For When You’re Scalding, Part 2

Here’s what not to do: go to the creek. Or not the one near our driveway, anyway, downstream from the neighbor’s cows.

We once called the shady bank and frigid, lazily trilling water our beach. We’d hike down and let the grandkids drag their toes through the silty undertow. I don’t know what we were thinking. The herd is still sizable, and where the meadow lies below the road—there’s a steep drop-off—the cows are still grazing the grass down to the quick and guzzling their drinks. On the hottest days, driving past, you can see them lined up in the water like a choir, or like blackbirds on a wire above a city street.

Birds only splat pearly white spots on the windshields. But cattle as they wander their acreage and streams drop pies of substance, steaming when fresh. The patties congeal as they dry, producing miracle nutrients for gardens. That’s looking at the bright side—you do want cow pies—but were somebody enamored with these bovines, unfamiliar with their habits, to try jumping the fence along our road to parley with the neighborhood herd, that person would swear off milk. At least for a week. They would have to get over the knowledge.

 

Here’s the thing. It is hot. Not as hot as in Heat Wave, this picture book we have where the cows’ milk turns to butter from them hopping around trying not to burn their hooves on the scorching ground. But don’t the ladies up the road deserve to soak a while? Are we supposed to blame them personally?

My husband says the farmer is overgrazing—it’s the farmer who’s bad. He could fence off the creek, keep the cows out. But by all appearances, this fellow doesn’t have the money. As the cows can’t help the abuse, I say let them cool their ankles.

We could just go enjoy the chlorine in the pool in town, I suppose. Then, back home again, as crusty hot and dried out as before, the kids could splash some sink water all over their clothes and continue running around outside playing. They could keep wetting themselves down, periodically. It would be something. But instead my husband runs a hose, one he’s outfitted with a sprayer, from the yard hydrant over to the trampoline where they can wrangle and bounce and shriek in the rain all they want before coming in for their supper, corn on the cob and plump tomatoes and the green beans I like to cook to death and drizzle with brown butter. It seems a lucky thing, indeed—that hose water, not to mention our sink and tub faucets. No lining up in queues, like it’s wartime, for a little smidge of desert water in a bucket so you can cook the rations nobody brings, over a tiny little cookstove without any scrap wood, and maybe wash under your arms once a week. Somehow I think this post just veered way off course.