We woke up to mooing on the basketball court. A cow had bullied her way through the sagging barbed wire fence and was enjoying the fresh grass in our front lawn. She was also crashing through the rhodies, smashing large branches off, and trampling big hoof holes into the lilies.
So, we started chasing. Now, we learned early on in farming that the cowboy movies where you gallop up real fast and startle the cows into running is a very dangerous and ineffective practice. With farm cows we are interacting daily, throwing apples and pea plants, moving them from field to field for fresh grass, throwing bales into the manger, and they learn a certain comfort level with having us around. But not too close. Usually if we walk up behind a cow, by the time we get within five feet the cow will slowly start walking ahead of us. Then we can walk them toward a gate or corral.
But not this set of cows. They have a wild streak. 106, 206, and 306 will turn to face us, square up and lean forward with their ears tilted, and run right at you. If you have not had 800 pounds running right at you with a head harder than concrete, you have not pooped your pants in fear.
But no problem! There are three of us! Elaine limping with her bad hip, Joe who just woke up, and me barely having put in contacts, by 8 AM, were stationed– one at the gate, one in front of the cow to lead, and one behind the cow to push.
You see the result. The cow is now below the house playing soccer and leaving 8″ holes from her big hooves sinking in– a new kind of aeration. Eventually we got her turned around and headed down the road toward the gate. You see her trying to turn 180 on Joe. 
So we finally got her in the gate. Whew. All three in the north field. But 206 walked straight from the gate, 50 feet, and pushed through the fence to be free on the road again. Cue Willie Nelson.
We change the destination. We are now going to put her temporarily in the east field as it is more secure. Joe again walks her down to the gate, this time aided in herding by the cat, Iverson. See the white speck behind Joe.
But as we successfully move 206 from the north field to the east field, 106 walks out through the saggy fence and has now joined Willie Nelson.
Yes, we finally, as Joe says, “buttoned up the fence” so they could not walk through. Yes, we acknowledged they had eaten most of the good grass around the buttercups and were ready for a new field. Yes, we admitted the need to “button up” the Farr’s field in the woods so we could move the cows over there. Yes, we hauled out the scrap fencing materials in the old buckets– clips tangled together for the wrong size steel posts, staples dumped among the clips, nails recovered from the dirt(free!) when we built our house in 1975, just a little bent. Hammer, maul, barbed wire tool, six “stays” to hold the barb wire in stretches too long for good tension, two-handed post driver weighing forty pounds, wire cutters, thirty feet of spare barb wire, two 8-foot boards, screwdriver. We began tramping all of this out to the quarter mile stretch in the woods to carefully place it among the ferns and branches– what could go wrong? Peter joined us at noon, fresh off an 8 hour shift at Costco, bleary eyed and mumbly. I was irritated and negative. We never do preventive fence maintenance, we wait till there is a crisis, we don’t have good equipment and it is not organized so you can use it. Barb wire is tricky and dangerous and we were stumbling around in the woods, slipping in the dry dirt on the hillside, cutting barb wire to have it spring up at our eyes. Elaine and I lack the hand strength the actually cut the two strand wire.
But I looked over at Elaine and realize she would give anything to be working on fence with Brooks again. She would give ten years of her life at the end to have ten more with him right now, rusty clips and all. And Joe was channeling his mom with kind politeness. “Thanks for bringing the hot chocolate, honey. Thanks for helping today, Peter. Good job with that barb wire, Elaine. Isn’t it nice here in the woods? Look how the cows are watching us.” And it became a beautiful day of fun and good work with cherished people.