Farm Girl Passing

I love it that cows keep eating even in the rain. They don’t even look up. Rain is meaningless to them.

This raises some questions. Are all cows born stoic, impervious to wet? Or did each learn that no one will come if they complain? And how would they complain anyway? Mooing?

These and other thoughts pop up while we are driving south on I-43 back home to Milwaukee from the U.P. Like, why are there car tires stuck on fence posts? Why do so many farmers own boats and why are the boats always for sale? Do the people living in farmhouses know that people driving by imagine they are them?

I think about living on a farm mostly because I am, at least temporarily, enamored of physical labor and can see myself in a smart pair of muck boots from the Tractor Supply Company. I also like weather and animals and the idea of having farm implements parked in various random places where the grass will grow long because the mower can’t reach. I like the idea of chickens pecking and goats wandering about – the look of freedom, wearing a flannel shirt untucked over a long underwear top, the waffle knit kind.

I wouldn’t be on the farm in my flannel shirt for two weeks before I’d want to get in the car and take off. That would be hard with the chickens and the goat and the cows, which were, after all, the impetus for this entire piece. You see, I don’t really want to live on a farm. I just want to think about living on a farm. Where I want to be is in a car driving by a farm and thinking about living there. Which is what I’m doing at the moment. It’s sort of a dream come true.

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Originally published in 2019