stand-off. Mutually Assured Destruction. It had the brawn, I had the brains. No, really.
I broke the tension. “Go on, then, bugger off.” I cried defiantly. It simply stared at me as incredulously as a cow can stare. So I decided to make the first move. I took a step toward the second beast. It edged away, clearly intimidated by the wildness in my eyes. I came closer. It turned tail and slowly fled in the same direction as the first cow.
“That’s right!” I yelled after it, exuberant. “This,” I motioned around me to indicate the yard and house, “this is *people* space. That,” I pointed at the paddock, “that is *cow* space!”
I felt it wise to let the Matriarch know then that all was now well, rather than risk having her race home for a now non-existent emergency. Again it went straight to voicemail.
“Hello. Well, I’ve answered my own question so don’t panic. Apparently you yell at them until they go out the way they came in. Love you.”
She was still laughing half an hour later when she called to make sure everything was alright. I elected not to tell her about her cabbage tree.
Tagged: adventures, Travel.