Deep inside, I knew it would happen someday.
I knew that Nash the Backyard Cow would grow and need a whole lot more space.
I never dreamed that eight months after my dad brought him to me, a starving, one week old orphaned calf with tears in his eyes for the mother he’d been taken away from, he would still be in the backyard of our duplex mooing for me.
I never dreamed I’d learn so much about raising a calf.
I never dreamed I’d still be feeding a huge beast a bottle, now just filled with water, simply because it was his comfort thing, but I did.
I did it day after day, watching the sun lower like an alarm that it was time to head down the garden path to him.
Dump the grain. Toss over the hay.
There is a rhythm in farm work.
It’s about much more than just feeding a thing.
There is a healing that takes place in golden hour water hoses, clouds of dusts, and dirt on your feet. There is treasure in the feeding time of day when it is just you and a creature,
quiet and in need of you to provide them something.
No words exchanged. No required thanks.
Just the reward of the setting sun, and the view back towards home you now see a whole different way.
The pasture had all been eaten down since spring, though, and the drought made new grass growth hard to maintain.
Nash had grown bigger and he wasn’t running, kicking his heels up as much.
I knew what I had to do when he looked at me.
So, I texted a message to my dad late one night, telling him it was time we took Nash back to the ranch we’d found him next to his dying mother on, so he could be set free.
I cried as I went to sleep that night wishing for sprawling fields of my very own to keep him on, dreaming of a Forever Cow I never had to have taken from me.
“I think it’s time,” the message said.
“I’m worried he doesn’t have enough space to roam or enough to eat.
It’ll be hard, but I know it’s the best thing.”
We set a date and I gulped as I said it the next day to my 10 year old Daughter.
She’d been even more of a mother to him these months than me.
Now it was real, and she was just blinking. She cried for an hour.
Had she done enough? Had she played with him enough? Would he remember her?
I assured her it was for the best, but that just loving him wasn’t enough of a reason to let him stay.
Cows aren’t meant to spend their adult lives in duplex back yards.
They need other cows, and hills to climb, and space to run and kick their legs.
Sometimes the best way to love something is to set it free.
Her head felt heavy on my chest that night, but she had nodded, “OK,” still not able to process all that would come on the day the trailer drove into our driveway to haul him away.
My dad had thought it would be really hard to get Nash from the back pasture into the trailer in the front of the house, because the walk is a long way, but I knew from the very start he would follow me wherever I called him to as long as I used his big baby bottle of water to help lead the way.
We swung open the gate and he trotted up the path, like it was any average day.
He trotted along innocently at first, until we had almost reached the gate, but then it was like he sensed what was happening, and suddenly decided he wanted no part of it.
Suddenly, he bucked and pulled at his rope, breaking 5 giant potted plants along the way.
Succulent bits, and dirt mounds, He had gone from trusting, to scared of everything.
Before I knew it, he was tangled around the hot tub, heaving big panicked breaths, pulling against the traitorous chain we’d slipped around his neck.
As tears streamed down my face, I tried to convince him (and myself) that he was OK.
Paige had run inside sobbing, worried that he was in pain.
I promised her that he was just scared of what was happening, but that soon he would realize that everything was alright, and that he was safe. I instructed her to maybe get him an apple.
He was really fond of those things.
He loaded up easier than I thought he would, led with an entire bag of expensive apples Paige had chopped like the cost vs. this moment in time made cost completely outweighed.
She would do anything for that steer she had taught to drink a bottle.
She had proven that now for hundreds of days.
I cried non-stop from the moment the trailer door slammed closed in our driveway, over coastal hills, and through the trees, until a long way later we pulled into the ranch.
No cell service. No other people or cars.
Just the hills and the ocean breeze.
A group of other cows looked as the trailer passed them, curious.
I prayed like a mom on her child’s first day at a new school that they would be kind to him; No bullying.
My eyes scanned the horizon for the water, and the green grass,
plenty of spots with ample shade.
We parked backed up to a large group of cows, no doubt, some his actual blood family.
My husband swung the trailer door open.
Paige came and stood beside me, chewing her nails, to wait.
Slowly, the face that we’ve grown accustomed to these last 8 months emerged from the darkness, peering hesitantly through the trailer doorway.
He placed one tentative hoof on his new homestead, then another, and before we knew it he was standing there, free.
11,000 acres of ocean-front land, once inhabited by my husband’s native Coastal Miwok family.
There was something beautiful in standing there knowing death had tried to sweep away life on those hills once more, but my little group of Natives had gathered up, nurtured,
and were returning something.
Nash stood for a second surveying a sea of staring cows, and then let out a loud moo introducing himself that made his whole body shake.
Within minutes he was frolicking with them, smelling them, and exchanging head-butts, as we all exhaled.
Paige begged to go home because she was too sad to watch it.
She grabbed my shirt tail and hid her wet face.
But then, a miraculous thing happened; As if I had manifested my perfect day –
Suddenly Nash turned, and headed right back towards us.
Before I knew what was happening, he was pressing his muzzle into Paige’s open palm.
Next, he made his way to me, then to each of the other two girls.
“I think he’s saying ‘Thank you,” I cried, my face knotted with the battle between joy and pain.
“I just feel too sad. I don’t want to leave him,” Paige sobbed.
“Well, one thing is for sure, HE’S not sad,” my dad replied, as Nash again ran off to play.
I truly believe he wanted us each to know he was happy, and would not forget what we’d done to save him, then set him free.
Driving away that day put a lump in my throat that still has not gone away.
I don’t think I’ll ever again see a cow on a hillside and not remember him, and the way that he left us all forever changed.
When I look into our backyard now, it feels painfully quiet. No 7:00 bellow for me.
The pots he knocked over haven’t been put away.
The wheelbarrow is still on its side from dumping hay off.
There is still a scoop out there for grain.
I laugh at myself all melancholy over a cow I never expected to raise.
“A COW, Kerri? You’re crying over a COW?”
But this is a cow I nurtured, gave baths to, medicated, and played ball with.
This cow was bonding time with my daughter, who I didn’t know was really needing that exact kind of distracting, maturing thing.
(Pandemics are lonely and often too quiet for little girls who have had to give up lots of things)
Sometimes little girls need calf duty,
you just don’t know it until one day you look down into your hands at a giant milk bottle being made.
This cow had more firmly bonded me to my father, who, since December, has showed up any time we needed anything.
There had been years of barely seeing him before this; A way in.
“Coming to do stuff for the cow” became an excuse we both made.
I’d call him with some task I needed help completing. He’d come, do that one, and find some other thing.
It was our time to learn new things about each other, out there working in the sun,
and we reclaimed some time we had let slip away.
There have been hours now spent talking to my therapist about the healing I have felt in these eight months, with an awestruck smile on my face;
Because no one expects a cow to heal them.
I now know people vastly underestimate animals with things.
I hardly slept the last two nights worried about him out under ocean stars as the newbie.
I worried maybe he was calling for me, wondering why we had just left him there that day.
I worried he would be lonely, but this morning I awoke to a message from my dad who was back out at that sprawling ranch, feeding horses and checking on things.
It was a message saying “he sure seems spoiled,” and him asking exactly what kind of grain was his favorite because “He doesn’t seem to like my fig cookie.”
Attached was a video, hard to see from the spotty service out there, of Nash sniffing something in his hand, and then slowly walking a few feet away.
He was surrounded by at least 4 cows in the video, looking like an album cover..
I could see his sweet, familiar face.
Later in the day, my dad messaged again with a huge list of things he’d purchased so that Nash’s bougie cow lifestyle could continue to be maintained.
He even bought him a new bottle for drinking water from,
even though he’s long been milk-weaned.
He will be drinking a bottle until he’s as big as Ferdinand at this rate,
fed from our hands, and checked on as if he were a Maltese on a velvet couch having some kind of pet spa day.
I guess all my worry was unfounded.
I practically have a live-cam on him, I see.
He’s still our baby, just with room to stretch, and explore the golden fields by the ocean;
Nash – The rescued cow who changed everything.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
